Introduction 171

Summary

Thus far we have been working with what we might term public, even ‘polemical’, sources. Of their publicness there can be no doubt. Bentham's and Bolton's sermons were first preached publicly, before the promiscuously assembled, albeit very likely somewhat self-selecting, godly audiences that attended the Kettering combination lecture and were then printed, in several editions. As for Barker's last dying speech, that was very self-consciously performed before an audience of thousands. Its subsequent circulation in the form of a manuscript separate, shows just how anxious its multiple authors were to get an account of it into the hands of a public wider than that present at the execution. Similarly, The Northamptonshire constable was a highly wrought piece of literary artifice, designed to appeal to and circulate amongst an overlapping series of both local and national publics. With its formal title page and epistle to the reader, the tract looks intended for print. All of which features suggest that although, as the title puts it, it was ‘calculated for the torrid zone of Northamptonshire’ it was also structured ‘so as it may give satisfaction in this business to the whole realm of England’.

But if The Northamptonshire high constable is the most overtly polemical, indeed, we might even say, the most ‘political’, of the texts with which we have been dealing, the others, too, had their polemical aspects. That was, of course, most obviously true of Barker's scaffold performance and the manuscript separate through which it has come down to us. Both were clearly designed to anticipate, address and refute the conclusions that the enemies of the godly would inevitably draw from Barker's and Beatrice's crimes and fate. For all the genuine spontaneity of Barker's performance, and for all the immediacy of access to the emotional inside of puritan religion that this document affords us, these remain both intensely public and thoroughly polemical events and texts.

The same could be said even of the sermons of Bentham and Bolton, which, for all that they presented themselves both in the pulpit and on the printed page as expositions of scripture by godly divines for the edification of their flock, also retain many of the forms and purposes of polemic.