A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (28 page)

The dispute increasingly took on a religious coloration. The gentry and merchants tended to identify with the Protestant forces in the Thirty Years War, out of a mixture of deep-felt religious convictions and crude economic calculations. The merchants reckoned that any weakening of Spanish influence would translate into easier access to American and East Indian markets. James and Charles were pulled in the other direction, towards alliances with the great Catholic monarchies—with Charles marrying the daughter of the French king, who was attacking Protestants in the town of La Rochelle. Charles’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, purged Calvinist ministers, used the church courts against religious dissenters and ordered the clergy to proclaim non-payment of the king’s taxes was irreligious. In effect, the church hierarchy began to act as if it was part of the civil service, a ‘moral’ police force acting on the behalf of the king.

Sections of the gentry and merchants began to fear they would suffer the fate of many European Protestants and drown in the wave of Royalist Counter-Reformation sweeping the continent. The fear grew after a clash between the Commons and the king in the late 1620s, when he imprisoned five knights for refusing to pay taxes and dispensed with parliament. A powerful Catholic group centred on the king’s French wife and her Jesuit adviser emerged at court, and the king’s favourite, Strafford, established a permanent Irish army made up of Catholics.

The king’s hardline approach seemed to be working. Then in 1637 he overstepped the mark. He attempted to impose a new non-Calvinist prayer book in Scotland—which he ruled was a separate country with its own political institutions, legal structure and church. A Scottish ‘convention’ of nobles, lawyers, Calvinist ministers and burghers raised an army of revolt. The king confidently set out to crush it, only to discover he could not raise the necessary finance. As Scottish forces moved into northern England he was forced to summon his first parliament for 11 years.

The gentry, the borough representatives and even many of the lords who gathered at Westminster were in no mood simply to grant the king’s requests without obtaining a great deal in return. In the main, they were conservative in their political attitudes. But for them, conservatism meant maintaining their own position as the rulers of the localities, and that position had been under threat from the king for 11 years. The majority took their lead from figures like John Pym—secretary of a company whose ambition was to break the Spanish stranglehold on trade with Latin America and the Caribbean. They demanded redress for their grievances: abolition of the new taxes and a pardon for non-payers; dissolution of the special courts; an end to the king’s power to dissolve parliament without its consent; the trial and execution of the chief royal adviser Strafford; the removal of the bishops from the House of Lords; and an amicable peace with the Scottish Calvinists.

The king made some concessions—for instance, the trial of Strafford. But he could not accept the platform as a whole. It would have meant the monarchy giving up most of the powers it had acquired over hundreds of years. Without them, the king would be little more than a figurehead at a time when across Europe his fellow monarchs were increasing, not diminishing, their powers.

As time passed, the king found his position improving. Many in the Commons and the majority in the Lords were reluctant to take a radical stance against him, lest it encourage others to challenge their power. A ‘king’s party’ grew among a section of the gentry and the aristocracy, especially in areas of the north and west, where remoteness from the influence of the London market had left many feudal customs intact. Even in more economically advanced areas the king had the backing of those of the gentry who gained financially from royal favours, from those great merchants benefiting from the royal monopolies (for instance, the East India Company) and from people of all social classes inculcated with the habits of deference established over many generations.

By January 1642 the king felt powerful enough to try to seize total power in a coup. He descended on parliament with 400 armed supporters, intent on arresting five of the most prominent MPs. But they had already fled a mile away to the security provided by the merchants, tradesmen and apprentices of the City of London.

When the king entered the City in pursuit the next day, an eyewitness told, ‘The king had the worst day in London that he ever had, the people crying, “Privilege of Parliament” by thousands…shutting up all their shops and standing at their doors with swords and halberds’.
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Rumours that the king was going to return to the City with his armed ‘cavaliers’ ‘brought huge crowds into the streets with whatever arms they could lay hands on: women provided hot water to throw on the invaders; stools, forms and empty tubs were hurled into the streets to “intercept the horse”.’
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The events were portentous. The king had failed to establish his absolute power by a simple police action. Within a week he had left London, intent on raising an army to retake it. The political argument had reached the point of civil war.

The first civil war

The king gathered around him the sons and retainers of the northern lords and the court gentry, military adventurers, unemployed mercenaries, the gilded youth of the royalist aristocracy, and a ‘Cavalier’ core of flamboyant bullies who were to earn a reputation for the arrogant despoilation of every area of the country through which they rode. Along with these came all those who believed the absolute monarchies of Spain and France were the model of how society should be run, including a significant minority of the Catholic apostles of Counter-Reformation. The parliamentary section of the ruling class could now only protect themselves and their property by raising armies of their own. But events had also drawn into the conflict masses of people who were outside the ruling class.

Merchants opposed to the royal monopoly holders had been able to gain control of the City of London by encouraging a wave of demonstrations by ordinary tradesmen and apprentices. But they could not simply switch the popular movement on and off, especially when Cavalier officers attacked the participants. Apprentices demonstrated in their hundreds and even thousands. ‘Mechanic preachers’ were blamed for encouraging people ‘to neglect their callings and trades two or three days a week’.
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This happened as economic hardship was causing more or less spontaneous riots in many parts of the country over enclosures and fen drainage (which deprived the peasants of part of their livelihood in East Anglia).

The eruption of popular anger was a double-edged weapon for the parliamentary wing of the ruling class. It enabled them to preserve their lives in the face of the attempted royal coup. But it also threatened them with a movement which, if it got out of hand, could damage their own class rule. Hardly had the urban agitation broken the hold of the king’s supporters on the City government than the parliamentarians were trying to bring it to an end. Many became convinced that only a new form of religious discipline, applied by themselves, could stifle revolt among the lower classes and maintain control. They wanted to force the king to accept their demands, but were keen to end hostilities as quickly as possible.

This group soon formed a moderate parliamentary faction. They were called ‘Presbyterians’ because they were associated with the notion that there had to be a uniform system of religious doctrine, which church elders (‘presbyters’) from their own class would impose on everyone else.

For the moment there was no avoiding war. Even the moderate Presbyterian gentry feared the consequences of unlimited royal power and had to mount resistance. But for the first two years of the war that resistance was held back, like that of the Bohemian estates to the Habsburgs in 1619, by disdain for genuinely revolutionary measures.

There was not one single parliamentary army, capable of following a coherent national strategy, but a collection of local armies, each with a lord as general and the local gentry as officers. The rank and file were conscripts, often forced to fight against their will, not revolutionary enthusiasts. The unwillingness of the gentry to provide for the upkeep of the armies led the parliamentary troops, like the royalist Cavaliers, to live by pillaging the land, so alienating the peasants of the countryside and the artisans of the town.

The parliamentarians enjoyed a couple of successes. The London bands of tradesmen and artisans stopped the royal army from marching on the capital at Turnham Green late in 1642, and the joint armies of parliament and Scotland defeated a royalist force at Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. But most of the battles of 1642-44 were inconclusive. Worse, by the beginning of 1645 the situation looked potentially catastrophic. The king was still entrenched only 50 miles from London at Oxford. The parliamentary armies were tired, unpaid, demoralised and often mutinous. There were desertions on a massive scale, and a danger of the Scottish army doing a separate deal with the king. Unless something was done quickly everything would be lost in an English repeat of the Battle of the White Mountain.

There was a single bright spot in the picture. The cavalry of one of the parliamentary armies, the ‘Ironsides’ of the ‘Eastern Association’, had been decisive in the defeat of the royalists at Marston Moor. The cavalry had been raised in a different way from the rest of the army. Its leader, the Cambridgeshire landowner and MP Oliver Cromwell, had consciously chosen not to officer it with aristocrats or man it with unwilling, impoverished conscripts. Instead, he relied on volunteers from ‘the middling classes’: mostly these were from the ‘yeoman’ layer of better off working farmers, who were wealthy enough to own horses but poor enough to have a commitment—often a Puritan, religious commitment—to hard work. They were, one observer later wrote, ‘most of them freeholders and freeholders’ sons, who upon a matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel’.
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Such troops, Cromwell saw, could be as skilled as the ‘gentlemen’s sons’ and mercenaries who rode for the king, but were more disciplined in battle since they were less likely to disperse in pursuit of booty at the first success. He said, ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a “gentleman” and is nothing else’.
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Cromwell also saw that he could not attract and hold such people unless he allowed them to give expression to values and views very different to those of the gentry. He would not allow Presbyterian parliamentarians to purge from his force followers of the various religious sects who carried a militant message of salvation for the lower middle classes. Preachers with a radical message travelled with the troops—the best known, Hugh Peter, would speak of a ‘just social order characterised by decent care for the sick and the poor and an improved legal system…imprisonment for debt abolished’.
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Cromwell even defended the non-religious radical John Lilburne against his commanding officer, the Earl of Manchester. The earl repeated gossip that Cromwell hoped to ‘live to see never a nobleman in England’, and loved some people the better ‘because they did not love lords’.
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Cromwell may or may not have held such views at the time. But he had built support for himself in Cambridgeshire in the past by speaking up for farmers opposing the draining of the fens, and was certainly prepared to play on the class feelings of the middling classes if this was necessary to defeat the king. This meant he was prepared to show a determination which had been lacking among so many Protestant leaders in the struggle across continental Europe.

The New Model Army

In the spring of 1645 Cromwell was the pivotal figure in a group of MPs and officers who saw only one way to avoid defeat—to rebuild the entire army as a centralised force, no longer commanded by aristocrats who held back from all out war, or officered by gentry amateurs. They only got their way in the face of strong resistance in the House of Commons and opposition from the House of Lords by relying on an increasingly radicalised layer of artisans and anti-monopolist merchants in the City of London. The instrument of revolutionary victory, the ‘New Model Army’, was formed at the moment of greatest crisis.

Many of its footsoldiers were recruited in the old way, from unwilling conscripts who had hitherto showed no concern for the issues at stake in the war. But the cavalry was built, as Cromwell’s Ironsides had been, of volunteers motivated by political and religious enthusiasm. And even among the footsoldiers there were a minority of enthusiasts who could motivate the rest at key moments of battle. There was, in effect, a revolutionary spine to the army, and its efforts were reinforced by inspired preaching from the likes of Hugh Peter, the circulation of pamphlets and news-sheets, informal Bible readings and numerous religious and political discussions.

The impact of the revolutionary approach was shown dramatically at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645. The parliamentary army was able to hold together after an initially successful royalist cavalry charge and then sweep forward and rout the enemy. Within days the king’s headquarters at Oxford was in parliamentary hands and the king had fled to surrender to the Scottish army at Newark.

This was the decisive battle of the civil war. However, it was not the end of the revolution.

With fear of the king removed, fear of the masses became the dominant emotion among the great majority of the gentry. They pressed immediately for the disbanding of the New Model Army, the curtailing of religious liberty, and the crushing of dissident religious groups and secular revolutionaries.

But there was another force emerging which the parliamentary gentry did not find it so easy to deal with. The rank and file of the army were not at all happy with the prospect of being disbanded without pay or, worse, being sent to fight a dismal war in Ireland. The ‘middling men’ of the cavalry, who had fought for their principles, were outraged and driven to adopt a more radical approach than hitherto. The conscripts were distressed at facing a future without prospects and, although they could occasionally give voice to monarchist sentiments, they were soon attracted to the talk of the minority of committed enthusiasts among them.