In this guest article, Professor Laura Stewart explores how the writing of a Scottish polemicist, David Buchanan, not only inflamed partisan rivalries, but also opened up the workings of the English Parliament to public scrutiny.
On 13 April 1646, a committee set up by the House of Commons to investigate an anonymously authored book ‘intituled, “Truth’s Manifest”’, reported on its findings. Passages of the book were read out by the committee’s chairperson, the political Independent and future regicide, John Lisle. He informed the House that the book was the work of ‘Mr. David Buchanon’, who ‘did avow it to be of his Writing’. It was resolved by the House that the book should be ‘forthwith burnt by the Hands of the common Hangman’ on account of the ‘many Matters false and scandalous’ contained within it. The serjeant-at-arms was instructed to locate Buchanan and summon him to the Bar of the House the following morning ‘as a Delinquent’. This was an extremely serious charge. It is little wonder that Buchanan’s response was to abscond before he could be apprehended. (CJ iv. 507).
The investigations into Truth its Manifest did more than reveal a ‘scandalous’ book. They exposed to public view a clandestine network of individuals who were using print to mobilise opinion within and beyond Parliament for partisan purposes. By the mid-1640s, Parliament was deeply divided over the conduct of the war, the terms on which peace negotiations should be pursued with the King, and perhaps most contentiously of all, the settlement of the Church of England. Although opinion on these issues remained fluid, two distinct parliamentary parties, referred to by contemporaries as the Presbyterians and the Independents, had come into existence. We can detect by this time the same people working together with a high degree of consistency, and across both Houses, in pursuit of relatively clearly defined objectives.
What had contributed much to the crystallisation of these parties was the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant in the early autumn of 1643. The Scottish government, led by the Covenanters (so called after the 1638 National Covenant), agreed to send an army to aid Parliament, supported at England’s expense once it was over the border. In return, the Scots were promised reform of the English and Irish churches along Scottish lines, meaning principally the establishment of Presbyterianism, and the strengthening of the union between England and Scotland. Some form of Presbyterian church was broadly acceptable to many parliamentarians, whether they identified with the Presbyterian or Independent parties, but the question of recognition for ‘liberty of conscience’ was far more problematic. The formal commitment of the Scottish government and its Kirk to religious unity and uniformity, as expressed in the Solemn League, caused bitter disagreements with those Independents for whom religious toleration was fundamental to any peace settlement worth the name.
Like other Presbyterian polemicists, Buchanan was outraged at the heresies and errors that he believed Independency promoted. The Independents claimed they wanted ‘to seek the Truth of God more than others’ but, opined Buchanan, ‘God knows, they seek themselves and to set up their Fancies’. Buchanan went further, by portraying the Independent party in Parliament as a corrupt faction whose leading individuals were manipulating its procedures to satisfy their own ‘ambition and avarice’. Their enthusiasm for pulling down tyranny, and their friendliness towards the Scots in the early days of the alliance, had been a ruse to bring in ‘confusion’ in religion and ‘Anarchy’ in the state. All was done to enrich and empower themselves. (Truth its Manifest (1645), pp. 81, 127).
What made these imputations so ‘scandalous’ was that they had the ring of truth about them. This conspiratorialist analysis appealed to people resentful of a tax burden far greater than that imposed by Charles I, and tired of the exactions of the war committees set up all over the country to coordinate the raising of men and supplies. To those in the know, the Independents really were masters of the committees now proliferating in Parliament, adept as they were at getting their friends appointed to them and managing votes in their favour. A particular sensitivity for the Scots and their Presbyterian allies was the way in which the Independents had first manipulated, and then sidelined, the committee that had been created to manage the Anglo-Scottish war effort, known as the Committee of Both Kingdoms. It seemed entirely plausible that certain individuals were benefiting directly from Parliament’s formidable machinery for extracting the nation’s resources on an unprecedented scale. Why else had a war that many thought would be over in months, dragged on from one year to the next, seemingly without end?
What Buchanan had written was controversial enough, but his offenses were compounded by how he had come by his information and transmitted it into the public domain. Investigations spearheaded by the Independents in the House of Commons soon truffled out Buchanan’s relationship to other publications revealing of his connections. Buchanan was a Scot by birth and a scholar. He had travelled on the Continent and his contacts there were useful to advocates of the Solemn League seeking international support. At some point, Buchanan came to the attention of Robert Baillie (1602-62), a politically active Scottish cleric. After the signing of the Solemn League, Baillie was posted to London to represent Scottish interests at the Westminster Assembly, set up by Parliament to reform the Church of England. Baillie and Buchanan both operated in Presbyterian circles that included George Thomason, bookseller and magpie collector of printed works, James Cranford, a London minister and licenser of the press, and Robert Bostock, a London stationer known for publishing Covenanter material. By early 1645, Buchanan was sufficiently trusted to be given papers for publication from the Scottish commissioners who sat on the Committee of Both Kingdoms. Over the course of about a year, it seems Buchanan moved from facilitating the publication of the commissioners’ papers, to adding in his own polemical material alongside them, to moulding them into the original composition that became Truth its Manifest. While the relationship between Buchanan and the commissioners remains shadowy, the polemicist was no mere mouthpiece simply parroting the views of more powerful men.
Buchanan’s publications show us something of the way in which new political practices, necessitated by the expansion of the state’s infrastructure, were being subjected to intensified public scrutiny. Many contemporaries were horrified by these developments, as ideals of consensus and unity, and social deference and order, were tested to breaking point by partisan writings and publication strategies. The interrogations by the parliamentary committee chaired by Lisle revealed public men using secret means and private associates to publish opinions they could not express themselves. Buchanan the self-professed truth-teller had asserted that the only way of cleansing Parliament from its corruption by the Independents was to prevent them hiding behind ‘mysteries of state’: what concerned the public must be known to the public. (Truth its Manifest (1645), p. 9).Yet here was evidence of the Scottish commissioners and their Presbyterian friends using devious methods to blacken their rivals and, ultimately, put pressure on Parliament. Who needed enemies like the royalist newsbook, Mercurius Aulicus, when a self-proclaimed friend was printing slanderous accusations against people who were meant to be his brothers-in-arms?
It could be argued that Buchanan’s activities did most damage, not to the Independents, but to the Scottish Covenanters, by reinforcing existing hostility towards them, further alienating their Presbyterian allies in Parliament, and exposing their own weakened ability to achieve the ends of the Solemn League through legitimate channels. Arguably, too, the reputation of Parliament itself was undermined by these partisan rivalries, as revelations about murky doings on both sides raised the question of whether anybody could be trusted to put the public good ahead of the rewards of worldly power. Buchanan was amongst those writers who had opened the way to far more radical critiques of the proper relationship between ‘the people’ and the Parliament of England, one with profound consequences for all the peoples of the British union.
L.S.
Professor Laura Stewart of the University of York, is the Editorial Board member for the 1640-1660 House of Lords section.
Laura’s blog surveys her forthcoming chapter in Parliament and Politics in Revolutionary Britain and Ireland, edited by Dr Alex Beeton, Research Fellow for the House of Lords 1640-1660 section. This exciting collection of the latest research on parliamentary politics in the revolutionary period will be published by Manchester University Press in 2026.
Further Reading:
John Adamson, ‘The Triumph of Oligarchy: The Management of War and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 1644-1645’, in Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds), Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), 104-7.
Jason Peacey, ‘Print Culture, State Formation, and an Anglo-Scottish Public, 1640-1648’, Journal of British Studies 56:4 (2017), 816-35.
Valerie Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’, in A. E. J. Hollaender and William Kellaway (eds), Studies in London History: Presented to Philip Edmund Jones (London, 1969).
David Scott, ‘Party Politics in the Long Parliament, 1640-8’, in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (eds), Revolutionary England, c.1630-c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes (Abingdon, 2017).