7) ENGLAND AND THE EARLY STUARTS (1603-1640)

The citizenry of the towns used money as a carpenter uses his plane: as a tool to level political inequality. Wherever a personal relationship was replaced by a monetary relationship, a rendering of goods by a rendering of money, that was the place where a bourgeois pattern took the place of a feudal pattern.

~Frederick Engels1

James I and VI

In 1603 James VI of Scotland (son of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots) came to the throne of England as James I. For the first time in history the two nations were subject to the same ruler, but otherwise remained entirely separate. This odd situation would have momentous political consequences later in the century.

“By 1600 gentlemen, new and old, occupied a far greater proportion of the land of England than in 1530 — to the disadvantage of crown, church, aristocracy [nobility] and peasantry alike.”2 The landed gentry in England, staunchly Protestant, was by now generally, if conservatively, influenced by Puritanism; Parliament, for the first time, refused to sit on Sundays.3 “…the Puritan group in the House of Commons made persistent efforts to secure the passage of legislation aimed at punishing such evils as swearing, drunkenness and adultery.”4 Even in 1586, London aldermen were directed to select men for the Trained Bands from “householders and able-bodied children and servants ‘who openly profess and show themselves to love the Gospel and hate Popery’…”5 There were early hopes that the new king would reform the church, and limit or eliminate the influence of the bishops. James recognized, however, that the established church was an essential prop of the monarchy: not for nothing were kings the anointed of God. He had previously contended with the democratic aspirations of the Scottish Reformation, and promoted the introduction of bishops into the Presbyterian church structure there. “No bishops, no king” was his succinct, and prophetic, reply to reformers.6

The Scottish king was nevertheless, much like the English gentry, a conservative Calvinist. He was opposed to both Puritanism (especially Presbyterianism) and Catholicism.7

James…was prepared to give favour and preferment to anti-Calvinists and to allow a range of theological opinion within the establishment of the church. But he did not want open theological debate or dispute, and in order to avoid it he imposed silence on the anti-Calvinists, while at the same time distancing himself from the excesses of hyper-Calvinism. … James had no desire to sponsor an extreme Calvinist heresy hunt.8

As a practical matter, the Church was thus largely kept as Elizabeth had left it, with multiple tendencies smothered under a pretended uniformity.

Christopher Hill comments that it took the Tudors 100 years to subdue the aristocracy. Nonetheless, the nobility was still the linchpin that counterbalanced the monarchy. “…the landed class had won a position rare in Europe…virtually independent of a [central] government…”9 Only now, the nobles’ power “was no longer measured principally by the number of their followers, the men who would fight for them: it was determined by their wealth.”10 Landowners, even if ennobled, had long since been forced to adapt to the bourgeois manner of conducting business, and by 1600 the titled peers were mostly no longer a military caste with private armies of thugs at their command.11 The Parliament of 1628 repealed most (Tudor) laws that regulated or limited the nobles’ military retainers as obsolete.12 But in exchange for a reduction in their power, and the frightened deference it had elicited, they all the more fiercely defended their privileges.13 Whereas Elizabeth had granted only a handful of new titles, James was so prodigious in bestowing or, worse, selling titles, that nobles and knights felt their prestige injured.14 James, from a much less developed country closer to its feudal past than England, was infuriated that he had to put up with a semi-independent Parliament and judiciary.

“So long as his bishops were ‘my bishops,’ his judges were ‘my judges’ and his parliament was ‘my parliament,’” he was happy to engage in lengthy, good-natured debate with them; but he was allergic to any suggestion that they enjoyed a standing separate from the ultimate will of the crown.15

A 1610 work in Latin argued that “men are not by nature born free. On the contrary, the relationship of subjects to their rulers is equivalent to that of children to their parents. Sovereignty is indivisible, and under a monarchy parliaments are merely consultative bodies.” James’ work, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, published in England in 1603, contained an “unequivocal assertion of royal absolutism…”16

The limitations on the crown did not mean it was feeble. “It was the reverse, for these circumstances preserved the supremacy of the aristocratic society in which the monarchy was embedded and from which it drew its strength.”17 The “King in Parliament” was the theoretical formulation that codified the unsteady relationship between the two wings of the outmoded feudal ruling class, neither of whom could yet do without the other. In the absence of a parliament, the monarch’s will was law. Only he could bring Parliament into being, and he could dismiss it any time. He could also veto any measure it passed. The monarch’s prerogatives were absolute and sacrosanct, his authority dominant, his person the repository of the nation’s sovereignty, its unifying symbol, the apex of church and state.

The king really ruled; he was the ultimate responsible party. Yet the king could do no wrong: more than a legal fiction, it was the article of faith on which the polity rested. To remove or even question it was virtually an act of rebellion.18

In the face of this defining supremacy, the traditional subordination of Parliament within the rigid feudal hierarchy made it particularly difficult for gentry MPs to legitimate their criticisms. As the Earl of Manchester, head of a Parliamentary army, expressed it in 1644, “If we beat the King ninety and nine times yet he is King still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.” To which Oliver Cromwell famously replied, “My Lord, if this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter.”19

The English gentry, an anomalous class

The landholding knights and squires who populated the House of Commons constituted the lower nobility;20 legally commoners, they were nonetheless highly privileged ones.

All that the gentry had in common was their gentility, their status as gentlemen. But, although this status was not based on the size of income, it was founded on the source of income, that it came from land and not from trade or industry.21

They were thus an intermediate class, but not a homogeneous one, as their incomes could range anywhere from £50 to £10,000 per year.22 Lower gentry ran the local affairs of the parish, higher gentry those of the county. The former served as undersheriffs or other assisting officials, and grand jurors; the latter were sheriffs, Justices of the Peace (JPs) or judges. The highest of these were appointed Lords Lieutenant and deputies by the king, or might even be given an office at Court.23 Enforcement of the crown’s policies was entirely dependent on these men (backed up by church courts and officials).

The economic changes in Elizabethan England caused major social shifts that were beginning to solidify and become more visible under the Stuarts. The first decades of the 17th century saw a continuation of the 16th-century inflation, which adversely affected aristocrats whose lands were occupied by copyholders on long leases at low rents. To preserve their idle livings the landlords needed to increase their incomes. Peers and greater gentry, who were used to sumptuous living, had an almost unlimited ability to obtain loans from “the great London aldermen and merchant financiers on the security of aristocratic mortgages, statutes, and bonds,”24 and nobles were immune to arrest for non-payment of debts.25 Some of the nobility invested in overseas trade,26 urban building,27 mining and industrial ventures, but they were also greatly concerned to preserve their social position and privileges. They “sought to indirectly profit”28 from industrial production, and usually kept their distance from any direct involvement.29

Active personal occupation in a trade or profession was generally thought to be humiliating. The man of business was inferior to the gentleman of leisure who lived off his rents. Retail trade was always degrading, and overseas trade only a respectable occupation for a son and heir if pursued as a hobby rather than as a profession.30

“It was perfectly in order for Sir Percival Willoughby to own ships and transport his coal down the Trent to Lincolnshire, but disreputable to buy corn there to provide a return freight for resale in Nottingham.”31 The nobility and higher gentry were thus resistant to the steady distortions capitalist markets introduced which undermined their medieval social standing, and which characterized the bourgeois mode of living. The price pinch was especially felt by those below the top rung of gentry, who had less stake in rank, and therefore were more willing to accept an active managerial role. Like the nobility, the gentry had been selling the agricultural produce of their estates at market for well over a century, and those with capital or the ability to borrow it searched for metals to mine, or developed other industries (such as iron or lead works) on their land.32 A variety of methods provided opportunities to improve their holdings: consolidation or expansion of lands, enclosures of commons and waste (unused) lands, modernizations, drainage, new crops and techniques, and clearing forests, as well as rack rents, short leases, calculated marriages33 and other means. But the lesser men, more in need, were often better placed to take advantage.

Generally it was the larger and more scattered estates which proved the most difficult to reorganize; the medium-sized land-owner alone had both the personal interest and the technical possibility of supervising all his estates. The larger owners, and the less efficient, those who had failed to adapt themselves in time, trailed further and further behind, dragging on from hand to mouth on “unimproved” estates, heavily mortgaged and involved in lawsuits, miserably unfit but surviving.34

Improving gentlemen were the most sensitive to the crown’s prerogative powers, which kept property ownership insecure and individual freedom of action (i.e., their own) restricted. This gave them much in common with yeomen, domestic manufacturers, artisans, and merchants:

The cry of property in danger united a wide movement behind the nobility and gentry, not only the urban middle class, but the small producers in town and country, the mass of the people. … No longer was the idea of property merely a defence of the old order but a challenge to that order — a demand to free the small producers from the exploitation of the existing system. This merged with the middle class hostility to government interference with economic activities and their demand for the removal of restrictions on production. It further embraced…a régime of economic freedom which would give a free hand to landlords.35

Importantly, the landlords’ freedom to carry out enclosures without interference, as both the Tudors and Stuarts (for different reasons) had made obstructive, but largely ineffective, efforts to curb the practice.36 Parliament passed 11 Acts against enclosure between 1489 and 1624,37 but “…the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain.”38 Especially under Charles I, fining for enclosure allowed the crown to pose (unsuccessfully) as friend to the peasantry, while (successfully) irritating the gentry. Meanwhile, the latter “continued to exploit its tenantry through manor courts…”39

The freezing reception given by the Long Parliament to petitions from the peasants for the redress of agrarian grievances is hardly surprising, when it is remembered that one in every two of the members returned, up to the end of 1640, for the five Midland Counties which were the disturbed area of the day, either themselves had been recently fined for depopulation [enclosure] or belonged to families which had been.40

The pace of enclosure would pick up after the Civil War when government interference ceased.41 But the progress of enclosure, which eventually converted the aristocracy to proprietary capitalist farmers and the peasantry to proletarians, nevertheless was slow.42 “Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the class of farmers.”43 The use of enclosure for economic reasons that began in the late 15th century would last to the end of the 18th century.44

Yeomen, the largest of whom might be as wealthy as some of the lower or even middle gentry by 1640,45 were working, capitalist farmers not idle socialites or remote investors. They enjoyed no legal privileges, so had no personal attachment to the feudal order. Like larger yeomen, gentry might also directly employ agricultural labor on their estates, or lease land directly where they were able to (e.g., to expanding yeomen or investors), further manifesting themselves as rural capitalists. But feudal land tenures operated upwards as well as downwards: directly or indirectly “‘…most of the great families of the nation were tenants of the crown…’”46 The complex and overlapping tenures acted as a drag on land transfers.

Not until after the First Civil War in 1646 would Parliament do away with feudal tenures (reiterated in 1656 and 1660), giving the aristocracy “absolute ownership of their estates,”47 but leaving them in place for the copyholders who “remain[ed] in abject dependence on their landlords…”48 Feudal fees such as “…reliefs, arbitrary fines, merchets, heriots and other payments due from tenants to their lords were left intact and explicitly confirmed” by legislation in the 1640s and 1650s.49 The replacement of customary tenures with capitalist leases would not become decisive until the second half of the 17th century, since “The improving landlord was not typical before 1660.”50 Those gentry who did embrace the new Puritan emphasis on thrift and capitalist accumulation did not therefore accept any idea of doing physical labor themselves. Outward displays of conspicuous wealth, such as lavish feasting or elegant clothing, fell out of favor with many gentry by the early 17th century, but they did not abandon their commitment to their feudal status as privileged idlers. They still regarded themselves as the natural rulers in the countryside. Anachronistic and antagonistic personal relations continued to exist as part of the tenant-landlord relationship for as long as copyhold remained in force, and were keenly felt by the peasants as demonstrated by their actions in the lead-up to the Civil War.51

Copyhold tenants were “‘the body of the kingdom’” according to a Buckinghamshire petition to General Fairfax at the end of the Civil War.52 The greater part of the aristocracy whose tenants still maintained their rights in the decades before the Civil War were therefore in a highly peculiar position: their participation in the swelling money economy habituated them to business and finance, yet they still retained a conflictive status vis-à–vis the peasantry. As landlords, the gentry subordinated tenants (whom they called “their people”) through their feudal rank and legal power over them.53 This dual role of the gentry came from having a foot in each of two incompatible social systems, feudalism and capitalism, which could not indefinitely coexist.

Social consequences of growth in the capitalist economy

By the time of James’ ascension it was an article of faith in England “that commerce, shipping and manufactures were the El Dorado of the future…” To command the sea was to command the world. This conviction, widely accepted in the ruling class, only strengthened as the 17th century proceeded.54 It is difficult to overstate the degree to which London, with its busy port and a population of around 200,000 in 1600, (nearly ten times its nearest competitors), economically dominated the country.55 “Consumption of corn in London is estimated to have grown by 230 per cent between 1605 and 1661… Grain imports to London from three north-eastern counties rose fourteen times in the sixty years before the civil war.”56 The city’s population would almost double again by 1642.57

The need to feed London’s growing population stimulated the commercial expansion and improvement of agriculture, as well as industry.58 This growing market, as well as the steady inflation, meant agricultural prices rose continuously in the late 16th and early 17th centuries to the benefit of the peasantry.59 But it was a detriment to gentlemen who let their lands to copyhold tenants at low rents for long periods. Landlords, in order to take the agricultural profits for themselves, retaliated through the use of enclosures, rack-rents (large increases), short leases, and the revival of every obsolete feudal tax they could find, supported by new legal claims, interpretations, and laws.60 Through these methods they forced tenants off the land, and caused an immense redistribution of wealth to the landowning class, including the crown.61

Many dispossessed tenants took to the forests to live semi-legally as cottagers, but most migrated to the edges of villages and towns, especially London, where they constituted a pool of desperately poor casual labor.62 In 1602 a judge thought that some 15% of London’s population was unemployed; it may well have been higher.63 A self-perpetuating cycle was set in motion as capitalist market relations expanded in the countryside, and continued virtually unchecked through the 17th century.64 By the mid-18th century the small peasantry and yeomanry had mostly disappeared,65 and mass vagabondage became the most pressing social problem in England.

In pastoral areas where the chief occupation was raising livestock, farmers or their wives could earn extra money by weaving cloth at home and selling it to local traders on a weekly basis. Domestic manufacture of this sort was the predominant norm for decades.66 After 1600 some rural parts, like the West Riding in Yorkshire, parts of East Anglia, and Worcestershire in the west Midlands, became centers of cloth and clothing manufacture.67 Smallholders, who could only engage in subsistence farming and who might have one or two animals they grazed on the common land, would hire themselves out to larger yeomen or find other by-employment to supplement their incomes. This was enough to keep them from qualifying as poor, at least until enclosure doomed them.68

Journeymen worked for wages; as skilled craftsmen who had completed apprenticeships they were an intermediate stratum. Few, however, had or could obtain the capital to set themselves up as masters in their own workshops. They therefore had to go wherever they could find work — part of the mobile “masterless men.”69 Those with no land and no skill were forced to work for wages either as agricultural labor, which was often seasonal, or in industry, mining for coal, iron, or copper, or making steel. Dependence on wages alone, which were set by JPs,70 was considered no more than slavery.

The merchant princes controlled the town governments as their private fiefs through self-perpetuating oligarchies, most especially London. They served as bankers to the aristocrats who were often indebted to them for large sums.

As the chief market for the larger transactions by mortgage and sale in real estate, London had its thumb on a considerable section of the landed gentry. The whole increasing mass of Government financial business, with its formidable reactions on public revenues and private fortunes, was virtually its monopoly.71

What first strikes the eye is the very high degree of specialization among a restricted circle of great London merchants, men who first made their money in overseas or retail trading and who then turned to the money-lending business. The most favourably placed for this business were the leading mercers, silkmen, jewelers, and goldsmiths…drawn into money-lending between 1580 and 1620.72

Above all, the close financial connection between the monarchy and the London company merchants made each dependent on the other. The overseas merchants derived their monopoly privileges from the king and enforced his edicts, while they supported him financially through customs duties, loans and gifts.73 James consulted them, even if reluctantly, on economic matters which, as business men, they were professionally able to assess. Moreover, they possessed liquid commercial capital which could easily be moved from one area of investment to another, unlike the aristocracy whose wealth derived mainly from land.74 Such economic mobility by the haute bourgeoisie cut across normal feudal social divisions, just as the movement of the dispossessed in the countryside did.

The merchants had little formal power but their economic interests closely interlocked with those of the landed classes, thanks to the dependence of the price of land on the price of wool, in turn dependent on the cloth export trade. The maintenance of this trade was also of vital concern to the government, since a slump not only created a threat to social stability in the clothing areas due to unemployment, but also reduced government revenue from the customs. … As a result, foreign, military, and economic policies were increasingly conducted with an eye to the interests, and with the advice, of this merchant elite.75

As previously described, England’s economy was primarily capitalist by the time of James’ ascension. This is not to say that its continued development could not have been arrested or collapsed as, for example, happened to the Italian statelets.76 The English economy had yet to solve numerous issues, but a critical precondition for its success — the expansion to a world economy — already existed.77 There is no other meaning to categorizing this period the “early modern era,” as historians commonly do, than the penetration of agrarian societies by capitalist market relations through urbanized commerce, finance, and manufacture. The only variations are the rate at which this process proceeded, and the uneven extent of its progress at any given time in different geographic areas.

Emanating out from London, the south and east of England were much more advanced than the north and west. Nonetheless by 1640, these more backward regions contained pockets of manufacturing towns. Many of these were cloth and clothing centers, such as the West Riding in Yorkshire. The towns and the areas around them largely supported Parliament in the Civil War; the “darker” parts would follow the king.

In 1603, however, the major European powers were financially exhausted. Spain declared bankruptcy in 1557, 1575 and 1596, and in 1607 declared a moratorium.78 France was in no better shape after 36 years of internal religious war, and Elizabeth left debts of £400,000, nearly twice what she had inherited.79 Peace and prosperity (that is to say, trade) became the order of the day, and within a year James signed a peace treaty with Spain. Over the next few years, a series of bilateral trade treaties were signed between various countries of Europe, including one between France and the Ottoman Empire. In 1609 a twelve-year truce was declared between Spain and the United Netherlands.80 During the first decade and a half of James’ rule, there was peace in Europe and commercial trade and production did indeed boom, much to England’s benefit.81

But the conflicts of early Stuart England were aggravated by the fact that the world of commerce and finance was interpenetrated by privilege and by legal prohibition — by patents and monopolies, companies and licences, guaranteed markets and favoured relationships.82

And by the fact that James I was “one of the most extravagant kings ever to occupy” the throne.83

A major source of friction had existed since the 16th century in the cloth industry where the Merchant Adventurers had been granted substantial supervisory authority over the cloth manufacturers. (Similar conflicts existed in other segments of the economy where noble courtiers had been granted monopoly licenses or patents.)84 Laws regulating the quality of broadcloth with great specificity were resented by the manufacturers, especially as mechanical improvements were banned by the government. Any dip in the Adventurers’ exports or profits was blamed on the craftsmen for producing poor quality goods.85 Clothiers responded by blaming high taxes and customs duties for low profits, and market depressions on the monopoly. They also attacked the necessity of transporting goods to London when provincial ports lay closer to the sources, a complaint which would be included in the Grand Remonstrance in 1641.86

The monopolists limited the number of merchants who could buy cloth in England and sell it abroad to between 20 and 30 investors,87 and set the prices and quantities of purchases to keep their costs low and profits high. This absence of competition kept down the volume of product that could be sold. The manufacturers, on the other hand, wanted to increase their volume of output, and believed competition among buyers would increase their prices. For obvious reasons they had the sympathy of smaller domestic traders who were also excluded from the company. The gentry too were unhappy with the siphoning of wealth from their local areas to the great merchants in London. First attempted in 1604,88 the Parliaments of the early 1620s finally got the regulations significantly liberalized in favor of free trade, but this would be reversed in the 1630s by Charles I’s government.89

The parliamentary gentlemen must have thought it was in their own interest: between 1575 and 1630, “Almost half of all the gentry who invested in trade also sat in Parliament, and most of them attended the Commons before they joined a company.”90 That aristocrats invested in trade or manufacture did not make them bourgeois; they remained privileged landowners, which their rank depended on in the existing social system. What it did do was to substantially align their economic and political interests with those of the bourgeoisie, especially its well-to–do middle layers who favored free trade and opposed arbitrary government.

Early political conflicts

In 1606 a court held that James had the legal right to raise impositions, special customs duties on trade, on his own authority. At the next Parliament in 1610, the House of Commons responded that, under the common law, “…English subjects had ‘such a propriety’ in their goods ‘as may not without their consent be altered and charged.’” Said an MP, “‘If…their lands and goods be any way in the king’s absolute power to be taken from them, then they are…little better than the king’s bondmen.’”91 Unparliamentary taxation and property rights would be a central bone of contention between the Commons and the crown right up to the revolution in London in 1641-1642.

The dominant role of the king in the state was obvious to all.

In 1610, when the members denounced the extravagance of his Scottish favorites, James was with difficulty restrained from arresting some of them. After he dissolved Parliament in 1614, he was not restrained. He jailed four members, including one who made unfriendly mention of courtiers who were “spaniels to the King and wolves to the people.” In 1621, after adjournment, James jailed the two most effective members of the House, Sir Edward Coke, a privy councillor, and Sir Robert Phelips.92

John Pym, the step-son of a knight and an oppositionist, was himself subjected to house arrest following the Parliament of 1621.93

James’ peace policy had the benefit of promoting “social order and monarchical legitimacy in a world threatened by Dutch and Presbyterian republicanism.” The extreme indebtedness of the state meant there was no money to conduct a war unless Parliament agreed to provide funds, which it would not do unless James made concessions. Instead, James spent years maneuvering for a “Spanish match,” marriage between Prince Charles and the royal Infanta, in the hopes of reaping a munificent dowry. The policy provoked much opposition among the nobles and gentry, as it necessarily implied increased tolerance for Catholic recusants. This added religious polarization of the English ruling class to the already existing political differences.94

Two important events occurred in 1618. A Protestant party of Hussites (political descendants of Jan Hus) led a successful revolt in Bohemia against the new Catholic Hapsburg king, Ferdinand II. They chose instead Frederick V, Protestant Elector of the Palatine in Germany, who accepted. The rebellion kicked off the highly destructive Thirty Years’ War. Frederick happened to be James I’s son-in-law, placing James in an embarrassing position with the Hapsburg rulers of Spain.

Puritans on the Privy Council, in Parliament, and the Church of England hierarchy enlisted Calvinist clergy and London citizens to raise money for the defense of the Palatinate.95 Clergymen were encouraged to attack the ungodly policies of the government, and many did so. The government retaliated through repressive measures against dissent, including arrests of a number of Puritan ministers, while simultaneously suspending the penal laws against Catholics. James’ apparent hard turn against Calvinists in the Church threatened the acceptance of multiple viewpoints within English Protestantism that had existed up to this time.96

The Spanish match and the drive towards war with Spain served to overturn the careful balance of the mid-Jacobean period. It served to politicize once again differences of religious opinion by giving them a direct relevance to policy options now of crucial interest to the king. The public agitation against the Spanish match…served to reawaken in James his latent fear of a populist Puritanism.97

James refused to lead a war for the “Protestant Cause,” deluding himself that diplomacy could be used to defend his son-in-law’s position, but Frederick was badly defeated by the Spanish army. During the same time Louis XIII was pressing a campaign against the Huguenots (French Protestants), and the truce between Spain and the United Provinces (Holland) was expiring.98

Also in 1618, England’s cloth trade was hit by depression: this was partly due to overproduction, but also to saturation of European demand, which beset Dutch, Flemish and Italian textile trades as well. The outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War made Continental markets inaccessible.99 With the Privy Council, Parliament and the Church all split over religious and political issues, a debate on foreign policy ensued. Archbishop Abbot in 1619 had openly opposed the Spanish match, and pronounced the Bohemian Revolution the beginning of the final struggle against the Antichrist in Rome. James, by contrast, “wrote to the pope as ‘his holy father’ to request his cooperation in the restoration of European peace.”100 In 1621, a new Parliament was called. James’ policy of seeking an alliance with Spain had come to nothing due to the monkey wrench of Frederick, and the impossibility of reconciling the various factions in both governments. He nonetheless continued to pursue it.101

A “Blue Water” program of war on Spanish shipping was presented in Parliament as a diversionary strategy toward saving the Palatinate for Protestantism (and thereby Frederick, whom James wished to help). This would open the West Indies to English shipping, and relieve Spanish pressure on Bohemia and other parts on the Continent, while providing financing (via plunder) for more military actions. James adamantly opposed war with Spain or any action which might provoke it. As a compromise, John Pym got a bill passed providing some money (“a gift”) for defense of the realm, but less than full financial support until such time as England declared war on Spain.102

Negotiations for the Spanish match, broken off in 1618, resumed in the years 1620-1623. During the interval the Earl of Warwick set up a small colony in Guiana (Guyana) as a base to privateer against the Spanish in the Caribbean. The resumption of negotiations forced him to give this up. Nathaniel Rich, the earl’s kinsman, became a leader in the 1621 Parliament for an international Protestant alliance emulating the one among Catholic countries, and he proposed that it should be confirmed by an act of Parliament. Such a direct intervention into foreign affairs would have been a novelty, certain to outrage the king. It gained no support.103

Instead, the Commons voted on 3 December 1621 to petition James “to declare war for the defense of the Protestant religion, to employ a diversionary strategy for the restoration of the Palatinate, to forge an international Protestant alliance, and to marry Charles to a Protestant princess.” James promptly dismissed Parliament.104 This was essentially the first bid for greater power in the government by the gentry-Puritan opposition. It combined an appeal for Protestantism with a viable program to restore England’s military power in international affairs. Three years later, with a new Parliament and the Spanish match now a complete fiasco,105 James reluctantly acceded to readying the country for war, and “assisting” the Low Countries as the price of financial support to the crown. A total of some £300,000 was allocated for a war in defense of the Palatinate, but Parliament put restrictions on what the money could be used for. To make sure, they entrusted it to their own appointed commissioners to administer.106 James also approved a Parliamentary petition to enforce the recusancy laws against Catholics for the same reason. However, a new dispute over religion broke out when an Arminian royal chaplain, Richard Montagu, published an openly anti-Calvinist pamphlet, meant to propagate James’ religious views and support him politically in the on-going public debate.107 Pym investigated and the Commons sent a protest petition to Archbishop Abbot directly, bypassing the House of Lords. James, in retaliation, arrested two East Anglian Puritan ministers, and defended the repressive Bishop of Norwich (a post later held by Montagu) against the Commons’ attacks. He then began to back away from war with Spain.108

England made only one half-hearted effort, by land, to defend the Palatinate during 1624-1625. James ordered the force to refrain from attacking Spanish troops, rendering it all but useless.109

Charles I, Parliament and the Church

Early in 1625, James suddenly died. Charles immediately began seeking loans in part to pay debts left by his father’s profligacy. To raise new loans from the City he was forced to turn “over to them a vast quantity of crown lands” as security.110 He married a French Catholic princess shortly thereafter, requiring him to break his previous promise to intensify enforcement of anti-Catholic laws against recusants in England. The dynastic alliance with France eliminated any possibility of English help for the Huguenots, who suffered renewed repression from Louis XIII as a result.111

Almost as quickly, confrontations occurred between Parliament and the new king over religion, foreign policy and his demands for money. During the 1620s “…the Crown had in fact alarmingly little business that it wanted done in Parliament, other than obtaining money…”112 Charles in particular “measure[d] the goodness of Parliaments by the degree of their subservience to him…”113 The new king appointed Sir Edward Coke, Sir Robert Phelips and other opposition figures to minor posts which prevented them from standing for election in 1626. Before the Parliament had adjourned he arrested two sitting members.114

Similar to 1621, the Commons and the Privy Council discussed setting up a West India Company to be financed privately, but under Parliament’s direction, to attack Spanish shipping. “In practice, the proposed company would have been beyond the reach of royal authority and English foreign policy would have been partly in its [Parliament’s] hands.”115 Like James, Charles rejected the Blue Water strategy to attack Spanish shipping. He was not helped by an ignoble defeat at Cadiz organized by Buckingham in 1625, or the looming prospect of war with France. Members of Parliament were alienated by Charles’ defense of his chaplain, the same Richard Montagu who had served James, and who had been held in contempt by the Commons for his anti-Calvinist pamphlet. Charles refused to repudiate his aide or Arminianism. The 1626 Parliament was called to fund armies for war. The Commons again offered money to Charles in exchange for the Duke of Buckingham’s ouster as chief minister, and Parliament’s review to stabilize the king’s finances.116

The Earl of Warwick (who would provide many positions to Puritan clergymen in the 1630s)117 and Viscount Saye requested a conference be held to debate religious doctrine. “Puritans assumed correctly that a rapprochement with Roman Catholicism was involved here and that they were likely to be the losers.”118 Not only did the York House Conference bring no agreement, it only demonstrated the royal government’s commitment to Arminianism, solidifying the parliamentary opposition to a greater extent.119 Charles consented to the Commons investigation of Buckingham, but upon their impeachment of him the king dismissed Parliament before it had voted him any money to live on and run his court.120

The king then made matters far worse by trying to bully the counties for a so-called “free gift” of money already denied him by Parliament, provoking opposition across the land. The crown next pressured London and the counties for the infamous forced loan early in 1627.

The [London] Court of Aldermen agreed to subscribe to the loan personally and submit lists of those men in their wards who were prepared to contribute and those who refused. This led to a demonstration of protest by parliamentary puritans who covered the City with placards denouncing the Guildhall as the “Yield-all.”121

Twenty gentlemen, sixteen of them knights, and nearly all future members of the Long Parliament, refused to pay and were imprisoned. In the Five Knights Case, argued near the end of 1627, gentlemen sought a writ of habeas corpus for release from prison. A few months later the court “reaffirmed the principle laid down in 1591, that the king had the right to commit men to prison without cause shown.”122

In London, the installment levied for 1628 of £120,000, was met by extensive opposition from some of the livery companies who were its first targets.

Prominent members of the Vintners’ Company, twenty or thirty members of the Saddlers’, including the Master and Wardens, and the officers of the Founders’, Glaziers’, Plumbers’, and Joiners’ Companies, were committed to Newgate “for not having used their best endeavours” in promoting the loan.123

The issue played a significant role in the parliamentary elections later that year:

…in the shires and large boroughs, at least, a crucial determinant was often a candidate’s response to the forced loan. …it was widely regarded as a crucial test of an individual’s ultimate loyalties. … Several of the regular knights of the shire were themselves loan refusers, and alongside these there were several refusers being elected for the first and only time.124

Charles’ resort (not for the last time) to a forced loan and unauthorized taxes was meant to pay for the war with Spain. But as relations worsened with France, new negotiations with Spain resulted in even greater favoritism being shown to anti-Calvinist Arminians. They “alienated the country further when they preached that Englishmen must comply with Charles’ attempt to collect a loan in 1626 or be damned for disobedience.”125 Arminian clergy rejected the view that the pope was Antichrist and accepted Catholicism as a legitimate religion. “The notion that kings might tax without consent was underpinned by the contention that the monarch is entrusted by God alone to govern the country.”126

In July 1626 Charles “effectively outlawed Calvinist teaching on a national basis.” Buckingham had become Chancellor of Cambridge, putting him in charge at one of only two universities turning out authorized ministers and theologians. Archbishop Abbot was stripped of his powers, and William Laud and other Arminians were promoted to the Privy Council in 1627. Pro-absolutist propaganda in sermons and pamphlets followed forthwith.127 The following year Laud was made Bishop of London.

The financial problems of both James and Charles were to no small extent due to the opulent courts they kept. “By the end of the 1630s the queen and the royal children had almost 400 servants.”128 Sent to London as a diplomat in 1629 (where Charles prevailed on him to paint a glorification of monarchy on the ceiling of the palace Banqueting House), Peter Paul Reubens wrote:

“The first thing to be noted is the fact that all the leading nobles live on a sumptuous scale and spend money lavishly, so that the majority of them are hopelessly in debt. … Splendour and liberality are of primary consideration at this Court.”129 [Ellipsis in original]

To reforming MPs and militant Puritans alike, such profligacy was irrational, and came at the expense of the state, not just in cost, but in prestige and influence abroad. Such wasteful ostentation, so characteristic of Catholicism, was a dangerous affront to those who championed thrift, investment and accumulation of wealth, backed up by sincere religious feeling.

Both James and Charles showed that…their sympathies were wholly with the privileged, provided that they exercised their power judiciously. … What was worse was that in a period of hardship and depression, the closed bodies appeared to become tighter and even more oppressive…130

The early Stuart kings disputed with, and then dismissed, Parliaments which sought to elicit reforms or policy changes from them in exchange for money. This was no more than the customs farmers, private merchants contracted by the crown to collect duties on overseas trade, did with far less justification.131 From the late 16th century on, the incomes from the estates of large landholders were mostly declining due to inflation, forcing many, including the monarchy which was the largest, to sell land.132 This put them in a losing struggle with bourgeois and improving aristocratic elements, whose continuously growing wealth led them to demand greater political power in the state.133

The spread of opposition

Almost from the time of Charles’ accession, London was in a state of “growing turbulence and defiance of authority.”134 Economic depression, threats of war, the crown’s high-handed actions to raise money, and open friendliness to Catholic or semi-Catholic adherents, made MPs in particular aware of the possibility of popular rebellion.135 In 1626, 300 sailors from the bungled attack on Spain broke into the house of the Treasurer of the Navy demanding to be paid. Even more bitter demonstrations broke out against the Duke of Buckingham; one of his followers was killed by a mob, and the Duke was assassinated not long after. “…the king’s subjects openly drank toasts to the assassin in taverns throughout England. [John] Felton was cheered by crowds of well-wishers as he was conveyed from Portsmouth to the Tower of London.”136 Buckingham’s state funeral had to be held at night for fear of what the citizenry might do.137

Charles also managed to provoke opposition from the ranks of company merchants for a time by unilaterally raising customs duties on imports, known as impositions. “By the end of 1628, thirty ‘prime merchants’ were under arrest.”138 The General Court of the Levant Company voted to overrule their Board of Governors and petition the House of Commons rather than the Privy Council. Merchant opposition reached a climax during 1628 and 1629 by going on “strike,” i.e., refusing to ship goods to deprive the crown of customs duties; but compliance was not uniform and eventually petered out. Although impositions remained high, the economic picture for trade improved after 1630, and future increases in royal revenue were extracted from London rather than the monopoly companies.139

Government interference in the economy was specifically designed to arrest the destablizing growth of capitalism.140

In 1624 the government ordered the destruction of a needle-making machine, together with the needles which it had made. Nine years later Charles I prohibited the casting of brass buckles and in 1635 the use of a windmill for sawing wood.141

The longstanding division between the Merchant Adventurers and regional clothing manufacturers also came to a head during the 1630s. The Adventurers were losing ground to cheaper competitors on the Continent, creating a depression in England which forced the manufacturers to cut costs, “which meant evading the statutory regulations.”142 In 1630, the Company successfully petitioned Charles’ government to appoint a commission to investigate and enforce cloth laws in four counties west of London. However, the commission “aroused wide-spread and persistent opposition in the west country clothmaking region, and on one occasion…[a commissioner] was seized and flung into the river.”143 Two local gentlemen, both JPs, were brought before the Star Chamber for obstructing the commission’s work and encouraging others to disobedience.144

Many of the justices of the peace supported the clothiers: some of them were clothiers themselves or had “social or economic ties with the cloth manufacturers;” some were producers of wool for the industry or had tenants who were clothmakers, and so were interested in the prosperity of the trade, and as local men…they were influenced by the belief of the clothiers that strict enforcement of the regulations would worsen rather then cure the depression; and they all resented governmental interference and the subjection of the industry to central rather than local control.145

With no other resource than the JPs to enforce the law, the government was forced to make concessions,146 but only for a time: “In 1634 the Merchant Adventurers had their monopoly of the export of all types of cloth restored,” and additional restrictions on the clothiers were implemented during the 1630s to the London merchants’ advantage.147

Charles’ need for funds was still great, forcing him to summon Parliament in early 1628. The House of Commons was quite unhappy that the City magistrates had granted the king a loan before he called Parliament into session. The House received two petitions from guild members who had been imprisoned for nonpayment, and voted to petition the king for their release.148 More significantly, in response to the court decision in the Five Knights case, Parliament passed the Petition of Right. It was preceded by two months of debate and negotiations with the Lords and the king, (who would not have accepted a legislative act).149 The document this produced invoked Magna Carta; re-asserted Parliament’s control over taxes including, for the first time, customs duties (which since the early Tudor era had accounted for half of state revenues);150 and declared arbitrary imprisonment illegal.151 Its passage was met with “widespread lighting of bonfires and ringing of church bells when the King’s final assent to the Petition was announced.”152

Despite being careful not to explicitly infringe the king’s prerogative, or assign absolute rights to the subject,153 this lengthy document was the first formal statement in the new century that codified protections for Parliament and the citizen (including habeas corpus) against the powers of the feudal monarchy.

…by placing them [Parliament’s grievances] within the framework of the common law, and asserting that these rights were pre-existent independently of the grace of the monarch, it became a broader assertion of the rule of law and the ancient constitution.154

Regardless of the extended wrangling needed to get the Petition approved, it established the political basis of the Commons’ anti-absolutist struggle, the opening shot that would culminate in war in 1642.

The political crisis engendered by the Stuart monarchy’s attempts to uphold and reinforce the feudal system against the social subversion of expanding capitalist relations, was becoming more acute. The more the government attempted to centralize power, the more of a hindrance it was to the expansion of capitalist ventures; the more the improving gentry insisted on doing as they liked with their own property, the more they resisted that centralization. They were already long used to ruling over their local areas, and now used their power of the purse to bend the king to their will. Charles was forced to approve the Petition of Right’s provisions in order to obtain money.155 But in 1629, the antagonism between Charles and Parliament became even sharper.

In the House of Commons…men said that the king possessed only those powers which the law granted to him, and that he need never be obeyed if he commanded against the law. …the House proceeded against customs officers…though the King made it perfectly clear that they had been acting on his command. In effect, the doctrine that the king’s servants are punishable for executing his commands permitted active resistance to the king’s will.156

Upon learning of Parliament’s sudden dissolution, MPs forcibly held the Speaker in his chair while they hastily passed several reform resolutions. Nine leaders were afterwards jailed.157 Their trials

took the better part of the year and succeeded only in inflaming the political situation. More importantly, the monarch never received the obedient submission of Sir John Eliot and two other M.P.s, whose indefinite imprisonment transformed them into popular martyrs.158

In response to the parliamentary alliance of the anti-absolutist aristocrats with the Puritan and merchant opposition, the early Stuarts turned to Catholic aristocrats to shore up the monarchy, and to promote the economic power of the Church of England. The Church had been “continuously undermined in favour of the crown and the lay landlords during the sixteenth century.” What became the Arminian high church movement was intent on promoting the power and independence of the church vis-à-vis the state, against its social decline and the rise of Puritanism.159 Notwithstanding the proscription on debate over Calvinism in 1626, ministers had still been afforded a good deal of slack due to Charles’ need to appease Parliament. In 1629, this leniency ended.160 Opprobrium and arguments formerly used against Catholics alone were now being employed by Church officials against Puritans.161

Charles made Arminians his allies, and their dependence on crown patronage made them the most ardent supporters of the king’s prerogatives. The Church provided the king with “the nearest thing to an independent bureaucracy.”162 But his policies only increased fears of popery within the ruling class, among nobles and gentry: much of their lands had once belonged to church monasteries, giving them economic incentive to fear a restoration of ecclesiastical power. They therefore wanted both church and monarchy subordinated to themselves.163

The moderate language of the Petition of Right, acquiesced to by the House of Lords, was deliberately written so as not to encourage rebellion by the lower classes.164 Charles however chose this moment to modify the Forest Law to his own advantage. Along with bad harvests and plague, this caused peasants in the west country to revolt and break down enclosures between 1628-1631. It was the largest popular disturbance in the countryside prior to the Civil War.165 But at the same time,

John Pym himself, leader of the “popular party,” was as a Receiver General for Crown revenues deeply involved in royal forest enclosures of the 1620s, and remained committed to that policy as one means of solving the Crown’s financial problems.166

Personal Rule of the 1630s

The passage of the Petition of Right in 1628, and the unruly end to the Parliament in 1629 completed the open rupture between the king and a large part of the aristocracy. “The point had been reached beyond which the King could retreat no further without a virtual abdication to the bourgeoisie,”167 i.e., those engaged in capitalist endeavors. In the face of Parliament’s antagonism, Charles tried to freeze the situation. After 1629, he refused to call another parliament for eleven years, a period known as the Personal Rule. The Tudors had generally deigned to observe the niceties of parliamentary legality, however grudgingly and hypocritically, because it was to their advantage.168

…the very people who would have to be relied on to collect unparliamentary taxes were the same ones who would be asked to consent to parliamentary ones, and their co-operation was much the more easily achieved if the King had consulted them.169

Even Bloody Mary Tudor waited eighteen months for Parliament to reauthorize the laws, circa 1400, permitting heretics to be burned at the stake, before she committed Protestant martyrs to the flames (at an average rate of two a week for the rest of her reign). MPs had made papal absolution a precondition to protect themselves for their infidelity to Rome under Edward VI.170

Charles defended his dismissal of the 1629 Parliament in writing, attributing its necessity to “‘ill-affected men’” whose aim was to “‘break…through all respects and ligaments of government, and to erect an universal over-swaying power to themselves, which belongs only to us, and not to them.’”171 King James had similarly “blamed the failure of the 1621 parliament on the activities of certain ‘fiery and popular spirits’” who impinged the royal prerogative.172 In fact, however, as early as the summer of 1626, “…Charles had spoken ‘of the means used by the Kings of France to rid themselves of Parliament.’”173 His personal rule was characterized by repeated attempts to illegally impose taxes without the benefit of Parliament; his shift of the Church of England in a sharply more Catholic direction, with consequent purging and persecution of Puritans; suspension of the recusancy laws; promotion of monopolies and other economic distortions; continuation of a pro-Spanish foreign policy; and attempts to reinforce social rankings and stymie social mobility, a Sisyphean labor but one with dire consequences.

In 1637 two draymen were acquitted of running down the Earl of Essex’s carriage. The Privy Council immediately intervened with prerogative powers to have them publicly flogged and committed to hard labor. In another case, “A gentleman called a tailor a ‘base fellow’ for demanding payment of his bill, but when the tailor replied ‘that he was as good a man as the other,’ he was forced by the Earl Marshal’s court to pay damages to the gentleman.”174

Many churchmen were made JPs, and the Bishop of London was appointed to the powerful office of Lord Treasurer.175 In 1633 Charles appointed the Arminian, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Many Catholics had been appointed to high court and government posts, and the French Catholic queen wielded great influence at court. In 1637, the first Vatican representative in nearly 80 years was received.176 Laud embraced many aspects of Catholicism which Puritans hated: outward shows of ostentatious display; prescribed rituals; limiting sermons to rote catechizing; and proscription of preaching by laymen, while opposing the strict Sunday sabbath and also enclosure. He restored such church accoutrements as altar rails separating the minister from the congregation, symbolic of the latter’s subordination, and requiring parishioners to kneel at them, giving renewed prominence to the ritual of communion.177 An apocryphal story long had it that Oliver Cromwell was all set to debark for America when he learned that Laud had reintroduced the use of candles during services, and decided to stay and fight.

A Catholic resurgence in England would have been a devastating blow to the Protestant cause, still under worrying attack on the Continent as the Thirty Years’ War raged on. Secret meetings or conventicles of the godly were illegal, and many well-known Puritan preachers were forced to emigrate to Holland or America. Some took their congregations with them (such as those later called the Pilgrims). Others were not so fortunate. William Prynne, a fervid Puritan pamphleteer, and two others were convicted of sedition by the Star Chamber in 1637, and sentenced to having their ears cut off, cheeks branded, and imprisonment for life.178 The following year, John Lilburne, the future Leveller leader, was sentenced to be publicly whipped through the streets of London, pilloried and imprisoned. Lilburne steadfastly refused, as Puritans had begun to do in church courts, to be “put on oath” which would have required him to give testimony incriminating himself.179

In 1635, Charles ordered the collection of ship money, traditionally an extraordinary tax raised from coastal areas for their defense at times of imminent danger. Not only was there no threat of invasion, but Charles imposed it far inland on an annual basis, permanently making it an unparliamentary tax.180 The tax fell more heavily on the middle sort, the poor and the peasants than on the aristocrats, according to William Prynne,181 and would become an issue in the elections of 1640.182 The government justified its collection by pointing to the audacious raids by Barbary pirates, not only in the Mediterranean far from home, but along the southwest coasts of England itself. This much was true. Between 1629 and 1638, at least seventy-three English ships were attacked and 1,473 English subjects were held captive or sold as slaves in North Africa.183 This state of affairs and the new tax were particularly galling to merchants, as it was the Stuart policy of neglect of the navy that allowed piracy to thrive.184 While a portion of the money collected was used for a punitive expedition to Morocco in 1637, pirate raids in English waters continued to increase.185

Despite royal attacks on themselves, the slavishly loyal London Aldermen enforced the collection of ship money, and imprisoned those who would not pay. Under increased pressure to meet collection targets, municipal officers were authorized to seize and sell the household articles of refusers. Opposition came from all social classes. In 1636, two Puritan nobles, the Earl of Warwick and Lord Saye and Sele, refused to pay ship money, “and both attempted to rouse their tenants to further resistance.” John Hampden’s legal challenge of 1637 was defended by Oliver St. John (later Pym’s successor as leader of the opposition in the Long Parliament). The court upheld the king. All five of these men were members of the Providence Island Company, owner of a Puritan colonial refuge, and would be active leaders of Parliament in 1640. (Hampden was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin.)186 Several Atlantic merchants also refused to pay, two of whom were partners of Maurice Thomson. All would come to play leading roles in London’s revolution in 1641-1642.187 “The Founders’ Company of London seems to have paid no Ship Money after 1637, the Society of Apothecaries none after 1638. Refusal to pay became general.”188 In 1638, London’s sheriff, Alderman Thomas Soames, refused to collect it. So widespread was the resistance throughout the land that each succeeding year brought in less money than before.189 But the many attempts to levy unparliamentary taxes did bring in considerable sums to early Stuart governments, more “than they ever did from Parliament — a fact which put the continued existence of that institution in jeopardy.”190 Thus the struggle over the power to tax, like the struggle over religion and church governance, and the legal and property rights of individuals, were all magnified and intensified by the crown’s steps toward absolute rule.

In London, the aldermen were often high officers in the Levant, East India and other overseas merchant companies. There were innumerable ties between them “as City magistrates and holders of public offices, customs farmers, lenders” and the monarchy. These men “were nominated to royal commissions on commercial and governmental matters…”191 The aldermen could thus be counted upon to be far less combative than the merchant company members. “Until 1629, the City Aldermen had a strong reputation for Puritanism.” But once the latter came under attack from Bishop Laud they ceased their support, “and began to contribute towards Laud’s favorite scheme for rebuilding City churches, particularly St. Paul’s.”192 Some of the merchant oligarchs also invested in sizable amounts of land.193

The king’s government frequently sought to influence merchant company elections on behalf of preferred candidates. In return, the Directors appealed to royal support against internal critics, particularly the Puritan nobles Brooke, Saye and Warwick. The Chamberlain of the City from 1625 to 1643 was the Treasurer of the East India Company.194 The oldest and wealthiest City families, “all closely interconnected by marriage,” dominated the monopoly trading companies, and some had close connections to the landed gentry or the royal court. For the most part, the ruling bodies of the livery companies also acquiesced to the king.195

The conflicts between the early Stuart kings, their supporters in the monopoly merchant companies and conservative wing of the Church, versus the gentry/Puritan alliance in and out of Parliament, set the historical stage. On the issues of taxation, political rights, and religion, the latter made themselves the champions of the new economy’s progress, which, in their various ways, they saw as more open, more constructive and advantageous, more moral and rational. The fidelity of James and Charles to the theological doctrine “divine right of kings” was a defensive, feudal, Catholic resort. As the crisis of the old regime deepened, a new and audacious component of bourgeois leadership was emerging, that would soon provide the oppositional movement with funds, breadth and drive.

1 “The Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie," Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol. 26 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1884, 1990), Marxists Internet Archive, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1884/decline/index.htm Accessed 27 October 2021

2 Hill, Reformation, 64

3 John Richard Green, History of the English People Vol. 5 (New York: Wallachia Publishers, 1874, 2015), 39, Kindle. Reprinted as Green’s England (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier & Son, 1900); Trinterud, “William Haller,” 38; Hill, Society, 7

4 Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry, 7

5 Nagel, “The Militia of London,” 11

6 Hill, Century, 67-68; Fincham and Lake, “Ecclesiastical Policy,” 174

7 Fincham and Lake, “Ecclesiastical Policy,” 170-171, 173-174

8 Peter Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635,” Past & Present, no. 114 (February, 1987): 51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/650960 Accessed 10 August 2015

9 Hill, Century, 87

10 Hill, Reformation, 19, 29-30

11 Anderson, Absolutist State, 125-126; Hill, Reformation, 34

12 Hexter, “Storm Over the Gentry,” 145-146

13 Hill, Reformation, 48

14 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 41-43, 48-52, 56, 58; Hill, Reformation, 107

15 Colin Kidd, “Royal Panic Attack,” London Review of Books 33, no. 12 (16 June 2011), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n12/colin-kidd/royal-panic-attack Accessed 22 May 2013, quoting Conrad Russell.

16 Tyacke, “Revolutionary Puritanism,” 753; Johann Sommerville, “Ideology, Property and the Constitution,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England, eds. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman Group, 1989), 51-52

17 Manning, “The Nobles, the People and the Constitution,” 50

18 Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 233

19 Hill, Century, 108; God’s Englishman, 69; 1640, 59; Fraser, Cromwell, 138

20 Hill, Century, 37

21 Manning, 1649, 51

22 Manning, 1649, 51; Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 68

23 Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 25; Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 28; Manning, 1649, 54-55

24 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 162

25 Hill, Reformation, 48

26 Based on surviving records from 1600-1630, one study found approximately 23% of those who invested in overseas monopoly trading companies were aristocrats. Theodore K. Rabb, “Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 1575-1630,” The Economic History Review 19, no. 1 (1966): 74, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2592793 Accessed 7 February 2019

27 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 12

28 Engels, Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 389

29 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 89, 91, 157-159, 161-162, 165-172; Hill, Reformation, 66; Grassby, “Social Mobility and Business Enterprise,” 355-356

30 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 24; Manning, 1649, 56

31 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 161. In George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, the 24-year old son of a weapons industrialist, circa 1900, sneers at his father for being “in trade.” His mother reproaches him: “Cannons are not trade, Stephen. They are enterprise.”

32 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 161-162

33 Hill, Century, 12; Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 91; Buchanan Sharp, “Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 by Roger B. Manning,” Albion 21, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 101, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4049875 Accessed 12 July 2018

34 Hill, “Land in the English Revolution,” 27

35 Manning, “The Nobles, the People and the Constitution,” 58

36 Hill, Century, 13; Reformation, 69; “Land in the English Revolution,” 29; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 719-721; Fisher, “Commercial Trends and Policy,” 103

37 Nicholas Blomley, “Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges,” Rural History 18, no. 1 (April 2007): 4, https://www.proquest.com/docview/211060271/fulltextPDF/643D9D8DBFB44BCPQ/1? Accessed 10 May 2021

38 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 724

39 Hill, “A Bourgeois Revolution?,” 130

40 R. H. Tawney, “Rise of the Gentry,” 34-35; Hill, Century, 13

41 Hill, Reformation, 151; “Land in the English Revolution,” 42-43

42 Hill, Reformation, 70; Hilton, “Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism,” 21; J. R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500-1914,” The Economic History Review 36, no. 4 (November 1983): 503, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2597236 Accessed 1 July 2017

43 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 722

44 Hill, “The English Civil War Interpreted by Marx and Engels,” 139; 1640, 70; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 727-728

45 Manning, 1649, 57-58

46 Hill, Reformation, 101, 146-147; “Land in the English Revolution,” 28

47 Hill, Reformation, 146; Century, 126-127; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 723. “This was the decisive change in English history which made it different from that of the continent. From it every other difference in English society stemmed.” H. J. Perkin, “The Social Causes of the British Industrial Revolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 18 (1968): 135, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3678958 Accessed 11 December 2016

48 Hill, Reformation, 147; 1640, 69-70; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 723

49 Hill, “Land in the English Revolution,” 41

50 Hill, 1640, 29

51 See Chapter 14 below.

52 Manning, English People, 205

53 Hill, ”Recent Interpretations of the Civil War,” 71; “Land in the English Revolution,” 24-25; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 28-29

54 R. H. Tawney, Business and Politics Under James I (London: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 3

55 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 13-14; Tawney, Business and Politics Under James I, 75-76; Hill, Reformation, 26

56 Hill, Reformation, 62; Stephen Porter, “The Economic and Social Impact of the Civil War Upon London,” in London and the Civil War, ed. Stephen Porter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 183

57 Coward, “London and the English Civil War,” 9; Weinstein, “London at the Outbreak of the Civil War,” 31

58 Hill, Reformation, 61-62, 85; Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 89

59 Hill, Century, 11; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 742-744; Capital Vol.3, 799

60 Hill, World, 54-55; 1940 28; Christopher Hill, “The Inns of Court,” History of Education Quarterly 12, no. 4 (Winter, 1972): 544, https://www.jstor.org/stable/367344 Accessed 2 August 2020. Reprinted in Hill, Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 152-153; Manning, English People, 131-133

61 Manning, English People, 134-135; Hill, Reformation, 65

62 Hill, World, 40-41, 43

63 Hill, Reformation, 45-46

64 Hill, Reformation, 26-27; Century, 127

65 Engels, Introduction to “Socialism Utopian and Scientific,” 389; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 723; Thirsk, “Seventeenth-Century Agriculture and Social Change,” 80-81

66 Thirsk, “Seventeenth-Century Agriculture and Social Change,” 99

67 Hill, Reformation, 86, 90, 96; Porter, “Impact of the Civil War Upon London,” 184-185

68 Manning, English People, 133-134; 1649, 60-61; Thirsk, “Seventeenth-Century Agriculture and Social Change,” 96-98

69 Hill, World, 41

70 Hill, Century, 15, 19

71 Tawney, Business and Politics Under James I, 76

72 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 241

73 Robert Ashton, “Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency and Inaction: Three Phases in the Role of the City in the Great Rebellion,” in London and the Civil War, ed. Stephen Porter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 47

74 Tawney, Business and Politics Under James I, 79-81

75 Lawrence Stone, “Social Mobility in England 1500-1700,” Past & Present, no. 33 (April, 1966): 52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/649801 Accessed 10 August 2015. Reprinted in Seventeenth Century England: Society in an Age of Revolution, ed. Paul S. Seaver (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976). J. P. Cooper, “Economic Regulation and the Cloth Industry in Seventeenth-Century England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (1970): 84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3678763 Accessed 2 February 2019

76 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 716 fn. 1

77 Marx, Capital Vol. 3, 333

78 Anderson, Absolutist State, 76

79 Tawney, Business and Politics Under James I, 13-14; Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” 98; Hill, Century, 39. Elizabeth, like her father, had been forced to sell crown lands acquired by the dissolution of the monasteries to help pay for the Spanish and Irish wars.

80 Tawney, Business and Politics Under James I, 14-15; Anderson, Absolutist State, 70

81 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 89; Hill, Reformation, 72

82 Barry Supple, “Class and Social Tension: the case of the merchant,” in The English Revolution 1600-1660, ed. E. W. Ives (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), 139; Hill, Reformation, 95

83 Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” 98; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 641

84 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 203-205

85 Manning, English People, 155-156

86 Manning, English People, 158-159, 161; Cooper, “Economic Regulation,” 76-77

87 Cooper, “Economic Regulation,” 78

88 “III. Free Trade and Parliament,” The History of Parliament, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/constituencies/london Accessed 13 August 2020

89 Manning, English People, 159-160; Hill, Reformation, 95-96; Cooper, “Economic Regulation,” 85-86

90 Rabb, “Investment in English Overseas Enterprise,” 72

91 Sommerville, “Ideology, Property and the Constitution,” 57-58

92 J. H. Hexter, “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England,” The Journal of Modern History 50, no. 1 (March 1978): 26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1878705 Accessed 16 December 2016. Reprinted “in slightly different form” as “Power, Parliament and Liberty in Early Stuart England,” in Reappraisals in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

93 Hexter, “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England,” 26; King Pym, 85

94 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 247

95 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 247

96 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 247-248; Fincham and Lake, “Ecclesiastical Policy,” 199-201

97 Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church,” 70

98 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 248

99 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 33-39; Hill, Century, 27-28

100 Fincham and Lake, “Ecclesiastical Policy,” 198

101 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 248-249

102 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 250-251

103 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 251-252

104 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 252

105 For a detailed discussion, see Brennan C. Pursell, “The End of the Spanish Match,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (December 2002), https://www.jstor.org/stable/3133525 Accessed 3 July 2021

106 Christopher Thompson, “The Origins of the Politics of the Parliamentary Middle Group, 1625-1629,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 22 (1972): 73-74, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3678829 Accessed 30 January 2017

107 Fincham and Lake, “Ecclesiastical Policy,” 202

108 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 253-255; Kennedy, “the Parliament of 1624,” 45-46, 50, 52-53, 53-54

109 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 255

110 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 72-73

111 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 255

112 Derek Hirst, “Unanimity in the Commons, Aristocratic Intrigues, and the Origins of the English Civil War,” The Journal of Modern History 50, no. 1 (March 1978): 58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1878706 Accessed 11 August 2016, citing Conrad Russell.

113 Hexter, King Pym, 56; David Johnson, “Parliament in Crisis: The Disintegration of the Parliamentarian War Effort During the Summer of 1643” (PhD diss., University of York, June 2012), 70, http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14226/ Accessed 25 January 2019 71

114 Hexter, “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England,” 26

115 Thompson, “Parliamentary Middle Group,” 80; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 257-259

116 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 258

117 Shipps, “The ‘Political Puritan,’” 204

118 Tyacke, “Revolutionary Puritanism,” 755

119 Thompson, “Parliamentary Middle Group,” 79-80; Richard Cust, “Charles I, the Privy Council and the Parliament of 1628,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (1992): 35-36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3679098 Accessed 5 November 2018; Jesse McCarthy, “The Emergence of English Arminianism: Richard Montagu 1624­-1629,” Senior Honors Thesis, UC Santa Barbara, (June 14, 2013), 38-39, https://jessekmccarthy.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/the-emergence-of-englis-arminianism.pdf Accessed January 27, 2019

120 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 260

121 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 74

122 Hill, Century, 8

123 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 75; Hexter, King Pym, 83 fn. 51

124 Cust, “Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s,” 156-157

125 Shipps, “The ‘Political Puritan,’” 201

126 Sommerville, “Ideology, Property and the Constitution,” 60

127 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 261; Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” 133; Hill, Society, 27

128 Porter, “Impact of the Civil War Upon London,” 188

129 Charles Hope, “England: How the Masterpieces Came and Went,” New York Review of Books 61, no. 2 (February 6, 2014), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/02/06/england-how-masterpieces-came-and-went/ Accessed May 10, 2016; Porter, “Impact of the Civil War Upon London,” 189

130 Hirst, Representative?, 50

131 Donald Pennington, “The Making of the War, 1640-1642,” in Puritans and Revolutionaries, eds. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 165

132 Hill, Century, 11, 39-40

133 Hill, 1640, 41-42

134 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 76

135 Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th Century England,” 115-117

136 Como, “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London,” 274-275

137 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 77

138 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 77

139 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 77-79; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 227-239

140 Manning, “The Nobles, the People and the Constitution,” 49

141 Hill, Reformation, 95

142 Manning, English People, 157

143 Manning, English People, 156

144 Manning, English People, 157

145 Manning, English People, 156

146 Manning, English People, 157

147 Cooper, “Economic Regulation,” 85-86. “Cloth valued at roughly £1,150,000 was exported from London in 1640, three-quarters of the national total, and that was a poor trading year.” Porter, “Impact of the Civil War Upon London,” 184

148 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 75-76

149 Thompson, “Parliamentary Middle Group,” 82-85

150 Hill, Reformation, 105

151 Thompson, “Parliamentary Middle Group,” 82

152 Cust, “Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s,” 143

153 Thompson, “Parliamentary Middle Group,” 85; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 266

154 Foxley, “Magna Carta,” 67

155 Woolrych, “The English Revolution: an introduction,” 13; “The Parliament of 1628-1629,” The History of Parliament, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/survey/parliament-1628-1629 Accessed 10 August 2018

156 Sommerville, “Ideology, Property and the Constitution,” 61

157 Hexter, “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England,” 26; “The Parliament of 1628-1629,” The History of Parliament

158 Thomas Cogswell, “Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule by L. J. Reeve,” Albion 22, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 670, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4051403 Accessed 25 April 2019

159 Manning, “The Nobles, the People and the Constitution,” 56

160 Como, “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London,” 267-268

161 Michael Questier, “Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England,” The English Historical Review 123, no. 504 (October 2008): 1162, http://www.jstor.com/stable/20485375 Accessed 14 July 2020

162 Hill, Reformation, 122

163 Manning, “The Nobles, the People and the Constitution,” 56; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 690; Hill, “Henrician Reformation,” 35, 42-43

164 Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 116-117

165 Manning, English People, 135-136; Hill, Reformation, 69

166 Sharp, “The Place of the People in the English Revolution,” 106

167 Hill, 1640, 47. Hill is here principally referring to gentry MPs in the House of Commons, whom he terms bourgeois, along with merchants then in opposition, who actually were. See the Preface, and the section “The English gentry, an anomalous class” above regarding the distinction.

168 Hill, Reformation, 30

169 Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” 94

170 Ridley, Bloody Mary’s Martyrs, 60

171 “Declaration Showing the Causes of the Late Dissolution of the Parliament,” quoted in Lake, “From Revisionist to Royalist History,” 671-672 [Ellipsis in original]

172 Lake, “From Revisionist to Royalist History,” 672

173 Richard Cust, “Charles I, the Privy Council, and the Forced Loan,” Journal of British Studies 24, no. 2 (April 1985): 212, https://www.jstor.org/stable/175703 Accessed 25 February 2019

174 Manning, English People, 175

175 Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 26

176 Hill, Century, 50

177 Hill, Century, 70; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 14; Hill, Society, 32, 54; Christopher Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster,” in Change and Continuity in 17-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, 1991), 202

178 “William Prynne, 1600-69,” BCW Project, http://bcw-project.org/biography/william-prynne Accessed 10 June 2016

179 Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution (New York: Schocken Books, 1895, 1963), 38-39; Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, 80. See Hill, Society, Chapter 11 on the importance of and resistance to oaths.

180 Woolrych, “The English Revolution: an introduction,” 14

181 Brian Manning, “Religion and Politics: The Godly People,” in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Manning (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 107

182 Hirst, Representative?, 150-151

183 Adrian Tinniswood, The Rainborowes (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 95

184 Hill, Century, 30-31; “A Bourgeois Revolution?,” 126

185 Tinniswood, The Rainborowes, 42, 95-96

186 Hexter, King Pym, 78; Fraser, Cromwell, 97; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 156

187 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 291-292

188 Hill, Reformation, 108

189 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 297-298; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 88-91, 192; Hill, Century, 46

190 Sommerville, “Ideology, Property and the Constitution,” 56

191 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 91

192 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 79

193 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 93

194 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 92

195 Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 93-94