Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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King Charles’s Inheritance I:

Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples

England was not only the largest and richest of Charles’s three kingdoms,

but politically the most highly developed. Compared with the other major

monarchies of early modern Europe, that of England possessed both

strengths and weaknesses. In the later sixteenth century England had been

arguably the most stable and best governed realm in Europe, and there was

no sharp decline under James I.

Its greatest asset was its political unity. The authority of the king and his

privy council extended on an almost equal footing into every corner of the land,

and the system of local government was virtually uniform throughout. The

regional jurisdictions of the Council of the North and the Council in the

Marches of Wales, and the palatine privileges of Durham, Lancashire, and

Cheshire, constituted only minor exceptions. A single system of common law

operated throughout England and Wales; a single parliament represented the

whole realm (except County Durham, though the Bishop of Durham sat in the

Lords), and the taxes that it voted were levied equally (at least in theory)

throughout it. The contrast with the regional diversity within the French and

Spanish monarchies could not be stronger. In the former, only the central Île de

France enjoyed anything approaching England’s political and legal uniformity.

The great outlying provinces from Brittany through Guyenne and Gascony,

Provence and Dauphiné to Burgundy and Lorraine had to differing degrees

retained their own institutions when they were absorbed into the French king-

dom; some still kept their own representative assemblies, some their own

parlements (or semi-sovereign courts of law), while most clung to their own

legal codes and judicial systems and their own distinct forms and levels of tax-

ation. In the Spanish monarchy, the imperfect assimilation of the kingdom of

Aragon to that of Castile was shown not only in their separate institutions but

in the former’s revolt in 1591–2 and the major rebellion of Catalonia in 1640.

Portugal remained even more a distinct kingdom, and the attempt to increase

the Spanish king’s authority over the Spanish Netherlands led to their revolt in

1566 and to their ﬁnal loss eighty-two punishing years later.

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In France too the provinces often showed separatist tendencies when the

crown’s position was weak, as it so often was during the long wars of religion.

There were strong regional loyalties in various parts of England, but never

such as to impair the overall sense of nationhood and (until 1642) loyalty to

the crown. That was largely true even of Wales, despite its separate language

and relatively recent assimilation, as its strong popular royalism was to show

in the Civil Wars. Shakespeare’s cameo of Captain Fluellen in Henry V is

perhaps evidence of a certain affection on England’s side, as well as of Welsh

pride. It is a striking difference between England’s civil wars and France’s that

loyalty to Charles I was ﬁrmest in the north, in Wales and the West Country,

the regions furthest from his capital, whereas the French king was usually

strongest in the nuclear Île de France and most under threat in the imperfect-

ly assimilated provinces. The Fronde was to be only a partial exception,

because after the short-lived Fronde of the Parlement was overcome the

movement was hijacked by overmighty princes and nobles, playing their

time-dishonoured game of raising rebellion in their provincial power-bases.

Such ‘overmighty subjects’ had long ceased to be a threat to the English

monarchy, and that was one of its great strengths. In France and Spain the

king’s justice, while gradually asserting its supremacy, still coexisted with the

jurisdiction of the great feudal lords, and even minor nobles commonly had

some judicial powers over their tenants. But in England (though not Scotland)

the battle had long been won; the king’s courts had a monopoly of criminal

jurisdiction, and all important civil cases came before them too. The ecclesi-

astical courts still wielded signiﬁcant power over the laity in certain areas, but

they too were ultimately under the power of the king as the church’s Supreme

Governor. Feudal jurisdiction survived in the manorial courts, at least in the

more highly organized manors, but they dealt with little more than the rights

and obligations of tenants within the manorial community. The military

powers of the English nobility were as attenuated as their judicial rights.

Whereas in the French wars of religion the greatest magnates had been able to

build up large clienteles of dependent nobles, whose lords they literally were,

and who brought their own retinues of armed vassals with them, the Tudor

kings had ﬁnally established the principle that allegiance to the monarch took

precedence over all other allegiances, and that to raise military forces by any

other authority but that of the crown was treason. The long Tudor peace, and

England’s even longer immunity from invasion, had much diminished the

ancient military role of the aristocracy; indeed by 1625 few English nobles

had any military experience at all. England was fortunate too in having

among her magnates no princes of the blood, whose closeness in lineage to the

king could offer a dangerous alternative focus of loyalty. The last Englishman

to try to play the overmighty subject had been Elizabeth’s favourite the Earl

of Essex, and the ﬁasco of his ﬂing had shown what an anachronism it was.

10 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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The English nobility not only had fewer powers and privileges than their

continental counterparts; they were relatively much fewer in number. In 1633

the English lay peerage, from barons up to dukes, numbered only 122, in a

national population of about 4.75 million. Queen Elizabeth, parsimonious

with titles as in everything else, had let the total fall to a mere ﬁfty-ﬁve. James

I had more than doubled it, mainly through openly selling peerages to raise

revenue, but thereby he had only restored the proportion of titled nobles in

the total population to roughly what it had been when the Tudors ﬁrst came

to power. Despite his blatant sale of honours, however, the deference in

which the peerage was held was only slightly dented, and the political inﬂu-

ence of the older and greater houses remained large, whether through the

House of Lords, or the privy council (which they dominated), or senior ofﬁcers

in the royal household, or the patronage that they exercised in and around

their territorial bases in the counties. The notion, once widely held, that a

general rise of the gentry in the century 1540–1640 was balanced by a decline

of the titled aristocracy has been very heavily modiﬁed by more recent

research. At the latter date the peerage did indeed hold a smaller proportion

of the land of England than at the earlier, but most of them had weathered the

crisis that the long inﬂation of the sixteenth century had inﬂicted on them,

and on the eve of the Civil War their mean landed incomes were in real terms

slightly higher than they had been at Queen Elizabeth’s accession, despite

there being more than twice as many of them. They had mostly risen to the

challenge of managing their estates better and maximizing their resources,

and they had beneﬁted as the chief recipients of the large proﬁts that ﬂowed

from royal patronage.

A corollary of the small number of the titled nobility was that very many

substantial landowners who would have ranked as nobles in a social structure

like that of France or Spain were classed in England among the gentry, so that

in law they were commoners. The gentry played such a crucial part in the Eng-

lish Revolution that it is helpful to have an idea of their status, wealth, and

numbers. They were of several degrees. At the top was a small elite, number-

ing just over 300 in 1633, which consisted mainly of baronets, a new title that

James I had created simply in order to sell it, but which also included some

eldest sons of senior peers who bore courtesy titles and some English holders

of Scottish and Irish peerages, which James had also sold. The titles of these

300 or so were hereditary, but did not qualify them to sit in the English House

of Lords. Next came upwards of 1,500 knights, whose title was conferred by

the monarch but was not hereditary. Below them were between 7,000 and

9,000 esquires, still substantial men with a landed income averaging around

Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 11

Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965).

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£500, as compared with a mean of over £5,000 enjoyed by the peerage and

with the £10 that an agricultural labourer might earn in a year if he was regu-

larly employed. Most members of parliament and justices of the peace were

esquires and above, who constituted what were recognized as the county fam-

ilies in their home territory. The lowest and largest category among the gen-

try were those who styled themselves simply gentlemen, which was a far from

meaningless social distinction, though impossible to deﬁne with precision, as

contemporaries acknowledged. It was very much a matter of social accept-

ance: if you lived like a gentleman and were accorded the title by your fellow-

gentry, that was sufﬁcient. Most of the 10,000 to 14,000 ‘mere’ gentlemen in

Caroline England were landowners, but a growing minority were gaining

recognition as such through ofﬁce-holding, mercantile wealth, or practising

as barristers or in other professions. Taken as a whole, however, the gentry

formed essentially a landed class, and at the top of the scale their wealth over-

lapped with that of the nobility. Their collective landed income probably

came to more than ten times that of the whole peerage.

England’s governing class was a more open society than that of France or

Spain, in that entry into it required less formality. The ranks of the gentry were

volatile during the century before the Civil War, and successful newcomers

had no difﬁculty in obtaining a coat of arms from the College of Heralds if

they had a sufﬁcient estate and paid the fee. Many of the lesser gentry, how-

ever, were not armigerous. There was indeed a rise of the gentry in the sense

that the numbers of knights, esquires, and gentlemen increased at a consider-

ably greater rate than the population as a whole, but against their success

stories must be set large numbers of small squireens who struggled un-

successfully to keep up the life-style of a gentleman and fell out of the race.

Failure of male heirs was the commonest cause of the disappearance of gen-

try families, though incautious borrowing or too many daughters to ﬁnd

dowries for could be fatal too. Oliver Cromwell was one whom hard times

almost forced out of the ranks of the gentry. Yet the thesis that the sixfold

price rise that began around 1510 and was levelling out by 1625 spelt ultim-

ate disaster to gentlemen who lived by their landed income alone has not been

found generally true. Some, especially the smaller, went under because of it,

but landowners of whatever degree who managed their estates in a busi-

nesslike fashion, lived within their means and had reasonable demographic

luck could generally keep their heads above water, and even prosper.

Although gentry estates seem to have changed hands more rapidly from

about 1540 to 1640 than before the Reformation or after the Restoration, it

was not only their members that rose but the amount of the land of England

12 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

This paragraph is heavily indebted to G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service

of Charles I (rev. ed., 1974); see esp. Table 35, p. 331.

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that they collectively owned. Most of the monastic lands sold off by Henry

VIII came into their hands, if not immediately then in the course of the next

generation or two. When Elizabeth and James I sold off large quantities of

crown land to make ends meet, and when overspending peers had to part with

real estate to meet their debts, the gentry were generally the purchasers. Some

were investing the proﬁts of ofﬁce or courtiership or success in trade or the

law, but many were of established landowning families, taking the opportun-

ity to expand or round off their estates. Newcomers to landownership might

take a generation or so to make their mark in county society, but generally it

remained true, as Sir Thomas Smith had written in 1565, that ‘as for gentle-

men they be made good cheap in England’.

There was no nation-wide clash

of interest between old and new gentry, or between rising and declining ones;

no quasi-geological fault-line ran through the landed classes, such as would

determine which way they split when it came to civil war.

Nobility and gentry formed a single economic class in England, and the

social gap between the barons and the upper crust of commoners was not

wide. Marxist attempts to identify the gentry, or at least a very substantial

part of the gentry, with the bourgeoisie have fallen right out of favour, and

with good reason. The gentry themselves were strongly aware of the social

distinction between the landed and the landless, whatever the latter’s wealth,

even though they intermarried with wealthy merchant families more freely

than on the continent, and often put their younger sons into trade or the law.

Merchants and clothiers had their ups and downs under James I, but in the

longer term they were ﬂourishing. By 1625 they collectively possessed a con-

siderably larger share of the nation’s wealth than a century earlier, but they

had not increased their political weight proportionately. This was partly

because of the prestige that continued to attach to landownership, which led

the most successful merchants to invest their gains in real estate and acquire

gentry status. Two spectacular Jacobean examples were Sir Arthur Ingram,

the company promoter and customs farmer who built Temple Newsam near

Leeds, and Baptist Hicks, the silk merchant and moneylender who became a

viscount. The City of London, with its prestigious corporation and its well

armed, well trained militia, was to become a power in English politics in the

1640s, but until then its political inﬂuence rested largely on the crown’s

dependency on it for loans. The capital grew prodigiously in population and

wealth, from about 60,000 in 1500 to 185,000 by 1600 and 355,000 in

1640.

At James I’s accession there were only three other cities in England

Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 13

Sir Thomas Smith, The Commonwealth of England (1589 ed.): excerpt in G. W. Prothero

(ed.), Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth

and James I (Oxford, 4th ed., 1913), p. 177.

R. Finlay and B. Shearer, ‘Population growth and suburban expansion’, in A. L. Beier and

R. Finlay (eds.), London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (1986), pp. 37–59, esp.

Table 3, p. 45.

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with populations over 10,000: Norwich with about 15,000, Bristol with

12,000, and York with 11,000, and none were growing at anything like the

rate of London.

The concentration of foreign commerce on the capital was

excessive, and the living conditions for its thousands of poor were horrible.

London was handling about four-ﬁfths of England’s entire foreign trade, and

paying three-quarters of all the customs revenue received by the crown.

If the mercantile classes ranked rather modestly in the political nation

(meaning that part of the population which had some say in the running of the

country’s affairs), there was a large and ill-deﬁned ‘middling sort’, to use the

favourite contemporary description, on the fringe of it. The term embraced

yeomen and substantial tenant farmers in the countryside and lesser mer-

chants, shopkeepers, and independent craftsmen in the towns. They were on

the whole a more ﬂourishing class than in most of continental Europe (the

Netherlands excepted), and they carried real responsibility when they served

as high or petty constables, overseers of the poor, or in other unpaid local

ofﬁces. In parliamentary elections, they voted at the county hustings if they

were freeholders, and they were being admitted to the franchise in an increas-

ing number of boroughs. They were becoming steadily more literate and

politically aware, and were capable of strongly independent religious

opinions.

The century prior to Charles I’s accession had not been kind to the poorer

folk who made up the majority of the people of England. The greatest strains

upon English society had been the relentless rise in prices, already almost six-

fold, and a doubling of the population from about 2.3 million in 1524 to

4.6 million in 1625. Wage-earners were a minority in this pre-industrial

society, but there was a surplus of labour, and the real value of wages fell by

half. Small landholders, mostly customary tenants with a plot that they could

regard as their own and hope to pass to their heirs, were more numerous than

wage-labourers, and enjoyed varying fortunes. But landlords facing rising

prices had strong motives for getting rid of small tenants whose rents they

could not easily raise, and where such husbandmen did hang on their hold-

ings became too small to subdivide, so younger sons had to leave home and

seek employment. Some found it in neighbouring or more distant parishes;

others swelled the ranks of London’s poor, or took up the travelling trades of

pedlars or minstrels or quacks. Many were driven to begging or crime, or

both. Vagrancy became a serious social problem. The Elizabethan Poor Law

made more humane provision than many a European country could boast, but

it discriminated heavily against incomers to a parish, and poor rates were

still levied reluctantly. During the century down to 1625 the poor had been

getting poorer and the rich richer. The lot of the poor was brutally harsh by

14 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976), p. 83.

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modern western standards, but England was not an uncharitable country,

and few of them starved. The year 1623 was the last—it was one of acute

dearth—in which English people died of hunger in considerable numbers,

and they did so mainly in the more inaccessible parts of the north.

Civil war, however, was to come about not through the desperation of the

poor or the resentment of oppressed tenants, but through a quarrel which

until shortly before the ﬁghting started involved few outside the governing

class. The unique structure of that class in England vitally affected the com-

position of parliament; indeed it goes far to explain why the English parlia-

ment survived so vigorously when most of the corresponding representative

assemblies in the rest of Europe were far gone in decay. Those had typically

developed during the Middle Ages as meetings of the three estates of clergy,

nobles, and commons, whose representatives usually debated separately. The

noble estate generally spoke for the landowning class as a whole, and the third

estate, typically composed of lawyers, ofﬁcials, and merchants, was too infer-

ior in status or too subject to royal pressure to wield much independent inﬂu-

ence. Astute monarchs, unwilling to accept any check on their power to make

laws or raise taxes, exploited the inherent antagonism between the nobility

and the third estate, and played one off against the other. But there was no

chance of that in England, where parliament was uniquely composed of two

houses, both dominated by landlords. The clerical estate was represented sole-

ly by the twenty-six bishops, who sat in the Lords with the lay peers. The

House of Commons represented the communes or communities of the coun-

ties and boroughs; formally it comprised 90 knights of the shire and a still

growing number of burgesses—372 in 1601 and 417 by 1641. There was an

old law that members should be residents of their constituencies, and if it had

been observed there would have been over four times as many townsmen as

country gentlemen in the House. By late Elizabethan and Jacobean times,

however, the actual ratio was almost the reverse. Many parliamentary bor-

oughs were already long decayed, and among the country gentry there was an

insatiable appetite for the prestige of a seat in parliament—far more than the

county constituencies could supply. So they had long been invading the bor-

ough seats, and the crown was under constant pressure to create new ones,

both from aspirant local gentry and from magnates, courtiers, and ministers

of the crown who had the monarch’s ear and wanted parliamentary patronage

to dispose of. Many of the boroughs enfranchised by Elizabeth and James

were sleepy little backwaters from the start. The gentry who vied for these

seats, however, were not all plain country landowners; they included holders

of royal ofﬁces and successful lawyers, who regularly outnumbered the forty-

odd wealthy merchants who typically got elected to early Stuart parliaments.

Disputes between Lords and Commons were by no means unknown, but

there was a fundamental homogeneity about the English parliament that the

Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 15

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États-Généraux of France or the Cortes of Castile, for example, had never

possessed. There was no gulf of economic interest or social class between the

two Houses, for most MPs were landowners like the peers, and the richest

overlapped with them in wealth. The Commons’ chief strength lay in their

consisting mainly of the ‘natural rulers’ of the counties, rather than of hum-

ble burgesses from small provincial towns, yet mercantile wealth was not felt

to be inadequately represented, and clashes between landed and bourgeois

interests were rare. Ministers of the crown sat in both Houses, and non-noble

privy councillors had long been aware of the importance of ﬁnding them-

selves seats in the Commons, so that the policies and wishes of the king’s gov-

ernment could be properly spoken to there. When they neglected that duty, as

in the Addled Parliament of 1614, the king’s interests suffered seriously. Par-

liament, especially the Commons, needed to be carefully managed, and the

art whereby Elizabeth’s great ministers had effected this was in decline.

But the trend towards worsening relationships was not irreversible. The

picture that we used to be offered of a House of Commons seeking relentless-

ly to increase its initiative in face of a monarchy inspired by an ideal of abso-

lutism is one that historians have rightly discarded. A strong parliament need

not necessarily imply a weak crown, or vice versa. The great Tudors, in their

more successful phases, had recognized that the king (or queen) in parliament

was more powerful than an English monarch could possibly be acting on his

or her own, and they had achieved more through parliamentary statutes than

their cousins of France and Spain could ever do by more absolutist methods.

The Reformation statutes, the transfer of monastic property to the crown,

Henry VIII’s and Elizabeth’s Acts of Supremacy, the imposition of successive

liturgies on the church, the several Treasons Acts, and the tampering with the

succession to the throne are just the more obvious examples of what the

crown could do in partnership with parliament. But parliaments were still

special occasions for speciﬁc needs; no one imagined that they should be sit-

ting for most of the time. James I took time to realize that his interests and

parliament’s were not necessarily opposed, but his relations with his last par-

liament were altogether more cordial than with his previous ones. It was still

true when he died that parliaments met in the hope of reaching mutually bene-

ﬁcial agreement with the king rather than of opposing him; the expectation

still was that they would vote the subsidies he needed, and he would assent to

the statutes that they desired for the people they represented.

An inadequate revenue was the greatest weakness of the early Stuart

monarchy, and the commonest source of friction between crown and parlia-

ment. The Tudors and James I had not had the pretext of foreign invasion and

war on their own soil that had justiﬁed most continental monarchies in levy-

ing taxes without the consent of representative assemblies. The regular rev-

enues of the English crown—rents from crown lands, ﬁnes imposed by the

16 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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courts, and a clutch of ancient ﬁscal prerogatives—had not risen proportion-

ately with the great inﬂation. The customs, which parliament had voted to the

king for life at the start of every reign since Edward IV’s, were levied on the

nominal values of merchandise, which were ﬁxed by royal authority, but fell

far below their real values in the course of the long price rise. When James’s

Lord Treasurer issued a new Book of Rates in 1608, partly redressing over

half a century of undervaluation, he raised a storm that blew in the parlia-

ment of 1610 and was still blowing in that of 1614. During Elizabeth’s reign

the crown became increasingly dependent on direct taxes that only parlia-

ment could impose. But the units in which parliament voted supplies, the

‘subsidies’ of early Tudor origin and the more ancient ‘tenths and ﬁfteenths’,

not only failed to adjust to inﬂation but fell steadily in even their nominal

value. The whole ﬁscal system should have been overhauled many years

before James inherited the crown. Elizabeth had been urged to take it in hand

at a time when the war with Spain would have made parliament not unsym-

pathetic, but to the despair of her ministers she had refused to consider it, out

of sheer dislike of ‘novelty’.

Parliament rarely resorted to withholding subsidies as a lever for exacting

concessions or the redress of grievances; it happened only four times before

the Civil War. But when the Commons did vote supplies, they were invariably

less than the king asked for and needed. Even when they thought they were

being generous and voted multiple subsidies and tenths and ﬁfteenths, they

had little idea of how far these units had shrunk in real value. And when these

taxes were collected, local gentry commissioners were entrusted with assess-

ing their fellow gentry’s estates, and undervalued them to a degree that to

modern eyes looks scandalous—until we remember that the gentry’s equiva-

lents abroad, the lesser nobility, were often exempt from direct taxation

altogether. James I was driven to various unpopular expedients, the most

lucrative being the levying of special import duties, known as impositions,

which were additional to tonnage and poundage, the customs duties regular-

ly granted by parliament at the start of each reign for its duration. But this

caused a parliamentary outcry, as an abuse of the royal prerogative. Robert

Cecil, Earl of Salisbury and Lord Treasurer, made a brave effort in 1610 to

rationalize the crown’s revenue and parliament’s responsibility towards it.

His scheme was called the Great Contract. The crown was to give up the

impositions and some anachronistic ﬁscal rights, including the wardship of

heirs to noble and gentry estates who inherited while under age, in return for

a guaranteed annual parliamentary grant of £200,000. Added to the customs

and other regular revenues of the crown, that would just have sufﬁced a fru-

gal monarch in peacetime. But James was far from frugal, and the whole deal

eventually fell through, basically because neither the king nor the Commons

really trusted each other. Yet the Great Contract was not forgotten in

Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 17

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