|
|
From: A History
of Civilization.
By
Robin
Winks, Crane Brinton, John Christopher, and Robert Wolf
(Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs: New Jersey, 1988)
English-speaking people throughout the world tend to believe that England has always had a representative and constitutional government and never went through the stage of divine-right monarchy that France and other continental states experienced. This belief is largely correct, but it would be better stated as follows: To the extent that English government utilized the new methods of professional administration developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it may be considered potentially just as absolute as any divine-right monarchy. But representative government provided a check on this potential through the concept of a constitution, a set of rules not to be altered by the ordinary processes of government. These rules might be written down, but they might also be unwritten, a consensus about certain traditions. They came to be regarded as limiting the authority not only of the king but even of a government elected by a majority of the people, a guarantee to individuals that they had "civil rights" and might do certain things even though men in posts of authority disapproved. Without these rules and habits of constitutionalism, and without powerful and widespread human convictions backing them up, the machinery of parliamentary government could be as ruthlessly absolute as any totalitarian government.
In seventeenth-century England the development of potentially absolute institutions was checked and modified by the continued growth of representative institutions. In France kings and ministers were able to govern without the Estates General. In England Parliament met in 1629 and quarreled violently with King Charles I, who then governed for eleven years without calling Parliament. But in 1640 he felt obliged to call Parliament and, though he dismissed it at once when it proved recalcitrant, he had to call another in that same year. This was the famous 'Long Parliament, which sat-with changes of personnel and with interruptions-for twenty years, and which made the revolution that ended the threat of absolute divine-right monarchy in England. If we understand why Charles, unlike his French counterpart, was obliged to call Parliament, we have gone a long way toward understanding why England had a head start in modern representative government.
Two very basic reasons go back to medieval history. First, as we have already seen, in the English Parliament the House of Commons represented two different social groups not brought together in one house on the Continent, the aristocratic "knights of the shire" and the "burgesses" of the towns and cities. The strength of the Commons lay in the practical working together of both groups, which intermarried quite freely and, in spite of some economic and social tensions, tended to form a single ruling class with membership open to talented and energetic men from the lower classes.
Second, local government continued to be run by magistrates who were not directly dependent on the Crown. We must not exaggerate: England, too, had its bureaucrats, its clerks and officials in the royal pay. But whereas in France and in other continental countries the new bureaucracy tended to take over almost all governmental business, especially financial and judicial affairs, in England the gentry and the higher nobility continued to do important local work. The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 put the care of the needy not under any national ministry but squarely on the smallest local units, the parishes, where decisions lay ultimately with the amateur, unpaid justices of the peace, recruited from the gentry. In short, the privileged classes were not, as in France, shelved, thrust aside by paid agents of the central government; nor did they, as in Prussia, become themselves mere agents of the Crown. Instead they preserved a secure base in local government and an equally firm base in the House of Commons. When Charles I tried to govern without the consent of these privileged classes, when he tried to raise from them and their dependents money to run a bureaucratic government without these privileged amateurs, they had a solid institutional basis from which to resist.
But they had to
struggle. They had to fight a civil
war. No matter how much emphasis the
historian may put on the social and institutional side, he cannot ignore what
looks like the sheer accident of human personality. The Tudors from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, with some faltering
under Edward VI and Mary, had been strong personalities and had been
firmly-quite as firmly as any Valois or Hapsburg-convinced that they were
called to absolute monarchy. They had
slowly built up a very strong personal rule, handling their parliaments
skillfully, giving in occasionally in detail, but holding the reins
firmly. Henry VIII and his daughter
Elizabeth both commanded the kind of devotion from their subjects that can be
built in time into formidable personal rule; their successors could not command
such emotional loyalty.
Elizabeth
I was childless, and in 1603 she was succeeded by the son of her old rival and
cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. James Stuart,
already king of Scotland as James VI, became James I of England (1603-1625),
thus bringing the two countries, still legally separate, under the same
personal rule. James was a pedant by
temperament, very sure of himself, and above all sure that be was as much a divine-right monarch as his French
cousins. He was a Scot, and as a
foreigner and object of distrust to his English subjects. He lacked entirely
the Tudor heartiness and tact, the gift of winning people to him. His son
Charles I (1625- 1649) under whom the divine-right experiment came to an end,
had many more of the graces of a monarch than his father, but he was still no
man to continue the work of the Tudors.
He was quite as sure as his father had been that God had called him to
rule England, but he could neither make the happy compromises the Tudors made
nor revive their broad popular appeals.
The fundamental fact about
the actual break between the first two Stuarts and their parliamentary
opponents is that both were in a sense revolutionaries. Both were seeking to bend the line of
English constitutional growth away from the Tudor compromise of a strong crown
working with and through a late medieval parliament based on the alliance of
nobility, gentry, and commercial classes.
James and Charles were seeking to bend the line towards divine-right
monarchy of the continental type; the parliamentarians were seeking to bend it
toward something even newer, the establishment of a legislative body possessing
the final authority in both the making and the carrying out of law and policy.
Behind
this struggle lay the fact that the business of state was gradually growing in
scope and therefore in cost. The money
required by Stuarts- and indeed by Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and the rest of the
continental monarchs-did not go just for high living by royalty and the support
of parasitic nobles; it went to run a government that was beginning to assume
many new functions. Foreign relations, for example, were beginning to take on
modern forms, with a central foreign office, ambassadors, clerks, travel
allowances, and the like, all requiring more money and personnel. James I and Charles I failed to get the
money they needed because those from whom they sought it, the ruling classes,
succeeded in placing the raising and spending of it in their own hands through
parliamentary supremacy. The Parliament
that won that supremacy was a kind of committee of the ruling classes; it was
not a democratic legislature, since only a small fraction of the population
could vote for members of the Commons.
In this struggle between
Crown and Parliament religion played a major part in welding both sides into
cohesive fighting groups. The struggle
for power in England was in part a struggle to impose a uniform worship on
Englishmen. The royalist cause was
identified with High Church Anglicanism, that is, with an episcopalian church
government and a liturgy and theology that made it a sacramental religion
relatively free from left-wing Protestant austerities. The parliamentary cause, at first supported
by many moderate Low Church Anglicans, also attracted a strong Puritan or
Calvinist element. Later, it came under
the control of the Presbyterians and then of the extreme Puritans, who were
known as Independents or Congregationalists. The term "Puritanism" in seventeenth-century England is
a confusing one, for it was used as a blanket to cover a wide range of
religious groups, from moderate evangelical Anglicans all the way to the radical
splinter sects .of the 1640s and 1650s.
The core of Puritanism went back to Zwingli and Calvin, to the
repudiation of Catholic sacramental religion and the rejection of music and the
adornment of churches. It placed a
positive emphasis on sermons, on simplicity in church and out, and on
"purifying" the tie between the worshiper and his God of what the
Puritans considered Catholic "superstitions" and
"corruptions."
In the
troubled reign of James I, three major issues emerged that intensified the
struggle in which his son was to go under-money, foreign policy, and
religion. In all three issues, the
Crown and its opposition each tried to bend the line of constitutional
development in its own direction. In
raising money, James sought to make the most of revenues that did not require a
parliamentary grant. Parliament sought
to make the most of its own control over the purse strings by insisting on the
principle that any new revenue raising had to be approved by parliament. When James levied an import duty without a
parliamentary grant, an importer of dried currants named Bate refused to
pay. Bate's case was decided in favor
of the Crown by the Court of Exchequer, and the decision attracted much
attention because the judges held the king's powers in general to be absolute. Then a royal "benevolence"-a
euphemism for a contribution exacted from an individual-was resisted by a
certain St. John, and his appeal was sustained by the chief justice, Sir Edward
Coke. James summarily dismissed Coke from office and thereby drew attention
once again to his broad use of the royal prerogative.
The Tudors had regarded
foreign affairs as entirely a matter of royal prerogative. The delicate problem of marriage for
Elizabeth I, for instance, had
concerned her Parliaments and the public; but Parliament made no attempt to
dictate a marriage, and Elizabeth was careful not to offend her subjects in her
own tentative negotiations. On the
other hand, when James I openly sought a princess of hated Spain as a wife for
his son Charles, the Commons in 1621 made public petition against the Spanish
marriage. When James rebuked them for
meddling, the House drew up the Great Protestation, the first of the great
documents of the English Revolution, in which they used what they claimed were
the historic privileges of Parliament to assert what was in fact a new claim
for parliamentary control of foreign affairs.
James responded by dissolving Parliament and imprisoning four of its
leaders. The Spanish marriage fell
through, but the betrothal of Charles in 1624 to the French princess Henrietta
Maria, sister of Louis XIII, who was also Catholic, was hardly more popular
with the English people.
In
religion, Elizabeth, though refusing to permit public services by Catholics and
Puritans, had allowed much variety of practice within the Anglican church. James summed up his policy in the phrase
"no bishop, no king"-by which he meant that the enforcement of the
bishops' monarchical authority in religion was essential to the maintenance of
his own monarchical power. James at
once took steps against what he held to be Puritan nonconformity. He called a conference of Anglican bishops
and leading Puritans at Hampton Court in 1604, at which he presided in person
and used the full force of his pedantic scholarship against the Puritans. After the conference dissolved with no real
meeting of minds, royal policy continued to favor the High Church, anti-Puritan
party. In spite of James' failure to
achieve anything like religious agreement among his subjects, his reign is a
landmark in the history of Christianity among English-speaking peoples. In 1611, after seven years' labor, a
committee of forty-seven ministers authorized by him achieved the English
translation of the Bible that is still widely used. The King James Version remains a masterpiece of Elizabethan
prose, perhaps the most remarkable literary achievement a committee has ever
made.
Under
Charles I, all his father's difficulties came to a head very quickly. England was involved in a minor war against
Spain, and though the members of Parliament hated Spain, they were most
reluctant to grant Charles funds to support the English forces. Meanwhile, in spite of his French queen, Charles
also became involved in a war against France.
This he financed in part by a forced loan from his wealthier subjects
and by quartering troops in private houses at the house- holders' expense. Consequently, Parliament in 1628 passed the
Petition of Right--"the Stuart Magna Carta"-which first explicitly
stated some of the most basic rules of modern constitutional government: No taxation without the consent of
Parliament; no billeting of soldiers in private houses; no martial law in time
of peace; no one to be imprisoned except on a specific charge and subject to
the protection of regular legal procedure.
All these principles were limitations on the Crown.
Charles consented to the
Petition of Right in order to secure new grants of money from Parliament. But he also collected duties not sanctioned
by Parliament, which thereupon protested by resolutions not only against his
unauthorized taxes but also against his High Church policy. The king now veered
from conciliation to firmness; in 1629 he had Sir John Eliot, mover of the
resolutions, arrested together with eight other members, and then dissolved
Parliament. Eliot died a prisoner in
the Tower of London, the first martyr on the parliamentary side,
For the next eleven years,
1629-1640, Charles governed without a Parliament. He squeezed every penny he could get out of royal revenues that
did not require parliamentary authorization, never quite breaking with
precedent by imposing a wholly new tax, but stretching precedent beyond what
his opponents thought reasonable. Ship
money illustrates Charles' methods. It
had been levied by the Crown before, but only on coastal towns for naval
expenditures in wartime; Charles now imposed ship money on inland areas and in
peacetime. When John Hampden, a very
rich gentleman from inland Buckinghamshire refused to pay it, he lost his case
in court (1637) but gained wide public support for challenging the king's
fiscal expedients.
In religious matters,
Charles was under the guidance of a very High Church Archbishop of Canterbury,
William Laud, who systematically enforced Anglican conformity and deprived even
moderate Puritans of their pulpits.
Puritans were sometimes brought before the Star Chamber, long a highly
respected administrative court but now gaining a reputation for high-handedness
because it denied the accused the safe-guards of the common law. In civil matters, Charles made use of an
opportunist conservative, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, who had deserted
the parliamentary side and went on to become lord lieutenant of Ireland.
England was seething with
repressed political and religious passions underneath the outward calm of these
years of personal rule. Yet, to judge
from the imperfect statistics available, the relative weight of the taxation
that offended so many Englishmen was less than on the Continent and far less
than taxation in any modern Western state.
The Englishmen who resisted the Crown by taking arms against it were not
downtrodden, poverty-stricken people revolting from despair, but
self-assertive, hopeful people defending their civil rights and their own forms
of worship as well as seeking power and wealth.
The attempts of
twentieth-century historians to isolate the economic motives of
seventeenth-century English revolutionaries have stirred up a great scholarly controversy,
which is linked with efforts to find a Europe-wide crisis in the middle
1600s. The debate has centered on the
role of the gentry, that large group of landed aristocrats just under the high
nobility, who did much of the fighting in the civil wars. R. H. Tawney, a Labor
party intellectual, claimed that the more enterprising, more capitalistic
gentleman farmers, rather like rural bourgeois, supported the Puritans. His antagonist, Hugh Trevor-Roper of Oxford,
asserted that on thc contrary the gentry backing the Puritans were those who
were barely holding their own or sinking down the economic scale in the face of
inflation, the enclosure of lands for sheep farming, and the competition of the
secular owners of former monastic lands.
Neutral historians tend to conclude that these are suggestive though
overabstract attempts to define the undefinable the role of an amorphous social
class whose economic status varied and whose political decisions were by no
means necessarily made on economic grounds.
Charles I could perhaps have
weathered his financial difficulties for a long time if he had not had to
contend with the Scots. Laud's attempt
to enforce the English High Church ritual and organization came up against the
three-generations-old Scottish Presbyterian "Kirk." In 1638, a "Solemn League and
Covenant" bound the members of the Kirk to resist Charles by force if need
be. Charles marched north against the
Scots and worked out a compromise with them in 1639. But even this mild
campaign was too much for the treasury, and in 1640 Charles had to call
Parliament back into session for the first time in eleven years. This Short Parliament denied him any money
until the piled-up grievances against Charles and his father were settled; it
was dissolved almost at once. Then the
Scots went to war again, and Charles, defeated in a skirmish, bought them off
by promising the Scottish army £850 a day until peace was made. Since he could not raise £850 a day, he had
to call another Parliament, which became the famous Long Parliament of the
Revolution.
Since the Scottish army
would not be disbanded until it was paid off, the Long Parliament held it as a
club over Charles' head and put through a great series of reforms striking at
the heart of the royal power. It abolished
ship money and other disputed taxes. It
disbanded the unpopular royal administrative courts, such as the Star Chamber,
which had become symbols of Stuart absolutism.
Up to now, Parliament had been called and dismissed at the pleasure of
the Crown; the Triennial Act of 1640 made obligatory the summoning of future
Parliaments every three years, even if the Crown did not wish to do so. Parliament also attacked the royal
favorites, whom Charles reluctantly abandoned.
Archbishop Laud was removed, and Strafford, declared guilty of treason,
was executed in May 1641.
Meanwhile, Strafford's harsh
policy toward the Irish had borne fruit in a rebellion that amounted to an
abortive war for national independence by Irish Catholics and that caused the
massacre of thirty thousand Protestants in the northern Irish region of
Ulster. Parliament, unwilling to trust
Charles with an army to put down this rebellion, drew up in 1641 the Grand
Remonstrance summarizing all its complaints.
Charles now made a final attempt to repeat the tactics that had worked
in 1629. Early in 1642, he ordered the
arrest of five of his leading opponents in the House of Commons, including
Hampden of the ship-money case. The
five took refuge in the privileged political sanctuary of the City of London,
when the king could not reach them.
Charles I left for the north and in the summer of 1642 rallied an army
at Nottingham; Parliament simply took over the central government. The Civil War had begun.
During these first years of
political jockeying signs were already evident that strong groups in England
and in Parliament wanted something more than a return to the Tudor balance
between Crown and Parliament, and between religious conservatives and religious
radicals. In politics, the Nineteen
Propositions that Parliament submitted to the king in June 1642 would have
established parliamentary supremacy over the army, the royal administration,
the church, and even the rearing of the royal children. Charles turned down the propositions. In religion, the Root and Branch Bill,
introduced in 1641 but not enacted into law, would have radically reformed the
Church of England, destroying "root and branch," the bishops and much
of what had already become traditional in Anglican religious practices. The moderates in politics and religion were
plainly going to have trouble defending their middle-of-the-road policies among
the extremists of a nation split by civil war.
The Civil War, 1642-1649
England split along lines
partly territorial, partly social and economic, and partly religious. The royalist strength lay largely in the
north and west, relatively less urban and less prosperous than other parts and
largely controlled by country gentlemen loyal to throne and altar. Parliamentary strength lay largely in the
south and east, especially in the great city of London and in East Anglia,
where Puritanism commanded wide support among the gentry. The Scots were always in the offing,
distrustful of an English Parliament but quite as distrustful of a king who had
sought to foist episcopacy on their kirk.
In the
field, the struggle was at first indecisive.
The royalists, or Cavaliers, recruited from gentlemen used to riding,
had the initial advantage of superior cavalry.
What swung the balance to the side of Parliament was the development of
a special force, recruited from ardent Puritans in the eastern counties, and
gradually forged under strict discipline into the famous
"Ironsides." Their leader was
a Puritan gentleman named Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), who won a crucial battle
at Marston Moor in 1644. The
parliamentary army, now reorganized into the New Model Army, staffed by
radicals in religion and politics, stood as Roundheads (from their
short-cropped hair, something like a crew-cut) against the Cavaliers. At the battle of Naseby in 1645, the New
Model was completely victorious over the king, and Charles in desperation took
refuge with the Scottish army, who turned him over to the English Parliament in
return for £400,000 back pay.
Now a situation arose that
was to be repeated, with variations for time and place, in the French
Revolution in 1792 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. The group of moderates who had begun the
revolution and who still controlled the Long Parliament were confronted by the
much more radical group who controlled the New Model Army. In religion, the moderates, seeking to
retain some ecclesiastical discipline and formality, were Presbyterians or Low
Church Anglicans; in politics, they were constitutional monarchists. The radicals, who were opposed to churches
disciplined from a central organization, were Independents or
Congregationalists, and they already so distrusted Charles that they were able
at least to contemplate that extraordinary possibility, an England under a republican
form of government. The situation was
complicated by the Presbyterian Scots, who regarded the radical Roundheads as
religious anarchists.
The years after 1645 were
filled with difficult negotiations, during which Charles stalled for time to gain
Scottish help. In 1648, Cromwell beat the invading Scots at Preston, and his
army seized the king. Parliament, with
the moderates still in control, now refused to do what the army wanted, to
dethrone Charles. The Roundhead leaders
then ordered Colonel Pride to exclude by force from the Commons ninety-six
Presbyterian members. This the Colonel
did in December 1648, in true military fashion, with no pretense of
legality. After "Pride's
Purge" only some sixty radicals remained of the more than five hundred
members originally composing the Long Parliament; they were known henceforth as
the Rump Parliament. The Rump brought Charles to trial before a special high
court of trustworthy radicals, who condemned him to death. On January 30, 1649,
Charles I was beheaded.
The subsequent eleven years
are known to historians as the Interregnum, the interval between two
monarchical reigns. This bit of English
understatement should not disguise the fact that England was now a republic,
under the government known as the Commonwealth. Since the radicals did not dare to call a free election, which
would almost certainly have gone against them, the Rump Parliament continued to
sit. Thus, from the start, the
Commonwealth was the dictatorship of a radical minority come to power through
the tight organization of the New Model Army.
From the start, too, Cromwell was the dominating personality of the new
government. In religion an earnest and
sincere Independent, but no fanatic, a patriotic Englishman, strong-minded,
stubborn, but not power-mad, by no means unwilling to compromise, Cromwell was
nevertheless a prisoner of his position.
He faced a divided England,
where the majority was no doubt royalist at heart and certainly sick of the
fighting, the confiscations, the endless changes of the last decade. He faced a hostile Scotland and an even more
hostile Ireland, where the disorders in England had encouraged the Catholic
Irish to rebel once more in 1649. In
1650, Charles II, eldest son of the martyred Charles I, landed in Scotland,
accepted the Covenant (thereby guaranteeing the Presbyterian faith as the
established Scottish kirk), and led a Scottish army once more against the
English. Once more, the English army
proved unbeatable at the battle of Worcester (1651), and the hope of the
Stuarts took refuge on the Continent, after a romantic escape in disguise. Finally, Cromwell faced a war with Holland
(1652-1654) brought on by the Navigation Act of 1651, which deliberately struck
at the Dutch carrying trade. It was a
typically mercantilistic measure, which forbade the importation of goods into
England and the colonies except in English ships or in ships of the country
producing the imported goods.
By 1654, Cromwell had
mastered all his foes. He himself went
to Ireland and suppressed the rebellion with bloodshed that is still not
forgotten. In the so-called Cromwellian Settlement, he dispossessed native
Irish landholders in favor of Protestants; he achieved order in Ireland, but not
peace. He brought the naval war with
the Dutch to a victorious close in 1654.
Later, Cromwell also waged an aggressive war against Spain (1656-1658),
from whom the English acquired the rich Caribbean sugar island of Jamaica. Even in this time of troubles, the British
Empire kept growing.
Cromwell, however, could not
master the Rump Parliament, which brushed aside his suggestions for an increase
in its membership and a reform of its procedures. In April 1653 he forced its dissolution by appearing in Parliament
with a body of soldiers. In December
1653 he took the decisive step of inaugurating the regime called the
Protectorate, with himself as "lord protector" of England, Scotland,
and Ireland, and with a written constitution-the only one Britain has ever
had-the Instrument of Government. It
provided for an elected Parliament with a single house of 460 members, who were
in fact chosen by Puritan sympathizers, since no royalist dared vote. Even so,
the lord protector had constant troubles with his parliaments and in 1657
yielded to pressure and modified the Instrument of Government to provide for a
second parliamentary house and to put limits on the lord protector's
power. Meanwhile, to maintain order,
Cromwell had divided the country into twelve military districts, each with a
major general commanding a military force.
Oliver Cromwell died in 1658
and was succeeded as lord protector by his son Richard, who was a
non-entity. The army soon seized
control, and some of its leaders regarded the restoration of the Stuarts as the
best way to end the chronic political turbulence. To ensure the legality of the move, General Monk, commander of
the Protectorate's forces in Scotland, summoned back the Rump and readmitted the
surviving members excluded by Pride's Purge.
This partially reconstituted Long Parliament enacted the formalities of
restoration, and in 1660 Charles Stuart returned from exile to reign as Charles
II.
Was there a Reign of Terror
in the English Revolution? Perhaps not,
since much of the bloodshed occurred in formal battles between organized armies
and was not the revolutionary bloodshed of guillotine, lynching, and judicial
murder. Nevertheless, Charles I was
beheaded; Strafford, Laud, and others suffered the death penalty; royalists had
their properties confiscated. Above all, the Puritans at the height of their
rule in the early 1650s attempted to enforce on the whole population the
difficult, austere life of the Puritan ideal.
This enforcement took the familiar form of "blue laws," of
prohibitions on horse racing, gambling, cock fighting, bear baiting, dancing on
the green, fancy dress, the theater, on a host of ordinary phases of daily
living. This English Reign of Terror
and Virtue, coming too early for modem techniques of propaganda and
regimentation, was not entirely effective.
Many an Anglican clergyman, though officially "plundered"-that
is, deprived of his living-continued worship in private houses; many a cock
fight went on in secluded spots. Nevertheless,
the strict code was there, with earnest persons to try to enforce it, and with
implacable enemies to oppose it. The
remark of the Victorian historian Macaulay-that the Puritans prohibited bear
baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to
the spectators-is a sample of the deep hostility that still survives in England
toward the reign of the Puritan "saints."
Many
Englishmen have seemed rather ashamed of their great revolution, preferring to
call it the Civil War or the Great Rebellion, and recalling instead as their
Glorious Revolution the decorous movement of 1688- 1689, to which we shall come
in a moment. Yet the events of
1640-1660 are of major importance, not only in the history of England, but in
the history of the West. Here for the first time the monarchy was challenged in
a major revolt by politically active private citizens; though the Stuarts were
ultimately restored, no English king could ever hope to rule again without a
Parliament, or revive the Court of Star Chamber, or take ship money,
benevolences, and other controversial taxes.
Parliament thenceforward retained that critical weapon of the
legislative body in a limited monarchy, control of the public purse by periodic
grants of taxes.
Another basic freedom owes
much to this English experience.
Freedom of speech was a fundamental tenet of the Puritans, even though
at the height of their power they did not live up to it. It received a classic expression from the
poet John Milton, who was the secretary of the Commonwealth, in his Areopagitica (the reference is to the Council of the Areopagus in
ancient Athens). While Milton defended
free speech principally for an intellectual and moral elite, one of his
arguments was characteristically English: attempts to curb free expression just
won’t work. In practice, the voluminous
pamphlet literature of the early years of the great turmoil is a lively
manifestation of free speech in action.
The extraordinary fermentations of radical minorities foreshadowed modern
political and social thought. One such
group, the Levelers, found many sympathizers in the revolutionary army and
advanced a program later carried by emigrants to the American colonies. They called for political democracy,
universal suffrage, regularly summoned parliaments, progressive taxation,
separation of church and state, and protection of the individual against
arbitrary arrest. There were even hints
of the collectivist drive toward economic equality; a goal closely tied to
biblical ideas in those days. The
Diggers, for example, were a small sect that preached the sharing of earthly
goods in a kind of communism. They
actually dug up public lands in Surrey near London and began planting
vegetables; they were driven off, but not before they had got their ideas into
circulation. The Fifth Monarchy men,
the Millenarians, and a dozen other radical sects preached the Second Coming of
Christ and the achievement of some kind of utopia on earth.
Still more important, there
emerged from the English Revolution even more clearly than from the religious
wars on the Continent, the conception of religious toleration. The Independents, while they were in
opposition, stood firmly on the right of religious groups to worship God as
they wished. Though in their brief
tenure of power they showed a willingness to persecute, they were never firmly
enough in the saddle to make England into a seventeenth-century Geneva. At least one sect held to the idea and
practice of religious toleration as a positive good. The Quakers, led by George Fox (1624-1691), were Puritans of the
Puritans. They themselves eschewed all
worldly show, finding even buttons ostentatious. They found the names of days and months indecently pagan, the
polite form "you" in the singular a piece of social hypocrisy, and
legal oaths or oath taking most impious.
Hence they met for worship on what they called First Day rather than the
day of the sun god; they addressed another person as "thee" or "thou";
and they took so seriously the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of the
believer that they did entirely without a formal ordained ministry. In the Religious Society of Friends, as they
are properly known, any worshiper who felt the spirit move might testify in
what other sects would call a sermon.
Friends felt too deeply the impossibility of forcing anyone to see the
"inner light" for them to coerce people to accept their faith. They would abstain entirely from force,
particularly from war, and would go their own way in Christian peace.
The Restoration, 1660-1688
The
Restoration of 1660 kept Parliament essentially supreme but attempted to undo
some of the work of the Revolution.
Anglicanism was restored in England and Ireland, though not as a state
church in Scotland. Against the
"dissenters," as Protestants who would not accept the Church of
England were then termed, the so-called Clarendon Code set up all sorts of
restrictions. For instance, by the Five Mile Act all Protestant ministers who
refused to subscribe to Anglican orthodoxy were forbidden to come within five
miles of any town where they had previously preached. Yet the dissenters continued to dissent without heroic
sufferings. In characteristically English fashion, the Test Act of 1672, which
prescribed communion according to the Church of England on all officeholders,
local as well as national, was simply got around in various ways, though it was
not actually repealed until 1828. One
way was "occasional conformity," by which a dissenter of not too
strict conscience might worship as a Congregationalist, say, all year, but
might once or twice take Anglican communion.
Another, developed in the eighteenth century, was to permit dissenters
to hold office, and then pass annually a bill of indemnity legalizing their
illegal acts. Dissenters remained
numerous, especially among the artisans and middle-class merchants, and as time
went on they grew powerful, so that the "nonconformist conscience"
was a major factor in English public life.
Indeed, the three-century progression of names by which these
non-Anglican Protestants were called is a neat summary of their rise in
status-the hostile term "dissenter" became "nonconformist"
in the nineteenth century and "Free Churchman" in the twentieth.
The Restoration was also a
revulsion against Puritan ways. The
reign of Charles II (1660-1685) was a period of moral looseness, of gay court
life, of the Restoration drama with its ribald wit (the Puritans in power had
closed the theaters), of the public pursuit of pleasure, at least among the
upper classes. But the new' Stuarts had
not acquired political wisdom. Charles
II dissipated some of the fund of good will with which he started by following
a foreign policy that seemed to patriotic Englishmen too subservient to the
wicked French king Louis XIV. The cynic
is tempted to point out that, if Charles's alliance with Louis in 1670 was most
un-English, it did result in the final extinction of any Dutch threat to
English seapower. And it sealed a very
important English acquisition, that of New Amsterdam, now New York, first taken
in the Anglo- Dutch War of 1664-1667.
What really undid the later
Stuarts and revealed their political ineptitude was the Catholic problem. Charles II had come under Catholic influence
through his French mother and very possibly embraced the Roman religion before
he died in 1685. Since he left no
legitimate children, the crown passed to his brother, James II (1685-1688), who
was already a declared Catholic. In the
hope of enlisting the support of the dissenters for the toleration of
Catholics, James II issued in 1687 a Declaration of Indulgence, granting
freedom of worship to all denominations,
Protestant dissenters as well as Catholics, in England and Scotland. This was in the abstract an admirable step
toward full religious liberty; but to the great majority of Englishmen
Catholicism still seemed the great menace to the English nation, and it was
always possible to stir them to an irrational pitch by an appeal to their fear of
"popery." Actually, by the
end of the seventeenth century the few remaining Catholics in England were glad
to be left in something like the
status of the dissenters and were no real
danger to a country overwhelmingly
Protestant. In Ireland, however, the Catholics remained an unappeasable
majority.
The political situation was
much like that under Charles I; the Crown wanted one thing, Parliament wanted
another. Although James II made no
attempt to dissolve Parliament or to
arrest members, he simply went over Parliament's head by issuing decrees, like
the Declaration of Indulgence granting full religious toleration, in accordance
with what he called the "power of dispensation." Early in his reign, he had made a piddling
rebellion by the duke of Monmouth, a bastard son of Charles II, the excuse for two ominous policies. First, his judges organized the "bloody
assizes," which punished suspected rebel sympathizers with a severity that
seemed out of all proportion to the extent of the rebellion. Second, he created a standing army of thirty
thousand men, part of whom he stationed near London in what appeared an attempt
to intimidate the capital. To contemporaries it looked as though
James were plotting to force both
Catholicism and divine-right monarchy on an unwilling England. The result was
the Glorious Revolution.
The Glorious Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1688-1714
The actual revolution was a
coup d'etat engineered at first by a group of James' parliamentary opponents
who were called Whigs, in contrast to the Tories who tended to support at least
some of the policies of the later Stuart monarchs. The Whigs were the direct heirs of the moderates of the Long
Parliament, and they represented an alliance of the great lords and the
prosperous London merchants.
James II married twice. By his first marriage he had two daughters,
both Protestant-Mary, who had married William of Orange, the Dutch opponent of
Louis XIV, and Anne. Then in 1688 a son
was born to James and his Catholic second wife, thus apparently making the
passage of the crown to a Catholic heir inevitable. The Whig leaders responded with a barrage of propaganda,
including a whispering campaign to the effect that the queen had not even been
pregnant and a new-born babe had been smuggled into her chamber in a warming
pan, so that there might be a Catholic heir.
Then the Whigs and some Tories negotiated with William of Orange, who
could hardly turn down a proposition that would give him the solid assets of
English power in his struggle with Louis XIV.
He accepted the offer of the English crown, which he was to share with
his wife, the couple reigning as William III (1689-1702) and Mary II
(1689-1694). On November 5, 1688, William landed at Tor Bay on the Devon coast
with some fourteen thousand soldiers.
When James heard the news, he tried to rally support, but everywhere the
great lords and even the normally conservative country gentlemen were on the
side of the Protestant hero. James fled
from London to France in December 1688, giving William an almost bloodless
victory.
Early in 1689 Parliament formally offered the crown to William on terms that were soon enacted into law as the Bill of Rights. This famous document, summing up the constitutional practices that Parliament had been working for since the Petition of Right in 1628, is in fact almost a succinct form of written constitution. It lays down the essential principles of parliamentary supremacy-control of the purse, prohibition of the royal power of dispensation, and frequent meetings of Parliament. Three major steps were necessary after 1689 to convert Britain into a parliamentary democracy in which the Crown has purely symbolic functions as the focus of patriotic loyalty. These were, first, the concentration of executive direction in a committee of the majority party in the Parliament-that is, the Cabinet headed by a prime minister, the work of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; second, the establishment of universal suffrage and payment of members of the Commons, the work of the nineteenth century, completed in the twentieth; and third, the abolition of the power of the House of Lords to veto legislation passed by the Commons, the work of the early twentieth century. Thus we can see that full democracy was still a long way off in 1689. William III and Mary II were real rulers, who did not think of themselves as purely ornamental monarchs, without power over policy.
Childless, they were
succeeded by Mary's younger sister, Anne (1702-1714). Anne and her nonentity of a husband strove hard to leave an heir
to the throne, but all their many children were stillborn or died in
childhood. The exiled Catholic Stuarts,
however, did better. The little boy
born to James II in 1688 and brought up at the court of St. Germain near Paris,
grew up to be known as the "Old Pretender." But in 1701 Parliament passed the Act of Settlement, which
settled the crown, in default of heirs to Anne, the heir apparent to the sick
William III, not on the Catholic pretender but on the Protestant Sophia of
Hanover or her issue. Sophia was a
granddaughter of James I, and the
daughter of Frederick of the Palatinate, the "Winter King" of Bohemia
in the Thirty Years' War. On Anne's death in 1714, the crown therefore passed
to Sophia's son, George, first king of the house of Hanover. This settlement clearly established the fact
that Parliament, and not the divinely ordained succession of the eldest male in
direct descent, made the king of England.
In order to ensure the
Hanoverian succession in both the Stuart kingdoms, Scotland as well as England,
the formal union of the two was completed in 1707 as the United Kingdom of
Great Britain. Scotland gave up its own
parliament and sent sixteen peers to the Lords and forty-five members to
Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom at Westminster. The Union Jack, with the superimposed
crosses of Saint George (for England) and Saint Andrew (for Scotland), became
the national flag of Great Britain. Although the union met with some opposition
from both English and Scots, on the whole it went through with surprising ease,
so great was Protestant fear of a possible return of the Catholic Stuarts. And, in spite of occasional sentimental
outbreaks of Scottish nationalism even in our own day, the union has worked very
well. With the whole of England and the
colonies open to Scottish politicians and businessmen, the nation famed for its
thrifty and canny citizens achieved a prosperity it had never known before.
The Glorious Revolution did
not, however, settle one other perennial problem-Ireland. The Catholic Irish rose in support of the
exiled James II and were put down at the Boyne in 1690. William then attempted
to apply moderation in his dealings with Ireland, but the Protestant
"garrison" there soon forced him to return to the Cromwellian policy. Although Catholic worship was not actually
forbidden, all sorts of galling restrictions were imposed on the Catholic
Irish, including the prohibition of Catholic schools. Moreover, economic persecution was added to the religious, as
Irish trade came under stringent mercantilist regulation. This was the Ireland
whose misery inspired Jonathan Swift in 1729 to make his "modest
proposal" that the impoverished Irish sell their babies as articles of
food.
