Charles I (1625–49)
Father and son could hardly be more different than were James and Charles. Charles was shy and physically deformed. He had a speech defect that made his pronouncements painful for him and his audiences alike. Charles had not been raised to rule. His childhood had been spent in the shadow of his brother, Prince Henry, who had died in 1612, and Charles had little practical experience of government. He was introverted and clung tenaciously to a few intimates. His wife, Henrietta Maria—French, Roman Catholic, and hugely unpopular—received Charles’s loyalty despite great political cost. So did Buckingham, who survived the change in monarchs and consolidated his grip on government.
The politics of war
Along with his kingdom, Charles I inherited a domestic economic crisis and the war with Spain. A series of bad grain harvests, continued dislocation of the cloth trade, and a virulent plague that killed tens of thousands all conspired against the new king. Under the pressure of economic crisis, members of the Parliament of 1625 were determined to reform the customs and to limit the crown’s right to levy impositions. The traditional lifelong grant of tonnage and poundage was thus withheld from Charles so that reform could be considered. But reform was delayed, and, despite the appearance of illegality, the king collected these levies to prevent bankruptcy.
The Spanish war progressed no better than the domestic economy. Buckingham organized an expedition to Cádiz, but its failure forced Charles to summon another Parliament. From the start the Parliament of 1626 was badly managed, and members of both houses thirsted for Buckingham’s blood. Where James had sacrificed his ministers to further policy, Charles would not. Parliament was dissolved without granting any subsidies.
Charles now fell back upon desperate remedies. All his predecessors had collected “forced loans” at times of imminent crisis when there was no time to await parliamentary elections, returns, and the vote of subsidies. It was widely accepted that the king must have discretion to require loans from his subjects in such circumstances—loans that were routinely converted into grants when the next Parliament met. What was unprecedented was the collection of forced loans to replace lost parliamentary subsidies. The £260,000 Charles collected in 1627 was precisely the sum he had turned down when it was made conditional upon his surrender of Buckingham to the wrath of the Commons. But he collected it at a heavy price: Charles was compelled to lock up 180 refusers, including many prominent gentry. However, he refused to show cause for his imprisonment of five leading knights, controversially relying on a rarely used discretionary power to arrest “by special commandment” those suspected of crimes it was not in the general interest to make public—a contingency normally used to nip conspiracies in the bud. The inevitable result was furor in the next Parliament, to which he again had to go cap in hand because he was desperate for money to fund simultaneous naval wars against the two superpowers, France and Spain. Lawyers, such as Sir Edward Coke, and country gentlemen, such as Sir John Eliot, now feared that the common law insufficiently protected their lives and liberties. This sentiment was compounded by the fact that soldiers were being billeted in citizens’ homes; local militias were forced to raise, equip, and transport men to fight abroad; and provost marshals declared martial law in peaceful English communities.
Yet the extremity of these expedients was matched by the seriousness of the international situation. Incredibly, England was now at war with both France and Spain, and Buckingham was determined to restore his reputation. Instead, the campaign of 1627 was a disaster, and the duke’s landing at the Île de Ré a debacle. It was hard to see how Charles could protect him from his critics once the Parliament of 1628–29 assembled.
The defeats of 1627 made emergency taxation more necessary than ever, and the new Parliament, 27 of whose members had been imprisoned for refusing to contribute to the loan, assembled with a sense of profound disquiet. It was proposed to grant the king five subsidies for defense but to delay their passage until the Petition of Right (1628) could be prepared. The petition asserted four liberties: freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from nonparliamentary taxation, freedom from the billeting of troops, and freedom from martial law. Couched in the language of tradition, it was presented to the king as a restatement of ancient liberties. In this spirit he accepted it, more in hope of receiving his subsidies than in fear that the petition would restrain his actions.
Between the two sessions of this Parliament, the duke of Buckingham was assassinated (Aug. 23, 1628). While the king wept in his palace, people drank to the health of the assassin in the streets; Buckingham had become a symbol of all that was wrong in the country. But with the king’s favourite removed, there was a void in government. Buckingham had been in charge of military and domestic policy, and there was no one else who had the confidence of the king or the ability to direct the royal program. When Charles I, grief-stricken, attempted to manage the second session of Parliament by himself, all the tensions came to a head. In the Commons some members wanted to challenge violations of the Petition of Right, especially the continued collection of tonnage and poundage without parliamentary authority. Others were equally agitated about changes in religious policy caused by the emergence of Arminianism. When the level of bitterness reached new heights, the king decided to end the session. But before he could do so, two hotheaded members physically restrained the speaker while the Three Resolutions (1629), condemning the collection of tonnage and poundage as well as the doctrine and practice of Arminianism, were introduced. Parliament broke up in pandemonium, with both king and members shocked by the “carriage of diverse fiery spirits.”
Peace and reform
The dissolution of the Parliament of 1628 in 1629 and the king’s clear intention to govern for a period without this troublesome institution necessitated a reversal of policy. Over the next two years, peace treaties ended England’s fruitless involvement in continental warfare in which more than £2 million had been wasted and royal government brought into disrepute. The king was also able to pacify his subjects by launching a campaign of administrative and fiscal reform that finally allowed the crown to live within its own revenues. Customs increased to £500,000 as both European and North American trade expanded. Under capable ministers such as Richard Weston, earl of Portland, prerogative income also increased. Ancient precedents were carefully searched to ensure that the crown received its full and lawful dues. Fines were imposed on those who had not come forward to be knighted at the king’s accession. These distraints of knighthood yielded more than £170,000. The boundaries of royal forests were resurveyed and encroachers fined. Fees in the court of wards were raised and procedures streamlined. With effort and application annual royal revenue reached £1 million.
The most important of Charles’s fiscal schemes was not technically a design to squeeze monies into the royal coffers. While the king’s own rights might underwrite the needs of government, they could do nothing toward maintaining the navy, England’s sole military establishment. Thus, Charles expanded the collection of ship money, an ancient levy by which revenue was raised for the outfitting of warships. Although ship money was normally only collected in the ports in times of emergency, Charles extended it to inland communities and declared pirates a national menace. At first there was little resistance to the collection of ship money, but, as it was levied year after year, questions about its legitimacy were raised. The case of John Hampden (1637) turned upon the king’s emergency powers and divided the royal judges, who narrowly decided for the crown. But legal opinion varied so significantly that revenue dropped, and the stirring of a taxpayer revolt could be felt.
Religious reform
Fears about the state of the church, which erupted at the end of the Parliament of 1628, had been building for several years. Charles had become drawn to a movement of church reform that aroused deep hostility among his Calvinist subjects. The doctrines of predestination and justification by faith alone formed the core of beliefs in the traditional English church. Yet slowly competing doctrines of free will and the importance of works along with faith, advocated by the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, spread to the English church. Arminians were viewed as radical reformers despite the fact that their leaders were elevated to the highest positions in church government. In 1633 William Laud, one of the ablest of the Arminians, became archbishop of Canterbury. Laud stressed ceremony over preaching. He believed in the “beauty of holiness” and introduced measures to decorate churches and to separate the communion table from the congregation. Both of these practices were reminiscent of Roman Catholicism, and they came at a time when Protestants everywhere feared for the survival of their religion. Nor did it help that the queen openly attended mass along with some highly placed converted courtiers. Anti-popery was the single strain that had united the diverse elements of Protestant reform, and it was now a rallying cry against innovations at home rather than abominations abroad.
But perhaps Laud’s greatest offense was to promote the authority of the clergy in general and of the bishops in particular, against the laity. He challenged head-on the central thrust of the English Reformation: the assault on the institutional wealth and power of the church as a clerical corporation. He wanted to restore the authority of the church courts and threatened to excommunicate the king’s judges if they persisted in trying cases that belonged to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He also tried to restore the value of tithes and prevent the misappropriation of churchyards for secular purposes. Moreover, he sought to penalize those who did not pay the (much-enhanced) levies for the refurbishment of church buildings. Menacingly, in Scotland and Ireland (as a prelude, many assumed, to actions to come in England) he tried to renegotiate by a policy of surrender the terms on which all former monastic and cathedral lands were held. In all this he appeared to act more like an aggressive papal nuncio than a compliant appointee of the royal supreme governor of the church, and Charles I’s purring complaisance in Laud’s activities was unendurable to most of his subjects. The master of Westminster School was whipped in front of his pupils for saying of Laud that, like “a busie, angry wasp, his sting is in the tayl of everything.” Others were flogged through the streets of London or had their ears cut off for “libeling” Laud and his work. He alienated not only everyone with a Puritan scruple but everyone with a strong sense of the supremacy of common law or with an inherited suspicion of clerical pride. No wonder the archbishop had so few friends by 1640.
His program extended to Ireland and—especially disastrously—to Scotland. Without consulting Parliament, the General Assembly, the Scottish bishops in conclave, or even the Scottish Privy Council, but rather by royal diktat, Laud ordered the introduction of new canons, a new ordinal, and a new prayer book based not on the English prayer book of 1559 but on the more ceremonialist and crypto-Catholic English prayer book of 1549. This was met by riot and, eventually, rebellion. Vast numbers of Scots bound themselves passively to disobey the “unlawful” religious innovations. Charles I decided to use force to compel them, and he twice sought to use troops raised by a loyal (largely Catholic) Scottish minority, troops from Ireland, and troops from England to achieve this end.
The Bishops’ Wars (1639–40) brought an end to the tranquillity of the 1630s. Charles had to meet rebellion with force, and force required money from Parliament. He genuinely believed that he would be supported against the rebels, failing to comprehend the profound hostility that Laud’s innovations had created in England. The Short Parliament (1640) lasted less than a month before the king dissolved it rather than permit an extended discussion of his inadequacies. He scraped some money together and placed his troops under the command of his able and ruthless deputy, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. But English troops fighting for pay proved no match for Scottish troops fighting for religion. In 1640 the Scots invaded England and captured Newcastle, the vital source of London’s coal. Charles was forced to accept a humiliating treaty whereby he paid for the upkeep of the Scottish army and agreed to call another Parliament.
The Long Parliament
With his circumstances more desperate than ever, Charles I summoned Parliament to meet in November 1640. The king faced a body profoundly mistrustful of his intentions. The reform movement in the Commons was led by John Pym, a minor Somerset landowner, who was prominent by his oratorical skills in debate and his political skills in committee. Pym was a moderate, and for the next three years he ably steered compromises between those who wanted too much and those who would settle for too little. In the Lords, Viscount Saye and Sele and the earl of Warwick and the earl of Bedford worked in tandem with Pym and his allies, leading or following as occasion required.
The Long Parliament (1640–53) opened with the imprisonment of Strafford and Laud, the architects of the Scottish fiasco. Strafford was put on trial and ultimately attainted for treason. The dubious legality of the charges against him forced the Commons to proceed by bill rather than impeachment, and thus both the House of Lords and the monarch had to approve the charge. The Lords were cowed by crowds of angry London citizens and apprentices and Charles by the mistaken belief that Strafford’s blood would placate his opponents. But Strafford’s execution in May was just the beginning.
In fact, parliamentary reform took two different tacks. The first was to limit the king’s constitutional authority in order to protect the existence of Parliament and the liberties of subjects. The second was to reconstitute the church. In February the Triennial Act (1641) was passed, mandating the summoning of Parliament every three years. In May the king’s power to dissolve the Long Parliament was removed. Charles was forced to accept both bills. Meanwhile, the Commons relentlessly investigated the legal basis of the king’s fiscal expedients, amending the laws that Charles had so scrupulously followed. Ship money and distraints of knighthood were declared illegal, royal forests were defined, and the prerogative courts of High Commission and Star Chamber were abolished. Again the king acceded.
Church reform proved more treacherous. Parliamentary leaders agreed that Charles and Laud had introduced intolerable innovations, but where some were satisfied by their removal, others wished that they be replaced by even greater novelties. In December 1640 an orchestrated petitioning campaign called upon Parliament to abolish episcopacy, root and branch. Pym and his supporters were as yet unwilling to propose such a sweeping change, fearing lest it divide the Commons and create a crisis with the Lords. Nevertheless, the equally radical proposal to remove the bishops from the upper house was passed in May, and, when the Lords rejected it, the Commons responded with the Root and Branch Bill.
Pym’s fear that the religious issue might break apart the parliamentary consensus was compounded by his fear of provoking the king to counterattack. Throughout the first six months of the session, Charles had meekly followed Parliament’s lead. But there were ominous signs that the worm would turn. His leading advisers, the queen among them, were searching for military options. The radical attack upon the church allowed the king to portray himself as the conservator of “the pure religion of Queen Elizabeth and King James” without “any connivance of popery or innovation”—a coded repudiation of Laudianism and Arminianism. Week by week, sympathy for the king was growing, and in August Charles determined to conclude a peace treaty with the Scots. This successful negotiation removed the crisis that had brought the Long Parliament into being. When Charles returned to London at the end of November, he was met by cheering crowds and a large body of members of the two houses, who were unaware that he had been behind a failed attempt to arrest the leading conservator and overturn the Scottish settlement.
While the king resolved one crisis in Scotland, another emerged in Ireland. Catholics, stung by the harsh repression of Strafford’s rule and by the threat of plantation and of the direct rule from England planned by the Long Parliament, rose against their Protestant overlords and slaughtered thousands in a bloody rebellion. Though the reality was grim enough, the exaggerated reports that reached London seemed to fulfill the worst fears of a popish plot. Urgently an army had to be raised, but only the king had military authority, and in the present circumstance he could not be trusted with a force that might be used in London rather than Londonderry. In despair over the situation in Ireland and deeply suspicious of the king’s intentions, the leaders of the Long Parliament debated the Grand Remonstrance, a catalog of their grievances against the king.
The Grand Remonstrance (1641) divided the Commons as nothing else had. It passed by only 11 votes, and the move to have it printed failed. Many were appalled that the remonstrance was to be used as propaganda “to tell stories to the people.” For the first time, members of Commons began to coalesce into opposing factions of royalists and parliamentarians.
The passage of the Grand Remonstrance was followed by Pym’s attempt to transfer control of the militia (the appointment of lords, lieutenants, military officers, etc.) from the crown to Parliament. The political situation had reached a state of crisis. In Parliament, rumours spread of a royal attack upon the houses, and at court wild talk of an impeachment of the queen was reported. It was Charles who broke the deadlock. On Jan. 4, 1642, he rode to Westminster intending to impeach five members of the Commons and one of the Lords on charges of treason. It was the same device that had already failed in Scotland. But, because the king’s plan was no secret, the members had already fled. Thus, Charles’s dramatic breach of parliamentary privilege badly backfired. He not only failed to obtain his objective but also lost the confidence of many of the moderates left in Parliament. After ensuring the safe departure of his wife and children out of the country, Charles abandoned his capital and headed north.
The initiative had returned to Pym and his allies, who now proceeded to pass much of their stalled legislation, including the exclusion of the bishops from the Lords and the Impressment Bill (1642), which allowed Parliament to raise the army for Ireland. In June a series of proposals for a treaty, the Nineteen Propositions (1642), was presented to the king. The proposals called for parliamentary control over the militia, the choice of royal counselors, and religious reform. Charles rejected them outright, though in his answer he seemed to grant Parliament a coordinate power in government, making the king but one of the three estates. The king, however, had determined to settle the matter by main force. His principal advisers believed that the greatest lords and gentlemen would rally to their king and that Parliament would not have the stomach for rebellion. On Aug. 22, 1642, the king raised his standard bearing the device “Give Caesar His Due.”
Civil war and revolution
The war that began in 1642 was a war within three kingdoms and between three kingdoms. There was a civil war in Ireland that pitted the Catholic majority against the Protestant minority, buttressed by English and Scottish armies. This war festered nastily throughout the 1640s and was settled only by a devastating use of force and terror by Oliver Cromwell in 1649–50 and his successors in 1651–54. Whenever they were in the ascendancy, the Catholic Irish were willing to send armies into England to assist Charles I, on condition that he give them religious freedom and effective control of the political institutions of the Irish kingdom. After the Cromwellian conquest, the English set out to destroy the power and wealth of the Catholic elite—at one point even proposing to transport every native Catholic from 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland into the western region comprising the 5 counties of Connacht and County Clare; in the event, they settled for a confiscation of two-fifths of the land and its redistribution to Protestant Englishmen.
Scotland also was embroiled in civil war, but, at one time or another, all the groups involved demonstrated a willingness to send armies into England. The Anglo-Scottish wars were fought from 1643 to 1646, resumed from 1648 to 1651, and resulted in an English military occupation and complete political subjugation (the incorporation of Scotland into an enhanced English state) that lasted until the Restoration in 1660.
And then there was the English Civil War that began in 1642, a war that neither king, Parliament, nor the country wanted. It was a war that was as dangerous to win as to lose. The parliamentarians could only maintain the fiction that they were fighting to “preserve the safety of the king,” as the commission of their commander, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, stated. The king’s fiction was that he was opposing a rebellion. Most of the country remained neutral, hoping that differences would be composed and fighting ended.
The first years of war were as halfhearted as these justifications. Parliament held the tactical advantages of controlling the navy and London. While the navy protected the coast from foreign invasion, London provided the funds and manpower for battle. The king held the strategic advantage of knowing that he had to recapture his capital. He relied upon the aristocracy for men and arms. In the first substantial engagement of the war, the Battle of Edgehill (1642), Charles’s cavalry proved superior to Parliament’s, and he followed this first encounter by marching on the capital. At Brentford (1642), on the outskirts of London, the City militia narrowly averted the king’s triumph. For the next two years, however, the war was fought to a desultory standstill.
Almost from the beginning, the members of Parliament were divided over their goals. A war group argued that Charles could not be trusted until he learned the lesson of military defeat. A peace group countered that the longer the war ground on, the less likely Charles would be to compromise. Both of these groups were loose coalitions, and neither of them dominated parliamentary politics. Until his death in 1643, Pym steered a course between them, supporting the Oxford Propositions (1643) for peace as well as creating the administrative machinery to raise and finance armies. The excise, modeled on impositions, and the monthly assessments, modeled on ship money, increased levels of taxation to new heights. The king burdened the communities his forces controlled just as heavily.
In 1643 the war widened. Charles negotiated a cease-fire with the Catholic rebels in Ireland that allowed him to bring Irish troops to England. Parliament negotiated the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) with the Scots, who brought an army to England in return for guarantees of a presbyterian church establishment. Initially Parliament benefited most. A combination of English and Scottish troops defeated royalist forces at the Battle of Marston Moor (1644) and took York. But ultimately religious differences between Scottish Presbyterians and English Independents vitiated the alliance. As the parliamentary commanders bickered, their forces were defeated at Lostwithiel (1644) and Newbury (1644). While another round of peace negotiations began, the unsuccessful Uxbridge Proposals (1645), Parliament recast its military establishment and formed the New Model Army.
There was little new about the New Model Army other than centralization. Remnants of three armies were combined to be directed by a parliamentary committee. This committee included the parliamentary generals who were displaced by the Self-Denying Ordinance (1645), an act that excluded members of Parliament from civil and military office. The New Model Army was commanded by Thomas Fairfax, Baron Fairfax, and eventually the cavalry was led by Lieut. Gen. Oliver Cromwell.
The new parliamentary army was thought so weak that the king hoped to crush it in a single blow and thus end the war. Instead, the Battle of Naseby on June 14, 1645, delivered the decisive blow to the royalists. Even though the parliamentary forces only just managed to carry the day despite their numerical superiority, their victory was decisive. It destroyed the king’s main armies and left open a path to the west, where his other substantial forces were defeated at Langport (1645). The following year, the king surrendered to the Scots, erroneously believing that they would strike a better bargain.
For four years the political divisions at Westminster had been held in check by the military emergency. But the king’s defeat released all restraints. In Parliament coherent parties began to form around the religious poles provided by Presbyterians and Independents and around the political poles of peace and war. Denzil Holles, one of the five members of Parliament Charles had tried to arrest in 1642, came to head the most powerful group. He pushed through a presbyterian church settlement, negotiated a large loan from the City of London, and used the money to ransom the king from the Scots. Holles’s peace plan was to remove the main points of difference between king and Parliament by disbanding the army and settling the disputes about the church, the militia, and the rebellion in Ireland. His party was opposed by a group led by Sir Henry Vane the Younger and Oliver Cromwell, who desired toleration for Independents and were fearful of disbanding the army before an agreement was reached with Charles I.
But war weariness in both Parliament and the country swept all before it. In January 1647 Charles was returned to English custody, and Holles moved forward with his plan to send a portion of the army to Ireland, assign a small force to English garrisons, and disband the rest. But in this he reckoned without the army. In the rank and file, concern about arrears of pay, indemnity, and liability for impressment stirred the soldiers to resist Irish service. A movement that began over material grievances soon turned political as representatives were chosen from the rank and file to present demands through their officers to Parliament. Holles attempted to brush this movement aside and push through his disbandment scheme. At this the army rose up, driving out those of its officers who supported the disbandment, seizing Charles at Holmby House on June 3 and demanding the impeachment of Holles and his main supporters. At the beginning of August 1647, the army marched into London, and Holles, with 10 of his allies, fled the capital.
The army’s intervention transformed civil war into revolution. Parliament, which in 1646 had argued that it was the fundamental authority in the country, by 1647 was but a pawn in a new game of power politics. The perceived corruption of Parliament made it, like the king, a target of reform. Initiative was now in the hands of the king and the army, and Charles I tried to entice Cromwell and Henry Ireton, the army’s leading strategist, to bargain his restoration for a tolerant church settlement. But the officers were only one part of a politicized army that was bombarded with plans for reorganizing the state. Among the most potent plans were those of the Levelers, led by John Lilburne, who desired that a new compact between ruler and ruled, the Agreement of the People (1647), be made. This was debated by the council of the army at Putney in October. The Levelers’ proposals, which had much in common with the army’s, called for the reform of Parliament through elections based upon a broad franchise and for a generally tolerant church settlement. Turmoil in the army led Fairfax and Cromwell to reassert military discipline, while the machinations of Charles led to the second Civil War (1648).
Charles had now managed to join his English supporters with discontented Scots who opposed the army’s intervention in politics. Though the fighting was brief, it was bloody. Fairfax stormed Colchester (1648) and executed the ringleaders of the English rebellion, and Cromwell and several New Model regiments defeated the invading Scots at the Battle of Preston (1648).
The second Civil War hardened attitudes in the army. The king was directly blamed for the unnecessary loss of life, and for the first time alternatives to Charles Stuart, “that man of blood,” were openly contemplated. Parliament too was appalled by the renewal of fighting. Moderate members believed that there was still a chance to bring the king to terms, despite the fact that he had rejected treaty after treaty. While the army made plans to put the king on trial, Parliament summoned its strength for one last negotiation, the abortive Treaty of Newport. Even now the king remained intransigent, especially over the issue of episcopacy. New negotiations infuriated the army, because it believed that Parliament would sell out its sacrifices and compromise its ideals. On Dec. 6, 1648, army troops, under the direction of Col. Thomas Pride, purged the House of Commons. Forty-five members were arrested, and 186 were kept away. A rump of about 75 active members were left to do the army’s bidding. They were to establish a High Court of Justice, prepare a charge of treason against the king, and place him on trial in the name of the people of England. Pride’s Purge was a last-minute compromise made to prevent absolute military rule. With Cromwell deliberately absent in the north, Ireton was left to stave off the argument, made by the Levelers, that Parliament was hopelessly corrupt and should be dissolved. The decision to proceed by trial in the High Court of Parliament was a decision in favour of constitutional forms, however much a shadow they had become.
The king’s trial took place at the end of January. The Court of Justice was composed of members of Parliament, civilians, and army officers. There was little enthusiasm for the work that had to be done. No more senior judge than John Bradshaw could be found to preside, and he wore a hat ringed with iron in fear of assassination. The charges against the king, however politically correct, had little legal basis, and Charles deftly exposed their weakness. But like Strafford before him, Charles was to be sacrificed to the law of necessity if not the law of England. On Jan. 30, 1649, at the wall of his own palace, Charles I was beheaded. A witness recorded in his diary, “Such a groan went up as I had never before heard.”
Commonwealth and Protectorate
The execution of the king aroused hostility not only in England but also throughout Europe. Regicide was considered the worst of all crimes, and not even the brilliance of John Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) could persuade either Catholic or Protestant powers that the execution of Charles I was just. Open season was declared against English shipping, and Charles II was encouraged to reclaim his father’s three kingdoms.
Despite opposition and continued external threats, the government of the Commonwealth was declared in May 1649 after acts had been passed to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords. Political power resided in a Council of State, the Rump Parliament (which swelled from 75 to 213 members in the year following the king’s execution), and the army. The military was now a permanent part of English government. Though the soldiers had assigned the complex tasks of reform to Parliament, they made sure of their ability to intervene in political affairs.
At first, however, the soldiers had other things to occupy them. For reasons of security and revenge, Ireland had to be pacified. In the autumn of 1649, Cromwell crossed to Ireland to deal once and for all with the Irish Confederate rebels. He came first to Drogheda. When the town refused to surrender, he stormed it and put the garrison of 3,000 to the sword, acting both as the avenger of the massacres of 1641 (“I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood”) and as a deliberate instrument of terror to induce others to surrender. He repeated his policy of massacre at Wexford, this time choosing not to spare the civilian population. These actions had the desired effect, and most other towns surrendered at Cromwell’s approach. He departed Ireland after nine months, leaving his successors with only a mopping-up operation. His reputation at a new high, Cromwell was next put in charge of dealing with those Scots who had welcomed Charles I’s son, Charles II, to Scotland and who were soon to crown him at Scone as king of all of Great Britain and Ireland. Although outnumbered and in a weak defensive position, Cromwell won a stunning victory in the Battle of Dunbar on Sept. 3, 1650. A year later to the day, having chased Charles II and a second Scottish army into England, he gained an overwhelming victory at Worcester. Charles II barely escaped with his life.
Victorious wars against the Irish, Scots, and Dutch (1652) made the Commonwealth a feared military power. But the struggle for survival defined the Rump’s conservative policies. Little was done to reform the law. An attempt to abolish the court of chancery created chaos in the central courts. Little agreement could be reached on religious matters, especially on the vexing question of the compulsory payment of tithes. The Rump failed both to make long-term provision for a new “national church” and to define the state’s right to confer and place limits on the freedom of those who wished to worship and gather outside the church. Most ominously, nothing at all had been done to set a limit for the sitting of the Rump and to provide for franchise reform and the election of a new Parliament. This had been the principal demand of the army, and the more the Rump protested the difficulty of the problem, the less patient the soldiers became. In April, when it was clear that the Rump would set a limit to its sitting but would nominate its own members to judge new elections, Cromwell marched to Westminster and dissolved Parliament. The Rump was replaced by an assembly nominated mostly by the army high command. The Nominated Parliament (1653) was no better able to overcome its internal divisions or untangle the threads of reform than the Rump. After five months it dissolved itself and returned power to Cromwell and the army.
The problems that beset both the Rump and the Nominated Parliament resulted from the diversity of groups that supported the revolution, ranging from pragmatic men of affairs, lawyers, officeholders, and local magistrates whose principal desire was to restore and maintain order to zealous visionaries who wished to establish heaven on earth. The republicans, like Sir Henry Vane the Younger, hoped to create a government based upon the model of ancient Rome and modern Venice. They were proud of the achievements of the Commonwealth and reviled Cromwell for dissolving the Rump. But most political reformers based their programs on dreams of the future rather than the past. They were millenarians, expecting the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Some were social reformers, such as Gerrard Winstanley, whose followers, agrarian communists known as Diggers, believed that the common lands should be returned to the common people. Others were mystics, such as the Ranters, led by Laurence Claxton, who believed that they were infused with a holy spirit that removed sin from even their most reprehensible acts. The most enduring of these groups were the Quakers (Society of Friends), whose social radicalism was seen in their refusal to take oaths or doff their hats and whose religious radicalism was contained in their emphasis upon inner light. Ultimately, all these groups were persecuted by successive revolutionary governments, which were continually being forced to establish conservative limits to individual and collective behaviour.
The failure of the Nominated Parliament led to the creation of the first British constitution, the Instrument of Government (1653). Drafted by Maj. Gen. John Lambert, the Instrument created a lord protector, a Council of State, and a reformed Parliament that was to be elected at least once every three years. Cromwell was named protector, and he chose a civilian-dominated Council to help him govern. The Protectorate tackled many of the central issues of reform head-on. Commissions were appointed to study law reform and the question of tithes. Social legislation against swearing, drunkenness, and stage plays was introduced. Steps were taken to provide for the training of a godly ministry, and even a new university at Durham was begun.
But the protector was no better able to manage his Parliaments than had been the king. The Parliament of 1654 immediately questioned the entire basis of the newly established government, with the republicans vigorously disputing the office of lord protector. The Parliament of 1656, despite the exclusion of many known opponents, was no more pliable. Both were a focus for the manifold discontents of supporters and opponents of the regime.
Nothing was more central to the Cromwellian experiment than the cause of religious liberty. Cromwell believed that no one church had a monopoly on truth and that no one form of government or worship was necessary or desirable. Moreover, he believed in a loosely federated national church, with each parish free to worship as it wished within very broad limits and staffed by a clergy licensed by the state on the basis of their knowledge of the Bible and the uprightness of their lives, without reference to their religious beliefs. On the other hand, Cromwell felt that there should be freedom for “all species of protestant” to gather if they wished into religious assemblies outside the national church. He did not believe, however, that religious liberty was a natural right, but one conferred by the Christian magistrate, who could place prudential limits on the exercise of that liberty. Thus, those who claimed that their religion permitted or even promoted licentiousness and sexual freedom, who denied the Trinity, or who claimed the right to disrupt the worship of others were subject to proscription or penalty. Furthermore, for the only time between the Reformation and the mid-19th century, there was no religious test for the holding of public office. Although Cromwell made his detestation of Catholicism very plain, Catholics benefited from the repeal of the laws requiring attendance at parish churches, and they were less persecuted for the private exercise of their own faith than at any other time in the century. Cromwell’s policy of religious tolerance was far from total, but it was exceptional in the early modern world.
Among opponents, royalists were again active, though by now they were reduced to secret associations and conspiracies. In the west, Penruddock’s rising, the most successful of a series of otherwise feeble royalist actions in March 1655, was effectively suppressed, but Cromwell reacted by reducing both the standing army and the level of taxation on all. He also appointed senior army officers “major generals,” raising ultra-loyal militias from among the demobbed veterans paid for by penal taxation on all those convicted of active royalism in the previous decade. The major generals were also charged with superintending “a reformation of manners”—the imposition of strict Puritan codes of social and sexual conduct. They were extremely unpopular, and, despite their effectiveness, the offices were abolished within a year.
By now it was apparent that the regime was held together by Cromwell alone. Within his personality resided the contradictions of the revolution. Like the gentry, he desired a fixed and stable constitution, but, like the zealous, he was infused with a millenarian vision of a more glorious world to come (see millennialism). As a member of Parliament from 1640, he respected the fundamental authority that Parliament represented, but, as a member of the army, he understood power and the decisive demands of necessity. In the 1650s many wished him to become king, but he refused the crown, preferring the authority of the people to the authority of the sword. When he died in 1658, all hope of continued reform died with him.
For a time, Richard Cromwell was elevated to his father’s titles and dignity, but he was no match in power or skill. The republicans and the army officers who had fought Oliver tooth and nail now hoped to use his son to dismantle the civil government that under the Humble Petition and Advice (1657) had come to resemble nothing so much as the old monarchy. An upper House of Lords had been created, and the court at Whitehall was every bit as ceremonious as that of the Stuarts. While some demanded that the Rump be restored to power, others clamoured for the selection of a new Parliament on the basis of the old franchise, and this took place in 1659. By then there was a vacuum of power at the centre; Richard Cromwell, incapable of governing, simply left office. A rebellion of junior officers led to the reestablishment of the Rump.
But all was confusion. The Rump was incapable of governing without financial support from the City and military support from the army. Just as in 1647, the City demanded military disbandment and the army demanded satisfaction of its material grievances. But the army was no longer a unified force. Contentions among the senior officers led to an attempt to arrest Lambert, and the widely scattered regiments had their own grievances to propound. The most powerful force was in Scotland, commanded by George Monck, once a royalist and now one of the ablest of the army’s senior officers. When one group of officers determined to dissolve the Rump, Monck marched his forces south, determined to restore it. Arriving in London, Monck quickly realized that the Rump could never govern effectively and that only the restoration of Charles II could put an end to the political chaos that now gripped the state. In February 1660 Monck reversed Pride’s Purge, inviting all of the secluded members of the Long Parliament to return to their seats under army protection. A month later the Long Parliament dissolved itself, paving the way for the return of the king.