Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  The army spread not only disease but also, on a more positive note, Leveller ideas about political change. After the king’s trial and execution, the possibilities for radical reform seemed especially promising. One leading Leveller, John Lilburne (1615?–57), made a career out of provoking the government with his incessant calls for a wider franchise, religious toleration, free speech, law reform, and individual rights, all of which he summarized in one ringing, radical phrase: “the Sovereignty of the People.” On occasion, several thousand Londoners, men and women, would take to the streets wearing Leveller-green ribbons, demanding these rights, or sign petitions for the release of Lilburne and other imprisoned Levellers. But the Leveller moment was urban-based and short-lived. In the spring of 1649 the Rump suppressed a second round of army agitation by arresting the Leveller leaders, executing the leading agitators, and buying off the rank-and-file by paying some arrears. Lilburne spent most of the next decade in prison or exile before dying in 1657, convinced that “posterity … shall reap the benefit of our endeavours, what ever shall become of us.”22 In fact, Leveller arguments would take centuries to bear fruit and some remain so radical as to be unrealized today. But the fact that they could be aired at all reveals that the revolution’s framers had opened a Pandora’s box of new ideas when they deposed the king. This becomes even clearer if we look at religion.

  Here, too, the Long Parliament’s abolition of censorship, and with it the temporal power of the English clergy, was crucial. Remember that it was only in the previous hundred years that the English people had been allowed to read the Bible at all; now, for the first time, they could interpret it from the pulpit and in print without fear of persecution. Admittedly, the increasingly conservative Presbyterian majority in the Rump Parliament made some attempt to enforce Kirk-like religious discipline on England. In 1645 the Westminster Assembly of Divines had agreed on a Presbyterian-style church government and a Directory of Worship to supercede the Book of Common Prayer. But the new regime never worked out adequate mechanisms of enforcement, persecution, or censorship and these were effectively opposed by the parliamentary Independents, who sought toleration for virtually all Protestant beliefs. The Independents, including Cromwell, embraced the revolutionary notion that it was not necessary for everyone to agree on the details of religion in order to be good Christians and worthy citizens. Like modern Congregationalists, they found more truth in the spirit, among individuals and small congregations, than in a national Church or the decrees of the Rump or Westminster Assembly. In fact this tendency was a necessary implication of the Protestant, and especially the Puritan, mindset. After all, if all men (and, for some, women) could read the Bible; if God desired a priesthood of all believers; and if all were equal in sin, who could say whose interpretation was right? In September 1650 the Independents in Parliament secured repeal of the statutes compelling Sunday attendance at the (State) parish church.

  This new-found freedom of thought, speech, and print resulted in a proliferation of unorthodox interpretations of the Bible and strains of Puritanism, many of which sought to apply ancient Scriptural injunctions to contemporary social realities. Some had longstanding antecedents; all were controversial. For example, the Baptists or “Dippers” could trace their ancestry to the German Anabaptists from a century earlier. They believed that baptism should be delayed until adulthood, when a rational person could make a free choice of his or her beliefs. Reasonable as this may sound, many contemporaries found it outrageous to rear children without baptism into a Christian faith. Moreover, adult baptism implied separation of Church and State, since the former would be limited to true believers. This was the antithesis of the mandatory State Church urged by those still loyal to the pre-war Church of England (hereafter called Anglicans) and Presbyterians.

  And yet, the Baptists were, in many ways, the most moderate of the sects emerging into the sunlight of toleration in the 1640s and 1650s. Related to the Baptists were the Seekers, who sampled church after church in search of truth and, presumably, a final confessional allegiance. More alarming were the Diggers, who could find no Biblical authorization for private property and the accumulation of riches. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley (1609–76), anticipated later socialists by urging the wealthy to give up their property and share it in common with their fellow Christians. One can imagine what the landed gentry or even minor freeholders thought of this! The Diggers attempted to put their beliefs into practice by establishing communes of sorts at St. George’s Hill in Surrey and elsewhere, but these collapsed due to bad weather and the hostility of local landowners. Yet another group sought neither political nor economic change but a revolution of the spirit: the Ranters believed that, since God was present in all things, and He was obviously without sin, sin could not exist. In any case, according to the Ranter Abiezer Coppe (1619–72?), “to the pure all things are pure.”23 That is, Ranters gave free rein to individual conscience in deciding questions of right or wrong. In the words of Laurence Clarkson (1615–67),

  There is no such act as drunkenness, adultery and theft in God. … Sin hath its conception only in the imagination. … What act soever is done by thee in light and love, is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery. … No matter what Scripture, saints or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.24

  The Ranters, reacting to centuries of tight social control and repression of individuality, reveled in “freedom of the spirit.” As might be expected, every other group reacted in horror at the Ranter program, and the “Ranter moment” of 1649 was followed in 1650 by harsh repression and statutes making blasphemy and adultery capital crimes.

  Even more alarming – in part because more numerous – was the Society of Friends, or, as they were popularly known, the Quakers. Quakers believed that each person possessed an inner light, the Holy Spirit, or the spirit of Christ. In their view, this inner light was invariably correct and to be obeyed over the dictates of the State, the Church, even Scripture. Moreover, they believed that every person had God’s inner light in equal measure. “Every person” meant, of course, king and commoner, landlord and tenant, master and apprentice, man and woman. This led Quakers to refuse to acknowledge earthly authorities like the State, the courts, or their social superiors; indeed, they publicly stressed God’s impending vengeance on “the great ones of the earth.” They manifested their disdain for the prevailing social order by refusing to pay tithes, swear oaths, doff their caps, or bow to those superiors. Moreover, while women played an important role in most of the sects, they were especially prominent in Quakerism: possessing God’s inner light as amply as men did, they participated fully in Quaker services; some went out into the world to preach, in violation of all contemporary gender norms. Finally, Quaker services themselves scandalized hostile observers, for the inner light compelled the Friends to sing, rant, “quake,” and move about in a trance-like state during their ecstatic communion with the deity. Some went farther, going “naked as a sign” or violently shouting down rival preachers (pacifism would only be adopted as a Quaker ideal during the 1660s, after a decade of harsh repression). In 1656, James Nayler (1618–60), a founder of the Quaker movement, reenacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding through the streets of Bristol on an ass. Nayler clearly meant his performance to symbolize Christ’s presence in all human beings, but Parliament saw it as “horrid blasphemy” and a sign of growing disorder. They decreed that he be pilloried in London, whipped through the streets of Bristol, his tongue pierced with a hot iron, his forehead branded with a “B” (for blasphemer), and, finally, put to death. Although Cromwell, by then lord protector, would not allow his execution, the savagery of this sentence indicates just how frightened the ruling elite were by the specter of Quakerism.

  Nayler’s entry into Bristol also suggests a strong millenarian aspect to these movements. That is, many of them, applying Old Testament prophecies and the Book of Revelation to recent, earth-shattering events, had concluded th
at the thousand-year reign of the anti-christ was ending, and the beginning of the end of the world was near. One group believed that Lodowick Muggleton (1609–98), a tailor from the West Country who had experienced a series of religious visions, was the last prophet named in Revelation. Muggletonians believed that he had the power to save or damn on the spot, which he did publicly – when not imprisoned for blasphemy – throughout the 1650s. But most radical and frightening of all to conservatives were the Fifth Monarchy Men. This group believed, in common with most people in the seventeenth century, that all legislative power was God’s. But the conclusion they drew from this position was that the legal profession should be abolished and all legislation should be Biblical, specifically based on the Mosaic law articulated in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. They argued, on this basis, that moral offenses were as serious as civil ones, advocating, for example, the stoning of adulterers. Finally, following Daniel 7, they believed that the Bible had foretold five great monarchies. Four had, according to their interpretation, already risen and fallen: those of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. The fifth would undoubtedly be that of “King Jesus,” whose return they thought imminent after the execution of King Charles. They were prepared to hasten this Second Coming by force if necessary. For a brief moment, around 1653, this group had extensive political influence; Fifth Monarchist Major-General Thomas Harrison (1616–60) had the ear of important politicians like Cromwell and wielded vast clerical patronage.

  It should be obvious that a free press and religious toleration had, predictably, led to religious diversity or, in contemporary eyes, chaos. It should also be obvious that these religious ideas had political and social implications and that all three, when added together, were the ruling elite’s worst nightmare. Where religion had once been one of the principal props of law and order and the status quo, it now seemed to justify, even demand from its followers, civil disobedience and radical change. Suddenly, extreme Puritanism’s emphasis on individual conscience, which had so alarmed Queen Elizabeth and her Stuart successors, was beginning to frighten moderate Protestant country gentlemen as well. As a consequence, the idea of a single established Church with the power to coerce conformity began to look good to them. In the end, the radical ideas of the Levellers and the sects proved to be too much for the landed gentry and urban oligarchy. They had had enough of revolution – if they had ever approved of it. Increasingly, they yearned for the kind of political and social stability which they had enjoyed under the monarchy – without the monarchy itself. They would spend more than a decade searching for it.

  Commonwealth, Protectorate, and the Search for Stability, 1649–58

  The Commonwealth, or government by the Rump, lasted from 1649 to 1653. By the end, it proved too conservative for the radicals and too radical for the ruling class. More specifically, it was too tolerant of the lower orders for the landed gentry; too Presbyterian for the Independent sects; and too tolerant of the sects for the Presbyterians and die-hard Anglicans. Its continued sequestration of Royalist lands raised badly needed cash, but never enough, and at the price of continued disaffection from that quarter. Above all, the new regime never effectively mastered the army. The easiest way for the Rump to become popular was to lower taxes, but the only way to do that was to disband the army. To disband the army, Parliament would have had to pay its arrears; but to do that it would have had to raise taxes! Since the Rump could do none of these things it remained unpopular – and thus utterly dependent upon the army for its continued existence. No one – not Holles and the Presbyterians in 1647, not the Rump 1649–53, not even Cromwell nor his son 1653–9 – would solve this conundrum. The Commonwealth would prove more successful with the Irish Confederates and Scots Covenanters, but at tremendous cost in money, blood, and bitterness.

  Once the business of the king’s execution had been dispatched, the Rump sought to kill two additional birds with one stone by sending the army overseas to deal with the Irish rebels. While the English were forging their revolution, Gaelic and Old English Catholic Confederates had joined forces with Protestant Royalists under Ormond to seize control of Ireland. Cromwell and the New Model Army landed in August 1649 and began to take the island back town by town, starting just north of Dublin (see map 7, p. 86). Within two months, they had taken Drogheda and Wexford, putting to the sword Catholic priests and any combatant who had refused an earlier opportunity to surrender. In the first siege, they did so on the orders of their general; in the second, they simply ran amok. Cromwell’s pronouncement on his slaughtered enemies was characteristically sanctimonious: “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.”25 In other words, the massacre of some 3,500 Catholic townspeople in 1649 was supposed to be revenge for the atrocities visited on New English settlers during the rebellion of 1641. Never mind the fact that the 1641 rebels had been Gaelic and Drogheda was Old English! The English rarely bothered with the subtleties of the Irish situation – and, as a consequence, continually mistook it. The massacres were also effective acts of terrorism, calculated to “prevent the effusion of blood for the future” by convincing the rebels to submit, and several towns capitulated soon thereafter. This was only the beginning: throughout early 1650 Cromwellian troops practiced a policy of scorched earth in Ireland, burning the crops and evicting natives, leading to the death by starvation and other causes of at least 200,000 and possibly as many as 600,000 in a total population of 2 million. Still, it took three years to subdue the Catholic armies. Once this was accomplished, the government resumed plantation, confiscating land from Catholics and selling it to Protestant soldiers and adventurers. Some 40,000 Catholic landowners and their families were evicted from their land and forced to move to the stony, infertile west of the island. Catholics were banned from walled towns, forcing many merchants to flee the island. Identified rebels were enslaved and sent to the West Indies; others were allowed to leave to join foreign armies. In 1641 Catholics had owned 60 percent of the land in Ireland; by the late 1650s that percentage had fallen to less than 10. The result left Ireland firmly in Protestant- Parliamentarian hands, but it also further embittered not only the Gaelic inhabitants of the island but also the formerly loyalist Old English.

  Having brought Ireland to heel, Cromwell next dealt with Royalist rebellion in Scotland. In 1649–50, the Scots, horrified at the execution of Charles I, declared for his son, whom they proclaimed King Charles II – of Great Britain. In return, he repudiated his Church of England upbringing and agreed to the Covenant. Young Charles’s claim to rule the entire island challenged the Commonwealth. Once again, the New Model Army had to be called upon to remind everyone who had won the Civil Wars. Fairfax, who had opposed the king’s execution, resigned rather than invade Scotland, so it fell to Cromwell to plead with the Scots: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”26 (Clearly, he had more time for debate with fellow Protestants than with the Catholic Irish.) On September 3, 1650 he defeated the Covenanter army at Dunbar, in Scotland (see map 11). One year later to the very day he defeated a second invading force made up of Royalists and moderate Presbyterians under Charles himself, at Worcester in England (map 11). These victories finally sealed Parliament’s triumph in the Civil Wars and left the Royalist and Scottish forces in disarray for a decade. As for the young “king,” he was forced to hide in an oak tree (which would forever after be commemorated in British pub signs as “the Royal Oak”). Eventually, disguised and covertly assisted by a network of mainly Catholic families, Charles made his way to the continent. He would spend the next decade as the impoverished and harried guest of a variety of European rulers. He kept a small, shabby, peripatetic court populated by Royalist exiles and hangers-on who plotted with sympathizers in England to engineer a restoration. These plots were all doomed to failure, partly because neither the English people nor the continental powers had much will to restore the Stuarts, partly because t
he Commonwealth had infiltrated the Royalist court with spies.

  Pacifying Ireland and Scotland should have bolstered the prestige of the Commonwealth. To an extent it did. Some Royalists and Covenanters now resigned themselves to rule by the Rump, taking an oath to be “faithful” to the English government “without a King or House of Lords.” This should, in turn, have enabled the Rump to enact the real reforms for which the Independents and the army had fought. As Cromwell, in one of his progressive moods, urged them after Dunbar, “relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of the poor prisoners …, be pleased to reform the abuses of the professions; and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a commonwealth.”27 The Rump made some attempt to do all these things. For example, in 1650–1, it sought to improve the economy by encouraging trade. It passed the first of the Navigation Acts which forbade foreign powers from trading with England’s American colonies and required all such trade to be carried in English merchant ships with crews that were at least 75 percent English. The Rump also pursued reform of the law courts, the Poor Law, the clergy, and the moral character of the nation, passing harsh statutes against adultery, fornication, blasphemy, and swearing. Finally, its administration was more efficient and less corrupt than its Stuart counterpart.