10) PARLIAMENT AND THE PEOPLE: THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION (1640-1641)
Much of England’s world turned upside down before the outbreak of hostilities, between 1640 and 1642. It was a revolution that caused the war, not the war that brought about revolution. …the spring of 1642 saw the Elizabethan confessional state disintegrate and the Stuart ancien régime fall apart. Though there would be further revolutions within the revolution…the fundamental shifts occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth years of the reign of Charles I. This early dating of the revolution used to be more common, but was swamped by the revisionist tide. … Seventeenth-century chronicles of England’s troubles also dated the core of the crisis to 1641.
~David Cressy1
On 3 November 1640 the members of what became known as the Long Parliament (it would govern until 1653) took their seats. The overwhelming majority of MPs in the House of Commons were well-to–do gentry, a consequence of the archaic electoral districts still in use, and the frequent ability of local gentlemen to assume the seats of nearby towns.2 London in particular was insufficiently represented given its economic importance and large population.3 Due to the piecemeal expansion of the franchise in the 1620s however, the election of 1640 returned a larger number of middle or lower gentry to the Commons, men such as Oliver Cromwell, who were more likely to be Puritan, and somewhat more radical in their views.4 Pym and the Commons leadership were supported by, and worked closely with, the same minority of Puritan nobles in the Lords who had been active in establishing expatriate colonies during the 1630s. These Puritan nobles, particularly Saye and Sele, Warwick, and Brooke, were men with whom the Commons leadership had innumerable ties.5 But “…the bond they shared was an intellectual one, of common ideas and political principles.”6 It was these men, but not them alone, who would eventually lead the nation into civil war, although at this time they had no inkling of the fact.
Shortly before Parliament opened, a meeting of the prerogative court of High Commission in St. Paul’s Cathedral was disrupted on 22 October by a hostile throng of perhaps 2,000 people. “Laymen crowded the court making ‘a hemming, hooting and shouting,’ and began to throw cushions at the commissioners.” An unpopular senior judge of the court was forced to flee, his robes shredded. A week later, another crowd tore the Commission’s paper records to bits.7
On 11 November, two days after the London citizens’ petition was presented by Alderman Isaac Pennington, the Commons debated the rumors of military force to be used against the people or Parliament by Charles and Strafford, and a committee was established to bring charges against Strafford. On the 23rd, a hundred citizens with swords, identified by blue ribbons, offered via Pennington to protect the House, but their offer was declined.8 Strafford and Archbishop Laud were impeached on 18 December. The entire political atmosphere had by now changed.
With the meeting of the Long Parliament puritans and radical protestants came out into the open: puritans were able to preach publicly again, to gain adherents, and to organize pressure for the reform of the church; the more radical protestants no longer had to meet in secret, but held their assemblies openly, propagated their doctrines and won converts to a more fundamental reformation of religion.9
Pennington and the City MPs used their positions to advance the Puritan program of radical church reform. In late November, MPs refused communion at St. Margaret’s Church until the altar rail was taken down, and the communion table moved to an acceptable space.10 Parliament freed William Prynne and the religious martyrs of Star Chamber, imprisoned in 1637. They were greeted as heroes on 28 November 1640 when they re-entered London accompanied by a joyous crowd of 10,000, an unprecedented event which sent shock waves through the royal court and its supporters.11
The part played by the City Members in the struggle for ecclesiastical reform was of crucial importance in the development of opposition to the crown and the growth of radicalism in the Long Parliament. …the ecclesiastical debates divided episcopalians from reformers, and helped to widen the gulf between what were shortly to become two contending parties. The religious issue also divided the moderate Puritan reformers from the supporters of Root and Branch, the radicals, and presaged some of the future divisions which were to split the Long Parliament.12
It was Pennington, on 11 December 1640, who presented a new petition13 with its 15,000 signatures to the Commons, calling for the abolition of the episcopal state church “root and branch,” along with hundreds of “respectable, well-to–do citizens, ‘a world of honest men in their best apparel’”14 with another thousand waiting outside.15 The mass petition demonstrated the existence of “a highly organized political machine among the parliamentary puritans of the City…”16 Conservatives were shocked that the petition came, not from the City government, but ordinary people. Pennington defended them: “They were not ‘mean rebellious’ people, he said, but ‘men of worth and known integrity.’ … ‘If there were any mean men’s hands to it,’ he said, ‘yet if they were honest men, there was no reason but these hands should be received.’”17 Had corrupt methods been used to get signatures as conservative opponents suggested, Pennington continued, “‘instead of 15,000 they might have had fifteen times 15,000…’” Conservative attempts to bring evidence of fraud failed.18
The seating of the Long Parliament thus kicked off two simultaneous struggles.19 One was an intra-ruling–class contest for power over the existing government of England, whose roots stretched back to the Parliaments of the 1620s, and even further. “…in 1641 speeches from as long ago as 1610 were published…”20 The other was the Puritan-led revolutionary petty bourgeois movement in London which aimed at bringing down the feudal system in order to replace it with an unspecified godly kingdom. The two movements were in competition, yet their leaders were in a de facto partnership. With common enemies, they mutually reinforced each other, creating a duel for power with the king’s government. When the crisis reached its height at the end of 1641, their respective leaderships and followers were politically as well as militarily united behind Parliament.
The House of Commons leadership, headed by the master politician John Pym, was determined to bring the king to heel. Its reform program was aimed at making the crown politically dependent on Parliament.21 (Modern day bourgeois historians romantically refer to this as “the constitutional crisis.”) They aimed to exclude bishops from the House of Lords and clergy from government posts, and wanted approval power over all major government appointments. In this way they believed they could control his majesty’s government, and they naturally saw themselves as the proper candidates to hold the leading positions in it.22 It was never their aim to overthrow the king, or to dissolve the old social order, but to “restore balance” in the feudal government by subordinating both state and church to the landowners in Parliament.23
There was only one fly in the ointment of this reform program: it required agreement by the king. During the 1620s, Pym and company had likewise promoted their fitness to lead through the blue water policy of attacking Spanish shipping and colonies in the New World to cut the legs out from under the Catholic empire, relieving the Palatinate and protecting Holland. This of course meant a degree of promotion for Puritanism at the expense of English Catholics, but it did not envision a dismemberment of the established Church or abolition of monarchy. The Commons pursued a fanciful strategy of seeking an accommodation with first James, and then Charles, on this program, primarily by having parliamentary leaders appointed as their counselors and ministers. But it had no more chance of success in 1640 than previously. All Charles had done since attaining the throne made it quite clear that he was committed to reinforcing every aspect of the feudal system, most especially his own power.
The Commons leadership disingenuously claimed to oppose, not the king, but only his “evil counselors,” a hoary English tradition.24
By arguing that the king’s sacred power was inalienable, they urged that royal ministers like Laud and Strafford were encroaching upon his divinity; and since the king himself could do no wrong, it followed that the ministers were to blame for his policies and should be punished accordingly.25
No independent legal framework existed for parliamentary action however. Even on the rare occasions in history when the House of Commons had tried to curb a monarch’s policies, it had lacked the power to do so unless backed by the nobles in the House of Lords.26 (Only in the Tudor era did they have any success at all.)27 Most often, whatever debates may have occurred, Parliament had acted as little more than a rubber stamp.28 But now, having laid hold of the ready-made feudal Parliament, the reformers attempted to wield it for their own purposes.
Few MPs supported outright abolition of episcopacy, but most were opposed to the innovations of Arminianism. They were intent only on placing limits on the power of the bishops and the king. But a month after convening, they were confronted by the mass Root and Branch petition from London’s middling class. Led by militant Puritan preachers and radical Independent Atlantic merchants, they were intent on a wholesale frontal attack to smash the power of the church and court hierarchies so they could decide how to pursue their religious and economic lives on their own. Whatever their subjective beliefs and goals, which were not uniform, this sweeping program aimed to end the feudal system as it then existed. “…it is necessary to recall the importance of the Church in relation to the civil government at this period.”29 New religious canons were hastily promulgated by the government in a futile attempt to forestall the revolutionary attack on the religious hierarchy.30 Abolition of the established church, as James I had foreseen, would lead to the collapse of the monarchy.
This put the popular movement at odds with those sitting in Westminster. “‘Many of the nobility and gentry…were contented to serve his [the King’s] arbitrary designs, if they might have leave to insult over such as were of a lower order,’” wrote the republican MP Edward Ludlow.31 This second front by the large petty bourgeois and laboring classes was unlooked for by the gentlemen of the House, and made many of them uncomfortable, if not outright trepidatious. “‘If by multiplying hands, and petitions, they prevail for an equality in things ecclesiastical, this next demand perhaps may be Lex agraria, the like equality in things temporal,’” argued the conservative Edmund Waller in 1641.32
In the opening decades of the 17th century, it became more and more acceptable for lesser gentry to purchase apprenticeships for their younger sons with merchants or artisans,33 which increased the economic and social overlap between them. By 1640 many businessmen in the livery companies came from gentry origins, and were viewed as an asset by their families.34 A new prefix, “Mr.,” was coming into use by shopkeepers, professionals, lesser gentry, upper yeomen.35 “As early as 1635, there were nearly 1,200 persons resident in London who described themselves as gentlemen, the great majority of whom were engaged in trade or in some professional occupation.”36 Lawyers, doctors, clergymen and civil servants were becoming respectable professions in the 17th century, the social equals of lesser gentry, especially inasmuch as they catered to the upper classes.37 “The Privy Council reported that from 1578 to 1633 the number of attorneys practicing in Common Pleas increased fourfold…”38 Thus, an emergent middle class, totally unconnected to the monopoly company merchants, had already become a fact of social life. These trends helped to subvert the rigid status categories from earlier feudal society.
The nimbler, more thrifty Puritan gentry were now rather wealthier than the more staid but profligate nobility, whose incomes from rents, like the king’s, had declined.39 “In 1628 a peer observed, with disapproval at the way times were changing, that the Lower House could buy the Upper house three times over.”40 This made those nobles with court appointments more dependent on royal favoritism and the crown’s largesse, and those not at court more resentful at their exclusion. Both provided Puritans with ammunition against idle parasites.41
The overarching contradiction of the privileged gentry in their dual roles as both peasant landlords, and agricultural or industrial principals, meant that very few MPs in the Long Parliament had any republican leanings.42 Most would only support demands for reform of the existing system. This contradiction would be starkly revealed in the split in the House of Commons in 1641-2, when only a slim majority of MPs would ally itself with the Atlantic merchants, the middle and petty bourgeoisie. Gentry opposition to the crown, or support of Parliament during the Civil War, was a result of being caught between the growing capitalist economy and the decay of the feudal social system: insecurity of property and their own persons; arbitrary taxation and fines (such as for enclosure); the drag on improved estate management by the tangle of feudal land tenures; state limitations on manufacture and trade; as well as Laud’s persecuting Arminianism. These violations of what they considered their rights were all the more galling since they themselves were still part of the feudal ruling class.
The gentry were exempt from the servile punishment of flogging. … The resentment which the Star Chamber sentences on Prynne [a lawyer], Burton [a clergyman], and Bastwick [a physician] aroused sprang not so much from their savagery as because this savagery was employed against gentlemen, members of the three learned professions.43
Gentlemen were not accustomed to being treated so roughly.
In the urban feudal class designations of the time merchants were at the top. This category included the great overseas monopolists, domestic wholesalers and retail shopkeepers, all of whom sold goods. Below them were craftsmen who combined art with manual skills. On the bottom were laborers, porters, carters, and watermen (ferrymen on the Thames). In reality, however, shopkeepers were part of the middling stratum: they were nowhere near as wealthy as the larger wholesalers and traders, and they were in daily contact with, and directly dependent on, their middling-class neighbors. Craft apprentices, servants under the law, lived in their masters’ homes, and were also actually part of the middling class, unlike maids or kitchen help. Nonetheless most of them, lacking the money to set up as masters, would end up as journeymen who worked for wages.44 During periods of economic downturn, the middling craftspeople and small shopkeepers “had to sell their wares every week to live, and the labourers had to have work or starve,”45 but rich merchants could live comfortably off their capital.
The Puritan leaders of the London movement, like those with whom they collaborated in Parliament, held a range of opinions on various aspects of religion, and the proper relationship between church and state. The Puritans’ differences would come to the fore in the second half of the decade. At this early stage however, they saw the overriding need to confront the monarchy and church hierarchy as compelling them to act in a coalition, subordinating their disagreements, and directing all their efforts to the political defeat of the king.46
Despite being a minority within the London religious movement, Independent congregations were able to influence events due to being well-organized, tightly knit units in close communication. Because they rejected the Calvinist tenet of a controlling Church governance or discipline, they in fact had a great deal in common with the more radical separatist sects (in particular Anabaptists). Despite their attempts to play down the similarities, there was frequent cooperation between them. The Independents’ major difference with the radical sects was their opposition to complete separation of church and state believing, with Presbyterians, that government support was necessary for an orderly and thorough reformation.47 Independents, like the sectarian separatist groups, insisted
that the sermon should be followed by discussion: that worship was not a matter of passively hearing the Word preached by a learned minister, but participation by the congregation after a gifted member had opened up a subject for discussion. … Meaningful discussion had hardly been possible in the pre-1640 parish church, with the parson safely in control,…with squire and churchwardens to enforce decency and order. Things were quite different in a gathered church, non-hierarchical in structure and social composition, with an elected minister who might himself be a mechanic, with no ritual, no squire or churchwardens.48
This was the actual practice of many gathered churches, meeting in people’s homes or in fields outside of the city, which mushroomed with the coming of Parliament, and in which women as well as men participated.49 These gathered churches, based on religious affinity, violated the existing geographical boundaries of the parish. This was a step too far for many, usually upper class, Independents. Isaac Pennington, for one, insisted on maintaining the traditional parish structure in conformance with the feudal past.50
The Presbyterians considered such discussion sinful, as it could easily result in a pluralist church, but English Presbyterianism was not exactly the same as the Scottish. Since the days of Elizabeth Puritan propaganda had promoted nationalist ideology intertwined with religious devotion.
They were on their guard against the extremer pretensions of Calvinist clericalism, and meant to retain over the church the supremacy of the Parliament which represented property. But like the divines, they were bent on uniformity and stoutly rejected toleration.51
Unlike the English Reformation imposed by Henry VIII, Scotland’s had been a popular movement led by Calvin’s disciple John Knox from within the Kirk itself, making it the dominant institution.52 As a result, nobles were as subject to church discipline as anyone else. In a 1606 speech before King James and Scottish Presbyterian clergy, the Kirk was assailed “as a ‘world turned upside downe, where the people commandeth all.’”53 To most English aristocrats this state of affairs was woefully democratic.54
Both Independents and Presbyterians regarded religious discipline as the glue that could hold society together, and replace the feudal hierarchy that they abhorred, “to create a new order through creating new men.”55 The question was how far the inner discipline of the “new men” could be trusted. Presbyterians saw the traditional need for outside compulsion; Independents were willing to rely on men’s consciences, which they held sacrosanct. “I had rather that Mahometanism was permitted among us, than that one of God’s children should be persecuted,” Cromwell declared in 1652.56 It was not until after the decisive defeat of the Scots army at Dunbar in 1650 that the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity, imposing fines for absence from church on Sundays, was at last repealed.57
The appointment of approved ministers from above naturally flowed from Presbyterianism, just as voluntary election by the congregation did from Independency. What was worse to the former was the acceptance by the latter of “mechanik” preachers, i.e., ordinary people who had not attended university and had no need of tithes. The condemnation of lay mechanic preachers proceeded from its economic implications:
The attack on tithes, common to all the radicals, undermined the whole concept of the state church, since if parishioners could not be legally compelled to pay tithes there would be no ‘livings’ for the clergy to occupy, no impropriated tithes for the gentry to collect in the forty per cent of livings which were lay fees. Disestablishment of the church would deprive the gentry of another property right — the right of presentation to a living, a right for which they or their ancestors had paid hard cash and which gave them useful opportunities of providing for a younger son or a poor relation.58
Impropriations, the transfer of tithes to a secular owner, was mostly a result of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Like church lands, the right to local tithes was expropriated by the crown, which could then sell or gift them.59 The fact that so many gentlemen drew income from the collection of tithes “goes far to explain the bitter opposition which proposals for tithe abolition were to arouse during the Revolution.”60 University financing depended on them, and these would lose their primary function of graduating religious ministers if they were abolished. Voluntary support by congregations of lay clergy, ordinary men who worked for a living, was not only far cheaper, but meant “the church as an organ for imposing and maintaining a single consistent outlook would cease to exist.”61 The more conservative arguments of Presbyterians did nothing to mollify the fears of the feudal ruling class on these grounds. In all these aspects, social, economic, and ideological, the London Puritan movement posed what the rulers correctly regarded as a mortal threat to the established order.
To avoid a debate in the Commons, the Root and Branch petition was referred to committee, with the stipulation that the fate of episcopacy was off the table. However, a week later a subcommittee was given authority to “inquire into the causes of the decay of preaching and the increase of Popery and ‘scandalous’ ministers.” The committee chairman, Member for Southwark, had been one of the Feoffees (trustees) of Impropriations62 which, until its suppression in 1633 by Laud, had purchased lectureships for Puritan preachers. Isaac Pennington continued his campaign on the issue, backed by a steady flow of petitions both moderate and radical. This resulted in a bill to abolish superstition and idolatry in February 1641, but it was not passed until the following August.63
A week after the Root and Branch petition was received, the Commons impeached Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford, Governor of Ireland. The fight against the king, through attacks on two of his closest and most powerful appointees, was on. The committee’s recommendations to remove bishops from the House of Lords and bar clergy from holding secular offices was passed on 10-11 March 1641. The Commons leadership hoped this would appease the citizens’ movement enough to focus on the trial of Strafford which had far more support in the House. It worked. Whether by prior agreement or not, the leaders of the City radical movement shifted gears and made the trial of Strafford the burning issue of the moment. Archbishop Laud was already safely in the Tower following his attempt on 1 March to secretly flee London, which had been thwarted by a crowd in Cheapside.64
Parliament also had to deal with the pressing and awkward financial situation. Under the interim Treaty of Ripon, signed by Charles in September 1640, England was required to pay £25,000 per month to the Scots, whose army remained on English soil. The Long Parliament was faced with either providing the money itself, or allowing the king to do so, which would likely mean Parliament’s dismissal. The solution was to secure a loan. With individual MPs acting as guarantors, Alderman Pennington was able to extract a promise from the City government that would cover two months’ payments. The Commons majority embraced the Scots army as their own because it was the only force they had available against the king. Without it, they were defenseless.65
The policy of Pym and his supporters was to procure sufficient money to keep the Scottish army in the north, but not so much that it would be paid off before enough concessions had been wrung from Charles. … The policy owed its success, very largely, to the City M.P.s, who…were quick to establish themselves as financial intermediaries between the House of Commons and the City.66
Pennington and MP Alderman Thomas Soames shortly became treasurers for the loan, releasing funds or not as they saw fit. Future City loans were referred to Common Hall directly, where Pennington had a large following, giving him “a platform in the City from which to influence the liverymen to lend or withhold their money, as parliamentary tactics dictated.”67 By mid-March, 1641, the two armies together were owed the enormous sum of £278,000.68 During this time Pennington and the parliamentary opposition stayed in close touch with the Scottish Commissioners in London.69
Pennington used his control of funding as leverage over the Commons majority for the radical Puritan program. Whenever a political matter was raised on the floor he would announce that loan money could not be secured, or if already collected, could not be paid, unless the House took acceptable action. This put significant pressure on Pym and the large and amorphous “middle group” in the Commons, and enjoined the right wing to push back, so that a more or less continual tug-of–war went on in the chamber over all major political and religious issues at stake.70
Both the extreme left (republican) and right (royalist) wings of the Commons were small, no more than 30-50 members. There was nothing called the middle group at the time; this is a 20th century designation.71 Its members were not anti-monarchical, but insisted on limits being placed on the powers of the king. The 1628 Petition of Right may be said to be its founding document.72 As there were no formal party organizations or discipline, factions were quite loose and often changing. Members “could vote as they deemed best on each issue as it emerged without being bound in advance,”73 and it was not uncommon for MPs to move one way or the other depending on the business at hand.74 Pennington’s tactic of withholding funds was not always successful since Pym, the leader and epitome of the middle group, was cautious about pushing his members too hard, and was intent on preventing serious interruptions to supplies for the Scottish army in the north.75
Royalist MPs wanted to use the same tactic in order to pay off the Scottish army and send it back across the border, thereby depriving Parliament of its hold over the king. They attempted to go around Pennington by raising money from the old-line company merchants and the official City government, which they controlled. But they did not get far, although Pennington’s inability to raise promised funds at one point hurt his credibility. Company merchants had no wish to finance the Scottish army against the king, and they objected to a leaked statement by the Scottish Commissioners stating their desire for the abolition of episcopacy, which scandalized the entire right wing. Moreover, the political situation was quite tense. The campaign against Strafford was reaching its height, and there was always the possibility that Charles could dismiss Parliament at any time. Worse, rumors were rife that the king and some army supporters were plotting to free Strafford, and use force against the people and Parliament.76 Given the highly unsettled situation, potential lenders would doubtless have had grave qualms about getting their money back.77
The center-left coalition quickly used this last objection to strike a blow at the king: ostensibly to reassure potential lenders, a bill was unanimously passed and sent to the Lords declaring that Parliament would remain in session until it voted to dissolve itself. They then rejected a proposal for a £300,000 loan from the Customs Farmers against future customs duties. Such a scheme by the king’s supporters was intended to make him financially independent. “There was to be no financial grant without the removal of ‘that great stumbling block’ Strafford.”78
The trial of Strafford in the House of Lords had dragged on. The Commons had charged the earl with high treason for subverting the fundamental law of England, a difficult charge to prove. Militant Puritans began a petition and agitation for “justice” for Strafford to counteract eroding support in and out of Parliament, and so that reform of the church could go forward. They also feared the king’s Catholic army in Ireland which Strafford had raised.79 On 10 April 1641, the king ordered the anti-Strafford petition suppressed. On the same day, in response to the radicals’ pressure, a Bill of Attainder was brought in the Commons “by which the earl would simply be declared guilty of treason and condemned to death by Act of Parliament.” But the House was divided on the matter.80
To encourage them, on 21 April, up to 10,000 Londoners, led by three captains of the Trained Bands, presented a petition at the House of Commons with somewhere between 8,000 and 30,000 signatures. It cited the laxity shown to Catholics in violation of the law, and the “Irish popish army” still in existence, and called for church reform and the death of “‘notorious offenders.’” The presenters included John Venn (who would soon become an MP), John Fowke and Randall Mainwaring, radical Puritan merchants who had been politically active in the past, and who would become key players in the near future. The House passed the attainder the same day, and sent it to the Lords. MPs voting against were denounced as traitors, who “‘should perish with Strafford’” in placards posted up in London and Westminster. In response, the king ordered the City magistrates to suppress all petitions.81
Due to the crisis over Strafford, in mid-February 1641, the king had appointed opposition nobles Bedford, Essex, Saye, Mandeville, and Warwick, among others, to the Privy Council. All of these had signed the Petition of Twelve Peers to call a new parliament six months previously, and all accepted their elevations. Oliver St. John, who was close to Bedford, had been made Solicitor-General the month before.82 By late April to early May, Pym and the Earl of Bedford were negotiating with Charles to assume the offices of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Treasurer respectively. In exchange, they offered to provide authorized revenue to replace nonparliamentary impositions, and to rationalize the crown’s finances; preservation of episcopacy; and Strafford’s life:83 i.e., a complete sellout of the Puritans’ revolutionary program. However Bedford died in May, and the agreement was never completed, at least in part due to lack of support in the Commons. Pym and Bedford’s financial reforms would have raised taxes on the aristocracy,84 and some MPs were suspicious that high offices were a sop that would fail to bring reforms in church and state. Shortly afterwards, Lord “Saye accepted the highly profitable office of Master of the Wards,” a Tudor institution whereby the crown took over estate management from widows or orphans.85 The unenthusiastic response may have been due to radical City influence in the Commons, but Charles then insisted that his demands be met before making any appointments. Even his advisor Lord Clarendon thought this position untenable.86 But the real sticking point was that there was no way to reconcile the king’s adamant demand for Strafford’s life with the force of the London movement for his execution.87
1 “Revolutionary England 1640-1642,” Past & Present, no. 181 (November 2003): 40-41, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600785 Accessed 17 September 2016
2 Hill, Reformation, 68-69; Century, 37; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 25; Keith Thomas, “Just Say Yes,” New York Review of Books 35, no. 18 (November 24, 1988), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1988/nov/24/just-say-yes/ Accessed September 15, 2013
3 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 193
4 Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 4; Manning, English People, 13-14. This was despite “unprecedented efforts” to interfere in the elections by the king and his allies. Cust, “Election and Selection in Stuart England,” 344-345
5 Hexter, King Pym, 84-85; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 394
6 Thompson, “Parliamentary Middle Group,” 72
7 Cressy, England on Edge, 160-162; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1981, 1985), 110
8 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 211
9 Manning, English People, 42-43; Cressy, England on Edge, 162-166; Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past & Present, no. 13 (April 1958): 44, https://www.jstor.org/stable/649868 Accessed 4 April 2020. Reprinted in Crisis in Europe 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston (New York: Anchor Books, 1967)
10 Fletcher, Outbreak, 109
11 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 211-212; Manning, English People, 14-16
12 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 212
13 One of whose authors was Oliver Cromwell. Hill, God’s Englishman, 73
14 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 214
15 Manning, English People, 17
16 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 214
17 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 214-215
18 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 215
19 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 393-394; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 7
20 Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 109
21 Hexter, King Pym, 199
22 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 319
23 Manning, “The Nobles, the People and the Constitution,” 50-51; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 320; Hexter, King Pym, 176; Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 108, 109; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 58-59
24 “But the fiercest resentment was always against evil counselors, represented as sticky-fingered opportunists (sometimes, as in 1376, as scarlet women)… The legend of private favorites with sinister ends was a routine scapegoat of popular political movements from the songs and chronicles of the fourteenth century to the civil wars of the 1640s.” Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonalty,” 232
25 Thomas, “Just Say Yes”
26 Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” 92
27 Hill, Reformation, 32
28 Hill, 1640, 41
29 Margaret James, “The Political Importance of the Tithes Controversy in the English Revolution 1640-60,” History 26, no. 101 (June 1941): 4-5, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24401760 Accessed 2 February 2017
30 Como, “Secret Printing,” 61-62
31 Hill, Century, 105 [Insert in original]
32 Manning, English People, 71; Fletcher, Outbreak, 123
33 Grassby, “Social Mobility and Business Enterprise,” 356-357; Stone, “Social Mobility in England,” 27-28
34 Grassby, “Social Mobility and Business Enterprise,” 379
35 Stone, “Social Mobility in England,” 54; Manning, 1649, 58-59
36 Stone, “Social Mobility in England,” 53
37 Manning, 1649, 56-57
38 C. H. George, “The Making of the English Bourgeoisie, 1500-1750,” Science & Society 35, no. 4 (Winter 1971): 409, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40401600 Accessed 7 January 2017
39 Hill, Reformation, 65-66
40 Hill, Century, 12; Stone, “Social Mobility in England,” 50-51
41 Hill, Reformation, 67
42 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 320; Hill, Reformation, 128
43 Hill, Century, 38; 1640, 48-49
44 Manning, English People, 104-105
45 Manning, English People, 116-117
46 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 278-279
47 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 418-419, 425-426; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 18
48 Hill, World, 104-105
49 Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” 44-46, 46-48; Hill, World, 310-312
50 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 420-421
51 Brailsford, The Levellers, 24; Trinterud, “William Haller,” 37-38. This view derived from Thomas Erastus (1524–1583) a Swiss theologian who argued that church governance, especially excommunication, should be exercised by the state and not the church.
52 Knox also traveled and preached in England, including in front of King Edward VI, until forced to leave by Mary Tudor’s accession.
53 Tyacke, “Revolutionary Puritanism,” 751
54 Hill, Reformation, 134; Society, 185-186; Manning, “The Godly People,” 101
55 Hill, World, 47-48; John Field, a Puritan organizer, wrote in 1587, “‘it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which we desire.’” Hirst, Representative?, 12; Plumb, “Growth of the Electorate,” 94
56 Hill, God’s Englishman, 75; Brailsford, The Levellers, 394; Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England, 307
57 Hill, World, 103; “September 1650: Act for the Repeal of several Clauses in Statutes imposing Penalties for not coming to Church,” Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp423-425 Accessed 18 November 2016
58 Hill, World, 99; Century, 65
59 James, “The Political Importance of the Tithes Controversy,” 3
60 James, “The Political Importance of the Tithes Controversy,” 4
61 Hill, World, 99
62 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 213
63 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 213, 219-220
64 Manning, English People, 20
65 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 197-198
66 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 198
67 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 199
68 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 336
69 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 199-200
70 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 330-331
71 Hexter, King Pym, 47; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 1; William G. Palmer, “Oliver St. John and the Middle Group in the Long Parliament, 1643-1645: A Reappraisal,” Albion 14, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 21, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4048483 Accessed 28 November 2016
72 Thompson, “Parliamentary Middle Group,” 86
73 Hexter, King Pym, 66-67
74 Hexter, King Pym, 36-47; Palmer, “Oliver St. John,” 20; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 2
75 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 200-202
76 See the section “The First Army Plot and the Protestation” in Chapter 11 below.
77 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 202-203; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 333-334
78 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 205-206
79 Manning, English People, 21; William Palmer, “Catholic Plots and the English Revolution: Some Comments,” The Catholic Historical Review 73, no. 1 (January 1987): 82-83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25022454 Accessed February 25, 2019
80 Manning, English People, 21-22. Bills of Attainder are explicitly prohibited in the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Sections 9 and 10.
81 Manning, English People, 22-23; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 216-217; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 337-338
82 Manning, “The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I,” 55; Conrad Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 38 (1988): 87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3678968 Accessed December 26, 2016; Fletcher, Outbreak, 45
83 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 338-339; Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” 111; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 205
84 Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” 112
85 Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” 113
86 Manning, “The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I,” 55-56; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 396-397
87 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 339