The Puritan iconoclasm of the 1640s was as notorious in its own time as it remains today. The destruction of church ornaments and fabric by the parliamentarian army (both spontaneous and directed from above) has been the subject of myth and exaggeration, but it was also a real and meaningful phenomenon, part of a wider official drive against images. The peculiar circumstances of the time – the collapse of Charles's personal rule following defeat in the unpopular Bishops' Wars with Scotland, and the outbreak of civil war between the king and his parliament – meant that a minority of godly parliamentarians were in a position to effect political and religious change. This included a major campaign against idolatry in the form of church images and other objects associated with religious worship. It is the nature, extent and impact of this campaign that is explored here.

Iconoclasm was not, of course, an invention of the hotter sort of Protestants, nor of the 1640s. It had been an important feature of both the Continental and the English Reformations, with its roots in ‘heretical’ or reforming ideas of earlier periods. Arguments against images were based on the biblical injunctions against idols and graven images in the decalogue and on various other pronouncements against idolaters and stories of godly iconoclasts throughout the Old Testament. The theological case against images was a crucial part of Reformation ideology, if a controversial one (Luther, for instance, remained ambiguous on the subject of their removal).