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Abstract
At the height of the Exclusion Crisis, an annual ‘solemn mock procession’ of the pope marched ‘through the City of London’ to a large bonfire into which an effigy of the pope was dumped. These processions took place on the accession day of Elizabeth I. They reportedly attracted as many as two hundred thousand spectators. This article reads these processions through the lens of civic ceremony, taking the performance of civic identity on the streets of London as the foundation of the threatening power of these cultural events. It demonstrates the significance of the trajectory of the march to Temple Bar, marking London’s boundary with Westminster and the court. This article also analyses the satiric broadside engravings that bolster the credibility of the processions’ central claim: that Englishness and Protestantism were inseparable and united against the foreign threat of Catholicism. With a variety of contemporary witnesses, this article challenges the claims that Protestantism had a united front at the time or that the purported statue of Elizabeth at Temple Bar was even a likeness of her. Working with the vocabulary of civic ceremony, the ‘Solemn Mock Processions’ of the Pope revive an old prejudice to coerce a unified national identity based on the exclusion of religious others.
Notes
1 O. W. Furley, ‘The Pope-Burning Processions of the Late Seventeenth Century’, History, 44 (1959), 16–23; Sheila Williams, ‘The Pope-Burning Processions of 1679-81’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 104–18.
2 Among others: Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 81–2, 285–87; Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 161–3; Odai Johnson, Rehearsing the Revolution: Radical Performance, Radical Politics in the English Restoration (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 117–42; Joseph Monteyne, The Printed Image In Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 155–214; Adam Morton, ‘Popery, Politics, and Play: Visual Culture in Succession Crisis England’, Seventeenth Century, 31:4 (2016), 411–49; Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 215–18.
3 Harris urges against thinking of the Shaftesbury, Sidney, and Monmouth interests as wholly orchestrated. Harris, Restoration, 139–40.
4 The term forms the subtitle of Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2010). Also Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603–1689 (London: The British Museum Press, 1998).
5 Monteyne, Printed Image, 156–61.
6 Morton, ‘Popery, Politics, and Play’, 414. Morton also recognizes anti-Catholicism as common political currency (427–28).
7 John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 181–2.
8 Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Longman, 1989), 72–106.
9 There had been gaps in the annual presentation of the Lord Mayor’s Shows, including a longish gap between 1639 and the Restoration and another after the Great Fire, from 1666 to 1671. Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 10.
10 Minutes of the club record an order that a ‘Pope Committee be appointed to prepare a Pope to be burnt on the 17 of this month’. Members of the Green Ribbon Club, 1676–1681 are listed in Appendix 50 of The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, vol. 1, Mark Goldie, ed. Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, 535–41. This list is compiled from Samuel Pepys’s transcription of the club’s journal, in Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge MS 2875 (Miscellanies, VII), 465–91. Monteyne cautions that few involved in the making of the prints can be directly linked to the club, Printed Image, 160.
11 David Allen, ‘Political Clubs in Restoration London’, The Historical Journal, 19 (1976): 561–80.
12 Several engravings and pamphlets share the title ‘The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope.’ I will distinguish according to Wing number and include further references in the text. There are no page numbers for the broadside engravings.
13 Monteyne, Printed Image, 164.
14 Lisa A. Freeman, Antitheatricality and the Body Public (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 17–32.
15 Johnson, Rehearsing the Revolution, 69.
16 Tim Ingold, ‘Maps, Wayfinding, and Navigation’, Chapter 13 of The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2011), 227–30.
17 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 180. The Gunpowder Plot anniversary commemorations were also seeing more violent elaborations, as reported in The Burning of the Whore of Babylon … in the Poultrey (London, 1673).
18 Charles Hatton, quoted by Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 177–8.
19 In 1681, the procession concluded in Smithfield, which is highly appropriate as the scene of burnings of Marian martyrs. But their first instinct to conclude the ceremony at Temple Bar is a far more resonating gesture in the politics of the day, and this is the destination on which my analysis focuses.
20 Benjamin Klein, ‘“Between the Bums and the Bellies of the Multitude”: Civic Pageantry and the Problem of the Audience in Late Stuart London’, London Journal, 17:1 (1992), 23.
21 Andrew Gordon, Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 38–41.
22 Gesta Grayorum (London, 1688; Wing C444), 43. I owe this reference to Derek Dunne.
23 Among them, An Account of the Burning the Pope at Temple-Bar in London, November 17, 1679 ([London, 1680]; Wing A257A); [Elkanah Settle], Londons Defiance to Rome, A Perfect Narrative of the Magnificent Procession, and Solemn Burning of the Pope at Temple-Barr, Nov. 17th, 1679 ([London, 1679]; Wing L2923); A Poem on the Burning of the Pope. Being Solemnly Performed on Queen Elizabeth’s Birth-Day: This Instant November the 17th. 1679 (London, [1679]; Wing P2688).
24 Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 282.
25 Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85.
26 Noble, Memorials, 30.
27 Monteyne, Printed Image, 160–2.
28 Monteyne, Printed Image, 161–4.
29 Roger North, Examen: or, an Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History (London, 1740) notes the figure’s acrobatic ability. On a reference to a ‘young blackamoor’ in Mercurius Anglicus I (13-20 November 1679), 4, see: Monteyne, Printed Image, 162–3.
30 Morton, ‘Popery, Politics, and Play’, 416, describes ‘a disciplined codification of four central scenes’ in the narrative of Godfrey’s death, with repetition in visual satire acting as confirmation.
31 The report goes on to note ‘& sr Robt Payton is to act his Part’, Newdigate Family Collection, Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger MS. L. c. 864 (Nov 22d 1679). Miller, Popery and Politics, 185n105, notes that the effigy was carried to Somerset House, though it is not reported in print.
32 Miller, Popery and Politics, 185n107.
33 On the long tradition of suspicion over ‘Church papists’, see: Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1993).
34 From OED: quoted from Wood, Ath. Ox. II, 21. ‘The Presbyterians said that he [Chillingworth] was always a Papist in his heart, or as we now say, in masquerade.’
35 Thanks to Robert Daniel for the observation.
36 Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in Early Modern England’, Past & Present 105 (1984), 79–113.
37 Miller notes measures were taken to exert greater control in subsequent years. Miller, Popery and Politics, 185–7.
38 Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 80; On Sir William Waller’s confiscations of Catholic paraphernalia, see: Jonson, Rehearsing the Revolution, 69–70.
39 See route map in Hill, Pageantry and Power, 2.
40 Thomas Jordan, London in Luster (London, 1679; Wing J1035), 3.
41 Roy Strong, ‘The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth I’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 92–3.
42 Emily Mann, ‘In Defence of the City: The Gates of London and Temple Bar in the Seventeenth Century’, Architectural History, 49 (2006), 77.
43 Vanessa Harding, ‘City, Capital, and Metropolis: The Changing Shape of Seventeenth-Century London’, in J.F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 118.
44 Survey of London, Strype (ed.), IV, 278. See also Monteyne, Printed Image, 163–4.
45 T.F. Reddaway, The Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940), 291n references The Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, 1495–1835. T.C. Noble, Memorials of Temple Bar (London, 1870), 28–9, indicates the negotiations between City and Court were drawn out and tense.
46 Mann, ‘In Defence of the City’, 89.
47 It echoes the gesture Charles I made in mounting statues of himself and his father on the west side of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the 1630s.
48 Survey, Strype (ed.), IV, 278. All current City of London web references to Temple Bar identify the statue as Anne. The earliest such identification I have found is Noble’s passing remark as he describes the sad condition of Temple Bar as it was about to be dismantled. He also more generally dismissed the ‘forlorn-looking statues which stand unnoticed within their niches on each side of Temple Bar’, 19, 38 (emphasis added). The ongoing influence of Strype’s identification, itself under the sway of the processions is confirmed in Mann, ‘In Defence of the City.’ However, Mann’s analysis of the significance of the ‘dynastic display of statues’, 88, is weakened by acceptance of Strype and the pope-burning processions for evidence of the identity as Elizabeth, 86, 92–3.
49 Echoing Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 39.
50 It is no surprise that Odai Johnson analysed these events in Rehearsing the Revolution. As Johnson observed, the challenge was ‘to say “Pope” and mean “King,” to draw Roger [L’Estrange] and burn York, to read royalist and act radical’ (140).
51 A Poem on the Burning of the Pope, 1679.
52 Strong, ‘Popular Celebration’, 102.
53 Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 172.
54 Londons Defiance to Rome, 1.
55 ‘An Account of the Burning of the Pope’, A1.
56 Simeon and Levi, Brethren in Iniquity. A Comparison between a Papist and A Scotch Presbyter ([London, 1679]; Wing S3788).
57 British Museum Prints and Drawings, BM1849.0315.69.
58 ‘To see ye Impudence of ye Papist & ye [envie] of Tory Churchmen yt Joyned with them that they should on ye 5. Of Novem: 1681. At Westminster Burnt in Effigie Mr Alsop an Eminent Divine, as Jack Presbiter, See [Tomsons] Loyale Prestent Inteligencer Nomber. 74. 77.’
59 Williams, ‘The Pope-Burning Processions’, 117, notes reports of processions in Salisbury, Taunton, and Edinburgh.
60 In A Dialogue upon the Burning of the Pope and Presbyter (London, 1681; Wing D1371), 6, the author quotes (purportedly verbatim) a report of the incident in ‘that Bellweather to the Tories, N.T. who in his Scurrilous Pamphlet, approved and made sport with it, calling it a sign of Loyalty?’ (the question mark indicating the author’s incredulity of this interpretation).
61 A Dialogue upon the Burning of the Pope and Presbyter, 8.
62 Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), Appendix: ‘Dating’, 309.
63 Williams, ‘Pope-Burning Processions’, 105, 117.
64 North, Examen, 577–8.
65 North, Examen, 578.
66 North, Examen, 574.
67 North, Examen, 576.
68 ‘The Faction had always, upon the Tip of their Tongues, the People, and all their Routs were the People, and now they intended, by this Leviathan Mob, to shew the People in good Earnest. And then the King, if he had not known better, might perhaps have mistaken this Assembly for the People whom he was to satisfy, and whom nothing would pacify by the Exclusion and its Dependances; and here is the Spirit of this Congregation.’ North, Examen, 576.
69 North, Examen, 574.
70 North, Examen, 574.
71 Harris, Restoration, 300–9. Mark Goldie, ‘The Hilton Gang and the Purge of London in the 1680s’, in Howard Nenner (ed.), Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 43–73.
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Kathleen Lynch
Kathleen Lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her monograph, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. This article is part of her current project, which examines contested space for public worship in London after the Great Fire. That project seeks a new purchase on the dynamics and terms of community formation.