Cromwell is Robespierre and Napoleon rolled into one; the Presbyterians, Independents and Levellers correspond to the Gironde, the Montagnards and the Hébertists and Babeuvists; in both cases the political outcome is rather pitiable, and the whole parallel, which could be elaborated in much greater detail incidentally also proves that a religious and an irreligious revolution, as long as they remain political, will in the final analysis amount to the same thing.
~Frederick Engels1
The central political issue in 17th century England was the struggle against monarchical absolutism. The Stuart dynasty’s attempts to consolidate its absolute rule over a changed and changing society, and its failure to do so, unlike the monarchies of Spain and France, reflected specific economic, historic, political and geographic factors of England. Government-fostered domestic manufacture and commercial capitalism measurably expanded in the second half of the 16th century, intensifying the contradictions with the rigid hierarchy of the feudal system. The overall rise in economic activity gave force to the Puritan movement in the Church of England. Puritan demands for religious reform against anything that smacked of Catholicism were an only partially disguised argument for a more rational and democratic society. By the early 17th century, the conflicts caused by a capitalist economy held within the bounds of feudal social and political relations were on open display for all to see.
While Puritanism was a trans-class movement, it appealed most widely, and in its most radical forms, to the large stratum of London’s “middling people,” petty-bourgeois craftworkers, shopkeepers and domestic traders. They formed a popular democratic movement which both supported and pressured the reform-minded gentry in the House of Commons. Their organization was supported and led in good part by pro-free trade Puritan merchants. These new or Atlantic merchants had only recently made their fortunes in Virginia during the late 1620s and 1630s, and were in the main more religiously and politically radical than most other Puritans at the time.
As London overwhelmingly dominated the country economically and politically it was the key to revolution in the country at large. Thus the developed south and east were strongly for Parliament, whereas the far less industrial parts of the country, which were also the less solidly Protestant and Puritan parts, in the north and west of England and Wales supported the king.2 During the Civil War, both sides fully understood that the retaking of London by royalist forces would put an end, not only to the war, but to Parliament’s political program, and perhaps to Parliament itself.
Significant outposts of parliamentarianism in the more remote areas existed, however, in the manufacturing towns and their environs, most of which depended on the cloth and clothing trade.3 In addition, a great deal of support for Parliament came from large and small yeomen (freeholders) who owned and worked their own land, and were therefore their own masters,4 along with the larger portion of the peasantry who held their land by copyhold (“tenure by copy of the court roll according to the custom of the manor”).5 But the rights of copyholders to the land they worked were under threat from “improving” aristocrats, those who were seeking to enhance their livelihoods through coercive methods such as enclosure.6 The many thousands thrown off the land were mostly forced to become impoverished wage-workers.
In the century beginning with Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (1653-1658) and Charles II’s Restoration in 1660,
Many copyholders and small freeholders either lost claims to their land or sold out. This was the period during which large landowners, capitalist tenants, and agricultural laborers became the dominant figures in agriculture and the small, independent farmers shrank in importance.7
Similarly, in the cities and towns
…when expanding markets and improved methods of production gave rise to a more complicated type of industry, the small master craftsman was gradually displaced by the capitalist trader and manufacturer on the one hand, and by the mere journeyman on the other.8
In the pre-Civil War decades, however, these trends were just beginning to take hold. Here we are concerned with a more embryonic state of society, when the process of capitalist development was only beginning to cause substantial dislocation to, and conflict with, the feudal state power, itself mirrored and interpenetrated with the established state church.
The revolutionary break came in London in the weeks before and after Christmas 1641. During this time, “The alliance of the parliamentary Puritans…enjoyed the overwhelming support of the middle and lower ranks of the London citizens, men by no means to be dismissed as a mere ‘rabble’ or ‘mob’…”9 The respectable, petty-bourgeois middling people, were the bedrock supporters of the revolution.
By the end of 1643, however, the revolutionary tide in the city had ebbed; the reasons are analyzed in Chapter 15. But by then it was too late. The question of power had been posed point blank, the feudal system had already been dealt a near-fatal blow. The House of Commons and the London government were committed to preserving their gains (and themselves), and war was the preeminent concern of both.
1 “The Condition of England, Part I The Eighteenth Century,” Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1844 , 1975), Marxists Internet Archive, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1844/condition-england/ch01.htm Accessed 28 July 2019
2 Hill, Century, 103-104; Samuel R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War Vol. I 1642-1644 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886), 23, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.505225/mode/1up?view=theater Accessed 5 August 2019
3 Hill, Century, 103-104; Austin Woolrych, “The English Revolution: an introduction,” in The English Revolution 1600-1660, ed. E. W. Ives (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 22
4 Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 67-68
5 R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London: Macmillan, 1970), 48
6 Hill, 1640, 25 fn. 1; Century, 13; Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom, 58-59. See the section in Chapter 7 below “Social consequences of growth in the capitalist economy.”
7 Cohen, “The Marxist School,” 49-50
8 Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution 1640-1660 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 193
9 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 279