The historians who grabbed my teenage attention were serious academics confident that the stories they told and vehemently disputed mattered to the present. According to these stories, the English Revolution was an event of seismic proportions, at the epicentre of powerful social, economic and cultural forces which transformed the country from a medieval backwater into ‘the first modern society.’ … But few historians denied that political revolution was one dimension of a larger set of historical changes which made us what we are today. … In the 1980s this consensus position came under severe pressure…[which] was especially violent and decisive. … What all revisionists agreed, however, was that there were no ‘deeper’ causes of the English Revolution (if indeed it could be called a ‘revolution’): just contingencies and events which, almost by accident, disrupted a prevailing political consensus.
~Phil Withington1
M. Guizot deems it superfluous to mention that the subordination of the kingship to Parliament was its subordination to the rule of a class. … He has just as little to say about Charles I’s direct interference in free competition, which made England’s trade and industry more and more impossible; or about his dependence upon Parliament, which because of his constant financial straits became the greater the more he sought to defy Parliament.
~Karl Marx2
Because of the long rule by the absolute monarchy, intensified by Louis XIV in the 17th century, the French Revolution of 1789 was an all-the–more explosive social reverse, with consequently sharp and distinct class lines. In England under the early Stuarts, however, the monarchs, dominant within the ruling feudal class thanks to their Tudor predecessors, were only able to aspire to such power as their French and Spanish counterparts possessed. The imposition of a parliamentary council by the Norman-derived nobility in the 13th century, and the effective abolition of serfdom in the first part of the 15th, blocked a true absolutism from developing, which allowed for the growth of domestic market relations, in part stimulated by the wool trade.
The century and a half between 1490 and 1640, when there was no large-scale warfare on English soil, provided the time needed for these relations to expand and capital to accumulate. Reactionary as he was, James I and VI was politically calculating, maintaining a certain stability based on this thriving economic sector and a state policy of peace. In the last few years of his reign economic depression hit England; serious opposition to his rule begins at this time. Ideologically devoted to feudal tradition, Charles I succeeded his father in the middle of this muddle. Confronted with an unprecedented transformation in English (and European) history, Charles refused to recognize that the ground had shifted under his feet; the money interest was now infinitely more important to, indeed, dominated the national economy, as the economic depressions of the 1620s and ‘30s demonstrated all too well. Only the traditional forms of feudal political relations remained, hollowed out of any real social content. When the central contradiction between a capitalist economy and a feudal political system had spawned the twin crises in state and church, the king was left with only his courtiers, the bishops, and monopolists to support him.3
After a relatively brief struggle during the late 1620s, the majority of overseas company merchants abandoned any pretense of opposition, and became the most slavish supporters of the king.4 This is hardly surprising as this social grouping benefited most from the protection of the old order, and stood to lose a great deal in a more open and competitive economy. They had learned the lesson of their impotent strike of 1628-1629 against the monarchy all too well (although a few became firm supporters of Parliament). But the hatred of domestic manufacturers for the companies’ regulatory role, and the obstacle they presented to less exalted traders anxious to share in their outsize profits, created a deep antagonism that would break out in revolt at the first opportunity. That opportunity came with the opening of the colonial trade to the Americas.
The new Atlantic merchants, arrivistes from the middling class, wasted no time in seeking their fortunes, and making political alliances with Puritan holy men and aristocrats. As open opposition to Charles’ reign grew, they were increasingly in the forefront, the most dedicated supporters and influencers of the House of Commons, boldly transgressing feudal social and political relations. Their vanguard role in commerce and military adventure abroad, and politics and religion at home, provided the English Revolution with the bourgeois leadership which Christopher Hill appears to have had such trouble identifying. By so doing they drew the bourgeois businessmen in the middle layers of the livery companies to active service in the new, revolutionary regime. The division between the monopoly and free-trade merchant groups, most thoroughly documented by Robert Brenner, explains the paradox posed by Tawney that the bourgeoisie was on both sides, even if the latter’s conception was somewhat different.
The virulent antipathy to Catholicism by Puritans and active Protestants of all stripes must not be seen as equivalent to the dead-end interethnic and religious wars so prevalent in our contemporary, decaying era, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 17th-century England, thoroughgoing Protestants were the heirs of the revolutionary Reformation of Luther and Calvin, and the target of the reactionary Counter-Reformation spearheaded by Rome. The import of the Vatican’s crusade had been forcefully exemplified during Queen Mary’s horrific time, and Elizabeth herself had been excommunicated, not once, but twice by the popes after coming to the throne. Forced to sit on the sidelines, English Protestants could only watch in fear as the Thirty Years’ War ground on.5
Whereas Catholicism laid all the burden on the individual as a sinner with a constant need to repent, Calvin’s doctrine of predestination relieved individuals from responsibility for their salvation, since “Only God knows his elect.” Those whom God appeared to favor were the frugal, but assiduous, rich, “a spiritual aristocracy.”6 Calvin’s audacious new discipline for the reform of society influenced the early Tudor Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer, prompting much theological debate in the century between 1550 and 1650. This was the period when capitalism began its rapid ascendancy, particularly in Holland and England. The bourgeois frontal assault on the feudal order, integrated with and overlorded by the Catholic Church for the previous millennium, necessarily failed to distinguish between these because they were in fact indistinguishable. Only once feudalism had decisively given way to capitalism, and the landowners had been reconciled to the political rule of the bourgeoisie, could any form of equal tolerance for Catholics be envisaged.
The Protestant attack was a major advance for the liberation of the masses despite itself being expressed and justified in religious terms. A more flexible theology than Catholic dogma, it grew up along with the development of urban society.7 For some Puritans in the early 17th century, such as John Corbet, “The puritan was responsible for his own salvation,”8 an argument that went beyond Calvin’s ideology of predestination. The topic was thus subjected to extensive, often tortured, disputes, along with other religious issues. Puritanism was especially popular with the petty and middle bourgeoisie because it preached the freedom to individually pursue their economic betterment and religious beliefs. This enormously extended the measure of control they had over their own lives, freeing them from the tyranny of the priest and the terrors of hell. “…this insistence that a well-considered strong conviction overrode everything else had a great liberating force,”9 and “elevated the self-respect of his congregation.”10 This is likely why Calvinism did not hold sway very long after the revolution: freedom for the lower classes included freedom of conscience; and once it was accepted that free-trade merchants or capitalist manufacturers could become rich through their own efforts, what need was there for God’s blessing? But for a time it suited them to say their gaining wealth was God’s work.11 The complete stripping away of religious domination and obfuscation, resulting in the triumph of bourgeois secularism, would first be attempted by the Leveller party in the latter 1640s. Eventually, after the setback of the Restoration of Charles II, secularism would be confirmed in its essentials by the Revolution of 1688.
Without London there would have been no civil war and no eventual parliamentarian victory.”12 The events in London from 1640 to 1643 expose the empty claims of rightwing Revisionist historians as absurd frauds. They demonstrate beyond any doubt the existence of a pro-democratic social movement composed of tens of thousands who were neither rich nor poor, though some portion of the poor also followed it some of the time. The petty bourgeois citizens’ movement was at least partially organized by, and closely responsive to, the new City leaders, colonial merchants and guild members, along with Puritan clergy.
…although there was a large element of spontaneous protest and social revolt, it was not the upsurge of a desperate population. Its day to day tactics (but not its long-term strategy) bore all the signs of careful planning and resolute leadership…13
This movement intervened at decisive moments to pressure the House of Commons or, at moments of greatest threat, to protect its members with arms in hand. (From this comes the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution: both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison argued that the militias — “citizens with arms” — were the guarantee of the people’s liberties, even from the federal government if necessary.)14 Without the armed support of the London masses, along with the Trained Bands who went over to them, under Puritan (Presbyterian, Independent, Anabaptist) and sectarian leadership, the Commons did not have the power to overcome the king.
Thus it was “the awakened petty-bourgeois masses, who had become the most important force of the revolution.”15 The power and revolutionary nature of the London citizens’ movement had been badly underestimated, or simply ignored, by Whig and even Marxian historians in large part due to their singular focus on the admittedly novel role of the House of Commons. The fact that the gentry, as represented by the MPs in the Long Parliament, was seriously divided was used to attack the Marxist position by claiming that the Civil War was nothing more than an intra-ruling class squabble, not unlike the earlier War of the Roses, if perhaps with loftier phrases. “…Revisionists insisted that most actors in the period 1603 to 1640 were not seeking fundamentally to change the system.”16 In reference to the consciousness of the gentry this was true enough; but a large number of them were seeking to make changes which they did not consider revolutionary, to say nothing of the urban Puritan masses which did. The weakness in Hill’s and Tawney’s gentry argument was thereby exploited by conservative and Revisionist historians, who were able to gain credence for their attacks on what they claimed was the orthodox Marxist view.
In place of any sort of class struggle or progressive trajectory, many if not most Revisionists came to embrace either a theory of tensions between local and central government authorities,17 or alternatively, a war of religion,18 as adequate explanations. A number were eventually forced to come to grips with such issues as “Court Catholicism, ecclesiastical Arminianism, and popular fear of popery,” though they mainly strained to misinterpret these in various ways.19 While perhaps providing useful research via local or regional studies, the Revisionist onslaught was squarely aimed at denying, indeed burying, the revolutionary history of England.
The petty-bourgeois artisan and working class combination here played the same revolutionary role as its later historical analogue, the Sansculottes. It also had the active support of the sailors, who were military men. It was precisely reliance on the lower classes that caused large sections of the gentry and nobility to withdraw from the anti-absolutist struggle in favor of either the king or neutrality. The extraordinary breadth of anti-royalist sentiment, which united to build fortifications to protect London in 1642-1643, stretched across nearly all but the uppermost classes of the city. Likewise the enormous response of volunteers and money for the Parliamentary army in 1642; the London Trained Bands’ heroism under competent leadership at Edgehill in 1642 and Newbury in 1643; and defense of the City at Turnham Green by Army troops, Bandsmen, and ordinary citizens; all demonstrated a political consciousness that was revolutionary in scope, however weighted down with religious notions it may seem to us today.
To thousands of Englishmen, Puritanism was the very Gospel itself, the voice of God speaking to a careless generation. Those who believed this were ready to die rather than allow God’s voice upon earth to be silenced. If the existing law was against it, let the law be broken. If Parliamentary majorities were against it, let them be silenced.20
“Godliness” was the rallying cry of the anti-feudal, anti-Catholic Church movement. Two hundred years later, John Brown among others was moved by no less an imperative.
Following the revolution in London the widespread disaffection of the peasantry broke out. Enclosures and manor records were destroyed, especially in the southeast. Yeoman farmers and tenants joined townsmen, occasionally led by a local gentleman, in seizing weapons caches all over the country for Parliament. The peasant uprisings in the countryside were only surface manifestations of the deep antipathy to the feudal state and church, upheld by so many of their landlords. While peasant opposition was certainly not uniform throughout the country, it helped to batter down feudal tradition, making recruitment to the king’s army more difficult.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, Revisionist historians all strove to provide yeoman service to the capitalist ruling classes, which were hurriedly charging toward an intensified immiseration of the working populations in Britain and America. If they could discredit revolution as exaggerated or insignificant, it would reinforce an ideological justification for social reaction. “…nearly all the major positions were in place by the early 1980s, and as Tom Cogswell has pointed out, they achieved a rapid takeover of what one might term the commanding heights of textbook orthodoxy.”21
The Revisionists’ reactionary intent is revealed whereby
The developments highlighted by Marxists are regarded as illusory, ambiguous or irrelevant, and at best as unproven assertions. Their efforts to trace long-term causes for the Civil War, rooted in economic and social shifts, have generally been rejected as deterministic or based on hindsight. And the designation of the resistance to the monarchy as “progressive” by both Whigs and Marxists is also discarded. In some versions it is the monarchy which is innovative… It was the Crown’s opponents, especially in the House of Commons, who were “conservative,” stubbornly clinging to outmoded customs and rights.22
These sorts of anti-Marxist, anti-democratic aspersions are hardly new, as Hill noted in 1950:
A school of Roman Catholic propagandists, headed by Hilaire Belloc, has attempted a synthesis of a kind. They depict Charles I as trying to defend the people of England from the aggressive greed of a gang of wicked capitalists.23
Cust and Hughes continue:
There is a particular tendency [by Revisionists] to take as true some of the more favourable perceptions of Charles and Laud. … If revisionist historiography has attacked Whig interpretations as parliamentarian, we have come increasingly to regard revisionist accounts as echoes of seventeenth-century royalist views. … Royalist accounts are also echoed in the emphasis on high politics and the relationships of great men at court as a sufficient explanation of events…”24
Revisionist dismissals of social analysis as “hindsight” — as if nothing new had been learnt in the ensuing four centuries — were merely a cover to rewrite history. At bottom, they were an attempt to refurbish the moral image of the feudal monarchy.
A mainstream centrist historian reviewing a 1977 collection of Revisionist essays by multiple authors found their claims false to the point of absurdity.25
They dismiss, either overtly or covertly, all long-term social or sociopolitical developments and leave in their place what looks like a Clarendonian vision. … Writing of the years following the Self-denying Ordinance, no less, he [Farnell] feels able to assert that “a group of peers organized and led the campaign against Charles I.”26
…he [Christianson] maintains that, “for the purposes of this article, it suffices to extend those electoral ties…into the sitting of Parliament” and so proceeds to construct his thesis. With a methodology like that, who needs methodologies?27
The right-leaning, maverick American historian J. H. Hexter further deflated the Revisionists’ “purely political” offerings:
Now it is possible that in the early seventeenth century the men who opposed some of their king’s actions were Livian republicans. It is also possible that they were defenders of an imaginary ancient English constitution. And it is even possible that they were Mahayana Buddhists. Unfortunately, on the evidence provided by Farnell it is not possible to tell which, if any, of the three they were. It is perhaps unnecessary here to chase further after the ephemeral phantasms of Farnell’s overheated historical imagination.28
It is surely significant that despite this abundance of the printed record none of our writers directly confronts the question of the nature of the troubles between king and Parliament. Kishlansky drowns out the noises of conflict by pulling out the stops on consensus, thus producing an improbably loud sound of dovelike cooing. Russell rather cavalierly evades the question by arguing that the apparent conflict between king and Commons was really a conflict between court and country. Farnell’s essay and Christianson’s on “The Causes of the English Revolution,”…manage to avoid any citation of the rich record of the House of Commons. They appear to regard that record as a matter of no importance, except as it reflects the control exercised by the peers over the Commons. Which, since the peers didn’t, it doesn’t.29
Revisionist attempts to propound new “theories” were thus built on sand, when not simply invented wholesale. Their real purpose was not to improve the historical understanding of the revolutionary period, but to deny or smother any hint of revolution, and at any cost, as an historian described in 1980:
Unfortunately, the new revisionists…proceed to minimize to the point of nonexistence any substantive conflict between Crown and Parliament before 1640, and finally to deny that an “English Revolution” took place at all. What happened, in the new exegesis, was simply a breakdown of administrative order which, confessedly, got a little out of hand.30
A 1981 presentation on Revisionism posed a central question:
…one begins to wonder why parliament was summoned at all. If its demands were self-defeating, its proceedings disorderly, its subsidies not worth the fuss, and its initiatives and influence minimal, why did anyone bother with it? Why did not the crown dismiss subsidies as not worth the effort? A crucial element is missing…31
The startling programme of the early 1640s did not spring new-born from the minds of a few parliamentary leaders. The abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission, the assault on [anti-Calvinist] ministers, the Triennial Act, and the Grand Remonstrance may have been revolutionary, but the criticisms on which they were based…had been voiced long before. Why else did the Grand Remonstrance begin with a rehearsal of the principal grievances of the 1620s?32 … The progression, slow and drawn out, was not inevitable, but it was a progression. … Unless there is an understanding of how events relate to one another, the accumulation of details will lead nowhere.33 [Emphasis in original]
In 1983 Jack Goldstone, while against Marxist interpretation, credited Manning, Fletcher, Pearl, and even Hill for their work demonstrating “rural riots and tumults in London” to have been “key” to the conflict,34 and criticized the Revisionists’ short-sightedness:
Was the virtual simultaneity of the English Revolution, the Fronde, the rebellions in Catalonia, Naples, and Sicily, and the Ukranian revolt of Khmelnitsky merely a concatenation of coincidences? Was the whole “crisis of the 17th century” mere happenstance? If the English Revolution was simply a product of Charles’s bad choice of policies and advisors, rather than part of a larger, more encompassing set of social changes, then its concurrence with similar political crises throughout Europe is baffling to say the least.35
Nine years after the critiques by Hirst and Hexter an historian could still observe, “If a revolution was not what took place in England between 1640 and 1660, at least in any strong sense of the term, then what did? This is a question to which revisionists by and large are not yet willing to commit themselves.”36
In 1990, David Wootton detailed the debate, between Puritan ministers and royalists, over the issues of parliamentary sovereignty and the people’s right to overthrow their leaders, in the pamphlet war of the time. Despite some of their later views, in these early years Puritans like Edward Bowles, Jeremiah Burroughs and William Prynne were espousing radical political ideas about government and society that did much to justify and extend the ground for revolution.37 In Plaine English, Bowles (the almost certain author)
proposed to form a bond or association of those willing to fight on should Parliament come to terms with the King, committed “To the maintainance of our establish’d Religion and Law with all possible improvement.” … Here was a clear threat of a war not for constitutional but revolutionary ends, and of a settlement finally imposed against the wishes not only of King, but also of Parliament. … Perhaps there was no “high road to civil war;” but there evidently was one from rebellion to revolution…long before the Leveller movement came into existence.38 [Emphasis in original]
This evidence was greatly reinforced in 2007 by David Como, who established the existence of a clandestine pamphlet (one of many) advocating resistance to the king, printed in 1640 London before the convening of the Long Parliament:
…if a King maintaine a Faction about him, which goe about to oppresse his whole Kingdome, and People in their Laws and Liberties, and most of all in the true Religion…but seeks to make all his Subjects, Slaves, by bringing their soules, Bodies, estates under a miserable bondage: is it not now high time…to stand up as one man to defend themselves and their Countrey, untill the Faction shalbe utterly cashered, and so the King reforme himselfe, and renew the Covenant and Conditions of the Kingdome to the good and just Satisfaction of the People.39 [Italics in original]
This early propaganda came from an underground press operated by Richard Overton, the future Leveller leader.40 That they were produced from such an early date proved that
…there existed, at least in London, an aggressive and organized confederation of activists, who were willing to engage in overtly treasonable behaviour…promoting parliamentary governance, upending the tyrannical style of prerogative rule that had evolved under Charles, and most significantly, abolishing the Church of England and replacing it with a purified order of gathered voluntary Churches.41
The Revisionists’ “…presumed absence of radical political and religious ideas in the England of 1640”42 is thus shown to be wishful thinking.
Looking back in 2015, Peter Lake described how Revisionism casually wrote off any inconvenient views to the contrary:
…there could be no ideological causes for the breakdown; Charles’s failure had to be sought in his personality rather than his beliefs, ideology, or program. Hence Conrad Russell’s otherwise rather eccentric insistence that Charles’s “arbitrariness” was “temperamental” rather than “constitutional.” Religion did not count as an ideology because it was something that just happened to people… Moreover, the more extreme manifestations of religious belief or affiliation like anti-popery could be categorized under the sign of the “irrational” and thus rendered even less capable of being rationally explained. Attempts at such explanation in terms of wider social or ideological contexts or forces could be dismissed as irredeemably reductionist.43
Thus, on the one hand, Revisionist academics blithely ignored the ideas in people’s heads which they believed and argued about, and fought and killed for, while on the other, focusing at great length on the personality of the king.44
Contemporaries were far more cognizant of the real magnitude of what was occurring. A royalist tract of 1643 ended by declaring that if posterity asked
“who would have pulled the crown from the king’s head, taken the government off the hinges, dissolved monarchy, inslaved the lawes, and ruined their countrey, — say, ’twas the proud, unthankefull, schismaticall, rebellious, bloody city of London…”45
In the first decade of the new century, Mark Kishlansky and Kevin Sharpe were still defending the actions of King Charles against his opponents.46 In 2015, David Cressy cited their cold-blooded indifference to human suffering under Charles:
While claiming, erroneously, that there was little public support for Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne, Sharpe at least acknowledged that their punishment in 1637 was a public relations disaster for Charles I’s government… From the point of view of [Sharpe’s] The Personal Rule,47 however, it was not the degradation, mutilation, and perpetual imprisonment of a lawyer, a cleric, and a physician that mattered, or the heavy-handed overreach of the state, but rather the damage done to the image and authority of the king. Kishlansky, by contrast, stressed that the “martyrs” were not executed, as if this exhibits the tolerance of the Caroline regime.48
The construction of academic careers by Revisionists was founded merely on the basis of anti-communism. Given the purpose and frailty of their own positions, it was not enough to question Marxist interpretation; Revisionism had to malign its entire ideology, even if it took a denial of reality to do so. Any useful local research they performed, or analytical weaknesses they pointed to, were in service to their counter-revolutionary agenda. In the rampant conservative milieu of the 1980s their doctrinal posture was welcome, and treated seriously by capitalist academia, politicians, and media; it often still is.
To have a reasonably accurate and encompassing theoretical model does not mean social reality will conform to it in every last instance or detail.
The history of society is thus a collaboration between general models of social structure and change and the specific set of phenomena which actually occurred. This is true whatever the geographical or chronological scale of our enquiries.49
Historians therefore need to understand the developments in society over time as a process, and be able to clearly evaluate the relative importance and consequences of different factors, events, and patterns by organized study and honest discussion; to be able to distinguish what is qualitative from what is quantitative; to appreciate phenomena that are often contradictory as part of a complex social whole. This however was never the Revisionists’ goal. Their aversion to analysis per se, a kind of know-nothing–ism; their attempts to narrow the arenas for research, and declare any others illegitimate; their hunt for superficial gloss masquerading as proof; or their attempts to simply void issues through willful blindness; are the methods of intellectual bankrupts. But such methods have a madness: a deliberate, reactionary defense of the minority class of exploiters and oppressors of the majority in the here and now.
The enlistment of the London mass movement on the side of Parliament was responsible for the early victories over the king. Whether the people could have actually repulsed a force of the king’s men in January 1642 may be open to question, but neither their purpose, background nor determination to do so are. The French ambassador was “astonished” at the lack of bloodshed due to the discipline of the people occupying the streets at the very end of 1641.50 That the test never came was all to the good; it undoubtedly saved many lives and much agony. Both materially and politically, the king was unlikely to win. Deprived of control over the militia, obstructed by the aristocracy from creating a standing royal army (the pivotal weakness of the English monarchy), Charles was left with few resources.51 An open military attack of a few hundred so-called “gentlemen”52 on the 140,000 aroused people of London53 would have forfeited whatever shreds of legitimacy were left to him after his ham-handed and futile attempt to arrest the Five Members. The urban middling people of 1641 were not the peasants of 1381: they had higher status and more money, were better educated and more skilled, less easy to intimidate, and had God, Parliament, and numbers on their side. Not liking his odds, Charles chose not to chance it and fled. As it was, his constant duplicity would in the end do him in.
It cannot be denied that thorough-going Protestantism, i.e., militant Puritanism, provided a broad ideological justification for revolution. The struggle over church governance for control of religious practices was a major political issue in promoting the conflict. The lower classes’ (unsuccessful) attack on tithes was an instrumental part of their rejection of the established church under the bishops. The deep resentments of the royal monopolists by the middling class, who regarded them as oppressors in multiple ways, gave them every reason to fight the feudal monarchy and its highly undemocratic lackeys in the London government. Their revolutionary demand to abolish episcopacy (and also monopoly) implicitly meant, and was intended to achieve, the end of the feudal political system as it then existed. In Puritanism, the small and middle bourgeoisie found the expression for its all-sided opposition to a society in which religion had always oppressively saturated social life. “These new ideas, therefore, were unavoidably colored by religion.”54 Although the kingdom of Jesus was a chimera, belief in it was not, and reflected a burning desire for a different kind of society, one which seemed newly within reach.
Radical religion’s prominence as an issue was due to the urban workers and manufacturers, domestic traders and small retailers, who actually powered the revolution, and not to the hesitant rural gentlemen trembling in their seats in the House of Commons. What they shared was an acute sense of Protestantism under siege that made both classes diehard opponents of Laud and Arminianism, thus enabling their early unity to be more easily achieved. “…in their hatred of Roman Catholicism the most moderate members [of the House of Commons] did not yield to the most violent.”55 Pym knew what he was doing in his constant appeals for the defense of Protestantism.
The aristocrats’ participation in capitalist markets, financial investment and early industry explains their general opposition to the monarchy’s moves toward absolutism, and their willingness to ally with the anti-monopoly colonial merchant bourgeoisie. But with very few exceptions they were not themselves conscious revolutionaries, or even anti-feudalists.
“The contortions into which M.P.s got themselves while arguing passionately against abuses…and simultaneously trumpeting their eternal loyalty to the king, shows they were really pushed into a corner.”56 More plainly, it displays the untenability of their position. In 1648 most of Pym’s middle group members would be excluded or arrested during the Army’s purge of the Commons.57 Even Russell, referring to the 1620s, makes a salient point, described by Hirst:
…when the parliament-men went home and donned their other hats as JPs or deputy-lieutenants, they often had to contribute to the implementation of privy council directives which had come under criticism in parliament.58
This highlights tensions within the ruling class, tensions which existed long before the outbreak of war. There is no reason historians, least of all Marxists, should shy away from acknowledging this manifest contradiction. On the contrary, it is essential to a dynamic understanding of the English Revolution. “The idea that the civil war was made by a ‘revolutionary party in the House of Commons’ has, one hoped, gone forever,” Christopher Hill wrote in 1981.59
The stress laid on this point is necessary to spotlight the skew it introduced as the revolutionary process played out. The gentry’s actions from 1640 on were at almost every step driven, as we have seen, by the people in the streets of the capital, or by their leaders with their explicit or implicit support. Hill was retreating under the blows of Revisionists who opportunistically exploited the weakness in his argument for their own purposes; but the largely neglected or disparaged work of Pearl, Manning, and Brenner, as well as Hill himself, provide much of the detail for a wholly consistent social class analysis.
“Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and for the plebeian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold.”60 Most certainly neither would have the gentry. As traditional, paternalistic landowners they continued to dominate local political affairs, and the peasantry who were obliged to them for their copyhold leases. As such they were still, socially and legally, a feudal stratum within the ruling class, the untitled nobility, a role they continued to occupy even after the king’s military defeat. Sequestration, and later composition, were designed to keep large estates more or less intact, and therefore beyond the peasants’ ability to purchase them. The desire of many aristocrats to grow rich through capitalist investment required eliminating their obligatory feudalistic tenures to both the king and the copyholders. They did not hesitate to use the latter’s subordination to violate their welfare through enclosure and other methods, any more than they did to use their newly-won power after the war to free themselves in law from the throne.61
In this way they were able to clear the ground of the feudal overgrowth, to free capitalist production, and let the non-monopoly bourgeois class emerge. The moderate reform program of 1640-1641 espoused by the Commons’ leadership, and codified in the Nineteen Propositions, quite transparently sacrificed the monarchy’s power to their own. But trapped between the hostility of the monarchy and the unrelenting pressure of the London mass movement, the aristocrats were forced to go further than they had envisioned if they were to achieve their goals, and remain true to their principles. Their anti-absolutist program was progressive precisely because it dovetailed with the bourgeoisie’s need to smash feudalism: the removal of government interference in the economy, religion, personal liberty, and above all, property. The alliance provided a portion of them confidence to act. Nonetheless, the gentry’s dualistic social position made them irresolute, causing them to hold the door open for the king’s return. The Commons repeatedly tried to negotiate a new governmental arrangement with Charles, right up through 1648; the only differences were over how much to concede. In the summer of 1643 they very nearly voted to throw in the towel, and once again, it was intervention by the Puritan populace and their bourgeois leaders that saved the outcome for the men now in power. Unsurprisingly then, when civil war became inevitable in 1642, a large minority of MPs deserted to neutrality or outright royalism.
Had Parliament not existed, or had it failed to win a measure of power independent of the crown, the events of 1640 to 1643 would undoubtedly have looked quite different. Recall that the Third Estate was forced to break with its assigned role in the États-Généraux of 1789 in order to transform themselves into the National Assembly. But the English gentry were quite content to keep their “house” as it was, only expanding its functions through the prolific use of committees. The purge of bishops from the House of Lords on the other hand required a mammoth struggle. The English Revolution might well have occurred rather later, and even more powerfully, had the Stuarts had as much rein as the Bourbon kings did.
The financial bankruptcy of the French feudal state was brought on by long and repeated military campaigns, including the American War of Independence. In 1788, 50% of French state expenditure was going to interest payments.62 Bankruptcy however was not the main issue in 1640 England, although the king’s government was heavily mortgaged. Money could be raised had Parliament been willing to do so,63 and it repeatedly (and self-servingly) offered to take over the king’s finances to, they claimed, “stabilize” them. But under the disruptive conditions of economic depression and class struggle the king was unable to obtain loans for his war against the Scots. Legally blocked from the usual sources of income, Charles’ authority to raise new revenues was continuously challenged, calling into question his ability to rule. Had Ship money been successfully collected it “would have made the government independent of the will of Parliament and the taxpayers.”64 This was the crux of the political program by those leaders in the feudal government who wanted to reform it: in a money economy, control of taxation is crucial. Without it, armies cannot be paid, and control of armed forces means control of state power. “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.”65 The revolutionary divide was deep, principled, and programmatic: a clash between social classes.
Even the king instinctively understood this essential, which is why he refused to compromise his powers: to give in would mean the end of any serious monarchy, and therefore the feudal order as a whole. “As Charles explained, ‘Kingly Power is but a shadow’ without command of the militia.”66 The feudal state was destroyed by the armed citizens of London in January 1642, and the more perceptive members of Parliament were happy to make use of this expedient. The absolutist aspirations of the crown were defeated. But just as the presence of Parliament had attenuated the power of the monarchy, it also attenuated the power of the Revolution. “[Parliament] was able for the most part — although not at all points — to hold the City movement within bounds.”67 By providing a reformist source of opposition to the monarchy it absorbed into itself a good portion of the people’s fury. This did not leave the House of Commons itself unaffected. Rather, its resistance to the king and its reliance on the citizens transformed it from the feudal “great council” into a bourgeois legislature, a process codified after the fact by the Militia Ordinance.
Ultimately the parliamentarians were able to win the civil war only because they held London and its environs, which importantly gave them access to loans and tax revenue the king could not obtain. The pockets of bourgeois businessmen were deeper than those of rural landlords.68
A tactical policy of support to the Commons’ reform program by the middling/working class movement would have been more than appropriate. Its eventual betrayal was set up by its strategic reliance on Parliament, however much it tried to bring pressure on it. The failure to counterpose a democratic program independent of the gentry/merchant alliance left the middling people with no political alternative. Not until the Levellers later in the decade would this be provided. But in the first half of the 1640s, it was the House of Commons that benefited by acting in part as a political safety valve, dissipating the people’s steam, thereby creating an opening for royalist counterrevolution.
This function, and danger, is most clearly seen in the governmental revolution that occurred in the midst of the democratic uprising that shattered the fabulously wealthy oligarchs’ power in London. “From then on the City, indeed all London, was controlled by a new ruling group.”69 The new leadership, with the Commons’ now eager sanction, rapidly undertook military measures to reform the militia and secure the City. But Parliament continued to treat with the king, codifying its reform program for control of the state in the Nineteen Propositions of June 1642. Only after the king’s almost immediate rejection of these conditions did recruitment of an army truly begin.
This effort was successful, but the new leaders did not further mobilize the population in any extensive action except the building of the fortifications around London during 1642-1643. Eager volunteers, whose conscious identification with the revolution made them pick up and leave their more remote homes for London or other towns, were turned away rather than made use of. The more militant Puritans and merchants complained of this,70 but the sober business men on the Common Council, like the centrist gentry in the Commons, had no inclination to whip up the population any further than minimally necessary. They understood the political challenge to their own positions that could ensue from a maelstrom of unmediated activity by the oppressed people of England. Meanwhile, the official armies were for many months left unpaid and un-supplied, resulting in numerous military fiascos. When Parliament’s noble commanders eventually got around to placing troops in the field, they mostly played at combatting the king’s army. This unnecessarily prolonged the war, risked defeat, and stoked reaction.
The subsuming of the revolution under Parliamentary leadership, both in London and nationally, explains the absence of any Terror directed against the feudal ruling class as a whole. While the power of royalists in the City was curtailed, and some were jailed, no moves were made to arrest or remove the bulk of them, leaving them free to fester and undermine the revolution as they could. (Prominent royalists were arrested when the king’s army was threatening London in October 1642.)71 In particular, despite a great deal of talk, the alliance of the haute bourgeois monopoly company merchants with the crown was barely touched, let alone broken, as they were effectively able to buy off the Commons.
The Puritan leadership’s failure to organize the people in arms against the aristocracy, as the Jacobins later did, was a direct consequence of the political unity between bourgeois moderates and radicals in the City government with the majority of the gentry in the House of Commons. The businessmen of the livery companies were chiefly concerned with maintaining stable conditions in which to conduct their commerce, and MPs were obviously not going to sponsor a campaign against themselves. Despite being less conservative, the Independent leadership was not prepared to break with parliamentarianism. As republicans or semi-republicans, the ascendant bourgeois legislative councils were their natural homes and arenas of struggle. This commitment condemned them to being displaced and made irrelevant until the Army interventions of 1647 and 1648. By that time, however, they were being challenged from the left by the more active and courageous Levellers.
The single exception to mobilizing the citizenry against Parliament came when it appeared the Commons was about to give up the struggle in August 1643. The implicit threat the bourgeois City leaders held over the gentry MPs, of independent popular action, was made manifest for the first and last time, and only in an unarmed demonstration at that. In this manner, they used it to recommit the Commons gentry to a resolute war against the king, thereby preserving the alliance between them, and cementing Parliament’s leading role in it. Had the Commons voted to accept the peace proposals, dissolving the alliance, the London government would have faced the issue of leading the civil war itself. It is not possible to say what might have happened in this hypothetical situation, but it was a clear crisis point for all the parliamentary factions, foreshadowing events after the war.
The comparison with the French Revolution, only cursorily addressed here, illustrates the qualitative transformation of England during the revolutionary years. This transformation is explained by Marxist social class analysis, and Marx was well aware of the specifics of the English situation:
The only explanation M. Guizot is able to offer of…the puzzle of why the English Revolution was conservative in character, is that it was due to the superior intelligence of the English, whereas its conservatism is to be attributed to the permanent alliance between the bourgeoisie and the greater part of the big landlords, an alliance which essentially differentiates the English Revolution from the French — the revolution that abolished big landownership by parcellation. Unlike the French feudal landowners of 1789, this class of big landed proprietors, which…incidentally, had arisen already under Henry VIII, was not antagonistic to but rather in complete accord with the conditions of life of the bourgeoisie. In actual fact their landed estates were not feudal but bourgeois property. On the one hand, the landed proprietors placed at the disposal of the industrial bourgeoisie the people necessary to operate its manufactories and, on the other, were in a position to develop agriculture in accordance with the state of industry and trade. Hence their common interests with the bourgeoisie; hence their alliance with it.72 [Emphasis added]
The alliance of the Atlantic merchants and Puritan preachers with a section of the aristocracy brought the revolutionary part of the bourgeois class — colonial merchants and middle layers of the livery companies — to power in London. Only later, with the Independents’ seizure of power via the New Model Army in 1648, were the radical pro-capitalist forces able to go further. They created a republic, without and against the bulk of the landowners and by-then hostile Presbyterians in London. In both instances they had decisive support from a mass of the petty bourgeois middling class.
The disregard of abundant material on unwelcome historical episodes by state powers or their apologists is not unusual. It is not for lack of research or published work that propagandists and pundits can and do disseminate the most outlandish and frivolous theories. The actual events shown here support the orthodox Marxist viewpoint of a social conflict that abolished the feudal political system, and brought major sections of the capitalist class to power, however much conservative historians tried to wriggle around it.73 A resolutely non-Marxist historian wrote in 1970:
Puritanism, constitutional opposition and business opposition were all assaulting the same citadel. … It would be absurd to suggest that constitutional ideas per se could have attracted such wide support if they had not been intimately connected with men’s material interests.74
The paramount weight of the capitalist economy by 1600 affected every social class in England. Aristocrats ramped up their participation in agricultural markets servicing the urban areas. Economic growth allowed, and inflation compelled, them to rationalize their country holdings and/or make investments in manufacture or trade, to maintain their idle livings. Enclosures were the most direct method to improve estates. Displaced peasants became urban or rural wage workers to the extent they could find work at all. More well-off and adventurous members of the petty-bourgeois middling class, from families of minor gentry and yeomen, or urban business, spilled into the opening of colonial free trade, breaking the stranglehold of the joint-stock companies. Having made fortunes, they used their money and connections to assume leading roles in the democratic movement that smashed the feudal monarchy, church hierarchy, and monopolist oligarchy.
This put mainly radical Independent colonial merchants and moderate Presbyterian businessmen of the livery companies into power in London, in alliance with the bourgeoisified aristocratic investors in Parliament. The pro-capitalist gentry were dedicated to security of property, persons and even reformed religion as long as these were under their own control. Despite all of the leftover trappings of feudal society, neither the divisions within the bourgeois class in this early revolutionary period, nor the strains on its alliance with the reforming landowners, change the fact that the royal court, established church, and London oligarchs — in short, the feudal state — had been overthrown and replaced.75 A simple fact Revisionist historians, and not only them, did their mightiest not to acknowledge.
The divisions within the bourgeois/aristocratic alliance and its component parts, leading up to the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate, are subjects for another work. That the new ruling class’ insecure hold on power would be interrupted by the Restoration in 1660 (the real Interregnum) changes nothing. “…the Stuart monarchy came back in 1660. The old regime, however, was not restored along with it.”76 The gains of the revolution meant that English society could no more return to its pre-1640 condition than Mary Tudor could reverse her father’s Reformation. The bourgeois revolution, supported by and building on the mid-century events, would be completed in 1688-1689, triumphing over absolutism once and for all.
But that is down the road. As the Civil War dragged on and conditions worsened, disappointment and reaction would grow and take over the city. The locus of revolutionary action would shift to the soldiery of the New Model Army. The same worker-craftsmen and rural yeomen constituted the main repository of revolutionary cadre, driven by their highly radical, more egalitarian Puritan principles. Pro-revolutionary forces remained in London and other towns as well. But during the long pause in the war (1646-1647), it was the Army troops, disciplined and battle-hardened, and influenced by the Levellers, who had developed a new view of themselves as a collective social group of consequence. And they would not just stand idly by and let go of all they had so painfully won.
1 “Past v. Present,” London Review of Books
2 “A Review of Guizot’s Book ‘Why Has the English Revolution Been Successful?,’” in Marx and Engels On Britain, 347
3 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 691
4 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 314, 686-688
5 Hibbard, “Early Stuart Catholicism,” 31; Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution,” 43
6 Hill, World, 153
7 Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” 35-36
8 Manning, “The Godly People,” 106
9 Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” 23, 27; World, 154
10 Hill, “Henrician Reformation,” 44
11 Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” 32-33
12 Lindley, Civil War London, 404
13 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 279
14 The Federalist Papers #29, #46 (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), 185, 299
15 Trotsky, “Two Traditions: The Great Rebellion and Chartism,” 112
16 Harris, “Revisiting the Causes of the English Civil War,” 620
17 Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 215-216, 227, 228-229; “What Does the English Revolution Mean?,” 626. This theory, known as “court vs. country,” is most closely associated with Perez Zagorin. See, for example, his “The Court and the Country: A Note on Political Terminology in the Earlier Seventeenth Century,” The English Historical Review 77, no. 303 (April 1962), https://www.jstor.org/stable/561547 Accessed July 15, 2019
18 Baskerville, “Puritans, Revisionists, and the English Revolution,” 152-153; Zaller, “What Does the English Revolution Mean?,” 628-629; Hirst, “Revisionisms and Early Stuart Studies,” 611-612
19 Zaller, “What Does the English Revolution Mean?,” 629-630
20 Gardiner, Great Civil War Vol. I, 31
21 Lake, “From Revisionist to Royalist History,” 659
22 Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, “Introduction: after Revisionism,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England, eds. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman Group, 1989), 3
23 Hill, “Historians on the Rise of British Capitalism,” 309
24 Cust and Hughes, “Introduction: after Revisionism,” 14-15
25 The essays in The Journal of Modern History 49, no. 4 (December 1977) included: James E. Farnell, “The Social and Intellectual Basis of London’s Role in the English Civil Wars,” http://www.jstor.org/stable/1875624 Accessed November 30, 2016; Paul Christianson, “The Peers, the People, and Parliamentary Management in the First Six Months of the Long Parliament,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/1875621 Accessed February 25, 2019; Mark Kishlansky, “The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament,” http://www.jstor.org/stable/1875623 Accessed November 18, 2016; John K. Gruenfelder, “The Electoral Patronage of Sir Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1614-1640,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/1875620 Accessed March 30, 2019; Clayton Roberts, “The Earl of Bedford and the Coming of the English Revolution,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/1875622 Accessed March 30, 2019
26 Hirst, “Unanimity in the Commons,” 52
27 Hirst, “Unanimity in the Commons,” 62
28 Hexter, “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England,” 24. On Farnell, see also Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 105-107
29 Hexter, “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England,” 29-30. Hexter is here referring to a similar essay by Paul Christianson, “The Causes of the English Revolution: A Reappraisal,” Journal of British Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 1976), https://www.jstor.org/stable/175132 Accessed May 2, 2019
30 Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 220
31 Rabb, “The Role of the Commons,” 62
32 Rabb, “The Role of the Commons,” 71
33 Rabb, “The Role of the Commons,” 75, 76
34 “Since the appearance of Manning’s work [The English People and the English Revolution], even historians like Fletcher, committed to a largely elite perspective on the origins of the English Revolution, have been compelled to find a place for the people in the Revolution.” Sharp, “The Place of the People in the English Revolution,” 96
35 Jack A. Goldstone, “Capitalist Origins of the English Revolution: Chasing a Chimera,” Theory and Society 12, no. 2 (March 1983): 145, https://www.jstor.org/stable/657429 Accessed 4 April 2020
36 Zaller, “What Does the English Revolution Mean?,” 621
37 For Burroughs, see the section in Chapter 15, “Program and tactics of the radical Independents.”
38 Wootton, “The Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3,” 664, 668; Manning, English People, 242-243
39 “Englands Complaint to Jesus Christ against the Bishops Canons,” quoted in Como, “Secret Printing,” 65
40 Como, “Secret Printing,” 38, 54, 69-70, 74, 82
41 Como, “Secret Printing,” 75
42 Como, “Secret Printing,” 78
43 Lake, “From Revisionist to Royalist History,” 660. Lake’s essay traces contradictions between the earlier and later writings of prominent Revisionists.
44 Lake, “From Revisionist to Royalist History,” 661
45 Quoted in Roy, “A Cavalier View of London,” 168-169
46 Mark Kishlansky, “Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” Past & Present, no. 189 (November 2005), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600749 Accessed 8 November 2016; Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603-1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq151.1 Accessed May 14, 2020
47 Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
48 Cressy, “The Blindness of Charles I,” 655
49 Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” 29
50 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 279
51 “He [Charles] arrived at York with only thirty-nine gentlemen and seventeen guards.” Cressy, “Revolutionary England 1640-1642,” 35
52 Stephen Porter, “Introduction,” in London and the Civil War, ed. Stephen Porter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 2-3
53 Hill, Century, 103; Cressy, England on Edge, 394; Lindley, Civil War London, 123
54 Trinterud, “William Haller,” 35
55 Hexter, King Pym, 20
56 Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 110
57 Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 231
58 Hirst, “Parliament, Law and War in the 1620s,” 456
59 Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 106
60 Engels, Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 389
61 Hill, Reformation, 146-148; “Land in the English Revolution,” 28-29
62 Anderson, Absolutist State, 102, 104-106, 111.
63 Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 226
64 Hill, Reformation, 107-108
65 Hill, 1640, 56-57
66 Schwoerer, “the Militia Controversy,” 45
67 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 394
68 Johnson, “Disintegration of the Parliamentarian War Effort,” 160-161; Porter, “Impact of the Civil War Upon London,” 175
69 G. E. Aylmer, “London’s Revolution,” The Guardian, 28 April 1961, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/londons-revolution/docview/184772837/se-2? Accessed August 25, 2020
70 Manning, English People, 244-245
71 Nagel, “The Militia of London,” 72
72 Marx, “A Review of Guizot’s Book,” 348-349
73 George, “The Making of the English Bourgeoisie,” 385-391
74 Ashton, “The Civil War and the Class Struggle,” 105
75 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 373
76 Tyacke, “Revolutionary Puritanism,” 767