This is a paper delivered yesterday afternoon at the
Early Modern Studies Conference at the University of Reading by Chris Thompson. It has a new explanation of the origins of
the English Civil War\Revolution. The paper is copyrighted Permission is needed
to reproduce.
Exactly a century ago, A.P.Newton’s seminal book, The
Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, was published. It traced the
lineage of the Providence island Company with its unsuccessful attempts to
found profitable Puritan settlements in the Bay of Honduras in the 1630s back
to Elizabethan colonising and privateering efforts and forward to the
expeditions of the Cromwellian Protectorate to the Caribbean in the 1650s. His
investigation of the ties between the company’s adventurers and their
activities in opposition to Charles I’s regime in the period of Personal Rule
cast new scholarly light on this subject and had a profound influence on later
historians.
Inevitably, however, the contours of historical analysis
have changed. The events of the 1620s and 1640s are no longer viewed as
causally linked. Accidents and contingency, the interplay of multiple kingdoms
and rival conspiracy theories, the problems of political and religious myopia
as well as those of personality now predominate. It has, indeed, never been
more dangerous to enter the historical equivalent of a billiard hall.
Even so, it is impossible (for me, at least) to pass by
such premises with their deep green baize tables, dim lights and interesting
characters without being tempted in. I am conscious of the risk in doing so but
life is too short not to do so at all. The argument that I shall put to you is
basically that there were two profound crises in early Stuart England, a
proto-revolutionary one in the late-1620s and a revolutionary one in the 1640s.
I shall argue that these crises were umbilically linked and that there is
unmistakable evidence not just of deep hostility to the Caroline regime after
1629 on the part of the king’s leading opponents but also of a growing
willingness to resist him by force of arms from the mid-1630s. It was,
therefore, in England, not in Ireland or Scotland, that the most serious of the
early crises occurred and where discussions on alternative forms of government
in Church and State first began.
The Crisis of 1629
The origins of the crisis of the 1620s can be traced to
England’s engagement and failure in simultaneous wars against France and Spain;
to the fiscal and military measures used to fight those wars; to the alleged
infringement of the subject’s rights by the Crown in implementing those
policies and the support for authoritarian rule from Arminian clerics in the
Church whose doctrines and practices were anathema to Calvinists. Its symptoms
were evident in resistance in varying degrees to levies of men, money and
munitions; in the pressures placed on the machinery of local and national
government to work in the face of this opposition; in arguments inside and
outside Parliaments about the respective rights of the king and his subjects
and in the development of ideas about conspiracies to subvert established forms
of government in Church and State on the one hand and threats to undermine the
sovereignty of the Crown on the other. There were little noticed revolts in the
House of Lords in 1626 and 1628 against royal attempts to manipulate its
membership, to intimidate opponents and to frustrate its dealings with the
grievances of the House of Commons. Across the country, physical violence was
common – in attacks, for example, on unpaid soldiers billeted on unwilling host
communities, in protests from indigent sailors, and, most notably, in the
murder of the royal favourite’s astrologer and of the Duke of Buckingham
himself. These were quite apart from the remarkable tax strikes by merchants,
especially in the Levant and East India companies, over duties involving an
assault on the Customs House in London led by a former Lord Mayor and the
brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Crown was effectively bankrupt by
March, 1629 as Charles I’s critics well knew. If either of the groups then
manoeuvring in the lower House had succeeded in their aims, the king would have
been shorn of royal supremacy in religion and his capacity to choose his own
servants severely limited. Within a few months, he characterised them as
republicans aiming to reduce his power to nothing
.
It is easy enough to find alarmist comments by contemporaries
on the political situation in England after the dissolution of Parliament in
March 1629. Domestic and foreign observers agreed on the divided state of the
country. The king’s view was that the crisis was the result of the malice of a
small group of M.P.s led by Sir John Eliot, a contention set out in a series of
proclamations. The private correspondence of his advisers and servants, men
like Viscount Dorchester, Heath and Roe, was on similar lines although
Councillors were divided on whether Parliament could or should be summoned
again. Regal and conciliar authority had to be restored, particularly by
punishing the former M.P.s now imprisoned for sedition and, if Charles had his
way, for treason. Attempts to do so in the courts nonetheless kept issues about
Parliamentary privilege, the grounds for their imprisonment and terms for bail
uncomfortably alive.
Critics of the regime shared such gloom. The
unprecedented threat of violence on the floor of the House of Commons shocked
Sir Thomas Barrington to the point where he told his mother that he blessed God
there had been no more serious consequences. Dramatic accounts of the
concluding events reached the godly further afield destroying hopes for
defeating the twin menaces of Arminianism and Popery and for the further
reformation of the Church. The Venetian Ambassador, Contarini, was in no doubt
about the hostility to the king and his councillors and the prospect for future
conflict in the spring of 1629, a view shared by a later report from a Spanish
agent. Peace abroad, a resumption of trade and restoration of order offered the
only hope.
There is some historiographical justification for
regarding this as a proto-revolutionary situation. G.M.Trevelyan described the
members leaving St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster in March 1629 as “freemen
still and almost rebels” while Russell considered the aim of the demonstration
planned for the 2nd as “the potentially revolutionary one of appealing over the
King’s head to the country at large.” John Reeve and Austin Woolrych have both
written about the wide-ranging, potentially revolutionary implications of the
resolutions passed on that day for the idea of treason against the
commonwealth. Hexter argued that relations between the royal Court and the more
amorphous remainder of the body politic, the ‘Country’, broke down after 1618
and had reached ‘crisis level’ by the end of the next decade. They had ceased
to speak the same language and the Commons had by then constructed a view of
the Court as its palpable enemy. Puritan clergy and gentry were full of rage at
the impotence of English policy abroad and the inroads made by Popery at home.
He was thus the advocate of a theory of successive crises, one in the 1620s and
a second one in the early-1640s leading to Civil War and Revolution. Stone
agreed. It was the experiences of the late-1620s that led the future leaders of
the Long Parliament, according to Trevor-Roper, to organise themselves in
country houses, Puritan societies and trading companies for the revenge they
were determined after 1640 to take. The concept of a link between the two
crises of the late-1620s and the early-1640s thus has a respectable ancestry
even if its genealogy has not hitherto been precisely traces.
The reaction of the leading critics of Caroline rule is
difficult to detect given the absence of correspondence and diaries. But the
strategy of Pym and Rich, the two men in the Commons most closely associated
with the ‘great contrivers’ of the 1640s, had been predicated on inoculating
the Church of England against Arminianism and crypto-Popery in return for
settling the legality of collecting Tonnage and Poundage (and, perhaps,
impositions). The breakdown of Parliament made that aim unrealisable. The
anxiety of the great merchants in the East India and Levant companies over a
continuing refusal to trade was sufficiently alarming for the 2nd Earl of
Warwick, Viscount Say and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke, three of the principal
figures in Newton’s embryonic connection, to appear at the Quarter Court of the
East India company held on 2nd March to open a serious attack on the dominant
London merchants. This suggests but does not prove that the idea of withholding
revenues from the Crown to exact concessions was already present in their
minds.
The Peers and their connections
The core of this group had been drawn together in the
politics of the mid to late-1620s. They were committed to the Protestant cause
in the Thirty Years’ War, to struggles against Arminianism and for the
preservation of the House of Lords’ privileges and the rights of the subject.
They were also connected to the Cambridge Puritan, John Preston. Warwick and
Say and Sele, Pym and Rich are too well known to need much discussion here. The
4th Earl of Lincoln is probably best known as Say’s son-in-law and Preston’s
pupil. The two men together with Francis, Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, the
future 4th Earl of Bedford, supervised the settlement of the debts of Lincoln’s
father. Lincoln was probably the author of the appeal to English freeholders in
January 1627 to resist the Forced Loan as illegal and a threat to Parliament’s
survival and to call them to follow his fellow peers in their resistance to the
levy. His household and local allies were deeply involved in this campaign and
many of them later became involved in the colonisation of Massachusetts.
Lincoln’s relationship with one of Preston’s other
allies, the 2nd Earl of Warwick, is less well known. Warwick was not a
Lincolnshire landowner himself but his step-mother, originally Frances Wray,
was. There is evidence to connect their households and Lincoln’s in the
late-1620s. Both men shared a taste for theological disputations before and at
the York House conferences of February 1626 and were patrons of two of the
first three ministers sent to New England in 1629. Both Earls proved to be
supporters of Sir John Eliot after his incarceration in the Tower and drank the
health of this arch-enemy of Charles I’s regime at every meal on a trip to the
West country in 1631. Lincoln is, indeed, the most likely figure to have sought
Warwick’s consent as President of the Council for New England to the granting
of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Company charters in 1628 and 1629
respectively.
New England
The links between these men were already in place by the
summer of 1628. The revival of plans to settle and trade in New England first
developed by John White of Dorchester and his local allies was also under way
in alliance with London merchants such as Matthew Cradock and John Venn, both
of them friends of Eliot: in the next few months, a Lincolnshire contingent
appeared, perhaps as a result of so many Forced Loan resisters having been sent
to Dorset in 1627, many of them from the 4th Earl’s network of allies. The
story of the transformation of the New England venture into the Massachusetts
Bay Company in March 1629 with a new charter that allowed its place of
government to be transferred there is one of the most familiar episodes in
early colonial history. Warwick must have known about this.
The enterprise was more fundamentally transformed in the
summer and autumn of that year. The idea of establishing a godly commonwealth
there was canvassed with increasing enthusiasm in lay and clerical circles
associated with the Earls of Warwick and Lincoln. A key meeting was held in
Sempringham, probably in the Priory, which was Lincoln’s home, late in July and
early in August 1629. Out of it came a series of observations from John
Winthrop on the imminent doom awaiting England for its sinfulness: Antichrist
had risen, the Church and universities had been corrupted, inflation was
rampant and poverty multiplying: the only hope was to go to New England to
found a new commonwealth and a new church. The remnant of the godly could
follow the path of righteousness, multiply there and create a bulwark against
Popery. It was a searing indictment of England under Charles I’s rule, a more
comprehensive indictment than anything uttered by Alexander Gil in his cups or
John Scott of Canterbury in his diary. It is possible to watch this argument
being spread much further afield to sympathisers like Eliot and John Hampden
before the Great Migration of 1630.
It is often said that the New England colonies in general
and Massachusetts in particular owed nothing to aristocratic patronage. This is
doubtful. Warwick – with whom John Winthrop the elder had long been connected –
was of practical help in managing the rival claims of the Gorges family to the
territory, in providing access to fortifications in Essex and in securing
patents for new land. Winthrop himself was taken up by men in Lincoln’s circle
in the autumn of 1629 and early winter of 1630|: when he sailed on the Arbella
late in March 1630 he was accompanied by Lincoln’s brother, one of the Earl’s
sisters and her husband, Lincoln’s putative former household steward and other
allies of the peer. As the Barrington family’s correspondence shows, Warwick’s
gentry allies and their clerical dependents were interested in the settlement
and, like Warwick, prepared to help persecuted clergymen and others move there.
Saye and Sele’s interest in New England (with its
distinctive form of congregational church government and a franchise dependent
from the outset on church membership) was even more important. He, like
Lincoln’s brother, was one of the recipients in March 1632 of the ‘Old Patent’
of Connecticut and, later that year, together with the 2nd Lord Brooke, bought
the patent of Pascataqua. Its governor provided crucial evidence on behalf of
Massachusetts before the Privy Council at the turn of the year against charges
brought by Gorges and Mason alleging that the charter had been illegitimately
obtained and that the colony was a nest of political and religious rebels. The
colony’s most “noble and best friends” advised it to have a Council of allies
in England to protect its interests. But a second hearing before the Council
late in 1633 resulted in a demand for the return of the Massachusetts Bay
Company’s charter. The colony’s enemy, Thomas Morton, gleefully reported how
Cradock and Venn, its merchant allies, had been denounced by Archbishop Laud
and, despite their great friends, had left the Council Chamber with lowered
shoulders.
The reaction in Massachusetts was to procrastinate and to
prepare to resist any expedition sent from England with force. In England, the
colony’s supporters had already responded by dispatching a large quantity of
arms. Simultaneously, propositions were sent “from some persons of great
qualitye & estate (& of speciall note for pietye)” indicating
their intentions to join with them if satisfied by Massachusetts’ rulers. Saye
and Sele and Lord Brooke have traditionally been thought to be the authors of
these proposals. This willingness to support forcible resistance to the
Caroline regime, admittedly at a very great distance from England, is highly
significant. It shows that, long before 1640 or 1642, such men had been
alienated from the king’s rule to the extent that the use of violence against
it was acceptable. More interestingly still, in the same summer, John Winthrop
received a letter from Warwick offering his support and expressing his
willingness to further the colony’s prosperity.
Fortunately, there is other material to illustrate the
close relationship between these peers and the Bay colony’s rulers. The
settlement of Connecticut was planned as a joint venture in 1634 and 1635 with
the two noblemen and their radical allies, including Sir Arthur Hesilrige and
Henry Lawrence, aiming to move there. The fort, moreover, to be erected at the
mouth of the Connecticut River was explicitly intended as part of the coastal
defences protecting their friends in Massachusetts from a sea-borne attack from
England. In fact, Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke had distinct constitutional
proposals in 1636 for a commonwealth covering both Connecticut and
Massachusetts: they envisaged a ruling assembly divided into a house composed
by gentlemen all of whose heirs would inherit places and a second composed of
the elected representatives of the freemen for whom a property qualification
was required: each house would have a negative voice and all officers would be
responsible to the assembly. There was nothing in these proposals acknowledging
royal authority at all: this would have been a minuscule Venetian republic
without even a Doge. But, whatever the peers’ admitted personal qualities,
severing the link between church membership and the rights of freemen in
Massachusetts proved too much for the godly rulers of that colony to accept.
They preferred their own arrangements and relations with the Saybrook
adventurers deteriorated partly, at least, because migrants from the towns of
Massachusetts seized the adventurers’ lands. Even so, when the members of the
prospective ‘Junto’ were in treasonable contact with the Scottish Covenanters
in 1639, it was to the refuge of Saybrook that they planned to flee if their
plans to overthrow Charles I failed.
Conclusion
This colonial evidence casts important light on the
evolution of the views of those identified by A.P.Newton as the core of the
critics and opponents of Charles I’s regime in the 1630s. It can be
supplemented by additional material from Bermuda and Providence Island, both
potential refuges for the godly at that time. There was indeed, as Newton
thought, a middle term, a connecting link between the major crises of the
late-1620s and the early-1640s. Some of the fissile human material ejected by
the first, proto-revolutionary detonation found its way to Massachusetts, which
was the sanctuary for the defeated and explains, in part, some of its
fossil-like features after 1640s. Revolutionary situations do not necessarily
lead to revolution because accidents and errors intervene but, in the case of Charles I’s realms, the
delay merely increased the power of the ultimate explosion. Those who sought to
exploit it remembered its origins very clearly and were determined not to lose
their opportunity to re-cast the Church and State a second time.
