Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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Many members of Barebone’s Parliament held this position, which was not

conﬁned to sectarian fanatics; John Milton was soon to write its classic

defence. Few in the House took the wholly conservative view that had been

defended in the Rump, namely that tithes had a scriptural authority that

Christ had not abrogated, and that being also an ancient and integral part of

the law of England they were the indefeasible property of those to whom they

were legally due.

The main line of division in Barebone’s Parliament lay between the outright

abolitionists and the rather larger number who aimed to reform but not to

remove the public provision for the parochial clergy, and so were against

abrogating tithes until a superior system had been devised to replace them.

The matter was referred to a large committee in which both parties were

equally represented, and its brief was greatly extended a month later when the

House instructed it to propose the best means of ejecting ignorant and scan-

dalous ministers and encouraging godly preachers. This implied the continu-

ance of a national ministry, but this and other evidence of a moderate

reformist line in parliament was countered in the public mind by various

extravagant excesses among the London sects, accompanied by a wave of

millenarian petitions against not only tithes but any form of established

church. These generated a counter-campaign of petitions in defence of a pub-

licly maintained preaching ministry, and the effect of so much contention was

to foster a widespread impression among the public that the church was in

danger.

The parliament’s attempt to reform the law started out with just as good

intentions as its efforts to promote the preaching of the gospel, and ended by

becoming if anything even more divisive. All members agreed that the law

needed to be reformed, but they differed radically over how it should be done.

There were three broad schools of thought. The ﬁrst, to which Cromwell and

the moderate majority in the House adhered, wanted to preserve the historic

common law of England in its essentials but to improve and expedite its pro-

cedures, clarify its obscurities and archaisms, abolish parasitic fees, make its

beneﬁts available to a wider public, and render it more humane, especially

with regard to insolvent debtors and the excessive number of capital crimes.

A more radical objective was pursued by the Levellers and their fellow-

travellers, who regarded the current legal system as a product of the Norman

Yoke imposed by the Conquest, and aimed to scrap it altogether. They wanted

to replace it with a simple written code that would be easily comprehensible

548 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

For a masterly account of tithes, impropriations, and the controversies over the provision

for the clergy in mid-seventeenth-century England, see Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of

the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford, 1956), esp. chs. 4–6. On

the tithes debate in the Nominated Parliament see Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate,

pp. 235–50, 333, 336–8, 342–3.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:51 AM Page 548

by the laity and could be competently administered by popularly elected

magistrates, holding court at frequent intervals in every county, without any

need for professional advocates. The third school of reformers consisted of

the Fifth Monarchist and other extreme sectaries, who believed that the

kingdom of Christ was in process of being established and that the only laws

ﬁt to be observed in it were those contained in the Scriptures, whether in the

Mosaic code or the teachings of Christ. Incredible as it may seem, they really

were conﬁdent that these were ‘perfect and sufﬁcient, and so large as the

wisdom of God judged needful for regulating judgement in all ages and

nations. For no action or case . . . possibly can fall out in this or other nations,

by sea or land, but the like did or possibly might fall out in the land of

Israel’.

This was of course the position of a minority, but it was a very vocal

minority, both inside and outside the House.

The moderate reformist party had a programme ready-made in the work of

the Hale Commission, which in the later days of the Rump had drafted ﬁfteen

bills for speciﬁc reforms and a comprehensive act for a more general restruc-

turing of legal institutions and procedures.

The House chose its committee

‘for the business of the law’ on 20 July with particular care. Eight of its nine-

teen members had been called to the bar, two more had been attorneys, and

another was a specialist in Scottish law. Seven MPs had actually served on the

Hale Commission, and all were appointed to the committee. Six or seven of

its members could be categorized as radicals of one hue or another, but none

of these were extremists or Fifth Monarchy men. The committee took the

Hale Commission’s drafts as its starting-point, and two of them, including an

act for civil marriage, were passed with amendments into law. But radical

members were dissatisﬁed with the moderate tone and measured pace of the

committee’s work, and during August several developments coincided to

make them press for more drastic action. One was Lilburne’s challenge to the

law’s injustices, together with all the clamour and propaganda that accom-

panied his trial. Another was a debate on the Court of Chancery, which was

notorious for its slow and arcane processes and for the fees exacted by its

swollen body of ofﬁcials and clerks; this ended in a vote in the House to abol-

ish the court outright, before deciding who or what should take over its func-

tions. A third was a set of charges that parliament heard on 17 August against

the Keeper of the Marshalsea, Sir John Lenthall, brother of the Speaker of

the Long Parliament. They were probably not all true, but they painted a

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 549

William Aspinwall, A Brief Description of the Fifth Monarchy (1653), p. 11, quoted in

Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, p. 264.

The adverse view of the Hale Commission’s work taken by older legal historians has been

radically revised, notably by Mary Cotterell in ‘Interregnum law reform’, English Historical

Review LXXXIII (1968), 689–704, and by Donald Veall, The Popular Movement for Law

Reform (Oxford, 1970). On the Nominated Parliament’s handling of law reform see Woolrych,

Commonwealth to Protectorate, esp. pp. 262–73, 291–9.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:51 AM Page 549

shocking picture of venality and extortion, practised by the prison’s whole

staff upon the poor debtors within it. They occupied the House for most of

two days, and they may have been the last straw in convincing its radical

members that the legal system as it stood was rotten to the core. With many

of the less zealous attenders absent, arranging for their families to join them

for the winter, the hard-line reformers carried a vote by forty-six to thirty-

eight to set up a new committee ‘to consider of a new model of the law’—at

least that is what they thought they voted for, but the Clerk of the Parliament

misheard the motion and recorded it as for ‘a new body of the law’. They tried

twice to get the word corrected, but the moderates rallied and successfully

insisted that ‘body’ should stand, thinking that this even more alarming

prospect would discredit the whole enterprise.

The word in fact made little difference. The new committee had a predom-

inantly radical membership, and it set out to codify all that it found good and

just in the existing laws, harmonize them with the law of God, and prescribe

proportionable punishments for speciﬁc offences. It invoked the example of

Massachusetts, where such a written code had been promulgated ten years

earlier, but England, with its age-old complexities of tenure and property

rights, was not Massachusetts. The new committee did not supersede the

original one ‘for the business of the law’, which continued to meet. The result

was that the parliament was committed simultaneously to two fundamental-

ly different programmes of law reform, which would almost certainly have

proved incompatible, and would weaken the prospects of securing the very

real beneﬁts that the Hale Commission’s projects held forth. The impact on

conservative public opinion was deeply damaging.

Cromwell became increasingly disillusioned with the parliament as the

summer wore on. Writing to Fleetwood on 22 August, he lamented the lack

of mutual kindness among its members and their division into parties, each of

which was turning upon himself. Shortly afterwards he was reported as

saying that he was ‘more troubled now with the fool than before with the

knave’.

The millenarian enthusiasts who had so rejoiced when he expelled

the Rump were coming to feel that he was no longer the chosen instrument of

the work of the Lord, and no one preached that message with more histrion-

ic ostentation than the Fifth Monarchist prophetess Anna Trapnel, whose

performances had something of the pull of a raree-show. His old comrade-in-

arms Harrison was drawing steadily further away from him. On the other

hand the moderates were inclined to blame him, though much less publicly,

for not supporting them more actively and for giving such a free rein to the

zealots. Whether he was wise not to take the seat to which the parliament

550 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 89; Woolrych, Commonwealth to

Protectorate, p. 274.

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co-opted him may well be doubted, but he was ultra-sensitive to the charge

that he had broken the Rump in order to secure power for himself, and he

clung as long as he could to the belief, which he had expressed so passionately

in his opening speech, that authority had come to the present assembly

through divine providence. If that were so, providence must be trusted to

guide it, and it would be wrong for him to usurp that role. The Council of

State was not in a position to provide the management that he failed to offer,

partly because of its lack of experience in such skills and partly because it was

almost as divided as the House itself.

Cromwell’s policy of non-intervention was eventually strained beyond

breaking-point by the new government’s ineptitude in foreign relations, when

it could be brought to giving them any consideration at all. During the Inter-

regnum between April and July, envoys from France, Spain, Portugal, and the

United Provinces had attempted to open negotiations with him, as well as a

minister representing the Prince of Condé and the rebel frondeurs besieged

in Bordeaux—though any chance that England might support them, as

Cromwell was inclined to do, ended when Bordeaux surrendered to

Louis XIV on 20 July. France itself was seeking a closer accord with England,

Spain wanted a commercial treaty, and the King of Portugal sought a treaty

of peace that could help him in his struggle for independence from Spain. But

the most urgent mission was that of four envoys whom the States-General

sent in June, for the Anglo-Dutch war was having disastrous effects on Dutch

commerce after the battle of the Gabbard, and even worse after the further

defeat off the Texel. Cromwell referred all these diplomatic overtures to the

interim Council of State, and implied that any long-term commitments would

have to await the meeting of the new supreme authority.

The Dutch commissioners had their ﬁrst meeting with the four Englishmen

appointed to treat with them four days after Barebone’s assembled. To

Cromwell’s dismay, the English commissioners demanded the same impos-

sibly harsh preconditions that had wrecked negotiations under the Rump,

including reparations for English losses in the war, the handing over to Eng-

lish occupation of several Dutch ‘cautionary towns’, to be chosen by England,

and a humiliating public acknowledgement that Tromp had been the original

aggressor. Several times Cromwell sent privately to one or other of the Dutch-

men to suggest ways in which the terms might be modiﬁed, but he himself still

clung to the idea of a partial fusion of sovereignties between the two

republics, so as to form the united core of a triumphant ‘protestant interest’

in Europe. He would soon give this up when he came to realize how utterly

unacceptable it was to the Dutch, but no such realism was to be ex-

pected from the parliament or its Council of State. The latter kept changing

the composition of its committee for foreign affairs, and like the House itself

was too engrossed in domestic issues for weeks at a time to give foreign

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 551

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policy any proper attention. The scales were tilted against a reasonable peace

by a combination of ill-informed chauvinists who held inﬂated views about

the terms that England’s victories entitled them to demand, and the millenar-

ian minority who were opposed to a peace altogether. It may seem strange

that Harrison and his kind in the House and the Fifth Monarchist preachers

outside it were so opposed to a treaty with a fellow-protestant power, but

victory had gone to their heads—victory over the king (representing the

fourth monarchy), over the Scots, over the Irish, and now over the Dutch. The

latter’s protestantism made little appeal to them, for its prevailing tone was

an orthodox Calvinism akin to that of the English Presbyterians, who were

their enemies. As they saw it, the Dutch obsession with trade and material

wealth aligned the United Provinces with the carnal kingdoms that were soon

to be overthrown, republican though they nominally were, and England’s

victory over them marked an early stage in a career of conquest which would

culminate when the saints toppled the throne of the Roman Antichrist him-

self. Fundamentalist fanaticism tends to ﬂourish when political institutions

are in the melting-pot, and the ﬁrebrands took advantage of the loosening of

traditional restraints, both secular and ecclesiastical.

The naivety and incompetence of the new government in diplomatic busi-

ness became a matter of notoriety among the foreign envoys and ambas-

sadors in London. The Dutch commissioners, hearing the Fifth Monarchist

fulminations against their country and the projected peace, must have won-

dered what kind of land they had come to. But Cromwell kept in touch with

them, often clandestinely, and he played an increasingly interventionist role

as the autumn wore on. Understanding now how strongly disliked his con-

ception of a ‘coalition’ was, he let them know that he would not pursue it. He

worked closely with John Thurloe, the secretary to the Council of State, a

born negotiator and intelligence-gatherer who had held the same post since

the Rump’s last year in power. Thurloe played an increasing role in conduct-

ing the council’s diplomatic correspondence and contacts with ambassadors,

and in so doing brought some sense to its handling of foreign affairs.

Although the main issues that were to split the parliament fatally can be

seen emerging quite early, the House was not in a regular habit of polarizing

until well into the autumn. It considered most other questions that came

before it on their merits, without dividing along a predictable party line

between moderates and radicals. Its legislative achievement was not negli-

gible. Of its twenty-nine public acts (there were also a few private ones), many

were of a purely administrative nature, or renewed existing statutes that were

due to lapse. But its act for civil marriages was not the only one of more gen-

eral interest. The act for the disposal of land in Ireland laid one of the bases

of the Protectoral settlement of that country, and a bill to incorporate

Scotland with England in a single commonwealth was ready by 23 November

552 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:51 AM Page 552

for its ﬁnal passage when the outbreak of a royalist rising under the Earl of

Glencairn caused it to be laid aside. An act for the relief of creditors and poor

prisoners, though limited in scope and duration, was a step towards further

reform under the Protectorate. Another act protected the persons and estates

of lunatics, and several more ambitious reforms were in the pipeline when the

end came. Two of them sought to provide for jurisdiction in equity after

Chancery was abolished, but Chancery was an issue that split the House

down the middle. A bill introduced in mid-October to suspend proceedings in

the court for a month led to heated debates and a tied division; the Speaker

gave his casting vote against it.

With the increase in dissension went a decline in attendance. After the

counts of well over 100 in July, divisions in August show a presence ranging

from 71 to 91, an average of 72 in September and of 70 in October—just

under half the membership. One can guess that many moderates shared

Cromwell’s disillusion with the parliament, and found the zealots’ constant

pressing of their views repellent and tedious, but few of the absentees with-

drew from it completely. They could still turn out in force for a vote on a mat-

ter of real concern to them, and they did so strikingly on 1 November, when

the term of the Council of State chosen in July expired and a new one was

elected. It had been decided that sixteen of the currently serving councillors,

chosen by ballot, should be retained, and ﬁfteen new ones elected. The polling

left only four radicals in the whole council. Some of the busiest MPs in the

House lost their places on it, and even Harrison only just scraped back—but

then he had attended only seven council meetings since July, and he came to

none at all after his re-election. By contrast every member present, no fewer

than 113, voted to retain Cromwell. The voting also showed a strong prefer-

ence for men of gentry rank.

If the moderate majority had maintained their presence and given their

constant support to the council they had thus transformed, and to

Cromwell’s increasingly active role in it, they might just have enabled the par-

liament to run its appointed sixteen-month course. But it was not to be. On

the very day after the council elections the attendance fell to sixty-ﬁve, and on

15 November to forty-nine. Yet two days later well over a hundred members

turned up for a debate on the right of lay patrons to present to ecclesiastical

beneﬁces. This was an issue of great social and economic as well as religious

signiﬁcance. In four of the largest dioceses, York, Lincoln, Norwich, and

Rochester, nearly two-thirds of parish livings were in the gift of lay patrons,

and the proportion was high everywhere. Such patrons frequently bought

and sold advowsons, which the law treated as freeholds. They often paid the

vicars they appointed a mere fraction of the rectorial tithes which they them-

selves received, and bestowed beneﬁces upon kinsmen dependants, and any

clergymen willing to marry their dowerless daughters. Yet widespread though

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 553

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such abuses were, lay patronage was often employed to less selﬁsh ends. Most

of the puritan clergy who held parish livings owed them to like-minded peers

and gentry who owned the advowson, and a few of these encouraged con-

gregations to name the parson they wanted. The main opponent of lay

patrons’ rights before the Civil War had been Archbishop Laud.

The matter therefore was not a straight issue between conservatives and

radicals, for the parliament included many sober Independents who while

moderate enough on other questions believed deeply in the right of every con-

gregation to choose its pastor. With their support, and after strenuous debate,

the House voted by sixty to forty-three that a bill should be brought in to

abolish ‘the power of patrons to present to beneﬁces’. This signiﬁcantly added

to the parliament’s unpopularity among property-owners generally, and was

cited by the ﬁrst speaker on its last day as a prime reason for ending its exist-

ence. At about the same time the renewal of the excise and a new bill for the

abolition of Chancery further alienated conservative opinion, and Lilburne

hit the news-sheets again in a way that stirred populist feeling against the gov-

ernment. In mid-November he understandably tried to obtain his release

through a writ of habeas corpus in the Upper Bench, as the former King’s

Bench was now called. A worried Council of State intervened and ordered the

Lieutenant of the Tower not to deliver him, and on the 26th the House con-

ﬁrmed that he was to remain a prisoner ‘until the parliament shall take fur-

ther order’.

It was uncomfortable to be put in the position of overriding the

due process of law, just when the pseudo-parliament’s standing as a legit-

imate government was being questioned more strongly than ever before.

From mid-November onward the foreign diplomats in London were

reporting that an early dissolution was widely expected, to be followed by a

change in the whole form of government. They commonly named four rea-

sons: the stresses and divisions within the parliament itself, the resultant frus-

tration of the peace treaty that the majority of Englishmen and Dutchmen

dearly wanted, the increasing seriousness of an incipient royalist insurrection

in Scotland, and the stridency of the Fifth Monarchist preachers in London,

whose jeremiads were rising to a pitch that no government could put up with.

It was of course intolerable that peace with the Dutch should be denied by a

combination of domestic distractions, ill-informed negotiators, and the Fifth

Monarchists’ crazy expectations of a career of universal conquest by the

saints. Of the royalist movement in Scotland more will be said in the next

chapter, but it was spreading from the Highlands where it originated and

threatening to become a general national movement against the presence of

English conquerors on Scottish soil. The Earl of Glencairn, whom the king

commissioned to command his forces, was himself a Lowlander. Resolutioners

554 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, p. 320.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:51 AM Page 554

were praying openly for the king, and even the Protesters, who had been so

strict against an uncovenanted monarch, saw Glencairn’s adherents as less of

an enemy than the English. The latter were lucky that the powerful Earl of

Argyll stuck to his alliance with them and resolutely opposed the insurgents,

but there was a real danger that if the rising spread further it would encour-

age the English royalists to take to arms too. It was probably in November

1653 that the most active of them formed the highly secret committee which

they called the Sealed Knot, with the aim of giving leadership and organiza-

tion to royalist conspiracy throughout England.

The situation called for ﬁrm and competent hands at the helm, but a com-

bination of factors was increasingly undermining the government’s stability.

Many of the moderate MPs, who commanded a majority when they were

present in force and might have held the parliament on constructive courses,

especially after the new council was chosen on 1 November, more or less gave

up hope of it and stayed away, except when matters of special concern to

them were voted on. This enabled the radical minority to promote projects

like the codiﬁcation of the law and the abolition of Chancery which deeply

antagonized most of the political nation. But a major part in the downfall of

Barebone’s Parliament was played by the Fifth Monarchist preachers in Lon-

don, particularly by those who led the great prayer meetings held each Mon-

day at St Anne’s, Blackfriars, where Christopher Feake was pastor. It may

seem strange that incendiaries who thundered a message that sounds so

absurd to modern ears could pose any serious threat, but what made them

dangerous was that they received enthusiastic support from the Fifth Monar-

chist caucus and its fellow-travellers within the parliament, and from Harri-

son and his following in the army. Parallels may suggest themselves with

movements of fundamentalist fanaticism today, but the fundamentalism of

Feake and Harrison and their brethren was not based on the bible as a whole

but on a few apocalyptic books, especially Daniel and Revelation, that fed

their feverish visions and their hunger for power. Twice, in late October and

early November, Cromwell sent for several of the Blackfriars preachers, and

in the presence of such moderate divines as Owen, Nye, Marshall, and Jessey

tried gently to persuade them that all those who professed to follow Christ

should strive to agree in mutual love and refrain from reviling each other. It

was to no avail. Two Mondays later the Blackfriars fulminators were blasting

the parliament, the council, the army, and everyone in power in scurrilous

terms, and by late November they were concentrating their shafts upon

Cromwell himself, ‘calling him the man of sin, the old dragon, and many

other scripture ill names’.

Harrison was reportedly railing every day against

him and the Anglo-Dutch peace negotiations, and there were allegations that

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 555

Thurloe State Papers, I, 621.

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he and his party were aiming to take over the command of the army. There

was never any real danger of that, but Harrison was capable of seriously

dividing it, and his favourite preachers were aspersing the loyal majority of its

ofﬁcers as janissaries and pensioners of Babylon, corrupted by wealth and

power. Vavasor Powell ‘told the sword-men in general, that the Spirit of God

had departed from them; that heretofore they had been precious and excellent

men, but that their parks, and new houses, and gallant wives had choked

them up’.

In the parliament’s later stages its radical millenarian members were meet-

ing frequently at the home of one Arthur Squibb, MP for Middlesex, to con-

cert their policy. There were strong reports that they were plotting to secede

from parliament and set up as an authority on their own, backed by their

friends in the army. This sounds extravagant, but it may have been a contin-

gency plan in the event of the great decisions still pending, concerning tithes,

the ministry, and the law, going against them. It was indeed the question of a

national clergy and the manner of maintaining it that triggered the end of the

parliament. How to provide for the public ministry had been referred, it will

be remembered, to the committee for tithes, whose recommendations were

heard at last on 2 December. Six days of intense debate ensued, ﬁlling almost

all of the parliament’s remaining life.

What the committee proposed represented an honest attempt to secure the

dedicated parochial clergy that most of the nation clearly wanted, and its

scheme did not differ greatly in principle from that which Owen and his

brethren had submitted to the Rump in 1652. The ultimate responsibility for

ejecting unworthy incumbents and replacing them with godly and competent

ones was to be vested in twenty-one commissioners, but England and Wales

were to be divided into seven circuits, in each of which these national com-

missioners were to act in consultation with local ones, chosen on the basis of

three or four per county. Tithes were to be retained, supplemented where

necessary so as to give all parish clergy an adequate income, but people who

had conscientious scruples about paying tithes were to be allowed to make an

equivalent contribution in money or land, to be assessed by their nearest JP.

Few members can have been aware that the parliament’s very existence

would hang on the way they voted on these proposals. Major-General Lam-

bert, however, had decided quite some time earlier that it was past saving, and

that the country needed a new kind of government altogether. He had never

thought that a nominated assembly was a good solution, and he had with-

drawn from active political life from the day it met, ignoring its co-optation

of him and ceasing to attend the Council of State. Years earlier he had

556 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Strena Vavasoriensis (1654), pp. 18–19, quoted in Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protec-

torate, p. 331.

ch17.y8 27/9/02 11:51 AM Page 556

assisted Ireton in framing the Heads of the Proposals, and now in his leisure at

Wimbledon House, the former royal residence that a grateful Commonwealth

had assigned to him for his outstanding military services, he worked from

about mid-October on a written constitution. It bore a broad resemblance to

Ireton’s Proposals, and like them it was a prescription for a limited monarchy,

though this time the monarch was to be Cromwell. It came to be called the

Instrument of Government. At some time in the latter part of November,

when Barebone’s was visibly heading for the rocks, he took half-a-dozen

fellow-ofﬁcers into his conﬁdence and discussed his draft closely with them.

How far they contributed to its ﬁnal form is unknown, but the general belief

was and is that the Instrument was essentially Lambert’s work. He and they

brought it to Cromwell a few days before the committee for tithes reported,

having assembled a large number of ofﬁcers at Whitehall, without telling

them why. He probably hoped to announce an imminent dissolution and to

obtain their acclamation of King Oliver and the new constitution there and

then. But in the course of long discussions with Cromwell, both on that day

and the next, he and his coadjutors found him adamantly opposed to their

proposals on two central points: he would not hear of the title of king, and he

would not be a party to forcibly terminating an assembly whose authority he

himself had given nearly a year more to run.

But if Cromwell would not dissolve the parliament, the parliament might

be persuaded to dissolve itself. The pretext came when it took its ﬁrst and only

vote on the report from the committee for tithes, on Saturday 10 December.

This was on its ﬁrst clause, which prescribed the manner in which unworthy

incumbents were to be removed and godly ones chosen to replace them. It was

lost by just two votes in an exceptionally full House; 115 members were

present, including the Speaker. There was no motion to recommit the clause,

so the whole scheme was in effect rejected. It is evident that radicals who were

opposed on principle to tithes and an established clergy were joined by con-

servatives who would rather have kept the traditional system of maintenance

and patronage in place, but it is not impossible that some who voted with the

majority were already in collusion with Lambert and his friends, and were

deliberately helping them to bring the parliament to an end.

At its next sitting, on Monday the 12th, the moderate members took their

seats earlier than most of them were wont to do, and in force. Clearly they

were following a concerted plan, and there can be little doubt that Lambert

and his group were parties to it. One member after another rose to denounce

the radicals, for threatening not only the church and its clergy by throwing

out the tithes committee’s recommendations, but the army by opposing the

assessment, the legal system by abolishing Chancery and projecting a ‘new

body of the law’, and property itself by annulling the rights of patrons. Since

the parliament had patently failed to answer the people’s expectations, they

‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’? 557

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