Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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16. Battle of Naseby

Joshua Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva (1647)

17. ‘England’s Miraculous Preservation’

The British Library, 669 F.10 (107)

18. Henry Ireton

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

19. The King’s Trial, 1649

Bridgeman Art Library

20. Battle of Dunbar

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

21. The Great Seal of the Commonwealth

Bridgeman Art Library

22. Barebone’s Parliament in session, 1653

Fotomas Index

23. John Lambert, after Robert Walker

By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

24. Sir Arthur Haselrig, by Robert Walker

By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

25. General Monk, miniature by Samuel Cooper

26. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, after Adriaen Hanneman

By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

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List of Maps

1. Marston Moor Campaign of 1644 287

2. Naseby Campaign of 1645 317

3. Land owned by Catholics in 1641 and 1688 787

Civil wars in the three kingdoms

4. England 798

5. Scotland 799

6. Ireland 800

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Prologue

The title of this book is a play upon two senses, old and new, of a word that

has undergone a change of meaning since the times it describes. When a mod-

ern historian writes of revolution, he has in mind a violent upheaval affecting

a whole state, profound enough to alter at least its system of government and

probably the very structure of its society too. He means something more than

just a coup d’état, and if he uses the term ‘palace revolution’, to describe a

forced change of ruler which leaves the basic nature of the regime intact, he

implies that it was something less than the real article. But in Cromwell’s and

Milton’s time the only familiar sense of ‘revolution’ was its original one of cir-

cular motion, whether of a celestial body in its orbit or simply of a wheel turn-

ing full circle. Political writers sometimes applied the word by way of analogy

to convulsions in the state—they had been doing so since Machiavelli’s time

in the early sixteenth century—but the metaphor still trailed its astronomical

roots; it implied a return to a point of origin, however great the intervening

upsets. It was related to the widely held notion, classical in origin, that the

course of history moves in cycles, and only a little more distantly to that other

favourite analogue of human destiny, the wheel of fortune. Thomas Hobbes,

for instance, wrote after the Restoration: ‘I have seen in this revolution a cir-

cular motion of the sovereign power, through two usurpers, from the late

king to this his son’.

The very experience of the commotions of 1640–60,

however, brought ‘revolutions’ (usually in the plural) into increasing use as a

loose description of any major cataclysm in a country’s history, and just occa-

sionally a writer distantly preﬁgured the word’s modern use, but its cyclical

connotations remained dominant.

Then as now, however, people employed metaphors without too close an

attention to all that they implied, and there were many who did not believe

that the course of history was following a circular path. Many, as we shall see,

became convinced that the catastrophic events of the 1640s heralded the last

times of this world, as prophesied by Daniel and the Book of Revelation: not

the end of a cycle, but the end of history. And even if the modern concept of

Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (1679), quoted in Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country

(1969), p. 14.

Christopher Hill dates the arrival of the modern sense earlier, in ‘The word “revolution” in

seventeenth-century England’, in Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (eds.), For Veronica

Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth Century History (1986), pp. 134–51.

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a revolution had not yet been formulated, that did not mean that such a thing

could not happen. Whether it did or not is a question I would rather leave to

the end of this book. I am rashly embarking on an attempt to make the events

it describes intelligible to those who have not read much about them before,

and I would hope that such readers will approach this crowded canvas with-

out trying to ﬁt it into the frame of some preconceived model of a revolution.

I hope too that they will be struck, as I continue to be, by how little was

inevitable in the way the course of events unfolded, and what different direc-

tions it might have taken at several crucial points if human beings with a genu-

ine choice before them had taken other decisions than those they did.

There was a time, not so long ago, when you could make a fair guess at a

historian’s interpretative standpoint from whether he referred to the Civil Wars

and Interregnum as the English Revolution or as the Great Rebellion. Marxists

always wrote of the English Revolution, but many besides Marxists used the

same label. Those who did so tended to assume that the upheavals of 1640–60

had a long germination, and constituted a breach in the continuity of our

national history comparable, however remotely, with the French and Russian

and other latter-day revolutions. This often went with a dogmatic assumption

that all true revolutions are basically social revolutions, with their root causes in

long-term economic change and in consequent conﬂict between social

classes. Those who wrote of the Great Rebellion, on the other hand, generally

assumed a more limited political causation, and saw more continuity between

early Stuart and later Stuart England. Earlier, the favourite appellation had been

the Puritan Revolution, to which the great Samuel Rawson Gardiner had given

currency in the late nineteenth century, but it fell out of fashion during a long

phase (now happily past) in which the religious factors in the mid-century con-

ﬂicts tended to be played down or explained away in other than religious terms.

None of these labels is really satisfactory, though in the absence of a better

one it would be pedantic to reject any of them out of hand. The Great Rebel-

lion has a partisan ring; it was what royalists came to call the affair, and most

parliamentarians would have hotly denied that they were engaged in rebellion

at all. The Puritan Revolution suggests a monocausal explanation; it also

obscures the facts that very many parliamentarians were not puritans, and

that most of those who were disliked the word almost as much as they resent-

ed ‘roundhead’ or ‘rebel’. As for the English Revolution, the objection is not

only that it suggests questionable parallels with later revolutions but that it

leaves out the Scots and the Irish. Present-day historians have rightly been

emphasizing what Gardiner always knew: that the story of the period covered

by this book can only be told intelligibly if it embraces all three nations.

They

2 Prologue

See particularly Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), esp.

chs. 2 and 5.

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have started a vogue for a new nomenclature, the Wars of Three Kingdoms,

and for the period 1639–51 it serves very well; but after that the serious ﬁght-

ing was over, apart from some mopping-up in Ireland and Glencairn’s rising

in Scotland. We still lack a term for the whole hiatus in royal government,

down to 1660. ‘Interregnum’, despite its royalist implications, is useful for

1649–60, but it really begins only with the abolition of monarchy.

I have tried to set forth the events of 1637–60 as a story of three kingdoms,

though in calling this book Britain in Revolution I open myself to the charge

of promising more than I deliver. There is much more about England in it

than about Scotland and Ireland. This is not mere chauvinism, nor just a

reﬂection of England’s greater size and power. The fact is that England was

where most of the crucial decisions were taken, and most of the crucial bat-

tles fought, which determined the fates of all three kingdoms. Sheer intelligi-

bility commands a closer focus on England. To be sure, it was rebellion in

Scotland which brought the personal rule of Charles I to an end and set all the

troubles in motion, but that rebellion was a response to a decision taken in

England, which England tried to impose by force. Three years later, it was

rebellion in Ireland which more than any one factor tipped England over into

civil war, but that rebellion was a reaction to a perceived threat from Eng-

land. Later, it was convulsion in England that brought the king of all three

kingdoms to the scaffold, and (later still) restored his son. Scotland’s and Ire-

land’s resistance to the king’s enemies led to their conquest and subjection by

England. The radical political and religious movements which give a unique

interest to the years following the king’s defeat—Levellers, Diggers, Fifth

Monarchists, Quakers, and the rest—were English movements, and the

thinkers who struggled most memorably to make sense of the collapse of the

old political order—Harrington, Hobbes, Milton, to name only three—were

English thinkers. For the prominence of England in what follows, therefore, I

make no further apology, and I assure Scottish and Irish readers that it implies

no lack of sympathy for what their ancestors suffered and strove for. I do

apologize to purists, and still more to Irishmen, for using ‘Britain’ as though

it included Ireland; it is just so useful to have one name to embrace the whole

extent of the Stuarts’ multiple kingdom and of Oliver Cromwell’s rule.

James I, who styled himself King of Great Britain, would have understood.

Historians still disagree quite widely about the causes of the Civil War (or

the Wars of Three Kingdoms), and not least about where to begin looking for

them. From the 1940s to the 1960s and beyond, the prevailing orthodoxy

was that the roots of the conﬂict must be sought in certain socio-economic

changes which took place in England during the century or so before 1640,

and generated such tensions within the structure of society, and between

government and the governed, that they ﬁnally reached breaking-point in

civil war. The period 1640–60 was sometimes called Tawney’s century,

Prologue 3

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because of the great inﬂuence of an article on ‘The rise of the gentry’ which

R. H. Tawney published in 1941. Even the most outspoken critic of the Tawney

school, H. R. Trevor-Roper, looked for the origins of the war in changes and

conﬂicts within England’s governing class, though he interpreted them very

differently. Lawrence Stone, writing in 1972, did look beyond socio-

economic factors, but in The Causes of the English Revolution he took an

equally long-term view, identifying the ‘preconditions’ for revolution in the

century 1529–1629, the ‘precipitants’ which brought it inexorably on in the

decade 1629–39, and the ‘triggers’ that set it off in 1640–2.

But before then

the senior Tudor historian G. R. Elton, impatient with the distortions to

which interpreters of the English Revolution were subjecting his own period

and that of the early Stuarts, protested vigorously against their practice of

reading a century of our history as a series of milestones along ‘a high road to

civil war’. He questioned indeed whether there was any grand inevitability

about the war at all.

This was a timely call to order when historical thinking

on the subject had been in danger of losing its way in a fog of determinism,

and it was the more cogent because those sweeping and simplistic socio-

economic interpretations were already being undermined by detailed and

unprejudiced research. A series of close studies of particular social and polit-

ical groups—the holders of ofﬁce under Charles I, the members of the Long

Parliament, the peerage, and the political communities in particular coun-

ties—were showing, and have continued to show, that the realities of the

Caroline political nation were too diverse to be ﬁtted into any Procrustean bed

of ‘rising’ or ‘declining’ gentry, and that the Civil War required a much wider

range of explanation than class conﬂict could supply.

It is an increase of knowledge, much more than a swing of fashion, that has

turned historians away from those over-simple and anglocentric interpret-

ations that held sway up to a generation ago. For the last twenty years and

more most of us have been trying to write Stuart history without hindsight,

and without ideological preconceptions. We are readier to admit the role of

the personal and the contingent in bringing even catastrophic events to pass;

a civil war, even the overthrow of an ancient monarchy, may be the climactic

outcome of a gradual, inexorable increase of stresses in the fabric of society

or the frame of government, but it may also come about through a failure of

statesmanship. It may be something of the two. Some of our revisionists seem

to me to go too far in reacting against earlier interpretations, whether of the

old Whig school or the newer Marxist. Charles I’s eleven-year rule without a

4 Prologue

Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (1972). Stone has also edited and

introduced a useful anthology of the gentry controversy in Social Change and Revolution in Eng-

land 1540–1640 (1965).

G. R. Elton, ‘A high road to civil war?’, ﬁrst published in 1965, reprinted in Studies in Tudor

and Stuart Politics and Government (3 vols., Cambridge, 1974–83), II, 137–54.

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parliament, for instance, has been portrayed as neither intrinsically unviable

in the long term nor widely unpopular, and discontent with the Laudian

church as conﬁned to a small but strident faction. Some writers have seemed

to suggest that the storm-clouds of civil war loomed almost suddenly out of a

clear sky. That strikes me as just as implausible as tracing their formation

back to a non-existent ‘opposition’ in Elizabethan parliaments or to the redis-

tribution of monastic land under Henry VIII.

It is possible to believe that the rebellions in Scotland and Ireland were until

a late stage avoidable, and the English Civil War not only avoidable but

unforeseeable, and yet to feel it necessary to look some way further back than

their immediate causes for their preconditions. None of Charles I’s three king-

doms was threatening to become ungovernable when he inherited them, but

there were unresolved political problems in all three, as well as religious and

social tensions of varying seriousness. These need never have led to civil war,

but when a series of unanticipated crises did explode in war, and Scots, Irish

and Englishmen (in that order) were forced to choose sides, they tended to split

along existing lines of stress. All governments in early modern Europe were for

varying reasons fragile and vulnerable, and the British monarchies were more

lacking than most in the elementary means of enforcing unpopular govern-

mental decisions. Yet when our period begins England had enjoyed a century

and a half of almost unbroken internal peace, and Scotland more than sixty

years. A glance at continental Europe will remind us how untypical they were.

France had suffered a succession of civil wars of religion from 1562 to

1598, and again (less severely) from 1622 to 1629; the Frondes of 1648–53

were shortly to come. The Spanish monarchy had been struggling vainly to

suppress the revolt of the Netherlands since 1568, and was to be torn apart

from 1640 by the rebellions of Catalonia and Portugal, followed by that of

the kingdom of Naples in 1647. The German-speaking lands were locked in

the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, and for much of that time the

Scandinavian kingdoms were involved in it too. The degree to which these

conﬂicts were civil wars varied, but they put a heavy strain on the govern-

ments of all the countries concerned, few of which escaped the miseries of

warfare on their own soil. Indeed so widespread were rebellion and civil strife

in the 1640s that there was much debate a generation or so ago as to whether

Britain’s civil wars should be seen primarily as part of a general crisis of Euro-

pean monarchy. It came to be generally recognized, however, that the differ-

ences between the upheavals in these islands and those on the continent were

so much more signiﬁcant than any common features between them that the

search for common causes was on to a false trail. No other mid-century rebel-

lion generated so dedicated a ﬁghting-force as the New Model Army, or cut

the head off an anointed king, or altered ancient governments so drastically,

or opened up so rich a vein of radical thought.

Prologue 5

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So where to begin? Any precise date must be to some degree arbitrary. But

in November 1641, when the embryonic parliamentarian party prepared a

comprehensive statement of all the ills that threatened the peace of the king-

dom, it began its tally of the nation’s grievances in 1625, the year of Charles I’s

accession. No historian regards this wildly partisan Grand Remonstrance as

an objective analysis of the state of the nation, or lays such exclusive blame

for the rifts within it upon royal misgovernment. But the perception that the

new reign had wrought a great change in the prospects of all Charles’s king-

doms was a true one, so his accession will be our starting-point too, as it was

of Clarendon’s classic History of the Rebellion—and he had lived through it.

The next two chapters try to sketch with very broad strokes what England,

Scotland, and Ireland were like when he inherited them, the ﬁrst focusing on

their social characteristics and political institutions, the second on the state of

religion and on religious divisions within them. They pave the way for a chap-

ter on the nature of Charles’s rule before its peace was broken by rebellion in

Scotland. Readers may understandably feel that they have an unconscionable

way to go before the action starts, and those who already know their bearings

in early Stuart history will need no prompting on how to skip through the ﬁrst

three chapters.

A word as to footnotes and reading lists, neither of which are as full as they

would be in a work addressed to an academic readership. Footnotes are con-

ﬁned mainly to direct quotations, or controverted points on which I have pre-

ferred one interpretation to another, or places where I have plundered a

fellow-historian’s work specially heavily. Bibliography was a problem; a full

one would have been very long, and inappropriate to the kind of book that

this sets out to be. So at the end of each of its six chronological parts I have

appended a page or two of advice on further reading, addressed to the inter-

ested general reader or student who feels the need for a broader background

or wishes to pursue a particular topic further. The recommendations are

highly selective, and they are mostly conﬁned to books that might be found in

a municipal public library or a smaller university or college library. For that

reason, articles in learned journals are cited only where there are exceptional

reasons for including them. Spelling has been modernized in the titles of

seventeenth-century books and pamphlets, and in quotations from contem-

porary sources. The place of publication is London unless speciﬁed otherwise.

6 Prologue

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part i

Background and Beginnings

1625–1640

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