A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  The English Revolution

  By the end of 1646, the three Stuart kingdoms were each dominated by a completely different regime, installed by violence: England by the Long Parliament, Scotland by the Covenanters, and Ireland by the Confederate Catholics who had risen in 1641. All owed nominal allegiance to Charles I, who controlled none of them, and both the English and Scottish governments were committed to the destruction of the Irish Confederacy, while the Scottish one still felt itself obliged to seek a reformation of the Church of England. The two British regimes were deeply resented by many of their subjects, while the Irish one was still locked into a savage civil war. Everybody in the archipelago must have recognized that this situation could not endure for long.

  Of the three regimes, that of the Long Parliament had the most secure grip on its territory, and the greatest resources; but it was still vexed by serious problems. The defeated Royalists included most of the traditional leaders of social and political life, who were now excluded from any role in central and local government for the foreseeable future. The Scots were demanding the price of their wartime aid, in ecclesiastical reforms and in hard cash. Because a large army was needed to hold down the Royalists, the heavy war taxes had to be continued, but these were very unpopular: in 1646 and 1647 twenty-five county petitions were presented to Parliament asking for their removal. Despite them the government was still disposing of twice as many soldiers as the taxes alone could support, so it was £2.8 million in debt. The Church had been wrecked by the ejection of about a third of its clergy, for Royalism or mere local unpopularity. The worst harvest failure of the century was commencing, and would continue for three years. Most threatening of all, the king had concluded the Civil War by surrendering to the Scottish army in England. Despite his tendency to panic at critical moments, Charles had an underlying dogged courage. Most other monarchs would have fled abroad after total defeat by rebels, but he chose to remain in his own land, and carry on fighting by negotiation. His first hope was to turn the Covenanters against the Long Parliament, and he spent the second half of 1646 as their prisoner, attempting to reach an agreement with them.

  Between the summer of 1646 and the spring of 1647, the leaders of the Parliament produced a programme that seemed to deal with all these challenges. They abolished the bishops and Elizabethan Prayer Book and substituted a presbyterian system of church government and a liturgy which did away with most formal ceremony and prayer. This pleased the Covenanters, who were also paid their war expenses from the proceeds of the sale of bishops’ lands. As Charles had proved unable to agree to reforms of the English Church that were as extensive, the Scottish government handed him over to the Long Parliament and took its soldiers home. At the same time, Parliament set about disbanding most of its own army, intending to substitute a militia which would be supported by local rates and to ship off the best of its remaining soldiers to reconquer Ireland. All this was intended to isolate the king, who would then be forced to accept the settlement thus achieved, abandoning the Royalists to accommodate themselves to it and making a considerable reduction of taxes possible. This effort became the work of a set of politicians led by Denzil Holles, who secured a steady majority of supporters in Parliament, the City of London and the provinces. The result would have been a constitutionally limited monarchy of the sort that Charles had already conceded in Scotland in 1641.

  A minority existed in the nation which was very much opposed to the settlement being imposed. It included anybody who wanted the right to worship outside the established church, in congregations gathered around ministers of their own choice, or anybody who was prepared to accord others this right. The settlement prescribed after the war was intended to create a national religion which, like the pre-war one, was enforced upon everybody in the nation; but wartime conditions had produced an effective period of toleration, in which independent congregations had been able to appear among Puritans who had scruples about the brand of worship and belief being prescribed nationally. These congregations wanted to continue, and to them were joined those people who sought some overall reform and rationalization of the political and legal systems. Such demands were orchestrated and publicized during the post-war period by a group based in London which became known to its enemies as the ‘Levellers’. At times, it seemed to consist of three intellectuals, John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton, armed with a printing press. At others, it appeared to be an imposing popular movement, which could field thousands of supporters for demonstrations. The truth was that it was both – and all points between – according to the moment and the issue.

  It would not have mattered much, save to historians of ideas, had one other minority group not taken up similar interests, that is, Parliament’s most important body of soldiers, the New Model Army. This had been formed in 1645, and was the force that won the battle of Naseby and struck all the other decisive blows in the defeat of the king. It was the most successful product of a general process produced by the war, by which both sides divested themselves of most of the nobles and greater gentry who had provided their leading officers at the opening of hostilities. In their place they promoted men of lesser social rank and proven military talent. The king engaged in this practice to a slighter extent, and could conceal it better by giving his new men titles; but even among Royalists it was significant. Peter Newman examined their field officers and found that of the total 55 per cent did not rank as gentry and 77 per cent were not esquires, the class that provided traditional local governors. The New Model represented this tendency at its most dramatic: none of its members had noble titles when it was formed and by 1648 only 9 per cent of its officers were gentry of any kind.

  This social mobility was associated with a notorious tendency to radical ideas. Probably only a minority of the army wanted to worship outside the national church by 1647, but this still represented a large number of armed men. None the less, the New Model would probably have peacefully disbanded or gone to Ireland, as Holles and his allies wished, had the latter been prepared to address its material needs. The soldiers wanted their large arrears of pay, and also a legal indemnity for any actions committed during the war. The problem here was that the available money was almost certainly not enough to provide the arrears, and now the Holles group blundered by trying to bully the army into submission and disbandment without satisfying its requests. During the course of the summer of 1647 the New Model went into mutiny. Many of its more moderate officers departed or were ejected, and the remainder led their men in seizing the person of the king and then surrounding London. Holles and his friends fled, and power at Westminster passed to a coalition allied to the soldiers, and known as Independents.

  The Independents and army officers now presented the king with their own plan for a settlement, known as the Heads of Proposals. It was gentler to Charles, the Royalists and traditional religion than any terms which the Long Parliament had been prepared to offer at any previous point since the war. The king lost his powers over government for a shorter time, the Royalists suffered fewer penalties and bishops and the Prayer Book were allowed back into the national Church. The price of these concessions was to have shorter and more frequent Parliaments, elected according to a regular franchise and more equal distribution of seats, and a Church in which the bishops lacked coercive powers, the Prayer Book was not enforced, and Protestants who wished to worship in their own congregations could do so. Recent historians have been almost unanimous in agreeing that this was the best chance that Charles was given after his defeat to settle the nation, and that to refuse it, as he did, was a grave error. This is understandable, but is a judgement delivered not only with the benefit of hindsight but according to modern beliefs. The notion of a national Church from which people were able to contract out at will, in any parish, was one repugnant to most of the English, Welsh and Cornish at that time and virtually all Scots; as part of this pattern it was also literally damnable to Charles himself.

  Faced with the king’s obdurac
y, the unity of the soldiers began to fragment, some of them taking up the Levellers’ call for wider political and religious freedoms. It was restored in November, when Charles escaped from army custody to the apparent security of the Isle of Wight, which had an apparently sympathetic governor, and then signed a deal with the Scottish Covenanters. The prospect of having as a neighbour an England where heretics could flourish in legal freedom had shocked a majority of the Covenanters at last into deciding to declare war on the English Parliament and its soldiers. All that they asked of the king was the establishment of a presbyterian Church of England for a trial period of three years, after which the settlement could be reviewed; and this he was prepared to grant.

  The preparations for a new Scottish invasion encouraged every group that was dissatisfied with the regime that had ruled ever since the army’s coup to join an armed rebellion, and the result, in the summer of 1648, was the Second Civil War. In the course of it, many Royalists, some former Parliamentarians, most of the English navy and large numbers of provincial people all took up arms to aid the Scots against the Independents and the New Model Army; and the New Model beat them all. Because none of their efforts were properly concerted, they could be contained and defeated one by one, by a compact, experienced and dedicated body of soldiers operating on internal lines of communication. An English expeditionary force then installed in Scotland a new government composed of those Covenanters who had opposed the treaty with the king. Charles could only watch the process helplessly, as the governor whom he had trusted held him a close prisoner on the Isle of Wight, on behalf of the Independent-dominated Long Parliament.

  None the less, the New Model’s victory was a difficult and hard-fought achievement, and its soldiers came out of the war with a determination to ensure that Charles, who had started it, never again wielded authority. This demand flooded up from the junior officers and their men, carrying away with it first the colonels and then the generals. It split the Independents, many of whom still wanted to reach an agreement with the king which would restore as much of the pre-war system of religion and government as possible. A majority of the Commons and almost all of the remaining Lords decided to carry on talking with him. As a result, in December the army seized the capital and purged Parliament down to the minority of MPs willing to call the king to account. The Commons had now been filled up with new men, faithful to the wartime Parliamentarian cause, and numbered 461; but of these only 71 were prepared to accept the soldiers’ action.

  Charles’s trial took place in January 1649, and could have ended in his abdication or deposition had he been prepared to recognize the authority of the court; but he would not and so was executed on 30 January. Because an alternative king could not be found – the legal heir, the king’s eldest son, was safe in the Netherlands and promptly proclaimed himself Charles II, vowing vengeance – the monarchy was abolished. Because too few Lords would cooperate to make up a quorum, the House of Lords was abolished too. In their eagerness to get at the person who had tried so hard to destroy them, and whom they had come to call the ‘Man of Blood’, the soldiers had wrecked the constitution. It was a genuine revolution, carried out simply to commit an act of tyrannicide. The Bible, which was the main source of ideological inspiration for most of the army, had little to say about republics but much about doing away with wicked kings.

  Charles I ended his life a crashing failure, and such failures have few friends among historians. Indeed, to defend him means persuading an audience to award him three out of ten instead of zero, but some defence can be mounted. It is possible to point out that had he not mishandled the Scots he would never have lost control of England and Ireland; that during the Civil War he acquired a new sense of the need to appeal and explain himself to his subjects, and that after it he was almost certainly more popular than the Long Parliament; that his ideals were not bad in themselves; and that his gentleness was impressive. He was not so different in his personality and tastes from many more successful contemporary rulers, and it could be that he was simply in charge of the wrong set of kingdoms. The true tragedy of his position was that he could not accept that a Church of England over which the monarch had no control, through bishops, was one worth having. This was because by abdicating his responsibility for it he was essentially betraying his duty to his God. In the last ditch, in December 1648, he was willing to give up his power over the armed forces and political appointments but not permanently to alter the form of the Church; and it was this that signalled to the army that he had not changed his ways. In that narrow sense, he died a martyr, giving up his life for a concept of religion which, as in most people of his time, was bound up with his whole view of politics, society and humanity.

  The Politics of Religion in the 1640s

  One of the great intellectual developments of the 1980s was a recognition that ideas have an independent life of their own, and that human beliefs, decisions and reactions are often, in objective terms, irrational. The writing of history is in itself traditionally often an attempt to make sense of apparently irrational events, and the new ‘cultural history’ that commenced in that decade tried to get to the heart of the problem by reckoning with the most intangible and powerful of ideological forces: faiths, fashions and moods. In part it was a self-contained development resulting from the actual progress of historical research, especially into local records, which suggested by the 1980s that economic forces did not, in fact, lie behind most political and religious changes. It was also, however, the result of broader developments. The primacy of economic forces in human affairs had been the main tenet of Marxism, an ideology which seemed to be expanding all over the world in the middle of the century but which collapsed as a political force towards the end of it. Instead, Islamic and Christian fundamentalism both reappeared as potent ideological forces, and local ethnic and religious hatreds convulsed regions from Ireland to India and Central Africa.

  One impact of these changes was a new appreciation of the importance of religion in the politics of the 1640s. As said, it was both the most important single factor in the formation of the Civil War parties, and one which interwove with other attitudes to life. It is least easy to discern in the case of the Royalists, many of whom seem to have lacked more than a conventional religiosity, and to have supported the traditional Church as part of a general affection for established ways. In some, however, and above all in Charles I himself, religious faith was paramount, and its influence was the more important the further towards the radical end of the political spectrum people were situated. This has recently been emphasized in the case of groups who had been seen by historians before in more secular terms. It is true that the issues over which the New Model Army went into mutiny in 1647 concerned material conditions of service; but most recent commentators have pointed out that the soldiers who resisted most fiercely were those most opposed to Parliament’s impending religious settlement. The Levellers were seen for most of the twentieth century as the forerunners of the Victorian Chartists, or the modern Labour Party or Green Party. It is now obvious that they made increasingly extreme calls for reform of the political system because their original aim, to gain the right to worship outside the national Church, was refused successively by every component of the existing system.

  This pattern carried over into the republic established on the execution of King Charles. Consistently, those individuals in the localities who gave it the most active support were members of independent congregations, who saw the republican government as their best bulwark against an intolerant and monopolistic old-style Church of England. In 1649, a small but active movement appeared under the name of Diggers, which sought among other things the right for poor people to cultivate common land. They were viewed for much of the twentieth century as primitive communists, but their ideologue, Gerrard Winstanley, was primarily a mystical Christian, seeking a personal union with his God. This is equally true of the loose collection of individuals branded by their enemies with the label of Ranters, who cam
e to public attention in 1650, allegedly preaching such doctrines as the non-existence of Hell. In the early 1970s they were portrayed as counter-cultural activists, loosely equivalent to modern hippies, but now seem more like yet another manifestation of mystical Christianity. That so many new ideas could be voiced was largely due to another development made possible by the excitement generated by the Great Civil War and the collapse of effective regulation of belief as authorities had to give their whole energy to the conflict. It was the wholesale exploitation of printing presses for the communication of ideas. In the 1630s, these pumped out an average 624 books per year in England. In 1641 the figure rose to 2,042 and in 1642 to 4,038, and almost never sank below 1,000 for the rest of the century. Common people, and women, gained a voice in published works during the 1640s that they never subsequently lost.

  As Blair Worden has pointed out, the tragedy of the whole age was that virtually nobody in it believed in genuine religious toleration in the modern sense. To almost all Scots and Irish, all English Royalists and most Parliamentarians, toleration was a dirty word. It was something to be granted only if all other options had been closed. In the 1620s Puritans fought hard to deny it to Arminians, and then protested vigorously in the 1630s when the Arminians harassed them in turn and rejoiced when the chance did come to crush Arminianism in the 1640s. The only true liberty, to the average Puritan, lay in salvation by divine grace. Today, people talk about the virtues of religious freedom in social terms, but the early seventeenth century was more concerned with the fate of souls than of societies. To tolerate a bad religion was clearly to flout the will of the one true God, a step which was literally soul-destroying. Likewise, nobody in early Stuart England had believed in freedom of the press: all wished, instead, for it to be made to express their point of view. De facto toleration was achieved, from 1647 onwards, because all those Protestant groups who now wished to worship outside the national Church were driven together by a common fear of being wiped out by an intolerant presbyterian system. They were kept in alliance with each other by the fact that they remained unpopular minorities, dependent on the army’s support to survive. The hope of most of those army officers and politicians who supported this liberty of conscience was that sooner or later a better national Church would rebuild itself from the ground upwards. An external diversity of belief and practice could be allowed among godly Protestants as a temporary expedient. People were not permitted to hold such dogmas as they pleased but those which might lead eventually towards a properly reformed Church.