Commonwealth of England

8 Key excerpts on "Commonwealth of England"

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  The Post-Reformation

  Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603-1714

  • John Spurr(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The godly cause had emerged from the struggle of the 1640s, a decade which, as we have seen, transformed the religious landscape of the country. Before 1640, religious conflicts had been centred on the teachings and actions of the clergy of the Church of England and on the international threat from popery. A decade later the question of liturgical conformity was irrelevant and debate on the nature of church government a sideshow since attention was focused on liberty of conscience and worship, the right of lay men (and even women) to preach, the possibility of national moral and spiritual regeneration, and the mechanisms to preserve parish-based religion. Popery remained a threat, but there was now a real possibility that the English would take the fight to the Roman Catholics and face them on their own European territory. The godly seized their moment. The failure to establish a new national church or to reach a political settlement in the later 1640s paved the way for a decade of largely unchecked religious experimentation and speculation. The number of those who joined the sects may have been small, but the sense of spiritual and intellectual emancipation was widespread. To some, this was a heady freedom; to others, it was a corrosive attack on certainty and order. The later 1640s and the 1650s are the key years in our story, the years in which religious pluralism took root and became an ineradicable fact of English life. They were also years in which the English left their stamp on Ireland and Scotland.

  The Commonwealth

  On 19 May 1649 England was declared ‘a Commonwealth and Free State’ in which supreme authority rested with ‘the representatives of the people in Parliament … without any King or House of Lords’. This most unlikely republic had a slow birth: the Commons had only resolved to abolish monarchy as ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people’ a week after the King's head was cut off; it took another five weeks to pass acts abolishing the monarchy and House of Lords. Perhaps this just goes to show how little planning had gone into the removal of Charles I; it certainly reveals the lack of ideological republicanism in mid-seventeenth-century England. So familiar was kingship and so alien was republicanism to most people that Kelsey has described this as a period of ‘unkingship’.2

  The new Commonwealth had to clothe its nakedness in the fig leaf of known forms, familiar titles and official seals, to invent an effective machinery of government and, perhaps most urgently of all, to defend itself against military threats. Whatever its propaganda, the new Parliament – the Rump – was far from representative of the people: although its membership was over 200, only 60 or 70 of these were active participants in debates and legislation. Executive authority was exercised by a Council of State made up of MPs. The common expectation that the Rump would shortly dissolve itself and hold fresh elections was soon disappointed. Rumpers were too anxious about the security of the new Republic to risk a poll. Their anxiety was apparent in the imposition of the Engagement – an oath of loyalty to the government as it was then established without King or Parliament – first on office-holders and then extended to all adult males. Politically, the Engagement was a failure, but the arguments that swirled around it and found their way into print marked an important development in political philosophy and popular attitudes – a pragmatic distinction was increasingly drawn between the obedience due to a ruler who had the legal right to sovereignty and a ruler who in fact exercised that power, a distinction which eased many consciences both in the 1650s and later.

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  The English Civil Wars

  A Beginner's Guide

  • Patrick Little(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  Charles, who did not share his father’s religious or political scruples, was happy to keep his options open. He held talks with a Scottish delegation in the spring of 1649, but made no firm commitments to them, while at the same time encouraging Ormond. If the Irish plan failed, he would always be able to reopen negotiations with the Presbyterians. For Charles, the English throne was the prize; the means to that end were not of great importance.

  Creating a British republic

  In England, the dramatic events of December 1648 and January 1649 were not followed by the far-reaching revolution that some hoped for and many feared. Even the dismantling of the old system of government was very slow. It was not until 7 February 1649 that the Rump Parliament (so-called because it was only the rump or remnant of the Long Parliament) set up an executive body, to fulfil those functions traditionally performed by the king and his councillors, and, more recently, by a plethora of committees acting under parliamentary authority during the civil wars. This council of state played an important role in controlling the armed forces, and was the focus for diplomacy and foreign policy, but it was firmly under Parliament’s thumb: most of the members were MPs; they were elected by Parliament annually; and their decisions were subject to parliamentary scrutiny. The establishment of an executive was followed by a great deal of constitutional tidying up. In mid-March, acts were finally passed for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, and it was not until early May that the Rump parliament voted through another crucial measure – the act declaring England to be ‘a commonwealth and free state’. This last act perhaps typifies the halting, ad hoc nature of the ‘English Revolution’. It consisted of only 105 words, and made no mention of what the republican state might look like – except for the brief comment that it would include neither a monarch nor an upper House of Parliament.

  The main reason for this apparent reluctance to make positive statements about the new commonwealth was the sense of uncertainty within the Rump Parliament itself. Pride’s Purge had not only removed the Presbyterians and crypto-royalists, but it had also caused the voluntary withdrawal of a large number of less partisan MPs, shocked and dismayed by the army’s actions. In the weeks after the Purge, only around seventy MPs attended the Commons. No more than forty of these were in any sense committed republicans, including Thomas Scot, Henry Marten, and Thomas Chaloner – and by no means were all of these men friends of the army. Aware that the Rump’s legitimacy was under question, the surviving MPs were keen to persuade their former colleagues to return to the House, and gradually those opposed to the regicide – including such republican critics of the army as Sir Henry Vane and Sir Arthur Hesilrige – were coaxed back to Westminster. By February, there were further concessions, aimed at winning over the more moderate MPs secluded at Pride’s Purge, with the only condition being the signing of a ‘dissent’, disowning the Newport Treaty with the late king. Such moves certainly provided a more respectable membership of around 200 (although only around a quarter of these men were present at any one time); but it also brought in yet more conservative MPs, who were keen to limit the power of the army in the commonwealth’s affairs, and who opposed radical reform in church and state.

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  Conquest and Union

  Fashioning a British State 1485-1725

  • Steven G. Ellis, Sarah Barber(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  72

  The vitality of politics in Ireland and Scotland had brought down Charles I. Their facility for independent action, despite Stewart attempts at integration, had caused too many fissures in the royal regime. The attempt to assert power and orthodoxy was at the heart of both royal and Cromwellian policy. It was the defeats of Scotland and Ireland that confirmed Cromwell's reputation and contributed to the fall of the Commonwealth: maintaining control over the defeated territories was vital if Cromwell was to keep his prestige. The Commonwealth had not been a dress rehearsal for Cromwellian policies. Commonwealth politicians had been more concerned to consolidate control of England: they had had a hard enough struggle to establish a national republican interest. Retrenchment was part of the package when the majority of people in all three nations believed their very existence to be illegitimate.

  1 This is the legacy of Samuel Gardiner, Charles Firth and the scholars of the early twentieth century. More recently, studies have appeared such as R. Ashton, English Civil War: Conservation and Revolution 1603–1649 (London, 1978); J.H. Hexter (ed.) Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (Stanford, Calif., 1992) ; M. Ashley, The English Civil War (London, 1974). 195

  2 R. Hutton, The Royalist War Effort, 1642–1646 (London, 1982); A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987); J. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Civil War (Oxford, 1974); D. Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973).

  3 The revision of the religious aspects of the wars has never been fully realized but a contribution has been made by P. White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Commonwealth and Protectorate

  Oliver Cromwell in perspective

  There is no doubting that the dominant figure of the 1650s was Oliver Cromwell and that in order to understand the years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate it is essential to get to grips with the man who served as Lord General and Lord Protector for much of that decade, down to his death in September 1658. He is one of those figures in English and British history whom very few approach without some preconceptions and who often provokes a strong and emotional response. In the popular mind he is generally viewed as a dour Puritan, a killjoy whose victims numbered Father Christmas as much as King Charles I, and who went on to rule as an oppressive, even brutal, military dictator. In Irish popular opinion he is viewed in an even darker light, as a perpetrator of massacre or genocide. Although his record in Ireland remains divisive, in stark contrast to many popular views, academic assessments of Cromwell and his achievements in England and abroad are generally positive. Since the Victorian era, when the texts of his many surviving letters, mainly of the years 1640–51, and, as recorded by others, of his apparently largely extempore public and state speeches, mainly delivered during the last 10 years of his life, became more widely available, his scholarly as opposed to his popular reputation has risen and in recent decades has remained quite uniformly positive. With remarkably few exceptions, academic studies over the last generation or two have rated highly his performance as soldier and politician, as statesman and man of God, and have concluded that he was motivated by genuine religious goals and the pursuit of godly reformation rather than personal ambition or greed. While he certainly used his growing power to intervene and to make or break regimes, he did so, most modern historians suggest, with good intentions; while he may have failed in some areas and in others his achievements proved temporary and were reversed after his death, he was for a time able to provide strength and stability in the difficult post-war era, many argue.

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  The Puritan Revolution

  A Documentary History

  • Stuart E. Prall(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Elizabeth of England, for prevention of the same) by many wicked peopie, selling their Manors, Messuages, Lands, Tenements, Hereditaments, and other things; sometimes twice, other times thrice, four or five times over to several purchasers, for good and valuable consideration, whereby divers honest people of this Nation (who have purchased the same Leases, Rents, Annuities or charges, out of the same, for great sums of money) have been defrauded of all that which they carefully and honestly have labored for, the greatest part of their lives, and afterward lived in great misery and extremity the residue of the continuance of their time. And. other of such Purchasers by reason of such frauds and deceits, have been troubled and turmoiled, and put to great excessive charges and tedious Suits; and especially in the Courts of Chancery, or in Courts called Courts of Equity, or English Courts, many years together; and yet in the end, by the means of aforesaid, have failed of recovery or obtaining that, for which they have justly and honestly paid, or any part of their money, which they have disbursed in that behalf.

  4 . A DECLARATION OF THE COMMONERS OF ENGLAND TO CROMWELL [13 February 1652]

  The Government of a commonwealth is the uniting of the people of a Nation into one heart and mind; And blessed is that People, whose Earthly Government is the Law of Common Righteousness. When Israel was under a commonwealth’s Government, they were a tenor to all Oppressing Kings in all Nations of the World; and so will England be, if this righteous Law become our Governor: But when the Officers of Israel began to be covetous and proud, they made a breach; and then the Government was altered, and fell into the hand of Kings like other Nations, and then they fled before their Enemies and were scattered. But if we look upon the customs of the Law itself, it is the same it was in the King’s days, only the name is altered; as if the Commoners of England had paid their Taxes, Free-quarter, and shed their blood, not to reform, but to baptize the Law into a new name, from Kingly Law, to State Law; by reason whereof the spirit of discontent is strengthened, to increase more Suits of Law, than formerly was known to be; And so as the Sword pulls down Kingly power with one hand, the King’s old Law builds up monarchy with the other.

  . . . .

  And now the Commoners of England in this Age of the world are risen up in an Army, and have cast out that Invasion of the Duke of Normandy, and have won their Land and Liberties again by the Sword, if they do not suffer their Councils to befool them into slavery again upon a new account. For if so be that Kingly Authority be set up in your Laws again, King CHARLES hath conquered you and your posterity by policy, and won the field of you, though you have seemingly cut off his head. For the strength of a King lies not in the visible appearance of his body, but in his Will, Laws, and Authority. But if you remove Kingly Government and set up true and free Commonwealth’s Government, then you gain your Crown, and keep it, and leave peace to your Posterity.

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  Internal Empire

  The Rise and Fall of English Imperialism

  • Victor Bulmer-Thomas(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Hurst Publishers

    (Publisher)

  26

  It is doubtful how much of this change in nomenclature was absorbed by British voters at the time. The economic and financial difficulties facing the UK were immense, and the country had just survived one of the harshest winters on record without adequate housing or heating. Yet the change would be permanent and eventually UK citizens had little choice but to accept that a large part of their British identity now came through the Commonwealth rather than through the Empire. It was a demonstration of how flexible British constitutional arrangements could be.

  Where the British government showed no flexibility, however, was on the requirement that former colonies must become a dominion and not a republic in order to be a self-governing member of the Commonwealth. This, of course, preserved the role and function of the British monarch in postcolonial affairs and gave Great Britain formal leadership of the Commonwealth. Yet, for many in the nationalist movements of the colonies, it diluted the meaning of independence. Furthermore, dominion status had been a running sore in the relationship between Ireland and the UK ever since the creation of the Irish Free State.

  Following partition in 1947, therefore, both India and Pakistan had to become dominions as a condition for decolonisation within the Commonwealth. The same happened to Ceylon (today Sri Lanka). This left the British monarch as Head of State, causing grave disquiet among many of those who had fought for independence. Yet to have rejected dominion status in pursuit of independence would have put at risk all the privileges of Commonwealth membership. And while many of these ‘privileges’ might have seemed minor or even redundant, they did include imperial preference in trade, and that gave former colonies a strong incentive to accept British conditions. To have lost access to the British market at the start of independence would have been a costly and painful process—not to mention the opposition it would have generated from powerful business groups.

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  Literature of the Stuart successions

  An anthology

  • Andrew McRae, John West(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part III: 1653 and 1658 Passage contains an image

  Introduction

  The installation of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland was a key event amid one of the most unpredictable periods in British political history. On 30 January 1649, Charles I was executed after a trial in which he was condemned as a tyrant, traitor and murderer. Shortly afterwards the monarchy was abolished and a republic was declared. Cromwell, who saw the trial and execution of the King as an act of divine justice, was Lord General of the army in these years, and he led the republic’s fight against Royalist insurgency in Ireland, Scotland, and England. The ruthlessness with which he prosecuted some of these campaigns, especially in Ireland, remains controversial to this day. Victories over Charles Stuart’s forces at Dunbar on 3 September 1650 and at Worcester on the same date in 1651, however, dashed Royalist hopes of a swift Stuart restoration.

  From this point, attention shifted from military to political matters and in particular the question of how to secure a lasting settlement. The life of the republic was characterized by frictions between moderate MPs and the reformist zeal of the army. Frustrated by the Rump Parliament’s resistance to reform, Cromwell expelled it in April 1653. It was replaced in July by the Nominated Assembly, a group of 140 new MPs selected by Cromwell and his Council of Officers. As with the Rump before it, however, divisions between moderates and radicals over political and religious reform led to its downfall. On the morning of 12 December 1653, MPs voted to yield their authority to Cromwell. Four days later he took the title of Protector at a ceremony at Whitehall, described in the newsbook Mercurius Politicus below (III.1 ).

  The Protectorate faced a number of immediate challenges. England was at war with the Dutch. Royalist plots were a constant threat. The Protectorate also faced opposition from republicans and radical religious groups for whom Oliver’s acceptance of the title of Protector elevated him to a position of quasi-regal authority. This was perceived as a betrayal of everything that had been fought for in the past decade. Attacks on Cromwell proliferated, from both Royalists and republicans. He was condemned as a tyrant, mocked as a false king and ridiculed for his appearance: Cromwell’s nose was one of the most common features of satirical verse in the 1650s. But there were, equally, defences of him as an active ruler guided by providence far beyond what any king could be. As Andrew Marvell put it: ‘For to be Cromwell was a greater thing, | Than ought below, or yet above, a king’ (see III.3

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  Europe During the Thirty Years War

  • A. Ward(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Ozymandias Press

    (Publisher)

  On May 2 conferences began between representatives of the officers-and of the remains of the Long Parliament; on the 7th the Rump reassembled at Westminster, and on the 25th Richard sent a message to the House conveying his formal submission to the new Government_ whatever this may have meant. If Richard’s protectorate can be said to have terminated on any particular day or by any particular act, it was by this submission on May 25,1659. But, as a matter of fact, from the dissolution of his Parliament on April 22 he had dropped out of view as a nonentity.

  The ecclesiastical history of this period is simply a record of confusion. The key to the religious problems of the Commonwealth is to be found in the conflict between the political necessity which drove Oliver to attempt to conciliate the Presbyterians and that exalted conception of freedom and toleration which distinguished him beyond all his contemporaries. So irreconcilable were these two conflicting interests that to the end of the Commonwealth no religious settlement was ever arrived at. The triumph of the army meant that of the principle of toleration; but this victory never obtained full legislative expression, and the remains of the Presbyterian system were left cumbering the ground. Its position as the legally recognised form of national Church government was never legally abrogated; and all attempts at a religious settlement subsequent to 1649 took the form of such a definition of toleration as would secure the liberty of individual men and congregations on the one hand, and as would guard the State against the dangers of Popery and blasphemy on the other.

  Such a problem of necessity resolved itself into a discussion, not of principle or of forms of Church government, but of a definition of fundamentals of Christian belief. So long as Parliament was not sitting, the problem hardly existed for Oliver. The religious freedom which he had won with the sword he was strong enough to keep by the sword; and under his rule a statesmanlike tolerance prevailed. But whenever Parliament was in session the ineradicable itch of the theologian-politician for a systematic definition of fundamentals instantly reappeared. During these periods it is always the Parliament which plays or tries to play the part of the divine, of the intolerant persecutor. In 1650 the Rump persecuted the Ranters. In February, 1653, it promulgated a standard of conformity and of toleration; but the scheme was rendered abortive by the ejection of the Rump. The project of the Nominated Parliament for such a declaration as would give fitting liberty, whilst discountenancing blasphemies, met a similar fate. In December, 1653, the Instrument declared for a toleration “ of all professing faith in God by Jesus Christ, provided that liberty extend not to Popery and Prelacy nor be abused to the disturbance of civil peace.” The attempt to define these simple words “faith in God by Jesus Christ” led Oliver’s first Parliament to summon a second Assembly of Divines to draft the fundamentals of belief (November, 1654). Whilst the Independent divines (now stigmatised by Baxter as stiffly orthodox) were engaged in their congenial repressive task, the Parliament was persecuting John Biddle for heresy. But again the whole contemplated work fell to the ground when, in January, 1655, Oliver dissolved the Parliament.

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