Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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of their holdings. The natural result was that both catholics and protestant
claimants were left with strong grievances, which were exacerbated by the
greed and opportunism of Charles II’s ministers and courtiers, who wheedled
from him excessive grants of Irish land for themselves.
Turning finally to England, it would narrow the question unduly to ask
merely how far the parliamentarians secured permanently the objectives for
which they first took up arms. We should take account of what they had
already gained in 1641 before it came to war, and of the broadening of their
aims in the course of the fighting. The battle against arbitrary taxation was
already largely won; there would be no revival of anything like Ship Money,
and the financial settlement at the Restoration, imperfect though it was, was
based on the basic principle of the abortive Great Contract of 1610: namely
that the crown should renounce its objectionable fiscal rights, such as the
exploitation of wardship, and that in return parliament should supply it with
a regular annual revenue, supposedly sufficient in peacetime. The snags were
that the Convention got its sums badly wrong, and that even if it had got them
right, parliament was bound to suffer if it retained no right whatever to a say
in how the money it had voted was spent. The 1641 Triennial Act was an-
other gain that proved partially illusive. In 1664 the king demanded its repeal,
citing quite specious grounds, and parliament complied. It is true that the
repealing statute declared that by law no more than three years should inter-
vene between parliaments, but the means for enforcing the principle were
now gone, and at the end of the reign more than four years elapsed without
one. Nor was there any limitation to the life of particular parliaments, such as
had been sought by successive regimes since 1647. After the dissolution of the
Convention, the so-called Cavalier Parliament, elected at the height of royal-
ist reaction in 1661, was kept in being until the end of 1678. As for the
Triennial Act’s guarantee that each parliament should sit for at least fifty
days, Charles dissolved his last one, in 1681, after a mere eight days’ sitting.
At least there was no attempt to revive the prerogative courts of Star Cham-
ber and High Commission and, thanks to the prominence on the bench of
judges of such honourable men as the one-time adviser to the Rump Sir
Matthew Hale and the royalist Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the integrity of the
judiciary was pretty well maintained through most of the reign. It became
compromised, however, under the strains of the Popish Plot and the Exclu-
sion Crisis.
The most immediate issue at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 was the
control of the armed forces, and in the 1646 Propositions of Newcastle par-
liament had demanded sole authority over them for the next twenty years,
after which the king should dispose of them only after obtaining the consent
of both Houses. At the Restoration the command of the armed forces
returned unequivocally to the crown, as the Militia Act of 1661 expressly
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confirmed, but a dislike and suspicion of standing armies was one of the most
lasting legacies of the Interregnum, so Charles II was never in a position to
rely on military power. The plots and rumours of plots in the early 1660s,
however, followed by the second and third Dutch wars and other continen-
tal entanglements, compelled him to keep up a modest standing force, though
it was much hated and occasionally subject to parliamentary challenge.
Ruling without a parliament in his last four years, he could barely keep up six
regiments and a few garrison companies. It would take the ineptitude of
James II to ring the alarm bells by building the army up to a really formidable
size, and the result, after his overthrow, was a clause in the Bill of Rights that
made it illegal for the monarch to maintain a standing army in peacetime
without the consent of parliament.
With regard to religion, it is impossible to say with any precision what the
parliamentarians had fought for because their personal convictions had
ranged all the way from moderate Anglicanism to extreme sectarianism. They
were committed to the Solemn League and Covenant because they needed
Scotland’s military assistance, though only a smallish minority really wanted
the mandatory Presbyterian establishment that it prescribed. Their aim to
abolish episcopacy was coloured by the peculiar slant and the exorbitant pre-
tensions that Laud and his fellow Arminians had conferred upon ‘prelacy’,
and by the fact that most of the bishops were committed royalists. Attitudes
had greatly changed during the eighteen years since the outbreak of war. The
familiar Prayer Book services and rites of passage had been badly missed,
where they did not clandestinely survive. Deprived Anglican clergymen won
many hearts and minds as chaplains or tutors in the households of nobles and
gentlemen, and not only in those of active royalists. The rapid spread of rad-
ical religion in the 1650s, and especially the Quaker scare late in the decade,
had caused the main line of division to run no longer between Anglicans and
puritans, or between Presbyterians and Independents, but between on the one
hand the growing number of people who like Richard Baxter and his Worces-
tershire association had sunk their differences for the sake of Christian com-
munity in a sober, orthodox protestantism, and on the other the passionate
radicals who threatened social subversion as well as soul-destroying heresy.
The prospects for toleration were further damaged in January 1661 when
the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner led a wildcat attempt at rebellion in
London.
For a brief period there was a genuine attempt, encouraged by the king, to
make the established church more comprehensive by building bridges
between Anglican episcopalians and moderate Presbyterians. Charles set in
motion the talks between representatives of both that led to the Worcester
House Declaration, which he issued in October 1660. It proposed that when
bishops ordained ministers or exercised their ecclesiastical jurisdiction, they
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should act with the concurrence of elected lay ‘presbyters’. It allowed some
elasticity in the enforcement of the Book of Common Prayer, especially with
regard to the disputed ceremonies. It promised a synod representing Anglican
and puritan divines, that would be summoned shortly to define the final
settlement. Historians have disagreed about the Worcester House Declar-
ation. Some have seen it as a smokescreen, put up by Clarendon and the
senior High Church prelates to distract attention from the real operation of
filling the bishoprics—two-thirds were vacant in 1660—and other com-
manding positions in the church with staunch, uncompromising Anglicans.
4
But it is very doubtful whether Clarendon and Bishops Sheldon and Morley
were insincere in their intentions, and virtually certain that the king was not.
The religious situation was in rapid flux between 1660 and 1662, and it had
changed even by the time the promised synod met at the Savoy in April 1661.
The vacant sees had been filled; the Presbyterians (to use the term loosely)
Baxter and Calamy had been offered bishoprics but had refused them, and
most of the new prelates were High Churchmen. Those of their party at the
Savoy took heart from the reaction against puritanism in the country gener-
ally, and still more from the rout of Presbyterian candidates in the elections
to the Cavalier Parliament. The representatives of the puritan interest were
weakened by their own disagreements, and by Baxter’s rather poor tactical
skill as their chief negotiator. The Savoy Conference was a sad failure, for the
Cavalier Parliament took the religious settlement into its own hands, and the
result was the Act of Uniformity of 1662: a brutal nullification of the prom-
ises held forth in the Declaration of Breda and of the concessions proposed at
Worcester House. It authorized a new Book of Common Prayer, revised in
minor particulars but in essentials the same as that of 1559. It was to be strict-
ly adhered to, and no other form of public worship was allowed. All beneficed
clergy were required to declare publicly their ‘unfeigned assent and consent’
to everything contained in it, or forfeit their livings. Under the same penalty,
they had to obtain episcopal ordination if they had not already received it. All
schoolmasters must be licensed by a bishop and conform to the Prayer Book;
all clergy and teachers whatsoever must abjure the Solemn League and
Covenant as an unlawful oath and declare their abhorrence of taking arms
against the king or his commissioned officers.
Charles considered suspending the whole act; then with Clarendon’s full
support and advice, he tried to limit the damage and save his honour as the
author of the promises made from Breda by issuing a public declaration,
proposing that parliament should pass an act to recognize what he regarded
as his inherent power to grant dispensations from the strict letter of statute
790 Epilogue
4
This is the view of R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (New York,
1951); it is challenged by Anne Whiteman, ‘The Restoration of the Church of England’, in
Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick (eds.), From Uniformity to Unity 1662–1962 (1962).
epilogue.y8 27/9/02 3:22 PM Page 790
law, in this case in favour of loyal nonconformists and catholics who wor-
shipped in private. The Commons responded with a polite but total refusal.
The number of clergy ejected as a result of the Act of Uniformity came to 936,
but over 800 had already lost their livings since 1660, either because a previ-
ously ejected Anglican had reclaimed his own or because the local squire or
noble patron had jumped the gun in getting rid of a puritan ‘intruder’. The total
number of those ejected between 1660 and 1662 was about 1,760, and they
included many of the most gifted and dedicated pastors in the land.
The responsibility for the dreadful intolerance of the 1660s and 1670s lies
squarely with the Cavalier Parliament, in which the bishops were only a small
element numerically. It derived partly from fear, for in the ’sixties the air was
alive with rumours of threatened Presbyterian plots, but a spirit of vengeance
played a large part in it. The screw was tightened after the so-called Yorkshire
Plot of October 1663. The Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670 made it an
offence, subject to progressive fines, for five or more persons who were not of
the same household to meet for worship, even in private houses. The Five
Mile Act of 1665 forbade nonconformist preachers to come within five miles
of the place of the previous ministrations or any corporate town, unless they
took an oath declaring it unlawful to take arms against the king. In 1672
Charles made a brave bid to suspend all the penal laws against noncon-
formists and recusants by issuing his Declaration of Indulgence, but when
parliament met again in the following February it forced him not only to can-
cel it but to pass the Test Act, which required all holders of public office, civil
or military, to receive Holy Communion in a parish church and sign a declar-
ation ‘that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s
Supper’.
These measures were enforced with very varying rigour, both in time and
place. Their authors recognized that while they might discourage nonconform-
ity by penalizing it, they could not hope to stamp it out. Here was a major
difference between the pre-Civil War and the post-Restoration religious scene
in England. From the Reformation to the Long Parliament there had been a
genuine quest for unity among English protestants, and a hope that it could
be achieved. The rapid spread of religious diversity during the 1640s and
1650s, and the irreconcilable positions taken up by Presbyterians, Independ-
ents, Baptists and Quakers, to name only the principal denominations outside
the Anglican fold, made this impossible. The line of division between church
and chapel, which was to have so deep an effect on the lives of men and
women—at least for so long as England remained a church-going nation—
had come to stay. It was not yet the social division that it soon became,
for moderate puritanism still had highly placed defenders such as Annesley,
as well as plenty of adherents in the county elites. But the imposition of
political tests on holders of public office thinned them out, and the
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typically close association between squire and parson subjected them to some
degree of social discrimination, at least in rural society.
The best of the nonconformist ministers and the most faithful of their
flocks held together, despite sporadic persecution, with a tenacity that com-
mands respect. Their sufferings were often considerable; we owe Pilgrim’s
Progress, for example, to the fact that John Bunyan spent twelve years in
prison for unlicensed preaching. No work better exemplifies the kind of faith
that carried them through. It might be thought that Cromwell’s quest for a
reformation of manners was the most total casualty of the Restoration, but
mercifully not all of England took its moral tone from the court. The non-
conformist conscience had a long history, and the Cromwellian years were
surely a formative stage in it.
So we come back at last to the question posed at the very beginning of this
book: in what senses if any is the word ‘revolution’ applicable to the events
that it describes? It may be remembered that I identified three main ways in
which it has been used with reference to historical events.
5
The first and old-
est, still current in the seventeenth century, signified circular motion, compar-
able to that of a planet orbiting the earth or simply a wheel turning full circle;
it implied that the country in question went through a process of upheaval but
returned to something very like the status quo ante. From Macchiavelli’s
time, however, ‘revolutions’ could be used to describe any major cataclysms
that violently interrupted the history of the body politic, whether they per-
manently changed its institutions or not. Since the French Revolution, and
more widely in the political thought of the twentieth century, the word has
generally been used less loosely by serious writers. It has come to signify a
complex of interlinked events, commonly including the collapse or over-
throw of the existing institutions of the state, the violent competition for
power between deeply opposed interests or classes, and the consequent
restructuring of the body politic and even of society itself. To declare my
hand, I am sceptical about the quest for a morphology of revolution that will
accommodate the upheavals that began in France in 1789, in Russia in 1917,
in China under Chairman Mao, and other later convulsions elsewhere. Their
differences strike me as at least as significant as their common features. I am
particularly sceptical of any attempt to fit the English Civil War and Interreg-
num into such a model, and I welcome signs that the designation of them as
‘the English Revolution’, so widespread a generation ago, is fading out of use.
But revolution in the second sense identified above, as signifying a breach of
continuity deeper in its causes and effects than just a rebellion, remains a
useful concept, and its applicability varies between the different parts of the
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5
See above, p. 1.
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Stuarts’ multiple kingdoms. The most revolutionary thing that happened to
them collectively was their union with England in a single Commonwealth.
That was silently swept away at the Restoration, along with all the other
measures that had not received the royal assent, but like so many of them it
was to have a future undreamt of in 1660.
The concept of revolution is clearly less apposite to Ireland or Scotland
than to England. The Irish rebellion was indeed in its origins and early stages
a rebellion and nothing more, an attempt to attain limited ends by force of
arms, but not to change the structures of the state or society. The rebels were
seeking to secure what they saw as their rights within those structures. They
reached out towards revolution in the heyday of the Confederation of Kil-
kenny, at least among those of its adherents who glimpsed the possibility of
an Ireland independent of England, but they were defeated. Post-Restoration
Ireland was again a dependent kingdom, its institutions not so very different
from those over which Strafford had presided. The huge changes in land-
ownership altered the ascendant class’s character on such a scale that it would
be absurd to talk of a return to the status quo, but in other respects Ireland
reverted to a relationship of subordination, not least in the restoration of
the Church of Ireland, not so very different from that of early Stuart times.
The Presbyterian Scots settled in Ulster were among the losers, as well as the
catholic Irish.
The Scots themselves, in the wake of the Bishops’ Wars, the Civil Wars, and
the English conquest, had experienced changes in church and state profound
enough to be called revolutionary, but for the most part they were not lasting.
Of the three kingdoms, Scotland came nearest to conforming to the original
meaning of revolution as a rotation through years of commotions, ending in
a return to the position from which she had started. Superficially, her polit-
ical, judicial, and ecclesiastical institutions look much the same under Charles II
as they had been before 1637, and such changes in landownership as had
occurred were not large enough to alter the essential social structure of the
country. But the experiences of the intervening decades had left their mark. In
religion, Presbyterianism was weakened by the deep and lasting rift between
Protestors and Resolutioners, and there were to be no more General Assem-
blies until after the Revolution of 1688. But at the Restoration parish minis-
ters were not required, as in England, to undergo reordination by a bishop or
to conform to the Prayer Book, though many did so. There was no attempt to
re-introduce altars or surplices or kneeling at communion. Just over a quar-
ter of all ministers holding livings in 1660 were deprived, 270 in all, many
because of the restoration of patronage. That compares with more than half
in 1690, when Presbyterianism was restored. Episcopacy was not as widely
unpopular as might have been expected, partly because the new bishops kept
their noses out of politics.
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In the secular sphere it has already been noted that Scottish parliaments re-
covered a voice of their own, and became platforms for a quite vocal oppos-
ition. There was much to oppose, for the ministers through whom Charles II
governed Scotland, Lauderdale especially, were thoroughly corrupt and
enriched themselves shamelessly at their country’s expense. One thing that he
and they had learnt from the Commonwealth period was how to tax his Scot-
tish subjects more efficiently, but that did not exactly endear him to them.
When William of Orange landed at Torbay in 1688, he soon became aware
that he faced a deeply divided nation north of the border.
And so back to England. It should not need saying by now that rebellion is
a totally inadequate term with which to describe what happened in the 1640s
and 1650s. Even the original war aims of the Long Parliament went well
beyond remedying the specific grievances of the Personal Rule, and between
the first and second Civil Wars the Levellers and the New Model Army were
bent in their different ways on leading the country deep into revolutionary
waters. Despite the collapse of the Commonwealth and all that the Restor-
ation purported to restore, it has (I hope) been shown that the England to
which Charles II returned would never be the same as the one his father had
governed, and that even the institutions that bore the same names had suf-
fered an irreversible sea change. What Thomas Hobbes called ‘a circular
motion of the sovereign power, through two usurpers, from the late king to
this his son’, was in fact very much more than that, and we can be sure that at
heart he knew it.
So what is wrong with ‘the English Revolution’ as a handy label for these
two decades? It is nothing to go to the stake over, and to demur mildly at it
certainly does not imply condemnation of those historians, many of them
highly distinguished, who have used it. The objections, such as they are, are
threefold. In the first place it may imply that the commotions in England can
be understood in isolation from those in Ireland and Scotland, whereas histor-
ians like Conrad Russell and John Pocock have been demonstrating afresh
how closely they were interlinked—as Gardiner and Firth had been well
aware. Secondly, the term was always used (though not exclusively) by writ-
ers who were convinced that England underwent a social as well as a political
revolution in the period; so much landed property changed hands, they
thought, that a crucial shift took place in the composition of the governing
class. Marxists saw it as the decisive phase in the bourgeois revolution in Eng-
lish history; others identified a large-scale change in the balance between the
court and the country, with the ‘ins’ giving place to the ‘outs’. But pains-
taking research in county after county, in local record offices and family
archives, has revealed that the changes in the ownership of real estate, and
hence in the composition of the governing class, were nothing like as great as
used to be thought. Crown lands and church lands that the Rump had put on
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the market reverted to the crown and the church respectively. Virtually all the
780 nobles and gentry whose estates had been confiscated by act of parlia-
ment recovered them, or their heirs did. A much greater number, however—
well over 3,000—had had their estates sequestered and had had to redeem
them by paying composition fines, and many had had to sell land in order to
raise the money. But a high proportion of these sold to kinsmen or agents or
friends who held the property unofficially in trust until the original owner
could buy it back, as most did, more often before the Restoration than after.
Some royalist landowners did go under, especially if they were heavily in
debt, and some Civil War careerists did invest in real estate and hang on to it;
for instance Colonel Philip Jones, who had started with a yeoman’s income
and became Cromwell’s Comptroller of the Household, remained in posses-
sion of Fonmon Castle and a four-figure landed income. But many, perhaps
most, of the permanent acquirers of royalists’ estates came from a gentry
background, and the social complexion of the county elites probably did not
change much more between 1640 and 1660 than in any other two decades of
the early modern period. As a force in English politics, aristocracy had a long
future before it, all through the eighteenth century and beyond.
The third reason for quibbling at the ‘English Revolution’ as an appellation
is its suggestion that this was a self-contained episode in our history, which
reached a kind of terminus in 1660. There lies a particular danger in books
like this one that end there, and I would not wish to leave the reader with any
such notion. The revolutionary years can be more fruitfully and accurately
seen as part of a process: a process that reached some kind of a period (there
are no full stops in history, at least while the human race survives) in the Revo-
lution settlement of 1689 and after—for Scotland in 1707. The failings of
Cromwell’s immediate successors led to a partial reaction at the Restoration,
in which some of the political gains since 1640 were consolidated and others
were lost. But they were not forgotten for long, and they were not lost per-
manently. Large parts of the reigns of Charles II and James II were filled with
bitter political and religious strife, and this was partly because the problems
with which the Commonwealth and Protectorate had wrestled were real
problems, and they had not been solved. The mercy was that they would not
be solved, then or thereafter, by war; ‘Forty-one is come again’ was a com-
mon cry when the going threatened to get really rough in the 1670s, and it
was an effective deterrent. The Toleration Act of 1689 was a grudging meas-
ure, excluding catholics from its benefits as it did, but at least it ensured free-
dom of worship for protestant dissenters and Quakers. Parliament’s control
over the very existence of a standing army in peacetime has been mentioned,
and from 1689 the king required an annual act of parliament to legalize the
punishment by court-martial of mutiny and other military offenses in such
forces as he was permitted to maintain; he could not have maintained them
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without it. The Bill of Rights declared the crown’s claim to suspend laws or
dispense from them to be illegal, in the course of determining the succession
to the throne. The succession was further regulated by the 1701 Act of Settle-
ment, which took the opportunity to secure decisively the independence of
the judiciary and to debar the king from pardoning anyone impeached by par-
liament. After the Triennial Act of 1694 there could be no more parliaments
of indeterminate length and no long intervals between parliaments. Not
everything that the reformers of the Interregnum had striven for was secured,
for parliamentary reform had to wait for the nineteenth century, and democ-
racy as the Levellers understood it was won even later; but enough has been
said to show that they had not striven in vain.
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part vi: further reading
Sir Charles Firth died before he had carried The Last Years of the Protectorate beyond
Oliver’s death, but his mantle fell on Godfrey Davies, who covered the ensuing period
on the same scale in The Restoration of Charles II 1658–1660 (San Marino, Calif.,
1955). The book is essential for specialists, but Davies lacked Firth’s narrative gift and
power of organization, and most readers will be happier with Ronald Hutton’s lively,
more up-to-date and never unscholarly The Restoration: A Political and Religious
History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), which is admirable too on
the post-1660 phases of the settlements. On the latter see also the collection edited by
J. R. Jones, The Restored Monarchy 1660–1688 (Problems in Focus, 1979). I have
described the events and ideas of the years 1658–60 in my Historical Introduction to
The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII (revised ed., New Haven, 1980). On
Ireland the key work is Aidan Clark, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland (Cambridge,
1999), while J. G. Simms’s chapter 17, on ‘The Restoration, 1660–85’, in A New His-
tory of Ireland III is a good concise account of the settlement. Frances Dow remains as
good as ever in Cromwellian Scotland, and has an epilogue on the settlement. Maurice
Ashley, General Monck (1977) is a good popular biography, and so is Richard
Ollard’s Cromwell’s Earl (1994), i.e. Edward Montagu, Monck’s ally in 1659–60. Of
the restored king we now have two excellent biographies of complementary qualities:
Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989),
and John Miller, Charles II (1991). John A. Butler was a brave man to tackle so
unpromising a subject as A Biography of Richard Cromwell, The Second Protector
(New York, 1994).
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