Brighter Thinking
Stuart Britain and the Crisis
of Monarchy, 1603–1702
A /AS Level History for AQA
Student Book
Mark Parry
Series Editors: Michael Fordham and David Smith
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PART 2 MONARCHY RESTORED AND RESTRAINED, 1649–1702
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3 From Republic to restored and limited
monarchy, 1649–1678
The consolidation of the Republic: Scotland and Dunbar; campaigns in
Ireland; Charles II and Worcester.
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••
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In this section we will examine how England’s only experiment with
Republican government gave way to a return of the monarchy and
the re-establishment of the Church of England. This period saw Oliver
Cromwell subjugate Scotland and Ireland and then take power in England as
Lord Protector with significant successes, before his death saw the collapse
of the system he had established and the return of Prince Charles as Charles
II. The resulting Restoration settlement was a combination of the new king’s
pragmatism and his Cavalier allies’ desire for revenge, but its initial stability gave
way to significant divisions in both politics and religion. We will look into:
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Political divisions and experiments: Republicanism and the Rump;
Millenarianism and the Parliament of Saints.
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Cromwell and his aims; the Protectorates; Major-Generals and the relations
with the Political Nation;
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Charles II and the nature of restored monarchy; rule through parliament and
ministers; Clarendon; the Cabal and Danby.
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The emergence of Court and Country ‘parties’: causes, significance and
consequences.
••
Religious divisions and conflicts: the defeat of Millenarianism; the
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restoration of the Church of England; Protestant
Dissenters;
conflict
Catholic influence at Court.
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3 From Republic to restored and limited monarchy, 1649–1678
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The abolition of the monarchy in 1649 saw England become a Republic for the
first (and to date, only) time in its history. The first task of the new regime was to
impose this system of government on the two other constituent kingdoms of the
British Isles, something achieved through the military success of Cromwell and
the New Model Army. Republican government was destined not to last, however:
transformed, after four years, into a Protectorate (with Cromwell as king in all
but name), this in turn gave way to chaos upon Cromwell’s death and with it the
return of the Stuarts. The restored monarchy was chastened, but in many ways
its powers were undiminished, and soon many of the familiar problems (financial
hardship, confrontations with Parliament, and religious discord) returned. While
a combination of pragmatism and good fortune allowed Charles II to make
this work, facing down a serious challenge to the monarchy in the shape of the
Exclusion Crisis, his successor, James II, lacked the political sensitivity to emulate
him, and in 1688 he was overthrown in what has become known as the ‘Glorious
Revolution’. The extent to which this epithet is deserved, can, however, be
questioned. While undoubtedly the powers of kings were more limited thereafter,
the permanence of Parliament within the constitution no longer disputed, and
the emergence of two distinct political parties has been taken to herald the onset
of democratic government, there was no seamless transition to constitutional
monarchy: William III’s attempts to consolidate his position by securing control
of the British Isles and then use the resources at his disposal to make war
against Louis XIV, exposed continued strains in the power relationships, financial
resources and religious complexion of the three kingdoms over which he ruled.
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Introduction
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Following the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649, power lay in the hands of
the Rump Parliament, which promptly abolished the monarchy, as ‘unnecessary,
burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the
people of this nation’.1 The house of Lords was also abolished. Given the speed
of Charles’s posthumous transformation into a martyr for the royalist cause,
however, the potential hostility of foreign powers and the necessity of healing the
deep divisions caused by civil war in all three kingdoms, the question remained as
to how long the new regime would last.
The consolidation of the Republic
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The execution of the king and proclamation of a republic highlighted more than
ever the ‘three kingdoms’ problem; while the monarchy was abolished in England
by act of Parliament, imposing a republican settlement on Scotland and Ireland
would be more difficult.
Campaigns in Ireland
Once Charles had been deposed and executed in January 1649, the new
republican government of England was finally in a position to act to avenge the
slaughter of Protestants of 1641 (the scale of which, it will be remembered, was
much exaggerated in the reporting) and to seek to restore English control over
the government of Ireland. The task was made more urgent, however, by the fact
that in January 1649, the Duke of Ormond, the commander of the forces loyal to
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Key term
republic: a system of
government without a monarch
and with power usually vested
in a representative assembly
(e.g. senate or parliament).
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A/AS Level History for AQA: Stuart Britain and the Crisis of Monarchy, 1603–1702
Charles I, had finally concluded an alliance with the Confederates (the Catholic
rebels), by which an Irish expeditionary force of 18 000 men would be sent to
England, leaving open the prospect of Ireland being used as a back door into
England by Charles I’s eldest son, Prince Charles (‘Charles II’ to his followers).
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The decision to send a military expedition to Ireland was, however, a controversial
one. As has been seen the soldiers of the army had already displayed significant
resistance to the idea of being sent to Ireland and, coupled with the arrears of pay
in 1648–49, the mood among the rank and file was not pliant. Indeed there were
two mutinies and at the largest of them, 900 soldiers from three cavalry regiments
refused either to serve or to disband, only eventually to be cowed by Cromwell,
Fairfax and five regiments. After the last stand of mutinous troops at Burford
Church in Oxford, culminating in the surrender of all and the execution of three,
discipline was restored.2 The pacification of Ireland was the more urgent by the
spring of 1649 as Ormond had gained control of most of the eastern coastline and
was closing in on Dublin. A force of over 2000 English troops was sent to reinforce
the existing garrison of Ireland, and then in early August, a parliamentarian
commander, Colonel Jones, roundly defeated Ormond’s largest army at the
battle of Rathmines. In addition to the boost to English morale, this facilitated
the landing of Oliver Cromwell with an army of 10 000 English veteran soldiers
of the New Model Army on 15 August. Cromwell saw Ireland as a particularly
serious problem. He had told the Council of State, the executive government
of the Commonwealth regime, in March 1649 that ‘I had rather be overrun with
a Cavalierish [royalist] interest than a Scotch interest; I had rather be overrun
with a Scotch interest than an Irish interest; and I think of all, this is the most
dangerous … For all the world knows their barbarism’.3 His first objective was the
town of Drogheda; when the garrison, commanded by Sir Arthur Aston, refused
to surrender, Cromwell, in accordance with convention, began a bombardment.
When the town was stormed, on 11 September 1649, no quarter was given, and
nearly all of the defenders were killed. While the conventions of warfare of the age
did permit (and even by some analyses, require) that a besieging army that had
been put to the expense in money and lives of a protracted siege by a garrison’s
refusal to accept terms of surrender, should show no mercy to the inhabitants, the
slaughter at Drogheda was particularly brutal by the standards of the Civil War,
which, in England at least, with one or two exceptions in the Second Civil War, had
been waged with a degree of restraint that had ensured no similar massacres. 2000
people were killed, some of them in cold blood in the couple of days following the
storming of the town.
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Voices from the past: Cromwell on Drogheda
Cromwell’s justification of his actions at Drogheda
strongly implies that he, and his parliamentary
bosses, viewed the Irish as beneath such decencies,
on account of both their religion and their race, and
considered that his actions had divine sanction:
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‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of
God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued
their hands in so much innocent blood … it will tend
to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which
are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which
otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’4
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3 From Republic to restored and limited monarchy, 1649–1678
While Cromwell claimed that this action was in part to avenge the deaths of those
Protestants killed in the rebellion of 1641, in truth Drogheda had never been a
strong Confederate Catholic town and many of the soldiers of the garrison who
died were English. Cromwell must have known this, and so the more pressing
motive was to commit an exemplary act of brutality that would deter further
resistance. This proved a shrewd prediction, for many towns surrendered without
resistance in the wake of the massacre at Drogheda. It is also worth saying that
Cromwell’s actions were in accordance with the rules of war at the time (this is an
age before the Geneva Convention or any other notion of written, international
law); further, not all inhabitants were slaughtered, with few indications that
women or children died, and unarmed male civilians who played no part in the
town’s defence appear to have been spared. Even some soldiers, in the aftermath,
were spared execution, though admittedly many of these were sent to the diseaseridden climate of Barbados as punishment.
ACTIVITY 3.1
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How would you sum up Cromwell’s
reasons for his brutality in the
storming of Drogheda and
Wexford?
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The other notable episode was the siege of Wexford, at which a similarly brutal
massacre took place, though on this occasion it was not directly ordered by
Cromwell; rather it seems that he lost control of his men in the fray and they
proceeded to slaughter the garrison. Again around 2000 may have died and
Cromwell made no attempt to stop or restrain the killing, relating to the Speaker,
once again, that the slaughter was a divinely inspired action:
‘…God would not have it so; but, by an unexpected providence, in His righteous
justice, brought a just judgement upon them, causing them to become a prey to
the soldier, who in their piracies had made preys of so many families, and made
with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they had exercised upon the lives
of divers poor Protestants’.5
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The reduction of Irish fortress towns to obedience continued throughout the
winter of 1649–50 and the only town to offer any real resistance subsequent to
Drogheda and Wexford (and this was perhaps the strongest endorsement of
Cromwell’s actions) was Clonmel in May 1650, which itself eventually fell despite
heavy losses (of up to 2500) on the parliamentary side. Cromwell left Ireland
almost straight after this, answering a summons from an anxious Rump Parliament
to return and face a growing threat from Scotland. All told, he had achieved
something in Ireland that no previous general ever had: the effective imposition of
English control, albeit after a drawn-out military campaign. The attempt to make
the republican experiment in England into a genuinely ‘British’ phenomenon was
much closer to success.
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Scotland and Dunbar
By the summer of 1650 the Scots were beginning to seem like a bigger threat to
the new Commonwealth regime than did the Irish. Indeed the Scottish reaction
to the Regicide in January 1649 had been to declare Charles II to be king of Great
Britain and Ireland almost immediately. Though an initial attempt by the Earl
of Montrose to raise a Scottish Royalist rebellion in April 1650 had gone badly
wrong and led to his execution, by the summer Charles had agreed to sign the
Covenants and landed in Scotland, ready to make a bid for his throne. The Rump
sent a military expedition to meet this threat, commanded by Cromwell, who
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ACTIVITY 3.2
How did the Commonwealth
defeat the royalist threat in the
period 1649–51?
had 16 000 men under his command. Unlike the Irish, whom Cromwell and many
other parliamentarians regarded as racially inferior and religiously deluded, the
Presbyterian Scots were seen as right in the essentials but misguided in their
attempts to impose their ecclesiastical settlement on the English. In August
Cromwell famously wrote to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Scottish
Kirk, imploring them to recognise the new realities: ‘I beseech you in the bowels of
Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken’.6
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Charles II and Worcester
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Having ignored this request to stand down, the Scots faced Cromwell at Dunbar
on 3 September with an army twice the size of his; nevertheless, the English
prevailed, killing 4000 Scots and capturing another 10 000. Cromwell was then
able to occupy Edinburgh and the southeast of Scotland.
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However, despite some growing internal divisions, the majority of the Scots
remained committed to the Royalist cause and on 1 January 1651 they crowned
Charles II king of Great Britain and Ireland at Scone, the historic site of Scottish
royal coronations, after he had agreed to introduce Presbyterianism into England.
With Cromwell suffering from illness in the early part of 1651, Charles decided
upon a bold invasion of England, leading 13 000 men across the border with
London as his ultimate goal. However, he failed to raise more than about 2000
English supporters in a country now weary of war and the newly recovered
Cromwell was able to defeat the Royalist army decisively at Worcester, again
on 3 September, an event he described as a ‘crowning mercy’ and after which,
famously, the retreating Prince Charles was forced to hide in a nearby oak tree
to escape capture by parliamentarian forces. The Scots were cowed and would
eventually, by act of parliament (in 1654) be incorporated into one Commonwealth
with England, and thereby the kind of union King James VI of Scotland and I of
England had dreamed of was accomplished not by a monarch but by a republican
government.
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Political divisions and experiments: Republicanism and
the Rump
While the crushing of rebellion in Ireland and the final defeat of the royalist
cause in Scotland and England ought to be seen as significant achievements by
the Rump Parliament, once the royalist threats to the regime had been defeated
attention turned to the government of the realm. In addition to the conquests of
Ireland and Scotland, the Rump saw additional success in foreign policy: having
angered the Dutch by the passage of a Navigation Act in 1651 that threatened to
cut the Dutch carrying trade to North America by insisting that all goods destined
for the English colonies there be carried in English ships, a war at sea ensued in
which the English under Admiral Robert Blake performed impressively against
Europe’s premier naval power. The prestige of English arms abroad only grew as a
consequence.
Domestically, however, the Rump faced significant problems. One concern was
the lack of acceptance of the permanence of the Rump as a government: when
there was an attempt in January 1650 to have all adult males swear loyalty to the
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republic in the form of an ‘Engagement’, there was widespread objection to what
was seen as an intrusion into men’s consciences and, thereby, a betrayal of one
of the principles for which many on the parliamentarian side had fought. Another
hindrance to effective government was the apparent lack of interest shown by
many of the MPs in question: there were 210 members of the Rump who sat at
some stage between January 1649 and April 1653, but only 60 to 70 of them were
at all active, and the average attendance was between 50 and 60. Legislation
suffered: while 125 acts were passed in 1649, there was a steady decline to 78
the following year, 54 in 1651 and 44 in 1652, falling to a mere 10 in the last few
months of its sitting in January to April 1653.7 In practical terms this meant that
the Rump appeared not to be getting on with its task of reform. Many who had
fought for Parliament during the Civil Wars had harboured high hopes that after
the war’s end the nation would be remodelled on godly lines: a ‘new Jerusalem’.
There were two areas in which demands for reform were particularly vocal: the
Law and religion. Dissatisfaction with the legal system, particularly the delays in
judicial processes and the expense of legal proceedings, was longstanding. The
sense that the system favoured wealthy litigants and the lawyers who worked
within it, while being impenetrable to the layman, particularly with proceedings
conducted in Norman French, agitated many who saw the abolition of the
monarchy as an opportunity to tackle other vested interests. However, apart from
the establishment of a commission on legal reform, chaired by Sir Matthew Hale,
no substantive reforms were enacted, apart from replacing French with English
as the language of the law. As such, confidence in the Rump as an agent of reform
more generally was damaged.
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3 From Republic to restored and limited monarchy, 1649–1678
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The Rump’s dealings in religion also fell short of success. Some MPs wanted to
restrict religious freedom while others wished to increase it. In September 1650
the Toleration Act abolished compulsory attendance at services of the established
(now Presbyterian) Church. There was some progress on reform, notably the sale
of episcopal and royalist lands to support the poorer members of the ministry and
the tightening up of control over public morals via an Adultery Act in 1650 that
made, for the only time in English history, adultery a capital offence. However, it
was the growth of radical religious sects discussed in Chapter 2, in the section on
The Levellers and Millenarian groups, most of which had first emerged in the 1640s
with the breakdown of order during the Civil Wars, that proved most problematic.
The instinct of the Rump was to clamp down on the sects, and the passage of the
Blasphemy Act in 1650, which condemned ‘monstrous opinions and wicked and
abominable practices’, reflected this.8 However, though the sects were small, they
had made some headway within the rank and file of the army, where the more
radical political ideas of the Levellers (who, as their name implied, sought greater
social and political equality) and the Diggers (who wished for all land and property
to be held in common) had also taken hold. Above all, the old tensions of 1646–47
were evident, whereby the army suspected Parliament of seeking to undo what
they had won on the battlefield and instead pursue the conservative agenda of the
gentry MPs who sat there. The concern that the Rump was ignoring demands for
radical reform, whether of the Law or religion, and attempting to restrict hard-won
freedoms, became more acute by 1652.
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The trigger for the Rump’s dissolution, however, was the rumour in circulation
that its members intended to pass legislation deigned to perpetuate themselves
in power. The delays evident in announcing a date for fresh elections to a new
Parliament only seemed to corroborate this view. Cromwell pressured the Rump
in this direction until, finally, on 19 April 1653, it agreed to dissolve itself and
transfer power to a temporary council of MPs and army officers who would then
oversee the elections. However, when the following day Cromwell heard that the
Rump intended to hold snap elections, without vetting the candidates as had
been agreed, he went in person to Westminster to bring an end to the assembly.
He made an impassioned speech in which he sharply criticised the conduct of the
MPs, calling them ‘whoremasters’ and ‘drunkards’, before dissolving them with
the words: ‘You are no parliament…I will put an end to your sitting’ and called in
troops to disperse them.9
Over a year later in September 1654, he justified his actions:
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‘when one Parliament had left their seat, another was to sit down immediately
in the room thereof, without any caution to avoid that which was the danger,
(viz.) perpetuating of the same Parliaments; which is a sore now that will ever be
running, so long as men are ambitious and troublesome, if a due remedy be not
found.’10
Millenarianism and the Parliament of Saints
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Cromwell’s critics would later be quick to suggest that his real motive for
dissolving the Rump was personal ambition, given that within a few months he
was made Lord Protector of the realm, head of state and effectively sole ruler of
the country. However, that suggestion is weakened by what Cromwell did next:
instead of assuming sole power himself, he set up another kind of Parliament, an
‘Assembly of Saints’, or ‘Nominated Assembly’, a body of 144 men specially chosen
for their godliness and reputation; in Cromwell’s words, ‘persons fearing God, and
of approved fidelity and honesty’. In many ways this fitted in with the aspirations
of the Millenarian groups (see Chapter 2, in the section The Levellers and
Millenarian groups), for whom the execution of Charles I presaged the end of the
world and the millennial reign of Christ predicted in the book of Revelation. The
Fifth Monarchists, led by Major-General Harrison, who helped Cromwell dissolve
the Rump, lobbied for exactly this kind of government of the elect. Cromwell’s
address to the Assembly at its first meeting reflected his sense of optimism
that this would be a successful experiment in the government of the realm. He
expressed the hope that the Assembly would be a ‘door to usher in things that
God hath promised and prophesied of’ and that it would ‘win the people to the
interest of Jesus Christ and the love of godliness’. However, the members failed
to live up to Cromwell’s expectations. Despite the colourful names of some of the
nominees (such as ‘Praise-God Barebone’, whose surname was for many years
employed to describe the entire assembly as ‘Barebone’s Parliament’) which
might be taken to indicate the background many of them had in radical religion,
the make-up of the Assembly was actually remarkably similar to that of the Rump.
At least four-fifths of the ‘Saints’ were gentlemen, 44 had legal training, and at least
119 had served as JPs at some point.11 Quickly the conservative instincts of many
members were outraged by proposed legal reforms, including the abolition of the
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Court of Chancery and threats to replace the common law with mosaic law, while
a narrow vote to abolish tithes (taxes for the upkeep of the established Church) in
December was the final straw that convinced moderates to take advantage of the
absence of the radical members (who were attending a prayer meeting) to dissolve
themselves and return power into the hands of Cromwell. The failure of the
Nominated Assembly was undoubtedly a disappointment for Cromwell, though he
had also begun to be alarmed by the conservatism of the members, particularly
when it led them to threaten to reduce the size of the army by cutting off its
sources of funding. One ever-present consideration in Cromwell’s mind was the
continued existence and welfare of the army, the men with whom he had fought
in the Civil War. It was a senior officer within the army, General Lambert, who
drew up the constitution that would form the basis of the government to replace
the failed Assembly, one that would combine the ideas of rule by a single person
and rule by an elected assembly, and see Cromwell become head of state as Lord
Protector of the realm.
ACTIVITY 3.3
1. Why was the Rump dissolved in
1653?
2. Why did the experiment with
the ‘Assembly of Saints’ fail?
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3. Why did Cromwell take power
as Protector in December 1653?
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Cromwell and his aims
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Cromwell essentially had two aims: what he called ‘healing and settling’ (restoring
peace and stability after the years of Civil War) and godly reformation (chiefly
introducing, and getting the bulk of the nation to accept, liberty of conscience).
His ascent to be Lord Protector is in many ways an extraordinary story: he
remains the only commoner ever to serve as head of state in England. An obscure
Cambridgeshire gentleman farmer, he had become an MP in 1640 and then a
cavalry commander indispensable to the parliamentarian war effort despite
having no formal military training. He had played a key role in the trial and
execution of Charles I as well as subjugating Ireland and defeating the royalist
threat in Scotland, before looking on with increasing disappointment as the Rump
Parliament made a hash of the government of the new Commonwealth. Cromwell
liked to present himself as a reluctant ruler, a ‘good constable to keep the peace
of the parish’, forced to take up the government of the country after the failure of
the Rump and the Assembly of Saints by the need both to restore political stability
to avoid the resurgence of royalism.12 He saw himself as God’s instrument, a
servant of ‘Providence’, but also obliged to invoke ‘necessity’ to justify measures
for the security and safety of the nation. Some contemporaries, such as the poet
John Milton, saw this ‘necessity’ as little better than tyranny: the line ‘Necessity,
the tyrant’s plea’, used of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, is sometimes seen as a
thinly veiled reference to Cromwell. Others, such as the Leveller John Lilburne,
who felt Cromwell betrayed the parliamentary and republican cause by becoming
Lord Protector, see him as a hypocrite who used the language of religion to cloak
personal ambition. The prevailing consensus among modern historians, led
by John Morrill, is to take Cromwell at his word and broadly see him as sincere
in his claims to be acting in the service of divine providence as he understood
it, seeking genuinely, if not always successfully, to reconcile the twin aims of
godly reformation and healing and settling which were so often in tension.13 A
slightly dissenting view is held by Ronald Hutton, who argues that we ought to
take contemporary criticisms of the Protector more seriously. He sees a ‘darker
Cromwell’, one who, while genuine in his piety, was ‘tactically devious’, who
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displayed ‘innate ruthlessness and slipperiness’ as a politician, and whose aims
may not have been as selfless as he made out.14
The Protectorates
Figure 3.1: Oliver Cromwell as Lord
Protector (c. 1649) by Robert Walker.
ACTIVITY 3.4
When the First Protectorate Parliament did meet, in September 1654, it proved
a disappointment. Cromwell had, in his opening address, once again stressed
divine agency, that they were ‘a door of hope opened by God to us’, upon whose
shoulders lay ‘the interest of three great nations’, as well as ‘the interest of all
the Christian people of the world’.15 He also emphasised that their job was to
achieve ‘healing and settling’ of the nation, one of Cromwell’s own two great
aims as Protector. However, he swiftly found that they were more interested
in suppressing the sects and challenging the constitutional arrangements of
the Instrument of Government. In acute frustration, Cromwell dissolved the
Parliament at the earliest possible opportunity, using the lunar calendar to fulfil
the requirement of ‘five months’ and sending the members away in January 1655
with the disappointed remark that they had thrown away ‘precious opportunities
committed to them’.
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Looking at the portrait, what
image do you think Cromwell was
trying to project of himself as Lord
Protector?
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The constitutional settlement under which Cromwell was made Lord Protector
in December 1653 was known as the Instrument of Government. It established
a government made up of a Protector, a Council and a Parliament. In this, the
Protector held executive power and was explicitly charged with the control of the
army and oversight of foreign policy. Parliaments were obliged to be summoned
at least every three years and legislative power as well as control of finance fell
within their remit. The Council, meanwhile, approximated to the old royal, Privy
Council: it comprised between 13 and 20 members and was expected to advise
the Protector on civil and military matters, while also legislating with him in the
period between the establishment of the Protectorate and the meeting of the first
Parliament. In this nine-month period, Cromwell ruled by ‘ordinance’, issuing 82
in total, dealing with such matters as finance, the union with Scotland, trade and,
above all, ecclesiastical discipline. The most important pieces of legislation were
in March 1654, establishing a system of ‘triers’ who were responsible for examining
all new clergy before they were allowed to preach, and August of the same year,
a similar body of ‘ejectors’, who were deputed to expel clergy and schoolmasters
who failed to come up to scratch.
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It was the failure of the First Protectorate Parliament that prompted Cromwell
to alter the character of his Protectorate. Already having imprisoned a London
merchant, George Cony, late in 1654 for having refused to pay customs duties (a
clear echo of the actions of Charles I), several events in 1655 caused Cromwell
to adopt a more authoritarian model of government. First there was a royalist
uprising in Wiltshire, known to history as ‘Penruddock’s Rising’, easily crushed
but seemingly indicative of the fragility of the Republican regime; second was the
failure of a colonial venture, in which an expedition sent by Cromwell to capture
the Caribbean island of Hispaniola had miscarried and instead ended up taking
the much less desirable (though later celebrated) island of Jamaica. Fearing that
God had deserted him and the English nation, Cromwell felt a need to appease the
Almighty with significant reforms to the system of government along godly lines.
The result was the infamous ‘Major-Generals’ experiment, the twin aims of which
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were to increase national security and moral reformation, on the grounds of, in
Cromwell’s words, ‘necessity’.
The Major-Generals and the relations with the Political Nation
The Districts of the
major-Generals
(and their deputies)
Garrison towns
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(Howard)
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LAMBERT
(Lilburne)
(Dawkins&
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BERRY
WHALLEY
BUTLER
FLEETWOOD
SKIPPON
KELSEY
GOFFE
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DESBOROUGH
Figure 3.2: Map of England under the Major-Generals, 1655.
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In August 1655, Cromwell divided England and Wales into ten (later 11) regions,
each governed by a Major-General, a senior officer in the army. Their principal
functions were to raise a tax on royalists (the ‘Decimation’ – a 10% tax on their
income), to command local militias that would deter future royalist uprisings, and
to police public morals by enforcing the laws against drunkenness, blasphemy
and adultery. Some historians formerly saw this as effectively a military
dictatorship, a popular reading of events in the 1930s, for obvious reasons. More
recently, however, the limitations on the impact of the major-generals have been
emphasised. For instance, many of them were strangers in the regions they were
given to rule, and so the traditional elites, the gentry and the office-holders whose
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service was voluntary and concerns primarily local, viewed them with suspicion
and often refused to co-operate. This was made worse by the fact that many of
them were lowly born (e.g. Berry had been a clerk in an ironworks, while Barsktead
and Kelsey were both London tradesmen) and so were viewed as social upstarts
by their gentry opponents.16 Some managed to carve fearsome reputations
for themselves, particularly Major-General Worsley, whose region comprised
Lancashire, Cheshire and Staffordshire: he closed nearly 200 alehouses in Chester
alone and died aged only 34 as a result of overwork. It is not clear either that there
was a significant improvement in the moral behaviour of the people: there was no
marked fall or sustained fall in convictions for vice or sexual immorality.
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Ultimately, though, the major-generals experiment failed due to the hostile
attitude of Cromwell’s Second Protectorate Parliament, summoned for September
1656. During the elections the widely heard cry had been ‘No swordsmen! No
decimators!’ a clear reflection of hostility towards apparent military rule and,
above all, the costs it imposed on the people through the unpopular Decimation
tax. Even when Cromwell and the Council excluded nearly 100 MPs on grounds
of ‘ungodliness’, and another 50 to 60 withdrew in protest, a majority remained
against the major-generals such that Cromwell felt obliged to abolish both them
and the Decimation in January 1657. He did so, though, with a pragmatic motive:
in return he achieved from Parliament a grant of £400 000 to fund a war against
Spain.
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Relations between Cromwell and his Second Protectorate Parliament quickly
deteriorated. For his part, the Parliament was too keen on disciplining perceived
religious radicalism. One particular case stood out, in which a Quaker, James
Nayler, rode through the streets of Bristol in October 1656 in conscious reenactment of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Cromwell’s First Protectorate
Parliament had already shown itself religiously intolerant when it had imprisoned
the Socinian (Unitarian) John Biddle, in 1654, and burned his books that argued
against the divinity of Christ; it was not minded to be any more indulgent towards
Nayler. Seen as blasphemy by many MPs, and indicative of the subversive nature
of Quakerism, Nayler was convicted and threatened with a death sentence.
Cromwell, who disliked Nayler’s actions but thought such things a price worth
paying for religious toleration, and feared more the persecuting tendency of more
conservatively minded MPs, intervened to save Nayler’s life, though he was unable
to prevent his suffering severe corporal punishment (branding, flogging and
having his tongue bored-through) and being sentenced to life imprisonment. The
gap between Cromwell’s view of religion, in which men ought to be allowed the
freedom to seek after the truth as they understood it and then be gently corrected
when they fell into error, and that of many members of the political nation, was
now clear. Their apparent willingness to pursue and persecute those it deemed
to be mistaken in religion showed clear echoes of the persecutions conducted by
Laud and his allies under Charles I. John Milton’s claim that ‘New presbyter is old
priest writ large’ seemed to hold some currency. From Parliament’s point of view,
they were anxious to see Cromwell’s powers as Protector restricted, recognising
after the Major-Generals experiment that their ill-defined nature potentially left
them open to abuse (the absence of Parliament and the imposition of military
rule).
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Speak like a historian: Christopher Durston
Discussion point
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‘The major-generals were sent into the English and Welsh provinces in the
autumn of 1655 with the dual task of creating a more godly society and
enhancing the security of the Cromwellian regime. With regard to the first of
these objectives, they failed unequivocally…although most of them were utterly
committed to the attempt to improve the morality of the English and Welsh
peoples, they were unable to prevent large numbers of them from continuing
to offend their religious values by frequenting alehouses, attending traditional
sports and festivities, or indulging in illicit sexual activity. They also had little
success in reducing the large numbers of the idle poor who roamed the English
and Welsh countryside. To a large degree, their failure in this area stemmed from
their inability to forge a sufficiently close partnership with the county magistracy
and parochial ministry…they also failed as collectors of the decimation tax and
as local electoral managers. The one area where they can perhaps be regarded
as having at least partly achieved their aim was that of security….the measures
they enforced against royalists, including disarming them, imposing upon
them heavy security bonds, and closely monitoring their movements through
the London register office, clearly made it much more difficult for the regime’s
enemies to conspire against it. Even here, however, the achievement was not
unalloyed. Their new county militia troops were rendered far less effective
than they might have been had adequate funds for their payment been made
available. Moreover, it is also arguable that following the failure of the risings
of the spring of 1655 the royalist underground was already on its knees, and
that in setting up the rule of the major-generals Cromwell had overreacted and
employed what proved to be a highly unpopular sledgehammer to crack an
already seriously weakened nut.’17
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An assessment of Cromwell’s Major-Generals experiment has to be mixed.
The foremost recent historian of them explains why:
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How would you summarise Durston’s verdict on the success or failure of the
Major-Generals?
The offer of the Crown
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The result was an offer to make Cromwell king. While ‘King Oliver I’ may have an
odd ring to it, the prospect appealed to his civilian councillors (lawyers such as
Bulstrode Whitelocke) as it would have more clearly defined his powers based on
law and tradition.
Whitleocke, who was one of Cromwell’s most respected councillors, said:
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2. Why did they fail?
ACTIVITY 3.6
1. How does Cromwell’s speech
refusing the Crown reflect his
religious views?
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2. What does Cromwell mean by
the phrase ‘I would not build
Jericho again’?
As Lord Protector, it was never quite clear how far Cromwell’s powers reached in
various areas and it was thought while ‘king’ might be a more exalted title it was
actually in many ways a less powerful office. Cromwell was offered the Crown
formally in February 1657 and he seriously contemplated accepting it. After all, it
would have gone a long way towards fulfilling his cherished aim of ‘healing and
settling’, perhaps winning over disaffected royalists and wedding himself more
firmly to tradition and convention. On the other hand, however, Cromwell had a
genuine fear that the army, which had fought and bled to defeat and ultimately
destroy a king, would not accept this apparent betrayal of principles. Without their
support, his power base would crumble. A separate, though related consideration,
and ultimately the one that Cromwell weighed most heavily, was that by taking the
Crown, he would be going against the clear judgement of God, shown forth in the
successful trial and execution of Charles I and then the abolition of the monarchy.
In his formal rejection of the offer in a speech made to Parliament in April 1657, he
said:
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1. Why were the Major-Generals
introduced?
‘… it was thought that the title which is known by the Law of England for many ages,
many hundreds of years together received, and the Law fitted to it, and that to the Law,
that it might be of more certainty and clear establishment, and more conformable to
the laws of the nation, that that title should be that of King, rather than that other of
Protector.’18
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ACTIVITY 3.5
‘It was done by the Long Parliament, that was it. And God has seemed providentially
not only to strike at the family but at the name ... He hath not only dealt so with the
persons and the family, but he hath blasted the title … I would not seek to set up that
that providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho
again. And this is somewhat to me, and to my judgment and conscience: that it is truly.
It is that which hath an awe upon my spirit.’19
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For Cromwell, then, it was the fear of going against the revealed will of God that
stopped him from accepting the offer of the Crown, for which he appreciated there
were sound political arguments. Given that for the rank and file, and indeed the
leading officers of the army, the perception of what was God’s providential will
weighed at least as heavily as it did with Cromwell, the two factors (fear of the
loss of the army’s support, and the fear within his conscience that he would be
resisting divine ordinance) can be seen as closely linked together.
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Having refused the offer of the Crown, Cromwell nonetheless accepted the
new constitution under which he would have been made king, but without the
royal title. This Humble Petition and Advice represented a move towards a more
traditional form of government. It provided for a new ‘Other House’, like the
old House of Lords, to which Cromwell would nominate the 40 to 70 members
(albeit they were then to be approved by the Commons), and whom Cromwell
hoped would serve as a check on the excesses, particularly the tendency towards
religious persecution, of the Commons. The Protector’s council was now to be
known, as it had been under the Stuarts, as the ‘Privy Council’, and consist of no
more than 21 members. The Protector would also receive an annual parliamentary
grant of £1.3 million (something about which the Stuarts could barely have
dreamt!) and have the right to nominate his successor. Perhaps most striking,
though, were the monarchical trappings that Cromwell adopted under the revised
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3 From Republic to restored and limited monarchy, 1649–1678
Assessment of Cromwell
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The new settlement would, however, not last long. When the Second Protectorate
Parliament reassembled in January 1658, the House of Commons began to attack
the constitutional changes, particularly the creation of the ‘Other House’, which
they saw as a threat to their legislative supremacy. Cromwell was crestfallen
that the ‘healing and settling’ for which he hoped, the acceptance of a system
of government that would allow him to get on with the work of godly reform,
appeared further away than ever. In an angry and bitter speech, he dissolved
Parliament in early February with the words: ‘Let God be judge between you and
me’. He never called another one. Meanwhile, despite some notable successes in
foreign policy, chiefly an alliance with France (a tribute to Cromwell that one of
the foremost monarchies in Europe would sign a treaty with the previously pariah
Republic) that resulted in a triumphant military expedition against the Spanish
and the capture of Dunkirk, Cromwell showed signs of ill-health and exhaustion.
Devastated by the death of his favourite daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, from cancer
in August, he himself was seen to lose his vigour and strength. He died, possibly of
malaria (perhaps contracted in Ireland) or a kidney infection, at the age of 59, on
3 September 1658. Contemporaries noted the stormy weather on the night of his
death, and that the date was the anniversary of his great victories at Dunbar (in
1650) and Worcester (in 1651).
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constitution: at his second installation, in June 1657, he wore ermine robes and
carried a sceptre, took an adapted form of the coronation oath and was greeted
with cries of ‘God Save the Lord Protector’. He continued to live in the old royal
palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, and he signed himself as ‘Oliver P’ on
official documents, was addressed as ‘Your Highness’ by foreign ambassadors, and
otherwise adopted the forms of regality. In many ways, Cromwell was ‘king in all
but name’.
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In many ways an objective judgement on Cromwell’s rule would be that it was
very successful: he achieved peace and stability, established a moderate but
workable constitutional settlement, won great military victories abroad and
restored England to a place of respect and honour, even fear, among the courts of
Europe. Yet he himself would have considered his Protectorate a failure: he failed
to convince many of his contemporaries of the virtues of freedom of conscience
for all (Protestant) Christian believers, he was made to abandon his experiment in
enforced godly reformation (the Major-Generals) and enjoyed poor relations with
his Parliaments, assemblies that he had hoped would reflect a sense of national
unity and work together with him to pursue the ‘healing and settling’ of the
country. Perhaps the biggest tribute to, but also indictment of, Cromwell’s rule, is
the rapid collapse of the Protectorate within a year of his death. He was so driven,
strong-willed and capable a figure, that the system he had established could not
survive without him; at the same time he had so failed to convince others of the
virtues of the system and ensure it put down permanent roots, that it could not be
held together in his absence.
Figure 3.3: The statue of Cromwell by
Hamo Thornycroft outside the Houses
of Parliament, erected in 1899.
The statue was controversial when it
was put up: can you suggest reasons
why?
The Fall of the Republic
The 20-month period between Cromwell’s death and the Restoration of the
monarchy is one of the most complicated in English history. Having been
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A/AS Level History for AQA: Stuart Britain and the Crisis of Monarchy, 1603–1702
1. Why did Cromwell refuse the
offer of the Crown in 1657?
2. How far should the
Cromwellian Protectorate be
seen as a military dictatorship?
3. Why were Cromwell’s relations
with his Parliament so poor?
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4. How successful was Cromwell
as a ruler?
given the right to nominate his own successor, Cromwell chose his eldest son,
Richard. Had he chosen his younger son, Henry, a forceful and effective deputy
as ruler of Ireland, then the course of events might have been different. Richard,
however, lacked almost all of the necessary qualities. Known to generations of
schoolchildren as ‘Tumbledown Dick’, he is notable mainly for his appearance
in pub quizzes as the longest-lived head of state in English history (he died aged
85 in 1712) until the present queen of the United Kingdom surpassed him. Aside
from having little active experience of government, despite his father’s attempts
to involve him at the last, his chief failing was that he lacked any standing with
the army, having (unlike his brother) no military background. Lacking the force
of his father’s personality, and yet subject to the same mistrust from Republicans
who disliked the increasingly monarchical character of the Protectorate, he found
himself almost devoid of allies and supporters. This became apparent when
the Third (and final) Protectorate Parliament met in January 1659, summoned
because of the regime’s financial problems (the State’s debts totalled nearly £2.5
million, with an annual income of only £1.4 million). Since the war with Spain
continued, the need for money was urgent. However, Republican MPs refused to
recognise Richard as Lord Protector and antagonised the army by debating its
reduction in size and status to be little more than a militia. As a consequence, the
generals compelled him to dissolve Parliament in April 1659 and recall the Rump.
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ACTIVITY 3.7
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The Rump was, however, similarly hostile to the army and to Richard, with
the result that he resigned as Protector in May and retired into obscurity. The
Commonwealth was formally re-established but an atmosphere of instability
pervaded the realm. The Rump’s hold on the country was weak (when it
reassembled in July it contained only 42 members) and royalists saw this as an
opportunity to rise in revolt, though the resulting rebellion in Lancashire and
Cheshire in August, led by a former parliamentary Presbyterian, Sir George Booth,
was easily crushed by General Lambert, one of Cromwell’s former lieutenants,
who proceeded to dissolve the Rump in October when it sought to purge the army
high command and avoid fresh elections. The new government was a Committee
of Safety, which imposed military rule on the nation. This was also, however,
doomed not to last. With rivalries among the generals rife, the regime’s control
of the country began to evaporate. The Committee of Safety collapsed and over
Christmas 1659 there was effectively no government, with London a hotbed of
rioting and disorder. The commander of the army in Scotland, General George
Monck, who distrusted Lambert and feared anarchy, decided to act. He set off
from Edinburgh on a march towards London at the turn of the year. By the time
he arrived, there was total confusion in the capital, following a taxpayers’ revolt
over the (once again) reinstated Rump’s attempt to raise revenues. In February,
Monck restored the Long Parliament, reinstating those MPs who had been expelled
by Pride’s Purge back in December 1648, and finally, this assembly gave in to
the waves of popular pressure sweeping the land to call fresh elections for the
following month, effectively dissolving itself.
The Restoration of Charles II
It was in this context that Monck showed himself a pragmatist. He began
correspondence with the Stuart court in exile (Prince Charles had taken refuge
in various European states, finally ending up in the Low Countries). Monck
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ACTIVITY 3.8
1. Why did the Republic break
down in the period 1658–59?
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2. Why and how was the
monarchy restored in 1660?
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appreciated that only the monarchy could provide the stability that the nation
craved, but he was anxious that a return of Charles should not widen divisions
or lead to bloody royalist reprisals. And so it was, at his suggestion, that Charles
issued a conciliatory manifesto, the Declaration of Breda. In this document,
Charles promised to pardon former parliamentarians (with the exception of
those who had signed his father’s death warrant), respect the property rights of
those who had benefited from the Republican regime, and, most significantly,
to guarantee ‘liberty to tender consciences’, an effective promise of religious
toleration. This last undertaking would come back to haunt Charles, for, while
personally very tolerant (indeed he was largely indifferent to people’s religious
scruples), many of his followers were deeply intolerant and anxious to restore the
kind of narrow, episcopal Church settlement of his father’s reign. For the moment,
however, Charles’s prospective subjects were reassured and the elections of March
1660 produced a strongly pro-Royalist ‘Convention’ Parliament (it was technically
a Convention because it had not been summoned on royal authority). When it
met in April, complete with a restored House of Lords, it voted unanimously to
invite Charles back as King Charles II, backdating his reign to the day of his father’s
execution. He was also proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland in Edinburgh
and King of Ireland in Dublin. Charles duly sailed for England and entered London
on 29 May 1660, his 30th birthday, to rapturous rejoicing, a reflection of the
nation’s weariness with political instability and chaotic changes of government.
The monarchy was restored and the experiment in Republican government, the
only time in British history that it has ever been attempted, at an end.
Charles II and the Nature of the Restored Monarchy
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Having left a civil-war-torn England in his mid-teens, Charles had been bred
in exile, forced to move between foreign courts, and suffered the ignominy of
being politely expelled from France when its ruler, Cardinal Mazarin, signed an
alliance with Cromwell. He had therefore been acutely conscious of his reduced
status and wounded dignity, experience that made him tough and cynical. In
appearance he was dark, swarthy and sensuous, and in character gregarious and
pleasure-loving: the historical soubriquet ‘the Merry Monarch’ is in many ways
fitting. Fond of women, he had a succession of mistresses in exile, the first of
whom, Lucy Walter, gave him an illegitimate son, James Scott, whom he would
raise to be Duke of Monmouth. Charles was also, however, very intelligent: deeply
interested in science (he would later found the Royal Society) he loved mechanics
and experiments, and took a keen interest in developments in academic thought.
In religion he was conscious of the political necessity of being seen as a devout
Anglican, though his private beliefs were complicated, even sceptical, and he
would die a Roman Catholic. When it came to establishing the Restored monarchy,
he was a pragmatist: he understood that he could better afford to aggrieve his
father’s royalist supporters than his erstwhile parliamentary enemies, and so
he resisted the temptation to turn the clock back all the way to 1640. Instead he
made compromises over the extent of the prerogative and lost royalist lands, while
making use of former parliamentarians in government; at the same time, he was
compelled give his supporters some red meat with a strongly Anglican religious
settlement.
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Figure 3.4: King Charles II in Garter
robes (c. 1660–65) by John Michael
Wright.
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Rule through Parliament and ministers
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As king, Charles’s priority was to take advantage of the royalist national mood
and entrench the restored monarchy within the public consciousness. As such,
he was anxious not to exact recriminations or appear vengeful: he made use of
former parliamentarians (including Monck) among his councillors, and avoided
a wholesale persecution of his erstwhile opponents. ‘Forgive and forget’ were his
watchwords. An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion passed
in August 1660 pardoned all but a few, the few being the one group of people he
could not bring himself to forgive: the ‘regicides’, those who had brought his father
to trial and signed his death warrant. Blood was on their hands and they would
pay. Even then, however, there were limits. Cromwell, his son-in-law and key
political ally, Ireton, and the presiding judge of the Regicide court, Bradshaw, were
all dead, so Charles’s vengeance was to have their decaying corpses dug up and
posthumously subjected to the misery of a traitor’s death. Otherwise, 13 men who
had played some sort of role in the death of Charles I were tried for treason and
executed between 1660 and 1662. Others were imprisoned or fled abroad.
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This same leniency was visible in the Convention’s approach to the land
settlement. Over 5000 royalists had lost their estates or been forced to pay heavy
fines to regain them in the Interregnum period. Cleverly, in the Declaration of
Breda, Charles had left the problem of confiscated estates for Parliament to settle,
giving dispossessed royalists hope that their lost lands would be restored without
guaranteeing that they would. While the confiscated estates of the crown and
the Church were restored by official legislation, the Act of Indemnity and the Act
for Confirmation of Judicial Proceedings, individual royalists were often required
to bring private bills into Parliament in order to achieve restitution. However,
while this meant that many succeeded in recovering their property by the early
1660s, a significant minority, many of them lesser gentry, failed to get their lands
back at all. These were mainly those who had sold estates to enable them to pay
composition fines and Charles did nothing to help them. He was shrewd enough
to see that he could afford to upset his former supporters more than his former
enemies, and did not wish to risk causing outrage by any massive transfer of land.
This caused some bitter ex-royalists to quip that the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion
was an ‘act of indemnity to the king’s enemies and of oblivion to his friends’.
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Charles’s choice of councillors indicated his desire to heal divisions within the
political nation. Twelve of the 27 privy councillors appointed in 1660 were former
Parliamentarians. Along with many of his supporters from his days of exile, such as
the Earl of Clarendon, who served as Lord Chancellor and the Earl of Southampton
as Lord Treasurer, a former Cromwellian in Monck was made Captain-General
of the army (and elevated to the dukedom of Albemarle) and another, Edward
Montagu, a vice-admiral. Others with parliamentarian backgrounds, such as Denzil
Holles and the Earl of Manchester, were found places on the Council, which was
expanded to over 70 to accommodate this diversity of members. Charles, however,
liked to meet with smaller groups of his most trusted advisers in order to develop
policy, allowing him to keep more effective control and to adopt a ‘divide and
rule’ approach towards managing his ministers. In many important matters, most
famously perhaps the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670, the full council was only
informed of significant policy changes some time after the decisions had been
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3 From Republic to restored and limited monarchy, 1649–1678
taken. In the localities, the same blend of old and new was visible: about 40% of
Justices of the Peace were ex-Royalists and so they found themselves working
alongside those who had served the Commonwealth regimes.
ACTIVITY 3.9
1. How much was restored by the
Restoration Settlement?
The way in which Charles and his ministers attempted to ‘settle’ the nation
after two decades of upheaval was indicative of their appreciation of the
need for compromise. The clock was turned back to 1641 rather than to 1640,
preserving many of the concessions made by Charles I to the Long Parliament
(e.g. the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission). The need for regular
parliaments was also recognised, though the Triennial Act of 1641 was modified
in 1664 so that fresh elections were not required every three years, merely a
session of Parliament every third year. Government was once again to be by a
king, a Council (whose members were chosen by him) and a Parliament, which
met, within some prescribed limits, when the king wished it to. At the same time,
the impact of the Militia Ordinance of 1642 was reversed and, by the Militia Acts of
1661 and 1662, control of the armed forces effectively returned to the sole control
of the Crown.
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2. How strong is the argument
that in 1665 much still
remained to be settled?
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One area of serious disagreement between Crown and Parliament under Charles
I had been finance, and so the settlement in this area was considered carefully.
The Convention awarded Charles II an annual grant of £1.2 million, a sum of
which his father would have been hugely jealous, its generosity determined by a
realisation that the loss of the prerogative revenues enjoyed by his father, as well
as the much reduced income from Crown lands (newly returned to the King) would
scarcely be adequate. In addition, the expected revenue from customs, £400 000,
was never reached owing to trade being depressed. And so various expedients
were employed to boost the royal finances, including a Hearth Tax (a tax of 6d. on
every hearth, which ought to have hit richer families with bigger houses harder,
but ended up penalising bakers and blacksmiths too), introduced in 1662, whose
yields proved disappointing. The result of all of this was that by the middle of the
decade, the Crown’s annual revenue had fallen to £700 000 and the royal debts
increased to £1.25 million. In one sense then, that of chronic financial difficulties,
inadequate revenues and the resulting wrangling between Crown and Parliament,
the pre-Civil War situation was indeed ‘restored’.
Clarendon
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Charles’s chief minister for the first seven years of his reign was Edward Hyde,
Earl of Clarendon. One of the ‘constitutional royalists’ who had served Charles I
and helped to raise support for him at the start of the Civil War, Clarendon had
served his son in exile, a wise old head counselling the young king to be patient
and bide his time for the right moment to return to the British Isles. Occasionally
Charles and his young courtier companions, such as George Villiers, 2nd Duke of
Buckingham (son of Charles I’s favourite) would bristle at Clarendon’s apparent
conservatism and censorious attitude to their pleasure-loving lifestyle, but
Charles appreciated his vast experience and shrewd grasp of political realities. At
the Restoration, Clarendon was rewarded with the office of Lord Chancellor, the
highest legal office in the land and became a leading member of his privy council.
As a convinced Anglican and devoted servant of the dynasty, Clarendon enjoyed
the respect of the MPs in the royalist-dominated Cavalier Parliament. He played
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A/AS Level History for AQA: Stuart Britain and the Crisis of Monarchy, 1603–1702
a key role in consolidating the new regime in power, tempering the vengeful
instincts of some of Charles’s more extreme followers and re-establishing an
episcopal national Church complete with a package of discriminatory legislation
against dissenters, which became known as the ‘Clarendon Code’.
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Quite quickly, however, Clarendon became a focus for opposition and criticism.
Court and Parliament were divided and factionalism rife. He had arranged a
marriage for Charles to a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, in 1662,
which brought a large dowry and the port of Tangier. These gains were seen to
be outweighed, however, by her Catholicism and the dawning realisation that
she was infertile; given Charles’s own obvious potency (he would ultimately have
as many as 17 acknowledged bastards), she, and by extension Clarendon, would
receive the blame for the failure to secure the dynasty with legitimate heirs. He
also oversaw the sale of the port of Dunkirk, acquired by Cromwell in 1658 in the
greatest feat of English arms for centuries, back to France, an act which, while
pragmatically justifiable (it was ruinously expensive to maintain and defend),
appeared diplomatically craven and injurious to national pride. He was also
criticised for the harshness of the religious settlement and the persecution of
non-Anglicans, which resulted from the Clarendon Code. It was the Anglo–Dutch
war of 1665–67 that proved Clarendon’s undoing, however. He had opposed it
on grounds of expense but had been overruled by the king’s brother, James,
Duke of York, an aggressive (and capable) Lord Admiral. James seized the Dutch
settlement of New Amsterdam (renamed in his honour as ‘New York’) in 1664
and harried the West African coast, earning a generous grant of £2.5 million from
the Commons, which allowed him to expand the navy and win a magnificent
naval triumph off Lowestoft in 1665. However, things quickly started to unravel:
the Dutch were allied to France, the most powerful continental land power and
one with a significant navy, and English resources were stretched to breaking
point in protecting its Atlantic shipping from attack. With several indecisive
engagements and campaigns Parliament, and the nation, began to weary of the
war. As the financial costs mounted, signs of divine displeasure also appeared: a
‘Great Plague’, which killed nearly 70 000 people, swept London in 1665; this was
followed by the Great Fire in September 1666, which destroyed much of the City,
including over 13 000 houses and nearly 90 churches and goods valued at £3.5
million, serving only to worsen the Crown’s financial position.
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Meanwhile, Parliament attacked government officials for mismanagement of
the finances. Finally, there was a military humiliation: in June 1667, the Dutch
admiral, Michiel de Ruyter, launched a bold raid up the Medway and bombarded
the stationary English fleet before towing off the flagship, provoking outcry in
Parliament and the nation at large. For all of this, and despite having opposed the
war, Clarendon received the blame and his weakened position was exploited by
his enemies at court. Buckingham joined with other leading peers and politicians
to bring him down. Charles, who would prove himself a pragmatist throughout
his reign, saw the value of getting rid of his former trusted adviser: his resignation,
which he demanded at the end of August 1667, would act as a safety valve and
defuse criticism of the government that had been growing over the preceding
years. Parliament was not content with his removal and sought to impeach him
for treason, a charge that would have been difficult to sustain but which, in the
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hostile mood of the time would not have been worth the risk; he therefore decided
to escape into exile in France, where he spent his time writing a history of the Civil
Wars.
The Cabal and Danby
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After Clarendon’s fall, Charles was in a position to dictate policy much more
closely, though the choices he made would be dictated in part by the men
to whom he chose to delegate power. Five ministers came to dominate his
counsels, and, together, the first letter of their surnames spelt ‘Cabal’: Clifford
(Treasurer of the Household), Arlington (one of the two Secretaries of State),
Buckingham, Ashley Cooper (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Lauderdale (King’s
Commissioner in Scotland).
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The name, implying a close-knit group of men with common interests and policies,
almost an early ‘Cabinet’, is misleading: in fact they were united by little except
a dislike of Clarendon, in whose fall they had played a significant part. There
were religious differences among them: Clifford was a secret Catholic, Arlington a
crypto-Catholic, Buckingham and Ashley Cooper associated with non-conformists
and free-thinkers, and Lauderdale supported the compromise episcopal/
Presbyterian Scottish Church. One historian, Ronald Hutton, has argued that this
period is better known as that of ‘Arlington’s ministry’ on the grounds that he was
the most influential and politically significant of the members.20
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One of the areas in which this was most apparent was foreign policy. After the
end of the war with the Dutch in 1667, England had allied with her former enemy,
along with Sweden, in a Triple Alliance, in response to French aggression in the
Spanish Netherlands which threatened to de-stabilise Europe. Indeed, the France
of Louis XIV was the power feared by all on account of its military strength and
resources. This, however, was a source of alarm to the French king, who sent
a special ambassador, Charles Albert de Croissy, to England to try to detach
England from the Triple Alliance and instead join with France against the Dutch.
Negotiations were assisted by the fact that Charles’s favourite sister, Minette, was
married to Louis’s brother, the Duke of Orléans. The result of these negotiations
was a secret treaty, the Treaty of Dover (1670), the full contents of which were
known only to Arlington, Clifford and the Duke of York.
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There was sound reasoning for the secrecy: the terms were explosive. Charles
committed England to help Louis in a war against the Dutch (in return for a share
in the dismemberment of the Dutch Empire), and, in the most secret clauses,
undertook to repeal the laws against Catholics and announce his own conversion
to Catholicism when the time seemed ripe, a conversion to be supported, if
necessary, by French troops. Charles subsequently arranged for two of his
councillors with impeccably Protestant credentials, Buckingham and Ashley
Cooper, to negotiate another treaty, shorn of the religious clauses, though this was
also kept secret. As it turned out, however, Charles aroused massive opposition by
his attempt to fulfil the terms of the treaty.
First, in January 1672, came the ‘Stop of the Exchequer’. This was a result of the
Crown’s catastrophic financial position, with a deficit of over £2 million in 1670.
As £1 million of debt came due and with the planned launching of war against the
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Dutch only a few weeks away in accord with his promises to Louis XIV, Charles had
his Exchequer officials announce a deferral of payments of the main sum owed
(the ‘principal’) in order to avert bankruptcy. This decision to default on the royal
debt sent out all kinds of negative messages to government creditors at home and
abroad, and meant that any future loans from the City or from foreign bankers
were likely to come at higher rates of interest. The king of England suddenly
looked like a bad debtor. The second development came in March with Charles’s
issue of another Declaration of Indulgence, two days before his navy was due
to commence hostilities against the Dutch. The declaration affirmed that the
Church of England was the established Church, but promised dissenters the right
to worship freely under licence and Catholics the right to practise their religion
in private. While the naval engagements of 1672 and 1673 were inconclusive,
when Parliament met in 1673 it unleashed a torrent of Francophobia and antiCatholicism, and the Declaration was attacked, much in the way that Clarendon
had predicted the first one would be, as an abuse of the royal prerogative that
undermined the law. Charles was pressured to withdraw it. More than that, the
Commons made any financial grant in support of the war effort conditional
upon the king’s agreeing to a Test Act (1673), which required all public officials
and military officers publicly to take Anglican communion, and to take an oath
abjuring transubstantiation (a core Catholic doctrine). As a consequence, Clifford,
who was by now Lord Treasurer, resigned his office (and then committed suicide)
and James, Duke of York, resigned as Lord Admiral, thereby declaring himself to
be a Roman Catholic. This would quickly lead to widespread paranoia about the
likely succession of a papist to the English throne should Charles (as now seemed
probable) die without legitimate heirs. Indeed already there were suggestions that
he should divorce his barren wife (which he steadfastly refused to do) or legitimise
his bastard (but resolutely Protestant) son, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth.
Anxieties were exacerbated by James’s remarriage (following the death of his first
wife, Anne Hyde, Clarendon’s daughter) to a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena,
and the possibility of Catholic heirs following his own accession which this opened
up.
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In more immediate terms, the crisis created by the continuing, expensive war
and the passage of the Test Act brought about the fall of the Cabal. In addition
to Clifford’s suicide, Ashley Cooper (by now Earl of Shaftesbury) was dismissed
by Charles for supporting the Test Act and opposing James’s Catholic marriage,
while Arlington and Buckingham became scapegoats for the war in the eyes of
Parliament. They did not help matters by blaming each other for the nation’s
problems and, failing to present a united front, they were viciously attacked by
Parliament when it met again early in 1674 and both left office within the year.
Lauderdale remained, north of the border, the only surviving member of the
original five.
One important consequence of the ascendancy of the Cabal, arising from 1672
onwards, was the increasing association of two separate, but related fears, of
‘popery and arbitrary government’, complained of in Parliament and featuring
in street protests. Thanks to Charles’s alliance with Louis XIV, the contemporary
archetype of the Catholic absolutist monarch, contemptuous of the rights of his
subjects, and the revelation that his brother and heir was a Catholic, these two
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fears became inextricably linked and channelled into almost every major political
debate.
Danby
Figure 3.5: It was left to a new man
to bring the Dutch war to an end and
seek to restore some stability both to
the nation’s finances and to the Crown’s
relations with Parliament. This fell to
Thomas Osborne (1632–1712), Earl of
Danby.
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Danby initiated significant departures from the policies of the Cabal period. He
was a devout and convinced Anglican, so he rejected any notion of toleration
either for dissenters or Catholics (making him attractive to the residual ‘Cavalier’
interest in Parliament); he opposed diplomatic ties with France, preferring instead
a Dutch alliance; and he was an ardent believer in the monarchy, coupling faith
in the institution with effective political ‘fixing’ in its interests. The impact of his
different approach was felt very quickly. In April 1675 a Test Bill was introduced
requiring all office-holders and MPs to swear not to seek to alter the government of
Church or State, a further attempt to guarantee an Anglican monopoly on political
office. In foreign policy he brought England’s involvement in the Dutch War to an
end in 1674 and this facilitated a financial recovery, with total royal revenue rising
to an average of £1.4 million a year in the three years up to 1677, while the benefit
to trade meant an increase in customs revenue to £730 000 in 1674–75. Meanwhile
he engineered an alliance with the Dutch by arranging the marriage, in November
1677, of Princess Mary, James’s elder daughter and Charles’s niece, to William
of Orange, an event that prompted widespread public rejoicing and boosted the
Crown’s popularity. In the parliamentary sphere he was an accomplished manager,
building up a following of clients in the Commons, dependent upon the Crown for
pensions and offices. By late 1675, about 30 MPs were receiving pensions totalling
£10 000 a year. These policies also served Danby well in combination with each
other: for instance, his Anglican religious policies and pro-Dutch foreign policy
pandered to the prejudices of backbenchers in the House of Commons, those who
have come to be labelled as the ‘Country’ party (see the section The emergence
of Court and Country ‘parties’: causes, significance and consequences). Their
support brought him significant grants of revenue from Parliament, notably the
vote of over £600 000 towards the navy in 1677, and the further £600 000 given the
following year to disband the army he had earlier planned to use against France.
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Sir Thomas Osborne, who was to become Earl of Danby in June 1674, had proved
himself invaluable to the king in the first two years of the Dutch war, when he had,
as Treasurer of the Navy, managed to keep the government solvent. Coupled with
his experience of parliamentary politics as an MP, this made him an attractive
option as a chief minister, though Charles never warmed to him personally and
saw him much more as a reliable man of business and shrewd political judgement
(in the Clarendon mould) than as a boon companion.
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However, despite his successes, Danby’s position was undermined by a
combination of circumstance and his royal master’s deceit. The Test Bill failed
to pass as its opponents, such as Shaftesbury and Arlington, who hated Danby’s
hostility to non-Anglicans, exploited another of its clauses, that pledging officeholders to swear that taking up arms ‘on any pretence whatsoever’ was unlawful,
to claim that this was a step along the road to ‘arbitrary’ government. Danby’s
financial successes were impressive but could not compensate for Charles’s
continued extravagance, especially his spending on mistresses, jewels and
artworks, which resulted in an increase of £750 000 of the Crown’s floating debt
between 1674 and 1679. Worst of all, though Parliament supported Danby’s
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Dutch alliance and indeed had sought to pressure the government in this
direction after witnessing French military successes, Charles undermined his
minister by secretly continuing to pursue a French alliance. In August 1677 he
had compelled a reluctant Danby to take part in secret negotiations through the
English Ambassador in Paris, Ralph Montagu, for a French grant of two million
livres that would allow the king to keep Parliament prorogued. Then in spring
of the following year, after Danby had seemingly secured the alliance with the
Dutch, Charles privately signed another agreement with Louis in which he received
further subsidies in return for disbanding the army that Parliament had financed
for use against France. Unsurprisingly, both countries, France and the Dutch
Republic, lost faith in Charles and when the two nations finally made peace in
1678 by the Treaty of Nijmegen, Charles’s fear of isolation led him to keep his
standing army of 30 000 men in being. The result of all of this was a perfect storm
in which fears of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ reached fever pitch. Danby,
whose close management of his ‘Pension Parliament’ with Court money had
caused resentment among ‘Country’ MPs, was now seen as a sinister agent of a
deceitful and dangerous royal policy. He soon after fell from power, the victim of
his master’s refusal to allow him to pursue the policies in which he believed. It was
what happened next, in 1678, however, that turned this into one of the biggest
political crises the country has ever seen.
The emergence of Court and Country ‘parties’: causes,
significance and consequences
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It was during the period of the Cabal that two distinct groups began to emerge in
Parliament, defined in part by their response to the prevailing political climate: the
‘Court’ and the ‘Country’. They were broadly defined, in the case of the ‘Country’
platform, by a belief in a more limited, or ‘mixed’, monarchy in which power
was shared between Crown, Lords and Commons, and by hostility to courtiers,
ministers and bankers. The ‘Court’ was characterised by a commitment to serving
the interests of the Crown and an attempt to manage Parliament by building up
networks and clients who could be relied upon to vote in support of the king’s
interests. These views were increasingly apparent in the new MPs who joined the
Commons as a result of by-elections in the late 1660s.
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It would be wrong to see these loose and intermittent associations of men
as ‘parties’, in anything like the modern sense. Men moved between them as
their interests appeared to dictate. For example, following the fall of the Cabal,
Buckingham and Shaftesbury, formerly key figures in the Court and government,
joined the Country group and took part in its attacks upon apparent abuses of
royal power and anything that smacked of support for Catholicism. There were,
however, indications that these groups were beginning to associate together and
co-ordinate their actions in the house that appears to be something more than
casual groupings. For instance, there is some evidence that both before and during
the parliamentary sessions of 1673–74, some Country members met informally to
discuss their strategy in both Houses. In 1674 the Green Ribbon Club was founded
in central London, at the King’s Head Tavern in Chancery Lane, and this became a
meeting place for opposition MPs and radical politicians.
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As for the Court, inevitably there was less in the way of tavern-oriented battleplanning, but during the time of the Cabal, Clifford took the lead in beginning to
use patronage to win over potentially hostile members, an approach also adopted
by Danby during his ascendancy. Clifford earned the nickname ‘Bribe Master
General’ and his use of financial incentives to support the Court was particularly
effective in gaining the co-operation of former Royalists whose wealth had been
severely reduced during the Commonwealth period, and who were happy to take
on minor offices in return for payment to augment their meagre incomes. Clifford
was indispensable in managing the House of Commons and it was the business
of parliamentary management, of building a following united less by ideas than
by dependence, financial or otherwise, upon the ministers of the government
appointed by the king, that created the basis of a Court party.
Give a ‘Court’ and a ‘Country’
position on each of the following
issues of the 1670s:
1. The Dutch War (1672–74)
2. The Test Act (1673)
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3. The ‘Test Bill’ (1675).
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As the reign progressed, the royal court came increasingly to be identified with
Catholicism: Charles had a Catholic wife (though she was uninvolved in politics),
a Catholic heir in the shape of his brother (who himself had a Catholic wife and
therefore the prospect of Catholic heirs), and made little secret of his admiration
for the archetype of Catholic monarchy, the French king Louis XIV. The Cabal
had contained one Catholic and one crypto-Catholic, while the Treaty of Dover
appeared to demonstrate the links between the Court interest and a pro-French
foreign policy. Despite Danby’s efforts to the contrary, this persisted throughout
the 1670s thanks to Charles’s determinedly Francophile stance, while Danby’s own
reliance on parliamentary clients linked the Court increasingly to fears of secret
and corrupting influence of the Crown upon parliamentary affairs. In response
to all of this there arose both within Parliament and without a ‘Country’ interest,
which defined itself increasingly against that for which the Court was perceived
to stand: it embraced a more narrowly Protestant identity, opposing the French
alliance and preferring a connection with the Calvinist Dutch (though some
MPs also disliked the Dutch as a trading rival); it promoted the freedom of MPs
from Court influence and attacked Danby’s client networks; and perhaps, above
all, it expressed fear of Catholicism and the arbitrary power with which it was
thought to be connected. The emergence of Court and Country interests created
an atmosphere of political debate and division that would contribute to the
bitterness of the Exclusion Crisis in the period 1679–81.
ACTIVITY 3.10
Religious divisions and conflicts
D
The Restoration of the monarchy also saw the restoration of the Church of England
as the undisputed ‘official’ religion of the land, and was accompanied by a
sustained assault, upon the radical religious sects surviving from the 1650s, and by
continued suspicion of Catholic influences at court and within the wider political
nation.
The defeat of Millenarianism
There were two significant uprisings led by Millenarian Puritans that aimed to
puncture the air of expectation surrounding the re-establishment of an episcopal,
national Church at the Restoration. The first of these, usually known as Venner’s
Rising, occurred in January 1661 in London. It was led by Thomas Venner, a
Fifth Monarchist, and managed to enlist fewer than 50 supporters. He was
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ignored completely by the army (which in any case had by now been completely
demobilised), and the rebellion was swiftly defeated, but it served to confirm
the view held by many Anglicans that religious dissent was inextricably linked to
sedition. This informed the mood of the Cavalier Parliament when it met in May
1661 and contributed to the stringency of the Act of Uniformity (1662). Thereafter,
Millenarianism lost much of the confidence and militancy it had displayed in
the 1650s, and radical religion changed its focus to be more introspective: the
Quakers (who had emerged during the Interregnum, and at whom the Quaker Act
of 1662 was aimed) exemplified this: their emphasis upon the ‘inner light’ within
each believer and their attendant belief in social equality led them to reject the
conventions of social deference (such as the doffing of hats to one’s betters),
while their religious meetings were unstructured affairs in which any individual
was entitled to stand up and speak if they felt ‘moved’ by the Holy Spirit to do so.
As such they were widely seen as subversive and were the most persecuted of all
of the dissenting groups under the Restoration regime, particularly in the period
1681–85, though their importance grew and they perhaps numbered 60 000 by
1680.
The restoration of the Church of England
The Cavalier Parliament contained a solid majority in favour of the reestablishment of the Church of England. Within ten days of its first meeting,
bishops had been restored to the House of Lords and the Commons voted by 228
to 103 to burn the Solemn League and Covenant, symbol of Presbyterianism, and
to require all MPs to take the Anglican sacraments. As previously discussed, the
legislation it subsequently passed was designed to enshrine a narrow vision of an
episcopal Church of England within parliamentary statute, and dissent was to be
severely proscribed.
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The character of the Restoration Church was heavily determined by the character
of its leading bishops. The man appointed to be Archbishop of Canterbury, William
Juxon, who had attended Charles I on the scaffold, was old and infirm (and would
die in 1663) and so leadership of the Church was effectively exercised by the
Bishop of London, later Juxon’s successor at Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon. He and
the other bishops were sceptical about Charles II’s promises of a comprehensive
or inclusive national Church that might calm religious divisions. A conference held
between April and December 1661 at Savoy House on the reform of the Prayer
Book yielded few concessions to even moderate Presbyterians, and the revisions
made, if anything, strengthened elements within it disliked by dissenters. The
Cavalier Parliament accepted it in April 1662 after a debate in which Sheldon
refused any suggestion of compromise. Acceptance of the new Prayer Book was
then made the key test of the orthodoxy of Anglican clergy through the Act of
Uniformity (1662), which required all clergy and teachers to renounce the Solemn
League and Covenant and the right of resistance, and endorse and conform to
the established practices of the Church of England (including the Prayer Book).
Those who failed to do so by the specified date, St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August)
1662, would lose their posts and over 1000 in England and Wales suffered this
fate. The Church of England was being pruned of elements that did not subscribe
to a carefully defined core set of beliefs and practices. There was also an Anglican
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monopoly on public office through the Corporation Act of 1661, which removed
dissenters, and the Test Act of 1673 that excluded Roman Catholics.
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Along with the Act of Uniformity that forced some clergymen to leave the
Church of England, several pieces of legislation actively persecuted dissenters.
A Corporation Act in December 1661 forbade non-Anglicans from holding civic
office in town corporations, and a Quaker Act in May 1662 made meetings of five
or more Quakers illegal. The Quakers were seen as particularly dangerous because
of their refusal to accept rank and hierarchy in society, manifested most often in
their failure to doff their hats to their social betters. The persecution of Dissenters
increased after a second uprising, this time in Yorkshire in October 1663, which
featured former republicans, Cromwellians, Baptists, Quakers and Presbyterians.
The Conventicle Act (1664) banned religious services other than those of the
Church of England, and imposed fines, imprisonment and transportation as
punishments for those who contravened it. The Five Mile Act that followed a
year later banned all ejected clergy from going within five miles of their former
parishes, and was designed to prevent their maintaining any kind of power base in
urban centres or the capital. Of all this, Sheldon was an enthusiastic supporter. He
argued that ‘Those who will not be governed as men, by reason and persuasion,
shall be governed as beasts, by power and force’.21
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Protestant Dissenters
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Charles himself disliked the intolerance of the religious settlement and repeatedly
sought to temper the force of it using his powers under the royal prerogative. In
December 1662 he issued a Declaration of Indulgence that would have allowed
him to exempt certain individuals from the Act of Uniformity, but Clarendon
persuaded him to withdraw it and the Yorkshire Rising of October 1663 led to a
toughening of royal resolve. Charles did, however, allow the Conventicle Act to
expire in 1668 without its being renewed, leaving nonconformists free to meet.
The result, over the following two years, was a significant increase in reports of
conventicles meeting all over the country, some of them disorderly. Complaints
were heard both in the House of Commons, where Anglican gentry argued that
this was proof that dissent would proliferate if not clamped down upon, and in
the House of Lords, where Sheldon and the other bishops expressed fears for the
Church of England. Using its favoured weapon, in 1669 the Commons refused to
grant Charles the money for which he was asking and this compelled the king, a
year later, to agree to a second, more draconian Conventicle Act. This imposed
penalties on officials who turned a blind eye to the activities of dissenters,
illustrating the regime’s desire to clamp down upon its practice. Heavy fines up
to a maximum of £20 were also to be imposed for anyone holding or addressing
an illegal religious meeting. A grateful Parliament duly voted the king a generous
grant of subsidies in return.
A similar pattern of events occurred in Scotland, where in June 1669 Charles
issued a Letter of Indulgence allowing Presbyterian ministers to take up vacant
livings, followed up by an Act Assertory, affirming the king’s supremacy over the
Scottish Church and foreshadowing an attempt to alter its character in a more
tolerant direction. Protests ensued and, in urgent need of money from the Scottish
Parliament, again Charles was forced to backtrack, issuing a new Conventicle
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Conflict over Catholic influence at Court
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Act north of the border in 1670, known as the ‘Clanking Act’, which prohibited
unlicensed preachers from addressing conventicles and imposed the death
penalty for those who defied it. Charles tried again, in both Scotland and England,
in 1672 by issuing a Letter of Indulgence (and south of the border, a Declaration,
this time applying to Ireland too) but was again forced to abandon it after a
year when the Cavalier Parliament raised a storm of objection at this attempt
to dilute the Anglican monopoly on public office. Pragmatism and his financial
dependence on Parliament persistently forced Charles to abandon his own, more
tolerant instincts and give in to the narrow intolerance of his Anglican-dominated
Parliament.
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While Protestant Dissent was seen as the main threat to the Royalist Anglican
ascendancy early on, as the reign developed, Roman Catholicism would come
to be seen as a greater danger. Like his father before him, Charles married a
Catholic wife, the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. While she failed
to give her husband an heir to secure the succession and was therefore widely
seen as inadequate, her religion also revived fears of the spread of Catholicism at
court. Charles himself had spent part of his exile in France and his own Catholic
mother had made strenuous efforts to convert his younger brother, Henry, Duke
of Gloucester, to the Roman religion. While he sensibly resisted this and warned
his mother of the damage it could do, being aware as he was of the need for the
Stuarts to appear resolutely Protestant if they were to win back their kingdom,
Charles had some sympathy with and attraction to Catholicism and evidence for
this can (perhaps) be found in his efforts at toleration through his Declarations
of Indulgence, and (probably) in his undertakings to Louis XIV by the Treaty of
Dover in 1670. His willingness to appoint Catholics and Catholic sympathisers
as ministers in his government, notably Clifford and Arlington, is also suggestive
of a relaxed approach to the religion that many of his subjects regarded with
horror. What really stoked the fires of anti-Catholicism in England, however, was
the revelation that Charles’s brother, James, had converted to Catholicism at
some point during the 1660s. Initially known only to a few people, the passage
of the Test Act in 1673, the price Charles had to pay for the money he needed
to fight the Dutch, guaranteed that James’s conversion would become public
knowledge. Obliged to take the Anglican sacrament that Easter and to renounce
the core doctrine of transubstantiation, both acts which no sincere Catholic could
contemplate, James had no choice but to resign his office as Lord Admiral and
the country was in no doubt as to why. When he followed this up by marrying a
foreign, Catholic princess, Mary of Modena, later the same year, the furore rose to
fever pitch.
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The prospect unfolded before the eyes of the political nation of a Catholic
succession destined to last for ever if James had sons by his new wife, and soon
suggestions were heard, notably championed by Shaftesbury, that Charles should
annul this marriage and divorce his own wife in order to remarry and beget
Protestant heirs. Charles would have no truck with such proposals but the political
atmosphere changed markedly. In February 1674 the Earl of Carlisle proposed
in Parliament that any prince who married a Catholic without Parliament’s
consent should be excluded from the succession, an interesting foreshadowing
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of some of the arguments put forward during the later Exclusion Crisis. Cries of
‘popery and arbitrary government’, an elision of political and religious fears for
the future direction of the country, indicated the depth of hostility to the Catholic
religion and reflected widely-held anxieties about the king’s closeness to Louis
XIV’s France. The events of 1678 would magnify this into one of the most serious
political crises ever to have faced the country.
ACTIVITY 3.11
How serious were the religious
divisions in the period 1660–78?
Practice essay questions
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1. ‘The post-Restoration parliament governed more effectively than the
Rump and Protectorate parliaments’. Assess the validity of this view.
2. To what extent did religious tolerance in Britain increase after the
Restoration?
3. ‘The Restoration brought political stability to Britain in the period
1660–1678’. Assess the validity of this view.
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Using your understanding of the historical context, assess how convincing
the arguments in these three extracts are in assessing the extent to which the
Cromwellian Protectorate should be characterised as a military dictatorship.
Extract A
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‘From 1654 to 1658, the fundamental question of English politics was, whether Cromwell
would succeed in securing the assent of the nation to the authority which the army
had conferred upon him ... Then followed an extension of military rule which brought
more odium upon the Protector than any other act of his Government ... To the rest
of England, the arbitrary and inquisitorial proceedings of the major-generals were
sufficient to condemn the institution. It was evident that the military party amongst
the Protector’s advisers had obtained the upper hand of the lawyers and civilians.
The Protectorate, which had hitherto striven to seem a moderate and constitutional
government, stood revealed as a military despotism...Convinced that the maintenance
of his Government was for the good of the people, he was resolved to maintain it by
force, and did not shrink from the avowal.’22
Extract B
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‘Cromwell embarked on his aim of ‘healing and settling’ with a military presence in
central and local government that was notably modest in the circumstances, but
the exasperating experience of the first Protectorate Parliament and the shock of the
Royalist conspiracies revealed in 1655 made him change course for a while and give the
Army men their head. But to describe even the Major-Generals’ regime as military rule
is an overstatement, and it did not last long. From early in 1657 the military element in
local administration reverted almost to its former level, while the influence of the army
grandees on the policies of central government fell far below what it had been in earlier
years.’23
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Extract C
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‘Cromwell’s tragedy was that, in the cause of preserving some sort of order, he was
pushed into destroying the monarchy and violating the rights of Parliament ... A
vigorous warrior in the cause of God and His chosen people, Cromwell’s political
instincts were to seek moderate solutions of the civil problems of rule. A monarch
who abused trust to the point of legitimating the identification of monarchy with
Babylon, helped to engender a revolutionary situation in which moderate men could
only struggle to make an ordered and stable society out of the wreckage. This was
Cromwell’s tragedy. His greatness is that he did so much more than cling on to the
debris. By 1657 he had gone a long way towards finding a stable civilian basis for
the regime, a basis not altogether removed from the principles he and others had
fought for in the 1640s. But time was running out and the settlement was never to be
consolidated. It was a settlement far less radical than those who have aspired to an
English Revolution, then and since, would have wished. Nor could it ever possess the
hereditary legitimacy of those sympathetic to the fate of the ‘martyr’ King or sticklers for
the untarnished rule of law. But it was admirable none the less.’24
Chapter summary
By the end of this chapter you should have gained a broad overview of the
Commonwealth regime and the Restoration of the monarchy. You should
also understand:
the reasons for the failure of the Rump Parliament
••
the successes of Cromwell as Lord Protector
••
the reasons why the monarchy was restored in 1660
••
the nature of the Restoration settlement
••
the growth of political divisions under Charles II.
ft
••
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Further reading
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There is a voluminous literature on the Commonwealth and Protectorate.
The best short biography of Cromwell is Coward, B. Oliver Cromwell.
Longman; 1991. For more detailed exploration of the key issues, see the
collection of essays edited by Smith, DL. Cromwell and the Interregnum: the
Essential Readings, Blackwell; 2003. On the Restoration and the settlement,
with ample coverage of Scotland and Ireland as well as England, see Harris,
T. Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660–1685. Allen Lane; 2005. For
a more critical view of Charles II, see Hutton, R. Charles II: King of England,
Scotland and Ireland. Oxford; 1991.
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3 From Republic to restored and limited monarchy, 1649–1678
Endnotes
1
Kenyon, JP. The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary. Cambridge: CUP;
1986.
2
Kishlansky, M. Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1604–1714. London: Penguin Books; 1996. p. 195–96.
3
Quoted in Coward, B. Oliver Cromwell. Harlow: Longman; 1991. p. 72.
4
Quoted in Woolrych, A. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: OUP; 2004. p. 469.
5
Quoted in Gaunt, P. Oliver Cromwell. Chichester: Wiley; 1997. p. 119.
6
Woolrych, A. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: OUP; 2004. p. 484.
7
Smith, DL. A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603–1707. Chichester: Wiley; 1998. p. 180–81.
8
Kishlansky, M. Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1604–1714. London: Penguin Books; 1996. p. 203.
9
Woolrych, A. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: OUP; 2004. p. 530.
Quoted in Gaunt, P. Oliver Cromwell. Chichester: Wiley; 1997. p. 141.
10
Smith, DL. A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603–1707. Chichester: Wiley; 1998. p.184.
11
Roots, I. (ed.) Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. London: Dent/Phoenix; 2002. p. 133.
12
See for example Morrill, J. ‘Cromwell, Oliver’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford:
OUP; 2004.
ft
13
Hutton, R. review of Davis, JC. Oliver Cromwell: 2001[Online] Available from:
14
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http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5388 [Accessed 27th July 2015] and Ronald Hutton,
R. review of Patrick Little (ed.) Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives: Basingstoke; 2009 [Online]
Available from:
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/746 [Accessed 27th July 2015].
Smith, DL. A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603–1707. Chichester: Wiley; 1998. p. 187.
15
Durston, C. Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government During the English Revolution. Manchester:
Manchester University Press; 2001. p. 41.
16
Durston, C. Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government During the English Revolution.
Manchester: Manchester University Press; 2001. p. 228.
D
17
Roots, I. (ed.) Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. London; Dent/Phoenix; 2002. p. 124.
18
Roots, I. (ed.) Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. London; Dent/Phoenix; 2002. p. 137.
19
Hutton, R. Charles II: King of England, Scotland and Ireland. Oxford: OUP; 1991. p. 254.
20
Quoted in Kishlansky, M. Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1604–1714. London: Penguin Books; 1996.
p. 235.
21
Firth, CH. Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons;
1900. p. 409–18.
22
Woolrych, A.The Cromwellian Protectorate: A Military Dictatorship?, reprinted in Smith, DL (ed.)
Cromwell and the Interregnum: The Essential Readings. Chichester: Wiley; 2003. p. 88–89.
23
Davis, JC. Oliver Cromwell. London: Bloomsbury Academic; 2001.
24
© Cambridge University Press
Third party permissions still pending
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