An assiduous reader of everything published in England or in English in the 1630s would find little evidence of a polity crumbling into civil war. The modern editors of the exhaustive catalogue of all such publications list around 750 titles a year for the decade, and it was pretty tame stuff compared with the publications of the final quarter of the sixteenth century when a virulent Catholic campaign was waged against the heretic-bastard-tyrannical Elizabeth, a campaign which called for her to be deposed in favour of the Queen of Scots (before that queen's execution in 1587) or a string of less plausible Catholic candidates thereafter. Furthermore, the Puritan polemic against bishops and against the 'innovations' of Archbishop William Laud and his henchmen - the restoration of stone altars against the East walls of churches, the insistence on the faithful kneeling at an altar rail to receive holy communion, the clamp-down on preaching by unbeneficed clergymen and so on - was turgid and uninspired in comparison to the vitriolic and effective polemic of the Martin Marprelate Tracts of the 1580s.