Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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Dutch dominance of the Baltic trade was even more disproportionate. Dutch

mastery of the carrying trade had steadily increased during the rapid colonial

expansion of the last half-century; English merchantmen struggled against its

competition not only in northern and Mediterranean waters but along the

coasts of Africa and America, in the Caribbean and in all the seas plied by the

East India Company. Dutch carriers depended for protection on the Dutch

navy, which when Blake ﬁrst put to sea was the largest in Europe, though the

Commonwealth’s great effort to enlarge and improve its own was altering the

balance.

A source of grievance and controversy nearly as old as the century was the

United Provinces’ ‘Great Fishery’, which took most of its catches off the

coasts of Britain, from the mouth of the Thames right up to the Shetlands. It

is reckoned to have given employment to about a thousand ﬁshing-boats and

nearly half a million people on sea and shore. There had been more than one

attempt to organize a government-supported Anglo-Scottish ﬁshery, but each

had foundered in face of Dutch superiority in organization, ﬁnance, and tech-

nical proﬁciency. England’s greatest single concern, however, was to protect

her cloth trade, which still heavily dominated her exports as well as her

domestic industry. The old cross-Channel trade in traditional heavy broad-

cloths was still in the exclusive hands of the Merchant Adventurers Company,

but these materials, whose market was increasingly under challenge from

newer, lighter, more colourful fabrics, were sold ‘in the white’, to be dyed and

ﬁnished by Dutch craftsmen, whose work contributed more than half to the

value of the ﬁnal product.

Commercial rivalries and resentments generated a strong current of anti-

Dutch feeling in various quarters in England, but it was by no means

inevitable that they would lead to war; nor was it obvious that war would be

a good way of resolving them. When the Commonwealth was ﬁrst established

the Rump was so far from seeking a quarrel with the Dutch republic that in

April 1649 it sent Dr Isaac Dorislaus, a Dutch-born lawyer in its service, on a

mission to the States-General, with instructions to prepare the ground for an

alliance between the two republics. But a deep rift ran through the politics of

the United Provinces, so deep that it almost belied their name. On one side

was the party of the Regents, the urban patriciate that governed the rich mer-

cantile cities and was most dominant in Holland, the wealthiest of the

provinces and the most powerful in the States-General. This, sometimes

called the States party, was republican in sentiment, dedicated to promoting

Dutch commercial interests, and generally disposed towards peace. Against it

was ranged the quasi-monarchical Orangist party which supported the

descendants of William of Orange, the original Stadholder and Captain-

General. William II of Orange, who had succeeded to these ofﬁces in 1647,

was Charles II’s brother-in-law, and he nursed bellicose and expansionist

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aims. His strongest support came from the inland provinces, with their

largely agrarian economies and their relatively strong nobilities, and from

Zeeland. Unlike the Regents and the mercantile community, he had not

welcomed the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, for he had hoped by continuing

the war to enlarge his territory at the expense of the Spanish Netherlands. To

this end he entered into secret negotiations with the French court, which

remained at war with Spain, and at this stage shared his desire to see Charles II

restored to his throne. He made English royalist exiles welcome, and when a

group of them murdered Dorislaus in his lodgings there was suspiciously

little effort to bring them to justice. Anglo-Dutch relations became very cool.

But William died suddenly of smallpox in November 1650, and the political

balance in the States-General shifted dramatically in the States party’s favour.

The majority of the Rump was now keener than ever on a partnership with

the Dutch republic as a basis for a wider protestant alliance, and in March

1651 it sent St John and Walter Strickland to the Hague with proposals aimed

at averting war between the two commonwealths forever. These were for

what the Council of State called a ‘confederacy perpetual’, but what this

meant cannot be exactly known, because the envoys’ secret instructions have

not survived. It clearly involved, however, some permanent fusion of sover-

eignties and pooling of economic resources. It remains an astonishing con-

ception, and it bespeaks a strange mixture of idealism, naivety, and arrogance

in its authors. The proposals were never formally submitted, presumably

because the envoys’ general presentation of their drift was coldly received. To

the Orangists they were obviously anathema, since they threatened the whole

future of the stadholderate, and one can understand why they were quite

unacceptable to the majority of the States-General. The Dutch were natural-

ly jealous of their hard-won status as a sovereign power, which had ﬁnally

won formal international recognition at Westphalia only three years earlier,

and were little inclined to share their large commercial advantages, especial-

ly in the Baltic, with an up-and-coming maritime rival. Even while St John

and Strickland were still at the Hague, the Dutch signed a treaty with Den-

mark which secured for the United Provinces, and for them alone, the priv-

ilege of paying a very favourable composition in lieu of the dues imposed on

all other nations’ ships when they passed through the Sound. This was seen in

England as a bid to create a virtual Dutch monopoly in the indispensable

naval stores produced around the Baltic shores. It has been interpreted as a

deliberate death-blow to the Commonwealth’s diplomatic initiative, but it

more probably reﬂected a reluctant recognition by the States-General that

there was little prospect of agreement on the terms that the English envoys

sought. The States-General were certainly dismayed when St John obtained

his and Strickland’s recall to England, and they negotiated an extension of

their stay so that they could consider a more conventional commercial and

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political treaty. But the two Englishmen were convinced that the Dutch were

spinning out time until they saw the result of Charles II’s campaign in Scot-

land, and it is true that the Scottish royalists were being supplied with ships

and ammunition through Dutch ports.

St John and Strickland ﬁnally took their leave at the end of June, and on

9 October the Rump passed its famous Navigation Act. This has been attrib-

uted to the inﬂuence exerted upon the House by a particular group of London

merchants, but though it was undoubtedly designed to serve mercantile inter-

ests the motivation behind it was at least as much political as economic.

St John was plausibly reputed to be its prime mover, and he had returned home

full of resentment at the way he and Strickland had been treated in Holland,

where they had been the butt of many insults, as well as being (in their opin-

ion) bamboozled by the Dutch commissioners. St John was as concerned to

punish the Dutch as he was to promote English trading interests, and he had

a strong tide of public opinion running on his side. The act passed smoothly.

It reﬂected a widespread concern over the growing imbalance between

imports and exports, which was causing a net outﬂow of bullion (or ‘treas-

ure’), and especially over the increasing extent to which England’s imports,

and those of her colonies too, were being carried in Dutch ships. Its chief pro-

vision was that no goods should be imported into England, Ireland, or the

colonies except in English (or colonial) ships, or in ships of the countries

where those goods had been grown or manufactured. As to the ﬁsheries, no

cod, herring, pilchards, or any other commonly salted ﬁsh were to be landed

in England except what had been caught by English ﬁshing-boats, and their

catches must be cured in England.

The act caused consternation in the Netherlands, not only because of its

damage to Dutch commercial interests but because it potentially threatened a

war which was bound to hit them even harder than it hit English shipping and

taxpayers. They would not have let the act by itself cause a war, nor did the

Rump intend that it should do so. The States-General sent a powerful

embassy to England in December to try to mitigate its effects and put the two

republics on course again towards a general agreement. But a growing num-

ber of clashes on the high seas were exacerbating the long-existing mutual

animosity between Englishmen and Dutchmen at the popular level, and the

presses in both countries were inﬂaming it. On the diplomatic front negoti-

ations went well during the winter and spring, and by May the terms of an

offensive and defensive alliance seemed almost to have been agreed.

But

events at sea killed it.

The growth of friction was cumulative. In the course of the undeclared war

at sea between England and France that developed from 1649 onwards,

510 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 468–71.

Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, ch. 4, esp. pp. 54ff.

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French warships had been sinking or capturing English merchantmen on the

pretext that they were carrying contraband goods to the Spanish enemy,

whether or not they were actually doing so. Consequently the Council of

State in 1650 ordered its naval commanders to attack French vessels, whether

men-of-war or merchantmen, and from early in 1651 English shipping in the

Straits of Dover was furnished for the ﬁrst time with naval convoys. English

privateers were granted letters of reprisal, authorizing them to recoup the

losses that England had suffered at French hands by seizing French ships and

their cargoes. They increasingly executed this power against Dutch merchant

ships whom they suspected of carrying French goods, and they seized not only

the cargoes but the vessels and their crews. They were not always scrupulous

in checking that the goods really were contraband or even French, and the

Court of Admiralty found it necessary to threaten them with punishment if

they went on torturing Dutch mercantile ofﬁcers to make them declare car-

goes to be French when they were not. The Dutch were naturally furious at

such practices, and maintained that their neutral ﬂag covered the cargoes that

their merchantmen carried. That looked a plausible argument, but Dutch pri-

vateers were operating openly against English shipping from the French port

of Dunkirk, some of them with commissions from Charles II.

Another irritant was the English claim to sovereignty over the ‘British

Seas’, whereby they demanded that foreign vessels sailing them should salute

English men-of-war by striking their topsails and dipping their ﬂags. More-

over England claimed a right to stop and search any foreign ship in such sea-

ways. The claim was not new, but the notional extent of the ‘British seas’ was

now being extended from coastal waters into the whole Atlantic. Violent inci-

dents arising from the claim to stop and search multiplied, in colonial seas as

well as those nearer home, and public anger in both England and the Nether-

lands rose to match. Both governments dredged up grievances born of

decades of commercial rivalry, England’s being the more belligerent. The

Commonwealth claimed the right to impose conditions and levy tribute on

any foreigners who ﬁshed in the North Sea, and that was not the most pre-

posterous of its demands.

What ﬁnally sparked the war was a clash off the Downs between Blake and

the Dutch admiral Martin Tromp on 19 May 1652. Tromp was a fervent

Orangist, and so were most of his captains; he had forty-two ships, against

Blake’s ﬁfteen. These were English waters, so Blake demanded that Tromp

should strike his topsail, and on his failing to do so ﬁred several warning

shots. Tromp replied by ﬁring a broadside into Blake’s ﬂagship; he reported-

ly said he would strike sail if there were a king in England. A general engage-

ment followed, which Tromp broke off at nightfall after losing two ships. The

news of it left the Rump deeply divided; until then most members had been

inclined to accept the treaty terms thrashed out with the Dutch commissioners,

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but now the majority demanded satisfaction. Public feeling in the Nether-

lands was equally bellicose, and the States of Holland were almost isolated in

continuing to seek a peace treaty. They sent their elderly Grand Pensionary,

Adrian Pauw, to join the three Dutch envoys already in England, but his

mission was hopeless. A public declaration by the Rump on 9 July explained

that the war was the result of an Orangist-inspired design to subvert the

Commonwealth and restore the house of Stuart, and alleged that the United

Provinces had allowed their old protestant identity to become submerged by

reason of state, worldly materialism, and the worship of Mammon.

Not all the Rump was in favour of war; Vane was one of the minority who

opposed it to the last moment. Most prominent in the war party were the rad-

icals Marten, Neville, Thomas Chaloner, and Herbert Morley, and the more

moderate leaders Haselrig, Scot, and Whitelocke were in strong support. Curi-

ously little is known of Cromwell’s views at the time; his persistent absence

from the Council of State during the crucial period of decision, despite a direct

request for his attendance, suggests that he may have been going through one of

his periods of heart-searching. But he seems to have been convinced that it was

the Dutch who precipitated the war, and though he almost certainly regretted

that the two leading protestant powers were in conﬂict there is no convincing

evidence that he was opposed to it in principle when it was declared. Some of

the most enthusiastic supporters of the war were the Fifth Monarchists and

other extreme sectaries, including Harrison. They regarded the Dutch quest for

world dominance in commerce as contrary to God’s purpose for his people, and

they saw the prevailingly moderate tone of Dutch Calvinism as akin to that

of their opponents at home, the Presbyterians. They saw victory over these crea-

tures of Mammon as an appropriate ﬁrst stage in a career of universal conquest

by the saints over the carnal kingdoms of this world.

In the country at large, reactions to the war were very mixed, and they were

to ﬂuctuate with its changing fortunes. Dislike of the Dutch was very wide-

spread, and the combined impact of ofﬁcial propaganda, semi-ofﬁcial news-

papers, and public preachers (especially in fast-day sermons) made its mark.

But trade was hard hit by heavy losses of ships and crews sunk or captured,

by the enforced conversion of merchantmen into warships, and by the press-

ganging of seamen into the navy. The cost of maintaining a great ﬂeet on a

war footing, on top of garrisoning Ireland and Scotland, was huge. In Decem-

ber the Rump restored the monthly assessment from £90,000 per month to

the peak ﬁgure of £120,000 at which it had stood when the drain of the Scot-

tish and Irish campaigns was heaviest, but that did not sufﬁce. The war was

mainly what made parliament step up the sale of the estates of selected ‘delin-

quents’ to make up the shortfall in revenue. The process began when the lands

of 73 royalists were put up for sale by an act passed in July 1651, when war

ﬁrst threatened, followed by another a year later when it actually broke out;

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but this, which hit 29 victims, was nothing to the act of November 1652,

which deprived no fewer than 678. These measures not only made the bury-

ing of old quarrels much harder, but deepened the growing animosity

between parliament-men and army ofﬁcers, since the conﬁscations in not a

few cases infringed the articles of surrender that commanders had granted to

royalists in the ﬁeld. There had been similar clashes in the previous winter

over a belated Act of Oblivion for the beaten cavaliers, which Cromwell and

his fellow-ofﬁcers in the House, allied for once with Marten, had sought to

make as generous as possible. But Haselrig, ‘that arch-enemy of delin-

quents’,

managed with his various republican allies to clog it so heavily with

exceptions and provisos as to frustrate its original intentions.

The ﬁrst six months of the Dutch war were packed with incident, though

no engagement was decisive. Late in June Blake sailed again to the Dutch her-

ring ﬂeet that was ﬁshing south of the Orkneys and routed its naval escort,

sinking three ships and capturing nine. That was not his only business in

northern waters, for he next lay in wait off the Shetlands for the Dutch East

India convoy, which was sailing round the north of Scotland because it no

longer dared run the gauntlet of the Channel. While Tromp and most of his

ﬂeet were seeking Blake out, Ayscue showed how unsafe the Channel could

be when on 2 July, with only nine ships, he attacked a large convoy of Dutch

merchantmen. He captured six, burnt three, and drove twenty-six ashore on

the Calais sands; only seven got away to safety. On the 26th Blake and Tromp

came within sight of each other south of Shetland, but a fearsome north-

westerly gale prevented what would have been a major sea-ﬁght and forced

both ﬂeets to seek what safety they could. Blake found shelter in Bress Sound,

and though all his ships were damaged, none sank. Tromp, however, lost at

least ten wrecked on the Shetland coasts and six sunk at sea, though most of

the East Indiamen eventually limped home. On his return an ungrateful

States-General suspended him from his admiralship, though more because of

his Orangist partisanship than because he was really to blame for his recent

losses. They would soon ﬁnd that they could not do without him. But in his

absence the gallant Ayscue’s luck did not hold. In mid-August he attacked

about forty men-of-war under Admiral de Ruyter who were escorting the

West India ﬂeet of about sixty merchantmen, many of them heavily armed

and very ready to join in the ﬁght. Ayscue took something of a mauling, and

he did well to lose no ships, but he was forced to retire to Plymouth for

repairs, and only a sudden change of wind saved his battered vessels from

being attacked by de Ruyter at their anchorage.

Blake fought two more major actions before the end of the year. On 28 Sep-

tember he engaged the combined ﬂeets of Witte de With and de Ruyter off the

The Commonwealth in Crisis 513

Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 269, and for the act in general pp. 267–70.

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Kentish Knock and worsted them in a hot ﬁght, though his crews were short

of victuals and showing signs of mutiny. De With too faced disaffection

among his captains and seamen, and his setback was instrumental in deciding

the States-General to restore Tromp to the overall command in November.

Blake was further weakened by having to send twenty of his ships to the

Mediterranean, leaving him with only forty-ﬁve, including some hired mer-

chantmen. But when he heard that Tromp was escorting a huge merchant

ﬂeet through the Straits, he sailed to attack him on 10 December, even though

Tromp had eighty-ﬁve men-of-war. The odds became hopeless when twenty

of Blake’s ships held off and declined to give battle, and after losing two more

in action he was forced to fall back on Dover. It was a heavy defeat. Several

of his captains, including his own brother, were subsequently sacked. Up to

this action the honours in the war had been fairly even, but the year ended

with the Dutch on top and in full command of the Channel. That situation

was to change dramatically in 1653, but before the decisive actions of the

spring and summer there were to be major political changes in England that

were to be at least as important in setting the course towards peace.

One important side-effect of the Dutch war was upon the Common-

wealth’s so far heavily strained relation with France. Since September 1651

Spanish troops had been besieging Dunkirk, which had been part of the Span-

ish Netherlands until the French captured it in 1646. In September 1652 the

Admiral of France sent a ﬂotilla of six supply ships, with a guard of seven

men-of-war, to help relieve it. Blake, under orders from the Council of State,

fell on this convoy, capturing all but one of the warships and either destroy-

ing, capturing, or dispersing the store-ships. Loud protests came from the

French government, but the Rump made it clear that if France wanted her

warships back she must ﬁrst formally recognize the Commonwealth. The

outcome was the dispatch to Westminster of a French ambassador, Antoine

de Bordeaux-Neufville, who after some shufﬂing fully acknowledged the

present regime as the lawful government of England before the end of the

year. This was not, however, the result of a single wartime incident, for

Mazarin and his fellow-ministers had gradually been coming to a decision

that France’s interest lay in cultivating an alliance with England. The

Commonwealth’s reaction to Bordeaux’s overtures was to be vitally affected,

like its response to peace-seekers from the Hague, by the constitution of its

own government, and that was to change radically, not once but twice in the

course of the year 1653.

The most signiﬁcant turning-point in the four-year history of the republic, as

instituted in 1649, came with the revival of concerted political activity in the

army after its campaigning years came more or less to an end after the battle

of Worcester. Something has already been said about the impact that the

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return of Cromwell and other senior ofﬁcers to Westminster made upon the

political scene. This is not just a story of personalities, however, large though

Cromwell’s was. The army was not of one mind in matters either political or

religious. It had maintained the conviction, asserted in 1647, that it was not a

mere mercenary army, but had some claim to speak for the people’s interests

as well as its own. Since making that claim its years of ﬁghting in Ireland and

Scotland had strengthened a belief, shared by the articulate in all ranks, that

its mission was to advance the interest of the people of God, and that God by

conferring on it victory after victory had conﬁrmed its right to a voice in

speaking for their cause. It expected the regime that it served to show a simi-

lar commitment, by ensuring that the gospel was preached in every corner of

the land, by remedying obvious social and legal injustices, and by establishing

a constitution which would enable the people to elect representatives worthy

of God’s blessing at regular intervals. But members of the army, living as most

did in a semi-closed community, and having in many cases been physically

distanced through active service from contact with public feeling in England,

failed to realize that many of the things they most desired were bound to

increase the already disturbing unpopularity of the republic.

The Rump by contrast was well aware of how little it was loved, and this,

combined with its internal divisions and innate inertia, largely explains why

its record in reforming legislation was so barren. Its narrow basis in public

support was not getting any broader. On the credit side the hated county com-

mittees had largely withered away, and in local government there had been

some resumption of authority by the JPs and their quarter sessions. But the

overall ﬁnancial burden was as high as ever in the winter of 1652/3, and the

commission of the peace was not what it had been. The widespread dislike of

the Rump’s regime among the established county families had led to a con-

siderable piecemeal purge of the commissions, leaving the bench in most

counties to be occupied by men of generally lower status than of old. The

downward social trend had also characterized the setting up, by an act of

1650, of powerful militia commissioners in each county, who not only dir-

ected the trained bands but were empowered to search into conspiracies and

disarm papists and other suspects. Some counties were to a great extent

managed for the Rump by powerful local bosses, such as John Pyne in

Somerset, Robert Bennett in Cornwall, and Wroth Rogers in Herefordshire—

all styled colonel, though none was currently in the army. One way and

another, the Rump’s rule had alienated the traditional elite without earning

any signiﬁcant degree of genuinely popular support to compensate for it.

Whether a bolder reforming programme could have won such support for

the Commonwealth is a question that does not admit an easy answer, for

many of the areas in which the Rump’s critics called for action were them-

selves beset with difﬁculties. Perhaps the most contentious issue before it was

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the settlement of religion, and here there was no way in which it could have

pleased all parties. The even balance between Presbyterians and Independents

in the House had the result that the Presbyterian settlement enacted by the

unpurged parliament remained unrepealed, and nothing positive was erected

to take its place. The system of church government decreed by it was only very

patchily put in place by the time of Pride’s Purge, and though it was not dis-

mantled there was no longer any ofﬁcial drive to extend it. It did not retain

much vitality outside London and the clothing towns of Lancashire. Presby-

terians and orthodox Independents were closing ranks from 1649 onward

against the rising threat from sectaries and other extremists who sought to

abolish tithes, attacked the right of lay patrons to present incumbents to

parish livings, and aimed at severing all links between church and state. But

though there was much support in the army for these radical objectives, they

would (if attained) have alienated many more people than they pleased, and

there was never a chance that the Rump would espouse them. Tithes and

advowsons were recognized as forms of property, and they never came under

serious threat. Most MPs shared the strong public desire to retain a national-

ly maintained parochial ministry, and parliament showed its commitment to

one by two measures in particular. One was a church survey, carried out dur-

ing 1649–50, which established the yearly value of every beneﬁce with cure of

souls in the country; the other was the commitment of large powers to thir-

teen Trustees for Maintenance of Ministers, who had discretion to augment

where necessary the stipends of preaching ministers. This partly offset the

large depletion of the church’s overall wealth through the sale of the lands

belonging to bishoprics, deaneries, and chapters.

Where the Rump disappointed even moderate reformers was in its failure

to do more to ensure that the word was preached in every parish, for there

were still too many lazy, ignorant, or absentee parsons who left their ﬂocks

hungry in that sermon-loving age. As already mentioned, it did set up two

local Commissions for the Propagation of the Gospel early in 1650, one for

Wales and the other for the northern counties, but it made no progress at all

with a bill intended to do the same for the country as a whole. The propagat-

ing venture got a bad name when the Welsh commission was powerfully inﬁl-

trated by Fifth Monarchist ﬁrebrands, notably Vavasor Powell and Morgan

Llwyd, who had strong links with Harrison and his faction in the army. They

were not only seen as perverting the organization in order to preach socially

subversive stuff about the irrelevance of worldly rank and the imminent

rule of the saints, but they were unjustly accused of misappropriating the

tithes and other revenues of the church in Wales to their own sectarian

ends. This was only one symptom of a growing polarization between moder-

ate and extreme puritans. The year 1652 saw a spate of radical pamphlets

and petitions, tending to the total removal of religion from the state’s

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authority, as well as the rapid expansion of the Quakers and other highly

unorthodox sects.

On the moderate side John Owen and a group of similarly inclined Inde-

pendents pointed the way forward in February 1652 when they put a set of

proposals before the Rump which preﬁgured the ecclesiastical regime of the

Protectorate. They sought to preserve a broad established church, with a gen-

erous freedom of worship and association outside it, and with its own bounds

set only by the acceptance of certain deﬁned fundamentals of the Christian

faith. For the clergy within the establishment who were to enjoy the public

maintenance, they proposed two commissions, one to weed out the scan-

dalous and ignorant, the other to adjudge the ﬁtness of all those nominated to

livings from then on, whether by traditional patrons or by anyone else. The

Rump would have been wise to take this scheme into early consideration, not

only on account of its considerable merits, but because Owen enjoyed

Cromwell’s special conﬁdence. He had won it during the Irish and Scottish

campaigns, and on Cromwell’s recommendation he was made Dean of Christ

Church in 1651 and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University in the following

year. But a whole year went by before the relevant parliamentary committee

gave any attention to the proposals of Owen and his colleagues, and by then

the Rump was under such heavy pressure from the army that all its intentions

were suspect. If it had proceeded promptly and purposefully on the basis of

these proposals, religion might have been a potent means of rallying the

centre against the extremes. In the event, by contrast, it was to become a

trigger for the parliament’s expulsion.

There was considerable popular pressure for the reform of the law, and it

was a consistent aim of the army. Lawyers tended to regard any proposal for

change as an affront to the honour and prestige of their intensely conservative

profession, but the radical minority in parliament strongly favoured it; indeed

in November 1649 they proposed to exclude lawyers from the House, and

next year they succeeded in getting a parliamentary committee appointed to

consider just how (not whether) the law should be reformed. The drift back

of conservative members, however, increased the number of lawyers in the

Rump from fourteen when Charles I was executed to forty-four by the end of

1651, and the committee fell asleep. It was re-awoken brieﬂy by Cromwell’s

victory dispatch from Dunbar, but no proposal got anywhere near the statute

book until the army renewed its pressure after Worcester. Then a commission

of non-members was set up, with the distinguished lawyer Matthew Hale as

its chairman, and over the next eighteen months it did really valuable work.

It prepared a whole range of moderate but beneﬁcial measures for parlia-

ment’s consideration, including the erection of accessible courts in every

county and the total abolition of imprisonment for debt. But the resultant

bills tended to get bogged down in committee through the lawyer-MPs’

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