The Road Not Taken
Page 20
Perhaps most significantly, the unsolved commoner grievances of the Pilgrimage of Grace triggered another rebellion shortly after Henry’s death. The year 1549 saw two simultaneous but disparate risings in England, sucking in no fewer than twenty-six counties and showing the massive potential discontent with the Tudors that intelligent leadership of the Pilgrimage could have tapped. The curiosity of 1549 was that, whereas the Pilgrimage had managed for a time to unite the religious and socio-economic strands in the rebellion, this time they bifurcated, with the West Country being the focus for religious discontents and Norfolk the fulcrum for the social and economic issues.125 The most striking outer symbol of the Pilgrimage of Grace was the badge displayed by the Pilgrims on their banners, which depicted the famous Five Wounds of Christ. This symbolism was revived in the West Country and in Hampshire, where the trigger for rebellion was the imposition of a new English Prayer Book which jettisoned many of the much loved traditional elements of liturgy. The revolt, at its apogee in Devon, was another nostalgic Catholic one, emphasising Latin, orthodoxy and traditional modes. Yet it was ill led. It began promisingly with the siege of Exeter by a sizeable rebel army, but Somerset, the Lord Protector, was able to defeat the insurgents easily, bringing them to battle and slaughtering 4,000 of them.126 The revolt in Norfolk, uncoordinated with that in the west, was a more serious affair but very different in tone and temper. Here the great issue was enclosure, which some historians see as the locus classicus of inchoate capitalism. Enclosure has sometimes been portrayed as an economic imperative of the wool and cloth industries, and to an extent that is true, but its real impetus was the lust for profit. By 1500 about 45 per cent of arable land in England was enclosed, for landlords could rent enclosed land for three times the price of unenclosed land: in short, enclosure increased the wealth of landowners at the expense of wage labourers and tenant farmers.127 A spontaneous uprising of countrymen who began pulling down enclosure hedges in Norfolk – the first such incident was reported on 20 June 1549 – turned into something more serious when a local landowner, Robert Kett, joined the rebels, organised them, marched on Norwich with a force of 16,000 and set up a camp on Mousehold Heath – the same spot used by the Norfolk rebels in 1381. At this camp Kett held a mini-parliament under an oak tree, which became known as the ‘oak of Reformation’. The basic idea was taken up with enthusiasm and altogether another eighteen camps sprang up, thus gaining 1549 the reputation of being ‘the camping time’ or the ‘commotion time’. The camp movement soon spread to Kent, marking that county’s third significant entry into the annals of revolt. Although attempts have sometimes been made to portray Kett and his movement as forerunners of the Civil War radicals in the 1640s, this is unconvincing. Kett’s ambitions were purely local, not national, and his ambitions were modest. He called on the Crown to act as honest broker in the disputes over enclosure and for rents to be fixed at 1485 levels.128
The social composition of the rebels reveals the important role of small merchants, tradesmen, minor officials and bailiffs. It was thus in no sense a proletarian or peasant rising and, given its local nature and modest names, certainly does not merit the title of revolution. Yet to the rulers of Tudor England even the mildest socio-economic demands were construed by the elite as a challenge to its credibility. Kett’s threat to Norwich was the excuse Somerset needed to send an army against him. First into the fray was the Marquis of Northampton with a force of Italian mercenaries, but these were heavily defeated by the rebels on 1 August. The prelude to the battle saw taunting by the rebels in the form of ‘mooning’, which was to become a feature of the rising.129 Kett enjoyed a three-week run as chief magistrate of his oaken parliament, but on 23 August the Earl of Warwick arrived in the environs with a fresh army of 12,000 men. Norwich itself became a battleground. For three days there was desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and alleyways of the city. By the evening of 25 August Warwick’s men were close to defeat and begged him to surrender. He called for one final do-or-die effort, and his energy was rewarded by the fortuitous arrival of reinforcements. The new troops tipped the balance, the rebels were routed and a huge slaughter resulted as Warwick’s men sought to assuage their cowardice by mayhem and atrocities. Forty-nine rebels were hanged after the battle as exemplary punishment.130 So subsided the final ripples from the Pilgrimage of Grace. The failure of the Pilgrims to arrest the Reformation may have had profound cultural effects. The high tide of Protestantism that ensued resulted in a fanatical hatred of statues, icons, sacred images and all the farrago of traditional Catholicism. Devotional art in particular was perceived as Romish idolatry. Altar screens were torn down and replaced by bare boards listing the Ten Commandments. The possibility of an English Renaissance in painting to match that on the continent was killed stone-dead.131 It has been convincingly argued that in English culture the visual was replaced by the verbal. There were no Titians, Raphaels or Michelangelos in England, and even music went into abeyance, with no significant composer between Thomas Tallis and Elgar (Handel was German). In compensation in literature Protestant England produced Marlowe, Donne, Ben Jonson, Milton and Shakespeare (though there is a school of thought that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic). The truly revolutionary nature of the Pilgrimage reveals itself not just in the religious and social road not taken as a result of its failure but in the cultural consequences of Henry VIII’s triumph.
6
Cromwell and the Levellers
AS SO OFTEN happens in human affairs, the egregious errors and despotism of one generation are paid for by subsequent ones. Just as the weak and ineffectual Louis XVI of France would eventually carry the can for the excesses of Louis XIV and Louis XV, so the ‘sins’ of the Tudors were requited in blood by the Stuarts. Charles I, the second Stuart king (1625–49), was weak, vacillating, autocratic, devious, duplicitous and even treacherous, but was unlucky to spend his last minutes on earth under a headsman’s axe. If human affairs were ever governed by justice – and we know that they are not – that was the fate that should have attended the loathsome Henry VIII, who died in his bed. All the traits of despotism, hypertrophied willpower, cunning and sheer malice were inherited by his daughter Elizabeth – perhaps not surprisingly, as we would expect the issue of a pairing between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to produce a monster. Yet the Tudors have enjoyed an overwhelmingly favourable press: Henry VIII is known as ‘bluff King Hal’, while Elizabeth is ‘Gloriana’ or the ‘Virgin Queen’. It was the misfortune of the Stuart dynasty to inherit the throne of England at the very moment Europe was undergoing a ‘general crisis’.1 Whereas the sixteenth century in Europe had been an era of optimism, fuelled by the age of discovery and the Renaissance, by the seventeenth the mood was dark and pessimistic. It was true that the Reformation had unleashed violent religious conflicts, but these were as nothing compared with the holocaust of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), a conflict which saw the population of Germany decline from 21 million to just 13 million. While the radical empiricists deny that Europe suffered a general crisis in the seventeenth century – there is a breed of scholar that invariably denies all general manifestations and believes only in unique, minute particulars – the weight of evidence for such a phenomenon is overwhelming. Its principal obvious signs were the revolt against all-powerful and hegemonic Spain by Portugal, Naples and Catalonia in three separate revolts, the Fronde rebellion in France, and the Thirty Years War itself.2 Some historians would go even further and insinuate a general crisis of worldwide dimensions, whose other overt expressions would be the collapse of the Ming dynasty and rise of the Manchus (Qing) in China (1644–62), the Shimabara uprising in Japan in 1638 and the implosion of the Ottoman Empire. In Europe some of the common factors are patent and palpable. Massive inflation was caused by the influx of precious metals sucked in from Bolivia, Mexico and China. A precipitate demographic decline accompanied the coming of climate change (the ‘Little Ice Age’). There was tension and conflict between the highly bureaucratised royal courts
and the regional, land-based aristocracy and gentry – the first appearance of the ‘Court versus Country’ collision that would last well into the eighteenth century.3 And there were the highly significant intellectual and religious changes introduced by the Reformation and the Renaissance.
In England two factors were especially salient. By the reign of Charles I three-quarters of the population still lived in the countryside and the economy was still overwhelmingly agricultural, with tin being the only important mineral mined. Out of a population of perhaps 5 million – there had been a great spurt since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign – London already boasted half a million inhabitants, at least ten times larger than Bristol and Norwich, the most populous cities thereafter. East Anglia indeed was probably the most advanced area, with a class of small farmers enjoying economic prosperity and some local political independence. The social structure had not changed greatly in its essentials for more than a century: there was still the same fairly rigid hierarchy of great nobles, landed gentry, artisans and merchants, small peasants and agricultural labourers, plus a mass of paupers. Perhaps the truly significant class was the gentry, and it is no accident that there has been a frenzied polemic among academic historians as to whether this class was rising or declining on the eve of the English Civil War.4 Ironically, the gentry, the cutting edge of the Pilgrimage of Grace, turned out to be the major beneficiaries of the dissolution of the monasteries. Elizabethan England seemed to have frozen the class structure on an ‘as is’ basis, particularly with the Statute of Labourers, which aimed to break up all associations of working men and to control tightly the supply of peasant labour. This statute prescribed a seven-year apprenticeship for any given trade, and set the wages in each trade annually at Easter through the justices of the peace.5 The wool industry was still important in the 1590s, but there were signs of latent economic crisis in the intense conflict between weavers and merchants. Another sign that beneath the surface all was not well was the violent oscillation in priorities, whereby the English economy seemed unable to decide whether it should concentrate on the cultivation of corn or cattle.6 Aside from the socio-economic rumblings, by the reign of James I (1603–25) the Protestant religion was beginning to fracture. The reign of Elizabeth is rightly seen as an epoch when Protestantism in England finally demolished Catholicism, but another of history’s iron laws was about to be triggered thereby. The French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre sagely prophesied in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev famously denounced Stalinism at the 20th Communist Party Conference: ‘Les déstaliniseurs se déstaliniseront.’7 In other words, reformers always have to beware because they in turn will become the target for even more radical reforms, and so it proved with English Protestantism. The new Protestant winds blowing from central Europe would not leave the English dispensation unscathed. By the end of James I’s reign, the effect of the Thirty Years War was to fracture Elizabeth’s ‘Protestant settlement’. The new rival to the Anglican Church was Puritanism, bringing in its wake many even more radical belief systems. Puritanism called for an even greater distance between Church and State, the abolition of a State religion, the destruction of all remaining Catholic residues and the refinement of doctrines. Heavily influenced by the Lollards, who seemed to have been routed in the fifteenth century – to such an extent that Lollardism has been dubbed ‘the childhood of Puritanism’ – the new religion’s great strength was that it was a trans-class phenomenon. Ominously, its major stronghold was the prosperous East Anglia, virtually a byword for the power of the gentry.8 In the train of the Puritans came other dispensations born in German Europe: the Anabaptists, who appealed mainly to the lower classes, and Calvinism, mainly an urban and middle-class phenomenon. Side by side with the fracturing of Protestantism went a not-unconnected exponential increase in the power of Parliament. Henry VIII, who used the House of Commons as his pet poodle, would have been appalled at the ‘treasonous’ growth in the powers of MPs by 1625.
Charles I was one of those people who displaced or rationalised his own inadequacy by systematic duplicity. Swept along by historical currents with which he was incompetent to deal, Charles was a pathetic figure who reaped what the Tudors had sown and has some residual claims on sympathy, if not as ‘Charles the Martyr’ or the ‘holocaust of direct taxation’, as Disraeli dubbed him,9 then at least as someone caught up in the whirlwind of history. James I had left him a poisoned chalice in the shape of the violently anti-Puritan churchman William Laud. James had turned to the religious conservative Laud in alarm at the inroads of Calvinism. Though non-Catholic, Laud was a ‘high’ Anglican who favoured stained glass, altar rails and sumptuous clerical dress in religious ritual, and order, obedience and ceremony in the political sphere. Bishop of London in 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Laud regarded Puritanism and all the dissenting Protestant breakaway movements as schismatic in the theological sense and punished them severely. To the Puritans Laud seemed merely popery in another guise or the Counter-Reformation by another route – fears heightened by the fervent Catholicism of Charles I’s wife Henrietta – and the fact that Laud persecuted them with all the ferocity of a latter-day Thomas More lent credence to the belief.10 Laud and Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, were Charles I’s right-hand men, and the religious conflict between Puritanism and orthodoxy went in tandem with the struggle for mastery between Charles I and Parliament. The first test of strength between monarch and House of Commons came over the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham who, in some ways conveniently, was assassinated in Portsmouth in 1628. When Parliament moved to impeach Buckingham, Charles ‘solved’ the crisis by dissolving it. Thereafter, from 1629, he ruled as a far from enlightened despot in the eleven-year period of his ‘personal rule’. The notorious Court of Star Chamber was Charles’s favourite method of control.11 The problem any king faced in trying to do without Parliament was that only the Commons could vote for subsidies, so where was the money for government to come from? Charles hit on the expedient of Ship Money. Traditionally, in wartime a king had been able to call on all littoral shires to raise money for the navy, each county contributing the cost of one ship. Charles introduced a new version of Ship Money and broke the conventions of government in two ways. First, he decreed that all counties should pay it, and, secondly, he made it a permanent tax, obtaining even in peacetime. It was first levied in 1634 and made permanent in all counties in 1636.12
The battle lines between Parliament and monarch hardened as the disbanded Commons found other ways to oppose both Ship Money and the Laudian project. The danger for Charles was that the prosperous middle classes had now taken over the role previously assumed by the barons or pretenders to the throne. Both sides thought that God was on their side and the other side was the devil – a prequel to armed conflict that always presages future huge casualties, atrocities and war crimes. Two famous cases in the 1630s showed the opposition in action. In 1638 John Lilburne, later to be famous as a leading Leveller, was punished by the Court of Star Chamber for his verbal onslaughts on Laud by being flogged all the way from Fleet Prison to Westminster and then pilloried and jailed for two years; it was the foundation of his fame.13 Meanwhile in 1637 the wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner John Hampden refused to pay Ship Money and challenged Charles’s legal right to levy it. His was a principled stand of ‘Won’t pay’ rather than ‘Can’t pay’. In 1638 the judiciary ruled in Charles’s favour, but very narrowly, with the judges voting 7–5 for the legality of Ship Money. A more cautious ruler might have read the implicit warning signs in this narrowly favourable judgement. Hampden publicised his stance, mainly on the grounds that Ship Money was part of a wider popish plot, but he touched a nerve, for Ship Money was profoundly unpopular and distasteful to the tax-paying classes on a number of grounds. Obviously financial self-interest was involved but, more seriously, the exiled Parliamentarians sincerely believed in the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ and feared that the illegal tax meant the king would escape ever having to summ
on Parliament again. It was but a short step from this to the belief that the tyrant Charles could be halted only by force.14 Meanwhile the personal rule of the king was assiduously challenged at a number of levels: by Sir Edward Coke in the name of the ‘rule of law’ and by the displaced Parliamentarians in the name of the sovereignty of Parliament: this was the essential ‘soul’ of the body politic and its aim should be the overthrow of the Stuarts’ belief in the divine right of kings in favour of the notion of kingship as a trust, which could be revoked by Parliament for bad behaviour.15
Yet what really triggered Charles I’s ultimate downfall was the unfortunate fact (for him) that he was the King of Scotland and Ireland as well as England (the Stuarts were a Scottish dynasty). Laud’s reforms resulted in a New English Prayer Book, which to Scots, now deeply attached to Calvinism, was a ‘Popish’ tome. The swearing of a formal ‘Covenant’ to oppose the encroachment of Catholicism and the high Anglicanism of Laud led very quickly to armed insurrection north of the border. Charles’s forces performed shamefully badly in the ensuing ‘Bishops’ Wars’, waged in 1639–40. The Scots gained the upper hand, defeated the royal army at the Battle of Newburn in 1640 and even occupied the city of Newcastle. A humiliating peace was patched up towards the end of the year.16 Determined to have a military solution to the problem of the rebellious Scots, Charles abandoned his personal rule and summoned the ‘Short Parliament’ of 1640 so that he could raise the money to equip a credible army. The new assembly soon showed it would not be the king’s creature: instead of meekly voting the sums Charles required, it objected strenuously to the Court of Star Chamber, arbitrary taxation (especially Ship Money) and the economic monopolies granted by the monarch. Charles’s nemesis turned out to be the firebrand John Pym, a fanatical anti-Catholic and permanent thorn in the royal side, whose speech on 17 April 1640 is regarded as one of the timeless House of Commons classics.17 After three weeks of intransigence from the Short Parliament, with nothing achieved and no money voted, Charles angrily dissolved it. Having second thoughts with the military debacle on the borders, he hastily summoned another conclave, this time the famous ‘Long Parliament’. If he thought he had suffered slings and arrows from the Short Parliament, they were as nothing to the invective with which Pym and his colleagues now assailed him. Almost the only thing to be said in Charles’s favour was that he had kept Britain out of the Thirty Years War – the only time from 1066 to the present day that the nation has avoided involvement in a major continental conflict. The blistering attacks on Charles, Laud, Strafford and all the royal policies in 1640–2 have justifiably been called ‘the revolution before the revolution’.18 The Laudian system was a particular target for Pym and his associates. Once again the time-honoured distinction between a monarch to whom loyalty was owed and evil counsellors who had led him astray was resurrected. Parliament ordered the arrest of the four most prominent: Laud, Wentworth, formerly Charles’s deputy in Ireland and ennobled as the Earl of Strafford in 1640, Sir Francis Windebank and Lord Keeper of the Seals John Finch.19