Modern histories have demonstrated that absolute monarchy appears in those transitional periods when the old feudal estates are in decline and the medieval estate of burghers is evolving into the modern bourgeois class, without one of the contending parties having as yet finally disposed of the other. … The reaction of the rule of the princes, instead of proving that it creates the old society, proves rather that its day is over as soon as the material conditions of the old society have become obsolete. Its reaction is at the same time the reaction of the old society which is still the official society and therefore also still in official possession of power or in possession of official power.
~Karl Marx1
Charles told the Lords on 1 May that he would not agree to the execution of Strafford, but would accept his exclusion from office. The same day he sent one hundred armed men to the Tower (where Strafford was being held), but the officer in charge, Lieutenant Balfour, refused to admit them. News of the attempted rescue enraged the populace. They also learned of chilling discussions between the king and army officers to march the army in the north on London to suppress the citizens and release Strafford.2
Again some 10,000 people turned out on 3 May at Parliament and, as the Lords passed through the crowd to enter, shouted “Justice and Execution!” at them. Lieutenant “Balfour’s resistance was supported by a petition to the House of Lords, from the citizens, who kept a very close watch on what happened at the Tower.”3 They briefly blocked the Earl of Arundel who presided over Strafford’s trial, and demanded an answer to the petition on Strafford, which was immediately read. The king was to attend the session. Instead, he sent a message saying they should “‘settle peace and prevent these tumults,’” but the Lords adjourned without taking action. A known supporter of the king, the Earl of Bristol, was threatened when he left as “‘an apostate from the cause of Christ, and our mortal enemy…’”4 At the same time, Pennington and another City MP announced in the Commons that the king was attempting to seize the Tower, using the subterfuge that it was necessary to guard munitions, and that armed men were being brought into the City. All of which was true. No one doubted that at least one plot was afoot, or that Charles was responsible, which he was.5 “Leading members knew perfectly well, in the first week of May 1641, that what they were facing was a royal plot.”6 Clearly a response was required, but “…the real difficulty…lay in the fact that the danger came from the King himself.” Pym, who already knew a good deal about what was going on, was not yet prepared to openly proclaim it.7 Instead he proposed a Protestation, a direct pledge of loyalty to Parliament aimed at the London citizens, which passed next day.
With the demonstration of 3 May going outside, the House of Lords sent an inquiry to the king for information. In response, the king acknowledged authorizing the irregularly pulled-together troops to occupy the Tower, but when he refused their first request to withdraw the royalist soldiers, they sent their own officer, the Earl of Newport, and guards to take command.8 The next day, the Protestation was taken by nearly all the Lords “in attendance, including, uneasily, the bishops.”9
Throughout the country, at quarter sessions and borough assemblies, the governing class met to subscribe the Protestation. The text was passed from magistrates to chief constables, to ministers and parochial officials, across the local matrix of command. It was not yet intended for ordinary people, though occasionally there was pressure to tender it lower down the social scale.10
Eight months down the road, in January 1642, the Commons would order local officials to administer it to all males age eighteen and over with specified dates to return the names of both subscribers and refusers to Parliament. In a few places women took it as well.11
The Protestation was a cautious document. In the realms of both religion and law its vague language could leave it open to interpretation.12 “The importance of the Protestation lay far more in what was implied by it than in what it actually said.”13 It was not technically an oath, as the subscriber did not swear, but was only asked to “promise, vow and protest.”14 It upheld “his Majesty’s Royal Person, Honour and Estate” as well as “the Power and Privilege of Parliament, the lawful Rights and Liberties of the Subjects…” But in the circumstances, the main thrust was to require the subscriber to “endeavour to bring to condign Punishment” anyone who attempted “by Force, Practice, Counsel, Plots, Conspiracies or otherwise” anything against “the true, reformed, Protestant Religion, expressed in the Doctrine of the Church of England,” specifically, “Popery, and Popish Innovations.”15
In this respect, it was a pledge to defend Protestantism, and cast Parliament as the equal of the crown. Since the king was popularly reckoned to be pro-Catholic, its intent was easily perceived as “a declaration of readiness to resist a royal coup d’état.”16 But far from calming the situation as they’d hoped,
… the circulation of the Protestation in the summer of 1641 triggered hundreds of rancorous debates. … Zealots in dozens of parishes attempted to put their vow against popery into immediate effect, sometimes with violent consequences. …the Protestation could be used to justify not just the elimination of altar rails and surplices but the elimination of bishops and the book of common prayer.17
The crowd that had turned out at Parliament on the third of May was “‘for the most part men of good fashion;’ … ‘many thousand of the most substantial of the citizens;’ ‘…some worth £30,000, some £40,000.’ The most prominent leader was John Venn.” John Lilburne, the future Leveller leader and past victim of the Star Chamber, said, “they came unarmed today but tomorrow they would bring their swords.”18 Ignoring the Lord Mayor’s prohibition on tumults, the crowd that returned next day was predominantly lower-class in composition, “ordinary ‘mechanic folk,’” who brought swords and staves with them.19 “Swords traditionally were gentlemen’s weapons…so their flaunting by artisans represented a social challenge as well as a risk of violence.”20 A new mass petition was brought to the Commons the same day by two City MPs, along with several Puritan ministers and captains of the Trained Bands. It sought the Parliament’s authorization to administer the Protestation to all London citizens, which passed at once. The Commons directed “that it should be taken by all the [London] citizens in their parish churches,”21 and in practice the names of subscribers were recorded, as well as the names of those who refused. This served to identify and isolate royalists or Catholics, although a few Puritans raised reservations as well.22
But the City government initially refused to authorize its administration; meanwhile Puritan radicals circulated it themselves. After receiving additional instructions from the House of Commons, the government had to allow parish congregations to begin subscribing on 30 May.23
On 5 May Pym revealed to the Commons what he knew of the conversations between army officers, courtiers and the king about the possibility of intervention by the army on the king’s side. It was believed that the French king was sending an army to Portsmouth to help the queen, his sister; that the army which Strafford had built up in Ireland was about to invade; that the papists in England were about to rise and seize power.24
In fact, on 6 May the queen’s confessor, Father Philip, did send a letter asking for French intervention, and the queen herself was planning to escape to Portsmouth on the southern coast the day after.25
Tensions and fears of a coup d’état were running very high. A loud noise sounding like a gunshot in the middle of the debate caused a panic. Members fell all over each other, drew their swords, or fled. Rumors immediately flew through London that the Commons had been attacked by papists. Shops were instantly closed, and a large group of armed citizens along with a regiment of the Trained Bands headed for Westminster. It was a false alarm; a chair had collapsed under a member. But the incident demonstrated on the one hand the willingness of the people to defend by arms what they regarded as “their” House, and on the other the dependence of the MPs on the radical movement for their security.26
Pym’s exposure of the First Army Plot badly undermined the pro-Strafford party by publicly demonstrating their predisposition to use illegal force against the citizenry and/or Parliament. The following day four royalist gentlemen fled to the Continent “before anyone had accused them…;”27 the Lords issued orders for their arrests.28 The Plot alienated even some prominent supporters of the king, who feared that it entailed the dissolution of Parliament, or a move toward restoring Catholicism.29 This backed the Lords into a corner. They could neither countenance the king’s illegal efforts to free Strafford, or use force against Parliament, nor stop the rowdy demonstrations demanding Strafford’s death which continued on their doorstep. To save face, they agreed to the Bill of Attainder, but requested the Commons to call off the demonstrations so as not to appear to be making concessions to the people.30
Three days after Pym’s revelations, on 8 May, the House of Lords passed the Bill of Attainder, with many, including all of the Catholic members, absenting themselves out of fear of the people. The political victory was made complete by passage of the bill against dissolution of Parliament without its consent on the same day. Armed demonstrations began next day at Whitehall palace, where Charles resided and held court, as the two Houses of Parliament made their case to the king. “All through the night panic reigned at Whitehall.”31 The next morning, the king was urged to approve the attainder by the Privy Council, judges and even some bishops. “All day long the street in front of Whitehall was blocked by a shouting multitude. Every minute it was expected that an attempt would be made to dash in the doors.”32 Late that evening, Charles, demoralized, tearfully gave his approval to the attainder, which was announced the following day. On 12 May Strafford was executed; the streets were filled with people rejoicing.33
The ruling class was now openly polarized. That the victory had been the people’s was all too obvious. The idea that Parliament should be responsive to the people, indeed, that the people should play any role at all in the political life of the country, was antithetical to the entire construction of feudalism.34 The attitude of aristocratic conservatives was not so different as those at the time of the Peasants’ Rebellion who “had regarded the peasants as little more than laboring beasts of the land.”35 The specter of democracy to them was nothing less than the advent of anarchy, not to mention an appalling threat to their own positions.
Some army officers wrote a petition to the king with his permission. Also addressed to the Houses of Parliament, it offered to restore order and deliver up the ringleaders for punishment, but this was suppressed by senior officers. Nevertheless, a royalist party of order had begun to coalesce.36
The City government was rapidly losing the ability to rule in the old way. The Trained Bands were a citizens’ militia and therefore unreliable for the purpose of keeping order. “When a member of the Company of Watermen was told that he ought to be obedient to law, order and the Lord Mayor, he answered that ‘it was Parliament time now, and the Lord Mayor was but their slave.’”37 This identification of the London populace with Parliament, and more especially the House of Commons, was a source of strength to the Puritan middling class movement, and the seed of its eventual betrayal. The large crowds mobilized by the London Puritan leaders against the king and his government brought a new urban power onto the scene. It was socially distinct from the market-agrarian landlords, and from the few well-off merchants and manufacturers in the Commons, with a far more radical program it intended to fight for. It was also “joined often enough by the labouring classes of the City and suburbs.”38 The open conflict between the royal court and the Commons, backed by the mass artisan/workers movement, began a struggle for power, raising the question: which class would rule?
A culture of obedience which had designated the people subjects for whom unconditional obedience was a divine duty was being challenged by the emergence, if only temporary and half-formed, of a citizenry of free-born Englishmen (and, for some, free-born women).39
The political development of the citizens’ movement was blunted, however, by the wholesale support of the movement’s leaders, the bourgeois Atlantic merchants and Puritan preachers, for the gentry in the Commons. During 1641 Pym
struggled against the idea that the conflict with the King must be fought out by other than constitutional means. The King must be brought round by persuasion, not by force. In the end he must be surrounded by new counsellors, as a guarantee that he would conform to the new order of things. It was far too sanguine a view of what was possible with Charles.40
“‘If he [Charles] understood the laws, he would not err,’” Pym had argued in 1628.41 Within the anti-absolutist coalition, this blind moderation sabotaged the revolutionary process to the advantage of the reforming landowners and their pro-free trade merchant allies. The separate interests of the mass of small, more radical craftspeople in the end would be sacrificed to those far wealthier magnates of the new capitalist order.
Unlike the landowning gentlemen of the Long Parliament, the French Third Estate in 1789 was purely bourgeois: they were not in the main landowners, but mostly lawyers and civil servants. Unlike English landlords, French aristocrats “took no part in trade or industry.”42 There was thus no overlap of economic interests between aristocrat and bourgeois in France, and neither class had ever been able to share a significant portion of power during the absolute rule of the French monarchy. The defection of the French bourgeoisie from the feudal political system was therefore a hard split, one instantly made good by the establishment of a revolutionary democratic governing state authority, the National Assembly. A considerable number of MPs were also lawyers (including Pym), but they were not particularly distinguishable as common lawyers frequently came from gentry backgrounds.43 (Some knowledge of law was considered to be part of gentlemen’s general education, a help to them in administering their estates.)44 In England, the governmental evolution begun by Magna Carta had institutionalized the limited, but nonetheless real, powers of the lower House, and this made its members, mostly landed gentry, more conservative in their willingness to check the king’s excesses.45
To the extent that the middling people, and especially their Puritan leadership, were aware of the MPs’ reluctance to act — and when it came to religion they certainly were — the Puritans of whatever sort were unable, or unwilling, to put forward a comprehensive political program that reflected their demands for greater democracy and equality. The Commons would not have considered such a program in this early period, which therefore, to be effective, would have to have been asserted independently of its power struggle with the king. Not until the Levellers in the later 1640s, after the king’s military defeat, would this be accomplished.
Not long after Strafford’s execution a major public controversy broke out with the publication in June 1641 of Henry Burton’s pamphlet The Protestation protested. Burton had been one of the radical Puritan martyrs of the Star Chamber in 1637, and although the pamphlet was published unsigned, his sermon on 20 June at St. Margaret’s Church, next door to Westminster Abbey and Parliament, contained the same ideas. He
insisted on a revolutionary interpretation of “that noble Protestation” of the previous month. …the Protestation, in his view, also embraced “those that have been in the church of God ever since the apostles; whatsoever any man hath set up…that are in the sight of God idolatrous and against the scripture, that is popish innovation.”46
This was to impugn the entire history of the bishops’ rule going back to 1534. The sermon was not well received by the MPs in attendance. It was attacked by Presbyterians as well as Episcopalians as justifying Independency. A future bishop wrote it “would lead to ‘schism and democracy.’” The pamphlet and the uproar it caused, however, stimulated more radical discussion on religion.47
The same month London Common Hall demanded the right to elect both sheriffs. One of the two had traditionally for the last 300 years been appointed by the Lord Mayor, or so a petition to the king and Privy Council by the Court of Aldermen claimed. Their petition was referred to the House of Lords, which attempted to have the matter negotiated between six elected citizens and the City magistrates, thereby establishing an equality between the two sides. The six elected were opponents of the Crown. Five were associates or relatives of Maurice Thomson, Isaac Pennington or other leading Puritan merchants, and included John Fowke and Randall Mainwaring, who would eventually serve on the City Militia Committee. The dispute dragged on for two months, the Lord Mayor being backed by a petition of “172 of the wealthiest and most prominent merchants in the City.”48 When negotiations failed, the Lords, to end the matter, reluctantly allowed the vote to proceed in Common Hall, but expressed the hope they would choose the Lord Mayor’s candidate. They did, but the Mayor and aldermen, appearing before the Lords at the end of August, threatened to resign over the order claiming it would “‘destroy and dissolve the ancient government of the City.’” The Lords however stood by their order as fair to both sides.49
Over 50 of the 172 “prominent” signatories to the Lord Mayor’s petition were monopoly company members who obviously realized the threat the radical movement represented to their oligarchic rule. The petition organizers would go on to become the London nucleus of political reaction “that would grow in strength and audacity in the succeeding months.”50
On 5 July 1641 an act passed at the end of 1640 came into force proclaiming “the said Court commonly called the Star Chamber…and the Power and Authoritie thereby given unto it be…repealed and absolutely revoked and made void.” This act, which began by citing Magna Charta (sic), further prohibited any other court from obtaining “like jurisdiction,” and specifically excluded the king or Privy Council from exercising any power over the lands, goods, or inheritances of subjects, reserving these matters to the Common Courts.51 A similar act took effect the same day abolishing the Church High Commission.52
The king had been stripped of his main prerogative powers, ending the feudal government’s judicial terror against the citizenry. Simultaneously the security, not to say sanctity, of property, an absolute essential for a stable bourgeois society, took a major step forward: no longer did merchants, tradesmen or gentry need fear that judgements awarded in the common courts might be summarily overturned by the crown. To a greater degree, the capitalist economy could now develop on its own terms without arbitrary interference by the government. The concurrent breakdown of church courts freed the people from prosecution for sin, or excommunication for offenses of conduct. These acts alone would have the most enduring effects: the prerogative courts would remain in the dustbin of history through the 1660 Restoration, and, despite a brief attempt by James II to resurrect the High Commission, all the way to the revolution of 1688 and ever after. The Act of 1641 also “insisted that a writ of habeas corpus should be issued ‘without delay upon any pretence whatsoever’ when demanded on behalf of anyone arrested on warrant from the King or Privy Council.”53
The events of the spring had opened up the political situation, but it remained unsettled. Matters were complicated early in the summer when the House of Lords rejected expulsion of bishops from their chamber,54 and soon after the bill barring Catholics from holding state offices. The Commons majority made renewed approaches to Charles, but the king left for Scotland in August after making clear his disinterest in negotiating with Parliament, an ominous sign. Before leaving, he appointed several royalists to high offices.55 This made the Commons more susceptible to pressure from radical City leaders to advance on several of the most glaring grievances of the City movement. In mid-1641, the House addressed issues of monopolies, trade and religion.
As a tactical move to pressure the Lords, the Commons reintroduced a new root and branch bill that would give Parliament substantial control over the church. This was quite different from the popular demand to abolish episcopacy in favor of more local control by congregations. MPs “were, for the most part, repelled by both the Presbyterian and Independent alternatives” advocated by each in their own way.56 Nonetheless, the Commons bill encouraged renewed activity by Puritans who saw it as a renewed attack on the established church hierarchy.57
As indicated by the 1639 Common Council petition of grievances, monopolies were an oppressive sore point and regular complaint of the middling people.
The period before the Civil War was one of extensive economic controls. First imposed as a deliberate system of regulation of economic life for socially desirable ends, these degenerated fairly rapidly into a ramshackle bunch of monopoly patents, either sold for ready cash or more often given away as rewards to importunate courtiers.58
Monopolies retarded production, inflated prices to consumers and wage workers, and provided only a minimum of funds to the government.59 These feudal patents drove already existing small craftsmen out of business to the benefit of upper class gentlemen. They were so extensively used that there were monopolies on bricks, glass, coal, iron, tapestries, feathers, brushes and combs, soap, starch, lace, linen, leather, belts, buttons, pins, dyes, butter, currants, salmon, lobsters, salt, pepper, vinegar, wine, tin, hops, tobacco, pipes, playing cards, pens, writing paper, candles, books, alum, gunpowder, saltpeter, hay, and mouse traps, among many hundreds of other goods.60
One of the Commons’ first acts had been to expel twelve elected MPs for being monopoly merchants.61 Beginning in December 1640, the House of Commons sent shock waves through the overseas monopoly trading companies by public investigations into how they were operated pending renewal of their charters. The Committee on Trade first demanded all of the “‘books, letters, etc.’” of the East India Company. In January 1641, it required the Merchant Adventurers to provide all of the company’s patents and books. The Adventurers offered the committee an enormous loan of £200,000 in the spring, but the Commons as a body rejected it. By the end of 1641 however, desperate for funds as the political situation was reaching its critical point, the House renewed the Levant and East India Company charters in exchange for loans. The Merchant Adventurers’ charter was also approved; over the next two years Parliament received £140,000 from the company.62
Many individual London magistrates came under attack by Parliament. “Complaints about the municipality poured in to the [Commons’] Committee for Grievances from London citizens.” The Committee held that imprisonment of those who refused to pay ship money or other taxes, or had their goods or papers seized at the behest of City governors, was a violation of the law. Their property was ordered restored to them. They even ordered reparations paid to two collectors of ship money who had been jailed for failure to raise the required funds. Not a few aldermen who were merchants or manufacturing monopolists, or customs farmers, were heavily fined or even imprisoned for their actions in previous years.63
In August, the House voted to return to colonial merchants tobacco shipments which had been seized by the government in a dispute over customs duties. They slashed the customs tax on tobacco, setting a uniform rate, and ordered any fines or other charges repaid. The MPs also acted in a dispute between London wine sellers and the monopoly French Company. An economic settlement imposed by the king in 1638 had hurt the retailers in favor of the wholesalers’ profits. The Commons took the side of the middling-class shopkeepers, and imprisoned several of the monopoly importers, supporters of the City oligarchy.64 The same month, in response to a petition by the Atlantic merchants, a joint committee of Lords and Commons was set up to consider forming a West India Company to advance against the Spanish in the Caribbean.65
The Commons lastly moved on reform of religion, although this topic caused fierce debates. On Pennington’s initiative, they authorized altar rails to be removed from local churches, and communion tables to be repositioned by churchwardens, while upholding the “Government of the Church established by Law.”66 Just before recessing in September they further reversed Laud’s innovations by ordering the removal of crucifixes, candles, images, etc.; elimination of superstitious rituals; and banned sports and dancing on Sundays. On a motion by Oliver Cromwell, they also upheld the right of parishioners to hire lecturers at their own expense to preach when regular ministers were not scheduled.67 Both orders were rejected in the Lords, who repeated their order of eight months earlier, “That the Divine Service be performed as it is appointed by the Acts of Parliament of this Realm; and that all such as shall disturb that wholesome Order shall be severely punished…” But the Commons’ orders were widely circulated, resulting in violent conflicts around the country.68
Thus the House of Commons, urged on by its left wing, the radical Puritan leadership of the London citizens’ movement, took up a host of issues near and dear to the middling class and liverymen, the Atlantic merchants and many gentry. The outcomes were decidedly mixed. The signal failure was the persistence of monopolies by overseas merchant companies. The collaborative activity between the Commons and the City forces, however, was in sharp contrast to the split between the two Houses of Parliament, each of which contained minorities in sympathy with the other.
Meanwhile, Charles had been busy negotiating in Scotland, and signed the Treaty of London in August 1641. Although the Scottish army was ordered to disband, “it required the Crown to pay the Scottish army’s arrears of pay and, critically, demanded that the changes ordered by the Glasgow Assembly be given royal assent.”69 Under the circumstances, the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland may have seemed a small price to pay for getting rid of the only armed force the English Parliament could look to. But in reality, Charles, as was his custom, was only feigning. He had no intention of backing off from imposing rule by the bishops in all his domains. The apparent settlement of the war allowed the London oligarchs, at the end of September, to ram their nominations for Lord Mayor through Common Hall. The names of a royalist and a popular alderman were carried by the sheriff to the Court of Aldermen, who promptly elected the former.70
When the House of Commons reconvened in October, the leadership “conscious of the dubious legality of the Orders [on religion], deliberately shelved them…[and] quashed further discussion on a measure that was alienating moderate opinion and dividing the House…”71 Nevertheless, encouragement given to radical Puritans by the Commons’ actions spurred the creation of new gathered congregations and spread of lay preaching.72
Charles remained in Scotland plotting with conservative Scottish nobles against those who had put themselves at the head of the Presbyterian Covenanters, the Earls of Argyl and Lanark and the Marquis of Hamilton, who in early October, forewarned, fled Edinburgh. “The Incident,” as it came to be called, failed, but the story was recounted in the Commons by Pym as the horrible example of what had nearly happened. He specifically cited the Catholic Earl of Crawford in Scotland as a prime conspirator. Such an attack was considered still possible as new royalist army plots were being hatched in England. The situation was made more volatile by angry demonstrations at Parliament of disbanded English soldiers from the Scottish campaign demanding back pay. At the request of both Houses, one hundred men from the Trained Bands were placed on guard around Parliament by the Earl of Essex (son of the rebel executed by Elizabeth, and later first head of Parliament’s army).73
With the Scots army removed from England, Pym and company found themselves in a quandary. The Commons’ middle group of gentry was beginning to react negatively to the unruly participation of the London citizens’ movement, and its revolutionary religious program which appeared to them seditious. The king could obviously not be trusted with the safety of MPs, much less to carry out reforms. “From the time of the Petition of Right, Charles showed with what ease he could ignore parliamentary enactments that he himself had approved.”74 The only way to compel the king was to rely on the Puritan middling class movement, but this risked alienating many of Pym’s own supporters.75 For all its independence, the historic impotency of the House of Commons was here starkly revealed by its inability to effect changes to the feudal political system. To do so required either the backing of the Lords (which, as usual, it did not have), or calling in extra-parliamentary forces. Uniquely, for the first time, these social forces existed in England; moreover, they were organized and militant.
The threat from the right was quite real. “If Charles had the military power to dissolve Parliament, the Act against Dissolution would not restrain him. …they could expect to be tried and convicted for treason.”76 Playing to the conservatizing fear of the City population, the king “placed the protection of order and social hierarchy at the core of his program, making the defense of a non-Laudian episcopacy and of the prayer book the central plank on which to build a royalist party.”77 In these circumstances, Pym sought to draw back from religious reform in order to concentrate on winning control of the House of Lords by excluding bishops and lay Catholics, who constituted a reliable monarchist voting bloc. Once again Puritan leaders in London met and agreed to prioritize the campaign against bishops over reform of religion.78
1 “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality,” Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1847, 1976), Marxists Internet Archive, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm Accessed 28 July 2019
2 Manning, English People, 23; Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 95, 96
3 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 96
4 Manning, English People, 23-24
5 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 91-96, 98-99, 101; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 218; Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 351
6 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 105
7 Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 352-353; Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 92-93
8 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 96; Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 355
9 David Cressy, “The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (June 2002): 254, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3133645 Accessed February 13, 2019
10 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 259
11 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 267, 272. “Returns from more than 3,200 parishes from thirty English counties survive in the House of Lords Record Office, and dozens more have been found in local archives.” 252
12 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 257-258
13 Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 354
14 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 255-256
15 “The Protestation,” House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 03 May 1641, British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol2/pp131-133#p10 Accessed 13 February 2019; Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 255; Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 354
16 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 104; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 340-341
17 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 262, 264
18 Manning, English People, 25; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 216
19 Manning, English People, 26; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 217
20 Cressy, England on Edge, 383
21 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 218; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 341
22 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 260-261
23 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 261; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 218; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 341
24 Manning, English People, 26-27
25 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 97
26 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 27-28; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 340
27 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 90
28 Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 361
29 Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” 103-104, 105
30 Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 355
31 Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 364
32 Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 366
33 Manning, English People, 30
34 Hill, Reformation, 55-57. As in earlier centuries, the idea of a commonweal, or common good, was widely understood by the masses to mean the good of all social classes, even as the ruling aristocracy used it to mean only themselves. Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonalty,” 225-227, 244-245
35 O’Brien, When Adam Delved, 47
36 Manning, The English People, 31-32
37 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 119-120; Hill, World, 22
38 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 228
39 Walter, “the English Revolution Revisited,” 180
40 Gardiner, History of England Vol. IX, 352
41 Derek Hirst, “Parliament, Law and War in the 1620s,” The Historical Journal 23, no. 2 (June 1980): 460, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2638680 Accessed February 23, 2019
42 Hill, Century, 86; Grassby, “Social Mobility and Business Enterprise,” 355; Rabb, “Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 74
43 Hill, “Land in the English Revolution,” 28
44 Hill, “The Inns of Court,” 543, 545-546; Porter, “Impact of the Civil War Upon London,” 188
45 Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 231-232
46 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 264
47 Cressy, “The Protestation Protested,” 265
48 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 120-121
49 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 121-122; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 343-345
50 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 344
51 “Charles I, 1640: An Act for the Regulating the Privie Councell and for taking away the Court commonly called the Star Chamber,” Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628-80, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp110-112 Accessed June 10, 2016
52 “The Act for the Abolition of the Court of High Commission,” July 5, 1641 Statutes of the Realm, v. 112, Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1641-the-act-for-the-abolition-of-the-court-of-high-commission Accessed June 13, 2016
53 Hill, Century, 196
54 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 219
55 Manning, “The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I,” 69, 71; Fletcher, Outbreak, 44, 45
56 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 412
57 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 342
58 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 162
59 Hill, Reformation, 96
60 Hill, Century, 25-26; Manning, English People, 168-170
61 Hill, Century, 102
62 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 346-347
63 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 118-119
64 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 347-349
65 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 350-351
66 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 220; “Abolishing Superstition,” House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 08 August 1641, British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol2/pp245-246#p44 Accessed 10 January 2021
67 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 351-352; Manning, English People, 46-47; Fletcher, Outbreak, 114-116; “Innovations in Religion,” House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 01 September 1641, British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol2/pp278-280#p8; “Innovations in the Church,” House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 08 September 1641, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol2/pp281-284#p56; https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol2/pp281-284#p75 Accessed January 10, 2021
68 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 124; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 352; Manning, English People, 47-49; Fletcher, Outbreak, 117-119; “Order about Common Prayer and Service in the Church,” House of Lords Journal Volume 4: 16 January 1641, British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol4/pp133-134#p27; “Order concerning Divine Service,” House of Lords Journal Volume 4: 9 September 1641, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol4/pp393-396#p50 Accessed 15 February 2012
69 “The National Covenant, 1637-60,” The Scottish History Society, http://scottishhistorysociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/the-national-covenant.pdf Accessed June 10, 2016
70 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 124-125
71 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 220
72 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 354
73 Manning, English People, 34-35; Vernon F. Snow, “Essex and the Aristocratic Opposition to the Early Stuarts,” The Journal of Modern History 32, no. 3 (September 1960): 224, 231, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1872425 Accessed November 29, 2016
74 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 352
75 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 353
76 Russell, “Introduction,” 29
77 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 355
78 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 355-357; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 33-34