Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  36. Periodicals and newspapers published in England, 1620–75.

  In the 1640s, newspapers not only proliferated but acquired permanence: sequential issues with continuous pagination throughout the year; advertisements and special features; full coverage of domestic and foreign news. Issue 202 of The moderate intelligencer, for the week ending 1 February 1649, carried a report of the execution of Charles I and also an obituary ‘in regard this is the last time mention will be made of him as a king’; while the next five issues provided readers with ‘An epitome of the late thirty years’ war in Germany' which had just ended.

  37. Publications in seventeenth–century England.

  As in France a few years later, the abolition of government censorship triggered an unprecedented surge in printed works (as reflected in the titles of all known published works). The negotiations between Parliament, the Army and the king in 1647–8, and the debate in 1659–60 over the best form of government for the British state, likewise produced surges of printed works; but the totals of 1641–2 would not be equalled for almost a century.

  After Naseby, Charles gradually lost his other assets. In England, the remaining royalist garrisons surrendered, while in Scotland the Covenanters crushed an army of Irish invaders at the battle of Philiphaugh: only the soldiers of the ‘Confederation of Kilkenny’ continued to fight for the king. Although the Irish Catholics boasted a robust administrative structure (with a single-chamber General Assembly, and a Supreme Council, both operating under Ireland's first written Constitution, the ‘Model for Government’), and enjoyed foreign support, the conflicting aims of the papacy, France and Spain (all of which maintained diplomatic envoys and sent money and munitions) fostered Confederate divisions. Above all, the first papal nuncio ever sent to Ireland, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, became president of the Confederate Council and insisted on the restoration of all former properties of the Catholic Church as a precondition to any settlement with England – something that neither Charles nor the Westminster Parliament would ever grant. Competition between the various factions paralyzed the Confederation of Kilkenny and prevented it from sending the king any relief. Therefore, as Fairfax's army prepared to besiege Oxford, in May 1646 Charles rode out of his ‘temporary capital’ and surrendered to a detachment of Scottish troops.

  The New Model Army Takes Charge

  Charles I's surrender to the Scots created a power vacuum in England and Wales. Without the guiding hand of John Pym, who had died in 1643, the Westminster Parliament became bitterly divided between a Presbyterian majority committed to imposing the Solemn League and Covenant throughout the three kingdoms and a minority, known as ‘Independents’, who opposed it. The former found much support in London and the Home Counties, which perhaps concealed from them the fact that the rest of the country detested Presbyterianism – as did many officers and men in the New Model Army.

  Early in 1647, after the surrender of the last royalist outposts in England, the Presbyterian caucus at Westminster voted to transfer about half the New Model Army to Ireland and disband the rest. They sent commissioners to the Army's headquarters to put these measures into effect, offering to pay six weeks’ wage arrears immediately to those who agreed to serve overseas – but nothing to the others. This was outrageous: Parliament's soldiers had fought with great valour and outstanding success, and it owed them at least £1 million in unpaid wages. Fairfax and his senior officers therefore refused to discuss any demobilization plan with the commissioners sent by Parliament until they had clarified questions on full payment of arrears, indemnity for past actions and other matters. Pamphlets on these issues circulated among the rank and file, including one stating that no soldier should agree to go to Ireland until all had received their pay arrears in full.

  Irritated by the unexpected (though foreseeable) resistance to their plans, the Presbyterian MPs declared the authors of these pamphlets to be ‘enemies of the state and disturbers of the public peace’. This accusation outraged the entire army, and at the urging of Henry Ireton, deputy commander of the cavalry (and Cromwell's son-in-law), several regiments elected representatives, popularly known as Agitators. In an unprecedented exercise in military democracy these men from the rank and file met their officers and together resolved that they ‘would sooner die than disband without the utmost farthing of their arrears’.25 Amazingly, the Presbyterians failed to perceive the imminent danger and peremptorily ordered Fairfax to disperse his troops as a prelude to disbanding them. In response, and with the full support of his senior officers, Fairfax defied Parliament by summoning all units to a ‘general rendezvous’ near the town of Newmarket on 4 June 1647.

  Once again, contingency intervened. Parliament had recently paid the Scots £400,000 in return for the withdrawal of their troops from England and the surrender of the king, whom the Presbyterian leaders planned to bring to London; but while they debated the terms of the new constitutional settlement they intended to impose on Charles, he remained under guard at his palace of Holdenby, in the Midlands. On 3 June 1647 George Joyce, a former tailor and now a ‘Cornet’ (the most junior commissioned rank in the cavalry) arrived at Holdenby with a flying column of 500 troopers and took charge of the king's person. When Charles asked to see Joyce's commission, the cornet simply pointed to the soldiers arrayed behind him; and together they rode to Newmarket, where the king had a hunting lodge – and where Fairfax had summoned the New Model Army to assemble the following day. At first the Lord General was furious, refusing even to speak to Joyce, but he soon realized that control of the king's person provided the New Model Army with a priceless asset in their negotiations with Parliament, which now offered the troops full payment of arrears and an act of indemnity for wartime actions.

  No doubt Parliament hoped that the improved terms would destroy the army's unity, and indeed many officers and men accepted these terms and promptly left for Ireland; but the exodus included most of their Presbyterian allies, and ‘Independent’ officers now took their place. The regiments assembled at Newmarket approved a radical pamphlet entitled The Solemn Engagement of the Army, prepared by Ireton in association with the Agitators, which pledged that they would remain under arms until Parliament had not only redressed their material grievances but also enacted legal protection from oppression both for the troops and for ‘other freeborn people of England, to whom the consequence of our case does equally extend’.26 The troops also approved the creation of a General Council consisting of two officers and two Agitators from each regiment, as well as Fairfax and his senior officers.

  The General Council promptly resolved to march on London, accompanied by the king. They took with them a printing press, which produced multiple copies of a radical Declaration (again mostly drafted by Ireton) boldly stating that ‘We shall, before disbanding, proceed in our own and the kingdom's behalf to propound and plead for some provision for our and the kingdom's satisfaction and future security’ by virtue of the fact that ‘We were not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth and conjured by the several Declarations of Parliament to the defence of our own and the people's just rights and liberties.’ The document drew explicit parallels with the Scots, the Dutch, the Portuguese ‘and others’ who had secured their goals through armed resistance to arbitrary power, and demanded that Parliament do five things:

  • Provide full accounts of the money levied and spent during the war;

  • Issue a ‘General Act of Oblivion’ in order to remove ‘the seeds of future wars or feuds';

  • Grant freedom of worship for all law-abiding subjects;

  • Conduct a drastic electoral redistribution that would ‘render the Parliament a more equal representation of the whole’ kingdom;

  • After that, Parliament must dissolve itself so that the king could summon a new assembly according to the new franchise.27

  For the first time in England, a powerful group of citizens demanded both freedom of conscience and electoral reform –
issues that would dominate political debate in England, and indeed in the entire West, for the next two centuries. It is easy to forget that they were first articulated and discussed by the West's first national army.

  The ‘Young Statesmen’

  In July 1647 the Army's General Council discussed a yet more radical document, entitled The Heads of the Proposals, which both detailed the Army's terms for reaching a settlement with the king and proposed a new English Constitution, with a Parliament elected every two years according to a franchise apportioned according to taxation; the abolition of regalian rights and imprisonment for debt; and the right for the accused in criminal trials not to incriminate themselves. One cavalry trooper attending the General Council expressed a sense of awe at debating these weighty issues, ‘having relation to the settling of a kingdom’, because ‘We are, most of us, but young statesmen’. After ten days of animated debate, the senior officers shared the Proposals with King Charles. Having read them, he enquired what the Army proposed to do if Parliament rejected their suggestions. After an awkward silence, Colonel Thomas Rainborough blurted out: ‘If they will not agree, we will make them’.28

  The king had put his finger on a crucial weakness: London now boasted powerful new walls and could easily withstand a siege. Nevertheless, the capital was restless and the recent harvest had proved poor. Ralph Josselin, an Essex clergyman, complained in his diary about the ‘very hard times: I never knew the like want of money in my life'; while in London a crowd enraged by high meat prices burned down the excise office in Smithfield cattle market and destroyed all its records. Somewhat later, a diligent farmer on the Isle of Wight wrote that, although his homeland had been ‘the paradise of England, now, Anno 1647, it is just like the other parts of the kingdom: a melancholy, dejected, sad place’.29 With rapidly rising food prices, a plague outbreak and the ceaseless tax burden to support the army that refused to disband, hardship and discontent increased while in the capital trade and industry atrophied.

  These tensions created new divisions in Parliament between the ‘Independents’ who wanted to appease the Army and the Presbyterians who did not. As the latter lost ground they organized a mass demonstration outside the Palace of Westminster that got out of hand. On 26 July 1647 a mob of apprentices and ex-soldiers burst into both Houses of Parliament yelling ‘Traytors, put them out, hang their guts about their necks’ and ‘if they will not grant your desires, cutt their throates’. The Speakers of both Houses, followed by over 60 MPs and peers, now fled to the Army and appealed for its protection.30 A week later, sympathetic units of the capital's garrison opened one of the gates, which allowed Fairfax and his soldiers to enter London without firing a shot. They wore laurel leaves as they escorted the fugitive parliamentarians back to Westminster in triumph, and installed the king (under guard) at Hampton Court Palace, before withdrawing to Putney, strategically located on the Thames between Parliament and the king. There the Army's General Council resumed its discussions on how best to arrange the affairs of the kingdom.

  The composition of the Army had changed since it left Newmarket. Above all, many London radicals known as ‘Levellers’ enlisted to fill vacant places in the regiments – and also to influence the Army's political agenda. Many secured election as ‘Agitators’. Unlike most of the radical groups that flourished in the 1640s, the Levellers had no religious programme but instead demanded wide-ranging social and political reforms, including the right of each male citizen to participate in selecting his rulers. In October 1647 the General Council listened to a reading of An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right, a concise and eloquent pamphlet approved by the Agitators. After repeating the demand that Parliament must dissolve itself, the Agreement argued that sovereignty should pass to a single-chamber assembly, chosen every two years by an electorate ‘proportioned according to the number of the inhabitants’, whose primary function was to secure certain ‘native rights’ for all Englishmen: freedom from religious compulsion and from conscription; a universal indemnity ‘for anything said or done in reference to the late public differences'; laws that applied to all citizens equally; and a written Constitution. Finally, the document called on the army to impose its revolutionary programme by force if necessary.31

  Some 50 officers and men, including some of the new Leveller Agitators, now took part in one of the most famous debates in the history of democracy. After lengthy common prayers, the participants began to debate the Agreement. Colonel Thomas Rainborough, a recent convert to the Leveller cause, made the case for universal manhood suffrage with particular eloquence, using words that still inspire readers today:

  Really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live, [just] as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own counsel to put himself under that government. And I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.

  When Ireton continued to insist that only those who owned property should vote, Trooper Edward Sexby (formerly a grocer's apprentice but, after four years of valiant service, now one of the Army's leading activists) proudly spoke for the rank and file: ‘We have engaged in this kingdom, and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover out birthrights and privileges as Englishmen.’ He continued: ‘There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives [in the war]; we have had little property in the kingdom as to our estates, yet we have had a birthright. But it seems now [that] except a man has a fixed estate in this kingdom, he has no right in this kingdom – I wonder we were so much deceived!‘32

  Hot exchanges on the franchise (and its limits) continued until the weary stenographers laid down their pens. We therefore do not know for certain the outcome of the debate at Putney, but the majority apparently agreed ‘that all soldiers and others, if they be not servants or beggars, ought to have voices in electing those that shall represent them in Parliament’. The Levellers thus carried the day, and immediately sought to capitalize on their success. Although the senior officers imposed a news blackout, the Agitators circulated printed copies of the Agreement and invited soldiers to sign it in anticipation of another march on London, this time to dissolve the Long Parliament by force. Other pamphlets at the time advocated mutiny. ‘You have men amongst you as fit to govern as others to be removed’, A call to all the soldiers of the Army insisted, ‘AND WITH A WORD YOU CAN CREATE NEW OFFICERS. Necessity has no law.’ The pamphlet also described King Charles as ‘a man of blood’ – a biblical term with the clear connotation that he should be put to death.33 Two regiments stationed at Ware, not far from London, promptly expelled their officers, placed copies of the Agreement in their hatbands, and chanted ‘England's freedom! Soldiers’ rights!’

  Fairfax reacted forcefully. Showing great personal courage, he and a group of senior officers rode among the mutineers at Ware, beating them with their swords until the papers disappeared. Afterwards he convened a court martial that condemned several of them to death (although, in the end, only one was executed) and drew up a Remonstrance in which he pledged to ‘live and die with the army'; to secure its full pay arrears and an amnesty; and to replace the Long Parliament with a new representative assembly whose ‘freedom and equality of elections’ would ‘render the House of Commons (as near as may be) an equal representative of the people that are to elect’.34

  In one sense, the failure of the mutiny at Ware doomed the Leveller cause. Fairfax's Remonstrance was less ‘democratic’ than the Agreement, yet it went far beyond any of the Army's earlier constitutional pronouncements – and its programme was attainable, whereas that of the Levellers was not. No royalist could accept a settlement that excluded the king, while no Presbyterian would accept a scheme that granted an equal voice in parliamentary elections to saints and sinners alike. Anarchy would have resulted had the Levellers got their way in
1647 and persuaded the Army to dissolve the Long Parliament by force; and the only person who stood to profit from anarchy was Charles Stuart.

  ‘We suffer dearth: if warrs renue twixt the twoe kingdomes, both shall rue’: The Second Civil War35

  The king had followed the Putney Debates closely. Expressions like ‘man of blood’ led him to fear assassination, and in November 1647 he fled from Hampton Court. He was soon recaptured and, this time, the Army leaders (who saw his flight as breaking his parole) locked him up in prison. Cromwell and some other senior officers seem to have decided at this point that no understanding could be reached with Charles, and instead envisaged depriving him of his office. The royal prisoner, fully aware of this development, therefore entertained the ‘propositions’ clandestinely proffered by commissioners from the Scots, his erstwhile captors, who had concluded that their English allies were not capable of obtaining a settlement that would guarantee all the concessions they had gained. In December 1647 the king signed a secret ‘Engagement’ to establish Presbyterianism in England for a trial period of three years and to allow a committee of theologians nominated by both sides to determine a permanent religious settlement. In return, the Scots promised to send an army ‘into England for preservation and establishment of religion, for defence of His Majesty's person and authority, and restoring him to his government’.36 The Scots had thus declared war on the Westminster Parliament and its Army.