Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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supposed to mean in their case. Much of what they contended for was

achieved at least in part in the 1650s: regular parliaments at minimal inter-

vals, a radical and rational reapportionment of seats, a large liberty of wor-

ship and belief, freed from civil penalties, and the use of only the English

language in legal proceedings. The Levellers were not the only champions of

these objectives, but they took an early lead in asserting them. A household

franchise, as deﬁned in the second Agreement, would not have spelt the death

of the English political system. What was perhaps the most fertile of all their

concepts, the reservation of certain fundamental human rights from the

power of even the people’s representatives to infringe them, began its long

road to fruition in the ﬁrst Bill of Rights before the century was out. It has

been argued here that they spoilt their best chances through errors in tactics,

but that does not detract from the originality of their vision of a just and equal

commonwealth. It may be true that they demanded a greater degree of polit-

ical equality than was realizable in a society where social and economic

inequality was so ingrained, but they set a goal that posterity has rightly hon-

oured. It has been said that their programme, London-bred as it was and

geared to the needs of the middling sort in the great city, had little appeal for

the great mass of the rural population; but that is perhaps to underestimate

the potential taste for liberty among our village Hampdens, who would cer-

tainly have beneﬁted from the abolition of tithes and copyhold tenures—

probably too from popular courts of law in every hundred.

Religion was probably the sphere in which the Levellers were most out of

tune with the majority of their contemporaries. Their proposal to remove it

altogether from parliament’s and the state’s authority proved the biggest

bone of contention in the Whitehall debates, because Ireton and his fellow-

ofﬁcers were typical of the gentry in believing, in company with all beneﬁced

clergy, that in a Christian commonwealth the civil magistrate had a God-

imposed duty to ensure that the true faith was publicly professed and propa-

gated. We should also remember that while we in the west today think of

popular radicalism as aiming naturally towards democracy, and even com-

munist dictatorships feel obliged to call themselves people’s or democratic

republics, this was by no means necessarily the way minds ran three and a half

centuries ago. We have already noted the distrust felt by many of the sects and

radical Independents, whose congregations sprang from much the same

social soil as the Levellers, towards the latter’s trust in purely secular

panaceas, and towards their egalitarianism in particular. There was a funda-

mental incompatibility between the Levellers’ tenets and those of the Fifth

Monarchists, who were taking off as a political (as well as religious) force in

1649, just when the Levellers were entering upon their decline. Their reading

of the books of Daniel and Revelation led them to believe that the thousand-

year kingdom of the saints was imminent. This kind of millenarianism had

448 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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been around in England for some time, but the Fifth Monarchists differed

from its more sober exponents, who trusted to God to bring in Christ’s king-

dom in his own good time, in believing that they were called to do all they

could to bring it in themselves, if necessary (many of them thought) by force.

They differed as to whether they expected Christ to appear in person before

the thousand years were up, but they agreed that until he came his kingdom

was to be ruled by his saints, which of course meant people like themselves.

In an address to Fairfax and the Council of Ofﬁcers, shortly after they had

presented the second Agreement to the Rump, the Fifth Monarchist churches

of Norfolk asked: ‘How can the kingdom be the saints’ when the ungodly are

electors, and elected to govern?’

Between receiving this manifesto and confronting the main Leveller

mutiny, Fairfax was directed by the Council of State to deal with a small inci-

dent in Surrey. He and the council would have been astounded if they could

have learnt of the interest that posterity was to take in it three centuries and

more later. The ﬁrst Digger community, a company of thirty or so men who

called themselves True Levellers, had gathered on common land on St

George’s Hill near Walton-on-Thames, and had dug it and sown it with

parsnips, carrots, and beans, on which they proposed to live. They maintained

that God had made the earth as a common treasury, and that the division of

it into parcels of private property was the source of all bondage and blood-

shed. But rights of common were an appurtenance belonging by law to the

local landowners, and upon their complaint the Council of State instructed

Fairfax to evict the intruders. Fairfax entrusted the task to Captain Gladman

of his own regiment, but he listened courteously to two emissaries of the

Diggers, even though they refused to remove their hats in his presence—a sign

of the common intellectual ancestry that they shared with Quakers. Gladman

judged their little community to be harmless, and it was left undisturbed

through the summer. But after it moved on to nearby Cobham Heath in

August it gave rise to further complaints, and this time the council gave the

army ﬁrm orders to suppress it. The squatters’ shacks were pulled down, their

crops destroyed, and the men convicted of trespass and ﬁned, but somehow

the little colony survived into the spring of 1650. Other Digger communities

sprang up in various parts of the country, but they were equally short-lived,

and the movement was never large. By the summer of 1650 the ripple that it

made on the Commonwealth’s political history had all but died away.

Yet posterity’s interest in the Diggers has not been misplaced, for in

Gerrard Winstanley they had a leader and publicist of genius. He used to be

celebrated as an ancestor of modern secular-inspired communism, but his

Quest for a Settlement 449

Certain Queries Humbly Presented in Way of Petition (Feb. 1649); mostly printed in

Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 241–7.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 449

ideas derived from Daniel and Revelation no less than those of the Fifth

Monarchists, and his early writings read much like those of other radical mil-

lenarians. But by the spring of 1649, when he published his ﬁrst Digger mani-

festo, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced, he had become convinced that

the prophesied kingdom of the saints was to be brought into being through

Christ, the second Adam, working in the breast of every man and woman,

and inspiring them to redeem the ﬁrst Adam’s sin by renouncing lordship and

property. Spiritual regeneration was to be attained through the sharing of the

earth and its fruits. Further eloquent and often moving tracts followed, and

they culminated in a full model of a propertyless commonwealth which he

dedicated to Cromwell in February as The Law of Freedom in a Platform.

The freedom that it offered was severely qualiﬁed, however, because

Winstanley, like later devisers of communistic utopias, felt the need to hold

his ideal community together through draconian laws and a strict

regulation of education and ideas.

At least the various programmes of Levellers, Diggers, and even Fifth

Monarchists were borne up by a stronger conviction than the few dragging

steps which the Commonwealth’s actual government took towards shaping

its constitutional future. It was past the middle of March before the Rump

passed the two acts which formally abolished the ofﬁce of king (as ‘unneces-

sary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of

the people’) and the House of Lords (as ‘useless and dangerous to the people

of England’). The latter act aroused far more controversy than the former,

indeed Cromwell himself voted against it. The reason for it lay of course in the

overwhelming opposition of the peerage as a class to the king’s execution, but

even after that event a substantial number of Rumpers wanted to retain the

Lords in a purely consultative role. What tipped the balance was a printed

royalist declaration, proclaiming Charles II as king and designating the

House of Lords as the sole legitimate authority until he was able to exercise

his regal powers in person. On its appearance the bill for abolition was

rapidly passed, but by a majority of only ﬁfteen in a House numbering

seventy-three.

The Rump was being made aware almost daily of the deep unpopularity of

its regime in the country at large. One evidence of it lay in the huge success

enjoyed by a pious forgery entitled Eikon Basilike, which purported to record

the late king’s meditations and devotional exercises during his ﬁnal captivity.

It was compiled and probably mainly written by John Gauden, the future

Bishop of Worcester, and published ten days after Charles’s execution. Its

tear-jerking portrayal of martyred innocence and piety had a very broad

450 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Christopher Hill (ed.), The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (which include The True

Levellers’ Standard Advanced) (Harmondsworth, 1973).

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 450

appeal; despite the government’s attempts to suppress it it was reprinted thirty

times within the year and translated into several European languages. One

reader whom it exasperated, however, was John Milton. He had had no quar-

rel with monarchy as such when he took up his pen against the bishops in a

series of tracts in 1641–2, but the course of events during the Civil Wars, espe-

cially the establishment of an exclusive Presbyterian national church, aligned

him ﬁrmly on the side of the Independents and the New Model Army. His

sonnet of 1646 ‘On the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament’

ended with the famous line ‘New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large’, and

his sonnet to Fairfax two years later expressed his profound discontent with

the whole ethos of the unpurged parliament’s rule. He thoroughly approved

of the proceedings against the king, and he was so incensed by the ﬂood of

outcries against them that he returned to prose polemics to defend them,

directing his ﬁre particularly against the Presbyterian clergy. The Tenure of

Kings and Magistrates appeared two weeks after the king’s execution, but

most of it was written slightly before. The formality of its argument that kings

are accountable to the whole body of their subjects, along with its splendidly

orotund rhetoric and its piling up of biblical and classical authorities, seem to

place it in an older world of controversy than the pamphlets of (say)

Walwyn and Winstanley, but it was effective after its fashion, and Milton was

already well enough known as a poet, scholar, and polemist for his support to

be very welcome to the Rump, who had few enough defenders. Gratefully, the

parliament appointed him Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of

State at £200 a year. His routine duties included rendering the council’s

letters to foreign states into elegant Latin, translating incoming diplomatic

correspondence into English, acting as interpreter at audiences and confer-

ences conducted in Latin (still the lingua franca of diplomacy), and examin-

ing papers and tracts suspected of being subversive. But he earned his quite

handsome salary mainly by defending the Commonwealth in print against its

literary assailants, and one of the council’s ﬁrst requests was for a reply to

England’s New Chains Discovered. He never wrote it, and some have taken

this to imply that he felt some sympathy with the Leveller cause; but a much

likelier explanation is that he gave priority to writing an answer to Eikon

Basilike. This he did, to the extent of 242 pages, in Eikonoklastes, published

in October 1649. No Miltonist loves this turgid piece much, but he devoted

his failing eyesight to it, and to replying at length and in Latin to a piece of

royalist apologetics by the French scholar Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise).

By the autumn of 1651 he was almost totally blind, and his formal duties had

thinned to a trickle.

Milton was right in sensing that the huge popularity of Eikon Basilike (and

the uncritical acceptance of its genuineness) laid bare a great weakness in the

young Commonwealth. This lay not so much in any direct threat from active

Quest for a Settlement 451

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 451

royalists, raring to draw their swords again to avenge the regicide, for it

would be six years before any signiﬁcant number did so, as in a general lack

of positive commitment or affection towards the new regime. It was to be an

all but insoluble problem to win hearts and minds to a republic dedicated to

the supreme authority of the sovereign people’s representatives when so few

of the people really wanted a republic at all. More than ﬁve months passed

after Pride’s Purge before the Rump deﬁned what kind of a state it purported

to govern. It did so in a one-sentence act declaring England ‘to be a Com-

monwealth and Free State . . . governed by the representatives of the people in

parliament . . . without any king or House of Lords’. Later still, in January

1650, it required all men aged eighteen and over to take an Engagement to be

true and faithful to the Commonwealth, as now established without king or

Lords, but it was subscribed with a good deal of casuistry by many ill-

wishers, while it proved a stumbling-block to many honest men who had no

intention of engaging in sedition.

But most did subscribe, and the wide-

spread report that Fairfax refused it conceals the fact that he had already

taken the Engagement in the earlier form prescribed for the council.

Long before it passed the Engagement, the Rump became aware that the

state of public opinion made it impossible for it to keep its promise to hold

early general elections. It was precluded from courting the popularity it so

badly lacked by reducing taxation, because the threats from Ireland and Scot-

land forced it to keep up large land forces, which would grow even larger

when conquered territory had to be garrisoned. The Commonwealth had a

total of about 47,000 men under arms in March 1649, many with large

arrears of pay and living at free quarter, and this would rise to about 70,000

in 1652.

Furthermore it had to go on building ships, not only to counter

Rupert’s small ﬂeet and the much larger number of royalist privateers, but

because it faced the hostility and rivalry of the greatest sea-power in the

world. Charles II was currently the guest of his brother-in-law William II of

Orange, who was much disposed to help him. The Rump hoped, vainly, to cut

the monthly assessment at the end of 1649 from £90,000 to £60,000. Instead

it was forced in the autumn of 1650 to raise it to an unprecedented £120,000.

It was as hesitant in grasping the nettle of religion as it was in putting the

Commonwealth on ﬁrm constitutional foundations. The old line of division

between Presbyterians and Independents was no longer so sharply drawn,

since now many doctrinally orthodox Calvinists of both persuasions were

prepared to put their differences aside in order to resist the rising tide of

452 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Sarah Barber, ‘The Engagement for the Council of State and the establishment of the Com-

monwealth government’, in Historical Research 63 (1990), 44–57, corrects previous accounts in

important particulars. For text see Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 384, 391.

The most authoritative estimates of the army’s numbers are in the (unfortunately) unpub-

lished Oxford D.Phil. thesis by H. M. Reece on ‘The Military Presence in England, 1649–1660’.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 452

radical sectarianism and popular heresy, of which the writings of the so-

called Ranters were an extreme example. There was a small party of sectar-

ian enthusiasts within the Rump, with the army men Harrison, Rich,

Fleetwood, and John Jones prominent among them; they managed to secure

the establishment of a Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Wales and a similar one for England’s northern counties. But the majority of

members were suspicious of religious enthusiasm and did not want to incur

greater unpopularity by seeming to encourage it. They were aware of the

strong preference in the country at large for retaining a national church with

a publicly maintained parochial ministry, and many of them shared it. An

established church was already in being when the Rump came to power, with

its faith, worship, and government deﬁned by the Westminster Assembly and

given statutory authority by the unpurged parliament. In August 1649 there

was a motion to conﬁrm it; the division produced a tie and it was lost only by

the Speaker’s casting vote. That should not be taken as evidence that half the

members present were committed Presbyterians (though a signiﬁcant minor-

ity were), but that they preferred what they had got to any likely alternative.

The positive task of establishing working classical presbyteries everywhere,

based on ruling elders in every parish, was still very incomplete by the time of

Pride’s Purge, and it was not carried much further thereafter. But no new

ecclesiastical regime to replace Presbyterianism was proposed until late in the

Rump’s existence, and in practice a wide variety of worship and church organ-

ization prevailed, including the continued (though illegal) use of the Anglican

liturgy. But while the Rump shied off from the contentious business of

providing for the propagation of the gospel on a national scale, it was happy

to demonstrate that it was against sin. Between April and June 1650 it passed

acts against non-observance of the sabbath and against swearing and cursing,

as well as the notorious one which punished adultery, incest, and fornication

with death, even on a ﬁrst offence. Mercifully it was very little enforced. A

Blasphemy Act followed in August, less savage than the Long Parliament’s

Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 and aimed mainly against the Ranters, though

George Fox and John Bunyan were among those whom it threatened. The

House took longer to face the vexed question of toleration, but in September

1650 it repealed the recusancy laws to the extent of removing the penalties for

not attending parish services on Sundays, provided that those who absented

themselves took part in some other form of public worship.

When Fairfax, in the midst of the Leveller mutiny in May 1649, assured the

army that elections to a new parliament were high on the Rump’s agenda, he

cannot have known how mistaken he was. But the current pressure in the army

for an early dissolution did cause the House to debate the matter. It set up a

committee, over which Vane was given special responsibility, to consider

both the apportionment of seats in future parliaments and the date by which

Quest for a Settlement 453

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 453

the present one should dissolve itself. But amid the genuine dangers to the

Commonwealth from without, and the demoralizing symptoms of its unpopu-

larity at home, the prospect of putting its future to the hazard of general elec-

tions became ever less attractive. Nothing was heard from Vane’s committee,

though the House did try in October to prod it into activity by ordering it to

meet daily. When at last Vane reported from it in January 1650, its proposals

were very different from what the army expected and what the Rump had

promised less than a year earlier. It recommended that parliament should

henceforth consist of 400 members, whom the present House should appor-

tion between the counties and the towns within them, but that it should order

elections only in as many constituencies as were necessary to bring its strength

up to 400. The presently sitting members were to continue sitting, and be

counted as part of the strength of the counties in which their seats lay. The

Rump never formally adopted this recruitment scheme, as it came to be

called, but it was clearly attracted by it. It was to be a potent source of friction

with the army, which saw it as a device to keep its political opponents in

power indeﬁnitely. Its proposers could reply that its aim was to ensure not

only that the next parliament was not more hostile to the army than the pres-

ent one but that it could be trusted to preserve the very being of the republic.

Another area in which the Rump disappointed the army was that of law

reform. The common law was a majestic ediﬁce and the parliament-men were

right to venerate it, but its procedures were riddled with archaisms, and the

time was ripe for making it more rational, more accessible to the less well-to-

do, and more humane. A very little was done, for instance for the relief of

poor debtors, but the professional lawyers in the House formed a close-knit

group and exerted an inﬂuence disproportionate to their numbers through

their guidance of committees and their frequent employment in drafting

legislation. They formed an almost solid bloc of opposition to any serious

attempt to reform the law, and when the House at last took the matter in hand

in 1652 they made sure that nothing came of it.

As time went on, the suspicion inevitably arose that the Rumpers were

clinging to their seats for the sake of the material proﬁt that power brought

with it. Such a charge was indeed levelled against them by their opponents. In

assessing how far it was justiﬁed we should judge by the standards of seven-

teenth-century Britain rather than by those we profess to uphold today, and

under the Stuart monarchy holders of high ofﬁce expected to enrich them-

selves very considerably, often more through patronage and perquisites than

through their formal remuneration. There were limits to what was thought

acceptable, and Buckingham and Strafford overstepped them, but the prewar

view of where the bounds lay was a generous one. By the standards of the time

the Rumpers as a body do not come out badly—certainly better than the minis-

ters and courtiers of James I, viewed collectively. A fair number of them held

454 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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lucrative ofﬁces, and proﬁted from them in time-honoured ways. They were

all subject to newer temptations. They were responsible for the sale of vast

quantities of crown lands, royalists’ lands, and the land of bishops, deans, and

chapters, and it is not surprising that some of them secured choice bargains in

real estate for themselves. Haselrig was sometimes referred to as the bishop

because of the amount of diocesan land he bought in the see of Durham, and

Colonel Philip Jones, who was born in Swansea’s High Street of very minor

gentry stock, rose by questionable means to become quite a magnate in south

Wales. He was not the only army ofﬁcer or ex-ofﬁcer to do well for himself.

Outright corruption in the form of taking bribes seems to have been rare,

though one cannot be certain in an area where evidence is so elusive. Speaker

Lenthall was alleged to be guilty of it, and so was his MP son, but the accus-

ations were never substantiated. One Rumper, and only one, was actually

convicted of taking bribes, and that was Lord Howard of Escrick. The fact

that the House expelled him, disqualiﬁed him permanently from public ofﬁce,

ﬁned him £10,000 (though this was soon remitted), and sent him to the

Tower shows that it regarded corruption as a serious offence, from which

rank gave no protection.

Some MPs took advantage of the immunity from prosecution for debt that

membership conferred, including the Earls of Pembroke and Salisbury, who

both won seats in by-elections after Pride’s Purge; but no one would suggest

that that was why they sought election. Some, mainly among the least active

and committed members, took their chance to secure preferential repayment

of debts owed to them by the state. Among over two hundred men who

enjoyed opportunities for personal proﬁt such as no previous parliament had

afforded, it was inevitable that some abused their position. But they were

creditably few, especially among the core of members who worked hardest,

and the charge that the Rumpers as a body clung to power because they were

doing so well out of it will not stand up.

The main reasons why they were so

slow—and sometimes evasive—in providing for a successor to themselves

were ﬁrst the very real prospect that anything like free elections would return

a majority of men hostile to the very principle of a republic, and secondly a

desire to prevent the army from usurping political power. The two reasons

were of course linked, since in the last resort only the army could ensure that

a genuinely new parliament was not to be dominated by men disaffected

towards the Commonwealth, and for many members this remedy would be

worse than the disease. The Rump’s contemporary critics went a lot too far

in accusing it of corrupt self-interest, but they were more justiﬁed in com-

plaining of its inertia, its dilatoriness in providing positive measures for

Quest for a Settlement 455

The whole question is searchingly discussed in Worden, Rump Parliament, pp. 93–102,

and Aylmer, State’s Servants, pp. 139–55, 341–3.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 455

constitutional and religious settlement, its aversion to reform in general, and

the laxity of the majority of its members in attending to public business.

Nevertheless, looking at the Commonwealth as a whole, it was managed by

its councillors, ofﬁcials, military and naval ofﬁcers with more probity and a

stronger sense of public service than the early Stuart monarchy had been, and

that was to remain true right through the 1650s. One acid test was the admin-

istration of the navy, since the supply of timber and other material to the

dockyards, and the provisioning of the ﬂeet, involved very lucrative contracts

and offered fertile ﬁelds for corruption. But this topic can best be considered

in the context of the Commonwealth’s defence of itself at sea; and since the

most immediate threats to it were posed by land forces, its campaigns in Ire-

land and Scotland will be the main matter of the next chapter.

456 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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part iii: further reading

For the effects of the Civil Wars on those who fought them, on the civil population,

and on the material face of Britain, see particularly John Morrill, The Impact of the

English Civil War (1991), Charles Carleton, Going to the Wars (1992), Stephen

Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars (Stroud, 1994), and Martyn Bennett,

The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638–1661 (2000). Ian Gentles

remains authoritative on The New Model Army (Oxford, 1992). The army’s role in

politics between the wars is probed by the present writer in Soldiers and Statesmen:

The General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–1648 (Oxford, 1987) and by

the essays edited by Michael Mendle in The Putney Debates of 1647 (Cambridge,

2001), which also contains some of the best recent writing on the Levellers. A. S. P.

Woodhouse presents the most accessible text of the Putney Debates, along with many

other valuable documents and a good commentary, in Puritanism and Liberty (2nd

ed. 1950, and later reprints). The debates were ﬁrst published, with much else on the

army and its political activities, in C. H. Firth’s superb edition of The Clarke Papers,

of which volumes I and II have been reprinted in a single volume by the Royal Histor-

ical Society (Woodbridge, 1992). Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second

Civil War and its Origins (New Haven, 1994) is illuminating on the inter-war years

but stops short of the war itself. On this see Gentles (above) and S. R. Gardiner’s mag-

isterial History of the Great Civil War (various editions), and for the decisive Preston

campaign A. Woolrych, Battles of the English Civil War (1961, 2000). On the navy’s

role see Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (Oxford, 1989). Scotland is splendidly

covered down to 1651 by David Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in

Scotland (1977). For Ireland, besides the ever-valuable New History of Ireland, vol. III

and Micheál Ó Sliochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649, already recommended,

we have the essays edited by Jane Ohlmeyer in Ireland, From Independence to

Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995).

The course of political events and the changes in political alignment that led to the

execution of Charles I are wonderfully well traced by David Underdown in Pride’s

Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), whose scope is much wider

than its title suggests. The story of the king’s last weeks is incomparably told by C. V.

Wedgwood in The Trial of Charles I (1964). On the political history of the Common-

wealth down to 1653 Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974) is mas-

terly. Worden also gives the best account of the early development of English

republicanism in his contributions to David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty

and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, Calif., 1994).

Frances D. Dow gives a ﬁne brief survey of a big subject in Radicalism in the English

Revolution 1640–1660 (Historical Association, 1985), and Christopher Hill is at his

memorable best in The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the Eng-

lish Revolution (1972). He also writes affectionately about the Diggers in his edition

of Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (1973). On the Levellers, the

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