A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (29 page)

The eight cavalry regiments each elected two representatives—known as ‘agitators’—to express their views. The soldiers of the other regiments followed suit. The agitators began to make demands, in the name of the army rank and file, that challenged not only the power of the king but also the power of the gentry. A petition denounced the gentry in the House of Commons, stating, ‘some that had tasted of sovereignty had turned into tyrants’.
¹¹⁴
Regimental meetings took on an almost insurrectionary character, with attacks on the way the Commons were elected (by a tiny franchise), demands for annual parliaments, calls for vengeance against Presbyterian ministers, and attacks on the arcane language of the law courts.
¹¹⁵
The meetings of agitators began to turn into a system of self organisation for the rank and file of the army to press their demands—they set up a team of writers to prepare pamphlets, they insisted the officers obtain a printing press for them, they sent delegates to stir up the non New Model Army regiments, and they began to make contact with ‘well affected friends’ (other radical elements) throughout the country.

Levellers and revolutionaries

A radical democratic grouping, the Levellers, led by people like Richard Overton, John Wildman, William Walwyn and John Lilburne, enjoyed growing influence. In October 1647 support for the Levellers reached such a peak that Cromwell and other army leaders were compelled to chair a debate in Putney with soldiers influenced by them. It was here that Rainborowe, the most radical of the officers, put forward a view which challenged the whole basis of rule by the gentry and merchant classes: ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he…the poorest man in England is not all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not a voice to put himself under’.
¹¹⁶
In reply Cromwell’s close ally Ireton spelt out the class view which still motivated the Independents: ‘No one has a right to…a share…in determining of the affairs of the kingdom…that has not a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom…that is, the person in whom all land lies, and those in the corporations in whom all trading lies’.
¹¹⁷

The Levellers’ position, as has often been pointed out, was not for universal male suffrage. When pushed, they were prepared to accept that ‘servants’—those in the employ of others—should be excluded from their scheme for increasing those allowed to vote. In part this was because they feared that the royalist lords and gentry would dragoon their servants, labourers and retainers to vote for them. In part it was because the core of the radical influence in the army did not lie with the conscripted poor but with the volunteer small property owners who saw themselves as a cut above the labourers or journeymen working for them.

The leading Leveller, Lilburne, spelt out that the call for political rights for small property owners did not involve an attack on the system of private property. They were, he wrote, ‘the truest and constantest assertors of liberty and propriety [ie property]’, and there was nothing in their writings or declarations:

Nevertheless, the election of the agitators and the call for small property owners to have the same rights as large was enough to terrify the already frightened ‘moderates’ of the Presbyterian party. The power of the representative body of the gentry and merchant classes was being challenged by a new representative body of those members of the middling and lower classes enrolled in the army. And these people constituted by far the most powerful organisation of armed force in the country. A clash between a section of the ruling class and the king risked turning into a revolutionary conflict.

The parliamentary moderates summoned three of the agitators to appear before them and blustered about punishing them. The Presbyterian leader Denzil Holles later said that they should have had the courage to hang one as a warning to the others. But they let them go. They could not do more until they had reliable armed forces of their own. They now tried to assemble these, arranging for the City of London oligarchy to purge radicals from its militia, establishing a ‘committee of safety’ to organise forces under the control of the gentry in each county, attempting to ensure the military arsenals were in their hands and negotiating with their fellow Presbyterians who controlled the Scottish army to bring it into England. They came to believe they should unite with the royalist gentry to restore a slightly reformed version of the old monarchy.

The Independents around Cromwell were very weak in parliamentary terms. But they saw they could use the agitator movement to defend themselves, ensuring it did not get out of hand. They set up a ‘council of the army’, made up half of rank and file representatives and half of officers. Many of the rank and file troops still deferred to their ‘betters’, and the officers were able to direct much of the soldiers’ bitterness into channels favourable to themselves.

At first, the aim of the Independents was to force the king to negotiate with them. To this end they allowed a contingent of forces to seize the king from the hands of the Presbyterian party. Cromwell and those around him intended to make it clear that they had won the civil war and that the king had to accept the terms they dictated, which included many of the reforms he had resisted. But their terms still provided for a monarchy, for the continuation of the unelected House of Lords and for the restriction of the parliamentary franchise to the upper class.

The second civil war and the great execution

However, Charles had no intention of conceding to demands he regarded as against the very principles of kingship. He determined on a new resort to civil war, escaping from captivity in November 1647. Cromwell now recognised his attempts to negotiate with the king had been mistaken and used New Model Army troops to pressurise parliament into voting for the war party’s measures. What is usually called ‘the second civil war’ followed in the summer of 1648. Former supporters of parliament fought alongside the cavaliers, there were royalist risings in south Wales, Kent and Essex, and an invasion from Scotland.

This time the victory of the anti-royalist army was not followed by a policy of leniency or negotiation with the king. Cromwell declared, ‘They that are inflexible and will not leave troubling the land may be speedily destroyed,’ and the officers of the New Model Army called for the death sentence on Charles and his chief advisers. Knowing the Presbyterian majority among MPs would never vote for this, the army occupied London. A detachment of troops under Colonel Pride barred the leading Presbyterians from the House of Commons, and other troops removed the leading oligarchs from their control of the City of London. At the end of January the executioner held the severed head of the king before a crowd in Whitehall.

The events leading to the execution were paralleled by ferment within the New Model Army and among its civilian supporters. Cromwell and the Independents would not have been able to take control of London and beat back both the Presbyterians and the king without the revolutionary movement within the army. Faced with the threat of counter-revolution, Cromwell had been prepared for a time to defend the Levellers against Presbyterian repression. He even went so far as to visit the imprisoned Lilburne in the Tower of London in an attempt to reach an agreement. But he also resorted to force as the second civil war approached. He isolated the radicals by using the war as a pretext to reorganise their regiments, put down an attempted mutiny—executing one of the alleged leaders, Richard Arnold—and imprison the London Levellers. At the same time he continued to rely upon the Leveller-influenced army rank and file in the period up to and immediately after the execution of the king. Only then did he feel confident enough to smash those who articulated class feelings. Cromwell berated his fellows on the Council of State: ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you’.
¹¹⁹
In the spring of 1649 the Leveller leaders in London were confined to the Tower and, in May, a mutiny of 1,000 troops was broken and four of its leaders were executed in the churchyard at Burford in Oxfordshire.

The bulk of the New Model Army was no longer needed to defeat the king and the Presbyterians in England. It was dispatched, minus its agitators, to Ireland, while a Leveller pamphlet asked the soldiers:

This was a prophetic warning of what the English ruling class was to do to Ireland. But it could hardly stop impoverished men accepting military discipline and the only livelihood open to them once their leaders had been shot.

The Levellers were not a movement based on the impoverished mass of society, but on the ‘middling sort’—the artisans, the lesser traders, the better-off farmers and the soldiers who were recruited from these groups. They were the most radical and courageous party to emerge from these groups and pushed a programme which, had it been successful, would have brought about a much greater revolutionary change than actually occurred. They did so from the point of view of social groups which hoped to prosper from the growth of capitalist forms of production—the groups which were to crystallise over the next century into an increasingly self conscious ‘middle class’. But in doing so they began to challenge the tradition that a section of society was divinely entitled to rule over the rest. Like Müntzer and his followers in the German Peasant War, they helped to establish a rival tradition of resistance to class rule.

The defeat of the Levellers did not mean nothing had been achieved by the agitation and fighting of the previous years. The group around Cromwell had only been able to win by taking revolutionary measures, even if limited in scope. From 1649 the government of England—and soon of Scotland as well—was run by army officers, many of whom came from the ‘middling sort’.

Christopher Hill has noted that after the second civil war:

Such men pushed through a series of measures which broke the hold of those who would have turned English society back in a feudal direction once and for all. In this way the English Revolution cleared the ground for the development of a society based on market relations and capitalist forms of exploitation.

Cromwell himself did not come from a new ‘bourgeois’ exploiting class, although he had family connections with some of the merchants. But he could not have succeeded without relying on those out of whom such a class was forming. His genius lay in his ability to grasp the fact that the crisis of English society could not be resolved without turning to new methods and new men. This alone could stop the English Revolution suffering the same fate as the French Calvinists or the Bohemian estates. A member of a gentry family had to carry through a revolution which ensured society would be run on essentially bourgeois lines.

He ruled England virtually as a dictator for a decade. His regime was based on military force. But it could not survive indefinitely without wider social backing. Cromwell recognised this and attempted to establish parliaments which would back him, only to discover that the dissensions which had turned Presbyterians against Independents in the mid-1640s continually re-emerged. The gentry in each locality wanted an end to the uncertainty associated with revolutionary upheaval and balked at further reform. Sections of the ‘middling sort’ wanted more radical reform, and were well represented among the army officers. But they were not prepared to push such reform through if it meant further social unrest and as the decade passed they increasingly allied themselves with the very sections of the gentry they had fought during the civil war—people who still saw a monarchy as the precondition for maintaining social order. The culmination of this process came in 1660 after Cromwell’s death. A section of the army agreed with the remnants of parliament to invite the son of the executed king back as monarch.

Although the revolution was over, many of the changes survived. The monarchy’s existence now depended on the will of the propertied classes expressed through parliament—as was shown in 1688 when they threw James II out in a ‘bloodless’ revolution. The wealth of the propertied classes depended as never before on their success in coping with market forces. The large landowners increasingly embraced capitalist methods of agriculture. The growing portion of the population who lived in towns increasingly either employed others or worked for others. Guilds were no longer able to prevent innovation in productive techniques—by 1689 three quarters of English towns contained no guilds at all.
¹²²
Government policies were dictated by the desire to expand trade, not by the dynastic intrigues of the monarch.

Together these changes represented something radically new in world history. The means by which people earned a living was now carried out in units which depended for survival upon the ability of those who ran them to keep costs below those of other units. The big farmer, the medium sized iron master, even the individual handloom weaver, could only guarantee they earned a living if they could stay in business, and that meant keeping up with new methods of production which cut costs.