Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  14. Walter, Understanding popular violence, 259, ‘Humble Petition’ of the Suffolk clothiers; 261, speech of Sir Simonds d'Ewes to the Commons; and 288, Sir Thomas Barrington's report to Parliament (with other similar statements).

  15. HMC Report on the Franciscan Manuscripts (Dublin, 1906), 112, letter from London to Fr. Hugh Bourke, 29 Dec. 1641; ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity’, 61–2, orders of the Lords Justices, Jan. and June 1642.

  16. CSPD 1641–43, 508, Mr Harrison to John Bradley (in Paris), 28 Dec. 1643.

  17. Abbott, Writings and Speeches, I, 314, Cromwell's speech in the House of Commons on 9 Dec. 1644.

  18. [Parker,] The king's cabinet (published 14 July 1645), 1, Charles to the queen, 9 Jan. 1645, postscript.

  19. Ibid.; Hirst, ‘Reading’, 213. Hirst also notes both the hostile reception, as recorded in the London newspapers, and the fact that Parliament put the original documents on display to demonstrate they were not forgeries. For the later career of Wallis, see ch. 22 above.

  20. Symmons, A vindication, 241 (part of ‘A true parallel between the sufferings of our Saviour and our Soveraigne’). Hirst, ‘Reading’, and Potter, Secret rites, 59–64, discuss both content and context of The king's cabinet.

  21. Cressy, England on edge, 298, quoting Nehemiah Wallington's diary, 6 Feb. 1642 OS. See ch. 18 above for more on the ‘educational revolution’ in Tudor and Stuart England.

  22. Ibid., 313–14, quoting Thomas Knyvett to his mother, May 1642; Eisenstadt and Schluter, ‘Early modernities’, 25.

  23. [Parker,] The king's cabinet, preface, 43; Hirst, ‘Reading’, focuses on this important gender dimension.

  24. [Parker,] The king's cabinet, 7–8, to Henrietta Maria, 5 Mar. 1645; 16, to Ormond, 27 Feb. 1645; 46–7 and 54–6 (‘Annotations’ arranged in six heads).

  25. Woolrych, Soldiers and statesmen, 38; Firth, The Clarke Papers, I, 425–6, ‘Colonel Wogan's narrative’. Although Wogan wrote much later, his reliability on these matters is upheld by Norris, ‘Edward Sexby’, 41–2.

  26. Rushworth, Historical Collections, VI, 512, ‘A solemn engagement of the army’, 5 June 1647.

  27. Ibid., VI, 564–70, ‘A declaration, or representation from His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax and of the army under his command’, 14 June 1647. Woolrych, Britain, 371, attributes its authorship ‘essentially’ to Ireton.

  28. Gardiner, Constitutional documents, 316–26, ‘The Heads of the Proposals … to be tendered to the commissioners of Parliament residing with the army’, debated by the General Council, 16–26 July 1647 OS; Firth, Clarke Papers, 1, 213, speech by William Allen. For the context, and for the senior officers' discussions with Charles, see Woolrych, Soldiers and statesmen, 153–79.

  29. Macfarlane, Diary of Ralph Josselin, 87 (entry for 24 Feb. 1647); Bamford, A royalist's notebook, 112. Coates, The impact, 218, charts the impact of the 1646 harvest on London prices.

  30. Adamson, ‘The English nobility’, 567–8, quotations from depositions of two eyewitnesses of the siege of Parliament on 26 July 1647. Clarendon later asserted that the decision of the Speakers, peers and MPs to take refuge with the Army ‘appeared to every stander-by so stupendous a thing, that it is not to this day understood’: History, IV, 244–5.

  31. Gardiner, Constitutional documents, 333–5, An Agreement of the People. The author was either John Wildman (Morrill and Baker, ‘The case’, 121), or William Walwyn (Woolrych, Soldiers and statesmen, 215).

  32. Firth, Clarke Papers, I, 301–2, 304 and 322–3: Rainborough, Ireton and Sexby in the debate on 29 Oct. 1647. Note that no one suggested extending the franchise to any ‘she’ – whether poor or propertied. Morrill and Baker, ‘The case of the armie’, argue that Sexby composed the pamphlet entitled The case of the armie truly stated, which triggered the debate at Putney and formed the basis for The Agreement. On his remarkable career, see ODNB, s.v. ‘Sexby, Edward’.

  33. [John Wildman, a Leveller spokesman at Putney], A cal to all the souldiers of the Army, 7 (second pagination: capitals in the original).

  34. On the mutiny at Ware, and the Remonstrance, see Woolrych, Soldiers and statesmen, 279–86.

  35. Hindle, ‘Dearth’, 65, quoting a verse written by the vicar of Hartpury, Gloucestershire, in his Parish Register.

  36. Gardiner, Constitutional documents, 247–52, ‘The Engagement between the king and the Scots’, 26 Dec. 1647.

  37. Thirsk, ‘Agricultural policy’, 301; Macfarlane, Diary of Ralph Josselin, 125, 129, entries for 9 May and 28 June 1648. Bamford, A royalist's notebook, 120–1.

  38. Howell, Epistolae, III, 26, letter of 10 Dec. 1647 to his nephew (the output of the Mint fell by 90 per cent in 1648; see Coates, Impact, 229); Wildman, Truths triumph, 4–5 (published 1 Feb. 1648, describing his speech on 18 Jan.).

  39. AMAE (P) CPA 50/24v–25, Mazarin to M. de Grignon, 10 Apr. 1648 NS, register copy. See a similar lament one month later in Chéruel, Lettres, III, 1,023.

  40. Macfarlane, Diary of Ralph Josselin, 138, entry for 17 Sep. 1648; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, I, 636 and 641, Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall, Warrington, 20 Aug. 1648, and to the Derby House Committee, Wigan, 23 Aug. 1648.

  41. Rushworth, Historical Collections the fourth and last part, II, 1,396–8 (the ‘charge’ read by John Cook, ‘solicitor-general for the Commonwealth’); 1,406–14 (depositions); and 1,421 (sentence). ODNB, s.v. George Joyce, notes that astrologer William Lilly twice named Joyce as the executioner – once in testimony given at the Restoration and again in his autobiography – but casts doubt on his assertion. The changing composition of the High Court is chronicled in ODNB s.v. ‘regicides’.

  42. Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, II, 2–4, ‘An Act of thos present Parliament for constituting a counsell of state for the Comonwealth of England’, 13 Feb. 1649; 18–20, ‘An Act for abolishing the kingly office in England and Ireland, and the Dominions thereunto belonging’, 17 Mar. 1649; 24, ‘An Act for the abolishing the House of Peers’, 19 Mar. 1649; and 122, ‘An act declaring and constituting the people of England to be a Commonwealth and Free-State’, 19 May 1649. None of these and other constitutional acts mentioned Scotland: only ‘England and Ireland, and the Dominions thereunto belonging’.

  43. Charles I, Eikon Basilike (2005 edition), 183–4.

  44. Boulton, ‘Food prices’, 468 and 481–2; Firth, Cromwell's army, 184–5; Gaunt, Natural and political observations, 37. Macfarlane, Diary of Ralph Josselin, 152–85, entries for 7 Jan., 18 Feb., 15 Apr., 20 May, 7 Oct., 25 Nov. and 16 Dec. 1649 reported ‘all things were wonderful dear’.

  45. A true representation (24 May 1649). See similar heart-wrenching complaints from early 1649 in Thirsk and Cooper, Seventeenth-century economic documents, 51–2, and Hindle, ‘Dearth’, 84–6. Hindle notes with justified disapproval how ‘historians have made so little attempt to take seriously the harvest crisis of the late 1640s’: ibid., 65.

  46. Acts done, 35–8, ‘Proclamation of Charles the Second, king of Great Britain, France and Ireland’, 5 Feb. 1649, and ‘Act anent securing the Covenant, religion and peace of the kingdom’, 7 Feb. 1649. Although the Rump abolished monarchy in England and Ireland, it said nothing about Scotland. It is ironic that it thus wished to disaggregate the composite state created in 1603, in which it saw no benefit – and that the Scots disagreed.

  47. Bremer, ‘In defence of regicide’, 103, quoting John Hull's journal. Some committed themselves after news arrived of Cromwell's victory at Dunbar in September 1650, but commitment was neither official nor universal.

  48. Anthony Ascham murdered in Spain; Isaac Dorislaus murdered in Holland. On the narrow escape of Bradshaw in Russia, see Gordon, Diary, I, 251–2.

  49. Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, II, 325–9, ‘An Act for subscribing the Engagement’, 2 Jan. 1650; Worden, ‘The politics of Marvell's Horatian Ode’, 526–7, quoting Sir Henry Vane, jr, former governor of Massachusetts.

  50. MacDonald, The poems of Andrew Marvell, 118–21. Worden, ‘The politics’, 531,
argues that the work ‘was at least conceived in the week or so after Cromwell's return. The poem could have been completed then.’

  51. Balfour, Historical works, III, 409 (prices), 432–3 (weather) and 436–7 (witches); Larner, Source book, sub annis 1649–50; Larner, Enemies of God, 61 and 74–5.

  52. Hobbes, Leviathan, 491, 484, and 154 (for the dating of the work, probably begun early in 1649 and completed late in 1650, I follow Richard Tuck's introduction to the 1996 edition); Skinner, ‘Conquest and consent’, 97, quotes Hobbes's later boast (against criticisms by John Wallis); Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 56–7, reproduces and discusses the Dunbar medal; Bremer, ‘In defense of the regicide’, 118–24, prints and discusses John Cotton's sermon of thanksgiving for Dunbar; Bush, The correspondence of John Cotton, 458–64 and 468–70, prints Cotton's laudatory letter to Cromwell of 28 July 1651, and Cromwell's welcoming reply on 2 Oct.

  53. Abbott, Writings and Speeches, II, 463 and 467, Cromwell to Lenthall, 4 and 8 Sep. 1651.

  54. Ibid., 325, Cromwell to Lenthall, 4 Sep. 1650. Rommelse, ‘The role of mercantilism’, 597–8, stresses how the nature of the Rump facilitated state-building.

  55. See ch. 15 below on the impact of the Republic on Anglo-America. The second fleet carried instructions that, if necessary, the fleet should ‘rouse the planters' servants against their masters’ – a truly revolutionary measure that, although never put into effect, would be bitterly recalled by the planters' descendants during the American Revolution a century later. My thanks to Thomas Ingersoll for this detail.

  56. Scott, Politics, 201; Terry, The Cromwellian Union, xxi-xxiii, ‘A declaration of the Parliament of England, concerning the settlement of Scotland’, 28 Oct. 1651. The document proved hard for Scots Presbyterians to swallow, not only because it broke the Kirk's monopoly of legal worship but because it involved joining a Republic, which went against clause three of the Covenant (safeguarding monarchy).

  57. Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, II, 598–603, ‘Act for the settlement of Ireland’, 12 Aug. 1652. The ‘Grand Remonstrance’ of Dec. 1641 had already stated that the costs of suppressing the Irish rebellion would be reimbursed from estates forfeited by the rebels: Gardiner, Constitutional documents, 205. The Act of Settlement effectively sentenced around 100,000 Irish men and women to death – although relatively few were executed.

  58. Woolrych, Britain, 528–36; Osborne, Letters, 76, to Sir William Temple, her future husband, 24 Apr. 1653.

  59. Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, II, 813–22, ‘The government of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the Dominions thereunto belonging’, 16 Dec. 1653. Although a few other states tolerated freedom of private worship, the Instrument of Government was the first to guarantee freedom of public worship.

  60. Bush, Cotton, 461–2, on Cotton; Junge, Flottenpolitik, 246–7, on Gage. Cromwell had already sent forces to America in 1654, to seize both New Netherland and French forts in Acadia.

  61. Firth, Clarke Papers, III, 207, ‘Edward Montagu's notes on the debates in the Protector's council’, 20 Apr. and 20 July 1654; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, III, 860, Cromwell to Admiral William Goodson.

  62. Bethel, The world's mistake in Oliver Cromwell, 9; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, III, 857–8, Cromwell to General Fortescue, Oct. 1655; Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, 136–7, quoting ‘A Declaration of his Highness, inviting the people of England and Wales to a day of solemn fasting and humiliation’ (Mar. 1656). Gardiner, Constitutional documents, 447–59, prints The humble petition and advice. Worden, op. cit., 141–5, shows that the failure of the Western Design led Cromwell to decline the crown.

  63. Gaunt, Natural and political observations, 37 (‘sickly years’); De Beer, Diary of John Evelyn, 388, 393. Cromwell had intended to go to Westminster by boat to dissolve Parliament on 4 Feb. 1658, but because the river was partially ice-bound he had to travel by coach.

  64. Macfarlane, Diary of Ralph Josselin, 435, entry for 28 Nov. 1658; Rutt, Diary of Thomas Burton, III, 256.

  65. Gardiner, Constitutional documents, 465, the Declaration of Breda, issued by Charles on 4 Apr. 1660. Monck had followed just the same policy since February, leaving Parliament to make all the hard decisions. ODNB, s.v. ‘Monck’, by Ronald Hutton, probably comes as close as is possible to ascertaining Monck's motives.

  66. Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland’, 453–4, quoting ‘A light to the blind’, probably written by the Irish Catholic Nicholas Plunkett. No Union Parliament would meet again until 1802.

  67. Stoyle, ‘Remembering’, 19–20; Gentles, ‘The iconography’, 101, and plate; TCD Ms 813/286, deposition of William Collis, Kildare, 4 May 1643 (the deposition originally gave the victim's name, but it was later deleted). See also Ms 831/176, the gang-rape described in the deposition of Andrew Adaire, Mayo, 9 Jan. 1643 (‘severall of the rebells of Phelim o Dowles company ravished the wiffe of one Samuel Barber’).

  68. Thomas, Religion, 366 and 379 (see the originals in Bod. Ashmole Ms. 184, ‘Figures set upon horary questions by Mr William Lilly’ (for 1644–5) and Ms. 185 (for 1647–9)).

  69. Cressy, England on edge, 85; Carlton, Going to the wars, 305–6. For similar expressions of grief by the wives and widows of men in naval service, see Rodger, The command, 127–8.

  70. Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (by 1688, the year of Bunyan's death, 11 editions of Part I and 2 of Part II, and translations into Dutch, French and (apparently) Welsh, had appeared); Fox, A journal, another classic of religious literature largely composed in the 1670s, was not published until 1694.

  71. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 361, notes that only two statutes from 1641–2 were repealed: the Act excluding bishops from the House of Lords and the Triennial Act.

  72. Wheeler, Making, 195. Admittedly, each monarch could only collect customs and excise legally after Parliament gave its consent at the start of each reign.

  73. McKenny, ‘Seventeenth-century land settlement’, 198, Hyde to Mr Betius, 29 May 1654 OS.

  74. Pestana, English Atlantic, 223, Instructions of Charles II to the governor of Virginia, 12 Sep. 1662.

  75. Pepys, Diary, VIII, 262–9, entries for 12–13 June 1667; CSPD 1667, 185–90, letters dated 14 and 15 June 1667.

  76. Grey, Debates, VIII, 264, speech of Sir Henry Capel, 7 Jan. 1681. Capel also noted how Richelieu and Mazarin had ‘suppressed all the great men of France, and all to support absolute monarchy’.

  77. Plumb, The growth, 60.

  78. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 410–11, James II, ‘Declaration of Indulgence’, 27 Apr. 1688. On 4 May 1688 James ordered the public reading in churches to take place on 20 and 27 May in London and two weeks later elsewhere. Compare the orders issued by his father in 1637 to use ‘Laud's Liturgy’ in all the churches of Scotland.

  79. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 441–2, the bishops' ‘Petition’, 19 May 1688 (the day before the first reading scheduled for the Declaration); and 443–5, Trial of the Seven Bishops, 29 June 1688, opinions of Justices Holloway and Powell. On 4 July, James deprived both these judges of their office (all dates Old Style).

  80. Williams, Eighteenth-century constitution, 8–10, the ‘invitation to William’, 30 June 1688 OS.

  81. Goldie, The entring book, IV, 340, Roger Morrice's entry for 17 Nov. 1688 OS. He added: ‘And it's as well known the Parliament cannot sit here before six weekes be expired, and it will be longer before they can be supposed to dispatch any thing in a parliamentary way.’

  82. Williams, Eighteenth-century constitution, 60 and 26, notes of discussions between William and the English peers in winter 1688–9; he also prints the Bill of Rights at pp. 26–33.

  83. De Beer, The correspondence of John Locke, III, 545–6, Locke to Edward Clarke, 29 Jan 1689; and 538–9, Lady Mordaunt to Locke, 21 Jan. 1689.

  84. The weasel uncas'd, a single printed sheet of verses, each one ending ‘Which nobody can deny’ (Lutaud, Des révolutions, 146–7, reviews other similar verse compos
itions); De Beer, Diary of John Evelyn, V, 288; Cullen, Famine, 2, 10, and 49; Sinclair, The statistical account, XVII, 483, report from Insch (Aberdeenshire), and II, 551, report from Kilmuir (Skye). See ch. 20 above for more on the ‘climax of the Little Ice Age’ in the 1690s.

  85. Ingersoll, ‘The lamp of experience’, quoting Thomas Molyneux, MP; Anon., An essay on government, 95–6. (I thank Tom Ingersoll for bringing this remarkable reference to my attention.) On Masaniello, leader of the Naples revolution of 1647, see ch. 14 above.

  86. Ingersoll, ‘The lamp of experience’. For the numbing effect of the regicide in Europe at the time, see chs 12 and 19 above.

  87. Burke, Reflections, 223–4; Kenyon, Revolution principles, 208, quoting Burke's Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791). Lutaud, Des révolutions, describes how French Revolutionaries in 1789, 1830 and 1848 used precedents from the English revolutions of the seventeenth century.

  88. Macaulay, History, II, 508–9. Plumb, quoted above, was the doctoral advisee of George Macaulay Trevelyan, Macaulay's great-nephew. It is again worth stressing that Plumb, like Macaulay, wrote only of England. The Revolution Settlement in both Scotland and Ireland involved great violence and prolonged material suffering.

  Part III. Surviving the Crisis

  1. Lancellotti, L'hoggidi. Hoggidiani literally means ‘people nowadays’.

  2. Lancellotti, Oggidì, overo gl'ingegni non inferiori a’ passati (Venice, 1636).

  3. Green, Spain, IV, 6, Quevedo to Don Francisco de Oviedo, 21 Aug. 1645; Hobbes quoted on page xxiii above; Sévigné and Arnauld on page 318 above; Gracián, El Criticón, 3 parts published 1651, 1653 and 1657. Gracián also used the word ‘crisi’ in other works, with the sense of ‘judgement’, criticizing the world in which he lived.

  Chapter 13 The Mughals and their Neighbours

  1. Special thanks for help in preparing this chapter to Lisa Balabanlilar, Stephen Dale, Scott Levi, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Tristan Mostert and Stephan van Galen. Although members of the dynasty never used the term ‘Mughal’, an Arabized word for ‘Mongol’ picked up by Europeans in the sixteenth century (possibly as a term of opprobrium), it seems pedantic not to use it.