The Nature of the English Revolution

John Morrill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317895817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

John Morrill has been at the forefront of modern attempts to explain the origins, nature and consequences of the English Revolution. These twenty essays -- seven either specially written or reproduced from generally inaccessible sources -- illustrate the main scholarly debates to which he has so richly contributed: the tension between national and provincial politics; the idea of the English Revolution as "the last of the European Wars of Religion''; its British dimension; and its political sociology. Taken together, they offer a remarkably coherent account of the period as a whole.

Chapter One
The Nature of the English Revolution¹

I

This introduction seeks to do three things: first, to show why a particular kind of civil war took place in England in the 1640s; second, to examine the aims of those who challenged the authority of King Charles I in the 1640s; and third, to examine why a limited civil war turned into a revolution with profound effects on the subsequent history of the British Isles.

II

Early modern England was a personal monarchy in which the King or Queen exercised personal authority over the most sensitive issues of politics and statecraft and in which he or she personally selected (and dismissed) councillors, judges and bishops. In such a polity the personal weaknesses of the monarch could in themselves cause the collapse of order; certainly the particular weaknesses of particular monarchs were always likely to determine the kind of collapse of order that might occur.

It is worth beginning with this assertion because England had a civil war in the 1640s just when the danger had appeared to recede. There are at least five ways in which England seemed to be moving away from rather than towards internal collapse in the early seventeenth century.²

First of all, there was far greater security of title to the throne and an end to disputed successions. After chronic instability and civil war for much of the fifteenth century (the consequence of the complicated marital affairs of Edward III and John of Gaunt and the consequence of the Lancastrian coup d'etat of 1399), the country teetered on the brink of civil war for much of the sixteenth century as the doubtful legitimacy of Henry VIII's daughters and the childlessness of all three of his children made a War of the English Succession an ever-present threat. In 1559 a heretic bastard Queen (three damning qualities) was trying to secure the throne and was faced by a formidable rival in Mary of Scotland, married to King Francis II of France. If Francis had fathered a child by Mary before he died unexpectedly of an ear infection at the age of nineteen, there would have been a single heir to the thrones of France, Scotland and England, a circumstance that would have ensured that the great Habsburg/Valois struggle would have been fought out on British soil. If Elizabeth had died at any point before 1587, it seems clear that Mary, backed by legitimist and religious-conservative forces in England and abroad, would have plunged England into civil war.

Less certainly, if James I's elder son Henry, a blinkered and determined evangelical Protestant, had lived and acceded to the throne, it is quite possible that he would have plunged England into the maelstrom of European warfare, stretching the resources of the Crown to breaking point and presiding over the collapse of order which characterized so much of Western Europe.

By the mid-1630s, however, Charles I was the undisputed King with a quiverful of children. The civil war of 1642 was not the product of dynastic rivalry. Indeed England would have had a far less messy civil war with a far less violent outcome if it had been possible to depose Charles I and replace him by someone with a reversionary claim on the throne.

Secondly, in England - as throughout Europe - the Reformation divided the nation. The hybrid, compromise Church established by Elizabeth (reformed in doctrine, traditionalist in government and discipline, a mixture of 'catholic' and 'protestant' elements in its ceremonies and forms of worship) was accepted by the mass of the people, but it haemorrhaged on the one side a minority loyal to the Pope, and on the other side a minority determined to complete the re-formation of religion. Both these minorities had, by the 1580s, set up embryonic organizations (one outside and the other within the Church) comparable with the revolutionary parties in Western Europe,³ the Catholics in particular developing a radical political thought justifying resistance and regicide.⁴ By the 1620s, both the 'Puritan' militants and Catholic recusants had abandoned their organizational and intellectual challenges to the state and had opted for passive disobedience in the face of an increasingly indulgent, if not officially tolerant, state - an uneasy freedom of worship occasionally stamped on, but at the expense of civil rights (exclusion from office, heavier tax burdens, etc.). It was not far short of the kind of accommodation that made eighteenth-century England so free from religious strife.

Thirdly, the centre of gravity of Habsburg/Valois rivalry shifted during the sixteenth century from Italy to the Atlantic seaboard; and that, together with dynastic entanglements, made England a potential arena for the working out of their rivalries. In the late sixteenth century there was a constant threat of Spanish invasion of England or of Ireland, especially if Elizabeth died with the succession issue unresolved. By the 1620s, the centre of gravity of European power politics had moved eastward again, to the Rhineland and to Bohemia: invasions of the British Isles, even assistance to rebels, were not on the agenda of over-committed continental monarchs.⁵

Fourthly, the century from 1540 to 1640 saw major social and economic shifts. The root cause was a population steadily growing faster than the food supply. This produced severe underemployment, falling wages, occasional (localized) dearth. It also led to the consolidation of those who produced and marketed scarce goods (larger farmers, master craftsmen, merchants) and a relative decline of the greater (rentier) landlords. Yet by 1640 the pressures were easing. For the one hundred years after 1640 there were to be stable prices, fuller employment, and (from the 1670s) grain surpluses. The Stuarts had weathered the storm largely because the political system had proved supple enough to adapt to the major changes.⁶ Thus there was a dispersal of political power. In part this was a reaction against the lawlessness of the fifteenth century when a militarized peerage had run amok, and law and order had collapsed. The peerage had not been destroyed by the Tudors, but it had been systematically demilitarized and stripped of its inherent power to run the provinces. Instead of exercising full jurisdiction over particular regions by hereditary grant from the Crown, they found themselves appointed on a revocable basis to carry out specified duties under conciliar supervision. More importantly, an ever-increasing range of regulatory and judicial responsibilities were entrusted to the gentry who looked more and more to one another for support. Their advancement came more and more through the mediation of the King's councillors and courtiers and less and less through provincial magnates.

It is of the utmost importance that no noblesse de robe or hidalgo class developed in England. There were no intendants and no hereditary civil service posts. Less than one in ten of the judges were the sons of lawyers; less than one in five of all civil servants were the sons of civil servants. Most salaried or fee'd officials of the Crown were first-generation officials who either retired to, or set their sons up in, the provinces. The 'Court' consisted largely of men on loan from the 'country'⁷. In addition, the problems of lawlessness, the social ills occasioned by population growth and inflation, the policing of religious uniformity, all brought about a massive increase in state power. But while the Crown acquired new supervisory powers, the administration of those powers was entrusted to local elites the peerage and (more generally) the gentry. This growth of royal power was shaped and sanctioned by Parliament. The key to an understanding of sixteenth-century government is to see it as the enhancement of royal authority by consent, a story of the recognition of the mutual benefits to be derived from a controlled growth in the responsibilities and power of the monarch. Tudor Parliaments did not seek to reduce royal power. They sought to shape its growth.

One powerful testimony to the way political institutions had adapted to new social realities is the very low level of violence in early Stuart England. The period from 1569 to 1642 was the longest period ever without a major rebellion;⁸ the period 1605 to 1641 the longest without the conviction of a peer of the realm for treason;⁹ the number of trials for treasons declined decade by decade from the late sixteenth century through to the 1630s. Where else in the early seventeenth century were few or no royal officials killed in discharging their duties? Was not England alone in not having no-go areas for unaccompanied tax-collectors? Were there not more dead bodies on stage at the end of a production of Hamlet than following any collective act of violence in the period up to 1642? Where else was the arbitration of the royal courts so completely accepted? Riots declined in number, in the number of those involved and in intensity after the turn of the sixteenth century.¹⁰ Englishmen were notorious throughout Europe for being litigious. They were litigious because they were law-abiding.

Fifthly, we need to bear in mind Marc Bloch's judgement on medieval England: 'England was a truly unified state much earlier than any continental kingdom.' To linguistic, commercial, legal and fiscal unity unique among the states of late medieval and early modern Europe, the Tudors added greater administrative unity. The 'regionalism' which lay at the heart of so much rebellion in western and central Europe between 1560 and 1660 was absent.¹¹

III

The stability of early Stuart England made civil war unlikely; it was the instability of early modern Britain that first made the war of 1642 possible. It was paradoxically the strength of Tudor England which allowed it to extend its claims to sovereign power in Ireland¹² and it was the dynastic roulette that created the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 that set up that problem. Multiple kingship led to tension and jealousies within political elites, exposed less easily controlled peripheries to incompetent and overbearing kingship and created a billiard-ball effect between the events of the three kingdoms. England, Ireland and Scotland all experienced authoritarian government in the 1630s and the rebellions in Scotland and then in Ireland and then in England reflect variant responses to a shared problem - the incompetence and authoritarianism of Charles I. Thus his attempts to force a surrender of title to all grants made by the Crown of Scotland between 1541 and 1625 and his attempt to ram major reforms of the Scottish Church down the throats and past the consciences of the Scottish people without bothering to consult a Scottish Parliament, a Scottish General Assembly, the Scottish Council or even the Scottish bi-shops in conclave was breathtakingly inept. And Charles's determination to bring the resources of England, Ireland and Highland Scotland against the Scottish Lowlands elite initiated a struggle he was doomed to lose.¹³

IV

In the 1630s, England appeared to be a stable polity. There were, of course, persistent weaknesses in the state system. Political elites expected the Crown to administer the realm and to uphold the Protestant cause abroad, but on a shoestring budget. The Crown had thus to accept the limitations on its resources and underachieve in foreign policy; or it had to use provocative means to increase revenues so as to fulfil expectations. It is also clear that while there was massive coincidence of interest between the Crown and the political elites, the Crown could not attack what the latter believed to be its intrinsic interests without finding itself obstructed and rendered powerless. It was Charles's disastrously partisan challenge to many cherished values and beliefs which made civil war possible.

At one level, given the scale of Charles's assault on political liberties and religious values, it is surprising that he secured as much support as he did in the 1640s. On the other hand, it took some spectacular miscalculation on his part to create the circumstances in which resistance became feasible. England lacked a focal point around which resistance could gather: the flag of a Pretender or a militarized nobility; or provincial institutions (such as the Estates of the Dutch provinces or the French Parlements).

Indeed it is striking that the administrative unity of England made organized resistance unthinkable in the absence of a Parliament; and the recall of Parliament was in the king's gift. He chose to recall it in the spring of 1640 because he wanted to continue his fight with the Scots, but he dismissed it again (with ease) when he found it insufficiently cooperative. He could have chosen to make a painful deal with Parliament so as to secure the money to deal with the Scots; or to make a painful deal with the Scots...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Nature of the English Revolution
• Part One: England’s Wars of Religion
• Part Two: Problems of Allegiance
• Part Three: The Nature and Consequences of the English Revolution
• Major Publications by John Morrill, 1967-1992
• Index