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PAPER BULLETS

Henry Walker and the English Civil Wars

Introduction

As day broke on 5 January 1642, the streets of London were lashed with

torrential rain. The weather since Christmas had been some of the worst in living

memory, marked by violent storms and heavy snowfall.1 The mood amongst the city’s

inhabitants as they woke that morning was just as bleak. The past eighteen months

had seen tensions between Charles I and so-called ‘junto’ of puritan MPs and peers

deteriorate into an outright battle for control of political and religious institutions,

which was already being played out in printed propaganda, botched coups and mass

protests on the streets of London. This struggle had reached its climax on the previous

day, when Charles had made his famous attempt to arrest five leading opponents in

the House of Commons: arriving at Parliament only to find, in his own words, that ‘all

the birds are flown’.

London was thrown into panic. This ‘day of terror and wonder’, as the

pamphleteer John Vicars put it, seemed to confirm the city’s worst fears: that Charles

was planning a war against his people.2 Shopkeepers hastily shut up their premises

and Londoners ‘remained all that night under arms… possessed with strange fears and

imaginations’.3 The next morning, the Commons ordered the doors to the chamber to

be locked, posted look-outs outside, and adjourned the day’s proceedings.4

Charles was determined to track down the rogue MPs. Believing that they

were still in hiding in the capital, he decided to confront the Corporation of the City of

London. At about ten o’clock the same morning, Charles’s ornate, gilded coach

trundled slowly out of the palace of Whitehall towards the Guildhall. Four peers

accompanied him on the two-mile journey, including the Earl of Essex, who within

six months would be one of the leading lights of the Parliamentarian party. As the

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coach made its slow progress up the Strand and into Fleet Street, a rumour spread that

Charles was taking Essex to the Tower of London. By the time Charles’s retinue

arrived at the Guildhall, a substantial crowd had assembled to meet it.

Standing amongst the mass of apprentices, shopkeepers, housewives,

labourers and servants was a twenty-nine year old man from Derby called Henry

Walker. Trained as an ironmonger, Walker had moved away from his original trade

over the course of the previous twelve months, focusing instead on writing and selling

radical books and preaching street sermons to fellow members of London’s

disaffected. Clutched in his hands was his latest work, a printed petition to the king

entitled To Your Tents, O Israel. Contemporaries would have deduced its message

from the title alone: it was a reference to 1 Kings 12:16, which told the story of King

Rehoboam’s tyrannical rule over Israel. Rehoboam was a tyrant who imposed heavy

taxes and harsh punishments on his people. In response, the ten northern tribes of

Israel rebelled and formed their own nation. In alluding to these events, Walker was

criticising the extra-Parliamentary taxation that Charles had introduced under his

period of Personal Rule in the 1630s. To accuse the king of tyranny in this way was

treason, punishable by the traitor’s death: after being hanged then cut down from the

gallows, the offender would have his genitals cut off, his guts removed and burned

before him, before being beheaded and having his body cut into quarters.

Walker was well aware of the punishment that lay in store for him if he was

caught. In 1640 another disaffected Londoner, Thomas Bensted, had been hanged,

drawn and quartered for his part in a riot outside Lambeth Palace, the residence of the

Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. Bensted had been injured in the disturbance

and had declared to the crowd: ‘come follow me, seeing I am hurt I will be your

captain’. This was sufficient to condemn him to death. To Laud’s opponents, Bensted

quickly became a martyr. One anti-Laudian pamphlet imagined his ghost confronting

the Archbishop as he lay in bed.5 But Londoners also faced a grim reminder of

Bensted’s death for months after his execution: as was customary, his head was

placed on London Bridge and the four parts of his body on various of the city gates as

a warning to others.6

3

After addressing the Corporation, Charles dined with London’s Sheriff,

George Garrett, at his house in Aldermanbury Street next door to the Guildhall. After

their lunch was finished, Charles emerged from Garrett’s house and made his way

back to his carriage. The crowd surged forward. Massed shouts went up of ‘Privilege

of Parliament! Privilege of Parliament!’.7 Walker saw his chance. Pushing his way

through the crush of people, he reached Charles and hurled his pamphlet into the

king’s coach.

* * *

Seven years later, Henry Walker and Charles Stuart would meet again. It was

another cold January day, the ground hard with frost.8 However, much had changed

since their last encounter. Charles had fought and lost two civil wars, and had been

tried and condemned to death by a High Court specially constituted for the purpose by

Parliament. Walker had become a successful journalist with the ear of the New Model

Army. After throwing his petition at Charles in 1642, Walker had spent months on the

run, hiding in boltholes across London while also preaching to gatherings of

disaffected puritans. Finally, he was run to ground, arrested and sent to the Tower of

London to await a capital trial. He was spared only due to Charles’s personal

intervention. It was not long before he was back in custody: at the start of 1643, soon

after his release, Walker was imprisoned again, this time for publishing a petition

criticising Parliament. By this time the civil war was being fought in earnest, but

despite managing to have alienated both sides, Walker began afresh, becoming the

writer of a Parliamentarian newsbook: a forerunner of the newspaper, so called

because it was published in book form rather than on a series of separate sheets. By

the end of the 1640s, he had established himself as one of the most pre-eminent and

commercially successful newsbook editors, while also forging links with the

Independent faction within Parliament and the New Model Army.

The climax of Walker’s newfound career was being granted access to cover

the trial of Charles I during January 1649. He was one of a small number of

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journalists who brought unprecedented levels of transparency to the king’s last days:

summaries of the exchanges between Charles and John Bradshaw, President of the

High Court of Justice trying him, were available in bookshops and from street

hawkers the next morning for only a penny or two. Nor was Walker’s coverage

limited to the trial. On 30 January 1649, Walker was there as Charles stepped out of

the Banqueting House onto the scaffold that had been hastily erected outside it. This

time Walker’s task was not to present a petition, but to cover the execution for his

newsbook Perfect Occurrences. Walker had previously published lengthy transcripts

of Charles’s trial. However, his description of the king’s final moments was

workmanlike and to the point – perhaps recognising nothing could adequately

describe the enormity of the event:

‘King. Sirs, my conscience in religion, I think, is very well known to all the

world; and therefore I declare before you all, that I die a Christian according to

the profession of the Church of England, as I found it left me by my father;

and this honest man I think will witness it. Then turning to the officers said,

Sirs, excuse me for this same. I have a good cause, and I have a gracious God;

I will say no more. Then turning to Colonel Hacker, he said, Take care that

they do not put me to pain. After some other circumstances, the Executioner

severed his head from his body’.9

Henry Walker had been present at the start of Charles’s war against

Parliament. He also had a ringside seat at its end.

* * *

Walker’s reckless actions in January 1642 launched him on a trajectory that

would see him become one of the leading figures in the propaganda battles of the

English civil wars. At the height of his career, few figures on the Parliamentarian side

besides Cromwell himself attracted such opprobrium as Walker. He was a ‘coxcomb’,

‘Beelzebub’s brindled Ban-dog’, ‘Sirrah saffron-chaps’, an ‘Atheistical liar’, ‘Harry

Poison-Beard’, ‘Yellow Beard the News-Monger’, a ‘Rusty Nuncio’.10

Opponents

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lampooned him in vicious woodcut caricatures, depicting him being shat out of the

arse of a devil or preaching from a wooden tub to anyone who would listen.11

The

vitriol that was hurled at Walker reflected his significance as a pamphleteer and

newsbook editor who supported the causes first of Parliament, then the New Model

Army, and finally of the Commonwealth. Underpinning all three was his close

relationship with Oliver Cromwell and other army grandees, which made him

sufficiently trustworthy that he was one of the few newsbook editors allowed to

continue after the Rump Parliament swept the presses clean in the wake of Charles I’s

execution. Walker was the first person to break the news of Cromwell’s massacre of

the garrison and civilian inhabitants of Drogheda.

The printed word was by no means the predominant medium in which the

propaganda battles of the civil wars were fought. Handwritten manuscripts also had

their part to play, and as well as his newsbook trade Walker also for a time enjoyed a

lucrative market in writing manuscript newsletters for select clients.12

The spoken

word was no less important to crown or Parliament. Alongside his news business,

Walker also forged a parallel career first as an itinerant or ‘tub’ preacher, then as a

minister to a series of parishes. By 1649 his beliefs had become sufficiently

mainstream that he was chosen to preach a sermon to Cromwell and other army

leaders a month before the New Model departed to conquer Ireland.13

He was also

appointed minister first to the parish of Wood Street in Cheapside, then to

Knightsbridge, at this time a small hamlet outside the City of London. A year later,

Walker preached another sermon to commemorate Cromwell’s appointment as

commander-in-chief of the army.14

In 1655, leaving journalism behind, he became

pastor of the parish of St Martin’s Vintry on the north bank of the Thames. As a

Cromwellian favourite, he continued to make enemies. George Fox, the founder of the

Quakers, derogatorily branded him a ‘forger of lies’ and ‘an envious priest, a light,

scornful, chaffy man’.15

In late August and early September 1658, Walker was

amongst those who attended Cromwell on his deathbed, later publishing a pamphlet

about his experience of the Lord Protector’s final hours.

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Contemporaries were well aware of the power of the written and spoken word

to manipulate. By the seventeenth century, English monarchs and statesmen had

become increasingly adept at using pulpit and press to promote or defend their

policies, and their opponents had become equally skilled at using them to respond.16

Even so, the speed with which both evolved and mutated into new forms during the

early 1640s was surprising, if not downright alarming, to many. In 1640 and 1641, as

king and Parliament negotiated over the state of England’s political and religious

constitution, England saw an explosion in printed, handwritten and spoken forms of

debate and arguments.17

Handwritten newsletters brought news of discussions in

Parliament, and by the end of 1641 were jostling for position with printed newsbooks

covering the same topic. London’s presses erupted with short political, religious and

satirical pamphlets, a blast which reached the furthest corners of England. Sermons by

Puritans and separatists could be heard in churches, streets and private houses, and

copies bought from bookshops or hawkers within days. Streets and taverns not just in

London but in towns across England were alive with opinion, rumours and plots. The

subsequent collapse of monarchical and episcopal authority – and with them any

effective means of censorship – only encouraged this babel of voices, and brought

unprecedented access to religious and political news and opinion.18

The consequences were, depending on one’s point of view, either politically

transformative or socially destructive. Men and women in towns and villages across

England were drawn into a national debate about the future of the nation, not just as

passive consumers of information but as audiences that first MPs and peers, then

Charles I began actively to court. Nevertheless, king and Parliament alike remained

intensely nervous of popular, bottom-up engagement in the circulation of news and

opinion. Something of the dilemma that this presented is captured in the statement of

the MP Sir Edward Dering after Parliament issued its Grand Remonstrance in

November 1641: ‘I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories

to the people, and talk of the King as of a third person’.19

Shortly afterwards, he tried

to tell his own stories to the people by publishing a collection of his own speeches, as

a result of which he was briefly expelled from the Commons and the book burned by

the common hangman. Public opinion was a weapon that, while capable of being

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harnessed for political ends, could easily blow up in the face of those using it. It was

with some justification that contemporaries referred to ‘the paper Bullets of the

Press’, and compared ‘Schismatical Pamphlets’ to grenades.20

As one of Walker’s

rivals said of him (with only some exaggeration): ‘his pamphlets have done more

mischief in the kingdom than ever all my Lord of Essex's or Sir Thomas Fairfax’s

whole train of artillery ever did’.21

Then, as today, those in authority struggled to catch up with the rapid pace of

cultural, commercial and technological change. In the 1630s, Charles I had sought,

with some success, to strengthen press licensing arrangements and crack down on

seditious speech, and withdrew from engaging in public discussion and debate.22

The

sudden re-emergence of a public sphere in the early 1640s, ranging widely across

speech, print and manuscript, profoundly shifted the balance of power between state,

press and the public. The 1640s and 1650s saw periodic attempts to control both

supply and demands of news and information: acts and ordinances against seditious

printing were passed, searches for illicit presses carried out, and heavy penalties

imposed not just on authors, printers and distributors but on those reading or uttering

disagreeable words. But at the same time royalist and parliamentarian factions became

increasingly adept at influencing and managing publicity. The pressure to rebut and

respond to one’s critics meant that hostile, rebarbative responses and animadversions

began to dominate London’s presses. The result for many contemporaries was

confusion and discord. As one writer complained, ‘mercenary souls… who weekly

utter slanders, libels, lies’ had injured truth.23

The same critic complained that Walker

had ‘disguised falsehood by the name of Truth’ and ‘had his readers robbed of their

belief’.24

In the words of John Taylor, another of Walker’s enemies, ‘be it true or

false, good or bad, all’s one to him’.25

Henry Walker’s life tells the story of the publicity and propaganda battles of

the English civil wars from the perspective of one who was a frontline combatant in

them. It is the viewpoint of what, anachronistically, we would call a spin doctor: of

what contemporaries called a pamphleteer, intelligencer, or newsmonger. His career,

which spanned the outbreak of war all the way through to Cromwell’s death, is a case

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study in the role that news and public opinion played in causing and shaping the

conflicts of the day. But it also illustrates the wider network of politicians, printers,

publishers, and distributors who acted alongside Walker and other newsbook editors

to bring news to readers. Just as those serving in royalist and Parliamentarian armies

relied on a sophisticated supply chain of business and civilians to support them, so too

men like Walker were part of a much wider circuit of communication. It included the

political grandees like Oliver Cromwell and John Bradshaw to whom Walker owed a

great deal of his political intelligence, and civil servants like Henry Scobell who

helped him gain access to them. It included authors, both those with whom he

cooperated and those with whom he repeatedly clashed: royalists like John Taylor and

John Crouch, parliamentarians such as John Dillingham and Gilbert Mabbott, and

those – like Marchamont Nedham – who fought on both sides. It included printers and

booksellers: both men like Thomas Bates and Robert Ibbitson, and women such as

Jane Coe and Elizabeth Alkin. It included the street hawkers and chapmen who

bought wholesale and sold individual copies of Walker’s books. And above all, it

included thousands of ordinary men and women whose names are lost to us, but who

for better or worse were influenced by Walker: readers who scanned his newsbooks

for the latest goings-on in Parliament, activists who rescued him from the clutches of

the law in 1642, and worshippers who belonged to his congregations. Walker’s story,

and theirs, starts in the Midlands market town of Derby, early in the second decade of

the seventeenth-century.

Chapter One

A Godly Reader

1 March 1612. It is a Sunday, and the five bells of the church of All Saints,

Derby are ringing out across the town.1 Outside the church, members of the parish are

arriving for the Sunday service. Amongst them is a young father, clutching his

newborn baby to his chest. He is here to have his son baptised. His wife (as was usual

in this period) is at home recovering from labour, perhaps with a midwife or female

friends and relatives looking after her.2 After the last lesson of the service has been

read, father, son and godparents gather at the medieval font at the west end of the

church with the parish’s curate, Richard Kilby.3

Addressing the congregation, Kilby reminds his parishioners that they, like the

baby boy, have been born in sin, but that through the love of the Holy Ghost they can

be born anew. Turning to the baby’s godparents, he asks them to promise on the

child’s behalf that they will forsake the devil. They do so, swearing that they believe

in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Kilby asks for the child’s name. Dipping

the infant in the font’s water, he makes the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead and

christens him Henry Walker, after his father.4 The baptism over, Kilby hands Henry

back to his father and declares to the church: ‘we receive this child into the

congregation of Christ’s flock’.5

* * *

As Kilby spoke, the elder Henry must have been offering up a silent prayer for

the fate of his son. Little Henry was not his first child. Two-and-a-half years earlier, in

November 1609, his wife Anne had given birth to a son called Thomas. The couple

named their little boy after his grandfather, and must have had high hopes for their

firstborn. However, Thomas had died young.6 Henry and Anne had only recently

married, and Thomas’s death must have been devastating. Early seventeenth-century

England had a horribly high infant mortality rate: one in eight children died before

their first birthday, and a quarter never reached the age of ten. Derby was no

exception. The registers of the town’s parishes record many private tragedies: like the

boy found dead in the fields of Little Chester outside the town, or two twin boys,

William and John Culverwell, baptised on 3 January 1613 and buried three weeks

later.7

Even for an age accustomed to such heartbreak, the death of a child was a

horrific experience. Some of Henry and Anne’s contemporaries sought consolation

from their faith. Ralph Josselin, vicar of Earls Colne in Essex, found solace after the

death of his thirteen-month old son Ralph in the fact that Ralph’s short life had been

‘continual sorrow and trouble; happy he who is at rest with the Lord’.8 Others railed

against God for inflicting such misery upon them. Nehemiah Wallington, a puritan

woodturner from London, was nearly destroyed by the agonising death of his

daughter, Elizabeth, from the plague in 1625: ‘the grief for this child was so great that

I forgot myself so much that I did offend God in it; for I broke all my purposes,

promises, and covenants with my God’.9 However he sought to rationalise Thomas’s

death, foremost in Henry’s thoughts as Kilby reached the end of the service must have

been the desperate hope that young Henry would be luckier than his brother.

The service over, Henry took his son from Kilby and emerged from All Saints

into the spring sunlight. Towering two hundred feet above him were the pinnacles of

the church’s Perpendicular Gothic steeple. Built in the early sixteenth century, the

tower’s straight, vertical lines dominated Derby’s horizon and were a prominent

reminder of the town’s prosperity.10

A sizeable town of around 3,000 inhabitants,

Derby’s principal industry was clothmaking.11

The town had a longstanding

monopoly on wool dying that traced its origins to a royal charter of 1204. The

importance of the cloth trade was reflected in the town’s streets: Full Street and

Walkers Lane both owed their names to the process of fulling or walking, by which

wool was cleaned and thickened. Malting was another important local industry,

supplying markets in Cheshire, Staffordshire and Lancashire. Ale made from local

barley was famed as far away as London. The town was also a distribution centre for

the lead mined in Derbyshire’s hills, transported by horse from Derby to be ferried

along the Trent and from there to London.12

Alongside these industries were the host

of trades that could be found in any town in early modern England: victuallers such as

butchers and bakers, craftsmen like blacksmiths, carpenters, glovers and cordwainers,

and shopkeepers such as haberdashers, drapers, apothecaries, and – like Henry –

ironmongers.13

Henry and his son were part of a well-heeled, politically influential family.

The Walkers had established themselves in Derby in the early 1500s as a prominent

dynasty of butchers, who grazed sheep and steers in the hills around the town before

selling them on to markets in the richer pastures of Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire

for fattening.14

By the early seventeenth century, the family had become major figures

in the government of the town. Henry’s grandfather, Thomas, had been elected as one

of the town’s two bailiffs, or civic leaders, in 1578, 1587 and 1593.15

The funeral of

Thomas’s wife, Agnes, in May 1616 was significant enough to be noted in a

contemporary chronicle of the town’s history:

‘In this year died old Mrs Walker and was carried to the church by her four

sons all Brethren of the Company of twenty-four for the borough’.16

The four sons in question were William, Edward, Robert and the elder

Henry.17

A fifth son, Thomas – Agnes and Thomas’s firstborn child – had died in

1608.18

Like their father, they too played a significant role in the government of the

town. Some of Thomas’s sons served as churchwardens for All Saints, as he had done

in 1582. Edward occupied the position in 1610, and Henry in 1612.19

The role of

churchwarden was a well-established first rung on the career ladder of urban politics.

Ambitious and well-connected young men used it to gain experience of parish finance

and governance, which would stand them in good stead once they took on more

substantial civic roles.20

This was certainly the case for the Walker boys. As the

town’s chronicle makes clear, all of Thomas’s surviving sons eventually became

members of the borough’s corporation (its governing body), and William and Edward

were also elected as bailiff on several occasions.21

Thomas would have invested significant time and money in ensuring his sons

got a foothold in Derby’s political elite, drawing on friendships and professional

connections to have them apprenticed into local trades. In Henry’s case, he became an

ironmonger: a shopkeeper who sold iron, both unworked and as manufactured goods,

rather than making items himself. Thomas also used some of the property the family

had amassed to ensure that his younger, as yet unmarried sons would get off to a good

start in their respective trades.22

In 1607 he gave Robert, Edward and Henry houses in

Full Street, Friargate and Cornmarket. These would have served as both homes and

retail premises, giving the young men a base as they set up businesses and began to

have families of their own.23

Just as significant a priority for Thomas would have been to ensure that his

sons married well. Henry’s marriage to Anne, for example, cemented a connection

with another prominent local family. Anne was the daughter of Thomas Becke, with

whom Thomas had shared the position of bailiff in 1603.24

Anne’s father, like her

father-in-law, seems to have been in a victualling trade: in 1620, the two Thomases

were paid six shillings for providing a dinner to celebrate the beating of the parish’s

boundaries on Rogation Day.25

The marriages of Thomas’s other sons were equally

strategic. His firstborn child, the younger Thomas, wed Mary Turner, whose father

Edward had served as the town’s bailiff in 1575.26

A year after Henry had married

Anne, Edward Walker married Ann Fletcher, the daughter of Edward – another of the

town’s bailiffs.27

Contemporaries had an expression for people like the Walkers: the ‘middling

sort’ of people. Like many such phrases, the meaning of this term varied depending

on who was using it and in what context. One way in which it was used was to

describe independent, trading households: a broad definition that could include

disparate classes of people such as yeomen and husbandmen farmers, shopkeepers

and artisans, and professionals such as doctors and lawyers.28

The resources that

members of these groups had at their disposal were important in giving their children

a good start in life. They could afford to keep their children at school into their

teenage years, at the point where sons and daughters of poorer families would

generally have entered the labour market. This had important social consequences.

Children were only taught to write after they had mastered reading: at around the

same time that poorer children were old enough to leave school and contribute to their

family finances. As a result, while the ability to read may have been relatively

widespread, the ability to both read and write was confined to a minority. Studies of

signatures on wills and other legal documents suggest that around 30 per cent of men

in 1600 could read, and around 10 per cent of women.29

Henry was lucky enough to

be born into a family with sufficient resources to keep him in school. Every member

of the Walker family who served as a churchwarden of All Saints, for example, was

able to sign his name in the parish’s account book.30

Without this social background,

his eventual move into journalism and preaching would have been next to impossible.

A literate father like Henry would have begun the process of teaching his son

to read early on in his childhood. The Essex vicar Ralph Josselin, for example,

recorded in some detail his efforts to support his children in learning to read. In June

1646 he noted a ‘towardliness’ to reading in his four-year-old daughter Mary, and by

November the same year he was pleased to record that ‘the Lord was gracious to me...

in the towardly disposition of my daughter, giving her an aptness to her book’.31

Mothers, too, might be involved in educating their children. Alice Bramston, for

example, taught her children not just to read but also to appreciate scriptural texts, her

husband Sir John Bramston remarking that ‘she instructed them in the church

catechism, teaching them the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Creed,

which she heard them say constantly every morning’.32

Relatives beyond the

immediate family could also be important in young boys’ and girls’ education. Adam

Martindale, the son of a Shropshire yeoman, learned to read as a result of the gift of a

godparent: ‘when I was near six years old, one Anne Simpkin, who was one of my

sureties at the font... bestowed an ABC upon me’.33

Young Henry’s first steps into the world of letters would have been

supplemented by what he was learning at church every Sunday. An injunction of 1538

required that all children should know the English versions of the creed, the Lord’s

Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Ave Maria. This was a decree that Richard

Kilby, the curate of All Saints who had baptised Henry, took seriously. Kilby was a

quiet, introspective man, who often felt overwhelmed to the point of despair at his

failure to master his sins. He grappled with the ‘great and burdenous charge’ of being

curate of All Saints, while suffering from ‘windy disease’ – some kind of intestinal

condition – and kidney stones. Nevertheless, Kilby was committed to ensuring the

youth of his parish were instructed in the word of God, and had developed a question-

and-answer style of tuition: asking young people in the congregation questions before

then using scripture to demonstrate the answers.34

He would have been assisted by

printed primers giving versions of English prayers together with an alphabet and

sometimes syllables too. Particularly popular were so-called horn-books: a sheet of

paper mounted on wood or bone then covered in a thin, transparent sheet of animal

horn so as to prevent it from wearing. The sheet of paper would have the letters of the

alphabet printed on it, and perhaps also a prayer or a psalm. Although principally

spoken and repeated aloud, printed versions of catechisms were also popular.

Kilby remained curate of All Saints for the first five years of Henry’s life, and

sitting in the church’s pews would have been his first step into formal education. This

would have been followed at around the age of five or six by attending the local ‘petty

school’, an endowed establishment often run by a member of the clergy. The

schoolmaster was Thomas Duxbury, the parish’s assistant curate.35

Little evidence

survives about Duxbury – for example where he was educated, or what his religious

and political inclinations were – but he seems to have had connections with the

Walker family. After the death of Henry’s father, Duxbury was one of three men who

compiled an inventory of his goods and chattels. Despite the family’s relationship

with him, Duxbury’s teaching may not necessarily have been of the best standard: the

quality of petty schools could vary considerably. This was certainly the case for Adam

Martindale:

‘My first master was a young ingenious spark, having a good full school, but

so bad a husband, that he quickly spoiled all and left us. A worse followed

him, viz. an old humdrum curate, that had almost no scholars, nor deserved

any, for he was both a simpleton, and a tippler’.36

Contemporary teaching manuals give an intriguing, if idealised, sense of the

typical curriculum at petty schools. One of the most popular was The English School-

Maister by Edmund Coote, a teacher from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. First

published in 1596, it had been reprinted in a second edition by the time Henry started

school.37

Coote’s system introduced children first of all to lower- and upper-case

alphabets, then to vowels and consonants, then to whole words based on extensive

‘repeat after me’ exercises:

‘Scholar. Sir, I do not un-der-stand what you mean by a syl-la-ble?

Master. A syl-la-ble is a per-fect sound, made of so ma-ny let-ters, as we spell

to-ge-ther: as in di-vi-si-on you see few-er syl-la-bles’.38

Basic arithmetic might also have been taught, but generally not writing. This

might either have been taught for a fee by a local scrivener, or would have waited

until grammar school for those children who went to one. This transition generally

happened at around the age of seven or eight. Once Henry had mastered reading and

spelling, he must have moved on in this way, probably to attend Derby’s grammar

school. Although he does not appear on the school’s official register, the school’s

records for this period are fragmentary and only list a fraction of the pupils who

attended during this period.39

Derby would have been an appropriate choice:

respectable, but less expensive or socially exclusive than the fashionable Repton

School ten miles to the south of Derby.40

The school’s headmaster was Gervase Hall.

From 1610 until 1621, Hall was also the vicar of Elvaston, a village six miles to the

east of Derby, combining this with his post at the school.41

In 1621 – not long after

Walker must have started at grammar school – Hall moved parish to become vicar of

All Saints, succeeding John Chapell who in turn had replaced Richard Kilby after his

death in 1617. As a result, Walker would have spent most of each week from the age

of nine onwards listening to Hall teaching and preaching. Hall seems to have been a

sterner, more imposing figure than Kilby. Not long after he arrived in the parish, the

church’s account book records this entry: ‘paid for making our minister Mr Hall a seat

in the desk that he might keep his place there without such molestation as some times

formerly chanced. 3s. 4d.’.42

Grammar schools had a flexible approach to teaching, which covered both

equipping the less able boys for trade and preparing the cleverest for the transition to

Oxford and Cambridge. For the latter group, the schoolmaster would have been

responsible for teaching Latin grammar and vocabulary, before moving on to

composition and rhetoric, and occasionally in some schools ancient Greek and even

Hebrew. The first tentative steps in building up a working knowledge of Latin

vocabulary would have been taken through the preparation of vulgars: collections of

Latin sentences drawn from texts such as Cicero’s Epistles and Aesop’s Fables. The

older, more advanced pupils would also have been heavily involved in assisting the

master in teaching the younger pupils. The curriculum at Derby’s grammar school

would prove essential in giving Henry the knowledge of Latin that he would have

needed to attend Cambridge, and to make serious study of theological texts thereafter.

The language skills he was taught may also have helped him when he came to study

Hebrew during the 1640s.

School hours were long: a six or seven o’clock start in the morning, with two

hours for lunch, before finishing at five in the afternoon. It was perhaps just as well

that amongst the moral values often associated by contemporaries with members of

the middling sort were hard work, diligence, and discipline. Such ideals often meshed

comfortably with a puritan style of worship. Not every member of the middling sort

was puritan: but to many, godly ideals of social reformation and the elect sat

alongside their desire to differentiate themselves from their neighbours. While the

term could span a wide range of formal, doctrinal positions, most historians have

agreed that puritans were not content simply to accept that some were damned and

some were saved.43

The ‘hotter’ sort of Protestants sought signs of their own election,

and looked with horror on sinful behaviour by their neighbours, emphasising the

sanctity of the Sabbath and the importance of moral reformation. They considered that

the Church of England had further to go in its break from Rome: most puritans would

have shared a reflexive hatred of ‘popery’. To that end, puritans emphasised the

importance of the Word over the rituals and hierarchy of the church. From that also

flowed a commitment to preaching and pastoral activity, and to learning and

education.44

Although evidence for the Walker family’s faith is slim, they would certainly

have been exposed to puritan teachings and doctrine every Sunday while listening to

Richard Kilby’s sermons. Kilby was well-known to the Walker family. Between 1612

and 1613 the older Henry served as one of his churchwardens, a role that his brother

Edward had also filled between 1610 and 1611.45

Shortly before taking up his position

in All Saints, Kilby had published an extraordinary spiritual autobiography. The

burthen of a loaden conscience told the story of Kilby’s journey from the sins of his

childhood, via flirtations with Catholicism and the extremes of Puritanism, to his

current position.46

He followed it up with another book outlining his subsequent

spiritual struggles: Hallelu-iah: Praise yee the Lord, written in 1614 and published

posthumously in 1618.47

Together, they reveal Kilby as a classic example of a

moderate Elizabethan puritan. He was concerned to avoid rituals or practices

associated with the Catholic Church, something he made clear as soon as he

commenced his appointment by writing in the parish register:

‘May 16 1610. I see no reason why a Register for English people should be

written in Latin’.48

All the entries that follow are in English. Kilby’s rejection of Catholic

hangovers from the pre-Reformation church went alongside the desire to equip

himself and his parishioners to overcome the constant temptations the devil set before

them. His books are revealing about the kind of messages the Walkers would have

heard when they attended All Saints. Good Christians had to be ever watchful for sin,

and were exhorted to:

‘Take good heed, least the devil get first possession of your children. So soon

as your children be able to understand and speak, accustom them to know and

fear God.’49

Kilby knew what it was like to wrestle with temptation. In his childhood, he

had been lured in by the devil’s charms, and had succumbed. He was a ‘loathsome

sinner’, who had taken God’s name in vain, never observed the Sabbath, turned up

late to church, and ignored the vicar’s sermons.50

He had dishonoured his father and

mother, and stolen apples, books and money from them.51

‘Defiled with fleshly lust’,

he had let himself with down with ‘filthy talk’ and even considered castration to

prevent himself from indulging in lust.52

Only through the action of the Holy Ghost,

acting within the true believer’s heart, could these fleshly sins be taken away.53

Kilby

used his sinful childhood as a model for the godly parent of how not to bring up their

children. He warned that Christian parents needed to be very careful in bringing up

their offspring, because children took their cue from those around them. Parents

should keep girls and boys apart, and focus on spiritual rather than material

improvement: ‘it is better for them to be poorly brought up, and to have but little left

to them’.54

If they followed Kilby’s advice, the first task facing Henry and Anne

would have been to break young Henry’s wilfulness: to instil obedience in him, and to

impose a strict moral code which would keep him out of the devil’s reach.

By the 1620s, Calvinist orthodoxies about predestination were starting to be

unpicked by a movement within the Church of England influenced by the Dutch

theologian Arminius. Arminianism, as it became known, stressed the free will of

believers and placed much more emphasis on ritual as means of augmenting worship.

Unlike Calvinism, it also stressed the importance of the church hierarchy in imposing

order and consistency across parishes. By the later 1620s, Charles I had become

increasingly influenced by these beliefs and with the support of William Laud – first

Bishop of London then Archbishop of Canterbury – began to impose a ‘Laudian’ style

of worship across England.

Their efforts saw changes in parish churches up and down the country, and alls

Saints was no exception. A pulpit was erected in 1625, and an altar rail in 1635. These

were by no means innocuous alterations to the layout of the church: they emphasised

the distinction between the priest and the congregation, and highlighted the role of

ritual in salvation at the expense of the Calvinist doctrine of justification through faith

alone. As soon as they had the chance, however, key figures in the town’s governing

class set out to undo these impositions. Henry Fisher took away two surplices;

Edward Daft the altar rails; and William Moore and Thomas Bourne the font and its

surrounding rails.55

These are names that would have been well-known to the Walker

family. Fishers, Dafts, Moores and Bournes appear alongside the Walkers as leading

lights in borough and parish politics. The Fisher family were, like the Walkers,

significant players in the town’s Corporation. Henry Fisher was bailiff in 1618, 1626,

and 1636, and his brother Thomas in 1624 and 1633.56

In 1603 he had been

churchwarden of All Saints alongside Edward Fletcher, the man whose daughter

would five years later marry one of the Walkers.57

In 1620, he and the elder Henry

Walker served together as auditors of the parish accounts.58

Thomas Bourne ran the

Angel inn in the marketplace, and was also a member of the All Saints vestry.59

In

1614, Henry had been an overseer of his father Richard’s will.60

Edward Daft was a

metalworker who was regularly employed to repair and improve the bells of All

Saints.61

William Moore’s ancestors had been bailiffs during the sixteenth century and

he, like his partners in crime, also took up regular roles in the vestry committee.62

It is

tempting to think that these acts of theft and sabotage by Fisher and his accomplices

would have met with the Walkers’ approval. For Henry, the early changes made to the

interior of All Saints would have been the first experience of the Laudian impositions

that he would later play a vocal role in criticising.

* * *

This patchwork of connections gives a glimpse of the social and political

milieu into which Henry Walker was born. Henry’s immediate and extended family

were well-to-do, educated tradesmen: part of a self-reinforcing network of influential

local families who worked, socialised and worshipped together, whose sons and

daughters married each other, and who supported each other even in death by

assessing inventories or executing wills.63

Like many of their friends and colleagues,

they probably inclined towards moderate puritanism, rejecting Catholic ritual in

favour of a more direct relationship with God through scripture and sermons. From an

early age, Henry’s parents would have sought to build in him the right spiritual and

educational foundations to allow him to one day take his place amongst Derby’s

governing class. However, other influences were at work which would ultimately

result in his life taking a very different direction.

Chapter Two

Ruled and Governed By Opinion

14 August 1624. Derby is buzzing with anticipation. James I has spent the

summer touring England, moving from town to town as part of a royal progress.64

With him is his son Charles, recently returned from an ill-fated expedition to Spain

with George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, to negotiate marriage to the Spanish

infanta Maria Anna. James and his court have been in Nottingham for the past week,

and they are now on their way to Derby. Gentry from across Derbyshire and

Nottinghamshire, along with Derby’s bailiffs and members of the town’s corporation,

have assembled in the marketplace to welcome their king, alongside massed crowds

drawn from the town and the surrounding villages. Among the local worthies gathered

to meet James must have been Henry’s father and his uncles William, Edward and

Robert: all four of them are brethren of Derby’s corporation, and this is perhaps the

most important civic event they will ever participate in. Henry is twelve years old, and

he too is almost certainly in the crowd, along with his younger brothers Thomas and

Francis, who are ten and five, and his eight-year old sister Anne.65

While the lavish pageants that traditionally marked royal entries have gone out

of fashion, replaced by the private masques and ceremonies of the court, the king’s

arrival in a new town is still an occasion of ceremony.66

James’s retinue would have

entered the town from the north via the Nottingham road, processing down Iron Gate

past the church of All Saints into the market place. James may have decided to

dismount from his coach and undertake the final part of the journey on foot, as he had

done when arriving in York in 1604. Effusive speeches would have been made to

welcome the king, and lavish feasts prepared to refresh him. James would probably

have carried out a public act of worship, perhaps at All Saints or another of the town’s

churches, and may have visited local workers or exercised the royal prerogative by

pardoning any prisoners being held in the town’s two prisons.67

As James had put it

on his arrival at York twenty years earlier, ‘the people are desirous to see a king, and

so they shall, for they shall as well see his body as his face’.68

* * *

Although James’s visit must have been an occasion of high excitement for the

town, it was not unprecedented. James had last visited the town in 1619, and before

that in 1609. Despite its distance from London, Derby was far from isolated from

court or parliamentary politics. English communities in the seventeenth century were

part of a system of government in which towns and parishes played just as significant

a role as Parliament or the palace of Whitehall. With no standing army and only a

small paid bureaucracy, the English monarchy and its representatives in the localities

were forced to rely on popular acceptance of its authority in order to exercise power.

England could not have been governed without the involvement of its citizens in civil

roles and offices. Volunteers, most of them several ranks below the level of

aristocracy and gentry, took on the roles of magistrates, members of town and

borough corporations, constables and churchwardens.69

Age, gender and class did

place some limits on this unpaid workforce: for the most part, it excluded women and

the young, and also servants, apprentices and anyone else who did not own property.

Nevertheless, those who did take part in the exercise of authority in England’s towns

and villages were directly involved not just in enforcing the edicts of church and state,

but also in feeding petitions, demands and complaints back to the centre. The

gentlemen and corporation members who assembled in Derby’s marketplace in

August 1624 were there to meet James not just as subjects, but as fellow members of

England’s governing class. As the son of a corporation member, Henry was part of

this system, and even from an early age his horizons would have stretched further

than Derbyshire.

It was not just the Walker family’s status that would have exposed Henry to

the wider world beyond Derby. Accidents of location, too, had their part to play.

Henry grew up in the Cornmarket house that his grandfather had given to his father in

1607. No trace of the house survives today, but the street still traces the narrow path

that it would have done four hundred years ago. Then, it stood at the entrance to the

town from the south over St Peter’s bridge, which provided a crossing over a tributary

of the river Derwent called Markeaton Brook. The Walkers’ house was probably a

two or three-storey building: timber-framed and constructed from wattle and daub or

perhaps pargeted, with a steep pitched roof and the upper storeys jutting out over the

ground floor into the street. Its windows would have been small: perhaps glazed, but

more likely to have had leaves made of lattice, cloth and shutters. On the ground floor

would have been a large, unglazed opening which served as the shop counter, kept

secure with shutters at night but open during the day in order to tempt customers into

the elder Henry’s ironmongery business.70

His shop was a single room, dominated by

a long table surrounded by stools and chairs, with cupboards set up against the walls.

Henry would have sold raw iron as rods, bars and plates, but the bulk of his trade

would have been worked items: pots, pans, andirons and more specialised items such

as apple cradles or chafing dishes. Above all else, his shop would have sold nails,

used for everything from shoeing horses to constructing vehicles, boats and buildings.

At the heart of the house was the kitchen, built around a range hung with brass

and iron utensils as well as white wear pottery from the nearby village of Ticknall.

Next door to the kitchen was a small bedchamber with a spinning wheel, a hoop, and

a ‘chair for a childe’ – perhaps for a maid. To the rear of the house were a buttery and

a hay chamber with similarly basic bedrooms. On the upper floors were more

substantial bedrooms: one, with two bedsteads and a trundle bed, was probably where

Henry slept along with his younger brothers Thomas and Francis. Henry’s sister Anne

may have slept on the trundle bed in her parents’ room. Here the most luxurious bed

linen was reserved for the heads of the household. Lit with brass and pewter

candlesticks and hung with carpets, the room had a feather bed together with pillows

and cushions to ensure a comfortable night’s sleep. Hand basins and a chamber pot

provided for more basic needs.71

This must have been a busy, noisy household for Henry and his younger

siblings to grow up in. The chatter and gossip of their father’s regular customers

would have been punctuated by the sound of wagons and farm animals clattering

through the street outside as they made their way into the town. The Walkers’ shop

lay just south of Derby’s marketplace, sitting within the part of the town where grain

was bought and sold (the street divided with poles to mark out the areas in which

different types of grain could be purchased).72

The market days held every

Wednesday and Friday would have brought a stream of unfamiliar voices flooding

through the counters and windows of the house, as farmers, lead miners and artisans

from the surrounding countryside came into the town to buy and sell foodstuffs and

wares and to stock up on essential tools such as tongs and scythes.

Marketplaces in early modern England were more than just a commercial

space. They were also somewhere in which the tensions and stresses of the adult

world were negotiated and played out in public. For Henry and his siblings, Derby’s

market must have provided a swift induction into the politics of the town. Sermons

were preached beneath the marketplace’s cross, and royal proclamations were

announced at the south end of the market near a terrace of buildings called Rotten

Row.73

Every year on Shrove Tuesday, the marketplace was the starting point for a

game of football, in which young men from the parish of All Saints would compete

against their rivals from the parish of St Peter’s, just across the river Derwent. Games

quickly deteriorated into violence, and players would often end up in the river as they

fought for possession of the ball.74

Football matches were probably good practice for some of the other outbreaks

of violence to which the marketplace played host. In 1576, rival factions supporting

local magnates Sir John Zouch and Sir Thomas Stanhope had to be stopped from

doing each other serious injury, finally separated only by the ringing of the town’s

bells. Elections could prove particular flashpoints: in 1610, a pitched battle had taken

place in the marketplace between supporters of Sir Philip Stanhope and Sir George

Gresley.75

But it was also the venue for more peaceful political processes. The town’s

Guildhall – a two-storey wood and plaster building with a tiled roof at the south-west

side of the marketplace – was the site of the town corporation’s meetings. A steep

flight of stairs led from the marketplace to the Guildhall’s first floor chamber.76

Listening to his father, grandfather and uncles’ accounts of corporation business

would have been the first steps in Henry’s political education, foreshadowing the

power struggles within the Parliamentarian faction that he would go on to document

in his newsbooks.

The town’s two bailiffs also served as justices of the peace, and as a result the

Guildhall was also the venue for petty sessions (summary trials by magistrates

without juries) and quarter sessions (magistrates trying more serious misdemeanours

that required the attentions of a jury). The town prison, where defendants were held

before trial, was on the ground floor of the building. Derby played host to two of the

county’s four quarter sessions every year, occasions which would have brought

offenders from across the county to Henry’s doorstep. One of the most common

offences brought to trial was theft: like the case of George Clarke of Alfreton, accused

of stealing William Jackson’s goose, or that of Adam Flint of Wirksworth, accused of

breaking and entering into a miner’s hut.77

Twice a year, judges from the midland circuit arrived in the town to hold the

county’s assizes and to try those accused of the most serious crimes. As well as the

town prison, Derby also had a county prison – located a few hundred yards south of

the Walkers’ house at the south end of Cornmarket – where felons would be held for

trial. Prisoners were kept in squalid conditions, caused by the building backing onto

the Markeaton brook. Every so often, the brook burst its banks and flooded the cells.

Two years before Henry was born, three prisoners had drowned there, a horrible death

made all the worse by the fact that the brook would have carried a significant

proportion of the town’s sewage.78

George Fox, the founder of the Quakers who

would later spend nearly a year imprisoned there, described it as ‘a lousy, stinking

low place without any bed’.79

Outside the prison were the town’s gallows, a sight

which cannot have done much to improve the mental state of those remanded inside.

The assize courts had the power to condemn an offender to death, and hangings would

have been a routine outcome. At one assizes in 1591, no fewer than seven people

were hanged.80

In 1608 two women from Bakewell had been executed there as

witches.81

Executions were popular events: elaborately staged theatres of punishment

that were typically attended by hundreds of men, women and children from all social

levels. The condemned were expected to make a good death, recanting their sins in

their final speech from the scaffold before accepting their punishment. And yet

executions were not straightforward demonstrations of religious and political

judgment against offenders. For some contemporaries, hangings and beheadings

undoubtedly had something of a carnival atmosphere, and for others the behaviour of

the accused – for example, refusing to confess their crimes or failing to go meekly to

the scaffold – held out the potential to subvert the state’s purposes of retribution and

deterrence.82

These ambiguities ran through into printed accounts of executions,

which had become popular from the 1580s onwards. Typically structured around a

biography of the offender, a summary of their crimes, and an account of their last

speech and death, they could provide prurient thrills for some readers just as much as

they provided moral instruction to others.83

Such accounts circulated widely across

England, and would have informed how Henry and other spectators expected the

condemned men and women of Derby to behave in their final minutes – just as they

shaped the crowd’s own behaviour. Twenty-five years later, these accounts would go

on to shape the accounts of executions that appeared in Henry’s own newsbooks; not

least his narrative of the death of Charles I.

Derby’s marketplace also provided a connection to news from beyond the

town. It was a regular stopping point for coaches and wagons travelling north from

London. Traffic was heavy and frequent. Coaches left London for Derby every Friday

from the Axe tavern in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury near Cripplegate.84

The

road from London to Derby wound its way northwest up the ancient trackway known

as Watling Street, through St Albans and Northampton. At High Cross the road

diverged onto Fosse Way, another ancient path that, like Watling Street, had been

paved by the Romans. From there travellers passed through Leicester and

Loughborough, before crossing St Peter’s bridge over the river Derwent and into

Derby.85

Coaching inns in the streets radiating out from the marketplace, such as the

Angel, the Dolphin, or the King’s Head opposite the Walkers’ house, would have

been the first sight that greeted merchants, chapmen and other travellers arriving in

the town.86

In an age before instant communication, the coaches and wagons heading to

and from London carried more than just passengers. They played a vital role in the

transmission of information across England. The Gloucestershire estate steward John

Smyth recorded that the ‘clothiers, horse carriers and wainmen’ arriving in Berkeley

Hundred in Gloucestershire were interrogated with the question ‘what news at

London?’, after which their updates became ‘general speech between every cobbler’s

teeth’.87

The question ‘what news?’ was probably one of the most commonly-uttered

phrases in seventeenth-century England, asked of friends and strangers alike. The

clattering of cartwheels on cobbles that marked the arrival of a carrier in Derby’s

marketplace would have brought men, women and children out of their shops and

houses, curious to hear news of the latest court scandal, of battles and sieges in

continental Europe, or of catastrophes and disasters in distant parishes.88

Carriers also brought letters. The first postal service was not introduced until

1635, and before this coaches travelling to and from London would have been one of

the key means of receiving news from distant friends and family. London held a

magnetic pull over the rest of the country – its mortality rate far outstripped its birth

rate, requiring a significant influx of migrants every year – and most people in Derby

and other English towns would have known someone in the capital. The arrival of the

carrier in the marketplace must have brought with it the prospect of fresh news of

loved ones, together with updates on the latest developments in Parliament and at

court.89

Handwritten commercial newsletters were also starting to find a market

during this period, although they were expensive – one author charged individuals

£20 a year for his newsletter – and thus limited to the rich.90

Like oral news, letters

swiftly re-circulated beyond their original recipient, with extracts read out to an

audience or copied and sent on to others.

Last but not least, the carrier service also played an important role in the

circulation of the ballads, broadsides and pamphlets that were starting to be produced

in increasing numbers by London’s printers.91

While Derby did not have a dedicated

bookseller until the early eighteenth century, it is likely that some local shopkeepers

would have stocked books as a sideline.92

It was not uncommon for chandlers or

haberdashers, for example, to sell pamphlets alongside their more conventional

wares.93

The carrier would have been their chief source of stock, with traders perhaps

relying on friends in the London book trade to arrange purchases. Derby sent a steady

stream of young men to London to become apprentice printers and booksellers. Two

years before Henry’s baptism, for example, Zachary Bagnold, the son of a local tailor,

had left the town to become apprentice to Bartholomew Sutton, a bookseller based

near St Paul’s specialising in the works of Ben Jonson.94

Boys like Zachary may well

have found their free time taken up with errands for relatives back home, sourcing

books from London’s stationers. A parallel network of chapmen and pedlars hawking

goods from town to town and village to village would also have served as a source of

printed books, particularly ballads and other small, short items.95

Henry left no record of the type of books he read growing up. However,

alongside the classical and theological set texts he studied at school, he must also

have been exposed to the shorter, cheaper works of the sort brought by the carriers

and chapmen. Ballads, in particular, would have been ubiquitous in Derby and other

urban centres in early seventeenth-century England. Typically printed as a broadside,

on one side of a single sheet of folio (a paper size of around 15 by 11 inches), they

contained song lyrics and often also a woodcut illustration. Some were printed with

blackletter typefaces, modelled on Gothic script, long after most other forms of print

had moved to the roman and italic types inspired by new handwriting trends of the

Renaissance. Chapmen and ballad mongers hawked them in market places and while

on the road, perhaps singing the lyrics to attract customers. On sale for only a penny

or a halfpenny, they were affordable to wage labourers in Derby and the surrounding

countryside, and perhaps even to children with pocket money to spend.96

For those

who could not afford them, ballads were often posted up on the walls of the taverns

and alehouses in and around the town’s marketplace. Even those who could not read

them could appreciate the pictures that often accompanied ballads, and would quickly

have picked up lyrics and tunes by listening to them being sung aloud. Ballads

crossed social boundaries, as likely to be sung by workers in shops or fields as

collected in the libraries of gentlemen.97

Many of the ballads that would have found their way to Derby and other towns

and villages across England were old standards. Old Testament stories such as those

of Jonah and the whale or Daniel in the lion’s den were popular, as were New

Testament parables such as that of the servants and the talents. During the early

seventeenth century, however, these were gradually being supplanted by ballads

dealing with less overtly godly subjects, such as moralising tales of ghosts and

executions, the romances of knights and damsels, or bawdy stories of young lovers.

This trend was bolstered by changes in the book trade. From 1624 onwards, six of the

leading London ballad publishers formed themselves into a partnership and bought up

the copyright of a number of popular ballads, and shifted production away from godly

ballads. Their shops at key points of entry into the City to target carries heading out of

London: Henry Gosson’s shop, for example, was on London Bridge and John Wright,

Francis Coules and Francis Grove were all based just outside Newgate, on the road up

to Derby. Wright, Coules and Grove were also close to West Smithfield market, a key

hub where chapmen bought and sold goods while in London.98

As a result, their

ballads in particular must have been in wide circulation in Derby and other midlands

towns. In the early 1640s, Coules would go on to be one of the booksellers who sold

Henry’s earliest works.

But ballads could also respond to the news. An example of the sort that may

have been in circulation in Derby at the time of James’s visit is The Dismall Day,

published the year before by a London printed called George Eld. It told the story of a

catastrophe that had taken place in the French ambassador’s house in Blackfriars on

26 October 1623. A Catholic congregation had assembled to listen to a Jesuit called

Master Drury. He had been delivering a sermon for about half an hour to a crowd of

about 300 people when the weight of the crowd caused the main beam supporting the

floor to give way. Drury was killed along with 95 other people; the survivors were in

a part of the room that did not give away and escaped by cutting their way through the

plaster walls. Crowds quickly gathered and the city authorities had to close off the

accident scene to protect the survivors. Eld’s ballad was mocked up to look like a

tombstone, with lyrics for an inscription and surmounted by the grim reaper on one

side and a skeleton on the other.99

Ballads and broadsides were not the only printed source of news. From at least

the 1580s onwards, London’s printers and booksellers had found a ready market for

short, quarto pamphlets – eight or sixteen pages long, and around the size of a modern

paperback – describing wonders, marvels and catastrophes. Such topics allowed

authors to moralise, but could also thrill or horrify readers looking for titillation.

Accounts of murders were a common genre. One title that may have just started to

circulate around Derby and other English towns at the time of James I’s visit in

August 1624 was a pamphlet called The crying murther, printed by Edward Allde for

the bookseller Nathaniel Butter. Butter had a shop at the sign of the Pied Bull in St

Paul’s churchyard, and specialised in cheap books such as news pamphlets and

travelogues.100

The crying murther was typical of his stock, telling the story of the

grusome murder of a curate called Trat, from Old Cleeve in Somerset. Illustrated with

a gruesome woodcut of Trat’s body being dismembered, it was produced to mark the

execution of Trat’s attackers at the Taunton assizes in July 1624.101

Booksellers like Butter were also pioneering the invention of serial news

publications. These had become popular in Germany, France and the Netherlands

from the 1590s onwards, but it was not until the 1620s that these gained a foothold in

the English book trade. The outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 brought with it

the publication of translations of Dutch and German news pamphlets, which became

known as ‘corantos’. A number of Dutch-produced corantos, printed in English and

aimed at an English market appeared, and continued to circulate despite James I

requesting that the States General of the Netherlands place a block on exports.

However, it would be English-published corantos that would go on to dominate the

market. In 1622, Butter obtained a licence to publish Dutch translations, and began

selling them in earnest in collaboration with other London booksellers such as

Thomas Archer and Nicholas Bourne. Butter’s innovation was the idea of consecutive

numbers for each edition: although corantos were not published on a regular day of

the week, new editions were still prepared frequently and now readers would know if

they had missed a copy. Corantos brought a regular flow of overseas news to English

readers concerned at Protestant defeats and setbacks in western Europe and anxious

for the cause of their godly counterparts across the channel. They were ultimately

banned in October 1632, after a complaint by the Spanish ambassador, but not before

they had given readers like Henry an education in the confessional politics of English

foreign policy.102

Religious texts would also have been in wide circulation in Derby at this time.

Some were too probably too expensive for the average reader: a copy of the King

James Authorised Version of the Bible was sold unbound for ten shillings, or bound

for an extra two shillings, and would have been out of reach to all but churches and

the wealthy. Others were too specialist: a copy of Erasmus’s Latin Paraphrases of the

Gospels owned by the church of All Saints may have been read only by the curate,

and perhaps not even by him. However, the church’s copy of Foxe’s Actes and

Monuments may well have had a wider readership through services or use at

school.103

Other types of Bible, too, would almost have certainly been common

possessions for many in the town. The Geneva version of the Bible, produced in the

1560s by English scholars fleeing the reign of Mary I, was available in quarto format

for around 4 shillings plus an extra shilling for a binding. Its marginal annotations

made it particularly popular with Puritan audiences. This was around half a week’s

pay for a typical craftsman: a sizeable but not insurmountable investment. A copy of

the New Testament only would have been more affordable at around 10d. in octavo

(half the size of quarto), or 7d. in duodecimo (half as small again).104

Readers on a

low budget looking for spiritual edification could choose from a wide range of printed

sermons and other devotional literature such as catechisms and chapbooks. In the year

of James I’s visit to Derby, cheap religious books of the sort that might have

circulated in the town included a sermon called The anatomie of conscience, preached

at the Derby assizes in the spring of 1623 by Immanuel Bourne, the Presbyterian vicar

of Ashover.105

This was another of Nathaniel Butter’s works: the text provided by

Bourne, printed by George Eld and Miles Fletcher at their shop at the sign of the

White Horse in Fleet Lane, and sold by Butter to readers in London and across the

country. Eld was a Derbyshire native, the son of a carpenter from Scropton ten miles

west of Derby, and may well have provided contacts for Derbyshire authors like

Bourne looking to find a publisher for their books.

* * *

The first sixteen years of Henry’s life were thus spent living in the focal point

of a communications hub that stretched from Derby’s marketplace, through the towns

and villages of Derbyshire, into London, continental Europe and beyond. His father’s

shop would have been just as much of a centre for gossip and discussion as the

taverns and inns surrounding the house, particularly given the elder Henry’s

membership of the Corporation. Market days would have brought spoken news from

across the county and beyond into the town, as would the regular arrival of travellers

and carriers. Henry would also have had access to news and rumour in all its written

forms: whether titbits from letters sent to relatives and family friends, sensational

narratives of crimes and prodigies in ballads and pamphlets, or accounts of Protestant

misfortunes in corantos. Thanks to the good fortune of being born into a well to do

family living at the heart of the town’s commercial and political networks, Henry’s

time in Derby would have given him an early and thorough education in how news

was produced, communicated and spread in all its forms.

Henry could not have predicted how he would later put this education to use.

All other things being equal, he might have expected to have stayed in Derby, using

family money and connections to establish himself in a trade and inherit the roles in

vestry and corporation politics carved out by his father and uncles. However, any

certainty he may have had about his future changed abruptly in October 1627. In that

month Henry’s father, still only in his late forties, died.106

The death seems to have

been sudden and unexpected, and the elder Henry did not leave a will. The family’s

income must have fallen dramatically, and Henry’s mother Anne quickly found

another husband, John Bradshaw – the member of another prominent local family – in

All Saints on 27 November 1629.107

It was decided that Henry was to go to London

and be apprenticed into his father’s trade as a trainee ironmonger. As Henry himself

later put it, he was ‘taken from the school to the shop’.108

During this time he would

be supported financially by his master, and upon completion of his term of service

would be able to set himself up in business.

And so at some point in 1628, Henry made the short journey from Cornmarket

to the marketplace for the final time, to wait for the Derby to London carrier and set

out on the 150 mile journey to London. Saying farewell to his mother, siblings and

extended family, he left behind the security that being a member of Derby’s

governing class provided. At the age of sixteen, he was suddenly alone in the world.

Even with good roads it might have taken four days for the carrier’s horses to plod

their way southwards to London: plenty of time for Henry’s mind to linger on the

familiar world he was leaving behind, and the unknown city to which he was

travelling. He would have seen evidence of his destination long before he arrived.

Smoke from the sulphurous Newcastle sea coal burned in London’s fireplaces

hovered over the city and was visible from miles away. John Evelyn later described it

as an ‘impure and thick mist accompanied with a fulginous and filthy vapour’, which

was visible for miles beyond the City walls.109

As the carrier neared its destination,

rural fields would have given way to the growing suburbs around Clerkenwell and

then into the built-up housing on the western edge of the parish of St Giles

Cripplegate. It was Henry’s first look at the parish in which, five years later, he would

make his home and which would launch his second career as a writer and bookseller.

The coach continued towards London’s walls and the twin towers that flanked

the arch of Cripplegate. Passing under it and into the City, Walker’s coach trundled

down Little Wood Street, past the halls of the Curriers’ and Plasterers’ Companies,

before making a sharp left onto Love Lane. A final right turn, and the coach had

reached Aldermanbury, coming to a stop at the Axe inn on the east side of the street.

This was where the Derbyshire carriers lodged, and where they picked up and

dropped off their passengers every Friday.110

Waiting to meet Henry was the man

with whom he was to live for the next six years: Robert Holland, his new master.

Chapter Three

Taken From the School to the Shop

20 January 1629. Robert Holland is accompanying his new apprentice along

Fenchurch Street, towards the east end of the City of London. The narrow streets are a jumble

of noises: the clatter of cartwheels and coaches, the shouts of street hawkers, the sounds of

dogs, horses, pigs and cows, and the chatter of conversations. Master and apprentice pick

their way through the crowds, puddles and rubbish to make their way to Ironmongers’ Hall:

the headquarters of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, one of the City’s twelve great

livery companies. The Ironmongers are tenth in the order of precedence. In the procession

from the City to the Royal Courts of Justice each November after the new Lord Mayor is

sworn, the Ironmongers follow the Worshipful Company of Salters, and in turn are followed

by the Worshipful Company of Vinters.

The Hall is an imposing Gothic structure on the south side of Fenchurch Street, just

east of Fishmonger’s Alley. The Company have occupied the site since 1457, but the building

Holland and Walker are heading to dates from 1587, when a new hall had replaced the

ramshackle collection of houses that were there beforehand.1 Outside is a walled garden, a

quiet haven from the filth and noise of London’s streets, planted with roses and herbs such as

lavender, marjoram, rosemary and camomile.2 Inside, the walls are starting to show some

wear and tear since their construction thirty-four years earlier. Later in the year, the Company

will pay a painter called Nathaniel Glover to stain the wainscoting and staircase the colour of

walnut (haggling over the price when his workmanship turns out to be sub-standard).

Holland and Walker enter the building’s foreyard and pass the armoury, which like

every livery company the Ironmongers kept to contribute to the defence of the realm when

required to do so by the crown. Its contents include ten suits of russet-finished plate armour,

twenty pikes, thirty muskets, and nineteen barrels of gunpowder. The pair continue on up the

stairs into the dining hall, a large room based around two long tables, its windows glazed and

hung with green silk curtains. Pictures of James I and of the Company’s benefactors line the

walls, which are a mixture of lavishly painted plaster and intricate woodwork carved with

over fifty different coats of arms.

There to meet Walker are the members of the Company’s governing Court.3 Like all

of the City’s guilds, the Ironmongers’ Company has two types of member: the yeomanry,

who have been made free after successful completion of an apprenticeship, and the livery,

senior members of the Company who are entitled to wear the black gowns and fur-trimmed

crimson and brown hoods that mark them out from the freemen of the Company.4 Each

section of the Company’s membership has an elected Warden. Liverymen make up the

Company’s Court, and as well electing the Master each year carry out the more mundane

business of running the Company’s affairs. Walker is about to take on the most junior role in

this immaculately-ordered hierarchy. Like hundreds of teenagers before and after him, he

swears an oath of obedience to the Master and Wardens, writing it into the Company’s

register of apprentices and signing his name:

‘Memoranda that I Henry Walker being apprentice unto Robert Holland Ironmonger

do promise by my faith and trust to be obedient unto the Master and these our

wardens of the Company of Ironmongers of London and to their successors all the

days of my life in witness whereof I put my hand.’5

Walker is no longer the son of a burgess of Derby. He is a Londoner.

* * *

Walker’s home town had around 3,000 inhabitants, and he would have known most of

them by sight if not by name. London had a population nearly one hundred times the size of

Derby – around 250,000 inhabitants – and was the third biggest city in Europe: a dirty,

smelly, anonymous and ever-growing metropolis.6 Walker never recorded his reactions to his

early days in London, but those of a number of other apprentices from the same period do

survive. Thomas Raymond, sent to the capital to live with his uncle William Boswell, found

the violence which ‘young lads do undergo’ upon arriving in London ‘a very dreadful sight to

a young country boy’.7 Edward Barlow left his home in Prestwich in Lancashire for London,

and was greatly confused by the sight that met him at London Bridge: ‘seeing so many things

in the water with long poles standing up in them and a great deal of ropes about them, it made

me wonder what they should be’. He did not realise that they were ships, ‘for I had never

seen any before that time’.8

The Holland household, at least, would not have been completely unfamiliar. Unlike

many apprentice ironmongers, Walker had some acquaintance with Holland’s trade due to it

having been his father’s profession. And his master, too, may not have been unknown to him.

Holland was possibly a friend or acquaintance of the Walker family: various Walkers were

apprenticed into the Ironmongers’ Company during the early seventeenth century, and while

the Company’s archives are silent about whether they came from Derby, it is possible they

were relatives who put Henry’s mother in touch with Holland. Levels of migration into

London from elsewhere in England were so high that most people would have known

someone in the capital, who might act as an intermediary to help a friend’s son get settled in a

trade.9

Holland ran a shop in Newgate market, north of St Paul’s cathedral and just within the

western edge of the City’s walls.10

He had been made free in 1612, after serving a seven-year

apprenticeship with Nathaniel Loane in the parish of St Sepulchre, the other side of the walls

to Newgate.11

He had been married to his wife, Mary, since 1613 and had a young family:

two daughters, Dorothy and Frances, who were nine and two, and a newborn son, Thomas.12

The Hollands would later add two more sons, Peter and Richard, to their family, but of all

their children only Richard survived to adulthood. Thomas died before his second birthday,

and Dorothy, Frances and Peter were all taken by the plague outbreak of August 1636.13

The family lived and worshipped in the parish of St Bride’s Fleet Street, fifteen

minutes walk away from Newgate just outside the City’s walls across the river Fleet. The

parish’s church was a fifteenth-century building in the Gothic Perpendicular style, not

dissimilar to the tower of All Saints Derby. The vicar of St Bride’s – James Palmer – may

also have reminded Walker of sermons and catechisms from his early childhood: he was a

moderate puritan not unlike Walker’s first minister, Richard Kilby. In 1637 Palmer was

reported for diverging from the Laudian liturgy, often omitting the prayer to bishops and the

rest of the church’s clergymen, and ‘read[ing] divine service sometimes in his gown and

sometimes without either surplice or gown, in his cloak’. A humble man, he left gifts of

money in the houses of needy parishioners, and was said to have lived in the church’s

steeple.14

Although Holland, his family, and the environment of St Bride’s may have helped

smooth the transition from oldest son to indentured trainee, Walker’s move to London must

still have been an abrupt and confusing change to deal with. Apprentices had few rights and

many responsibilities. The terms of one typical indenture from the period give an idea of

what would have been expected of Walker. Holland was obliged at least to provide board,

lodging and training to him:

‘The said master his said apprentice shall teach and instruct or caused to be taught and

instructed, finding unto his said apprentice meat, drink, apparel, lodging and all other

necessaries, according to the custom of the City of London’.15

These commitments were necessary, as not all masters treated their apprentices

kindly. Court records of the period catalogue the cruelty with which young trainees could be

treated: one apprentice was stripped naked and hung by her thumbs; another had his hip

broken with a boat hook; and a third was beaten so badly that he spat blood for a fortnight.16

In return for staying in Holland’s care, Walker had to stick to his side of the bargain:

‘His said master faithfully shall serve, his secrets keep, his lawful commands

everywhere gladly do. He shall not commit fornication nor contract matrimony within

the said term. He shall not play at cards, dice, tables or any other unlawful games. He

shall not haunt taverns nor playhouses, nor absent himself from the master’s service

day or night unlawfully’.17

Of all the towns in England, London was perhaps the most likely to tempt apprentices

into breaking these promises. Walker’s early years with Holland would have consisted

principally of menial tasks: tidying, fetching and carrying and other unskilled jobs. Masters

did not want to risk expensive materials being damaged or broken by clumsy or

inexperienced apprentices. The standard term of apprenticeship was seven years, and there

was plenty of time for their charges to pick up skills gradually.18

Once the work was done,

there was still time to enjoy London’s distractions. The Lancashire teenager Edward Barlow,

for instance, quickly made friends with the children of his master’s neighbours.19

The city’s

open spaces and taverns were a natural meeting place and playground that could inspire both

innocent daydreams and – in the eyes of contemporaries, at least – more licentious fantasies.

Barlow, for example, bonded with his master’s servants over a shared ambition to travel the

world.20

Other apprentices inclined more towards the pleasures of the flesh. Roger Love,

though a devoted Presbyterian, recorded that in September 1663 he went to the ale house

seven times, including once on a Sunday.21

In his autobiography, Benjamin Bangs recalled

the romantic attentions of a young woman, who would come to his master’s shop and distract

him from work.22

For the most adventurous, the brothels of Southwark were a guaranteed

way to find female company. On Shrove Tuesday, these were traditionally the object of

attack by the city’s youth, but some apprentices at least had reason to visit at other times of

the year.

For Walker, one of the biggest distractions may have been London’s many

bookshops. Holland’s premises were a couple of minutes’ walk to the north of the churchyard

of St Paul’s, the centre of bookselling in seventeenth-century England. Shops based in houses

abutting the churchyard and on Paternoster Row just to the north competed with single-storey

booths and stalls in the churchyard itself. Signboards hung above the shops advertised the

distinctive emblems and logos of each bookseller. Edward Blackmore, who specialised in

cheap books such as sets of astrological predictions, could (appropriately enough) be found at

the Blazing Star.23

Nathaniel Butter, who had dominated the market for cheap news

pamphlets and corantos during the 1620s, had his shop at the Pied Bull near the St Austin’s

gate of the churchyard.24

At the sign of the Rose could be found Henry Featherstone, who

sold sermons, catechisms, and other religious texts.25

Underneath signboards, title pages and

illustrations would have been pinned to boards to advertise stock, allowing readers to wander

up and down the churchyard and its surrounding streets to browse for particular books.26

Other neighbourhoods in London had their own pockets of printers and booksellers.

Robert Holland’s home in St Bride’s was at the heart of a cluster of print shops in and around

Fleet Street: it had been next door to the church of St Bride’s that Wynkyn de Worde had in

1500 set up a printing press, after inheriting William Caxton’s business.27

Just as St Paul’s

provided a steady stream of customers looking for theological texts, so too booksellers also

gravitated to other parts of the City where there was demand for particular genres.

Westminster Hall, where the Courts of Commons Pleas, Chancery and King’s Bench sat, was

full of stationers’ and scriveners’ stalls, selling law books and other legal paraphernalia to the

lawyers, MPs and peers based there.28

The Old Bailey, too – site of the City of London and

Middlesex quarter sessions, and just the other side of the City walls from Holland’s shop in

Newgate – had its fair share of book stalls. Amongst them was Francis Coules’s shop, which

he had established a few years before Walker’s arrival in London. A short walk to the north-

east of Newgate was the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, home to many printers who, with

Walker, would become notorious in the early 1640s for illicit publications: the parish’s

position outside the City walls placed it (in theory at least) outside the regulation of the

Stationers’ Company.29

Walker’s daily journey from St Bride’s to Newgate, and the errands

he would have run for Holland, would have made it hard to escape the pull of London’s book

trade.

Whether it was bookshops, taverns or brothels, Walker seems to have fallen victim to

at least some of the pleasures that London had to offer a young man. At some point during his

apprenticeship, he underwent a period of spiritual turmoil that would have been familiar to

his old curate Richard Kilby. Many years later, when ministering to his own congregation,

Walker wrote at length about the struggle he went through. While much of his account is

couched in the familiar clichés of puritan conversion narratives, it is still revealing about his

mental state after his move to London. He regretted having ‘had an eye to some worldly

contents, which deprived me (for that time) of enjoying peace in [God’s] presence’.30

As a

result, Walker’s thoughts were ‘much taken up in consideration of my sad and deplorable

condition under the curse by nature’.31

Like many addicts, he often relapsed despite the best

intentions, saying to himself: ‘Lord once more, I will have but one day of pleasure, and then I

will part with all that offends thee’.32

He was miserable as a result:

‘My soul was much cast down, and I sat up a great part of many nights, when all the

family, where I then lived, was in bed, and with an heavy heart, and floods of tears

gushing from my sorrowful eyes, I was exceedingly disquieted, pouring forth mine

heart to my God, and begging mercy at the foot-stool of the Throne of grace’.33

After much anguish, Walker eventually experienced God’s grace:

‘But when my God was pleased to bring my heart to a frame to resolve seriously

never to delay with God a moment more, my heart was so fixed on my Saviour, that I

saw a sufficiency in him under any dispensation: I tasted a greater sweetness in the

graces of his Spirit, than in any temporal pleasure. And I found much of the love,

grace, spirit, and power of my dear Saviour appearing to refresh my troubled soul’.34

This focus on the Holy Spirit affecting a gradual regeneration in the believer’s soul

was typical of Puritan conversion experiences. Contemporary accounts of conversions

commonly began with an individual becoming aware of their sins, prompted by close reading

of scripture or by listening to sermons preached by a charismatic minister, before then

wrestling with their fallen nature and failure to move away from sin. Finally, through the

workings of the Holy Spirit, the individual was able to become aware of their growing

holiness, in the confidence that God had freely granted mercy to them.35

Walker’s account is silent on exactly how he came to find and accept God’s grace.

However, it seems likely that he came under the influence of a charismatic preacher. It was

compulsory to attend the Sunday service at one’s local parish church: this requirement had

first been imposed in 1552 under the Act of Uniformity, and in 1601 James I had issued a

strict reminder to magistrates to enforce it. However, this did not explicit prohibit attendance

at other churches, and for a young puritan seeking spiritual succour, London in the late 1620s

offered plenty of choice.

Many parishes appointed extra preachers to supplement the sermons of the incumbent

minister, and these lectureships had by the 1620s become a puritan institution. Some were

appointed directly by vestries, but others were controlled by livery companies or private

donors: in 1626, a body known as the Feoffees for Impropriations had been established by

influential puritan ministers and wealth lay people in order to buy up church property that fell

into lay hands (using tithe proceeds to pay the stipends of lecturers), and to purchase the right

to nominate parish ministers. There were active lecturers in at least a third of London parishes

by the 1610s, and at least half of these have been identified as puritans.36

Puritans also

crossed parish boundaries to hear Sunday sermons in other churches. ‘Sermon-gadding’, as it

was known, was a popular Sabbath activity for some puritans, but it was also controversial.

Anti-puritan polemicists attacked the practice for undermining the spiritual and secular

authority of the parochial church, but for moderate puritan ministers, too, it could also seem

dangerously close to separatism.37

Nowhere in England was gadding from sermon to sermon easier than in London. The

close proximity of the city’s churches, together with the staggered timings of different

lectures – some early on weekdays, others on evenings, and still more on Sunday afternoons

– meant some Londoners were able to notch up impressive attendance rates. The woodturner

Nehemiah Wallington once managed to go to nineteen sermons in a single week, and while

this seems to have been exceptional, it would have not have been uncommon for some godly

Londoners to attend three or four sermons a week, or even on a single Sunday. The

theologian Daniel Featley described in 1636 how when a new minister arrived in London,

audiences would ‘throng and crowd at the church doors, and not only fill all the seats, but

climb into the windows, and hang upon iron bars’. Within a few years, however, the audience

would have melted away, ‘run a gadding after some new schismatical Lecturer’.38

The experiences of another London apprentice, who arrived in London in the same

year as Walker, give a hint of how Walker may have spent his time after his conversion.

William Kiffin moved to London in 1629 – the same year as Walker – after the death of both

of his parents, to be apprenticed to a brewer. His conversion was triggered through hearing,

by chance, an early morning lecture from Thomas Foxley at the church of St Antholin in

Budge Row, close to Cannon Street. St Antholin’s had been one of the earliest London

parishes to appoint a lecturer, in 1559, and by 1566 sermons were being preached every

weekday morning.39

Foxley was one of a number of ministers placed at St Antholin’s by the

Feoffees as a kind of apprenticeship, on the understanding that a parish awaited at the end of

their term. He would go on to be examined by Archbishop Laud in 1630 as one of the

‘multitude of Irregular lecturers both in City and Country, whose work it was to undermine as

well the Doctrine as the Government of it’.40

Foxley was by no means the only puritan

lecturer seen as a threat by the Anglican church: in addition to the St Antholin’s lectures,

preached before the start of the working day, Walker might have chosen from weekday

sermons by William Gouge at Blackfriars or Lewis du Moulin at St Swithin London Stone.

After attending James Palmer’s service at nine in the morning in his home parish of St

Bride’s, he could have gone on to the Sunday sermon at St Paul’s Cross at ten, or to and from

Sunday sermons by John Davenport and his successor John Goodwin at St Stephen Coleman

Street. Many years later, when minister to his own church in St Martin’s Vintry just north of

where Southwark Bridge now stands, Walker published a collection of his congregation’s

conversion experiences. Many hinged on a particular sermon or minister: one singled out

Gouge in particular, recalling that his preaching ‘wrought so much upon my soul, that I saw

my condition under sin was very sad’.41

Kiffin quickly fell into company with like-minded apprentices, and got into the habit

of meeting up with them before sermons:

‘It was our constant practice to attend the morning lecture, which began at six o’clock,

both at Cornhill and Christ Church. We also appointed to meet together an hour

before service, to spend it in prayer, and in communicating to each other what

experience we had received from the Lord; or else to repeat some sermon which we

had heard before’.42

Such meetings were known by the Church authorities as conventicles: private

gathering of puritans in private homes or in barns and outbuildings in the countryside outside

towns and villages, for worship and study of the scriptures. William Laud, Archibishop of

Canterbury from 1633 onwards under Charles I’s reign, described them as ‘when ten or

twelve or more or less meet together to pray, read, preach, expound’. Whether or not a private

gathering for religious purposes was legal was, at best, ambiguous – and like gadding to

sermons, conventicles were seen by some as a direct threat to the parish structure that

underpinned the established Church.43

Many crossed parish boundaries, encouraging like-

minded members of the godly to associate and bolster each others beliefs. While for most,

they supplemented rather than replaced the parochial structure of the Church of England, they

could certainly diminish the importance of the Sunday service. And for a few, conventicles

could lead to outright separatism: joining an independent church that replaced, and stood

entirely outside, the established Church. The descendant of an early separatist congregation in

London founded by Henry Barrow and John Greensmith in the 1580s, was still active during

the early years of Charles I’s reign. In 1616, the preacher Henry Jacob gathered together an

independent congregation in Southwark, founded on the belief that every church should be

self-governing and based on a covenant willingly entered into by its members. After Jacob’s

emigration, John Lathrop – formerly curate of a Kent parish – was chosen as pastor of the

Jacob church. By the late 1630s it would have spawned a number of other, breakaway

separatist gatherings.44

There is no evidence that Walker ever attended one of these separatist churches.

Later, when accused of doing so, he would protest that ‘I was never yet a member of any

separated congregation’.45

However, there are clues that during the early 1630s, Walker was

starting to take an interest in the wider theological and political disputes affecting London’s

puritan community. On 20 January 1629 – the same day as Walker swore his oath to the

Worshipful Company of Ironmongers – Parliament was recalled after having been prorogued

the year before, in the wake of disputes over the collection of forced loans and customs duties

to finance Charles I’s war with France and Spain. The session was fractious, with prominent

puritans in the Commons such as Sir John Eliot and John Pym attacking the influence of

Arminian doctrines on the Church, and protesting against the continued collection of tonnage

and poundage on imports and exports. Frustrated, on 25 February Charles ordered John

Finch, the Speaker of the Commons, to end the session, less than two months after it had

started started. The MP Denzil Holles held the Speaker down in his chair, declaring that

‘God’s wounds he should sit still till it pleased them to rise’. On 2 March, blaming ‘certain

ill-affected persons’ in the Commons, Charles dissolved Parliament. It would not meet again

until April 1640.46

The dissolution of Parliament in 1629 was a watershed for Charles’s position on

predestination. The 1620s had seen the rise of an Arminian grouping within the Church of

England, which rejected the predestinarian Calvinist consensus of the Elizabethan and

Jacobean churches, and which sought to move away from a style of worship centred on the

spoken and written word towards one focused on liturgy and the sacraments.47

The

commonplaces of puritan worship, such as lectureships and strict observance of the Sabbath,

were seen as dangerous attempts to disrupt the uniformity of the Church. While Charles had

still hoped to reach a favourable position with Parliament, there had been a wide degree of

toleration for Calvinists within the Anglican hierarchy, despite formal debate on the question

of predestination being banned.48

Now that was no longer possible, an immediate crackdown

on predestinarian preaching began.49

Charles and his favoured bishops, most notably William

Laud first as Bishop of London then, from 1633, as Archbishop of Canterbury, increasingly

began to associate predestination with political defiance: arguing that those who felt assured

of their salvation would begin not to recognise the authority of church or king.50

For their part, Puritan ministers were equally afraid of the subversive effects that

Laudian doctrines were starting to have on the institutions of the godly. They were not helped

by divisions within the puritan community that Laud and his allies were able to exploit. The

early seventeenth century saw protracted debates within puritan circles on a host of issues:

conflicts over predestination, millenarianism and the exact role that public works of piety

played in salvation caused significant divisions, not just amongst ministers but also amongst

lay members of congregations. Laudian opponents were able to present those on the radical

fringes of puritanism as symptomatic of all puritans, despite the sometimes substantial

theological distance that separated them. A fierce debate raged within what has been termed

the ‘puritan underground’, carried out through pulpits, private meetings and hand-written

papers passed on from individual to individual, as mainstream ministers sought to defend

themselves from attacks from both outside and within their community.51

There are hints that Walker may have been privy to these internal disputes within the

circles of London’s godly. In 1642, Walker apparently spent time lying low in the house of

one Edward Fisher while on the run from the authorities.52

Fisher was a barber-surgeon who

had been made free of his master, Richard Marshalsey in November 1626. He lived near the

Old Bailey during the 1630s, minutes from Holland’s shop in Newgate. Fisher became

involved in the circulation of illicit manuscript versions of texts by Hendrik Niclaes, the

infamous founder of the Dutch sect called the Family of Love. Familists, as they were

otherwise known, caused panic within the mid-sixteenth century church as the authorities

feared their denial of the Trinity and rejection of infant baptism would spread. Fisher’s shop

appears to have acted as a clearing house for Familist manuscripts circulating in London and

beyond. A deposition by a disgruntled member of this underground network suggests that the

most coveted of Fisher’s texts was the Theologia Germanica, an anonymous mystical text

from the fourteenth century that set out advice on how, through rituals of purification, the

good Christian might open up access to otherwise secret knowledge of God. To more

orthodox puritans, used to the idea that access to God was only through His grace, this was

deeply suspect.53

* * *

Much later in his career, Walker would demonstrate some knowledge of the

Germanica, but the jury must remain out as to whether his association with Fisher dated as

far back as the early 1630s or later. What does seem likely is that during this period, he was

at least developing a theological position on the question of God’s grace that was firmly in

opposition to that of Laud. Near the end of his life, Walker donated to the Ironmongers’

Company a book that dated back to 1634. Synopsis Papismi, by the Calvinist theologian

Andrew Willet, was a popular work of religious polemic which attacked the doctrinal

foundations of Catholicism.54

The 1634 edition was its fifth, each edition having added

additional content such that by the time Walker acquired his copy, the book had become a

large folio volume of over 1,400 pages. It was clearly a significant possession for Walker,

and was probably acquired at the time of its publication: the explanation for his desire to

donate it to the Company may be that he purchased or was given the book in the year he

finished his apprenticeship (perhaps to mark the occasion of attaining his freedom). Walker

seems to have read it thoroughly. In the index, he carefully added hand-written headers to

each page to assist him in finding scriptural references.55

Willet was the son of a Hertfordshire rector, who had been educated at the puritan

hothouse of Chirst’s College, Cambridge (after a brief period at the rather less godly

Peterhouse under the Mastership of Andrew Perne: a weathervane at the college with Perne’s

initials was supposed by contemporaries to have stood for ‘A Papist’ or ‘A Protestant’

depending on which way the theological wind was blowing).56

He published his first edition

of Synopsis in 1592, aiming to publish ‘the heresies… which are maintained by the Church of

Rome this day’, together with an ‘antidotum’ or ‘counter-poison’.57

The appearance of the

1634 edition, thirteen years after Willet’s death, needs to be seen in the context of Laud’s

assault on the doctrine of predestination. It was published by the bookseller Robert

Milbourne, who kept a shop at the sign of the Greyhound in Paul’s Yard, and who specialised

in anti-Calvinist works.58

It would have been possible to read the Synopsis just as much as a

commentary on the politics of the 1630s as a critique of late sixteenth-century Catholicism.

Willet was hostile to the Catholic insistence that damnation was the responsibility of the

sinner, not God, and that salvation could achieved through good works: ‘God indeed electeth

all that shall be saved, not with any condition on their behalf, but on his own behalf… there is

then no respect to be had to our works’.59

This was a critique which could equally have been aimed at Laudianism, but which

carried with it plausible deniability: Laud’s licensers could not object to a text that was

targeted, outwardly at least, against popery. Walker’s ownership of the Synopsis suggests that

he may during the early 1630s have been taking his first tentative steps into an anti-Laudian

opposition. What is more certain is the impact that the final years of Charles’s personal rule

would have in radicalising Walker. The exemplary punishment of puritan preachers that had

started with the multilation and imprisonment of Alexander Leighton in November 1630, and

which climaxed in June 1637 with the lawyer William Prynne, the clergyman Henry Burton

and the physician John Bastwick being branded and having their ears cropped for publishing

anti-Laudian pamphlets. This savage punishment would make martyrs out of the trio: and

would make turn many of England’s godly into the beginnings of an opposition.

REFERENCES

Prologue

1 Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 25: 1640-1642

(London, 1924), pp. 267-286; John Hacket, Scrinia reserata (London, 1693), Wing / 533:03, part II, p. 179. 2 John Vicars, God in the mount. Or, Englands remembrancer (London, 1642), BL, TT, E.112[25], p. 73.

3 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1641-3 (London, 1887), p. 243-244.

4 Journal of the House of Commons: volume 2: 1640-1643 (1802), pp. 368-369.

5 Canterburies amazement, or, The ghost of the yong fellow Thomas Bensted (1641), Wing / 18:18.

6 Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 7-8.

7 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1641-3 (1887), p. 241.

8 C. V. Wedgwood, A Coffin for King Charles: The Trial and Execution of Charles I (London, 1965), p. 205.

9 Perfect Occurrences, 109, 26 Jan-2 Feb 1649 (1649), BL, TT, E.527[14].

10 Refs

11 J. Taylor, A reply as true as steele, to a rusty, rayling, ridiculous, lying libel (London, 1641), BL, TT,

E.160[23]; J. Taylor, A seasonable lecture, or a most learned oration (London, 1642), BL, TT, E.143[13]. 12

F. Henderson, The Clarke papers volume five: further selections from the papers of William Clarke

(Cambridge, 2005). 13

Henry Walker, A sermon, preached in the Kings Chappell at White-Hall, on Sunday last July 15. 1649

(London, 1649), BL, TT, E.565[18]. 14

Henry Walker, A sermon preached in the chappell at Sommerset-House in the Strand, on Thursday the 27 day

of June 1650 (London, 1650), BL, TT, E.604[7]. 15

Norman Penney (ed.), The Journal of George Fox (2007), p. 36., p. 107-108. 16

D. M. Loades, ‘The Press under the Early Tudors. A Study in Censorship and Sedition’, Transactions of the

Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 4 (1964), pp. 29-50; C. Read, ‘William Cecil and Elizabethan public

relations’, in S.T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield & C. H. Williams (eds.), Elizabethan Government and Society (London,

1961), pp. 21-55; V. Murphy, ‘The Literature and Propaganda of Henry VIII’s First Divorce’, in D. MacCulloch

(ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 135-158; J. N. King, ‘Freedom of the Press, Protestant

Propaganda, and Protector Somerset’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 40, 1 (1976), pp. 1-9; T. Cogswell, ‘The

politics of propaganda: Charles I and the people in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, 29, 3 (1990), pp. 187-

215; J. Raymond, Pamphlets and pamphleteering in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), ch.2. 17

D. Freist, Governed by opinion: politics, religion, and the dynamics of communication in Stuart London,

1637-1645 (London, 1997), chs. 3, 5; Raymond, Pamphlets and pamphleteering, ch. 5; M. Mendle, ‘De facto

freedom, de facto authority: press and Parliament, 1640-1643’, Historical Journal, 38, 2 (1995), pp. 307-32. 18

D. Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford, 2006), chs. 12-16; S. Achinstein,

‘The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution’, in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English

Revolution (London, 1992), pp. 14-45; S. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994). 19

E. Dering, A collection of speeches made by Sir Edward Dering Knight and Baronet, in matter of

religion (London, 1642), BL, TT, E.197[1], p. 109. 20

J. Nalson, An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State, 2 vols. (London, 1682), Wing (CD-ROM,

1996) N106, vol. 2, sig. Av, p. 807; L. Griffin, Essayes and Characters (London, 1661), Wing (2nd ed.),

G1982A, sig. A6r.

21

Anonymous, A Fresh whip for all scandalous Lyers (London, 1647), BL, TT, E.406[10], p. 6; 22

K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 644-654; K. Sharpe, Image

wars: promoting kings and commonwealths in England 1603-1660 (New Haven and London, 2010), ch. 5. 23

The great assises holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his assesours (London, 1645), BL, TT, E.269[11], pp. 2-

3. 24

The great assises holden in Parnassus, pp. 22-23. 25

John Taylor, A recommendation to Mercurius Morbicus (London, 1647), BL, TT, E.410[6], p. 6.

Chapter One: A Godly Reader

1 W. H. St John Hope, ‘An account of the ring of bells now in the tower of the church of All Saints, Derby’,

Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (1879), p. 42. 2 DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712. I have assumed that Anne Walker, in

common with most mothers during this period, would have undergone the ritual of churching and that she would

not have been present at the baptism. 3 J. C. Cox, The chronicles of the collegiate church or free chapel of All Saints, Derby (London, 1881), p. 184.

4 In response to a controversy within the parish over signing of the cross, Kilby stated that he would not stop

doing this until the authorities told him to do so. Richard Kilby, Hallelu-iah: Praise yee the Lord (Cambridge,

1614), pp. 120-121. 5 This quote and other elements of the description of Walker’s baptism are taken from ch. 14 of the 1604 edition

of the Book of Common Prayer. 6 There is no record of Thomas’s death in the All Saints register, which has some gaps for the early decades of

the seventeenth century. However, Henry and Anne Walker had another son named Thomas, who was baptised

on 19 May 1614. I have assumed, given mortality rates for the first two years of children’s lives, that the elder

Thomas would have died before his second or third birthday. 7 S. Glover & T. Noble, The history of the county of Derby (London, 1829), 2 vols, II, p. 479; DRO, D3372/1/1:

parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712. 8 A. Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: a Seventeenth Century Clergymen (Cambridge, 1977), p.

175. 9 N. Wallington, Historical notices of events occurring chiefly in the reign of Charles I (London, 1869), x vols,

I, p. xix. 10

Cox, Chronicles of All Saints, p. 71. 11

R. Clark (ed.), The Churchwardens’ Audit and Vestry Order Book of All Saints, Derby 1465-1689

(Chesterfield, 2010), p. xix; C. Glover & P. Riden (eds.), William Woolley’s History of Derbyshire

(Chesterfield, 1981), p. xli. 12

C. Glover & P. Riden (eds.), William Woolley’s History of Derbyshire (Chesterfield, 1981), p. 23. 13

The earliest records of the town’s traders are from 1675, but I have assumed that a similar set of professions

would have been in operation six decades earlier: H. Arnold-Bemrose, ‘The Derby Company of Mercers’,

Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (1893), XV, pp.113-160. 14

I. W. S. Blanchard, Economic Change in Derbyshire in the Late Middle Ages, 1272-1540 (unpublished Ph.D

thesis, London University, 1967), pp. 423, 456-457. 15

S. Glover & T. Noble, The history and gazetteer of the county of Derby (2 vols, London, 1831), vol. I,

appendix, p. 20. I am grateful to Richard Clark for discussions about the Walker family. 16

Glover & Noble, The history of the county of Derby, vol. II, p. 606. Thomas married Agnes Waundell on 23

November 1561 in All Saints. Agnes’s funeral was on 23 May 1616. DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All

Saints, Derby, 1558-1712. 17

William was born in 1564; Edward in 1566; Robert in 1576; and Henry in 1578. DRO, D3372/1/1: parish

register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712; Burton on Trent for Henry. 18

Thomas was born in 1563. His death is not recorded in the All Saints parish register. However, his will was

proved in 1609. DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712; will of Thomas Walker

(1609), PROB 11/113. 19

Clark, Churchwardens’ Audit, pp. 67-68. 20

Clark, Churchwardens’ Audit, pp. xxxiv-xxxix. 21

BL Stowe MSS 818, 29: James I’s charter to Derby 9 May 1611. I am grateful to Richard Clark for this

reference. William was bailiff in 1612; Edward was bailiff in 1619 and 1627. Glover & Noble, The history of

the county of Derby, vol. II, p. 606.

22

Cox, Chronicles of All Saints, pp. 16-17. 23

J. C. Cox, Calendar of the records of the county of Derby (Bemrose, 1899), p. 152. 24

DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712; Glover & Noble, The history of the county

of Derby, I, appendix, p. 20. 25

Cox, Chronicles of All Saints, pp. 207-208. 26

DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712; Glover & Noble, The history of the county

of Derby, vol. II, p. 606. 27

DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712; Glover & Noble, The history of the county

of Derby, vol. II, p. 606. 28

J. Barry, ‘Introduction’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and

Politics in England, 1550-1800 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 1-27; M. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender

and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (California, 1996), pp. 15-18; R. D. Smith, The Middling Sort and the

Politics of Social Reformation: Colchester, 1570-1640 (Oxford, 2004), ch. 1. 29

D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge,

1980), pp. 175-176. 30

Clark, Churchwardens’ Audit, p. xlii. 31

Diary of Ralph Josselin, 14 June 1646. URL: http://linux02.lib.cam.ac.uk/earlscolne/diary/70001655.htm;

ibid., 15 November 1646. URL: http://linux02.lib.cam.ac.uk/earlscolne/diary/70002055.htm. 32

K. Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (London, 2002), p. 205. 33

R. Parker, The life of Adam Martindale: written by himself, and now first printed from the original manuscript

in the British Museum (Manchester, 1845), p. 5. 34

Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience, p. 81. 35

LRO, B/V/1/32 (Liber Cleri) -

http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/jsp/DisplayLibClDetail.jsp?CDBLibClDeID=96596 36

Parker, The life of Adam Martindale, pp. 11-12. 37

Edmund Coote, The English schoole-maister (London, 1614), STC (2nd ed.) / 5712. 38

Coote, The English schoole-maister, p. 11. 39

B. Tacchella, The Derby School Register, 1570-1901 (London & Derby, 1902). 40

A. Smith, ‘Endowed Schools in the Diocese of Lichfield and Coventry, 1660–1699’, History of Education, 4,

2 (1975), p. 18. 41

Tacchella, Derby School Register, p. x;

www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/jsp/DisplaySubscription.jsp?CDBSubscrID=25743 42

Cox, Chronicles of All Saints, p. 185. 43

N. Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’, in C. Russell (ed.), The Origins of the

English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 119-143. 44

P. Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570-1635’, Past & Present (1987), 114, pp. 32-76; P.

Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society 1559-1625 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 6. 45

J. C. Cox, The chronicles of the collegiate church or free chapel of All Saints, Derby (London, 1881), p. 35. 46

Richard Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience (Cambridge, 1608), STC (2nd ed.), 14950. 47

Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience. pp. 46, 72. 48

DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712. 49

Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience. pp. 2-3. 50

Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience. pp. 18, 28, 31, 34. 51

Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience, pp. 37, 59. 52

Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience. p. 52. 53

Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience. p. 6. 54

William Gouge, Of domesticall duties eight treatises (London, 1622), STC (2nd ed.) / 12119, p. 76. 55

Cox, Chronicles of All Saints, pp. 179, 184. 56

Glover & Noble, History of the County of Derby, vol. I, Appendix, p. 20. 57

Edward Walker married Anne Fletcher in xx 1608; DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby,

1558-1712; Clark, Churchwardens’ Audit, p. 64. 58

Clark, Churchwardens’ Audit, p. 72. 59

Cox, Chronicles of All Saints, p. 22; Clark, Churchwardens’ Audit, p. 70. 60

LRO B/C/10: will of Richard Bourne (5 August 1614). I am grateful to Richard Clark for this reference. 61

W. H. St John Hope, ‘An account of the ring of bells now in the tower of the church of All Saints, Derby’,

Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (1879), pp. 57, 60. 62

Glover & Noble, History of the County of Derby, vol. I, Appendix, p. 20; Clark, Churchwardens’ Audit, pp.

70-71.

63

The elder Henry Walker was an appraiser of the goods of Richard Wandell. LRO B/C/10: inventory of

Richard Wandell, (26 April 1620). I am grateful to Richard Clark for this reference. The younger Thomas

Walker’s will entrusted the education of one his sons to his friend William Botham, the town’s MP, and left

sums of money to his brother-in-law Henry Wandell and to the then vicar of All Saints, Edward Bennet. TNA,

PCC, PROB 11/113: will of Thomas Walker (1609).

Chapter Two: Ruled And Governed By Opinion

64

J. B. Nichols, The progresses, processions, and magnificent festivities, of King James the First (London,

1828, 4 vols.), IV, p. 995; Glover & Noble, The history of the County of Derby, II, p. 479. 65

Thomas, Francis and Anne’s years of birth are all from DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby,

1558-1712. 66

R. Withington, English pageantry: a historical outline (Cambridge, Mass.,1918-1920, 2 vols.), II, pp. 222-

234; K. Sharpe, Image wars: promoting kings and commonwealths in England 1603-1660 (New Haven and

London, 2010), pp. 92-107. 67

I have based this reconstruction of James’s entry on descriptions of royal entries and progresses in J. B.

Nichols, The progresses, processions, and magnificent festivities, of King James the First (London, 1828, 4

vols.), III, pp. 389-90, 389-436, 411-412; T. Millington, The true narration of the entertainment of his Royall

Maiestie (London, 1603), STC (2nd ed.) 17153, sigs. C2v-C3r. 68

J. B. Nichols, The progresses, processions, and magnificent festivities, of King James the First (London,

1828, 4 vols.), I, p. 80. 69

K. Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle

(eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996), pp. 10-46; S. Hindle, The State

and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550-1640 (London, 2000); J. Walter, ‘The English People and

the English Revolution Revisited’, History Workshop Journal, 61, 1 (2006), pp. 171-182. 70

71

The description of the Walker family’s house is taken from the inventory made at Walker’s father’s death in

1627: Lichfield Records Office; Phillimore, Calendar of Wills & Administrations in the Consistory Court of

Lichfield, Series V 1624-1652, ref. 78, p. 505b, line 50. 72

Glover & Riden, Woolley’s History, p. 28. 73

Glover & Riden, Woolley’s History, p. 28. 74

Glover & Noble, The history of the county of Derby, I, p. 310. 75

Glover & Noble, The history of the county of Derby, II, p. 606. 76

W. Hutton, The History of Derby (London, 1817), p. 33; C. E. B. Bowles, ‘Expenses of the shrievalty during

the Summer Assize of 1631’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (1904), 26,

pp. 28-29. 77

J. C. Cox, Three Centuries of Derbyshire Annals: as illustrated by the records of the quarter sessions of the

county of Derby, from Queen Elizabeth to Queen Victoria (London, 1890), vol. 2, pp. 77-78. 78

Glover & Noble, The history of the county of Derby, II, p. 606. 79

N. Penney (ed.), The Journal of George Fox (2007), p. 36. 80

Cox, Three Centuries of Derbyshire Annals, p. 38. 81

Town chronicle; W. Wood, Tales and Traditions of the Peak (1862), pp. 160-168. 82

J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century

England’, Past and Present, 107 (1985), pp. 144-167; T. Laqueur, ‘Crowds, Carnival and the State in English

Executions, 1604-1868’, in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine & J. M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society :

Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 305-55. 83

Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 118-121. 84

J. Taylor, The carriers cosmographie (London, 1637), STC / 1036:09, sig. B2r. 85

J. Ogilby, Britannia: or, the kingdom of England and dominion of Wales (London, 1698), Wing (2nd

ed.) /

O169A, p. 19. 86

N. Pevsner & E. Williamson, Derbyshire (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 177. 87

J. Smyth, A description of the hundred of Berkeley in the county of Gloucester and of its inhabitants

(Gloucester, 1885), p. 30.

88 A. Fox, ‘Rumour, news and popular political opinion in Elizabethan and early Stuart England’, Historical

Journal, 40 (1997), 597-620. 89

R. Cust, ‘News and politics in early seventeenth-century England’, Past & Present, 112

(1986), pp. 60-90; F. J. Levy, ‘How information spread among the gentry, 1550-1640’, Journal of British

Studies, 21 (1982), pp. 11-34; M. Frearson, ‘The distribution and readership of London corantos in the 1620s’,

in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Serials and their readers, 1620-1914 (Winchester, 1993), pp. 1-25;

H. Love, Scribal Publicationin Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993). 90

Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, pp. 88-96. 91

J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 108-128; L.

Daston & K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York, 1998), ch. 5; T. Watt, Cheap Print

and Popular Piety 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991). 92

A. Wallis, ‘A sketch of the early history of the printing press in Derby’, Journal of the Derbyshire

Archaelogical and Natural History Society, 3 (1881), pp. 137-56; J. P. Briscoe, ‘Derby printers and booksellers

of the 18th

century’, The Bookworm, 5 (1892), pp. 89-92. 93

C. Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: a history, 1403-1959 (London, 1960), pp. 117-125. 94

[Stationers’ register of apprentices]; R. B. McKerrow, A Dictionary of printers and booksellers in England,

Scotland and Ireland, and of foreign printers of English books 1557–1640 (1910), pp. 259-60. 95

Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, pp. 23-30; M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular

Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 11-26. 96

Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 11-12. 97

C. Blagden, ‘Notes on the Ballad Market in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Studies in

Bibliography (1953-4), 6, pp. 161-80; A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700. (Oxford,

2000), pp. 299.344; Watt, Cheap Print, chs. 1-6. 98

Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 74-130. 99

M. Rhodes, The dismall day at the Black-Fryers (London, 1623), STC / 1885:40; A. Waltham, ‘‘The Fatall

Vesper’: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean England’, Past and Present, 144, 1 (1994), pp. 36-

87. 100

S. A. Baron, ‘Butter, Nathaniel (bap. 1583, d. 1664)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford,

2004). 101

C. W., The crying murther (London, 1624), STC (2nd

ed.) / 24900. 102

Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 128-149; M. Frearson, ‘The distribution and readership of

London corantos in the 1620s’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Serials and their readers, 1620-1914

(Winchester, 1993), pp. 1-25; S. Lambert, ‘Coronto printing in England: the first newsbooks’, Journal of

Newspaper and Periodical History, 8 (1992), pp. 3-19; M. Frearson, ‘London corantos in the 1620s’, Studies in

Newspaper and Periodical History (1993). 103

Cox, Chronicles of All Saints, p. 78. 104

I. M. Green, Print and Protestantism in early modern England (Oxford, 2000), p. 86. 105

R. O’Day, ‘Bourne, Immanuel (1590-1672)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 106

DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712. 107

DRO, D3372/1/1: parish register of All Saints, Derby, 1558-1712. 108

109

J. Evelyn, Fumifugium, or, The inconveniencie of the aer and smoak of London dissipated (London, 1661),

Wing / 353:14, p. 5. 110

J. Taylor, The carriers cosmographie (London, 1637), STC / 1036:09, sig. B2r.

Chapter Three: Taken From The School To The Shop

1 E. H. Nicholl, ‘The Ironmongers’ Company, Its Hall, Records, Plate, Library, etc’, Transactions of the London

& Middlesex Archaeological Society (1905), I, pp 454-460. The new Hall can be seen in Ralph Agas’s late

sixteenth-century birds-eye view of London: http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm. 2 J. Nicholl, Some account of the worshipful Company of ironmongers (London, 1851), p. 450.

3 Guildhall Library, MS16967/4, f. 148.

4 W. Herbert, History of the worshipful Company of ironmongers of London (London, 1837), p. 587.

5 Guildhall Library, MS16981/1.

6 R. Finlay, Population and Metropolis. The Demography of London 1580-1650 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 51-66,

V. Harding, ‘The population of London, 1550-1700: a review of the published evidence’, London Journal, 15

(1990), pp. 11-28. 7 T. Raymond, Autobiography (London, 1908), pp. 22-23.

8 B. Lubbock (ed.), Barlow’s Journal of his life at sea in the King’s ships, East and West Indiamen and other

merchant ships from 1659 to 1703 (2 vols, London, 1934), vol. 1, p. 23. 9 Rappoport, pp. 80-81.

10 J. Taylor, The whole life and progresse of Henry Walker the ironmonger (London, 1642), BL, TT, E.154[29],

p. 2. 11

Guildhall MS 16981/1; Guildhall MS 16977/1. 12

There were a number of Robert Hollands in early seventeenth-century London, including a tailor in St Giles

Cripplegate, and a cutler and a haberdasher respectively in St Bride’s Fleet Street. The Robert Holland married

to Mary is the only candidate who matches the details in Robert Holland’s will of 1652, which mentions only

one surviving child, his youngest son Richard. I have been unable to trace a record of Robert and Mary’s

marriage. London Metropolitan Archives, St Bride Fleet Street, Register of baptisms, 1587/8-1653,

P69/BRI/A/001/MS06536. 13

London Metropolitan Archives, St Bride Fleet Street, Register of burials, 1595-1653,

P69/BRI/A/004/MS06538; TNA, PCC, PROB 11/230: will of Robert Holland, ironmonger, 22 September 1653. 14

C. S. Knighton, ‘Palmer, James (bap. 1581, d. 1660)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford,

2004). 15

Jones, The Corporation of London, pp. 90-91. 16

S. Smith, ‘The London apprentices as seventeenth century adolescents’, Past & Present, 61 (1973), p. 152. 17

Jones, The Corporation of London, pp. 90-91. 18

I. K. Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth in early modern England. (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 115. 19

Lubbock, Barlow’s Journal, vol. 1, p. 20. 20

Lubbock, Barlow’s Journal, vol. 1, p. 20. 21

22

Benjamin Bangs, Memoirs of the Life and Convincement of that Worthy Friend, Benjamin Bangs (London,

1757), p. 16. 23

H. R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who Were at Work in England, Scotland and

Ireland, 1641-1667 (London, 1907), p. 25. 24

Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers, pp. 40-41. 25

Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers, p. 73. 26

J. Raven, ‘St Paul’s Precinct and the book trade to c.1800’, in D. Keene, A. Burns, and A. Saint (eds.), St

Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004, (London and New Haven, 2004), pp. 430-438. 27

W. H. Godfrey, Survey of London Monograph 15: St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street (1944), pp. 9-12. 28

J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court And Community, 1525-1640

(Manchester, 2005), p. 161. 29

W. E. Miller, ‘Printers and Stationers in the Parish of St Giles Cripplegate 1561-1640’, Studies in

Bibliography 19 (1966), pp. 15-38; D. Freist, Governed by opinion: politics, religion, and the dynamics of

communication in Stuart London, 1637-1645 (London, 1997), p. 95. 30

Walker, Sundry experiences, pp. 103-104. 31

Walker, Sundry experiences, p. 103. 32

Walker, Sundry experiences, p. 104. 33

Walker, Sundry experiences, pp. 109-110. 34

Walker, Sundry experiences, pp. 109-110. 35

P. Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge, 1985),

chs. 1-2; D. B. Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spirtual Autobiography in Early Modern

England (Oxford, 2008), chs. 1, 9; K. Lynch, Protestant 36

P. Seaver, The puritan lectureships: the politics of religious dissent, 1560-1662 (Stanford, 1970), ch. 5. 37

J. Craig, ‘Sermon reception’, in P. McCullough,H. Adlington & E. Rhatigan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of

the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford, 2011), pp. 178-197; A. Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and

Their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 190-203. 38

Quoted in Hunt, The Art of Hearing, p. 205. 39

Seaver, The puritan lectureships, p. 123. 40

P. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1668), Wing (CD-ROM, 1996), H1699, p. 188; Seaver, The puritan

lectureships, p. 251. 41

Walker, Sundry experiences, pp. 382. 42

Orme (ed.), Remarkable Passages, pp. 11-12. 43

P. Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, in W. J. Shields & D. Woods (eds.), Voluntary Religion: Studies in

Church History 23 (1986), pp. 223-59. 44

M. Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate Churches of London 1616-1649 (Cambridge, 1977), pp.

1-27.

45

H. Walker, The Modest Vindication of Henry Walker (London, 1643), E.85[39], p. 6. 46

K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), pp. 52-62 47

P. Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity, and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in K.

Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 161-185; A. Milton, ‘The creation

of Laudianism: a New Approach’, in T. Cogswell, R. Cust and P. Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity

in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 162-184. 48

R. Cust, ‘Charles I, the privy council and the parliament of 1628’, Transactions of the Royal Historical

Society, 6, 2 (1992), pp. 25-50. 49

D. Como & P. Lake, ‘Puritans, antinomians, and Laudians in Caroline London: the strange case of Peter Shaw

and its contexts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50

D. Como, ‘Predestination and political conflict in Laud’s London’, Historical Journal, 46, 2 (2003), pp. 263-

294. 51

D. Como, ‘Puritans, predestination and the construction of ‘orthodoxy’ in early seventeenth century London’,

in P. Lake & M. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1642 (Woodbridge,

2000), pp. 64-87; P. Lake and D. Como, ‘‘Orthodoxy’ and its discontents: dispute settlement and the production

of ‘consensus’ in the London (Puritan) ‘Underground’’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000), pp. 34-70; D.

Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the emergence of an Antinomian underground in pre-civil-war

England (Stanford, 2004), chs 1, 3, 11. 52

J. Taylor, The whole life and progresse of Henry Walker (London, 1642), BL, TT, E.154[29], p. 3. 53

Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 1-9, 51-53. 54

A. Willet, Synopsis Papismi (London, 1634), STC (2nd ed.) / 25700a.7. 55

Walker’s copy of Synopsis Papismi is now in the library of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers. I am

grateful to Colonel Hamon Massey, Clerk to the Company, and Mrs Teresa Waller-Bridge, Assistant Clerk, for

kindly allowing me to examine the book. See also J. Nicholl, Some account of the worshipful Company of

ironmongers, p. 466. 56

A. Milton, ‘Willet, Andrew (1561/2–1621)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); A.

Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant thought 1600-1640

(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 13-19. 57

Willet, Synopsis Papismi, sig. B3. 58

Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers, pp. 127-128. 59

Willet, Synopsis Papismi, p. 555.