Such ostentation must have dismayed many rank and file Parliamentary soldiers who had welcomed the republic and had once briefly hoped that the war would be a catalyst for a remodelling of the social as well the political order. Their voices were loudest during 1646 and 1647, when the Leveller movement won over sections of the army. Its pervasiveness disturbed the high command, which arranged a sequence of debates in Putney church between agitators and senior officers, including Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton. At the centre of the wrangling was the Leveller proposal for a broader electoral franchise that would embrace ‘free-born’ yeomen, craftsmen and retailers, who would offset the influence of the aristocracy and gentry.
Such a political counterweight was pointless, argued Ireton, who defended the continued paramountcy of landowners like himself. Their wealth gave them a stake in the kingdom and, therefore, a natural concern for its stability and welfare which benefited everyone. It was an argument that would be repeated during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the political dispensation was again challenged from below.
Ireton’s case obviously extended to the aristocracy, whose legislative powers the Levellers wished to abrogate for purely historical reasons. They were rooted in ancient injustice, for the nobility were merely the descendants of the fortune-hunting soldiers led by William the Conqueror, who colluded in his suffocation of fictitious Anglo-Saxon liberties. The Leveller concept of the ‘Norman Yoke’ lacked historical validity, but was attractive because it hinted at a lost golden age of liberty and equality that had been brutally terminated by the ancestors of the rich and powerful. Its modern manifestations included types of tenure which, the Levellers protested, were unfairly balanced in favour of landlords. The Norman Yoke theory lived on as part of radical mythology until the twentieth century.
The Leveller movement was easily squashed by Cromwell backed by loyal troops. Its significance has been overstated by left-inclined historians (particularly in the late 1960s when parallels were made between the Levellers and contemporary student agitation in America and Europe; the only connection was that both movements came to nothing, although the radical left still celebrates the anniversary of the execution of a trio of Levellers at Burford). Nevertheless, former Levellers had the satisfaction of seeing the end of the Lords, although they had to wait until the Restoration for the abolition of archaic feudal tenure.
A far greater threat to landowners of all ranks came from the millenarian sects which flourished briefly in the unsettled late 1640s and early 1650s. The Diggers wanted all land to be held in common, and the Ranters preached universal equality. According to one, ‘honour, nobility, gentility [and] propriety’ would disappear when the new Zion was established in England.5 Both movements were shallowly rooted and suppressed by a republic determined to preserve the social status quo. More formidable, insofar that its adherents had a disproportionate say in the short-lived 1653 ‘Barebones’ Parliament, was the Fifth Monarchy movement, who had a vision of the republic as an embryonic new Israel. The new Zion would see the extinction of an aristocracy based upon land and ancestry to be replaced by an elite based upon individual purity, religious zeal and orthodoxy. The theocracy of Puritan ‘saints’ never emerged, for Cromwell dissolved the Barebones Parliament.
The brief phenomena of social revolutionary movements of the Interregnum scared all landowners and Anglican clergymen. The antics and fancies of Levellers, Ranters, Diggers and Fifth Monarchy men became implanted in the historic memory of conservatives. Here was a baleful warning: madcap sectarianism and egalitarian subversion were inseparable and the inevitable outcome of defying the Crown and its Church. Perhaps so, but what is fascinating about the movements which disturbed the mid-seventeenth century is that their impact on the population as a whole was transitory. As Jonathan Clark’s English Society 1688–1832 reminds us, submission to authority and the social order remained ingrained in the psyches of the greater part of the population for the next hundred and fifty years. Yes, there were intermittent disorders during this period, but they tended to be spontaneous, violent reactions to injustices such as the enforcement of militia quotas, food shortages, or the expression of demotic, visceral anti-Catholicism. The mob was physically frightening, but it never threatened to overturn the social order.
At every stage of the conflict, royalist propaganda had accused Parliament of fomenting the social antipathy; whatever their rank, all roundheads were levellers at heart. A satirical ballad of 1642 has apprentices joyfully predicting the end of deference and courtesy:
We’ll teach the nobles how to stoop,
And keep the gentry down:
Good manners have an ill report
And turn to pride, we see,
We’ll therefore pull good manners down,
And hey, then up go we.
Faced with defeat in 1645, the royalist mood became bitter:
And the scum of the land
Are the men that command.
And our slaves have become our masters.6
By their own estimation, the royalists were aristocrats in spirit: after all, ‘Cavalier’ was derived from the Continental term for a gentleman horseman trained in arms. According to a definition of 1644: ‘A complete cavalier is a child of honour, a gentleman well born and bred; that loves his King for conscience sake, of a clean countenance and bolder look than other men, because of a more loyal heart.’ He was the true heir of the chivalric tradition of ‘English gentility and ancient valour’.7
But ancestral courage had not prevailed and, after 1646, Parliament found itself governing a country in which at least half the peerage and the gentry had fought against it and could no longer be trusted as agents of the state. It was, therefore, driven to appoint sympathetic men to local offices whose status would have disqualified them before the outbreak of the war. In Gloucestershire the lesser gentry were promoted and in Somerset ‘new made gentlemen’ found themselves in posts once held by their superiors, and were derided.8
Many of the intruders were Parliamentary army officers, often of humble origins, who had been promoted because of a dearth of gentlemen and their outstanding religious fervour. Some relished the turn of fortune which had elevated them, and did all they could to make life unpleasant for their former adversaries. Major George Purefoy, who commanded the garrison in the Earl of Northampton’s house at Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire, was a bully and extortioner whom the royalist press revealingly likened to Wat Tyler. Like many others in similar positions, Purefoy was corrupt and, it seems, vain, for he owned a hat embellished with diamonds.9
The trouble for the royalist aristocracy and gentry was that men of Purefoy’s stamp were often responsible for the sequestration of resources and cash for the Parliamentary war effort, and, when hostilities were over, for the assessment of punitive imposts levied on ‘delinquents’, as former royalists were called. The fleecing began in the first weeks of the war when Parliamentary and royalist officials began cataloguing the assets of the nobility and gentry and making demands accordingly. In 1643 Parliament voted for £4,000 to be levied from royalist estates in Gloucestershire to pay for the county’s garrisons.
Paradoxically, those hit hardest were peers who contrived to keep a foot in both camps. Thomas, Viscount Savile, claimed that royalist forces stole £8,000 in coin and plate from his estates after he had deserted the King in 1643. Reinstated in royal favour and given the earldom of Sussex, Savile abandoned Charles in 1645, and Parliament, doubting his sincerity, locked him in the Tower, where he suffered a bout of bladder stones. He was released and fined £4,000.10 Savile put his own and his family’s interests before those of King or Parliament and got off quite lightly, given his record. Another self-interested trimmer was John Tufton, second Earl of Thanet, who had loyally attended Charles at York in 1639 for the campaign against the Scots with a thousand pounds in cash and a doctor’s certificate excusing him from service in the field. Clearly allergic to or unfit for soldiering, he endured a brief spell of it
with royalist forces and departed for France in 1643.
On his return a year later, he alleged that livestock, silverware, timber and property with a total value of £54,000 had been seized by Parliament. Charges that he supplied Charles with cash and plate earned Thanet a further fine of £20,000. Soldiers from both armies despoiled his manor at Wiston in Sussex and he suffered further losses when his London house was commandeered for army quarters in 1650. By 1654 he had made his peace with the republic, was appointed sheriff of Kent and helped thwart a royalist conspiracy there. For this reason his still unpaid fine was reduced to £9,000.11
This was painful, but not beyond Thanet’s means, for his annual revenues were estimated at £10,000. John Strange, Lord Rivers, a Catholic and colonel of a royalist regiment of foot, was less lucky. At the end of the war, he was tottering on the edge of insolvency. He admitted a ‘weakness’ in his estates and was heavily in debt, despite having sold property to the value of £11,000. It was insufficient, for he died in 1654 while in gaol for debt. His £1,400 delinquency fine was suspended when he swore an oath of allegiance to the republic, not that he could have paid it.12
The ‘weakness’ in Strange’s estates may have been the result of mismanagement, or the cumulative fiscal demands and depredations of the war. Losers had no choice but to accept their fate stoically. In 1650 the royalist fourth Earl of Dorset wrote that: ‘it has pleased Divine Providence to lay his heavy hand on me (which I acknowledge my sins justly deserved) by making me less able in my earthly fortune by 40 thousand pounds’.13 Land values slumped and tenants quarrelled with landlords as to which should pay military levies. Some tenants took advantage of economic disruption and their landlords’ distraction to demand fresh terms which favoured their interests. The insubordinate spirit of the times may have emboldened the ‘proud fellow’ who, in 1654, led the resistance of tenants in Drayton in Staffordshire against their landlord’s plan to replace their leases with less secure and more onerous tenancies.14
Hardship could be mitigated. Delinquents used legal legerdemain to sidestep the complex official machinery for the assessment and collection of charges on their estates. If these were confiscated, then the owners covertly bought back their property: the Marquess of Winchester recovered thirteen or fifteen of his manors. Significantly, Cromwell turned a blind eye to such manouevres.15 The republic was striving to achieve stability and unity and neither was advanced by the overzealous persecution of royalists. Some sought assistance from kinsmen who had fought for Parliament. The second Earl of Denbigh pulled strings in London for his royalist cousin George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, in the matter of negotiating the fines imposed against him by Parliament. Denbigh also vainly sought a pardon for his brother-in-law James, Duke of Hamilton, who was executed in 1649.16 Differences of conscience did not erase family ties.
Sales of estates previously owned by the Crown, the Church and royalists who failed to compound their debts attracted purchasers from all social backgrounds, although the gentry predominated.17 Senior army officers used their influence to secure the choicest pickings: Colonel Thomas Pride, a former brewer, installed himself and his family in the royal palace of Nonsuch. The scale and briskness of the post-war land market persuaded some contemporaries that a revolution in the distribution of land was underway and the gentry were gaining in terms of acreage over the aristocracy.18 This was not so, and the balance was fundamentally unaltered.
In Ireland, however, the war dramatically changed the pattern of land ownership. Here Parliament treated the conflict not just as pacification, but as a golden opportunity to pursue earlier policies of forcibly replacing Catholic with Protestant landowners. From the beginning, the Irish war had a distinctly colonial flavour. In 1643 Parliament invited English investors (mainly businessmen) to contribute funds for the campaign in return for dividends in the form of lands confiscated from Irish rebels. When the payout came in 1653, over a million acres were available, to which were added the properties of Irish royalists.
All Catholic gentry, whatever their previous loyalties, forfeited a third of the estates and exchanged the remainder for lands in Clare and western Connaught. Over three thousand families were relocated.19 Catholic landowners with supple consciences and a sense of timing evaded these penalties through collaboration. Piers Butler, first Viscount Ikerrin, fought with the royalists in the 1640s and turned his sword on the ‘Tories’ (Irish royalists) in the 1650s, for which he secured Cromwell’s goodwill and ‘some proportion’ of his Tipperary estates.20
In the short term there was a bonanza in which many speculators sold their holdings, often to officers in the army of occupation. Among them was Captain Robert Godkin, whose troop of cavalry had fought the Tories in West Cork and who had built a fort at Rosscarberry, which he garrisoned with a hundred men. His efforts were repaid with two thousand acres of nearby land in which he invested five hundred pounds. By 1657 Godkin had attracted three hundred settlers to his domain, who lived within ‘musket shot’ (a revealing phrase) of his stronghold. It was the counterpart of many frontier outposts then being constructed and defended against the natives in North America. After the Restoration, Godkin was pardoned and confirmed in his estate.21
Unscrupulous chancers did well out of the Irish land grab. Sir John Clotworthy, an Antrim landowner and kinsman by marriage to the leading Parliamentarian Pym, hitched himself to the Parliamentary cause in the 1640s, proving his zeal by taunting Laud on the scaffold. He acted as an agent for London speculators in Irish lands and was ideally placed to make a killing, dealing in debentures and buying up land cheaply to enlarge and consolidate his Ulster holdings. After the Restoration, Charles II ennobled Clotworthy as Viscount Massereene.22
Massereene and the soldier-colonist gentry of Ireland retained most of their gains. Charles II did what he could to compensate his father’s Irish supporters, but he dared not risk upsetting the new landowners, who were vital props to the Protestant ascendancy. The brittle public peace of Ireland came before equity.23 Charles II’s accommodations with his father’s enemies left the dispossessed Catholic gentry bitter. The war had achieved the objective of the Elizabethan and Jacobean plantations: the creation of a dominant, imported Protestant nobility and gentry who could be relied upon to enforce the political and religious status quo in Ireland. The distance in outlook, sympathies and culture between them and their Catholic-Gaelic tenants was as great as that between a Virginian frontiersman and his Indian neighbours. No such gulf existed in the rest of Britain.
The narrative of the implosion of the British republic in 1658–9 and the negotiations which paved the way for Charles II’s restoration has no place here, for the aristocracy played little part in either. After over a decade of unsatisfactory constitutional experiments and rule by army officers, a return to the familiar and tested political order had become increasingly attractive. Disillusioned Parliamentarians began to appreciate the value of abandoned traditions: Robert Beake, MP for Coventry, reminded the Commons in 1659 that ‘usage is a good right’ and the House of Lords had been a valuable institution.24
It was a common sentiment of the time. Abolishing the House of Lords had not significantly devalued the dignity and prestige of the nobility, although whether the respect in which it was held would have decayed if the republic had survived is an imponderable of history. A bonus for the aristocracy in terms of its popularity was the widespread resentment against the agents of the republic who imposed Puritan morality on every aspect of human life. Fun was outlawed, theatres were closed, Christmas was abolished and adulterers faced the gallows; it was a happy time for busybodies and philistines.
The republic did not weaken the general acceptance of the aristocracy as an integral and useful part of society, and the feeling that, individually and collectively, its members had contributed to the overall order and stability of the country.25 The peerage (and the bishops) regained their legislative powers in 1660 as part of what Thomas Hobbes concluded was the final stage of a revol
ution. It had been ‘a circular motion of sovereign power through two usurpers [Cromwell and his son Richard], from the late King to his son . . . where long may it remain’.26
The aristocracy had been buffeted during this topsy-turvy time. Its traumas had been greater than those of the Wars of the Roses, which, despite high aristocratic casualties, had not witnessed the political eclipse of the peerage. The restoration of the House of Lords in 1660 raised morale and there was limited compensation for former royalists, although royal gratitude often fell short of expectations. The psychological impact of the war and its sequel is difficult to measure: some peers’ lives had been blighted by financial losses, privation and humiliation by the republic’s low-born officials; other peers mastered the arts of survival and flourished. The household accounts of Henry Bourchier, fifth Earl of Bath, show that between 1648 and 1650 he maintained a household of thirty-six servants at Tawstock in Devon. He ate and drank well, smoked large quantities of tobacco, travelled to London in his coach attended by outriders and treated himself to expensive drinking glasses.
Outwardly, the nobility’s political power in the post-1660 world was as it had always been, and its official and semi-official functions remained the same. New roles were created, paradoxically, by Cromwell’s proto-imperial expansion, which gathered pace in the next century and provided opportunities for the younger sons of noblemen to serve as proconsuls and commanders of fleets and armies.
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