A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  Although limited by modern standards, for its age this idea was still revolutionary, and it did indeed create a nation of exceptional religious diversity which was to persist until the present. This diversity was, however, precisely the result the various British religious groups in the 1640s did not want. If there is a God in heaven, and the course of history is broadly a reflection of His wishes, as all the religious factions of Civil War Britain certainly believed, then it must be acknowledged that every single one of them had got Him wrong.

  THE COMMONWEALTH AND

  PROTECTORATE (1649–60)

  In the course of the 1990s, it became fashionable for some historians of ideas, such as David Norbrook and Markku Peltonen, to emphasize a republican tradition in early modern English thought. This may have reflected disenchantment during that period with traditional non-democratic elements in British political life, such as the monarchy; it certainly added excitement to discussions of early modern ideological history. Some confusion was created, however, by the tendency of these writers to term ‘republican’ anybody who believed that power was ultimately accorded to rulers by the ruled, and that some of the latter, at least, should have a measure of control over their representatives. This belief is completely compatible with monarchy: indeed it underlies the whole concept of ‘mixed monarchy’, in which a sovereign shares some power with representative bodies, and is simply the ‘ascending theory’ of royal authority which was one of the themes of medieval and early modern political thought. Ever since the late fourteenth century at least, English thinkers had mixed an ideology of inherent royal power with one of responsible citizenship, drawing for the latter upon a language derived ultimately from republican Rome and filtered through the experience of medieval Italian city-states. It is a measure of how little genuine republicanism had lodged in the English political psyche that when a revolutionary regime actually abolished the monarchy and the Lords in 1649, it did so without any pre-prepared and shared ideology that justified the act or any blueprint for a government to replace it. Over the following few years, a number of authors, none of them disposing of any great influence, came up with different justifications for a republican regime, and models for one. The chronic political and constitutional instability of the 1650s reflected the inability of those who led this de facto republic to settle upon either an ideology or a model for it with which they themselves – let alone those whom they ruled – were content.

  This is the more remarkable in view of the tremendous practical achievements of the English Commonwealth, as the new regime was officially termed. It began life completely surrounded by enemies, at home and abroad, who regarded its very existence as illegal and immoral. The minority of MPs remaining in the House of Commons purged by the army, and the executive council that they appointed, proceeded to defeat the lot. Between 1649 and 1653 their regime submitted Ireland to a more thorough conquest than that which had been made by Elizabeth. Almost simultaneously, between 1650 and 1652, it completely conquered Scotland, being the first and last English government ever to do so. It then set about uniting the whole of the British Isles into a single political unit represented by an imperial Parliament at Westminster. Between 1651 and 1653 it turned to the European theatre of operations, picking a fight with England’s main commercial competitors, the Dutch. During these three years the Commonwealth drove them out of their powerful position in the carrying trade between England and its colonies, and hammered their war fleet in a succession of battles. As a result, the great powers of Europe began one by one to recognize the legitimacy of the upstart English state.

  Before turning on its foreign enemies, the Commonwealth dealt with those at home, on both political wings. The king was followed on to the headsman’s block by a number of prominent Royalists, while the Leveller leaders, who had turned against the new regime as insufficiently democratic, were locked up. Soldiers in the republic’s own army, who demonstrated or mutinied against their terms of service, and seemed to be infected by Leveller ideas, were suppressed and their spokesmen shot. The government took a firm stand against the most radical ideas, by allowing the local Digger communities to be dispersed and passing a law which declared the beliefs attributed to the Ranters to be blasphemy. In dealing with the Irish, Scots and Dutch, the Commonwealth could draw on all the advantages which the Long Parliament had enjoyed in the Civil War, now much enhanced. It deployed the entire machinery – fiscal, administrative, military and naval – which it had built up to win that war, and retained the heavy and efficient monthly taxation that sustained it, now applied to the wealth of the entire English state. This was much inflated by massive windfalls, in the shape of the lands confiscated from the Crown, cathedrals and leading Royalists. Such assets, in turn, enabled it to borrow heavily on the London money market, while huge areas of land taken from the conquered Irish provided another means of paying off soldiers and creditors. As a result, it was able to build up its armies and fleets to a strength that none of its enemies could match.

  In the case of Ireland, the Commonwealth was simply reasserting the traditional claim of the English monarchy to rule it, acting as usurper of all that monarchy’s former powers. Even in alliance, the Confederate Catholics and Irish Royalists could not field an army big enough to face that which the Commonwealth shipped over. All that they could do was retreat into their walled towns, which the heavy guns of the invaders could break open, and then into the countryside where they were hunted down as brigands. The Scots were a different matter. The radical wing of the Covenanters, whom the Parliamentarian army had installed in power in 1648, could not abandon the dream of their movement, of converting the religion of the English and Irish into a form similar to their own, and so securing their Kirk for ever. They therefore proclaimed the exiled king Charles II as ruler of all three kingdoms, and brought him to Scotland on their own terms in 1650, whereupon the Commonwealth decided on a preemptive strike. Once again, the Scots dared not face the English army in the field except at what seemed to be an exceptionally favourable moment. When that came, at Dunbar, they were outmanoeuvred and crushed, giving the Commonwealth half of Scotland. The rest was nibbled away until in 1651 the king broke out and led the fourth Scottish invasion of England in eleven years, hoping to raise the English Royalists. Instead, his army was annihilated at Worcester: he escaped abroad, but the conquest of Scotland was rapidly completed. Just as in the decisive stage of the Civil War, the Parliament’s generals had enjoyed crucial material advantages but deployed them with brilliance, not making a single error. The greatest of them all was the East Anglian squire who had emerged from the Great Civil War as Parliament’s main cavalry commander, and was now raised to the supreme position in the republic’s armies: Oliver Cromwell.

  Having seized the other two kingdoms, the Commonwealth, as John Morrill has emphasized, carried out changes in both which went far beyond any attempted in England. The Scots and Irish lost their Parliaments and governments, while the Irish Church was stripped of bishops and cathedrals and it and the Scottish Kirk were forced to allow godly Protestants to form independent congregations if they wished. The Scottish nobility was deprived of its judicial rights and most of its control over tenants, and some of it was completely ruined: the Earl of Traquair, who had been the Lord Treasurer in the 1630s, had to beg on the streets. As John Morrill has suggested, Ireland suffered perhaps the greatest exercise in ethnic cleansing in early modern Europe – only the fate of Bohemia after the revolt of 1618–20 comes close – and underwent the most complete political integration with Britain that it has ever known. Forty per cent of its territory was transferred from people born there to Protestants from England. The share owned by Catholics was reduced from a clear majority to 15 per cent. In both nations, moreover, the English conquest inflicted terrible damage to populations which had already been reduced by the preceding years of civil war. From one tenth to one fifth of the adult males of Scotland died as a result of the conflicts between 1637 and 1652, and at least one fifth of a
ll the inhabitants of Ireland were killed, fled, or perished of disease or hunger in the same period. Most of these losses were sustained during the Commonwealth’s invasions.

  All this served to confirm to most people at home and abroad, in an age in which great events were generally thought to reflect the will of God, that however abhorrent the regime might be there was some divine purpose behind its existence. By 1653 the only threat to it could come from within its own ranks; but that threat was very serious indeed.

  Constitutional Experiments

  Newcomers to the political history of England in the 1650s generally find it one of the most confusing episodes in the national story: a succession of short-lived regimes and constitutions with no apparent connecting thread of logic. Such an impression is largely a result of traditional historiography, which has concentrated upon the actions of governments and Parliaments in the period, and above all on the enigmatic figure of Oliver Cromwell, who presided over most. The key to an understanding of these years lies in a body of people that has been relatively neglected by scholars, partly because of a comparative lack of material and partly because of an academic preference for studying formal organs and offices of power. This is the army that commenced its life as the New Model in 1645 and became the force that had made the English Revolution. If it had little sense of an ideal form of government, it had a very good one of the kind of social and political outcome which it wanted any government to produce. Between 1647 and 1660 it had a consistent list of reforms it expected from any regime which it was prepared to support: a transformation of the legal system to make it faster, cheaper and easier for ordinary people to understand; regular Parliaments elected on a reformed franchise; and a broadly based national Church without the compulsory tithes which traditionally supported parish ministers and with freedom for radical Protestants to form their own miniature churches outside it if they wished. In 1647 the army had tried to get the king to agree to it; after he refused, it continued to search for a different form of government which would.

  In doing so, it suffered from two handicaps, which combined to produce a chronic impasse. The first was simply that its programme was too extreme, especially in religion, for the vast majority of the English to accept. It could command the allegiance of a minority in each level of society, and cumulatively this provided enough civilian allies to staff local government, but no more. The second handicap was that the soldiers could not bring themselves to face the reality that their reforms would not be imposed by any body that came close to representing the wishes of the English in general. Rather than enact them by the directions of a military tribunal in the manner of many modern revolutions, they continued to look to Parliaments elected from gentry, lawyers and wealthy merchants – groups which had a particular vested interest in the old order that the army wanted to reshape – to provide them. The soldiers were uneasily aware that they had seized power in the name of popular liberties but against the will of most of the people; their hope was that time, God and reeducation would win the majority of the nation over. It did not help their cause that while their reform package was clear enough in outline, their proposals were either vague or contradictory when it came to practical details; for example, what could replace tithes?

  The results were as follows. For four years the army applied pressure to the purged remnant of the Long Parliament to enact its reforms, with increasing confidence as its victories multiplied. In April 1653, led by Cromwell, it lost patience and threw the MPs out. Its officers then, for the first and last time, came close to the only sure means of achieving their aim, by nominating a Parliament themselves for the work instead of getting it elected. Unhappily, in their desire to give the resulting body some social weight, they named to it many individuals from the traditional governing classes, as well as many genuine radicals. The assembly concerned, popularly known as Barebone’s Parliament after one of its members, suffered none of the sloth of the purged one but was afflicted by division instead, and collapsed in December. By then, some of the officers had another solution ready: to have regular Parliaments, elected from reformed constituencies and a standard franchise and without any Royalists, and to manage them as a rider does a horse. Two components were built into the new constitution, called the Instrument of Government. The first was a presidential figure, the Lord Protector, who was Cromwell himself, working closely with the second, a powerful executive council, staffed mainly with men sympathetic to the army’s programme. During most of 1654, Protector and council used their own powers to impose a number of measures that prepared the way for the army’s reform package, and in September they called a Parliament. To their horror, it refused not only to complete the reforms but to recognize the legitimacy of the Instrument of Government itself. In 1655 Cromwell dissolved it, and his government then imposed a direct experience of local godly reform on the nation, by dividing it into provinces governed by leading army officers, the Major-Generals. They were expected to work with local enthusiasts to ensure that the poor were relieved, the peace kept, and crime, vice and ungodliness punished, to an unprecedented degree. After more than a year of this, in September 1656, the government hoped that the English had been sufficiently impressed and cowed for a more compliant Parliament to be elected under the new system.

  The second Protectorate Parliament was indeed different, but not in the way the army had hoped. A majority of it, which included some of Cromwell’s own civilian advisers, offered a counter-deal: to recognize and supply the government if it abandoned the reform programme and accepted a form of counter-revolution instead. This would consist of a restored monarchy, with Cromwell as king, a restored House of Lords, with enemies of the regime excluded, and a better-defined and better-policed Church of England. When the army officers came to him to protest, he told them angrily that this was the best offer that they had ever got. Only some, however, were convinced, and from February to May 1657 the Protector hesitated over the problem. In early May the news leaked that he was on the point of accepting the Crown, whereupon his three most senior generals told them that they would not support this, and the regiments around London mobilized to petition against it. This concentrated Cromwell’s mind, and he got in his refusal just before the petition arrived. Instead he brokered a compromise. He did not accept the crown or title of king but adopted increased powers, a royal robe, a sceptre, a throne and the right to create knights and hereditary peers. An Upper House was formed, but of supporters of the government rather than the old aristocracy, and a synod to tighten up the church was promised and never called. The Protector hoped that this would give enough to satisfy everybody. On the contrary, it satisfied no one, and when the Parliament was recalled in 1658, both it and the army became restless. Cromwell dissolved it after two weeks, and then listened to his councillors arguing fruitlessly over possible alternatives, as he slowly fell into a fatal illness which carried him off in September.

  At this point it may be worth asking whether such a sequence of failures really mattered: after all, equipped with an unbeatable army, an effective administration and sufficient local supporters, the regime could apparently go on trying out and discarding constitutions and Parliaments indefinitely. Sooner or later, this logic suggests, the army officers would find one of each that would do their work. The problem with this suggestion is that time was not on their side: instead there were two different time bombs ticking away underneath them. One was religious. The whole system of liberty of conscience was based on the premise that given a long enough period in which they were forced to coexist, the different groups into which the old Puritanism had shattered would learn to work together, and reconstruct a better national Church between them. By 1658 this was actually happening, as in several areas former non-Puritan Protestants, Presbyterians, members of independent congregations who favoured a national Church, and even some of the new sects who had not wanted a Church of England at all, such as Baptists, were starting to cooperate. Such a development, however, was emphatically not a sign
that the religious temperature of the English was starting to fall: on the contrary, these old opponents were sinking their differences in order to join forces against a terrifying new threat.

  This came from the north, traditionally the most conservative of all English regions. There the disturbances of the 1640s had inflicted unusually severe damage upon the established church, leaving many parishes with no ministry. In this emergency, some country people and inhabitants of small towns began to think things through for themselves, discussing the Bible and radical and mystical ideas that had filtered through from the larger centres of population. By the beginning of the 1640s, they had reached the conclusion that no settled ministry was needed at all for salvation: all that was required was for devout Christians to meet together and wait for the spirit of God to move one or more of them. Having tried out this technique, they found that it seemed to work. The discovery spread rapidly through the fells and dales of the North Country, and in 1654 its proponents were ready to come south to preach their message. They had now embraced the whole of the army’s reform programme with the major addition that the Church of England was to be wholly abolished, and with it the universities which trained clergymen. Within four years they had penetrated every county in England and some in Wales, finding adherents in town and country alike. They represented the most spectacularly successful popular heresy that the English had ever produced, and one to which their enemies gave the name of ‘Quakers’, after the religious ecstasies into which some of its proponents entered. If the army – already so inclined to radical beliefs – were to take up their cause, then it could very easily be carried into power. By late 1658 many who still believed in a national church, or even a settled ministry, feared that the nation would collapse into violence between the Quakers and their allies and those determined to resist them. In that sense England was growing steadily less stable.