1

What was the English

Revolution?
John Morrill, Brian Manning and
David Underdown

Originally appeared as John Morrill, Brian Manning and David Under-

down, ‘What was the English Revolution?’ in History Today 34. Copyright
© 1984 History Today Ltd, London.

Those living through the period 1570–1640 would have felt themselves
much closer to civil war in the first two decades than in the last two. A
disputed succession, organised Catholic and Puritan religious parties (in
the Catholic case made the more menacing by a strong advocacy of
tyrannicide), and the willingness of foreign powers to intervene in the
internal affairs of England: all these were far more the hallmarks of the
mid-Elizabethan than of the Caroline period. Yet these were the classic
occasions of internal conflict in Reformation Europe. They were the
major but not the only signs of a country moving away from civil war.
The Crown had weathered the storm induced by a century of popula-
tion growth and price inflation. By the 1630s, both these were blowing
themselves out; the economic and social outlook were rosier. The Crown
doubled its real income between 1603 and 1637 and had the lowest
national debt in Europe. Although the methods used were unpopular
and provoked some limited passive resistance, the Crown got its way. In
the later 1630s only one fiscal device – Ship Money – was openly (and
largely ineffectually) resisted, and the Crown could have abandoned it
and still balanced the budget in peacetime. Since no foreign power in the
foreseeable future would declare war on England, the Crown had
another twenty years in what would have been a favourable economic
climate to solve the problems of war finance.
Far from being a state sliding into civil war and anarchy, the early
Stuart state saw measurable decreases in levels of extra-legal violence:
fewer treason trials, no revolts, fewer riots concentrated in fewer areas
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 15
(the western forests, the fenland), the ubiquity and omnicompetence of
royal justice, the ability of the Crown to insist on the arbitration of dis-
putes at law or by royal officers.
It can thus be argued that the civil wars grew out of the policies and
out of the particular failings of a particular king, Charles I. For despite
its growing strength, the English political system remained a frail one
which required skilful management. The state did lack the means to
wage war, even to develop as a major colonial power; it lacked a bureau-
cracy dependent for its income and standing upon the Crown; it lacked
coercive power. Government had to be by consent, above all by the
willing co-operation of political élites in the forty counties and in the
two hundred self-governing boroughs. By and large, material self-
interest bound those élites to co-operation even in the 1630s, and there
was far greater ideological cohesion and agreement within these élites
and between them and the Court than in other western European states,
but they did believe themselves to have rights and liberties which it was
the Crown’s duty to protect, and much of the necessary modernisation
of finance and administration in the early seventeenth century had
involved the erosion of those rights.
On balance, however, Elizabeth and James were skilful in permitting
changes in the distribution of political and administrative power which
reflected changes in the distribution of wealth and social power. As the
peerage declined as social and political leaders, and as wealth became
increasingly concentrated in the hands of the gentry and of wealthy
craftsmen and farmers, so there was an enormous expansion of the
responsibilities and powers of the county community and of parish gov-
ernment. Thus the number of gentry appointed to prominent local
offices increased fourfold (through commissions of the peace, lieu-
tenancy, etc.), and the powers and responsibilities they discharged were
massively increased; and at the same time the wealthier members of
village communities gained enormous influence over their poorer neigh-
bours through the statutory expansion of the powers of parish officers
(the poor law, administration of charitable funds, etc.).
This redistribution of power away from the Church and the peerage
(and away from the poor) was achieved by the co-operation of Crown
and political élites in Parliament. This system of government, in which
the governors were not easily or directly subject to royal control, needed
very sensitive management. It needed control by a monarch who could
make the loaves and fishes of patronage feed a multitude of suitors. It
could be done, but in the reign of Charles I it was not done. Charles was
an incompetent King; inaccessible, glacial, self-righteous, deceitful.
Within fifteen years of his accession he had forfeited the goodwill of
most of the political élite, who viewed his actions with alarm, incom-
16 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

prehension or dismay. Yet few, if any, contemplated trying to bring down

his personal rule by force. Emigration not underground resistance was
the ultimate preference of men like John Pym and Oliver Cromwell in
the later 1630s.
In 1640, however, Charles blundered away his initiative. He tried to
impose his will upon his Scottish subjects twice, both times without ade-
quate means. He could have made painful concessions, resumed his per-
sonal rule in England and looked to divide-and-rule tactics to regain his
power in Scotland. But by attempting to impose his own brand of Protes-
tantism on the Scots through an unco-ordinated force of Irish Catholics,
Highland Catholics and an English army containing many Catholics, all
to be paid for with cash to be provided from Rome and Madrid, he turned
the anti-Catholic fears which his policies and his cultural values had
already stimulated into a deep paranoia. The Scots’ occupation of north-
east England, and their demand for war reparations guaranteed by Par-
liament, created a wholly unanticipated and wholly unique situation: a
meeting of Lords and Commons over whose determination he had no
control. The MPs who gathered for the Long Parliament knew they had
a once-for-all chance to put things right. They did not set out to organ-
ise for war but to restore the good old days.
There were three strands to the opposition to royal policies in
1640: they were, for many men, intertwined; but for many more
they were discrete. There were those whose opposition can be called
‘localist’, whose experience of government in recent years had been
of insensitive interventionism by central government in the affairs
of their shires or boroughs, the imposition of national priorities at
the expense of local preference and custom; there were those whose
opposition can be termed ‘legal-constitutionalist’, a genuine belief
that the Crown had been persuaded by evil counsellors to invade
the liberty and take away the property of the subject, at best to serve
the venal self-interest of the evil counsellors, at worst as part of a
grand design to set up popery and tyranny; and there were those whose
opposition was religious, who saw Protestantism under attack from an
insidious popish conspiracy at court, and a less concealed but just
as deadly and systematic challenge to the identity of the Church
of England instigated by an innovative and heretical Archbishop of
Canterbury and his henchmen.
The events of 1640–2 showed that neither the ‘localist’ nor the ‘legal-
constitutionalist’ perceptions of misrule led men to take up arms. Those
primarily concerned with the disruption to local government and auton-
omy occasioned by royal policies in the 1630s were overwhelmingly
neutralist in 1642, well aware that war could not but bring on
much worse disruptions. At most, such men followed the line of least
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 17
resistance, following reluctantly the orders issued by others. Constitu-
tional grievances were keenly felt by most of those who gathered at
Westminster for the Long Parliament. But constitutional remedy was
not speedily or rigorously pursued. Only the Triennial Act reached the
statute book in the first eight months; the prosecution of evil counsel-
lors took precedence, and what time was left over was spent more on
debating religion than the rule of law. However, when the Houses did
get round to constitutional grievances they quickly, and largely without
rancour, rushed through a body of remedial legislation. Two points are
obvious about the constitutional grievances of 1640–1; that they were,
without exception, grievances which had arisen since 1625 (that is,
they were grievances against Charles I and not against the early modern
state), and that Parliament saw itself as engaged in a restorative, con-
servative programme. By the summer, there were no constitutional
grievances left except those created by the King’s manifest bad faith in
conceding the remedies to those old grievances.
The constitutional programme of 1641–2 was not – unlike the
religious programme – an end in itself; it was a means to an end.
Fresh guarantees were sought that the King would honour his pledges
and rule responsibily. Whether or not such guarantees were necessary
really depended on whether or not the King could be trusted, and
that was a matter intimately connected with the religious question.
Although Parliament issued the Militia Ordinance and the Nineteen
Propositions, neither was the subject of prolonged debate in the
provinces. There were no county petitions for or against the Proposi-
tions, for example. In 1641 petitions called for constitutional reform;
in 1642 the overwhelming majority of those concerned with constitu-
tional issues called for accommodation, for negotiation, for settlement.
Yet throughout 1642 petitions from across England debated, in ever
more sharply distinguished ways, the case for and against episcopacy.
No more than a dozen serious pamphlets debated the constitutional
issues in the months before Edgehill; there were scores of pamphlets
considering the future of the Church. In the four weeks after
the Attempt on the Five Members, pamphlets on that outrage were
outnumbered four to one by pamphlets on the impeachment of twelve
bishops the previous week.
Many of those who felt that the guarantees being sought were legit-
imate and proper did not feel that it was right to fight to achieve them.
One could believe in the Propositions but vote against the raising of an
army to enforce them. The constitutional issues were the occasion of the
civil war but not the actual cause. Men decided whether to obey the
Militia Ordinance or the Commission of Array not on the merit of those
measures themselves, but on other grounds. The great majority tried not
18 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

to have to decide, seeing good and evil on both sides. They went reluc-
tantly to war. But minorities in most counties felt there was a cause
worth fighting for; that there was a glorious future to command. Those
who felt thus were those who felt strongly about religion.
In 1640, there was near unanimity in county petitions to the Houses
and in the rhetoric of the members that the Laudian church was inno-
vative, grasping, a threat to ‘the pure religion of Elizabeth and James I’,
and that Charles had become the victim of a popish conspiracy. He had
cut himself off from his people, had surrendered himself to the wiles of
his courtiers and of counter-reformation culture. He had been brain-
washed. The war with the Scots, together with his alleged involvement
in the Army Plots, the Incident, the Attempt on the Five Members, and
even in the Irish Rebellion, were all seen as the irrational acts of a King
poisoned by popery, a man no longer responsible for his actions. In so
far as there was a civil war because of the way men acted on their own
perceptions of events, there was a civil war in 1642 because many of
Charles’s subjects believed that they had to look to their own defence,
the King having become incapable of discharging his trust. Moderate
clergymen like Richard Baxter and official parliamentary apologists like
Henry Parker supported Parliament not because they feared royal
tyranny, but because they believed the King had ceased to rule. He had
become a zombie. In so far as that explanation made sense to the leaders
of Parliament like John Pym, it was a religious explanation.
But many others saw a different side of Charles. They saw a King who
had abandoned the counsellors of the 1630s; who had accepted the
remedial legislation of the Long Parliament; who had abandoned Lau-
dianism, had appointed moderate calvinist bishops, had promised to
reform abuses but to defend the ‘true reformed Protestant religion by
law established without any connivance of popery or innovation’ (a
euphemism which acknowledged his abandonment of his faithful Arch-
bishop whom he left to rot in the Tower). Such men saw a threat to order
and liberty less in the antics of the King’s ultra supporters than in
the tolerance and leniency which the parliamentary leaderhip ex-
tended towards the demonstrations and mass picketing of the Houses
by crowds of Londoners, and of the iconoclasm and popular distur-
bances throughout England.
Yet as these two sides emerged in Parliament and in the provinces, it
was the religious issue which stood out as the decisive one. While the
events of 1640–2 narrowed the constitutional issues which came to
revolve around means and not ends, religious issues broadened and
deepened. From a general detestation of Laudian innovation and
popery, there emerged a passionate defence of the pre-Laudian Church:
of bishops, the prayer book, the rhythms of the Christian year (built
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 19
around the festivals of Christmas and Easter). This passionate defence
was sustained by increasing numbers in both Houses and in petitions
from a majority of the shires, attested by gentry, yeomen, craftsmen and
clergy. But there also emerged an equally passionate call (such as had
not been heard for decades) for godly reformation, for the sweeping away
of a corruptible church order, so recently and so easily taken over by the
enemies of true religion, and for the erection of a Church committed to
preaching, to discipline, to a programme of moral rearmament. Such a
Church could turn England from a nation full of ignorance and vice into
a model godly commonwealth, into Zion. This cry too was heard in Par-
liament and throughout the country. As the impasse was reached in
1642, small groups in many counties thrust themselves forward to fight
for Church and King, or to fight for reformation and liberty.
In almost every case, those who thrust themselves forward were those
who had previously campaigned for episcopacy or against it. Many of
those who had had ‘legal-constitutionalist’ objections to the Personal
Rule now fought for Church and King. No-one who argued for a godly
reformation came over to the King’s side because they found the Com-
mission of Array more agreeable than the Militia Ordinance.
These ‘militants’ brought on the war. Others were dragged in, fol-
lowing agonised and slight preferences or taking the line of least resis-
tance. The war was not the result of social divisions. Gentry, yeoman,
tradesmen fought in equal numbers (though not equal numbers in each
region) for King and Parliament. If militant puritan middling sorts can
be identified, so can militant Anglican middling sorts and neutral mid-
dling sorts in similar numbers. If there were more puritan yeomen than
puritan gentlemen, there were more yeomen than gentlemen to be
puritan: there were also more Anglican yeomen than Anglican gentry.
The civil war was not a clash of social groups: it was the result of incom-
petent kingship which allowed religious militants to settle their disputes
about the nature of the church, and therefore of different concepts of
the moral order, to fight it out. It was the last and greatest of Europe’s
Wars of Religion.
After four years of civil war, the Parliamentarian minority defeated
the royalist minority. But they had alienated the uncommitted, the neu-
trals and their own moderate supporters. In order to win the war, they
had had to impose a crushing burden of taxation, to set up a civil
authority with draconian powers (of arbitrary taxation, arbitrary
imprisonment), and had created a standing army kept up to strength by
impressment and maintained by compulsory billeting and quarter. The
security problem required the maintenance of expensive security forces.
The measures required to sustain this expensive army increased the
security problem. At the same time, the attempt of puritan zealots to
20 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

impose their new and mandatory church and religious order foundered
amidst the passive resistance of the majority who remained loyal to the
old services and to their old ministers. The puritans’ hope of imposing
their Church was further weakened by internal disunity, extending
beyond natural differences of emphasis over correct church order as the
strain of events and a heady atmosphere engendered by a free press and
the questioning of all established values produced the disintegration of
puritan intellectual unity.
The yearning for settlement grew, with widespread recognition
that the war had resolved nothing, merely brought unprecedented
misery and loss. There was a massive call for a return of the King on
terms he might well have accepted in 1642. The second civil war
in 1648 was in large part the consequence of that yearning. But for
many in the puritan vanguard of 1642, the dream of the New
Jerusalem remained vivid. The sufferings of civil war were not a check
but a spur; they had a meaning. God was punishing, chastening, cleans-
ing his people. Theirs were pains with a purpose. The war had made the
wickedness of the old order all the clearer. An incorrigible King refused
to accept and actively sought to overture the judgment of God. He was
a ‘man of blood’, whose judicial execution was now demanded in atone-
ment. On January 30th, 1649, the Regicide marked the triumph of that
minority position.
Yet by executing the King and consciously proclaiming a godly
republic, the puritan vanguard further isolated themselves. So long as
their Army remained united they could cow the majority into acquies-
cence. But the puppet regimes set up and pulled down by the Army
were caught in a pincer. If they sought to realise the vision of the
New Jerusalem they found themselves frustrated by the passive resis-
tance of the old social élites; if they temporised with the élites, they
lost the support of the Army. And meanwhile the unacceptable face of
puritanism alienated them yet further from the majority. When Army
unity crumbled with the death of Oliver Cromwell, who strove to infuse
the old social order with new religious values, the return of the King
was inevitable.
Charles II came back to a changed world. Constitutionally, he had to
bow to the will of the country gentry and to accept their hegemony in
the counties and increasingly in the towns. The power of the state was
humbled and the autonomy of local governors exalted. But even more
important, the Restoration settlement saw the overthrow of religious
enthusiasm. Charles I and Laud had shared with the puritan county
bosses like William Brereton, Robert Harley, John Wray, and Army
bosses like Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Harrison, the vision of using
an alliance of Church and State to impose a new moral order. All such
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 21
hopes of realising a godly and ordered commonwealth were discredited
by the Revolution. Religion was relegated to the fringes. The Church was
emasculated and put under lay control; economic, political, artistic
thought was secularised; science ceased to be the means to create an
ordered world (‘a great instauration’ in which disease and dearth were
vanquished and man’s fleshly wants satisfied so that the spiritual values
could be cherished). Science became, as politics, accepted as the art of
the possible, a process of piecemeal empirical enquiry and improvement
unrelated to grand designs of social engineering. In the 1680s, plead-
ing for religious toleration, John Locke, heir to the puritan tradition,
defined a Church as a voluntary society of men, meeting together to
worship God in such fashion as they deemed appropriate. Religion had
been pushed to the edge of life, almost into becoming a hobby. Out of
England’s wars of religion came the modern secular state.
JOHN MORRILL

For further reading

Before the Civil War, ed. H. Tomlinson (Macmillan, 1984) is an excellent set of
essays on key aspects of 1603–42; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English
Civil War (Arnold, 1981), the best recent study of 1640–2; Caroline Hibbard,
Charles and the Popish Plot (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), the best
study of the collapse of royal credibility; Reactions to the English Civil War, ed.
J. S. Morrill (Macmillan, 1982), a collection of essays on 1642–9; William Hunt,
The Puritan Moment, is an important recent regional study. The main argument
of this essay is developed at greater length in J. S. Morrill, ‘The religious context
of the English civil war’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series,
34 (1984).

The Parliament which Charles I was obliged to summon to meet at West-

minster on November 3rd, 1640, did not intend to initiate a revolution.
The two Houses of Parliament were composed of nobility and gentry –
wealthy landlords – who represented the ruling class of England. Their
intention was to reinstate the ancient constitution which in their view
had been undermined by the actions of the King since 1629, and to
restore the Church of England to the position established by the Eliza-
bethan Religious Settlement which in their opinion had been subverted
by the innovations of Archbishop Laud. Charles and his advisers had
strained the natural alliance and normal harmony between the monar-
chy and the ruling class. The aim of the Parliament was to recover the
working partnership of the nobility and gentry with the Crown.
22 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

The King’s policies in Church and State during the 1630s were
blamed upon evil advisers. The first objective of the leaders of the Par-
liament was to remove those bad councillors. The Earl of Strafford
was executed and Archbishop Laud was imprisoned in the Tower of
London. But when the leaders of the Parliament went beyond the
removal of evil advisers and demanded that the King ‘employ such
councillors and ministers as shall be approved by his Parliament,’ they
raised an issue which caused division in the Parliament. Many of the
more conservative members of both Houses supported the King in the
defence of the ‘ancient and undoubted right’ of the monarch to choose
his own advisers.
The second issue which caused division in the Parliament was reli-
gion. Laud and the bishops were accused of betraying the Protestant tra-
dition of the Church of England by introducing ceremonies which in the
eyes of most of the nobility and gentry savoured of Roman Catholicism.
But this was an issue which troubled not only the ruling class. In some
parishes in London and in the provinces crowds tore down the rails in
the chancel and put the communion table back in the nave of the
church where it had been before the Laudian innovations. They
assaulted ministers for wearing the surplice and shouted out objections
to the liturgy of the prayer-book for having too much in common with
the Roman Catholic Mass. Petitions attacked the bishops and called for
the abolition of episcopacy. Some Members of Parliament rallied to the
defence of the bishops and the prayer-book. They feared that an attack
on the principle of hierarchy in the church might open the way for an
attack on the principle of hierarchy in society at large. They were con-
cerned to preserve the existing liturgy as an expression of a traditional
order against attack, on the one side, from a ‘popish’ faction of ‘upstart’
clergy led by Laud and, on the other side, from a ‘fanatical’ faction of
lower-class religious radicals. But they were also worried by the popular
disorders which accompanied the arguments about the bishops and the
prayer-book.
Thus the third factor which produced division in the Parliament
was popular disorder. Demonstrations at Westminster against bishops
and the prayer-book in the autumn of 1641 led some Members of
Parliament to demand action to disperse assemblies of the people
and to prevent them from gathering at Westminster. They feared
that Members would be intimidated and the Parliament overawed
by popular pressure. But the leaders of the Parliament were more
fearful that the King planned to use force against the Parliament,
and they were reluctant to discountenance popular demonstrations
because their only defence against a royal attack was popular support.
They were right. When the King attempted a coup and tried to arrest
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 23
leaders of the Parliament in January 1642, he was frustrated by
popular demonstrations and forced to flee from the capital. A majority
of the House of Lords and two-fifths of the House of Commons
also withdrew from Westminster in the following months, either out
of sympathy with the King or from unwillingness to be implicated
in actions against him.
Both the King with his supporters and Members who remained in
Parliament at Westminster raised armed forces, not with the intention
of fighting, but each with the object of deterring the other from resort-
ing to violence, and each with the aim of strengthening its position in
negotiations with the other. The Members at Westminster demanded
control over the King’s choice of advisers and of commanders of the
militia. Charles would not concede this and a substantial section of the
nobility and gentry rallied to him as the defender of the established
forms of government in the State and the Church, and as the symbol of
order and the guarantee of the existing social hierarchy. But few of the
men at Westminster were revolutionaries. They were driven to make
their demands by distrust of the King and fear that his intention was to
get rid of the Parliament by force and return to his ways of ruling in the
1630s.
A revolution involves the replacement by force or the threat of force
of one political or social system by another. So far what had happened
in England was not a revolution. By the summer of 1642 the old polit-
ical system had broken down, and the mechanism for resolving conflicts
had failed, but no new political system was visualised. The country
drifted into civil war. Most people remained, or attempted to remain,
neutral, deploring the conflict, seeking peace, and trying to avoid a com-
mitment to either side. The ruling class was split into three – royalists,
parliamentarians, and neutrals – though probably more were royalists
than parliamentarians. While most of the lower classes were neutrals,
the parliamentarians had significant popular support amongst the small
traders, artisans and apprentices of London, and amongst the people
engaged in the manufacture of cloth in the provinces.
Political and constitutional issues caused the breakdown into civil
war, but religious issues became increasingly influential in determining
allegiance to one side or the other, although never the only issues. Oppo-
nents of the King included a broad alliance of moderate Puritans,
militant Presbyterians, and radical sectaries. The Puritans wanted to
maintain the Established Church and to retain a reformed episcopacy:
their aims were to purge the Church of ‘the remnants of popery’,
to improve the quality of the clergy, to promote preaching, to raise
moral standards and to establish a stricter moral discipline over the
whole population. The Presbyterians had the same aims as the Puritans
24 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

but did not think that those could be achieved so long as the Church
was governed by bishops. They accepted the Established Church but
sought to change its government from the Episcopalian to the Presby-
terian form, which was based on a hierarchy of assemblies with repre-
sentatives of the laity as well as the clergy, rising from the parish
assembly to the National Assembly. The Presbyterians also sought the
replacement of the prayer-book by a liturgy on more strictly Calvinist
lines.
The sects rejected the idea of an Established Church to which every-
body was compelled to belong. They regarded a true church as a gath-
ering of ‘true believers’ – a voluntary association of like-minded people
who agreed to form a church and to worship together according to their
own lights. They separated from the Established Church, whether Epis-
copalian or Presbyterian, and formed their own independent, self-
governing congregations. If there was to be an Established Church they
asked to be allowed to worship outside its jurisdiction in their own
autonomous congregations according to their own consciences. This
broad alliance of moderate Puritans, militant Presbyterians, and radical
sectaries gave the parliamentarians victory over the royalists in the civil
war. But this alliance was inherently unstable and was breaking up even
before the war ended in 1646. This instability was a reflection of social
differences and conflicts. Parliamentarian gentry tended to be moderate
Puritans, and when they could not prevent the abolition of episcopacy,
they sought a form of Presbyterianism which would be controlled by
Parliament and the gentry. They were opposed by the militant Presby-
terians who had popular support amongst the middling and smaller
merchants, shopkeepers and apprentices of London. Presbyterianism in
either form was resisted by the sects, which had become during the war
increasingly influential in the parliamentarian army, London and some
provincial centres, and drew their strength from small traders and arti-
sans in London and people engaged in the manufacture of cloth in the
provinces.
The sects generated a radical political group, the Levellers, who
sought not only toleration for the sects but also the abolition of the
monarchy and the House of Lords, and the establishment of the
supremacy of the House of Commons, which was to be made responsi-
ble to an expanded electorate. The Levellers exercised some influence
amongst sections of the rank-and-file of the parliamentarian army and
amongst sections of the lower classes in London during the period
1647–49. But popular discontent at increased taxes and rising food
prices benefited the royalists more than the radicals. Nevertheless the
revival of royalism was crushed by the parliamentarian army in the
Second Civil War in 1648. In December 1648–January 1649 the same
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 25
army carried out a military coup: it occupied the capital, purged the Par-
liament, tried and executed the King, abolished the monarchy and the
House of Lords, and established a republic with a unicameral legislature
which elected the executive government. This was a revolution in that
it involved a change of the political system by force and it was not just
the substitution of one set of rulers for another. But the constitu-
tion devised by the Levellers was not implemented nor was the political
revolution followed by a social revolution.
Power had been slipping during and after the civil war from the hands
of the pre-war governing élites – the greater gentry, that is the bigger
landlords, in the counties, and the greater merchants in the towns. The
defeat of the King and the royalists meant that in London, some pro-
vincial towns, and many counties, power passed to lesser gentry and
smaller traders. But the greater gentry and larger merchants were not
displaced totally from power and held on to it in some counties and
towns. Although the lesser gentry did not form part of the old govern-
ing élites, and did not belong economically to the same class as the
bigger landlords, they did share the status which differentiated all
gentry, whether greater or lesser, from plebeians, and they had more in
common with the greater gentry than with radical traders and artisans.
They were determined to preserve the social hierarchy and the dis-
tribution of power according to social status.
Radicals failed to move the revolution further to the left after 1649.
In part this was due to the fact that they split into three broad tenden-
cies. Many religious radicals were satisfied with the defeat of Presbyte-
rianism and with the establishment of a degree of toleration for the sects
in the 1650s, and they sought little further political and social changes.
The other radicals were divided between the secular radicalism repre-
sented by the Levellers and the millennarian radicalism represented by
the Fifth Monarchists. Up to a point both the Levellers and the Fifth
Monarchists advocated similar programmes of reform; both demanded
the abolition of tithes and revolutionary changes in the legal system;
both sought economic growth; both drew their support from small
traders, artisans and apprentices, and both were essentially urban
movements; both denounced the nobility and gentry and the rich in
general, and both sought to displace the old ruling class. But here they
split. The Levellers aimed to transfer power by means of a more democ-
ratic and decentralised political system, in which the qualification for
political power would not be wealth or social status but merely being ‘a
free-born Englishman’. The Fifth Monarchists, however, sought to trans-
fer power to the ‘godly people’ or ‘saints’, that is the members of the sec-
tarian congregations, by making ‘godliness rather than wealth or social
status the qualification to exercise political power. They rejected the
26 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

Leveller constitutional programme because it gave political rights to the

ungodly as well as to the godly.
The second reason why the revolution did not move further to the left
was that the social base of the radicals was too narrow. Radicalism was
confined largely to small numbers of traders and artisans, and the peas-
ants – the great mass of the population – were unaffected. Occasionally
during the revolution particular grievances erupted amongst the peas-
ants in some localities but rarely rose to the level of a challenge to the
existing social and economic system.
The third reason was that the old social order remained strong
and fear of radicalism steadily reunited the gentry: the return of the
monarchy, of the House of Lords, and even of the bishops increas-
ingly seemed the safest guarantees of order, stability and the old social
hierarchy.
The monarchy was restored in 1660 but not to the position it had
held in the 1630s and it was to be a constitutional monarchy and not
an absolute monarchy on Continental lines. The power of the central
government was curbed and the greater gentry were strengthened in
their control of the counties and the greater merchants in their control
of the towns. The Church of England could not be restored to the posi-
tion it had held in the 1630s and it ceased to be the church of the whole
nation. The religious spirit of the revolution flowed into Dissent and
Nonconformity and the split in English religious life became permanent.
The old ruling class came back with new ideas and new outlooks which
were attuned to economic growth and expansion and facilitated in the
long run the development of a fully captialist economy. It would all have
been very different if Charles I had not been obliged to summon that
Parliament to meet at Westminster on November 3rd, 1640.
BRIAN MANNING

For further reading

Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: conservatism and revolution 1603–1649
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978); Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English
Civil War (Edward Arnold, 1981); Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the
Great Rebellion 1640–60 (Leicester University Press, 1966); J. T. Cliffe, The York-
shire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (Athlone Press, 1969); B. G.
Blackwood, The Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion 1640–60 (Chetham
Society, Manchester University Press, 1978); David Underdown, Pride’s Purge:
politics in the Puritan Revolution (Clarendon, Oxford, 1971); B. S. Capp, The Fifth
Monarchy Men; A study in seventeenth-century English millenarianism (Faber,
1972).
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 27
What was the English Revolution? Was it, as participants in the debate
over the gentry a generation ago variously argued, a revolution gener-
ated by social tensions, confirming a changed balance of power within
the élite, with a rising (or declining) gentry temporarily replacing an
aristocracy in crises at the centre of power? Was it part of a European
‘general crisis’, one of many seventeenth-century ‘revolts of the
provinces’ against the extravagance and assertive centralism of the new
state-building monarchies? Was that general crisis the outcome of
structural economic changes, the final stage in the replacement of
‘feudal’ productive relations by capitalism, the 1640s thus being in some
sense England’s ‘bourgeois revolution’? Or was it perhaps not really
a revolution at all, but merely a conflation of local struggles, or even,
as Conrad Russell and other revisionists have recently suggested,
simply a bit of bad luck, the result of, at most, short-term governmen-
tal breakdown?
As always, each historian has his or her own solution. My own
starts from two innocuous premises: first, that the revolution was not
a mere accident (though the fortuitous and unpredictable certainly
played a part in it); secondly, that to understand it we need to look
back once more over the history of the previous century. When we
do so we find, I suggest, a profound division emerging among the
English people about the moral basis of their commonwealth, a
division expressed in a cultural conflict that had both social and
regional dimensions. The revolution was an unsuccessful attempt to
resolve the conflict by imposing a particular notion of moral order, artic-
ulated in the culture of the Puritan ‘middling sort’, upon the rest of
the kingdom.
The Tudor state rested on a theory of order incessantly reiterated by
preachers, publicists and politicians. ‘Almighty God hath appointed all
things in heaven, earth, and waters in a most excellent and perfect
order’: the sonorous message of the Homily on Obedience was regularly
dinned into the ears of English men and women throughout their lives.
Society was a harmonious organism, held together by reciprocal obliga-
tions. ‘Some are in high degree’, the Homily continues, ‘some in low,
some kings and princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests and laymen,
masters and servants, fathers and children, husbands and wives, rich
and poor’. The patriarchal authority of the father of a family was the
cornerstone of order, reinforcing the corresponding layers of authority
of lords over tenants, monarchs over subjects. The theory presupposed
the universal existence of stable families, stable local communities, as
the bases of a stable state.
But in practice England was far from stable. Excessive population
growth had led to land shortage, unemployment, and ‘masterlessness’
28 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

for increasing numbers of people. Rapid inflation spawned disastrously

high food prices, especially in crisis periods like the 1590s and 1620s.
Some people profited from the situation: the farmer big enough to
produce a surplus for the market, who could often buy out less fortu-
nate manorial tenants, for example. Economic and social values, too,
were changing. People prospering in the marketplace had less time for
the old constraints of the ‘just price’ or the co-operative ethos of the tra-
ditional open-field community. The ideal of the harmonious ‘vertical’
society in which people of different degrees worked together, was being
challenged by a new world of competition. Villages became more
polarised, as ‘parish notables’, minor gentry and yeomen, began to rise
above the rest of their neighbours.
People like this, newcomers to wealth and status, often felt threatened
by the soaring numbers of poor generated by the population explosion.
They saw themselves as islands of godly virtue in a sea of sinful disor-
der – a disorder distressingly visible in the drinking and merrymaking
that constantly undermined household discipline, particularly among
the young. ‘Was there ever seen less obedience in youth of all sorts . . .
towards their superiors, parents, masters and governors?’ asked
Philip Stubbes in his Anatomy of Abuses, a vigorous attack on the festive
culture. Protestantism, especially its Puritan variant, taught doctrines
of discipline, work and responsibility, and it is not surprising that
the emerging local élites found in it a convenient justification for their
authority. They, after all, were God’s elect, charged with the duty
of advancing godly reformation by disciplining the reprobate major-
ity. County magistrates strove to suppress the church ales and other
disorderly village festivals; in some places (Dorchester is a conspicuous
example) their urban counterparts systematically enforced a ‘culture
of discipline’ aimed at realising their ideal of a reformed Christian ‘city
on a hill’. Puritanism was of course much more than a system of
social control, but this aspect of it is of particular relevance to the
revolution.
Of course Puritan discipline was not the only available response
to the crisis of order. There were those at court and in the Anglican
hierarchy who abhorred the divisive impact of Puritan preaching,
who like James I feared that its insistence on the primacy of indi-
vidual conscience threatened the whole system of order, even
monarchy itself. Stability could best be maintained, they thought,
by more traditional policies: by a paternalist monarchy, aristocracy
and church protecting the lower orders from exploitation by the
acquisitive ‘middling sort’. So they tried, as Robert Dover did at
the Cotswold Games, to revive the old festive culture – the May
games and revel feasts, and all the other calendric and religious
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 29
rituals in which the values of ‘good neighbourhood’ had been affirmed.
William Fennor captured the spirit of the conservative ideal in his
nostalgic lines:

Happy the age, and harmless were the days

(For then true love and amity were found)
When every village did a maypole raise,
And Whitsun-ales and May-games did abound.

The resulting cultural conflict became more intense after James I

issued the Book of Sports in 1618, proclaiming the legality of innocent
recreations even on the sabbath, and still more so when Charles I and
Archbishop Laud reissued it in 1633. Disputes over maypoles and
church ales may seem far removed from the English Revolution, but in
fact their political implications were clear. When village revels were pro-
hibited by the JPs people murmured, one of Laud’s bishops reported,
that it was hard ‘if they could not entertain their friends once a year,
to praise God for his blessings, and pray for the King, under whose
government they enjoyed peace and quietness’. The hierarchy’s policy
of protecting traditional culture further encouraged the suspicions,
aroused in numerous other ways, of the existence of a sinister plot to
restore Catholicism.
This is not to dispute the importance of the more familiar religious
and political aspects of the revolution, or of the crucial role played
by localist resentment of ‘Thorough’ policies. But politics and religion
are part of culture, and this was a cultural as well as a political revolu-
tion: an attempt by the Puritan gentry and middling sort to impose
their conception of godly order on the rest of the nation. The cultural
aspect is clearly apparent in the well-known autobiography of Richard
Baxter. When he embarked on his ministry at Kidderminster in 1641,
Baxter encountered a situation typical of many English parishes: ‘an
ignorant, rude and revelling people for the most part’, but also ‘a
small company of converts, who were humble, godly, and of good
conversation’. The ungodly majority resisted efforts to suppress
their ‘painted forms of giants and suchlike fooleries’ and soon, Baxter
recalls, ‘if a stranger passed . . . that had short hair and a civil habit, the
rabble presently cried, “Down with the Roundheads” ’. The familiar
stereotypes of Roundhead and Cavalier (cultural as well as political
symbols) were already emerging. Some of the local alignments in
the civil war were soon to reflect earlier cultural divisons. The Welsh
border counties and the downlands of southern England, always strong-
holds of traditional culture, were royalist in the 1640s; regions like
the Essex and Wiltshire clothing districts, where the parish notables
30 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

had been more successful in imposing godly reformation, were corre-

spondingly parliamentarian.
We have been using the term ‘English Revolution’, but ‘English
revolutions’ might be more appropriate, for there were in fact three
distinct revolutions: a moderate, reformist one in 1641, many of
whose constitutional achievements were endorsed by the settlement
of 1660; a violent, republican one in 1648–9, only temporarily suc-
cessful; and a third ‘revolution that failed’, the abortive democratic
revolution whose adherents were driven into the political underground
in the 1650s.
The first, reformist phase reflected the virtually unanimous rejection
by ‘the Country’ of Charles I’s ‘Thorough’ government; in it the Long
Parliament outlawed Ship Money, dismantled the Star Chamber and
punished Strafford and other agents of absolutism, all in the name of
the freedoms guaranteed by the mythical ancient constitution. The
cultural conflict was not a primary factor during this period of relative
unity, though it occasionally surfaced in attacks on Laudian clergy and
demands for ‘Root and Branch’ reform. Orchestrated by John Pym, a
propaganda campaign also reawakened the lurking fears of Catholic
conspiracy.
Parliament’s reaction to those fears – its appeal to the people and
its revolutionary claim to the militia power – drove moderate elements
over to the King’s side and precipitated civil war. In that war there
were, as we have been often reminded, many neutrals, many who gave
the integrity of their local communities a higher priority than the
national aims of either side. But even neutrals had preferences, and
not everyone was neutral. The war was not fought solely by conscripts
or troops imported from Scotland and Ireland: leadership and volunteers
on both sides reflected the enduring cultural split. Parliament depended
heavily on Puritan reformers, the King on people who had long
struggled against the socially divisive impact of godly reformation. It
was, among much else, a war between adherents of two competing
concepts of order.
The convoluted political struggle that followed the war contained
further echoes of the cultural conflict. The Puritan minority, entrenched
in the army and in Parliament’s county committees, demanded further
reformation at any cost. But the moderate gentry and their allies and
dependants in ‘the Country’, even in the hitherto parliamentarian coun-
ties of the south-east, had had enough of the military burdens, taxes
and other violations of ancient rights that made Parliament a far worse
centralising menace than ever the King had been. Most of the proper-
tied political nation wanted only a return to the settlement of 1641.
Thanks to the disciplined power of Fairfax’s army, the conservative,
 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION? 31
localist reaction was beaten back in 1648, opening the way to the
second revolution in which the House of Commons was purged, the
House of Lords abolished, and the King executed. The militant minority
which did these things was aided, and indeed pushed onward, by adher-
ents of the potential ‘third revolution’, the popular elements politicised
by the war, the middle-class London Levellers and the separatists
inflamed by millennarian visions of a new Jerusalem in which the godly
‘saints’ would rule. This, of course, was not what the parliamentary
leaders, even revolutionary leaders like Oliver Cromwell, intended. Sup-
pression of the Levellers was to be the new republic’s first order of busi-
ness; constant foot-dragging to frustrate the more extreme of the sects’
promised reforms (of Parliament, the law, the tithe system) was to be the
second.
Even at its zenith after 1649 the English Revolution was a limited rev-
olution, never approaching the thoroughgoing reformism of, for
example, Jacobin France in 1793. The vast majority of people of all
social levels retained most of an older, deeply ingrained value system –
beliefs in the patriarchal family, the primacy of ancient law and custom,
the virtues of the traditional, co-operative community. This is abun-
dantly clear in the outlook of the Clubmen, the biggest mass movement
of the entire period, in 1645. And even the leadership contained many
who were ambivalent about the revolution. Oliver Cromwell, one half of
him a zealous Puritan reformer, the other half a conservative country
squire, himself personifies the ambiguities of the revolution. When,
after the failure of the Commonwealth either to gain public acceptance
or to retain the confidence of the army, Cromwell attained the supreme
power as Protector, his regime exemplified these same contraditions: two
periods of ‘healing and settling’, separated by the interlude of the Major-
Generals, in which yet another blast of authoritarian Puritan reforma-
tion was inflicted on the nation. It is not surprising that even many of
those who had yearned for godly discipline at last concluded that mili-
tary rule was too high a price to pay for it, and welcomed the restora-
tion of Charles II.
In the end, the revolution was a conflict over the moral basis of
English society. Behind the clash of cultures we can detect two social
ideals, even two societies, in conflict: one stressing custom, tradition,
and the co-operative, ‘vertical’ community; the other moral reforma-
tion, individualism, the ethic of work and responsibility. The middling
sort’s campaign to impose theirs as the national culture failed because
deep-rooted social forces were too strong for them. The great cosmic
drama, the battle of good and evil, the journey towards the eternal city
on the hill: all were internalised after 1660, worked out within the soul
of each individual. Defeat compelled John Milton to locate paradise
32 WHAT WAS THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION?

within, John Bunyan to allegorise the quest for a righteous society as an

individual, not a national pilgrimage. The civil war had begun, says
Baxter in a passage alluding to the cultural conflict, ‘in our streets before
king or Parliament had any armies’. It ended, for many, in disillusion.
But in both its successes and its failures the revolution was as much a
cultural as a constitutional or political one.
DAVID UNDERDOWN

For further reading

Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (Secker,

1964); and The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revo-
lution (Temple Smith, 1972); William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of
Revolution in an English County (Harvard University Press, 1983); Brian
Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Heinemann, 1976); J. S.
Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil
War 1630–1650 (Allen & Unwin, 1976); Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the
English Revolution 1529–1642 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).