In the 1640s a clash between England's Parliament and Kings Charles I developed into a civil war and then a revolutionary upheaval, resulting in the overthrow of the monarchy and the execution of the king. The monarchy was not restored until 1660. These extracts from socialist historian Christopher Hill's The English Revolution 1640 try to explain both the civil war and lower-class democratic struggles during and after it.
Later Marxists, notably Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, developed alternative understandings of the class configuration of Tudor and Stuart England and how it intertwined with the civil war and revolution - but Hill's account remains useful in any case.
The issue was one of political power. The bourgeoisie had rejected Charles I’s Government, not because he was a bad man, but because he represented an obsolete social system. His Government tried to perpetuate a feudal social order when the conditions existed for free capitalist development, when the increase of national wealth could only come by means of free capitalist development.
Charles’s policy throughout his reign, illustrates the class basis of his rule. He tried to regulate trade and industry with the contradictory intention both of slowing down a too rapid capitalist development and of sharing in its profits. In foreign policy he wished for the alliance of the most reactionary powers, Spain and Austria, and refused therefore the forward national policy demanded by the bourgeoisie. Because he lost all favour with the moneyed classes, he had to levy illegal taxes, to aim to dispense with Parliament, to rule by force.
The Parliamentarian attack showed that the opposition had realised that they were fighting more than a few evil counsellors (as they had long believed or pretended to believe), more even than the King himself. They were fighting a system. Before the social order they needed could be secure they had to smash the old bureaucratic machinery, defeat the cavaliers in battle. The heads of a king and many peers had to roll in the dust before it could be certain that future kings and the peerage would recognise the dominance of the new class.
For many years during and after the Civil War, in their eagerness to defeat the old order, the moneyed classes willingly accepted taxes three and four times as heavy as those they had refused to pay to Charles I. For the objection was not to taxes as such; it was to the policy to implement which those taxes were collected. The bourgeoisie had no confidence in Charles, would not trust him with money, because they knew that the whole basis of his rule was hostility to their development. But to a government of their own kind the purse-strings were at once loosed.
Nor was it a war of the rich only. All sections of society in southern and eastern England brought in their contributions to help to win the war, for in the overthrow of the old régime men saw the essential preliminary condition of social and intellectual advance. Many of those who fought for Parliament were afterwards disappointed with the achievements of the revolution, felt they had been betrayed. But they were right to fight.
A victory for Charles I and his gang could only have meant the economic stagnation of England, the stabilisation of a backward feudal society in a commercial age, and yet necessitated an even bloodier struggle for liberation later. The Parliamentarians thought they were fighting God’s battles. They were certainly fighting those of posterity, throwing off an intolerable incubus to further advance. The fact that the revolution might have gone further should never allow us to forget the heroism and faith and disciplined energy with which ordinary decent people responded when the Parliament’s leaders freely and frankly appealed to them to support its cause.
The Revolution
Once the war against the King had begun, divisions arose inside and outside Parliament as to the mode of conducting it. The Cavaliers, as the troops of the Royalist gentry came to be called, had certain military advantages. The Roundheads (there is a social sneer in the name) were strongest in the towns, and though the burghers brought wealth to the cause, they were not at first experienced fighting men. The Cavaliers, on the other hand, relied mainly on the north and west of England, economically backward and badly policed; they, with their tenants and dependents, were used to hard riding and fighting.
Yet for a long time Parliament tried to fight the Cavaliers with their own weapons – by calling out the feudal militia in the counties loyal to Parliament, by using the old financial and administrative machinery of the counties to run the war. But by this means the real resources of Parliament were not drawn upon – the vast wealth of London, the administrative abilities of the bourgeoisie, especially the initiative and resource of the masses of ordinary people who staunchly supported the cause, but were thwarted by the caste system of officering the militia and by its local loyalties. A royalist advance on London was only checked by the obstinate resistance of three great ports – Hull, Plymouth and Gloucester – and by the bold front presented by the citizens of London at Turnham Green (1642) and their daring march to the relief of Gloucester. But these spontaneous efforts were inadequately co-ordinated.
Oliver Cromwell first showed his genius in overcoming these weaknesses and showing that a revolutionary war must be organised in a revolutionary way. In his force in the eastern counties promotion came by merit, not birth: “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain,” he said, “that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call ‘a gentleman’ and is nothing else,” He insisted on his men having “the root of the matter” in them; otherwise he encouraged free discussion of divergent views. Cromwell had to fight those of his superior officers who would not adopt the democratic method of recruitment and organisation whose advantages he had shown.
This conflict is usually described in our school histories as one between “Presbyterians” and “Independents.” It will be useful to retain these terms, but religion had little to do with it except in so far as Cromwell advocated freedom of assembly and discussion, i.e. “religious toleration”; the real difference was between the win-the-war party and the compromisers. It was, in fact, a class split – between the big trading bourgeoisie and that section of the aristocracy and big landowners whose interests were bound up with them – “Presbyterians” – and the progressive smaller gentry, yeomen, free-trade bourgeoisie, supported by the masses of smaller peasants and artisans – “Independents” and “Sectaries.”
Many of the great “Presbyterian” commanders did not want too complete a victory. “If we beat the King ninety and nine times, yet he is King still,” said the Earl of Manchester, Cromwell’s general. “My Lord,” Cromwell replied, “if this be so, why did we take up arms at first?”
The “Presbyterians” were afraid of the flood of radical democracy to which a frank appeal to the people against the King might expose them. Cromwell himself was alleged to have said, “There would never be a good time in England till we have done with Lords.” Certainly many of his troops were thinking so. The Independent and Sectarian congregations were the way in which ordinary people organised themselves in those days to escape from the propaganda of the established Church and discuss the things they wanted to discuss in their own way. The Presbyterian Edwards gave as one of the “heresies” of the Sectaries the view that “by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like property, liberty and freedom.” These were the small people, whose intellectual vision was not restricted by anxieties for their own property. They were invaluable for their enthusiasm, courage and morale in the army; but they came to produce what their paymasters regarded as dangerous social ideas.
Such were the difficulties the bourgeoisie experienced even at the beginning of its career; it needed the people and yet feared them, and wanted to keep the monarchy as a check against democracy – if only Charles I would act as they wanted him to, as Charles II, by and large, later did.
The “Presbyterians” hoped to rely principally upon the well-disciplined Scottish army to bear the brunt of the fighting. But after the great victory of Marston Moor, won in 1644 by Cromwell’s genius and the discipline of his yeomen cavalry, he forced the issue. “It is now a time to speak or for ever to hold the tongue,” he said in Parliament. The tax-paying classes were becoming irritated at the slow and dilatory tactics of the aristocratic “Presbyterian” commanders which increased the cost of the war. A democratic reorganisation was necessary for victory over the more experienced fighters on the Royalist side.
These considerations caused Cromwell’s views to prevail, and by the “Self-Denying Ordinance” all Members of Parliament were called upon to lay down their commands (April 1645). This hit principally the peers; the abandonment of their traditional right to command the armed forces of the country was in itself a minor social revolution. The New Model Army of the career open to the talents was formed – nationally organised and financed by a new national tax.
This in its turn led to corresponding changes in the State machinery. The destruction of the royal bureaucracy had left a void which was ultimately to be filled by a new middle-class civil service. But meanwhile, pressure of revolutionary necessity had led to the creation of a series of revolutionary committees in the localities. “We had a thing here called a Committee,” wrote a despondent gentleman in the Isle of Wight, “which overruled Deputy-Lieutenants and also Justices of the Peace, and of this we had brave men: Ringwood of Newport, the pedlar: Maynard, the apothecary: Matthews, the baker: Wavell and Legge, farmers; and poor Baxter of Hurst Castle. These ruled the whole Island, and did whatsoever they thought good in their own eyes."’ (Sir John Oglander probably exaggerated the social inferiority of his enemies: over the country as a whole the county committees were run by the gentry and the upper bourgeoisie). These committees were now organised and centralised and all brought under the unifying control of the great committees of Parliament, which really ran the Civil War – the committee of both kingdoms, the committee for advance of money, the committee for compounding, etc. The old State system was not wholly but partially destroyed and modified; new institutions were being built up under pressure of events.
In the military sense the war was won by artillery (which money alone could buy) and by Cromwell’s yeomen cavalry. The cavaliers charged with vigour and desperation, but they were totally undisciplined, split up for plunder after the first charge. In war as in peace, the feudal gentry could never resist the prospect of loot. But Cromwell’s humbler horsemen had a discipline that was irresistible because it was self-imposed. Thanks to the complete freedom of discussion which existed in the army, they “knew what they fought for and loved what they knew.” So they charged home, knee to knee, reserving their fire till the last moment, then reformed and charged again and again until the enemy was broken. The Parliament’s battles were won because of the discipline and unity and high political consciousness of the masses organised in the New Model Army.
Once properly organised and regularly paid, with an efficient commissariat and technical staff, with Cromwell, the indispensable leader, reappointed to his command, the New Model Army advanced rapidly to victory and the Royalists were decisively routed at Naseby (1645). After that the war soon ended. A Royalist commander, surrendering, said: “You have done your work and may go play – unless you fall out among yourselves.”
Once the fighting was over, the “Presbyterian” compromisers began to raise their heads again, inside and outside Parliament. Charles had surrendered to the Scottish army in 1646, who sold him to the English Parliament. Thereupon the “Presbyterians” began to negotiate with the captive King: they proposed to get rid of the victorious Army by sending it to conquer Ireland, without paying its wages; they produced no social reforms, not even an indemnity for actions committed during the war, so that soldiers were actually brought before the courts for what they had done in the service of Parliament.
But as the opponents of the New Model Army had anticipated, the people were not so easily to be fobbed off, once they were armed and given the chance of organisation. The main obstacle to a peasant and artisan population making its will felt is the difficulty of organising the petty bourgeoisie; but the radicals saw the Army as an organisation which could “teach peasants to understand liberty.” In London a political party sprang up to represent the views of the small producers, which got into touch with the Army agitation. These were the Levellers.
The trouble came to a head in the Army in the spring of 1647 with the attempt to disband regiments and form new ones for the Irish service. Led by the yeomen cavalry, the rank and file organised themselves, appointed deputies from each regiment (“agitators,” they were called) to a central council, pledged themselves to maintain solidarity and not disband until their demands were satisfied. There was a high degree of organisation – a party chest and levy on members, a printing press, contacts with London, with the other armies and garrisons, and with the fleet. The initiative in this mass movement seems undoubtedly to have come from the rank and file, though many of the lower officers co-operated enthusiastically from the start. The general officers (“grandees” as the Levellers called them) hesitated for a time, tried to mediate between the “Presbyterian” majority in Parliament and the Army rank and file. Then, when they saw the latter were determined to proceed, they threw themselves in with the movement and henceforth concentrated on guiding its energies into their own channels. They worked principally to restrict the soldiers’ demands to the professional and political, and to minimise the social and economic programme which the Levellers tried to graft on to the rank-and-file movement.
Army and Parliament now existed side by side as rival powers in the State. In June 1647, in order to stop the “Presbyterians” in Parliament coming to an agreement with the King behind the backs of the Army, Cornet Joyce was sent by the agitators (though probably with Cromwell’s connivance) to seize Charles. At a general rendezvous next day, the whole Army took a solemn “Engagement” not to divide until the liberties of England were secure. An Army Council was set up in which elected representatives of the rank and file sat side by side with officers to decide questions of policy. England has never again seen such democratic control of the army as existed for the next six months. Then, holding the king as a bargaining weapon, the Army marched on London. The principal “Presbyterian” leaders withdrew from the House of Commons, leaving Cromwell and the “Independents” temporarily in control; the Army was in a position decisively to influence policy.
That was as much as the gentlemen “Independents” wanted. They had removed their main rivals and were perfectly satisfied with the old system (with or without the King). They had no desire to modify it further, so long as they had the running of it. But the petty bourgeoisie, whose interests were more and more being expressed by the Levellers, wanted vast changes. And Leveller influence was growing rapidly in the Army. They wanted complete free trade for small producers, as well as the freedom of the big merchant companies from the corrupt monopolies which Parliament had already abolished; they wanted disestablishment of the Church and the abolition tithes; security of small property and reform of the debtors’ laws; and to secure all this they wanted a republic, extension the parliamentary franchise, manhood suffrage.
These were the points at issue in debates of the Army Council held at Putney in October and November, 1647, on proposed Leveller constitution, the Agreement of the people. The Leveller Rainborowe wanted manhood suffrage, because he thought “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.” Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law, summed up the Grandees’ case when he said: “Liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense, if property be preserved.” An attempt by the Levellers to capture control of the Army was defeated by the Grandees at Ware in November, 1647, and resulted in the dispersal of the Army Council and the end of Army democracy. But meanwhile the King had escaped from captivity, civil war broke out again in the following May, and this reunited the Army behind Cromwell.
After the Army’s victory in this second civil war, Grandees and Levellers united to clear the compromisers out of Parliament (Pride’s Purge) and to bring the King to justice. After a speedy trial, he was executed on January 30th, 1649, as a “public enemy to the good people of this nation.” Monarchy was declared to be “unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people,” and was abolished. The House of Lords, which was also abolished, was merely “useless and dangerous.” On May 19th, 1649, a republic was proclaimed. But the Agreement of the People, the extension of the franchise, the economic and social demands of the Levellers, were as far from attainment as ever; they felt they had been betrayed. The Grandees were able to provoke them into an unsuccessful revolt, which was isolated and put down and its leaders shot at Burford in May, 1649.
It is not difficult to account for the failure of the Levellers. Their demands were those of the petty bourgeoisie, a class always unstable and difficult to organise because of its dependence, economic and ideological, on the big bourgeoisie (cf. the impotence of present-day liberal morality to control a rapidly changing world). Moreover, the petty bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century was in the process of stratification. For if some of the richer yeomen and artisans were prospering and pushing their way up into the bourgeoisie and gentry, many more were being squeezed down to the status of landless agricultural labourers. The events of the Civil War speeded up this process. Many of the most successful and influential members of the petty bourgeoisie found they had interests in common with those of the bourgeoisie. Both, for instance, welcomed enclosure and the employment of wage labour in production for the market. Consequently this section deserted the Leveller movement as soon as it ceased to be merely the most revolutionary wing of the bourgeoisie and began itself to attack the big bourgeoisie. The section which was sinking in the social scale tended to be erratic, despairing and defeatist. The Leveller ideal was a small-producer’s Utopia in economics and petty bourgeois democracy in politics. Despite the focus of the Army, the Levellers never represented a sufficiently homogeneous class to be able to achieve their aims. The full realisation of the democratic tasks even of the bourgeois revolution is impossible unless there is a working class able to carry them out. The most radical achievements of the English bourgeois revolution (abolition of the monarchy, confiscation of Church, drown and aristocratic estates) were put through by what Engels called the “plebeian methods” of the Levellers and Independents; but there was no organised working-class movement, with a vision of a different form of social order and a scientific revolutionary theory, to lead the petty bourgeoisie to a frontal attack on the power of big capital. After the Burford shootings, the Leveller movement degenerated. Many of its leaders turned careerist or speculated in land; others took to terrorism, sometimes even in agreement with the Royalists. Many more had their energies diverted by the radical religious movements which date from this period – notably the pacifist Quakers, the anarchist Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchists.
The nearest the English bourgeois revolution got to representing the interests of the propertyless was the Digger movement. This was an attempt to proceed by direct action to a form of agrarian communism by members of the dispossessed rural proletariat, who argued that lords of manors had been defeated as well as the King, that the victory of the people had freed the land of England, which was now theirs to cultivate.
Transferring Rainborowe’s slogan from politics to economics, the Digger Gerrard Winstanley wrote: “The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man.” In the spring of 1649 a group of Diggers began to dig up the waste land on St. George’s Hill in Surrey. Indignant local gentlemen and parsons called in the soldiery, and the communistic colony was ultimately dispersed. There were similar attempts in Kent, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, but the movement reached no great dimensions, representing as it did a small if growing class; its weakness is evidenced in the pacifism and passive resistance its leaders preached.
Winstanley’s communist ideal was in one sense backward-looking, since it arose from the village community which capitalism was already disintegrating. But the Diggers were the most radical and egalitarian opponents of the feudal social order. Winstanley’ clear statements have a contemporary ring: “This is the bondage the poor complain of, that they are kept poor by their brethren in a land where there is so much plenty for everyone.” “Every one talks of freedom, but there are but few that act for freedom, and the actors for freedom are oppressed by the talkers and verbal professors of freedom.” For “it is clearly seen that if we be suffered to speak, we shall batter to pieces all the old laws, and prove the maintainers of them hypocrites and traitors to the commonwealth of England.” And Winstanley did not only look to the past; he also had glimpses of a future in which “wheresoever there is a people united by common community of livelihood into oneness it will be the strongest land in the world, for there they will be as one man to defend their inheritance.”
The Restoration
The history of the English Revolution from 1649 to 1660 can be briefly told. Cromwell’s shooting of the Levellers at Burford made a restoration of monarchy and lords ultimately inevitable, for the breach of big bourgeoisie and gentry with the popular forces meant that their government could only be maintained either by an army (which in the long run proved crushingly expensive as well as difficult to control) or by a compromise with the surviving representatives of the old order. But first there were still tasks to be done.
1. There was the conquest of Ireland, the expropriation of its landowners and peasantry – the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy. For the petty bourgeoisie of the Army, despite the warnings of many of the Leveller leaders, allowed themselves to be distracted from establishing their own liberties in England and, deluded by religious slogans, to destroy those of the Irish. Many of them set up as landed proprietors in Ireland. (The Leveller revolt of 1649 had been occasioned by the refusal of many of the rank and file to leave for Ireland, for that meant violating their Engagement of 1647 not to divide until the liberties of England were secure.)
2. There was the conquest of Scotland, necessary to prevent a restoration of the old order thence; Scotland was opened up to English traders by political union.
3. A forward commercial policy was undertaken with the Navigation Act of 1651, the basis of England’s commercial prosperity in the next century. This aimed at winning the carrying trade of Europe for English ships, and at excluding all rivals from trade with England’s colonies. It led to a war with the Dutch, who had monopolised the carrying trade of the world in the first half of the seventeenth century. For in that period the royal policy had frustrated all attempts of the bourgeoisie to throw the resources of England into an effective struggle for this trade. In this war, thanks to Blake’s fleet and the economic strength the Republican Government was able to mobilise, England was victorious.
4. An imperialist policy needed the strong Navy which Charles had failed to build up, and under Blake the Commonwealth began to rule the waves to some purpose; war in alliance with France against Spain brought Jamaica and Dunkirk to England.
5. The abolition of feudal tenures meant that landlords established an absolute right to their property vis-à-vis the King; the failure of copyholders to win equal security for their holdings left them at the mercy of their landlords, and prepared the way for the wholesale enclosures and expropriations of the next 150 years.
6. A violent restoration of the old order at home was made impossible by demolishing fortresses, disarming the Cavaliers, and taxing them to the verge of ruin, so that many were forced to sell their estates and with them their claim to social prestige and political power. For many owners of economically undeveloped estates who were already desperately in debt, the period of the Commonwealth and after represented a great foreclosing on mortgages, capital at last getting its own back against improvident landlords.
7. Finally, to finance the new activities of the revolutionary governments, the lands of Church and Crown and of many leading Royalists were confiscated and sold; smaller Royalists whose estates had been confiscated were allowed to “compound” for them by paying a fine equal to a substantial proportion of their estates (and they were thus often compelled to sell a part of their property privately to be able to keep the remainder).
If we keep these points in mind, there is no need to go into the detailed political revolutions of the next eleven years. Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament forcibly in 1653, nominated a convention of his own adherents (the Barebones Parliament), which revived the social and economic demands of the petty bourgeoisie and had to be hastily dissolved. Cromwell was then proclaimed Protector under a Constitution (the Instrument of Government), which was rigged to conceal the dictatorship of the Army officers. He called a Parliament under this constitution on a new £200 franchise, by which moneyed men were admitted to vote and the lesser freeholders excluded. But Parliament and Army quarrelled, Parliament was dissolved, and a period of naked military dictatorship followed under the Major-Generals, in which the Cavaliers were finally disarmed. Ultimately Cromwell and his Court circle (representing especially the new civil service), under pressure from the City, came to realise that the Army had done its job and that its maintenance now meant a crushing burden of taxation on the propertied classes, for which no compensating advantages were obtained.
Moreover, despite repeated purges and the drafting of politically unreliable units to fight in Ireland, Jamaica, Flanders, the Leveller and democratic tradition remained strong in the Army. So in 1657 Cromwell surrendered to his second Parliament and accepted a new parliamentary constitution. This constitution (the Humble Petition and Advice) took executive power from a council representing the Army Grandees and placed it in one controlled by Parliament, brought the Army under Parliament’s financial control, made the protectorate non-elective and the Protector subject to Parliamentary control. The new constitution was introduced by a City Member, and was supported by many former Presbyterians who were soon to welcome home Charles II. Protests in the Army only just prevented Oliver accepting the Crown as King. The Grandees were bought off by being given seats in a new second chamber.
But Cromwell died in 1658 before this constitution was working satisfactorily; his son and successor, Richard Cromwell, lacked his influence with the Army; and the Petition and Advice constitution was so like a monarchy that it was clear that the bourgeoisie would accept Charles II if he would accept them, and if the Army could be disposed of. When the Grandees deposed Richard Cromwell in a palace revolution and seized power for themselves, a revulsion occurred. The English army of occupation in Scotland, under command of the ex-Royalist adventurer General Monck, had hitherto taken no part in English political intrigues. Monck had concentrated on purging it of left-wing elements and enforcing “discipline.” Now he became the hope of the conservative classes in the State, frightened of the radicalism of the English armies. Monck took charge of the situation. With the approval and financial backing of the Scottish gentry, he marched down from Scotland with his purged and disciplined army, and declared for a free Parliament elected on the old franchise, to the applause of the bourgeoisie and gentry. For all knew that a “free” Parliament meant the dominance of the landed classes. “Freedom” is a relative term. This Parliament recalled Charles II in May, 1660.
That is very briefly what happened. Now let us try to see why it happened. The most conspicuous feature of the ‘fifties is the growing conservatism of the “Independent” leaders; their increasing fear of social revolution as they themselves became sated and reassimilated to the “Presbyterians.” This is especially evident in the class split within the Army (so powerful through its unity in 1647 and in December 1648–January 1649). After the breach with the Levellers, the scramble for confiscated lands had helped to widen this split, for officers had bought lands with debentures (promises to pay wages) purchased at a discount from their troops. The rank and file, after receiving a piece of paper in lieu of wages for risking their lives in the Parliament’s cause, were lucky if they got 7s. 6d. in the £1 for those pieces of paper. Many got far less. But for those who were rich enough to be able to wait, the “debentures” were a profitable investment. After 1657 the lower officers also felt themselves betrayed by the Grandees, who had sold out for seats in the new Upper House. Fear of the possibility of a political reunion between lower officers and Army rank and file helps to account for the haste with which Charles II was scrambled home.
For by 1654 the land transfers had been completed: a new class of landowners had appeared, who now wanted peace and order to develop their property. The “Independent” gentry – Oliver Cromwell’s class – had been the spearhead of the revolution because they wanted to abolish the monopoly of social and political privileges attached to feudal landholding and to extend them to the advantage of their own class. They had no desire to abolish big property in land as such, and the left-wing parties advocating this ceased to be useful allies and became dangerous foes as the “Independent” gentry succeeded to the position of the old ruling class. The attack on tithes made the owners of impropriations see unsuspected virtues even in the old Church establishment, whilst the “excesses” of the democratic sects – Quakers and the like – made the squirearchy yearn for an established State Church, uniform and disciplined and undemocratic.
In industry the interregnum saw attempts to organise small producers (“the yeomanry”) against the power of merchant capital. In a bitter class struggle, wages were forced up. Add to this the financial difficulties, the arbitrary taxation which the Government was forced to impose after the exhaustion of the land fund (for Parliament refused to vote taxes for the Army) and we can understand the willingness of the new ruling class to compromise with the old, to agree to a restoration of the old law to guarantee the new order.
The Restoration, then, was by no means a restoration of the old régime. It is evidence, not of the weakness of the bourgeoisie and gentry, but of their strength. The personnel of the Civil Service, judicial bench, Government financiers, continued with very little change after 1660. Charles II came back, and pretended he had been King by divine hereditary right ever since his father’s head had fallen on the scaffold at Whitehall. But he was not restored to his father’s old position. The prerogative courts were not restored, and so Charles had no independent executive authority. The common law, as adapted by Sir Edward Coke to the needs of capitalist society, triumphed alike over the arbitrary interference of the Crown and the reforming demands of the Levellers. There was no rationalisation of the legal system in the English Revolution comparable to the Code Napoléon, which the French Revolution produced for the protection of small property. After 1701 subordination of judges to Parliament was a point of the Constitution: the gentry dominated local government as justices of the Peace. The King had no power of taxation independent of Parliament (though by a lack of foresight Parliament in its enthusiasm voted Charles the Customs revenue for life, and such was the expansion of trade in his reign that towards the end of it he came near to financial independence. This was rectified after 1688). Charles was called King by the Grace of God, but was really King by the grace of the merchants and squires. He himself recognised this when he said he didn’t want to go on his travels again. James II was less wise in recognising the limitations of his position – and he travelled.
Some of the rich Royalists had bought their lands back before 1660. Others got them back then. Church and Crown lands were restored, too. But the mass of smaller Royalists, who had sold their estates privately after ruining themselves in the cause, got no redress. And even where landowners were restored, they were not restored on the old conditions. Feudal tenures had been abolished in 1646, and confirmation of their abolition was the first business Parliament turned its attention to after recalling the King in 1660; the absolute property rights of big landlords were secure. Between 1646 and 1660 many of the confiscated lands had passed into the possession of speculative purchasers, mostly bourgeois, who had improved cultivation, enclosed, racked rents up to the market level. The returned Royalists had perforce to adapt themselves to the new free market conditions, i.e. to turn themselves into capitalist farmers or lessors of their estates, or they went under in the competitive struggle.
Many of the landowners restored in 1660 had mortgaged and resold their estates by the end of the century. Among these landowners we must include the King, who henceforth became dependent on a Parliamentary civil list, a salaried official, the first Civil Servant. The King could no longer “live of his own” on his private income from his estates and feudal dues, and so could never be independent again. In the eighteenth century he had influence but no independent power. On the other hand, the failure of the democratic movement to win legally watertight security of tenure for small peasant proprietors had left the door open for ruthless racking of rents, enclosures, evictions, the creation of a landless proletariat, with no redress from a Parliament and a judicial system dominated by the propertied classes.
In the business world, monopolies and royal control of industry and trade disappear forever. Gilds and apprentice laws had broken down in the interregnum, and no effective attempt was made to revive them. Liberated trade and industry expanded rapidly. There was no break in commercial, imperial or foreign policy at the Restoration. The Navigation Act was renewed by Charles II’s Government and became the backbone of English policy, the means by which the English merchants monopolised the wealth of the colonies. The exclusive trading companies declined, except where special circumstances made their retention necessary to the bourgeoisie (the East India Company). The complete domination of the moneyed interests was not established till after the second revolution in 1688, with the foundation of the Bank of England and the National Debt (1694). The years from 1660 to 1688 are a period of retrenchment, in which wealth was accumulated to finance grandiose imperialist policies which the Protectorate had undertaken and been unable to carry through. By the end of the century they were being resumed, now under the complete control of a Parliament representing landed and moneyed interests fundamentally united by their similar ways of producing wealth.
Technology likewise benefited enormously by the liberation of science and by the stimulus to free thought and experiment which the Revolution gave. The revolutions in industrial and agrarian technique which were to change the face of England in the eighteenth century would have been impossible without the political revolution of the seventeenth century. The freedom of intellectual speculation in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England enormously influenced the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789.
In 1660 passive obedience was preached in all pulpits; a King was brought back “with plenty of holy oil about him,” because this was necessary for Parliament, for the possessing classes, threatened by social revolution from below. A white terror was introduced by the returned émigrés, and an attempt was made to drive from political life all who did not accept the restored régime in Church and State (the Clarendon Code, the Test Act). Educational advances, like the purge which had made Oxford a centre of scientific research, were reversed. All this broke the revolutionary-democratic movement for the moment, though it fought back again in the sixteen-seventies and -eighties. In 1662 a Presbyterian minister, who had been deprived of his living by the Restoration, wrote in words that recapture the fears of many respectable members of the possessing classes at that time:
“Though soon after the settlement of the nation we saw ourselves the despised and cheated party ... yet in all this I have suffered since, I look upon it as less than my trouble was from my fears then ... Then we lay at the mercy and impulse of a giddy, hot-headed, bloody multitude.”
Many Presbyterians conformed to the Church of England, now again fashionable. But the very parsons and gentry who preached passive obedience to constituted authority in 1660 united to expel James II in 1688, when he made the mistake of taking these theories at their face value and threatened to restore the old absolutist monarchy. James was hustled out by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, “glorious” because bloodless and because there was no social disorder, no “anarchy,” no possibility of a revival of revolutionary-democratic demands.
Learn from the 17th century
Ever since then orthodox historians have done their utmost to stress the “continuity” of English history, to minimise the revolutionary breaks, to pretend that the “interregnum” (the word itself shows what they are trying to do) was an unfortunate accident, that in 1660 we returned to the old Constitution normally developing, that 1688 merely corrected the aberrations of a deranged King. Whereas, in fact, the period 1640–60 saw the destruction of one kind of state and the introduction of a new political structure within which capitalism could freely develop. For tactical reasons, the ruling class in 1660 pretended that they were merely restoring the old forms of the Constitution. But they intended by that restoration to give sanctity and social stamp to a new social order. The important thing is that the social order was new and would not have been won without revolution.
“If writings be true,” said the Leveller Rainborowe in 1647, “there have been many scufflings between the honest men of England and those that have tyrannised over them; and if it be read, there is none of those just and equitable laws that the people of England are born to but are intrenchment altogether. But ... if the people find that they are not suitable to freemen as they are, I know no reason should deter me ... from endeavouring by all means to gain anything that might be of more advantage to them than the government under which they live.”
(Woodhouse)
It is struggle that wins reforms, just as it is struggle that will retain the liberties which our ancestors won for us. And if the people find the legal system “not suitable to freedom as it is,” then it can be changed by united action. That is the lesson of the seventeenth century for to-day. It was of us that Winstanley was thinking when he wrote at the head of one of his most impassioned pamphlets:
”When these clay bodies are in grave, and children stand in place,
This shows we stood for truth and peace and freedom in our days.”
“Freedom,” he added with a bitterness born of experience, but also with pride and confidence, “freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies.” And freedom for Winstanley was not a cheap politician’s slogan: it meant the living struggle of comrades to build a society based on communal ownership, a society which ordinary people would think worth defending with all their might because it was their society. “True freedom lies in the community in spirit and community in the earthly treasury.”
“This commonwealth’s freedom will unite the hearts of Englishmen together in love, so that if a foreign enemy endeavour to come in, we shall all with joint consent rise up to defend our inheritance, and shall be true to one another. Whereas now the poor see, if they fight and should conquer the enemy, yet either they or their children are like to be slaves still, for the gentry will have all.”
“Property ... divides the whole world into parties, and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere.”
“When the earth becomes a common treasury again, as it must, ... then this enmity in all lands will cease.”
We still have much to learn from the seventeenth century.
