7.6: England's Civil War

England is an outstanding example of a state in which the absolutist form of monarchy resolutely failed during the 17th Century while emerging stronger. Ironically, in the 18th Century, the two most powerful states were absolutist France and its political opposite, the first major constitutional monarchy in Europe: the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Historians often associate modernity with representative governments, capitalist economies, and relative religious toleration. All of those things first converged in England at the end of the seventeenth and start of the eighteenth centuries. Likewise, England would eventually evolve from secondary importance in terms of its power and influence to the most powerful nation in the world in the nineteenth century.

Tudors

At the start of the 17th Century, England was a relative backwater. Its population was only a quarter of that of France and its monarchy was comparatively weak. Precisely as France was reorganizing along absolutist lines, England’s monarchy was beset by powerful landowners with traditional privileges they were totally unwilling to relinquish. The English monarchy ran a kingdom with various ethnicities and divided religious loyalties. It was an unlikely candidate for what would one day be the most powerful “Great Power” in Europe.

The English King Henry VIII had broken the official English church away from Roman Catholicism, renaming it the Church of England. In the process, he seized an enormous amount of wealth from English Catholic institutions and used it to fund his own military. Subsequently, his daughter Elizabeth I was able to build up an effective navy (based at least initially on converted merchant vessels) that fought off the Spanish Armada in 1588. While Elizabeth’s long reign (r. 1558 – 1603) coincided with a golden age of English culture, the money plundered from Catholic coffers had run out by the end of it.

Despite Elizabeth’s relative tolerance of religious differences, Great Britain remained profoundly divided. The Church of England was the nominal church of the entire realm, and only Anglicans could hold public office as judges or members of the British parliament, a law-making body dominated by the gentry class of landowners. In turn, the church was divided between a “high church” faction that was in favor of all of the trappings of Catholic ritual versus a “Puritan” faction that wanted an austere, moralistic approach to Christianity similar to Calvinism. Meanwhile, Scotland was overwhelmingly Presbyterian (Scottish Calvinist), and Ireland - which had been colonized by the English starting in the sixteenth century - was overwhelmingly Catholic. Within English society there were numerous Catholics as well, most of whom remained fairly clandestine in their worship out of fear of persecution.

Thus, the monarchy oversaw a divided society. It was also relatively poor, with the English crown overseeing a small bureaucracy and no official standing army. The only way to raise revenue was to raise royal taxes, which were resisted by the very proud and defensive gentry class (the landowners) as well as the titled nobility. The traditional right of parliament was to approve or reject taxes. However, an open question was whether it had the right to set laws. Simply put, English kings or queens could not force lawmakers to grant taxes without having to beg, plead, cajole, and bargain. In turn, the stability of government depended on cooperation between the Crown and the House of Commons, the larger of the two legal bodies in the parliament, which was populated by members of the gentry.

Stuarts

While her reign was plagued by these issues, Elizabeth I was a savvy monarch who was skilled at reconciling opposing factions and winning over members of parliament to her perspective. She also benefited from what was left of the money her father had looted from the English monasteries. This delicate balance started to fall apart with Elizabeth's death in 1603. She died without an heir (she had never married), so her successor was from the Scottish royal house of the Stuarts, a line that the Tudors had married into previously.

The new king was James I (r. 1603 – 1625). James was already the king of Scotland when he inherited the English crown, so England and Scotland were politically united and the kingdom of "Great Britain" was born. (It was later ratified as a permanent legal reality in 1707 with the "Act of Union" passed by parliament).

Inspired by developments on the continent, James tried to insist on the “royal prerogative,” the right of the king to rule through force of will. He set himself up as an absolute monarch and behaved with noticeable contempt toward members of parliament. Still, England was at peace and James avoided making demands that sparked serious resistance. While members of parliament grumbled about his heavy-handed manner of rule, there were no signs of actual rebellion.

His son, Charles I (r. 1625 – 1649), was a much greater threat from the perspective of parliament. He strongly supported the “high church” faction of the Anglican church just as Puritanism among the common people was growing. Also, he began to openly encroach on parliamentary authority. While styling himself after his relative Louis XIII of France, he came to be feared and hated by many of his own people. Charles imposed taxes and tariffs that were not approved by parliament, which was technically illegal, and then he forced rich subjects to grant the crown loans at very low-interest rates. In 1629, after parliament protested, he dismissed it and tried to rule without summoning it again. He was able to do so until 1636, then he tried to impose a new high church religious liturgy (set of rituals) in Scotland. That prompted the Scots to openly break with the king and raise an army. To get the money to fund an English response, Charles had to summon parliament.

The result was a civil war. The Scots were well-trained and organized. When the English parliament met, it declared Charles' various laws and acts illegal and dismissed his ministers, an act remembered as “The Grand Remonstrance.” Parliament also refused to leave, staying in session for years, which earned the moniker “the long parliament".

Meanwhile, a huge Catholic uprising took place in Ireland and thousands of Protestants were massacred. In 1642, war finally broke out, pitting the anti-royal “round-heads” (named after their bowl-style haircuts) and their Scottish allies against the royalist “cavaliers.” In 1645, a Puritan commander named Oliver Cromwell united various parliamentary forces in the “New Model Army,” a well-disciplined fighting force whose soldiers were regularly paid and did not need to live off the land, as did the king’s forces. Due to the effectiveness of Cromwell, the New Model Army, and the financial backing of the city of London, the roundheads gained the upper hand. In 1649, Charles was captured, tried, and executed by parliament as a traitor to his own kingdom.

Figure 7.7.1: An engraving celebrating the victory of the parliamentary forces as “England’s Miraculous Preservation,” with the royalist forces drowning in the allegorical flood while the houses of parliament and the Church of England float on the ark.

During the English civil war, England became one of the most militarized societies. One in eight English men were directly involved in fighting, and few regions were spared horribly bloody fighting. Simultaneously, debates arose among the roundheads concerning what kind of government they were fighting for. The Levelers argued in favor of a people’s government, a true democratic republic. The radical Diggers wanted to set up a proto-communist society in which goods and land were held in common. Those more radical elements were ultimately defeated by the army. But the language they used in discussing justice and good government inspired later debates, ultimately informing the concept of modern democracy.

The Civil War resulted in an explosion of print in England. Various factions attempted to impose and maintain censorship, but were largely unsuccessful due to the political fragmentation of the period. Instead, there was an enormous growth of political debate in the form of printed pamphlets. Over 2,000 political pamphlets were published in 1642 alone. Ordinary people had begun in earnest to participate in political dialog, another pattern associated with modern politics.

After the execution of the king in 1649, England became a (technically republican) dictatorship under Cromwell, who assumed the title of Lord Protector. He ruled England for ten years, carrying out an incredibly bloody invasion of Ireland. Following his death in 1658, parliament decided to reinstate the monarchy and the official power of the Church of England. None of the initial problems that brought about the civil wars were resolved, and Cromwell ended up being as authoritarian and autocratic as Charles had been.