Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  This is not to say that the Civil Wars, their onset and aftermath, settled nothing. The upheavals of the past three decades had taught the English ruling class three hard lessons. First, while they had not settled the sovereignty question, it was now established that the English constitution required both king and Parliament. Unfortunately, this still left open the question of which was to predominate. For Evelyn and old Cavaliers, the more specific lesson was clear: kings might err, but they were still semi-sacred beings whose authority was not to be questioned. To kill the king, as the revolutionaries had done in 1649, was to sin against the universal divine order. For the Royalists, the chaos of civil wars, revolution, and interregnum demonstrated clearly the fatal effects of abandoning the Great Chain of Being. Eventually, these beliefs, married to loyalty to the Church of England, coalesced into the ideology of one of the first political parties, the Tories. But for old Roundheads the events of 1629–60 held a different lesson: that Parliament was the true guarantor of English liberties. The 1630s, in particular, had proven that body an integral and necessary part of the English constitution as much as the 1650s had proven the need for a king. Some went further, arguing that the past quarter-century had taught that kings were not gods but men; therefore, a bad king could and should be deposed. This implied the sovereignty of Parliament and, by extension, the people whose interests it, theoretically, represented.

  Contemporaries holding these opinions, and tending to favor toleration for all Protestants, would eventually form an opposing political party known as the Whigs. In other words, the question of sovereignty, and by implication the related questions of finance, foreign policy, religion, and local control, would continue to divide English men and women at court, in parliament, and in the country at large.

  Perhaps religion above all: the second lesson taught by the Civil Wars and learned by the ruling class of England was that Puritans could no more be trusted with political and religious authority than Catholics. From henceforward they, too, would be associated with political and religious extremism: king-killing, republicanism, toleration of outlandish sects, intolerance toward beloved ceremonies and traditions. This does not mean that Puritans would cease to be an important force in English life, despite their apparent defeat in 1660. On the contrary, it means that religion would also continue to fracture the nation as Puritans, like Catholics, faced proscription and persecution. If the Civil Wars clarified, but failed to solve, the questions of sovereignty, finance, foreign policy, and local control, they rendered that of religion even more complicated and dangerous.

  One more thing became clear as a result of these experiences: the vast majority of the English ruling elite had become strongly averse to using violence, or making common cause with the common people, in order to effect constitutional or political change. The past quarter-century had proven that such expedients were just too unpredictable, too dangerous to their own interests. Since the tensions which had led to those expedients were not yet resolved in 1660, this raised the pressing question of how such change was to be effected in future. The Convention Parliament would begin the attempt to solve each of these problems.

  The Restoration Settlements, 1660–5

  Given the lack of consensus about what the Civil Wars had meant, the English Restoration was bound to be a compromise.1 It did not restore the monarch’s powers as they were in 1603 or 1640 but as they had been modified by the Long Parliament in 1641. Still, this was mostly good news for the new king, Charles II. First, he was restored to executive power. That is, the king could once again conduct foreign policy as he saw fit. According to the Militia Acts of 1661 and 1662, he, and only he, could call out that body – an issue that had been disputed on the eve of the Civil War. He could appoint what ministers he wanted and he could remove judges at will. He could, moreover, dispense with the law in individual cases and, theoretically, suspend it during national emergencies. Finally, he could summon, prorogue, or dismiss Parliament with much the same freedom as his predecessors had exercised, within the limitations of the Triennial Act. That is, he was merely required to convene it for a brief meeting once every three years.

  Realizing that such power would prove hollow if the king were forced to beg constantly for money (another lesson learned from the recent past), the honorable members of the Convention also tried to provide him with the first truly adequate royal revenue since the accession of Henry VIII. That is, they sought to base Charles II’s financial settlement not on what they felt like paying in taxes, but on a reasonable estimate, based on the Protectorate’s expenditure, of what his government might actually cost. They restored Crown lands confiscated during the war and granted the Customs for Charles’s life, a courtesy denied his father. In order to make up for the abolition of fees of wardship and feudal dues, Parliament also granted the king a continuation of the liquor Excise. The whole package was designed to yield the truly princely annual sum of £1,200,000 – far more than any parliament had granted any previous king. It would appear that, once more, God’s lieutenant sat on the throne, once again master in his own house.

  Or was he? Many Convention members were moderate Parliamentarians or Presbyterians, not arch-Royalists. They rejected the most extreme legislation of 1641–2 and deplored the killing of the king in 1649. But they did not regret the tax strike of 1638 or the moderate reform legislation of 1641 or even, necessarily, the taking up of arms in 1642. These men agreed to Charles II’s restoration in 1660 because they saw him as the best hope for reestablishing order, not because they wanted him to be all powerful. Thus, while they restored the royal power to make peace and war, they failed to vote Charles funds for a fully fledged army, such as Cromwell had commanded. They recalled ruefully the New Model Army and rule by the major-generals, and they knew that such forces were powerful instruments for royal oppression all over Europe. They feared that a standing army would make the king an absolute monarch and, like most members of the English ruling elite, they opposed it vehemently. The New Model Army was paid off, leaving only a few guards regiments to protect the king. Similarly, while Charles II controlled the militia in theory, he still had to raise it the old-fashioned way: by asking the lieutenancy – the lords lieutenant of the counties and their deputies – to call out the troops.

  The king’s power was also circumscribed in non-military matters. While he could dismiss judges at will, most prerogative courts which had enforced that will under the Tudors and early Stuarts (i.e., those of Star Chamber, High Commission and Requests, as well as the Council of the North), abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641, were not restored in 1660. More importantly, replacing feudal dues with parliamentary taxes left nearly all the king’s revenue under parliamentary control. That was crucial because, while the new king was voted revenues in 1660 estimated to yield £1,200,000, that estimate was not reliable. In fact, the revenues described above averaged less than half that amount in the reign’s first two years. Parliament responded in 1662 by passing the Hearth Tax – easy to collect by counting chimneys. This and other new taxes did eventually bring the yield up to the promised amount. But even that amount proved inadequate: while taxes eventually yielded £1,200,000, the new king’s expenses soon outran this by £200,000–300,000 a year. This was not, as we shall see, Parliament’s fault. Nevertheless, it ensured that Charles II would, like so many of his predecessors, be chronically short of money. Nor could he, like those predecessors, raise funds from extra-parliamentary taxation, for the Long Parliament’s condemnations of impositions, forced loans, and Ship Money remained on the books. That meant, in turn, that without major belt-tightening, he would have to call frequent parliaments. In short, the financial settlement papered over, but did not erase, the most basic area of tension in Stuart politics, that of sovereignty and Parliament’s constitutional role.

  This becomes even clearer if we look at the religious settlement. It will be recalled that Charles II had promised “a liberty to tender consciences” and an indulgence for differing religious opi
nions in the Declaration of Breda. Charles favored religious toleration partly to reconcile all sides to his regime; partly because he felt indebted to Catholics for saving his life after Worcester and to parliamentary Presbyterians for his Restoration; and partly because he was truly tolerant on matters of faith. Catholicism interested him; even Quakers amused him. But despite being restored as Supreme Governor of the Church of England in 1660, he could only accomplish religious change by act of parliament; that is, with the agreement of the ruling elite.

  Unfortunately, the new king had spent too many years away from England to have a good sense of what his most important subjects would put up with. They had experienced religious toleration in the 1650s and had not found it to their taste. Their views on “Papists” remained unchanged and they did not feel much better disposed toward the Independent Protestant sects which had preached madness up and down the country for a decade. When conservative members of the Church of England saw a Puritan, they now saw a breaker of the Great Chain of Being; a king-killer; a Leveller, a Digger, a Quaker, or a Fifth Monarchist; a persecutor of conservative clergy and traditional ceremonies; an imposer of high taxes; an instrument of the major-generals – in short, as great and radical a danger to the status quo as any Catholic. This goes far to explain the spontaneous revival of the Church of England in many localities at the Restoration: from May to December 1660, parish after parish forced out Puritan clergy and restored “high” Church ceremonies and traditional pastimes banned by the major-generals, like dancing around maypoles and drinking loyal healths. This was a grass-roots movement, but former Royalist gentry often gave their approval, tacit or otherwise. As this implies, the newly resurgent Church of England embraced the restored monarchy and the social hierarchy over which it presided. After 1660 its clergy thundered from their pulpits on the necessities of loyalty, passive obedience, and nonresistance to the sovereign. They began to refer to Charles I as “the Royal Martyr,” and, annually on the anniversary of his execution on January 30, they would remind their congregations of the intimate connections between the Puritan sects and the radical politicians who had struck him down. Early in the reign, that association was reinforced by a number of die-hard radical revolts – most spectacularly a brief uprising of 35 armed Fifth Monarchists who proclaimed the reign of King Jesus in the middle of London in 1661. No wonder that conservative Englishmen increasingly associated radical politics with radical religion, rebellion with Puritanism. No wonder that they saw themselves as the Stuart regime’s faithful defenders and the true, or “Anglican,” strain of the Church of England.

  As a result, the best that Charles II could hope for was comprehension: that is, loosening the structure, doctrine, and liturgy of the restored Church of England to create a “big tent” in which moderate Puritans, particularly Presbyterians, would feel comfortable. But the Convention of 1660 had no success in passing measures for either toleration or comprehension before its dissolution in 1661. The new parliament elected that spring was far more heavily Anglican and Royalist than its predecessor – hence its nickname, the Cavalier Parliament (1661–78). One might think that so Royalist a parliament would do the king’s bidding, but precisely because they were Royalists, for all the reasons noted above, its members were in no mood for religious toleration or even comprehension. Rather, between 1661 and 1665 the Cavalier Parliament sought to exclude the sects from public life by passing a sweeping program of anti-Puritan legislation. This set of laws came to be known as the Clarendon Code after Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon (1609–74), the lord chancellor and nominal head of Charles II’s government. In fact, “Cavalier Code” would be a fairer term, for Clarendon, though a staunch Anglican and political conservative, was no persecutor of Puritans. Instead, it was old Royalists (or their sons) in the Cavalier Parliament who sought not only the full restoration of their beloved Church of England but vengeance on those who had persecuted it (and them) during the Interregnum. Almost immediately, the Cavalier Parliament threw down the gauntlet by restoring the bishops’ temporal and spiritual power, the ecclesiastical courts, the Book of Common Prayer, the wearing of vestments, and the right of advowson.

  Having thus rejected comprehension, the framers of the Cavalier Code now became punitive. The Corporation Act of 1661 required municipal officers to renounce the Presbyterian Covenant and to receive the sacrament according to Anglican rites. The Quaker Act of 1662 made it illegal to refuse to plead in court (thus attacking the Quaker aversion to swearing oaths) and proscribed all meetings for worship outside the parish church of groups of five or more. The Act of Uniformity of 1662, the Code’s central plank, required all ministers, professors, and schoolmasters to swear oaths repudiating both the Covenant and the taking up of arms against the king. It also required the Book of Common Prayer for all Church services; each minister was to swear his consent to “all things” in the Prayer Book or face deprivation of his living. In effect, the Act created nonconformity by testing for outward conformity of practice. Altogether, this legislation and the more ad hoc purges noted above deprived about 1,760 clergy, over 15 percent of the total in England and Wales, of their livings between 1660 and 1663 (compared with about 1,600 Anglicans ejected by the Puritans between 1642 and 1649). In 1662 Parliament restored print censorship in England via the Licensing Act, aimed explicitly at the sorts of “heretical, schismatical, blasphemous, seditious and treasonable books, pamphlets and papers” that had circulated so freely during the Interregnum (14 Charles II, c. 33). Once again, the number of master printers in England was limited and all presses had to be reported to the London Stationer’s Company. Virtually all publications had to carry the names of the author and printer and be approved by a government licenser of the press, the soon-to-be-notorious Royalist journalist Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704). The net effect of the act was to reduce the number of newspapers to a few insipid, pro-government sheets, as well as to drive Puritan writers like the poet John Milton and the novelist John Bunyan (1628–88) underground.

  Whatever hopes remained for a tolerant religious settlement were dashed when another short-lived rising against the government, the Yorkshire Plot of October 1663, prompted Parliament to pass the Conventicle Act in 1664. This statute, which would be fine-tuned in 1670, ordered huge fines (and exile for the third offense) for those attending conventicles (nonconformist meetings). JPs could break into houses upon information of a conventicle there. Finally, in 1665 Parliament passed the Five Mile Act, prohibiting nonconformist preachers from coming within 5 miles of their former parishes or of an incorporated town unless they took an oath stating that it was unlawful to take arms against the king. Once again, non-conformity to the Church implied disloyalty to the State, and now it was more rigidly defined than ever.

  The Cavalier Code thus split the Protestant majority in England into the acceptable and loyal (Anglican) and the unacceptable and disloyal (Puritan). The intended effect was to squeeze Puritanism out of existence by driving its adherents from the clergy, the schools, the cities, the presses – in effect, from public life and discourse entirely. In fact, from this point it is no longer accurate to refer to “Puritans” at all, for, clearly, they no longer had any hope of “purifying” the Church of England of its more conservative practices. Rather, this group came increasingly, and more accurately, to be referred to as “Nonconformists” or “Dissenters,” names which emphasize that they now formed a community apart from the Anglican majority. English Presbyterians might continue to hope for comprehension within a less restrictive national Church, but most Dissenters would now focus not on reform of Church and State but on mere survival. They joined Catholics as officially defined second-class subjects and potential enemies to the constitution. From this point on, they, too, would be subject to crippling fines, imprisonment, having their meetings broken up and their property seized. To offer but one statistic, during the period from 1660 to 1688 some 15,000 Quakers were sent to prison; 450 died there. It was in prison that Bunyan, an unlicensed Baptist preac
her, wrote his great allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), about the travails of one Christian in search of the Celestial City while attempting to evade the traps and snares of a world grown sordid and hostile. Even when the authorities left the sects alone, they were subject to periodic mob violence.

  Clearly, the monarch and the Church of England had been restored to their primacy. But a careful reading of the Restoration Settlements in Church and State shows that the monarch’s primacy was qualified: for all their protestations of loyalty and submission to the king, the parliamentary aristocracy had reserved a great deal of power to their own hands, not only in Parliament but also in the localities. The new regime revived the lieutenancy and stocked it with Royalists and loyal Presbyterians. They worked with the JPs, using the militia to enforce the new religious settlement and purge corporations of the disloyal. But this return to local control after the infamous centralizing experiment of the major-generals meant that provincial officials could once again be selective about how they enforced the cascade of statutes and proclamations coming down from Whitehall or Westminster – strictly or laxly as the local situation (i.e., their neighbors) dictated.

  In other words, if the Restoration political settlement was a qualified win for the king, it was an unalloyed triumph for the largely conservative local nobility and gentry. Political leaders would ignore this basic fact at their peril. Flouting Charles II’s intentions at Breda, the aristocracy had already created winners and losers. The success or failure of the Restoration Settlements would ultimately depend on the new king’s willingness to ally with those winners and accommodate his policies to their power.

  Charles II and the Unraveling of the Restoration Settlements