Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

one, and its members mustered between them a reasonable amount of admin-

istrative experience.

Its functions, however, were strictly those of a caretaker executive. The

Council of Ofﬁcers kept in its own hands the decision of how to constitute the

sovereign authority of the state over a longer term. The fact that they had to

start by debating the most basic questions is further evidence that the expul-

sion of the Rump was no part of a premeditated scheme. The main division of

opinion was between Lambert, who was for committing power to a compact

council of not more than a dozen men, and those who wished to entrust a

much larger body. The latter differed among themselves; Harrison, for

instance, favoured a congregation of seventy godly men, after the model of

the biblical Sanhedrin. Lambert, in view of his earlier share in framing the

Heads of the Proposals and his authorship later in this year of the Instrument

of Government, must have thought of his small council as the executive elem-

ent in a constitution which would include an elected legislature when the

temper of the country made it safe to go to the polls, but Cromwell and the

majority carried a decision in favour of a larger assembly, sufﬁciently broad-

based to set about the long-delayed work of reformation without waiting

until a normal parliament could be summoned. Their opting for a larger body

should not be seen, however, as a victory for the Fifth Monarchists, for Har-

rison told a friend soon afterwards that though his party had argued for hav-

ing its members chosen solely by the saints they did not get their way. Not all

Fifth Monarchists were of the same mind though, for one of their preachers,

John Spittlehouse, published a bizarre proposal for a ruling assembly consist-

ing of two ofﬁcers elected by each regiment, together with some chosen by the

navy. He soon changed his mind, for in mid-May he was urging that

Cromwell should govern on his own, since he was as plainly called by God as

Moses had been to rule Israel. John Rogers, another prominent Fifth Monar-

chist, did not go quite so far, though he too hailed Cromwell as a second

Moses and advocated that he alone should select the members of the ruling

assembly.

There was never any question of such advice being followed. Cromwell

was acutely aware of his vulnerability to the charge of military dictatorship,

and most of his senior ofﬁcers shared his aversion to such a thing, whether

personal or collective. They had long been pressing for a new elected parlia-

ment, but there were several cogent reasons why Cromwell could not sum-

mon one. He had no shred of legal right to do so, and the members of the

Long Parliament would have claimed that their seats were still lawfully theirs,

since they could be dissolved only by their own consent. Moreover, the Rump

had been on the point of passing a bill for general elections to be held in

November when he dissolved it; and even if these objections could have been

overcome, a parliament elected in 1653 would have been even less likely to

538 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 538

endorse a government inaugurated by the army than the ﬁrst parliament of

the Protectorate proved to be a year later.

So what Cromwell and the Council of Ofﬁcers decided upon was a kind of

surrogate parliament, to wield paramount authority for a strictly limited period

of time, and so nominated that every county in England was represented,

together with six members apiece for Ireland and Wales and ﬁve for Scotland.

Seventy was clearly too small a number to accommodate a membership thus

grounded, and Cromwell wanted an assembly weighty enough to enact laws

that judges and magistrates would enforce. He later claimed that he himself

proposed 140, the number agreed upon. But who was to select them? It was

decided to entrust their choice to Cromwell and the Council of Ofﬁcers col-

lectively, and to debar serving ofﬁcers from being nominated. This last was a

remarkable self-denying ordinance, and it was credited to Cromwell himself;

the one ofﬁcer who is said to have been seriously disgruntled by it was Harri-

son. The two men, for long so close, were now clearly taking different direc-

tions.

But there is no sign of serious conﬂict within the Council of Ofﬁcers,

which had made considerable progress with the selection of representatives

only two weeks after the Rump was expelled. Every ofﬁcer present was free

to propose whom he pleased, and the decision on each nomination was taken

by a simple majority vote. Rank seems not to have counted; Cromwell said

later that there was ‘not an ofﬁcer of the degree of a captain but named more

than he himself did’.

The process of selection was complete early in June,

when Cromwell signed the letters summoning the members in his capacity as

commander-in-chief.

The character and purpose of the resultant assembly were until recently

widely misunderstood, because generations of historians followed Gardiner

in one of his rare errors (though Gardiner was not the ﬁrst to fall into it).

Because a few letters survive in which the gathered churches in certain coun-

ties and towns recommended particular candidates to represent them, he

assumed that the Council of Ofﬁcers sent out circular letters to the similar

churches throughout England, inviting them to name men ﬁt for the trust of

government, and then chose the members from the lists submitted. But there

is no evidence that any such circular letters were issued, and many indications

to the contrary.

Those congregations or groups of congregations that sent in

names did so without formal invitation, though it is likely enough that

some individual ofﬁcers consulted their pastors or fellow-churchmen about

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 539

For the deliberations leading to the summoning of the Nominated Assembly, the fullest

account is in Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, ch. IV; for Harrison’s role see esp.

pp. 108, 111, 115, 121–2, 142–3.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 418.

A. Woolrych, ‘The calling of Barebone’s Parliament’, English Historical Review LXXX

(1965), 492–513, and more summarily in Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 114–21.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 539

suitable candidates. Of the nominees in the surviving letters of recommenda-

tion from the churches, ﬁfteen were actually chosen, and it is unlikely that

many more members owed their seats to such sponsorship.

The supposition that the majority did so, and the association of the Inde-

pendent and sectarian congregations mainly with the middling sort rather than

with the county elites which traditionally dominated the House of Commons,

also misled historians into accepting too readily the contempt with which

royalists and other hostile commentators described the social standing of the

membership at the time. ‘A pack of weak, senseless fellows’, Clarendon called

them; ‘much the major part of them consisted of inferior persons, of no qual-

ity or name, artiﬁcers of the meanest trades, known only by their gifts in pray-

ing and preaching.’ Collectively they were certainly below the social level of a

typical Stuart parliament, but Clarendon’s description is a travesty. At least

four-ﬁfths and perhaps ﬁve-sixths of them could style themselves gentlemen

in an age when that distinction was still crucial, however blurred it was round

the edges. Lesser gentry outnumbered greater by about two to one, and a few

had acquired their gentry status through success in trade or a profession, but

the assembly included two peers, three future earls, four baronets, and four

knights. At least a third of the members would not have been socially out of

place in any seventeenth-century House of Commons; indeed nearly half of

them were elected to subsequent parliaments, mostly under the Protectorate.

Eighteen had sat in the Rump. Of the 128 who represented English or Welsh

constituencies, 117 were justices of the peace, and though some of these were

new to the bench 89 had been on it in 1650 or earlier. Twenty-eight members

served as sheriffs of their counties at some stage in their careers. At least forty-

four had been to a university, and the same number to one of the Inns of

Court.

Allegations that the assembly consisted largely of religious fanatics and lay

preachers were almost as exaggerated as the sneers at its social level. Most of

the Council of Ofﬁcers held strong religious convictions, and these were

reﬂected in their choice, but their nominees included at most thirteen Fifth

Monarchists and perhaps a dozen more who can be categorized as religious

radicals. One of these was Praise (or Praise-God) Barebone, a warden of the

Leathersellers Company and lay preacher to a congregation of his own. His

published writings show him to have been no ranting fanatic (he was scep-

tical about the ﬁfth monarchy, for instance), and he was a substantial enough

citizen to serve more than once on London’s Common Council. But his name

chimed so well with the anti-puritans’ stereotype of the assembly that some

came in time to call it Barebone’s Parliament (though not ‘the Barebones Par-

liament’). It was a misleading label, for the membership spanned a wide reli-

gious spectrum, ranging from a very few like Viscount Lisle and Ashley

Cooper who were not exactly burdened with spiritual convictions to the Fifth

540 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 540

Monarchist fringe. The prevailing confessional tone was that of a sober con-

gregationalism, though as time went on the zealot minority were to wield an

inﬂuence on proceedings out of proportion to their numbers.

Between the choosing and the meeting of the Nominated Assembly the

Dutch war reached its climax. The Rump had taken so much care to remodel

the navy with commanders and captains fully committed to the Common-

wealth that Cromwell must have felt some anxiety about its reaction to his

April coup. Blake was a member of the Rump and was reported to be strongly

on its side in its quarrel with the army, but in February he had been severely

wounded in the course of his hardest-won victory, in which he fought Tromp

all the way from Portland to Beachy Head, and he was out of action until well

after the change of government. It therefore fell to the other two Generals at

Sea, Deane and Monck, to make sure that their ships’ captains accepted the

new regime, and they lost no time in getting them to subscribe a very neutral-

ly worded declaration that was probably designed to paper over their varying

reactions to it. But there was no reason to fear their disobedience. They were

all in the thick of a gruelling war, and they had no doubt who the prime enemy

was. Some were enthusiastic about the change, and those who had misgivings

about it put their country’s interest before their own political preferences.

Captains and crews all fought magniﬁcently in the decisive battle of the war,

in which Deane and Monck confronted Tromp off the Gabbard on 2 June.

More than a hundred ships on each side slogged it out, on and off, for four

days, and the ﬁght had already gone against the Dutch when Blake, still far

from fully recovered, joined in it at a late stage. The English men-of-war were

larger and better built, and by this time the skill and morale of their seamen

and gunners were superior too. Tromp lost about twenty ships, the English not

one, though Deane was killed on the ﬁrst day.

The States-General sent commissioners to London in mid-June to explore

the possibilities of a peace, but the Council of State was mostly inexperienced

in foreign affairs, and some of its members insisted on excessively humiliating

conditions. Even Cromwell, who really wanted peace now that the Dutch had

been worsted and were ready to grant reasonable terms, clung to the dream

of a closer union between the two commonwealths which had wrecked the

earlier peace overtures while the Rump was still sitting. So one more battle

had to be fought, and it proved the bloodiest of all. It was joined off the Texel

on 31 July when Tromp attempted to break Monck’s blockade of the Dutch

ports, but Tromp himself was killed in it and about twenty-six of his ships

were lost. Human casualties were high on both sides, but much heavier on the

Dutch. Both countries were now groaning at the war’s toll in lives, ships, and

merchandise, not to mention its punishing ﬁnancial burden, but the peace

that both wanted had to wait until the government of England was in hands

with a stronger grasp of political realities than the Nominated Assembly.

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 541

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 541

That body ﬁrst met on 4 July. Cromwell, who had avoided the word ‘par-

liament’ in all references to it, signiﬁcantly summoned it not to the Commons’

Chamber in the Palace of Westminster but to the Council Chamber in the

Palace of Whitehall. The day was hot and the room uncomfortably crowded,

but he spoke to it for about two hours. For him it was a solemn occasion, for

in his view he had taken the whole care of the Commonwealth on his shoul-

ders when he dissolved the Rump, and he was now disburdening himself. He

wept frequently as he spoke. He began by tracing the unbroken chain of provi-

dences that had brought him and his listeners through victory after victory to

the establishment of the Commonwealth and beyond, and then traversed the

frustrations and disappointed hopes that had ensued upon the ‘crowning

mercy’ at Worcester. His purpose was to persuade the men before him that

the juncture in which he and they now found themselves had not come about

through human will or ambition but through the high destiny that God had

in store for his people, and this led him into the second half of his speech,

which was a solemn charge to them to be worthy of their calling. The author-

ity that he was transmitting to them came ‘by the way of necessity, by the way

of the wise providence of God, though through weak hands . . . Truly you are

called by God, to rule with him, and for him.’ He struck an increasingly

visionary note as he approached his ﬁnal peroration. ‘Jesus Christ is owned

this day by you all,’ he said, ‘and you own him by your willingness in appear-

ing here, and you manifest this (as far as poor creatures can) to be a day of the

power of Christ by your willingness.’ And a little later: ‘Why should we be

afraid to say, or think, that this may be the door to usher in things that God

hath promised and prophesied of ? . . . Indeed, I do think something is at the

door, we are at the threshold.’

These passages have been taken as evidence

that Cromwell was temporarily converted to Fifth Monarchism and hoped

that the kingdom of Christ was in process of being realized there and then.

This is largely because in Abbott’s standard edition of the speeches Cromwell

is made to say ‘you manifest this . . . to be the day of the power of Christ’.

There is no authority whatever for this reading, and it distorts his whole

sense. By ‘a day of the power of Christ’ he was expressing a hope that his pres-

ent entrustment of authority to men dedicated to the interest of the people of

God would prove to be a milestone on the road to the promised kingdom, but

he was not saying that they had already arrived at it. He had long been a mil-

lenarian, but he never shared the Fifth Monarchists’ quest for a literal, phys-

ical rule of the saints. The kingdom he looked forward to was a spiritual

kingdom, and it would be realized in God’s good time. Meanwhile, the fact

542 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

The Lord General Cromwel’s Speech delivered in the Council-Chamber (1654), pp. 22, 24.

The text of this speech in Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 52–66 is seri-

ously unreliable. On the texts and their interpretation see Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protec-

torate, pp. 145–50, 399–402.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 542

that those to whom he now spoke owned God, and were owned by him, put

them on a footing ‘with those that have been called by the suffrages of the

people; who can tell how soon God may ﬁt the people for such a thing, and

who would desire any thing more in the world but that it might be so?’

Clearly he regarded elected parliaments as the norm, and longed for the time

when it would be safe to return to them.

Before he ﬁnished he had a brief ‘Instrument’ read out, by which he com-

mitted the supreme authority and government of the Commonwealth to the

present assembly, with just one restriction: they were to sit no longer than

3 November 1654, the terminal date that the Rump had appointed for its own

dissolution. Three months before then, the present members were to choose

others to succeed them. These were to sit for no more than a year, and during

that time were ‘to take care for a succession in government’.

The implication

is that Cromwell hoped that before the end of 1655 the people would be suf-

ﬁciently settled to return to regular elected parliaments. Finally he told the

assembly that the Council of State’s authority was subordinate to their own,

and that its membership and duration were as they should order; but he

hoped that for the sake of continuity they would respect the present council’s

authority until they saw ﬁt to change it. He said nothing about his own

authority, and he expressly handed over executive as well as legislative

power. In so doing, and in entrusting his and his ofﬁcers’ nominees with

selecting their own successors, he was taking large risks, but that is a measure

of his reluctance to be seen as seeking power for himself.

Before they broke up that day the members voted to sit in future in the trad-

itional Commons’ Chamber. There they spent at least ten hours next day in

prayer and humiliation, without the assistance of any ordained minister.

Before they parted they elected Francis Rous as their chairman—an ecumen-

ical choice, for although sometimes labelled a Presbyterian he is perhaps

better described as just a broadly tolerant puritan. He was Provost of Eton

and a learned and proliﬁc author; he had been half-brother to Pym, and had

sat in every parliament since 1626. They also invited Cromwell and the other

four army ofﬁcers on the interim Council of State to sit with them as co-opted

members. They spent most of the ﬁrst full day of secular business in debating

whether or not to assume the title of parliament, and after much argument

they voted to do so by sixty-ﬁve to forty-six. Most of the minority doubtless

associated parliaments with mere ‘carnal’ government and felt their own call-

ing to be from God, but the noes also included some relative conservatives,

like Sir Gilbert Pickering, who felt that the title should be reserved for the

elected body known to the law. But once the title was adopted the rest of the

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 543

Lord General Cromwel’s Speech, pp. 23–4.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 67; printed from the ofﬁcial

Mercurius Politicus, where the gist of the Instrument was immediately published.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 543

trappings quickly followed; Rous was voted Speaker, the mace—Cromwell’s

‘bauble’—was daily carried before him, the Rump’s Clerk of the Parliament

and Sergeant-at-Arms were restored to their ofﬁces, and the Journal of the

House was kept as of old.

A crucial test of the assembly’s co-operativeness lay in its decisions regard-

ing the Council of State, and here too the auspices looked good. It conﬁrmed

all Cromwell’s interim councillors as members, starting with himself, and

decided to make up their number to thirty-one—ten fewer than under the

Rump, though the average attendance at this council was to be actually high-

er. Six of the eighteen new councillors were religious radicals, but they also

included Charles Howard (the future Earl of Carlisle), Edward Montagu (the

future Earl of Sandwich), Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (the future Earl of

Shaftesbury), Viscount Lisle, and Sir Charles Wolseley—not exactly ‘artiﬁcers

of the meanest trades’. All were members of the parliament (as we can now

call it) except Charles Fleetwood, who was obviously chosen because of his

almost vice-regal position as commander-in-chief in Ireland, but never

attended because of his absence there. The council was a youngish body, with

at least twelve members under forty and probably only seven (including

Cromwell) over ﬁfty. The average age of the parliament itself, as far as can be

known, was only just over forty.

The parliament set about its business with enthusiasm. The divisions dur-

ing its ﬁrst month show an average of almost 105 members present out of 144

(including the co-opted ones), and the absentees included a few who declined

their summons on principle. Cromwell was one of these; he seems never to

have taken his seat, except on one day of prayer, but that was probably

through a wish not to seem to sway an assembly that he himself had called.

This attendance record contrasts sharply with that of the Rump, in which

over the years the number present had averaged about 55 out of well over

200. And whereas the Rump had sat on only four days a week except in emer-

gencies, and rarely for more than three hours, Barebone’s Parliament met on

every day except Sunday, and began its often lengthy sittings with prayers at

8 a.m. It very soon showed its commitment to initiating reform in areas where

the Rump had stalled, by setting up committees to consider what should be

done about tithes, ﬁnancial administration (including the project of a single

treasury), prisons and prisoners, trade and corporations, the relief of pov-

erty, the advancement of learning, and most contentious of all ‘the business of

the law’. These were not all, and by 21 July every member so far present had

been appointed to one of the House’s ten committees, or to the Council of

State, or to the Commission for the Admiralty and Navy. This early zeal and

spirit of co-operation were not to be maintained, but in spite of the divisions

which later afﬂicted it Barebone’s Parliament managed to pass more than

thirty statutes during its ﬁve months’ existence. That was far more than the

544 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 544

Rump had ever achieved in such a term, and the ﬁrst parliament of the Pro-

tectorate was to sit nearly as long and pass none. Barebone’s has sometimes

been written off as one in a series of ‘constitutional experiments’, but that is

far from the mark—further indeed than the depiction of it as an attempt to

establish a rule of the saints, since that really was the aim of a small minority

of Fifth Monarchists in the Council of Ofﬁcers and in the House itself. For

Cromwell and the majority of his fellow-ofﬁcers it was an expedient rather

than an experiment. His expulsion of the Rump may have been a mistake, and

in his several retrospective speeches he seems to have found it among all his

actions the most uncomfortable to explain, but in the circumstance a nom-

inated ruling assembly, to tide the nation over until it could safely return to

elected parliaments, made a good deal of sense. With a little more goodwill

and good fortune it might even have worked.

While it was getting down to business so purposefully, a ﬁgure from the

recent past re-emerged to cause it some embarrassment. The banished John

Lilburne had been intriguing with a number of fellow-exiles on the royalist

side, and there were reports from several quarters that he had offered, for a

consideration of £10,000, to bring about the destruction of Cromwell, the

Rump, and the Council of State and to raise 40,000 men for the king. He and

the Duke of Buckingham, the rakish son of James I’s favourite, had formed a

close attachment. He longed to return home, but he hated Cromwell as much

as ever. Commenting in March 1653 on reports that the army was pressing to

put an end to the Rump, he wrote that he was resolved ‘never to see England,

so long as Cromwell’s most hateful and detestable beastly tyranny lasteth,

unless it be in a way to pursue him, as the grandest tyrant and traitor that ever

England bred’.

But when the Rump was expelled, Lilburne saw a chance of

getting its act of banishment annulled and made his humble addresses to

Cromwell, asking for a pass to let him back into England. He was told that he

must wait for the new supreme authority to adjudge his case, but he decided

to take a chance, and after a farewell dinner with Buckingham and other roy-

alists he sailed for Dover on 14 June. On reaching London he tried and failed

to get an audience with Cromwell, but he wrote him a letter full of false

pathos, promising to serve the Commonwealth to his best ability, or if that

was not acceptable to retire submissively ‘to the most private life’.

His

recent conduct and writings, however, made such a change of heart unbeliev-

able. Cromwell referred him to the Council of State, which promptly com-

mitted him to Newgate. But he was not without sympathizers in the council,

nor in the Nominated Parliament when it met. It was decided, to the credit of

all concerned, that his case should be determined by due process of law, and

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 545

L. Colonel John Lilburne Revived (1653), quoted in Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John (1961),

p. 320.

Gregg, Free-Born John, p. 322.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 545

Cromwell promised him a fair trial. This was appointed for 13 July at the Old

Bailey, and formally all that the court had to decide was whether the prison-

er at the bar was the John Lilburne named in the act of banishment. If he was,

it could proceed to the death sentence therein prescribed. This was unlikely to

be carried out, partly because of his personal popularity and partly because of

a reluctance to endorse one of the discredited Rump’s more tyrannical acts;

the new regime could have won credit for clemency by commuting his sen-

tence to imprisonment.

But if this was Cromwell’s preferred scenario—and the supposition is only

a conjecture—Lilburne’s was different. He hoped that the new supreme

authority would repudiate the Rump’s act, or failing that that a London jury

would refuse to convict him. He and his friends mounted a campaign of pamph-

lets and petitions reminiscent of the heyday of the Leveller movement; two

dozen of them appeared on the bookstalls during July and August. One, by Lil-

burne himself, appealed to parliament to suspend his trial, and this was refused

only after considerable debate. When the trial did open, he and his friends

made it into a great piece of public theatre. His supporters packed the court-

room and thronged the surrounding streets, women (as before in his career)

being conspicuous among the demonstrators. The council had detailed three

cavalry regiments to stand by, but found it needed considerably more of both

horse and foot to keep some kind of order. Lilburne exercised all his oratorical

skill and knowledge of the law to probe every chink in the prosecution’s case,

and in the course of four strenuous days he won several quite exceptional con-

cessions from the court, which then adjourned until 10 August. When it

resumed, the demonstrations grew in volume. He spun out the proceedings for

ten more days, refusing to plead to the charge because he challenged its funda-

mental validity. He ﬁnally entered a plea of not guilty, but only when threat-

ened with the ancient penalty of being crushed to death if he went on declining.

The jury then went out, and after long deliberation returned its famous verdict

that he was ‘not guilty of any crime worthy of death’. This was of course utter-

ly irregular, because juries are judges only of fact and not of law, but they were

rewarded with a series of great shouts as the news of their boldness spread

through the surrounding streets. The very soldiers who guarded them blew

their trumpets and beat their drums. It is heartwarmingly typical of the times

that twelve nameless London citizens, at real risk to themselves, refused to be

party to what they saw as a piece of tyranny, and in effect passed judgement on

the Rump’s act of banishment and the penalty that it decreed. These jurors

stood up subsequently to a severe grilling by the Council of State, but they were

quite unrepentant and they went unpunished.

546 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

On Lilburne’s trial and its contempary impact see Gregg, Free-Born John, ch. 28, and

Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 250–62.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 546

What to do with Lilburne himself was an embarrassing question. Few

would have wanted to vindicate the Rump’s treatment of him, but his rela-

tions with the exiled royalists and his reviving power to stir up the soldiery

made him a real danger. His attitude to the present parliament was typically

equivocal; just before his trial he had addressed it as ‘the Supreme Authority

for the Commonwealth of England’, but since then some of the petitioners on

his behalf had been questioning its claim to be a parliament at all. His fate was

referred to the House itself, which resolved, though only after much con-

tention, that he should remain imprisoned ‘for the peace of this nation’. He

was transferred to the Tower, where his devoted wife was given permission to

join him. But he was allowed no visitors, and with his disappearance from

sight the agitation for his release quite quickly died down.

By that time the parliament had sat for two months, and serious divisions

had appeared within its ranks, chieﬂy over tithes and the reform of the law.

Today it requires a stretch of the historical imagination to understand what

strong feelings the issue of tithes aroused from the time of the Rump onward,

but opposition to them ranged over several levels, both secular and religious,

and touched on some deep convictions. On the material plane tithes fell very

unequally on different sectors of the population. They were a severe burden

on small landholders, who mostly had to part with literally a tenth part of the

produce of their crops and livestock. Wealthy townsmen by contrast general-

ly escaped or evaded them altogether, while many substantial landowners

actually proﬁted from them, since their forbears, in appropriating the estates

of religious houses to their own use on long leases before and during the

Reformation, had often acquired the rectorial tithes of the parish livings with-

in the gift of the monasteries concerned. About a third of all the tithes paid in

England went to these lay ‘impropriators’, and not to the parochial clergy for

whom they were originally designated. They had become a marketable prop-

erty, and those who owned or traded in them saw the movement to abolish

them as part of a radical threat to property itself. Moreover such tithes as

were still the clergy’s by right rewarded them very unequally, leaving some

lucky rectors very well off, while many a parish vicar got less than enough to

live on.

At the spiritual level, many strong protestants condemned tithes as popish

and superstitious, a relic of the age before the Gospel superseded the Law and

an apostolic ministry replaced the Levitical priesthood. The most radical

objection to them, however, came from strict separatists who rejected the

whole conception of a national church with a publicly maintained clergy, and

held that the state as such had no business with religion, except perhaps to

punish gross blasphemy. In their view the only true church consisted of a

body of believers voluntarily united by a covenant with God and with each

other, and each such church should choose and maintain its own pastor.

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 547

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:50 AM Page 547