In his thoughtful and engaging Civil War London: Mobilizing for Parliament, 1641–5, Jordan Downs tells the fascinating story of London during the Civil War era, which for his purposes is largely confined to the years 1641–1645. Drawing on a wide array of sources, he argues that while London's civic leaders might on the whole have supported parliament during the conflict, Londoners had a variety of opinions on events that would profoundly shape subsequent English history. Building on some of the more methodologically sophisticated works of recent years, Downs focuses on the moments of mobilization through which significant numbers of Londoners became engaged with national events. He succeeds in offering a new synthesis that allows historians of the period to move well beyond the highly influential work of Valerie Pearl from sixty years ago. Whereas Pearl emphasized the crucial role of London's radicalized elite, Downs demonstrates that humble Londoners were essential to the efforts of parliament to mobilize metropolitan resources for its war effort. Although London's support for parliament's cause was indispensable, the social and economic stresses the war placed on daily life contributed to fatigue and, in some cases, loud calls for peace. By focusing on subtle shifts in popular sentiment in the metropolis, Downs makes an important historiographical intervention.
Throughout Civil War London, he explicates the political mood of Londoners with reference to government records and to the ever-expanding output of the metropolitan presses. Downs reconstructs how, from late 1641 through the summer of 1642, providential rhetoric mobilized non-elite Londoners first to respond to the plight of beleaguered Protestants in Ireland and then to support parliament at the outbreak of civil war: “London was at the epicenter of the ideological shifts that were taking place” (45). Those London ministers and preachers who swam against the tide by insisting that attacks on royal authority threatened to bring divine judgment upon the city faced ejection from their positions by municipal authorities. Expediting that process in the summer of 1642 was the successful effort by more radical common councilors to remove Lord Mayor Richard Gurney, who consistently supported the king, and to replace him with Isaac Pennington, a staunch defender of parliament's rights. Under Pennington's leadership, the city government rapidly pressed its citizens—largely through the livery companies—to furnish loans of both money and military supplies to parliament's cause, further enlisting the (sometimes reluctant) support of ordinary Londoners for the war effort.
The unfolding military campaigns of the closing months of 1642 revealed fissures in the ranks of parliament's supporters in London. Downs emphasizes that petitions from Londoners bolstered the support among some in parliament for a negotiated settlement with the king, and he shows how, in the early months of 1643, the City's leaders attempted to represent the complex attitudes of the citizenry. Charles mistook openness to a negotiated resolution for an opportunity to isolate the more militant Londoners, leading him to overplay his hand by insisting that seven prominent citizens—including Mayor Pennington—be arrested for high treason before he would consider a truce. This demand, which recalled his failed effort the previous year to seize five members of parliament sheltering in the City, served only to galvanize support for rebellion. Pennington and his allies intensified their pamphleteering and petitioning efforts to engage popular sympathy for their cause and to marshal metropolitan resources in the service of an all-out military campaign against the king. Downs convincingly identifies this as the key period when “City militants . . . hardened their resolve in light of the king's charge of treason against the seven Londoners” and “zealous Londoners pushed harder than ever to transform their City” (127).
As went London, so went parliament. Hopes for a negotiated settlement of the conflict dimmed throughout the spring, culminating that June in the circulation of competing loyalty oaths that forced Londoners to choose among irreconcilable options. Downs concurs with David Como's assessment that attempts at the mass mobilization of Londoners in support of calls for parliament to press ahead for a military victory set the stage for the creation of the New Model Army eighteen months later (Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War [2018]). He differs with Como in arguing that the greatest significance of agitation for a general rising was its fostering, through petitioning, of a popular engagement with politics, albeit one that succeeded with the guidance of the civic elite: “they had delivered their desires from the streets of the metropolis to the very chambers of Westminster; their actions dictated the course of metropolitan politics and, by extension, the civil war” (215). That is not to suggest that London opinion was unified; rather, throughout the remainder of the war ongoing divisions regularly revealed themselves as sermons, pamphlets, petitions, and demonstrations expressed a variety of views on religious differences and weariness with the costs of the conflict. Although many of parliament's supporters attributed the spectacular victory at Naseby to divine intervention, it was carried out by an army that was to a great extent staffed and funded by Londoners.
Downs deftly narrates a complex story, writing with a confidence earned from many years of research and analysis. He acknowledges that he is entering a well-populated field, but his historiographical interventions advance the conversation among scholars. He has produced a work that will be a touchstone for studies of Civil War London—indeed, of Civil War England—for many years to come.
