Introductuon To The English Revolution
by Christopher Hill

THE object of this essay is to suggest an interpretation of the events of the seventeenth century different from that which most of us were taught at school. To summarise it briefly, this interpretation is that the English Revolution of 1640-60 was a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into the hands of a new class, and so the freer development of capitalism was made possible. The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords. Parliament beat the King because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about. The rest of this essay will try to prove and illustrate these generalisations.

The orthodox attitude to the seventeenth-century revolution is misleading because it does not try to penetrate below the surface, because it takes the actors in the revolution at their face value, and assumes that the best way to find out what people were fighting about is to consider what the leaders said they were fighting about. We all know that during the seventeenth century England underwent a profound political revolution. Everyone has heard of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads, King Charles and his Cavaliers, and we all know that a King of England had his head cut off. But why did this happen? What was it all about? Has it any significance for us at the present day?

These questions are not usually very satisfactorily answered in the text-books. The bloodshed and violence which accompanied the revolution are slurred over as regrettable incidents, when Englishmen for once descended to the wicked continental practice of fighting one another about politics. But that was only because mistakes were made, opportunities for British compromise were ignored: what a good thing, the books imply, that we are so much wiser and more sensible to-day! So they do not ever give us reasons which would seem to us sufficient to justify the devotion and the sacrifices of our ancestors in their struggles.

The most usual explanation of the seventeenth-century revolution is one that was put forward by the leaders of the Parliament of 1640 themselves in their propaganda statements and appeals to the people. It has been repeated with additional detail and adornments by Whig and Liberal historians ever since. This explanation says that the Parliamentary armies were fighting for the liberty of the individual and his rights in law against a tyrannical Government that threw him into prison without trial by jury, taxed him without asking his consent, billeted soldiers in his house, robbed him of his property, and attempted to destroy his cherished Parliamentary institutions. Now all this is true - as far as it goes. The Stuarts did try to stop people meeting and holding political discussions, did cut off the ears of people who criticised the Government. did arbitrarily collect taxes which were very unequal in their incidence, did try to shut up Parliament and try by nominated officials. All that is true. And although Parliament in the seventeenth century was even less genuinely representative of ordinary people than it is at the present day, still its victory was important as establishing a certain amount of self-government for the richer classes in society.

But further questions are still unanswered. Why did the King become tyrannical? Why did the landed and commercial classes represented in Parliament have to fight for their liberties? During the sixteenth century, under the Tudor rulers, the grandfathers of the Parliamentarians of 1640 were the monarchy's stoutest supporters. What had happened to change their outlook? Parliament had supported Henry VII and Henry VIII and Elizabeth in their efforts to police the country against the anarchy and brigandage of over-mighty subjects, of feudal potentates with their private armies, and England had been made safe for commercialism. Parliament had also supported Henry VIII and Elizabeth in their victorious struggle against the international Catholic Church: money no longer went from England to Rome, British policy was no longer dictated by a foreign power. Parliament, finally, encouraged Queen Elizabeth in her resistance to the political ally of the Papacy, the Spanish Empire, and the plunder of the New World was thrown open to Drake, Hawkins and the piratical but Protestant seadogs.

The Tudors, in short, were backed by the politically effective classes because the latter did very well out of Tudor rule. Why did the Stuarts, James I and Charles I, lose this support? It was not just because James, who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, was a particularly stupid man, a Scot who did not understand England, though many historians have seriously argued thus. But one has only to read what James, Charles and their supporters wrote and said, or examine what they did, to see that so far from being merely stupid, they were either able men trying to impose a vicious policy, or men whose ideas were hopelessly out of date and therefore reactionary. The causes of the civil war must be sought in society, not in individuals.

Another school of historians - which we may call "Tory," as opposed to the Whigs - holds that the royal policy was not tyrannical at all, that Charles I, as he told the Court which sentenced him to death, spoke "not for my own right alone, as I am your King, but for the true liberty of all my subjects." Clarendon, who deserted the Parliament in 1642 and later became Charles II's first minister, developed this theory in several volumes of eloquent prose in his History of the Great Rebellion; it is now propagated by a number of historians whose political prejudices, royalist or Catholic sympathies, and bias against liberalism in general, make up for their lack of historical understanding. Their idea is that Charles I and his advisers were really trying to protect ordinary people from economic exploitation by a small class of capitalists on the make; and that the opposition which faced Charles was organised and worked up to serve their own purposes by those business men who identified their interests with the House of Commons in politics and Puritanism in religion.

Now, it is true that the English Revolution of 1640, like the French Revolution of 1789, was a struggle for political, economic and religious power, waged by the middle class, the bourgeoisie, which grew in wealth and strength as capitalism developed. But it is not true that as against them the royal Government stood for the interests of the common people: on the contrary, the popular parties proved to be the King's most militant opponents, far more vigorous and ruthless and thorough-going than the bourgeoisie itself.

The interests for which Charles's monarchy stood were not those of the common people at all. It represented the landowning nobles, and its policy was influenced by a Court clique of aristocratic commercial racketeers and their hangers-on, sucking the life-blood from the whole people by methods of economic exploitation which we shall be considering later on. The middle-class struggle to shake off the control of this group was not merely selfish; it fulfilled a progressive historical function. The sharper-witted landowners were grafting themselves as parasites on to the new growth of capitalism, since their own mode of economic existence no longer sufficed to maintain them. It was necessary for the further development of capitalism that this choking parasitism should be ended by the overthrow of the feudal state. It was to the advantage of the masses of the population that capitalism should be allowed to develop freely. Under the old order, in the century before 1640, real wages for labourers in industry and agriculture fell more than one half: in the century after 1640 they more they than doubled.

The new economic developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made the old economic and social and political system hopelessly out of date. Those of its defenders looking regretfully back to the stability and relative the peasantry in the Middle Ages were quite unrealistic and in effect reactionary. Their role was the same as that of many liberals at the present day who think how nice it would be if capitalism could still work in the "liberal" nineteenth-century way, without having to resort quite so frequently to fascism and war. But fine words alter no historic processes. History has passed on and left these apologists of an imaginary system standing, just as it left Charles I's defenders.

These two theories, then, are both one-sided. The Whigs stress the progressive nature of the revolution, and slur over the fact that the class that took the lead in the revolution and most profited by its achievements was the bourgeoisie. Their interpretation perpetuates the legend that the interests of the bourgeoisie are identical with those of the nation, a legend obviously convenient for our own day, though so much less true now than in the seventeenth century. The Tories, on the other hand, stress the class nature of the revolution in an attempt to deny its progressiveness and value in its own time, to whitewash feudalism, and to suggest that revolutions never benefit more than a narrow clique. A recent version suggests that all politics is a dirty game, all principles are eye-wash, all revolutions useless.

A third and more familiar theory is emphasised by both sides: that the conflict was to decide which of two religions, Puritanism or Anglicanism, was to be dominant in England. Here, again, the effect of this explanation is to make us pity and misunderstand the men of the seventeenth century, and. congratulate ourselves on being so much more sensible to-day: however much Anglicans and Nonconformists may dislike one another personally, we say, they no longer fight in the village street. But this is to miss the point. Certainly religious squabbles fill many pages of the pamphlet literature of the seventeenth century: both sides justified their attitude ultimately in religious terms, believed they were fighting God's battles. But "religion" covered something much wider than it does to-day. The Church throughout the Middle Ages, and down to the seventeenth century, was something very different from what we call a Church to-day. It guided all the movements of men from baptism to the burial service, and was the gateway to that life to come in which all men fervently believed. The Church educated children; in the village parishes - where the mass of the people was illiterate - the parson's sermon was the main source of information on current events and problems, of guidance on economic conduct. The parish itself was an important unit of local government, collecting and doling out such pittances as the poor received. The Church controlled men's feelings and told them what to believe, provided them with entertainment and shows. It took the place of news and propaganda services now covered by many different and more efficient institutions - the Press, the B.B.C., the cinema, the club, and so forth. That is why men took notes at sermons; it is also why the government often told preachers exactly what to preach.

For example, Queen Elizabeth "tuned her pulpits" ("as governing persons now strive to tune their morning newspapers," said Carlyle); she circulated an official book of homilies to all preachers to make sure they said the right things. It was "to be read in every parish church agreeably", and concludes with a sermon in six parts condemning "disobedience and wilful rebellion." Bishops and priests were far more like civil servants, part of the government's administrative machine, than they are at present; and the first to recognise this fact were the ecclesiastics themselves. Bancroft, a prelate of late Elizabethan times, mocked at the Puritan claim to be dealing simply with Church matters. "How far these words Church causes ... extend!" he cried. "You see what an infinite sea of affairs they would thrust their elderships." "Presume not," warned the Anglican Hooker, "ye are sheep, to make yourselves guides of them that guide you ... For God is not a God of sedition and confusion, but of order and of peace."

Church, then, defended the existing order, and it was important for the Government to maintain its control over this publicity and propaganda agency. For the same reason, those who wanted to overthrow the feudal state had to attack and seize control of the Church. That is why political theories tended to get wrapped up in religious language. It was not that our seventeenth-century forefathers were much more conscientious and saintly men than we are. Whatever may be true of Ireland or Spain, we in England to-day can see our problems in secular terms just because our ancestors put an end to the use of the Church as an exclusive and persecuting instrument of political masters, not because we are wiser and better, but because Cromwell, stabling in cathedrals the horses of the most disciplined and most democratic cavalry the world had yet seen, won a victory which for ever stopped men being flogged and branded for having unorthodox views about the Communion service. As long as the power of the State was weak and uncentralised, the Church with its parson in every parish, the parson with honoured access to every household, could tell people what to believe and how to behave; and behind the threats and censures of the Church were all the terrors of hell fire. Under these circumstances social conflicts inevitably became religious conflicts.

But the fact that men spoke and wrote in religious language should not prevent us realising that there is a social content behind what are apparently purely theological ideas. Each class created and sought to impose the religious outlook best suited to its own needs and interests. But the real clash is between these class interests: behind the parson stood the squire.

It is not then denied that the "Puritan Revolution" was a religious as well as a political struggle; but it was more than that. What men were fighting about was the whole nature and future development of English society. Contemporaries knew perfectly well what it was all about, far better, in fact, than many later historians.

It was not merely that, when the victory of the bourgeoisie had been achieved, thinkers like Winstanley, Harrington, Neville, Defoe recognised that the war had been primarily a struggle over property. Shrewd politicians showed in the heat of the contest that they knew well enough who their opponents were. As early as 1603, James I told Parliament that the Puritans -

"do not so far differ from us in point of religion as in their confused form of policy and parity, being ever discontented with the present government and impatient to suffer any superiority, which maketh their sects insufferable in any well-governed commonwealth."

The political theorist, Hobbes, describes how the Presbyterian merchant class of the city of London was the first centre of sedition, trying to build a state governed like the republics of Holland and Venice, by merchants for their own interests. (The comparison with the bourgeois republics is constantly recurring in Parliamentarian writings.) Mrs. Hutchinson, the wife of one of Cromwell's colonels, said all were described as Puritans who "crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry ... whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit or conversation, or anything good." Baxter, a Puritan divine, was even more explicit:

"A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of England ... adhered to the King ... And most of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry and were for the King. On the Parliament's side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures."

He concluded -

"Freeholders and tradesmen are the strength of religion and civility in the land; and gentlemen and beggars and servile tenants are the strength of iniquity."

Why he lumped together precisely these classes will be evident.

End of Introductuon To The English Revolution by Christopher Hill