Catholic and Puritan Conspiracies in Samuel Ward’s The Double Deliverance (1621)

Abstract

English Puritanism was not a unitary phenomenon. It evolved and changed over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So did English Puritans’ relationship with the English government and established church, which ranged from strong opposition to the official religious authorities in the 1590s and 1630s to a virtual merging of the Puritan movement with state religious policy during the Protectorate. England’s engagement with the Catholic powers, whether military or diplomatic, functioned as a rallying call for Puritans and amicable exchanges with Catholic countries predictably tended to pit the radical protestant circles against the authorities. The print known as The Double Deliverance, designed by the Puritan minister Samuel Ward documents one notable instance of this polarisation. The print depicts two instances of attempted Catholic takeovers of England — the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 — in order to critique from a Puritan perspective the alliance with Spain pursued by King James in the second half of his reign.¹ The work was in demand at the time of its first publication in 1621 and continued to be popular even as England’s public opinion and foreign policy subsequently shifted and evolved. It was still being reprinted in the 1670s from the original etching plate, by then noticeably worn down by five decades of heavy use.²