The AWL Basic Education Programme

Second edition.

Issued 1997

HTML version issued 1998


Excerpt from Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603-1714

The Parliament of 1626 was dissolved without voting supplies - not even the customs dues (tunnage and poundage) normally voted to every king for life at the beginning of his reign. But [King] Charles continued to collect them, and also raised a forced loan. Refusals to pay led to the Five Knights Case (Darnel s Case), in which the judges reaffirmed the principle laid down in 1591, that the king had the right to commit men to prison without cause shown. This produced the Petition of Right in the Parliament of 1628-9. The Petition declared illegal both arbitrary imprisonment and the collection of taxes without Parliamentary consent. It also prohibited billeting or martial law, for [the King s minister] Buckingham was now engaged in war against France as well as Spain, and the troops levied to relieve besieged La Rochelle were a burden on the southern counties both before and after the disastrous failure of English intervention.

In August 1628 Buckingham was assassinated. But his death altered nothing. Renewed quarrels led to the dissolution of Parliament and eleven years of personal government. Charles chief minister in this period was William Laud, Bishop of London (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1633), whose emphasis on the more traditionally Catholic ceremonial aspects of worship appealed to Charles no less than did the resolute championing of royal authority by Laud s prot‚g‚s in the Church. Charles other outstanding servant was Sir Thomas Wentworth, who became Earl of Strafford in 1640. Wentworth had led a centre party in the Commons in the sixteen-twenties, and his acceptance of office and a peerage in 1628 was regarded as treachery by Pym and the more radical opposition. Wentworth was made President of the Council in the North, in 1632 Lord Deputy of Ireland. "Black Tom Tyrant ruled Ireland with a heavy but efficient hand, reducing the Irish Parliament to submission and building up an army of Papists which aroused apprehension in England.

Catholicism became fashionable at court. The recusancy laws which fined Catholics for not coming to church were not enforced. In 1637 a papal agent was received at Whitehall. The Puritans blamed Laud for this policy, and for England s failure to give any support to the Protestant cause in the [continental] Thirty Years War. Simultaneously critics of the state Church were savagely punished. In 1637 the lawyer William Prynne, the Reverend Henry Burton, and Dr John Bastwick were mutilated, heavily fined, and imprisoned for life.

One reason for the feebleness of Charles' government in foreign affairs was lack of money. It was Ship Money that at last made the government solvent. Originally an occasional tax on port towns in lieu of providing a ship for the royal navy, Ship Money was extended in 1635 to inland towns. Repeated in the next three years, it looked like becoming a regular tax not voted by Parliament. In 1637 John Hampden and Lord Saye and Sele, in concert with a group of opponents of the government brought a test case. By the narrowest possible margin the judges decided in favour of the legality of Ship Money.

But events in Scotland intervened to thwart Charles. At the beginning of his reign Charles had tried to recover Church lands from the nobles who had seized them, and so roused hostility: in 1637 he introduced a slightly modified version of the English Prayer Book, and touched off a national resistance movement. The leaders of the English opposition were already in touch with the Scots, and when Charles at last called a Parliament in April 1640 he found it impossible to appeal to English patriotism against the old enemy. The Short Parliament was dissolved after three weeks. The Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, John Hampden, John Pym, and other Parliamentary leaders were arrested. Unprecedentedly, Convocation, the assembly of the clergy, was continued after Parliament was dissolved. It accepted a series of new canons which ordered the clergy to preach up the Divine Right of Kings, placed restrictions on preaching, and ordered altars to be railed. Convocation also granted the King £20,000 as a "benevolence from the clergy.

Since Parliament had voted no supply, and the two bodies normally acted together, this demonstrated the Church's subservience to the crown. But it did not solve the government's financial problems. The City of London refused to grant a loan. The army facing the Scots was mutinous. The latter entered England virtually unopposed and occupied Newcastle. Charles attempted to appeal to the peerage by calling a Great Council of peers to York in September 1640. Even they recommended summoning Parliament. The Long Parliament assembled on 3rd November. With intermissions it sat for nearly twenty years.

When the Long Parliament met, the House of Commons at once impeached Strafford and Laud. Other ministers fled from the country. Strafford was executed in May 1641. A Triennial Act provided for regular meetings of Parliament, with an automatic procedure if the King failed to summon them. An Act was passed against dissolving this Parliament without its own consent. It thus for the first time became a permanent part of the constitution. Tunnage and poundage was forbidden without consent of Parliament; the judgement against Hampden and the levying of Ship Money were declared illegal, together with the other non-Parliamentary taxes of the eleven years of personal government. Prerogative courts - Star Chamber, Council of the North and in Wales - and the High Commission were abolished. Prynne, Burton, Bastwick, Lilburne, and other victims of the personal government were released and compensated.

In November 1641 a rebellion took place in Ireland, at last liberated from Strafford's iron hand. Many hundreds, probably many thousands, of Englishmen were killed. The opposition group in Parliament refused to trust a royal nominee with command of an army to reconquer Ireland. So the question of ultimate power in the state was raised. In the panic caused by news of the Irish rebellion the Grand Remonstrance was adopted, a comprehensive indictment of royal policy. It passed the Commons by only eleven votes. Charles replied by bringing a body of armed men to the House in an attempt to arrest Pym, Hampden, and three other leaders of the opposition group. They took refuge in the City and resolutions in their support poured in from all over the country. Charles quitted London, of which he had lost control; the Five Members returned in triumph. Almost the last act of the King was to agree to the exclusion of Bishops from the House of Lords (February 1642) and to a Bill for raising troops for Ireland. The conflict had now extended from Westminster to the country at large, and civil war became inevitable. In August the King raised his standard at Nottingham. The Earl of Essex was appointed to command the Parliamentary armies.

In September 1643, in the hope of breaking the military deadlock, Parliament signed the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots, and in January 1644 a Scottish army crossed the Border again. In July the battle of Marston Moor was won by the combined armies of Scotland, Yorkshire (Sir Thomas Fairfax) and the Eastern Association (the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell). The New Model Army was formed with Fairfax as general, and the Self-Denying Ordinance (April 1645) deprived all peers and members of Parliament of their commissions. The immediate result was the decisive rout of the Royalists at Naseby (14th June). The rest of the war was a series of mopping-up operations, culminating in the surrender of Oxford in June 1646 after Charles had given himself up to the Scots. The latter handed him over to the English Parliament on 30th January 1647. Meanwhile Archbishop Laud had been executed in January 1645 and episcopacy abolished in October 1646. The same ordinance offered Bishops' land for sale.

The controversies over the New Model Army and the Self-Denying Ordinance had seen the formation of two parties among the Parliamentarians. These we usually call Presbyterians and Independents, the conservatives and the radicals. Once the fighting had ended, the "Presbyterian majority in Parliament, which had always disliked and feared the Army, proposed to disband it, with its wages unpaid, offering the rank and file the chance of volunteering for service in Ireland. This led to a mutiny, and to the election of Agitators by the regiments. After some hesitation, Cromwell and most of the officers threw in their lot with the men. Those who did not were deprived of their commissions. Cornet Joyce was sent to take the royal prisoner out of Parliament s control into that of the Army. A General Council of the Army was set up, composed of the Generals and representatives of other officers and of the rank and file. The newly united Army issued a manifesto declaring that it would not disband or separate until its grievances had been met. It called for a purge of Parliament, an early dissolution, and new elections. Impeaching eleven Presbyterian leaders, the Army occupied London and forced their withdrawal from the Commons, (August 1647). But now divisions arose among the Independents. Negotiations took place between Charles and the Generals for the establishment of limited monarchy (the Heads of Proposals). These roused the suspicions of radicals in London (the Levellers) and in the Army who produced a rival, more democratic constitution, the Agreement of the People. The two constitutions were discussed in the Army Council at Putney in October, between spokesmen of the Generals and of the Agitators. Deadlock resulted, and finally Cromwell forcibly terminated the discussions. The Agitators were ordered back to their regiments (15th November). One of the Agitators was shot and the recalcitrant regiments subdued.

Cromwell was able to do this because on 11th November the king had escaped from the Army s custody and fled to the Isle of Wight. The Army had to reunite in face of imminent renewal of civil war. In December Charles signed an agreement with the Scottish commissioners in London, as a result of which a Scottish army entered England in July 1648. But it was an army led by Hamilton and the nobility, not the disciplined army of the Covenant. It was easily defeated at Preston by Cromwell, who had previously disposed of a "Presbyterian -Royalist revolt in South Wales, whilst Fairfax reduced a Royalist force in Colchester.

The "Presbyterians in Parliament had meanwhile entered into negotiations with the King (the Treaty of Newport). But by now the Generals felt that the King could not be trusted, and were determined to settle accounts with him. They revived their alliance with the Levellers. London was occupied once more, some hundred members were excluded by Colonel Pride, and a court was set up to try the King. On 30th January 1649 he was executed as a traitor to the Commonwealth of England. Monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished. But there were no democratic reforms, and the republican government soon forfeited Leveller support. There were demonstrations against it, and in March the Leveller leaders were imprisoned. There were also mutinies in the Army, the most serious of which was put down at Burford in May. Henceforth the government had to face opposition from left as well as right.

The Irish revolt, which had dragged miserably on since 1641, was crushed in a whirlwind campaign by Cromwell, which started with the storming of Drogheda and the massacre of its garrison. An Act for the Settlement of Ireland (12th August 1652) provided for the expropriation of the owners of some two-thirds of the land, and for the transplantation of the bulk of the Irish population to Connaught. This was never fully carried out, but a great deal of Irish land passed to London merchants who had lent money to Parliament, and to soldiers in lieu of wages. In 1650 Scotland, where Charles II had been recognised, was invaded. Cromwell, succeeding Fairfax as Commander-in-Chief, won the Battle of Dunbar on 3rd September. Exactly a year later Charles and an invading Scottish army were routed at Worcester. Scotland, like Ireland, was united to England, and occupied by a military garrison. Meanwhile the Commonwealth's authority had been asserted over the colonies. Navigation Acts of October 1650 and October 1651 aimed at wresting the carrying trade from the Dutch. They led to the First Dutch War (1652-4).

The Rump of the Long Parliament was expelled by Cromwell in April 1653. It had sold crown and Dean and Chapter lands, and the lands of some 700 Royalists, but produced few domestic reforms. In July an assembly was summoned by Cromwell, composed of 140 men selected by the Army leaders from nominees of the Independent congregations. It came to be known as the Barebones Parliament. Proposals for radical reform frightened the conservatives in this assembly, and in December they engineered its dissolution.

Power was handed back to the Lord General - i.e. to the Army. The officers produced a new constitution, the Instrument of Government, probably drafted by Major-General Lambert, under which Cromwell was given the position of Lord Protector. The franchise was redistributed. But when Parliament met, in September 1654, it refused to accept the Army's ascendancy, and was preparing a new constitution when Cromwell dissolved it in January 1655. A minor Royalist rising followed in March, and the opportunity was seized to extend the machinery of military rule. England was divided into eleven areas, and a Major-General was set over each, with wide powers.

In February 1658 Cromwell dissolved Parliament. Seven months later he died. The Petition and Advice had authorised him to nominate his successor, and his eldest son Richard succeeded him.

A Parliament (elected on the old franchise) met in January 1659 and recognised the new Protector. The Commons also accepted the Other House, though reserving the right of peers who had been faithful to Parliament to sit in it. In April 1659 Parliament tried to assert control over the Army; the Generals retorted by forcing the Protector to dissolve it. Power reverted to the Army. On 5th May the Generals restored the remnant of the Rump, and Richard retired into oblivion. The City of London refused to co-operate with the military government; and General Monck, commanding the army in Scotland, was authorised by some of the deposed Council of State to take military action on their behalf.

He opened the doors of Parliament to the members excluded in 1648, and they carried out a pledge to Monck by dissolving themselves on 16th March, after providing for elections to a new Parliament. This met on 25th April. It was "Presbyterian -Royalist in composition. The House of Lords was restored (though Royalist peers were still excluded), and Parliament accepted the Declaration which Charles II had issued from Breda on 4th April. By this he offered an indemnity, settlement of disputes about land sales, payment of arrears to the Army, and liberty of conscience - all subject to confirmation by Parliament. On 25th May Charles II returned to England.

When we try to summarise the effects of the decades 1640-60, two apparently contradictory points have to be made. First, that a great revolution took place, comparable in many respects with the French Revolution of 1789; secondly, that it was a very incomplete revolution, as can be seen as soon as the 1789 parallel is considered.

A great revolution. Absolute monarchy on the French model was never again possible. The instruments of despotism, Star Chamber and High Commission, were abolished for ever. Strafford has been described as a frustrated Richelieu; the frustration of all that Strafford stood for was complete and final. Even James II in his wildest moments never forgot what had happened on 30th January 1649; nor did his ministers or his subjects. Parliamentary control of taxation was established, as far as legislation could establish it. Ecclesiastical courts lost their teeth. The Clarendon Code after 1660 could not destroy the nonconformist sects. Bishops never again controlled governments. The country had managed to get on without King, Lords, and Bishops; but it could never henceforth be ruled without the willing co-operation of those whom the House of Commons represented. After 1640 it was impossible for long to disregard their views, whether on religion or foreign policy, taxation or local government. Nevertheless, an incomplete revolution. The Army was not used, as Hugh Peter wished, "to teach peasants to understand liberty". A society of the career open to the talents was not established. There was no lasting extension or redistribution of the franchise, no substantial legal reform. The transfers of property did not benefit the smaller men, and movements to defend their economic position all came to nothing. Tithes and a state Church survived; religious toleration ended (temporarily) in 1660.


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