God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  That the army, the servant of Parliament, should act independently, propose and frame impeachments, and now generate its own peace terms demonstrated that politics had entered another completely new realm. The position of the army was a tolerant one, however, and concerned with healing and settling – religious toleration alongside a restored Anglican church and a relative forgiveness about actions during the war was clearly a less partisan position than that championed by Presbyterians. Moreover, they were outlines of proposals, not propositions – a basis for discussion rather than an ultimatum.

  As things moved against them, in mid-July, Presbyterian confidence evaporated. On 20 July, Holles and others sought permission to travel abroad for six months to prepare their defence, which they were granted. But the whiff of defeat also called forth powerful demonstrations in the city. On 20 July demonstrators swarmed around Westminster in such a tumultuous way that the Commons ordered 100 halberds be brought in for their defence. The following day, in the City, crowds of militiamen, watermen, Reformadoes and sailors assembled around Skinners” Hall. They were there to sign a ‘Solemn Engagement’ (presumably titled in imitation of the army’s own declaration) pledging to do their best to bring the King to Westminster for a personal treaty on the basis of his third reply to the Newcastle Propositions, of the previous May. It was framed as a recommitment to the Solemn League and Covenant, and of the Oath of Allegiance. The following day two or three thousand Reformadoes were at St James’s Field, intending to request the Corporation to join their petition to Parliament to bring the King home. But these City Presbyterians were on their own. The old Militia Commission was restored on 22 and 23 July, and on the 24th both Houses denounced the City’s ‘Solemn Engagement’. The previous day the Heads of Proposals had been shown to the King – there can be little doubt that the senior officers wanted to secure the basis for a negotiated settlement before any march on London. Lord Wharton had read a version in the Lords on 19 July, and there was a fear among Presbyterians that a deal was in the offing.104

  This seems to have been part of the explanation for a final, counter-productive and desperate attempt at mobilization in the city. On 26 July, Holles, Clotworthy and Waller met at the Bull Tavern in Westminster Street. It seems likely that they were co-ordinating the presentation of a petition against the Militia Act. They probably did not plan a coup against Parliament, but the petition was accompanied by a crowd which subsequently invaded the Houses. Terrified members were kept sitting until 9 p.m. and in that time first the Lords and then the Commons were forced to reinstate the Presbyterian Militia Commission and to retract their denunciation of the ‘Solemn Engagement’. The Commons was also forced to issue an immediate invitation to the King. Over the next few days a reduced and intimidated Parliament passed a series of measures helpful to the Presbyterian cause, but this naked intimidation of Parliament provided a final, very good, reason for the New Model to march on London. On 30 July the Speaker and fifty-seven members fled, many of them to the army, taking the mace with them, and it seemed that Parliament might not be able to sit. However, borrowing a mace from the City, business was resumed by the small number of members still willing to sit. A letter was sent to Fairfax’s forbidding him to approach within thirty miles, and the Committee of safety was re-established. Fairfax’s control of the Trained Bands was denied and Massey placed in control of the forces directly under Parliament’s control. This firm line was initially supported by the City authorities, which issued a similar injunction to the New Model.105

  In the first week of August, London seemed on the brink of serious disorder. Reformadoes were rumoured to be planning to plunder the City. On 2 August the City Militia Committee and Common Council sat in an agony of indecision, waiting on tenterhooks for news of the army’s movements. Political will was crumbling, however. The Westminster Assembly urged negotiation with the army. On 3 August the City sent a deputation to Fairfax disavowing any intention of starting a new war. Authorities in Southwark implored his help. The King also wrote, on 4 August, disavowing any attempt to make a new war (although not disowning the Presbyterian attempt to). By the time that peace protestors at the Guildhall were cut down by troops under the command of Poyntz (now returned from the north and vigorously committed to the Presbyterian cause), leaving some of the petitioners mortally wounded, the Presbyterian image problem was becoming acutely difficult.106

  Fairfax was able to enter the City unopposed on 6 August, after Southwark had been delivered to an advance guard. It was a triumphant procession rather than an occupation and the warmth of the reception bears testimony to the fact that London was not solidly Presbyterian. The fugitive members and the Speakers were escorted back to the Palace of Westminster by troops with laurel leaves in their hats, and the church bells pealed out. Fairfax was made constable of the Tower. On the following day 18,000 troops marched through London. The Lifeguard and train of artillery, as well as twenty regiments, assembled in Hyde Park. Accompanied by flying colours, drums and trumpets they marched to Cheapside in the heart of the City before fanning out to walk through every street from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Their behaviour was exemplary and, having made their point, Fairfax led them across London Bridge to quarters in Kent and Surrey. A force remained behind to protect the Houses from crowds. This, it was thought by Fairfax and the other officers, was but a preliminary to an accommodation with the King. Fairfax was shown the Great Charter and records of kingdom: ‘This is that which we have fought for, and by God’s help we must maintain’, he said.107

  There followed a struggle for control in Parliament and on 14 August the agitators called for a purge. This seems to have convinced six of the eleven impeached members to flee two days later. On 20 August an ordinance was prepared declaring null all the actions taken by the Houses in the absence of the Speakers and those who were present while forced votes were taken were exempted from idemnity. Although Fairfax had prevented a purge these tactics ensured that many of those who would have been purged stayed away. The Independent majority was re-established. Similar measures were taken in the City, and London’s defences were ordered to be destroyed. The work was completed by the end of September.108 The defeat of political Presbyterianism seemed complete – there was no attempt to rescue the programme, or to protect its promoters. Thereafter Presbyterian ambition was limited to energizing reformation through the existing church structures, rather than the establishment of new national discipline. Thomas Edwards, spokesman for the more militant view, joined the exodus, eventually dying in a bitter and disappointed exile.109

  There had been more than a little familiarity about the Newcastle Propositions. What was being offered, and refused, was similar to what had been offered and refused in 1642: the war, it seems, had not really changed the terms of the argument. Worse still, it had not really changed the balance of power. A royal military victory would have broken the deadlock, but a parliamentary one apparently had not. To that extent Manchester had been right in his famous exchange with Cromwell: ‘If we beat the king ninety and nine times yet he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves’. But it also gave continuing relevance to Cromwell’s riposte: ‘if this be so, why did we take up arms at first?’110 Worst of all, perhaps, the war had not only failed to change the political negotiation very much, but it had created further difficulties. These mobilizations took place against the background of continued publicity about the details of political negotiation in newsbooks, pamphlets, declarations and leaks. The public did not have to work hard to be informed.111

  For those interested in history’s ironies, there were plenty here. In 1642 Parliament had armed itself against the King and contested control of the country’s military resources. In the ensuing paper war arguments had sharpened and constitutionally radical arguments had been made. One of the triggers for the breakdown of normal politics was the attempt to exclude five members from the House. In 1647 it was the army, an
d it was eleven members, but the claim against Parliament was similar – it was no longer a real parliament. To some extent that was true – there does seem to have been a new ruthlessness with which Holles and Stapleton dominated the House of Commons in pretty close co-operation with the City and crowds. In the intervening five years the techniques by which support was mobilized among wider publics had also become more sophisticated – particularly in the co-ordinated use of print – and in the Large Petition a new and more radical discourse had inflected a petitioning campaign.

  Alliances could form around these various appeals – for arrears of pay, religious decency, toleration, opposition to the Negative Voice of the House of Lords, for recreation days or the abolition of the excise – and there were now more players. In addition to the City, Parliament and the King, the New Model became an independent actor, with a conscious political organization. Apprentices, excise rioters, Presbyterians, Covenanters, royalists and London radicals were all mobilizing in a more sophisticated political environment and appealing to different institutions. But, as in 1642, the resulting alliances did not necessarily bind very closely. The Presbyterians took control of London’s government and militia, but their appeal to the anti-excise and pro-recreation day crowds was of more measured success. And such loose alliances did not necessarily withstand the pressure to go to war – perhaps even less so in the immediate aftermath of the one just fought. When it came to the crunch, the Presbyterians could not deliver an armed and determined capital, or a northern army, with which to defeat the New Model.

  In the face of all this Charles had little reason to do anything other than look on. As these divisions widened, his prospects improved by leaps and bounds: as the Heads of Proposals seemed to demonstrate. This was a contest about whom he should deal with, and none of the parties spoke for the people as a whole, or championed a settlement that would obviously satisfy all shades of opinion. These various interests were all to some extent disposable, except perhaps the King. The Covenanters could be bought off, the army disbanded and Parliament dissolved, but few thought there could be a king other than Charles and very few, if any, thought that there need be no king at all.

  Spring and summer passed as Presbyterians and Independents fought for control of Parliament, the City and military force. There were no formal peace proposals after Newcastle and before the late autumn. But there is little sign that this battle resonated strongly outside London and the armies: no record of provincial mobilization for Presbyterian or Independent reaches us, except perhaps in Norwich. Elsewhere there is plenty of evidence of anti-army and anti-sectarian feeling, but it is difficult to document a powerful Presbyterian movement and, outside London and Lancashire, there is not much evidence of concerted attempts to establish a national Presbyterian church.112

  In the provinces the clearest message seems to have been a desire for settlement, and demilitarization, without much sense of commitment to the precise political measures that would allow this. In September 1647 pamphlet readers were treated to another story of monstrous birth, this one from Scotland. The child was born with two heads, one female and one male, its other features described with parallels in classical mythology: Midas, Polyphemus, Satyrs and a Gorgon. At its birth ‘nature seemed to be disquieted and troubled; in so much that the heavens proclaimed its entrance into the world with a loud peal of thunder, seconded with such frequent flashes of lightning that it was credibly believed of all… that the latter now was now come upon them’. At the height of the storm the monster announced with ‘a hoarse but loud voice… I am thus deformed for the sins of my parents’.113

  The lesson was a familiar one – the repentant mother admitted how she had been ‘seduced by heretical factious fellows’, and as a result had ignored the ‘laws and ancient customs of England and Scotland’ and had ‘vehemently desire[d]… to see the utter ruin and subversion of all church and state-government’. The editorial line was also predictable: this should be a lesson not just for those labouring with similar births, but for all people ‘whose outsides though they appear not so horrid to the eye as this misshapen monster, I fear their insides are hung round with all sorts of crying sins’.114 The symbolism and the visual image echoed John Taylor’s famous pamphlet of 1647, The World turn’d upside down.115 While partisans fought for the right to deal with the King, or slugged it out in rural churchyards,116 others looked on in horror. In fact, the line taken on this Scottish birth could have been in print in 1642, as the first edition of The World turn’d upside down had been.

  Images of political monstrosity

  The confrontation between Presbyterian and Independent seems to have been primarily a difference among activists on one side, seeking with little success to assimilate other issues, and to take control of Parliament and the City. It is not easy to see the Presbyterians as the ‘moderates’ in the parliamentary coalition – they were more a party of religious law and order. Their support for iconoclasm, reform of the calendar and intolerance, their willingness to use force and act beyond the constitution, and their polemical bitterness all speak against the view that they were the voice of common sense. Among the activists, in any case, there was a clear winner: the New Model. Its peace terms turned out to be relatively generous, but Charles still seemed to feel he could do better. He was probably wrong, but the mistake was pardonable in the circumstances.

  18

  The Army, the People and the Scots

  Putney, the Engagement and the Vote of No Addresses

  Defeat of the Presbyterian mobilization in 1647 seemed dangerously like a defeat for Parliament. Two extra-parliamentary forces had dominated the politics of the victorious coalition – the Presbyterian alliance of City, Covenanters and London divines on one hand, and a developing alliance between City radicals and the New Model on the other. They had fought for control of the political complexion of Parliament and as the conflict reached crisis point the army had shifted decisively from a body petitioning for redress to a political body seeking a particular form of settlement. A key moment in this transformation was the signing of the Solemn Engagement in early June, which had also established a new consultative body, the General Council of the Army. When the army published its Declaration on 14 June a dangerous political transformation was under way. Within the army there was now a mechanism for political mobilization and the army as a whole was lining up behind the idea that Parliament was no longer the true representative of the people. During the ensuing stand-off, as the army hovered outside London, it had presented a settlement to the King apparently on its own authority: the Heads of Proposals.

  By the time of the occupation of London in August there was no escaping the fact that this was a political body, but these developments were not necessarily comfortable for the officers. The role of the agitators was a potential threat to the normal chain of military command – hence, for example, Fairfax’s discomfiture when Charles pitched up at Newmarket in June. Moreover, as the army began openly to pursue a settlement, acting independently, it offered possibilities to Independent activists, who might make it a vehicle for their view of settlement. In particular, the call for a free parliament intersected with a gathering campaign by Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton: a spectrum of opinion from Charles I to John Lilburne and army agitators could now agree that the body sitting in Westminster was not a true parliament. The precise connections between the New Model agitators and these City radicals is unclear; so too that between Walwyn, Lilburne and Overton. These three did not become ‘the Levellers’ until labelled as such by royalists (and perhaps army officers) in November. Before that date five regiments had appointed ‘new agents’, alongside the agitators, who met daily in London in late September and early October. Their status is also unclear, and their connections with the London radicals are largely suppositious, but their purpose was plain: to galvanize the army into the pursuit of more-ambitious political ends.1

  This complicated conjunction between the ‘Lilburnists’ and elements within the
army reflected the potential of the army as an independent political actor. But what would the army do with this role? The parliamentary cause had been sustained, in part, by the myth of loyal rebellion: to fight the King was in some circumstances to protect him. Implausible as this may seem to modern eyes, it did at least have the virtue of expressing what was happening in terms which were respectable to contemporaries. There was no such easy resort for the army. Created as a servant of Parliament, in its service of the King, the army was now turning on its master and claiming a say in the settlement. What could possibly justify its posture in repudiating the authority of its master and creator? One seductive strategy, adopted during the summer of 1647, was to adopt the royalist line on Parliament – that it did not represent the people any more – to argue that the army was intervening to restore the people’s liberty. This line of argument potentially led in very radical directions.