by Frank McLynn
Windebank was a target for his anti-Puritan zealotry and his encouragement of Charles in his desire to impose a military solution on Scotland, while John Finch was in the line of fire for having presided over the trial of John Hampden. These two made good their escape to the continent, Windebank to France and Finch to Holland, but Strafford and Laud were caught securely in the net and so well guarded that Charles’s attempts to spring them clandestinely from jail came to nothing. Strafford, still bearing his grandiose title of lord deputy in Ireland, was initially impeached for treason but the charges would not stick.20 Parliament then acted just as despotically as Charles by resurrecting the medieval Bill of Attainder, which basically allowed Parliament to put to death anyone it chose without giving further reason, subject only to a simple majority in the Commons. A campaign of intimidation secured the required majority, by 204 to 59. Despite promising Strafford faithfully that he would not allow him to be put to death, Charles weakly gave his assent to the Bill of Attainder, effectively abandoning him and Laud to their fate. Three weeks later Strafford was executed on Tower Hill (12 May 1641), after being given the last sacraments by his friend the tearful and distraught Laud.21 The archbishop himself languished in prison until his execution in 1645. Charles seems to have thought that his assent to the attainder would conciliate Parliament, but MPs knew well enough that this time around he was not in a position to dissolve the House to avoid the attainder proceedings, as he had done in the case of Buckingham in 1628. Pym and his friends were in no mood to extend olive branches to a man they considered a popish tyrant, so pressed on with a wholesale programme of reform: gelding the Star Chamber, abolishing Ship Money and customs duties, enacting a law that stipulated that only Parliament could dissolve itself. The Triennial Bill required Parliament to be summoned every three years, whether or not the monarch called it.22 Whereas the constitutional changes might have been considered mild, in the sense that they simply took the country back to the status quo as in the reign of James, the religious measures the Long Parliament enacted were radical and revolutionary. Radicals like the poet John Milton hailed the coming extirpation of episcopacy.23 In vain did Charles I lament that the country was heading down the road of Tyler and Cade.24 His counter-strikes were hamfisted and amateurish, such as his dabbling in a plot by Scottish sympathisers to seize Covenanter leaders. He still imagined that if he could forge a lasting peace in Scotland, he might be free of the financial shackles of the Long Parliament and thus able to dissolve it.
The outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in 1641 took away the last vestiges of royal manoeuvring space. The shocking outburst of violence there had many causes, all exacerbated by Strafford’s despotic rule, but the ensuing massacres and atrocities lost nothing in the telling and were used as black propaganda by Protestant Parliamentarians insisting that Britain was already involved in a ferocious religious war. Some of the more extreme elements even alleged that Charles was complicit or in sympathy with the Catholic rebels. It was Ireland more than anything else that allowed the Puritans to claim that the general war that broke out in 1642 was a war of religion; some historians have agreed with them, dubbing the events of 1642–5 not a British revolution but the last European war of religion, and that what is termed the English Revolution should really be called ‘the second Reformation’.25 Pym used the occasion of the Irish rebellion to move in for the kill. First he got the Long Parliament to sign up to a bill that ensured the king could only use councillors approved by Parliament. Perhaps the pace of change at a moment of crisis was too much for some Parliamentarians, for this engendered surprising opposition and was passed only by 151 votes to 110. Nothing daunted, Pym next persuaded the Long Parliament to draw up a ‘Grand Remonstrance’ for presentation to the king.26 This was a lengthy and devastating indictment of the king’s entire reign and a wholesale assault on the royal prerogative and squeaked through the Commons very narrowly, by 159 votes to 148. Predictably Charles repudiated the charges, refused to accept the document and declared defiantly that he was now the sole bulwark against the floodgates of anarchy Pym was opening.27 Pym followed up with the Militia Bill, which effectively transferred control of England’s armed forces from the king to Parliament, but was thought a step too far by a significant minority in the Commons and probably by a majority in the Lords.28 Finally Charles heard the false rumour that Pym intended to impeach his queen, Henrietta, for her Catholicism. The provocation by Parliament led Charles to what some consider his most egregious act of folly. On 4 January 1642 he entered Parliament with some 200 armed men, intending to arrest six Parliamentarians, including Pym, but found, to use his own famous phrase that ‘the birds had flown’. Forewarned, Pym and the other potential detainees had slipped out of the chamber by a side door.29 The resulting uproar in overwhelmingly pro-Protestant and Parliament London was so great that the king fled the hostile capital, in mortal fear of the mob. There followed a period of low-level hostilities and guerrilla warfare between armed bands of the king and Parliament while Charles tried, with some success, to appeal over the heads of his Parliament to his people. Finally he raised the royal standard at Nottingham in August 1642 and declared Parliament and its forces to be in treasonable revolt against his own divinely constituted authority. The English Civil War had begun.
The bloody conflict that began was prolonged and merciless because for a long time neither side had a decisive advantage. Charles probably won the first major battle, Edgehill (23 October 1642), on points but lacked both the resources and the military skill to follow up with a knockout blow. The parliamentary armies, initially under the command of the Earls of Manchester and Essex, had to tread carefully and to try as far as possible to avoid potentially decisive battles, for, if they beat Charles on the battlefield, he would still be king, but if they lost he would undoubtedly execute the vanquished as traitors.30 The war settled into a stalemate of ineffectual sieges, small-scale skirmishes and guerrilla activity, with the royalists broadly controlling the west of England and Parliament the east. It was not until 1644 that Parliament felt confident enough to risk a major battle, but the result, at Marston Moor in July, was nearly decisive. Charles and his Cavaliers suffered a severe reverse in an engagement that has the dubious distinction of being the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil.31 Marston Moor should have been the effective end of the Civil War, but Essex and Manchester made serious blunders in the winter of 1644–5, allowing Charles to survive and regroup. By this time the rising star in the parliamentary ranks was Oliver Cromwell, who saw that victory would come only when Essex and Manchester had been demoted. Always a consummately skilful politician, Cromwell persuaded the Commons to pass the Self-Denying Ordinance, which stipulated that members of parliament should not serve in the army. This was his clever way of getting rid of Essex and Manchester, whom Cromwell replaced with his faithful acolyte Thomas Fairfax. It was symptomatic of Cromwell’s political guile that he engineered a situation whereby he himself was not subject to the Self-Denying Ordinance so that, still a serving MP, he was also in effect the generalissimo of the army.32 The Ordinance also called for a professional fighting force, to be termed the New Model Army. It was supposed to be – and to some extent was – a ‘People’s Army’ a forerunner of similar bodies in the French and later revolutions. Well trained and equipped, the new force proved its mettle at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645 when Parliament finally won the decisive victory that had so long eluded it.33 Cromwell distinguished himself in the fighting, and Charles fled north to Scotland, but surrendered to the Scots at Newark in 1646. The winning over of Scotland was another of Cromwell’s triumphs, achieved on the understanding that Presbyterianism would be introduced as the national religion in England. Charles was then handed over to Cromwell and Parliament by the Scots on payment of a ‘ransom’ of £200,000 and placed under house arrest at Holdenby, Northamptonshire.
It is difficult to overstate the objective devastation and sense of chaos engendered by the Civil War, and the later hostilities en
ding with the Battle of Worcester in 1651. The whole of the British Isles had suffered grievously in what some analysts rank as one of the most brutal wars of all time. There is fairly general agreement that some 190,000 died in the fighting in England (90,000 battle casualties and another 100,000 who died of wounds and disease), and 120,000 were taken prisoner. At least 60,000 (a very conservative estimate) died in Scotland, while in Ireland the colossal fatalities are generally considered unquantifiable.34 The high estimate of 618,000 dead (112,000 Protestants and 504,000 Catholics) may not be an exaggeration. This would provide a total fatality of nearly 900,000; even the most conservative ‘downsizing’ appraisal provides a figure of no fewer than half a million.35 To put it another way, England suffered a 3.7 per cent loss of population, Scotland 6 per cent and Ireland a staggering 41 per cent. Placing these figures in context, we should remember that the entire four-year holocaust of the American Civil War of 1861–5 produced 620,000 deaths, while even the Great Hunger in Ireland in 1845–52 resulted in ‘only’ a 16 per cent loss of human life (mass emigration was another matter). The most horrendous bloodletting in modern times, by the Soviet Union in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 1941–5, caused a death toll of 25 per cent of the population.36 Small wonder that many people living in 1645 felt they had been sucked into a black hole and that they were living in ‘a world turned upside down’. Even at the military level the situation was chaotic, for many vigilante bands and groups of thugs and gangsters appeared on the fringes of the fighting, further complicating campaigns and issues. The most significant ‘third party’ were the Clubmen, local self-help groups or vigilantes, as their name suggests usually armed with only primitive weaponry. Wearing white ribands and declaring a plague on both houses, the Clubmen hoped to emerge as a viable tertius gaudens. Because their natural inclination as conservative groups was to support the royalists at a pinch, Cromwell identified the Clubmen as an enemy who should not be ignored. Their heartland was Dorset and Hampshire, and in an hour’s stiff fighting on Hambledon Hill, Dorset, in August 1645 Cromwell’s men encountered ferocious resistance before dispersing the Clubmen; out of some 2,000 who engaged with the Parliamentarians that day, 60 lay dead on the field, 200 were wounded and another 200 taken prisoner; the rest fled into the Dorset wilderness, never to regroup.37
The most obvious sign of the chaos world of the 1640s was the shivering of Protestantism into myriad sects and cults. While mainstream Protestantism largely took the form of Prebyterianism and Puritanism, themselves offshoots of the original episcopal Protestantism, the fractionalism of even those radical sects continued apace. It was these seventeenth-century manifestations of religion that became particularly associated with the rise of capitalism, as shown in the classic works by Weber and Tawney.38 The historiography of 1640s England mirrors this splintering. Vulgar Marxism has sometimes been too ready to conclude that religion must always be the opium of the people, or the fantasy of Man afflicted by his own inadequacy, and that therefore the Protestantism of the Parliamentarians must have been ‘nothing but’ the interests of a rising (and temporarily ruling) class, a mere epiphenomenon. Vulgar anti-Marxists have been too ready to indict Marxist historians of believing in an overschematic and reductive ‘transition’ from feudalism to capitalism, somehow choosing the English Civil War as its epiphany.39 The truth is that in the 1640s religion and politics interpenetrated to an extent that is hard for the modern mind to encompass. Whereas a modern thinker might frame arguments for the ideal society in terms of economic and social statistics, the men of the 1640s invariably referred the issue to the Bible. A nuanced class interpretation of the ‘English Revolution’ is perfectly valid and possible as long as it does not become hypostasised as mere theory, and as long as it includes the religious factor. The more sophisticated Marxists were always aware that religion and socio-economic thought could not be reduced to ‘superstructure’ and ‘base’. Engels himself preferred to use ‘correlations’, pointing out that there was a connection between capitalism and Calvinism, in that predestination (the religious doctrine) was analogous to the theory of the market. Just as good works would avail a man nothing in the quest for Heaven, as only predetermined grace was efficacious, so mere entrepreneurial talent did not suffice in capitalism, as the market had its own iron rules.40
By the end of the Civil War the Presbyterians, in the majority in Parliament, were becoming seriously alarmed by the rise and proliferation of dissenting and left-wing sects within Protestantism; it even seemed to them that Charles I might have been right after all when he prophesied that the end of episcopacy was also the end of order and the beginning of chaos. The principal strand in what has been called ‘the Radical Reformation’ was furnished by the Anabaptists, who began in Germany and influenced the Peasant Rising there.41 Whereas Martin Luther had believed in the importance of grace, he drew the line both at predestination and the abolition of churches and hierarchy, as also the concomitant social doctrines; it was no accident that he was an arch-denouncer of the German Peasants’ Revolt. The Anabaptists by contrast believed in adult baptism and the literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, rejected oaths, capital punishment and all the trappings of magistracy. Bitterly opposed to feudal oppression as they were, it was not surprising to find Anabaptists opposed to all constituted authority and headed in the direction of political radicalism. By 1640, more than a century into its existence, Anabaptism was a creed whose tenets were absolute social equality and revolution to achieve the ideal Christian commonwealth. Anabaptism, itself an offshoot of Protestantism, loathed all established churches, priests and other religious elites or intermediaries, but soon spawned a number of breakaway movements in turn, principally the Mennonites, the Hutterites and the Amish. Perhaps its most important offspring were the Quakers or Friends, rightly identified by Voltaire as the ‘children’ of the Anabaptists.42 Quakerism went beyond the Anabaptists by rejecting not just baptism but all sacraments; religion was to be entirely a matter of communion between the individual and God, the Friends would congregate merely to share each other’s personal revelations reached by meditation; pacifism was mandatory and there was to be complete equality for women.43 Many of the sects in the Radical Reformation emphasised the original teachings of Jesus, as opposed to the later Christology of St Paul; the difference between the doctrines of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus has rightly been compared to the gap between orthodox Marxism and Marxism–Leninism. Yet many others emphasised mostly the core idea of antinomianism – the idea that there was no need to obey human laws, as faith alone was sufficient for salvation. The emphasis on faith rather than good works had been there in the beginning of Protestantism with Luther, but he vehemently denounced antinomianism. Finding it difficult to make out the antinomian case convincingly from the Gospels, sects with this notion as their core belief tended to gravitate to St Paul, from whose writings a specious case for the ideology could be made out.44
By the 1640s, with Puritans, Quakers, Baptists and Anabaptists well to the fore, the splintering of Protestantism seemed to have gone as far as it could. Yet all these creeds were recognisably Christian; already they were being overtaken by the second wave of cults and sects, which increasingly detached themselves from a Christian base. The Muggletonians were perhaps just still inside an ecumenical broad tent. Unitarian (deniers of the Trinity), hostile to reason and with a fondness for publicly cursing all who criticised them, the Muggletonians held the self-contradictory belief that Jesus Christ was indeed the Son of God but that God never intervened in the affairs of the world. God himself was precisely defined as a man between five and six feet who lived in a physical heaven about six miles above the earth.45 Another eccentric notion was that when Jesus was crucified, there was a temporary power vacuum in heaven, and God the Father had to deputise Elijah and Moses until the Resurrection. Muggletonians also rejected the mind–body dualism, and argued that with no ‘spirit’ it followed that there could not be ghosts, witches or other supernatural phenomena.
In rejecting the rigid separation of mind and matter, they anticipated by a couple of centuries William James’s later notion of ‘neutral monism’. As a Quaker-like community, the Muggletonians survived until late in the eighteenth century.46 Another sect with superficial similarities to the Quakers was the Seekers, a religion founded by the three Legate brothers in the 1620s. Starting from an anticlerical and anti-Trinity stance, the Seekers soon left Christianity further and further astern as they embraced millenarianism, hermeticism, mortalism (the soul is not immortal), gnosticism and occultism in a seam-bursting eclecticism that focused mainly on Hermes Trismegistus as the true god; the Seekers’ one saving grace was that they advocated religious tolerance.47 Yet another sect to abandon Christianity were the Ranters, who explicitly embraced antinomianism and pantheism. Starting from the Calvinistic premiss of predestination or predeterminism, they argued that this must logically provide a licence to do as one pleased. Scripture, tradition, authority, a personal god, conventional morality were all jettisoned. A Ranter, they claimed, was free from all conventional restraints, sin was purely the product of the imagination, and private property was wrong.48
