A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  The king’s hardline approach seemed to be working. Then in 1637 he overstepped the mark. He attempted to impose a new non-Calvinist prayer book in Scotland – which he ruled was a separate country with its own political institutions, legal structure and church. A Scottish ‘convention’ of nobles, lawyers, Calvinist ministers and burghers raised an army of revolt. The king confidently set out to crush it, only to discover he could not raise the necessary finance. As Scottish forces moved into northern England he was forced to summon his first parliament for 11 years.

  The gentry, the borough representatives and even many of the lords who gathered at Westminster were in no mood simply to grant the king’s requests without obtaining a great deal in return. In the main, they were conservative in their political attitudes. But for them, conservatism meant maintaining their own position as the rulers of the localities, and that position had been under threat from the king for 11 years. The majority took their lead from figures like John Pym – secretary of a company whose ambition was to break the Spanish stranglehold on trade with Latin America and the Caribbean. They demanded redress for their grievances: abolition of the new taxes and a pardon for non-payers; dissolution of the special courts; an end to the king’s power to dissolve parliament without its consent; the trial and execution of the chief royal adviser Strafford; the removal of the bishops from the House of Lords; and an amicable peace with the Scottish Calvinists.

  The king made some concessions – for instance, the trial of Strafford. But he could not accept the platform as a whole. It would have meant the monarchy giving up most of the powers it had acquired over hundreds of years. Without them, the king would be little more than a figurehead at a time when across Europe his fellow monarchs were increasing, not diminishing, their powers.

  As time passed, the king found his position improving. Many in the Commons and the majority in the Lords were reluctant to take a radical stance against him, lest it encourage others to challenge their power. A ‘king’s party’ grew among a section of the gentry and the aristocracy, especially in areas of the north and west, where remoteness from the influence of the London market had left many feudal customs intact. Even in more economically advanced areas the king had the backing of those of the gentry who gained financially from royal favours, from those great merchants benefiting from the royal monopolies (for instance, the East India Company) and from people of all social classes inculcated with the habits of deference established over many generations.

  By January 1642 the king felt powerful enough to try to seize total power in a coup. He descended on parliament with 400 armed supporters, intent on arresting five of the most prominent MPs. But they had already fled a mile away to the security provided by the merchants, tradesmen and apprentices of the City of London.

  When the king entered the City in pursuit the next day, an eyewitness told, ‘The king had the worst day in London that he ever had, the people crying, “Privilege of Parliament” by thousands … shutting up all their shops and standing at their doors with swords and halberds’. 107 Rumours that the king was going to return to the City with his armed ‘Cavaliers’ ‘brought huge crowds into the streets with whatever arms they could lay hands on: women provided hot water to throw on the invaders; stools, forms and empty tubs were hurled into the streets to “intercept the horse”.’ 108

  The events were portentous. The king had failed to establish his absolute power by a simple police action. Within a week he had left London, intent on raising an army to retake it. The political argument had reached the point of civil war.

  The first Civil War

  The king gathered around him the sons and retainers of the northern lords and the court gentry, military adventurers, unemployed mercenaries, the gilded youth of the royalist aristocracy, and a ‘Cavalier’ core of flamboyant bullies who were to earn a reputation for the arrogant despoliation of every area of the country through which they rode. Along with them came all those who believed the absolute monarchies of Spain and France were the model of how society should be run, including a significant minority of the Catholic apostles of Counter-Reformation. The parliamentary section of the ruling class could now only protect themselves and their property by raising armies of their own. But events had also drawn into the conflict masses of people who were outside the ruling class.

  Merchants opposed to the royal monopoly holders had been able to gain control of the City of London by encouraging a wave of demonstrations by ordinary tradesmen and apprentices. But they could not simply switch the popular movement on and off, especially when Cavalier officers attacked the participants. Apprentices demonstrated in their hundreds and even thousands. ‘Mechanic preachers’ were blamed for encouraging people ‘to neglect their callings and trades two or three days a week’. 109 This happened as economic hardship was causing more or less spontaneous riots in many parts of the country over enclosures and fen drainage (which deprived the peasants of part of their livelihood in East Anglia).

  The eruption of popular anger was a double-edged weapon for the parliamentary wing of the ruling class. It enabled them to preserve their lives in the face of the attempted royal coup. But it also threatened them with a movement which, if it got out of hand, could damage their own class rule. Hardly had the urban agitation broken the hold of the king’s supporters on the City government than the parliamentarians were trying to bring it to an end. Many became convinced that only a new form of religious discipline, applied by themselves, could stifle revolt among the lower classes and maintain control. They wanted to force the king to accept their demands, but were keen to end hostilities as quickly as possible.

  This group soon formed a moderate parliamentary faction. They were called ‘Presbyterians’ because they were associated with the notion that there had to be a uniform system of religious doctrine, which church elders (‘presbyters’) from their own class would impose on everyone else.

  For the moment there was no avoiding war. Even the moderate Presbyterian gentry feared the consequences of unlimited royal power and had to mount resistance. But for the first two years of the war that resistance was held back, like that of the Bohemian estates to the Habsburgs in 1619, by disdain for genuinely revolutionary measures.

  There was not one single parliamentary army, capable of following a coherent national strategy, but a collection of local armies, each with a lord as general and the local gentry as officers. The rank and file were conscripts, often forced to fight against their will, not revolutionary enthusiasts. The unwillingness of the gentry to provide for the upkeep of the armies led the parliamentary troops, like the royalist Cavaliers, to live by pillaging the land, so alienating the peasants of the countryside and the artisans of the town.

  The parliamentarians enjoyed a couple of successes. The London bands of tradesmen and artisans stopped the royal army from marching on the capital at Turnham Green late in 1642, and the joint armies of parliament and Scotland defeated a royalist force at Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. But most of the battles of 1642–44 were inconclusive. Worse, by the beginning of 1645 the situation looked potentially catastrophic. The king was still entrenched only 50 miles from London at Oxford. The parliamentary armies were tired, unpaid, demoralised and often mutinous. There were desertions on a massive scale, and a danger of the Scottish army doing a separate deal with the king. Unless something was done quickly everything would be lost in an English repeat of the Battle of the White Mountain.

  There was a single bright spot in the picture. The cavalry of one of the parliamentary armies, the ‘Ironsides’ of the ‘Eastern Association’, had been decisive in the defeat of the royalists at Marston Moor. The cavalry had been raised in a different way from the rest of the army. Its leader, the Cambridgeshire landowner and MP Oliver Cromwell, had consciously chosen not to officer it with aristocrats or man it with unwilling, impoverished conscripts. Instead, he relied on volunteers from ‘the middling classes’: mostly these were from the ‘yeoman’ layer of better-off working farm
ers, who were wealthy enough to own horses but poor enough to have a commitment – often a Puritan, religious commitment – to hard work. They were, one observer later wrote, ‘most of them freeholders and freeholders’ sons, who upon a matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel’. 110 Such troops, Cromwell saw, could be as skilled as the ‘gentlemen’s sons’ and mercenaries who rode for the king, but were more disciplined in battle since they were less likely to disperse in pursuit of booty at the first success. He said, ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a “gentleman” and is nothing else’. 111

  Cromwell also saw that he could not attract and hold such people unless he allowed them to give expression to values and views very different to those of the gentry. He would not allow Presbyterian parliamentarians to purge from his force followers of the various religious sects who carried a militant message of salvation for the lower middle classes. Preachers with a radical message travelled with the troops – the best known, Hugh Peter, would speak of a ‘just social order characterised by decent care for the sick and the poor and an improved legal system … imprisonment for debt abolished’. 112 Cromwell even defended the non-religious radical John Lilburne against his commanding officer, the Earl of Manchester. The earl repeated gossip that Cromwell hoped to ‘live to see never a nobleman in England’, and loved some people the better ‘because they did not love lords’. 113 Cromwell may or may not have held such views at the time. But he had built support for himself in Cambridgeshire in the past by speaking up for farmers opposing the draining of the fens, and was certainly prepared to play on the class feelings of the middling classes if this was necessary to defeat the king. This meant he was prepared to show a determination which had been lacking among so many Protestant leaders in the struggle across continental Europe.

  The New Model Army

  In the spring of 1645 Cromwell was the pivotal figure in a group of MPs and officers who saw only one way to avoid defeat – to rebuild the entire army as a centralised force, no longer commanded by aristocrats who held back from all-out war, or officered by gentry amateurs. They only got their way in the face of strong resistance in the House of Commons and opposition from the House of Lords by relying on an increasingly radicalised layer of artisans and anti-monopolist merchants in the City of London. The instrument of revolutionary victory, the ‘New Model Army’, was formed at the moment of greatest crisis.

  Many of its footsoldiers were recruited in the old way, from unwilling conscripts who had hitherto showed no concern for the issues at stake in the war. But the cavalry was built, as Cromwell’s Ironsides had been, of volunteers motivated by political and religious enthusiasm. And even among the footsoldiers there were a minority of enthusiasts who could motivate the rest at key moments of battle. There was, in effect, a revolutionary spine to the army, and its efforts were reinforced by inspired preaching from the likes of Hugh Peter, the circulation of pamphlets and news-sheets, informal Bible readings and numerous religious and political discussions.

  The impact of the revolutionary approach was shown dramatically at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645. The parliamentary army was able to hold together after an initially successful royalist cavalry charge and then sweep forward and rout the enemy. Within days the king’s headquarters at Oxford was in parliamentary hands and the king had fled to surrender to the Scottish army at Newark.

  This was the decisive battle of the civil war. However, it was not the end of the revolution.

  With fear of the king removed, fear of the masses became the dominant emotion among the great majority of the gentry. They pressed immediately for the disbanding of the New Model Army, the curtailing of religious liberty, and the crushing of dissident religious groups and secular revolutionaries.

  But there was another force emerging which the parliamentary gentry did not find it so easy to deal with. The rank and file of the army were not at all happy with the prospect of being disbanded without pay or, worse, being sent to fight a dismal war in Ireland. The ‘middling men’ of the cavalry, who had fought for their principles, were outraged and driven to adopt a more radical approach than hitherto. The conscripts were distressed at facing a future without prospects and, although they could occasionally give voice to monarchist sentiments, they were soon attracted to the talk of the minority of committed enthusiasts among them.

  The eight cavalry regiments each elected two representatives – known as ‘agitators’ – to express their views. The soldiers of the other regiments followed suit. The agitators began to make demands, in the name of the army rank and file, that challenged not only the power of the king but also the power of the gentry. A petition denounced the gentry in the House of Commons, stating, ‘some that had tasted of sovereignty had turned into tyrants’. 114 Regimental meetings took on an almost insurrectionary character, with attacks on the way the Commons were elected (by a tiny franchise), demands for annual parliaments, calls for vengeance against Presbyterian ministers, and attacks on the arcane language of the law courts. 115 The meetings of agitators began to turn into a system of self-organisation for the rank and file of the army to press their demands – they set up a team of writers to prepare pamphlets, they insisted the officers obtain a printing press for them, they sent delegates to stir up the non-New Model Army regiments, and they began to make contact with ‘well affected friends’ (other radical elements) throughout the country.

  Levellers and revolutionaries

  A radical democratic grouping, the Levellers, led by people like Richard Overton, John Wildman, William Walwyn and John Lilburne, enjoyed growing influence. In October 1647 support for the Levellers reached such a peak that Cromwell and other army leaders were compelled to chair a debate in Putney with soldiers influenced by them. It was here that Rainborowe, the most radical of the officers, put forward a view which challenged the whole basis of rule by the gentry and merchant classes: ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he … the poorest man in England is not all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not a voice to put himself under’. 116 In reply Cromwell’s close ally Ireton spelt out the class view which still motivated the Independents: ‘No one has a right to … a share … in determining of the affairs of the kingdom … that has not a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom … that is, the person in whom all land lies, and those in the corporations in whom all trading lies’. 117

  The Levellers’ position, as has often been pointed out, was not for universal male suffrage. When pushed, they were prepared to accept that ‘servants’ – those in the employ of others – should be excluded from their scheme for increasing those allowed to vote. In part this was because they feared that the royalist lords and gentry would dragoon their servants, labourers and retainers to vote for them. In part it was because the core of the radical influence in the army did not lie with the conscripted poor but with the volunteer small property owners who saw themselves as a cut above the labourers or journeymen working for them.

  The leading Leveller, Lilburne, spelt out that the call for political rights for small property owners did not involve an attack on the system of private property. They were, he wrote, ‘the truest and constantest assertors of liberty and propriety [ie property]’, and there was nothing in their writings or declarations

  that doth in the least tend to the destruction of liberty or propriety or to the setting up of levelling by universal community or anything really and truly like it … This conceit of levelling of property and magistracy is so ridiculous and foolish an opinion that no man of brains, reason or ingenuity can be imagined such a sort as to maintain such a principle. 118

  Nevertheless, the election of the agitators and the call for small property owners to have the same rights as large was enough to terrify the already frightened ‘moderates’ of the Presbyterian party. The power of the representative body of the gentry and merchant classes was being chal
lenged by a new representative body of those members of the middling and lower classes enrolled in the army. And these people constituted by far the most powerful organisation of armed force in the country. A clash between a section of the ruling class and the king risked turning into a revolutionary conflict.

  The parliamentary moderates summoned three of the agitators to appear before them and blustered about punishing them. The Presbyterian leader Denzil Holles later said that they should have had the courage to hang one as a warning to the others. But they let them go. They could not do more until they had reliable armed forces of their own. They now tried to assemble these, arranging for the City of London oligarchy to purge radicals from its militia, establishing a ‘committee of safety’ to organise forces under the control of the gentry in each county, attempting to ensure the military arsenals were in their hands and negotiating with their fellow Presbyterians who controlled the Scottish army to bring it into England. They came to believe they should unite with the royalist gentry to restore a slightly reformed version of the old monarchy.

  The Independents around Cromwell were very weak in parliamentary terms. But they saw they could use the agitator movement to defend themselves, ensuring it did not get out of hand. They set up a ‘council of the army’, made up half of rank and file representatives and half of officers. Many of the rank and file troops still deferred to their ‘betters’, and the officers were able to direct much of the soldiers’ bitterness into channels favourable to themselves.

  At first, the aim of the Independents was to force the king to negotiate with them. To this end they allowed a contingent of forces to seize the king from the hands of the Presbyterian party. Cromwell and those around him intended to make it clear that they had won the Civil War and that the king had to accept the terms they dictated, which included many of the reforms he had resisted. But their terms still provided for a monarchy, for the continuation of the unelected House of Lords and for the restriction of the parliamentary franchise to the upper class.