‘This Infamous, Scandalous, Headless Insurrection’: The Attack on William Laud and Lambeth Palace, May 1640, Revisited

Abstract This article offers a re-evaluation of the attack on Lambeth Palace in May 1640. Reconstructing the full extent of crowd actions and placing them in the context of a tradition of self-activating street politics, it emphasises the political nature of the crowd’s actions and the evidence this provides of key concepts in popular political thinking. The crowd, with London apprentices at its core, articulated the popular belief in the role of parliament as the people’s protector and claimed a legitimate agency in seeking to remove evil counsel. The Lambeth attack was triggered by and in turn triggered a litter of libels. The libels—scribal in form, anonymously authored and publicly posted—asserted a popular right to defend the commonwealth. The apprentices’ role in urban life gave them a claim to a political identity and authority in the Lambeth attack which helps to explain the significant part they were to play, and to be invited to play by competing political parties, in print and on the streets, in the politics of the English revolution. The article emphasises (and then qualifies) the severity of the royal government’s revenge, explaining this discrepancy in terms of the balance of power between royal government and popular politics in London in 1640. Examining how political violence came close to the court and to the royal family, the article assesses the impact on Charles I’s kingship. It suggests that the Lambeth attack was of greater consequence than has hitherto been allowed for the fate of Charles I.