Commonwealth Constitutional Experiments

Newcomers to the political history of England in the 1650s generally find it one of the most confusing episodes in the national story: a succession of short-lived regimes and constitutions with no apparent connecting thread of logic. Such an impression is largely a result of traditional historiography, which has concentrated upon the actions of governments and Parliaments in the period, and above all on the enigmatic figure of Oliver Cromwell, who presided over most. The key to an understanding of these years lies in a body of people that has been relatively neglected by scholars, partly because of a comparative lack of material and partly because of an academic preference for studying formal organs and offices of power. This is the army that commenced its life as the New Model in 1645 and became the force that had made the English Revolution. If it had little sense of an ideal form of government, it had a very good one of the kind of social and political outcome which it wanted any government to produce. Between 1647 and 1660 it had a consistent list of reforms it expected from any regime which it was prepared to support: a transformation of the legal system to make it faster, cheaper and easier for ordinary people to understand; regular Parliaments elected on a reformed franchise; and a broadly based national Church without the compulsory tithes which traditionally supported parish ministers and with freedom for radical Protestants to form their own miniature churches outside it if they wished. In 1647 the army had tried to get the king to agree to it; after he refused, it continued to search for a different form of government which would.
In doing so, it suffered from two handicaps, which combined to produce a chronic impasse. The first was simply that its programme was too extreme, especially in religion, for the vast majority of the English to accept. It could command the allegiance of a minority in each level of society, and cumulatively this provided enough civilian allies to staff local government, but no more. The second handicap was that the soldiers could not bring themselves to face the reality that their reforms would not be imposed by any body that came close to representing the wishes of the English in general. Rather than enact them by the directions of a military tribunal in the manner of many modern revolutions, they continued to look to Parliaments elected from gentry, lawyers and wealthy merchants – groups which had a particular vested interest in the old order that the army wanted to reshape – to provide them. The soldiers were uneasily aware that they had seized power in the name of popular liberties but against the will of most of the people; their hope was that time, God and reeducation would win the majority of the nation over. It did not help their cause that while their reform package was clear enough in outline, their proposals were either vague or contradictory when it came to practical details; for example, what could replace tithes?
The results were as follows. For four years the army applied pressure to the purged remnant of the Long Parliament to enact its reforms, with increasing confidence as its victories multiplied. In April 1653, led by Cromwell, it lost patience and threw the MPs out. Its officers then, for the first and last time, came close to the only sure means of achieving their aim, by nominating a Parliament themselves for the work instead of getting it elected. Unhappily, in their desire to give the resulting body some social weight, they named to it many individuals from the traditional governing classes, as well as many genuine radicals. The assembly concerned, popularly known as Barebone’s Parliament after one of its members, suffered none of the sloth of the purged one but was afflicted by division instead, and collapsed in December. By then, some of the officers had another solution ready: to have regular Parliaments, elected from reformed constituencies and a standard franchise and without any Royalists, and to manage them as a rider does a horse. Two components were built into the new constitution, called the Instrument of Government. The first was a presidential figure, the Lord Protector, who was Cromwell himself, working closely with the second, a powerful executive council, staffed mainly with men sympathetic to the army’s programme. During most of 1654, Protector and council used their own powers to impose a number of measures that prepared the way for the army’s reform package, and in September they called a Parliament. To their horror, it refused not only to complete the reforms but to recognize the legitimacy of the Instrument of Government itself. In 1655 Cromwell dissolved it, and his government then imposed a direct experience of local godly reform on the nation, by dividing it into provinces governed by leading army officers, the Major-Generals. They were expected to work with local enthusiasts to ensure that the poor were relieved, the peace kept, and crime, vice and ungodliness punished, to an unprecedented degree. After more than a year of this, in September 1656, the government hoped that the English had been sufficiently impressed and cowed for a more compliant Parliament to be elected under the new system.
The second Protectorate Parliament was indeed different, but not in the way the army had hoped. A majority of it, which included some of Cromwell’s own civilian advisers, offered a counter-deal: to recognize and supply the government if it abandoned the reform programme and accepted a form of counter-revolution instead. This would consist of a restored monarchy, with Cromwell as king, a restored House of Lords, with enemies of the regime excluded, and a better-defined and better-policed Church of England. When the army officers came to him to protest, he told them angrily that this was the best offer that they had ever got. Only some, however, were convinced, and from February to May 1657 the Protector hesitated over the problem. In early May the news leaked that he was on the point of accepting the Crown, whereupon his three most senior generals told them that they would not support this, and the regiments around London mobilized to petition against it. This concentrated Cromwell’s mind, and he got in his refusal just before the petition arrived. Instead he brokered a compromise. He did not accept the crown or title of king but adopted increased powers, a royal robe, a sceptre, a throne and the right to create knights and hereditary peers. An Upper House was formed, but of supporters of the government rather than the old aristocracy, and a synod to tighten up the church was promised and never called. The Protector hoped that this would give enough to satisfy everybody. On the contrary, it satisfied no one, and when the Parliament was recalled in 1658, both it and the army became restless. Cromwell dissolved it after two weeks, and then listened to his councillors arguing fruitlessly over possible alternatives, as he slowly fell into a fatal illness which carried him off in September.
At this point it may be worth asking whether such a sequence of failures really mattered: after all, equipped with an unbeatable army, an effective administration and sufficient local supporters, the regime could apparently go on trying out and discarding constitutions and Parliaments indefinitely. Sooner or later, this logic suggests, the army officers would find one of each that would do their work. The problem with this suggestion is that time was not on their side: instead there were two different time bombs ticking away underneath them. One was religious. The whole system of liberty of conscience was based on the premise that given a long enough period in which they were forced to coexist, the different groups into which the old Puritanism had shattered would learn to work together, and reconstruct a better national Church between them. By 1658 this was actually happening, as in several areas former non-Puritan Protestants, Presbyterians, members of independent congregations who favoured a national Church, and even some of the new sects who had not wanted a Church of England at all, such as Baptists, were starting to cooperate. Such a development, however, was emphatically not a sign that the religious temperature of the English was starting to fall: on the contrary, these old opponents were sinking their differences in order to join forces against a terrifying new threat.
This came from the north, traditionally the most conservative of all English regions. There the disturbances of the 1640s had inflicted unusually severe damage upon the established church, leaving many parishes with no ministry. In this emergency, some country people and inhabitants of small towns began to think things through for themselves, discussing the Bible and radical and mystical ideas that had filtered through from the larger centres of population. By the beginning of the 1640s, they had reached the conclusion that no settled ministry was needed at all for salvation: all that was required was for devout Christians to meet together and wait for the spirit of God to move one or more of them. Having tried out this technique, they found that it seemed to work. The discovery spread rapidly through the fells and dales of the North Country, and in 1654 its proponents were ready to come south to preach their message. They had now embraced the whole of the army’s reform programme with the major addition that the Church of England was to be wholly abolished, and with it the universities which trained clergymen. Within four years they had penetrated every county in England and some in Wales, finding adherents in town and country alike. They represented the most spectacularly successful popular heresy that the English had ever produced, and one to which their enemies gave the name of ‘Quakers’, after the religious ecstasies into which some of its proponents entered. If the army – already so inclined to radical beliefs – were to take up their cause, then it could very easily be carried into power. By late 1658 many who still believed in a national church, or even a settled ministry, feared that the nation would collapse into violence between the Quakers and their allies and those determined to resist them. In that sense England was growing steadily less stable.
The other ticking bomb was financial. The Commonwealth had fought its wars on a basis of heavy taxation and huge land sales; but the effort required was too much even for that, and by 1654 the state was heavily in debt and at the end of its credit. The Protectorate made matters worse, because of two miscalculations. The first was to court popularity by reducing the level of direct taxation, while not reducing the number of its soldiers to one that the new level could support. It was gambling on winning the acceptance of the political nation, which would enable it to reduce the army to a sustainable level and receive further grants from Parliaments. Neither occurred, and the soldiers’ pay slid ever further into arrears as the years passed.
The second mistake was to declare war on Spain, an action itself prompted by financial difficulty. In one of the very rare debates that they held which was recorded, Cromwell and his councillors decided that they could not afford to pay off the fleet sailing home at the end of the war with the Dutch in 1654. They decided to solve the problem by sending it out again to attack the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. The hope was that the Spanish monarchy, long committed to a war in three European theatres, would be prepared to write off some of its many overseas possessions, which would be lucrative enough to yield the English government an immediate profit. To those who thought the scheme ridiculously foolhardy, Cromwell and his supporters replied that God would surely favour a blow against an intolerant Catholic state. The critics were correct: in 1655 the English fleet was beaten off its main objective, and had to settle for seizing the smaller island of Jamaica, which required great expense to hold and develop it. The Protectorate was now locked into a full-scale struggle with a furious Spain, which was both very expensive and damaging to English trade. A subsequent alliance with France brought more victories, and the acquisition of a Channel port, Dunkirk, to replace the great medieval trophy of Calais. Dunkirk was, however, itself both costly and unprofitable, and the English economy slid into recession, even as the government, unable to make peace, faced the possibility of bankruptcy. The only sure ways to avert this were either to tax without Parliament, which even the soldiers thought ideologically unacceptable, or to find a way of working with a Parliament at last.
The second course was the one taken by the new Lord Protector, Cromwell’s oldest surviving son, Richard, who had succeeded his father in default of any other candidate behind whom the dead Protector’s followers could unite. He had been brought up outside political life, and so a large part of his acceptability lay in the fact that nobody knew quite what to expect of him. He soon showed his quality, having all of his father’s courage and verve but very different ideas. He called a Parliament and asked it to settle the nation and supply the government, making it clear that he had no personal interest in the army’s reform programme. In April 1659, he launched a coup to break the power of the soldiers, calculating that a third of its colonels would support him and a third hesitate, leaving his supporters able to attack and overpower the third who held to the soldiers’ old ideals. When the moment came, his miscalculation became clear, as regiment after regiment commanded by his supporters ignored their colonels and marched off to join those gathering to oppose him: the army as a whole still clung to its old ideals. The Parliament was dissolved and Richard Cromwell fell from power, taking the Protectorate with him.
The army now recalled the MPs who, of all those that had sat during the previous ten years, had seemed most amenable to its wishes: the purged remnant of the Long Parliament, which had at least abolished the monarchy and Lords and allowed people to worship outside the national Church. Its hope was that their time in the wilderness would have made its members more receptive to the soldiers’ wishes. What followed was a fast-forward version of the events of 1648–53. First came a miniature equivalent to the Second Civil War, called Booth’s Rebellion, in which former Royalist and Parliamentarians joined forces to resist further radical change. The army had taken four months to suppress the risings of 1648; it stamped out that of 1659 within four weeks. A yet more rapid rerun now followed. It had formerly taken four years for the army to get disappointed with the purged Long Parliament and throw it out; now it took four months to do so, and by October the MPs were expelled again. What seemed most likely to happen next was a Second English Revolution, as junior officers called for the rapid introduction of further reforms, and some began to speak of abolishing the church and some of the central law courts altogether. Many civilians suspected that the Quaker manifesto was about to be put into action.
Instead, for the first time, a section of the army turned against the rest – the one that was holding down Scotland, commanded by George Monck, a former Royalist who had changed sides to become a personal protégé of Oliver Cromwell and had been promoted by him to the Scottish command. Monck’s political attitudes remained flexible, but he turned out to have a rigid devotion to the Church of England, which he now believed to be in danger. He formed a flying column of supporters to ride around the separate army bases, arresting the many officers who sympathized with the soldiers in England. He replaced them with loyal men promoted from the ranks, and brought in Scots to fill up those, so creating a counter-revolutionary force. The army of England was still larger, and mobilized against him in November, but heavy snow made operations difficult through the winter and Monck cleverly bought time by offering to talk. Because Scotland was still overtaxed, his army was well paid, but that of England, crowded into inadequate quarters around Newcastle, felt the English fiscal and administrative system giving way behind it at last. It was underpaid, undersupplied and led by a provisional government of generals who had no clear and agreed plan for political action. At the end of the year, the regiments in England began to mutiny and disintegrate, and some of them called back the purged Parliament – now derisively known as the ‘Rump’ – yet again. The MPs now definitively ended the revolutionary era, by dismissing most of the army officers and men who had called for the reform programme. They then summoned Monck’s army, believing it to be their only reliable armed force, to march south in order to defend them and enforce their will on the English.
When Monck and his men arrived at the capital, however, they found a thoroughly unpopular Commonwealth government adrift amid a turbulent and resentful populace, and saw no reason why they should continue to support it. Instead, they invited back the surviving MPs who had been purged at the end of 1648, with instructions simply to dissolve the Long Parliament legally and call another, which would settle the nation as it chose. When this ‘Convention Parliament’ was elected, in April 1660, it contained almost nobody who wanted a republic to continue. Within a few weeks it restored the monarchy, with Charles II invited back as king, and the House of Lords, composed of the traditional aristocracy; the pre-war Church of England, with bishops, cathedrals and the Prayer Book, duly followed, and Ireland and Scotland were allowed to recreate their own royal governments and national Parliaments.
These events can be read in two quite different ways. On the one hand, it is entirely legitimate to argue that the first and last republic that Britain has ever known was an entirely artificial and unnatural creation. It was imposed by a most unusual and unrepresentative group of people, the New Model Army, against the sustained will of the great majority of the population of England, Scotland and Wales. This army had been created and given ideological fuel by a unique set of experiences, and only its military power and its collective will allowed the republic to endure as long as it did. As soon as that power and that will collapsed, the traditional political and religious order returned almost immediately, as a process of nature.
On the other hand, it is equally justifiable to point out that revolutions are rarely made by the majority of a population, but by relatively small cadres of determined people who seize power and then subdue or re-educate the rest. In that sense, what happened in Britain was entirely normal, and a process of further radicalization and alteration ought to have ensued, as it almost did in 1659. This perspective would emphasize the financial errors of the Protectorate in undermining its stability, but above all the personal action of Oliver Cromwell in putting George Monck in charge of the army of Scotland instead of a soldier who had been part of the revolution of 1648–9 and shared its ideals. In that sense, only a historical accident wrenched the British Isles from their natural course of development into a yet more revolutionary republic. Readers may choose whichever of these verdicts seem the most compelling to them as individuals; and in doing so, of course, they will reproduce some of the instincts and beliefs that opposed people at the time.