Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:27:41.696Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Social Interpretation of the English Revolution*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Perez Zagorin
Perez Zagorin
Affiliation:
McGill University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The discussion of the social character of the English revolution is carried on at present largely in terms of the well-known controversy over the gentry. The debate which has been conducted has undoubtedly been welcomed by all historians as a valuable stimulus to think afresh and more deeply about the seventeenth century. But the preoccupation with the gentry, instructive as it has been, has also had its disadvantages, for it has served, I think, to obscure how much a general judgment on the social origin and development of the revolution depends on a knowledge of many other topics besides those to which R. H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, and H. R. Trevor-Roper have drawn to our attention.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 1959 , pp. 376 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1959

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Some indication of the nature of the controversy and its literature will be found in Zagorin, P., “The English Revolution 1640–1660,” Journal of World History, II (1955), 668–81.Google Scholar Besides the writings there cited, see also the remarks of Cooper, J. P., “The Counting of Manors,” Economic History Review [hereafter cited as Ec. H. R.], 2d ser., VIII (1956)Google Scholar; Manning, B., “The Nobles, the People, and the Constitution,” Past and Present, No. 9 (1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640 (“Northamptonshire Record Society,” Vol. XIX; Lamport, 1956); Elton, G. R., England under the Tudors (London: Methuen, 1955), pp. 251–59.Google Scholar The following contributions to the discussion had not appeared when this paper was written: Hill, C., “Recent Interpretations of the Civil War,” History, n. s., XLI(1956)Google Scholar; Hexter, J. H., “Storm over the Gentry,” Encounter, X (1958)Google Scholar; and Yule, G., The Independents in the English Civil War (Cambridge: University Press, 1958).Google Scholar

2 Cf. the remarks of H. J. Habakkuk in his Preface to M. E. Finch, Five Northamptonshire Families, p. xix.

3 Cf. Dodd, A. H., “Nerth y Committee, Studies in Stuart Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1952)Google Scholar; Pennington, D. H. and Roots, I. A., eds., The Committee at Stafford 1642–1645 Manchester: University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Everitt, A. M., The County Committee of Kent in the Civil War (Leicester: University College, 1957).Google Scholar Cf. also Coate, M., Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum (Oxford: University Press, 1933), ch. xiii.Google Scholar

4 Tawney, R. H., “The Rise of the Gentry, 1558–1640,” Ec. H. R., XI (1941)Google Scholar and “The Rise of the Gentry: a Postscript,” ibid., 2d ser., VII (1954).

5 Cooper, J. P., “The Counting of Manors,” Ec. H. R., 2d ser., VIII (1951).Google Scholar

6 Trevor-Roper, H. R., The Gentry 1540–1640 (Ec. H. R., Supplements, No. 1; Cambridge: University Press, n. d. [1953Google Scholar]), and “La révolution anglaise de Cromwell,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations X (1955).Google Scholar Cf. also his “The Elizabethan Aristocracy: an Anatomy Anatomized,” Ec. H. R., 2d ser., Ill (1951)Google Scholar, with its in-the-main justifiable criticism of L. Stone's “The Anatomy of the Elizabethan Aristocracy,” ibid., XVIII (1948).

7 The Gentry, pp. 13, 26

8 Thomas Wilson, who claimed to have consulted official government figures on the point, gives the number of gentlemen and knights in 1600 with position and substance sufficient to make them eligible for appointment to the commission of the peace as above 16,500 (The State of England, anno dom. 1600, ed. F. J. Fisher, in Camden Miscellany, XVI [1936], 23).

9 Cf. Campbell, M., The English Yeoman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942)Google Scholar and Thirsk, J. in Victoria County History, Leicestershire (3 vols.; London, 1907–1955), II, 207–9Google Scholar; Trevor-Roper, The Gentry, p. 9.

10 Trevor-Roper, The Gentry, 9–10; Robert Loder's Farm Accounts 1610–1620, ed. G. E. Fussell, in Camden Society, 3d ser., LIII (1936); Finch, Five Northamptonshire Families.

11 Hoskins, W. G., “The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640,” Past and Present, No. 4 (1954). p. 50.Google Scholar On the fall of wage rates, cf. Brown, E. H. P. and Hopkins, S. V., “Wage-rates and Prices: Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century,” Economica, n.s., XXIV (1957).Google Scholar

12 Cf. Habakkuk, Preface to Finch, Five Northamptonshire Families, p. xiv. Trevor-Roper's description of economic conditions shows a curious inconsistency. On the one hand, “in the reign of Elizabeth … the great rise in rents had not yet begun” and “the whole position of the landowning class must sometimes have seemed perilous … although, after 1590, rentals seem generally to have risen….” On the other hand, “from about 1580 the rents of land show a marked rise which continues till the end of the price revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century.” The Gentry, pp. 13, 51. Similarly, on the one hand there was a “general economic depression” in the decade after 1600; on the other hand, the peace of 1604 with Spain “had introduced a period of unexampled prosperity …” Ibid., pp. 13, 37.

13 See the tables in Kerridge, E., “The Movement of Rent, 1540–1640,” Ec. H. R., 2d ser., VI (1953).Google Scholar It is, of course, also true that prices were rising in this period. Yet agricultural prices seem to have risen a good deal more than industrial goods or wages. In consequence, “there can be little doubt that the profits of capitalist farmers increased in the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Ibid., p. 29.

14 Finch, Five Northamptonshire Families.

15 Batho, G. R., “The Finances of an Elizabethan Nobleman: Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632),” Ec. H. R., 2d ser., IX (1957).Google Scholar Northumberland is mentioned here because, though a peer, his income was derived almost entirely from land, for he held but one small crown office, and that only from 1603 to 1606. What could be done to make land profitable is shown by his income, which rose between 1598 and 1632 from an average of £6,650 per annum to £12,750. On the increase in income from the earl's Northumberland estates, see also James, M. E., ed., Estate Accounts of the Earls of Northumberland 1562–1637 (“Publications of the Surtees Society,” Vol. CLXIII; Durham: Andrews, 1955).Google Scholar

16 Committee of Kent, p. 8. Everitt points out that most of the gentry of Kent were indigenous to the county rather than descendants of courtiers and merchants transplanted from London. His conclusions are founded on a study of 160 gentry families of the county. Ibid., pp. 8, 9 n.

17 Cf. Finch, Five Northamptonshire Families, pp. 63, 166.

18 Cf. Part V of his essay. First, the nonofficial gentry are described as resentful and opposed to Elizabeth after 1590. On the strength of a single reference to Goodman's Court of James I, they are next shown greeting King James as their savior, only to turn against him as the betrayer of their hopes. A reference to Holles's Memorials makes possible the statement that the “mere gentry” now change their attitude towards Elizabeth, who becomes for them the patron saint of a Golden Age. (We are not informed why Gervase Holles, the author of these Memorials, should, as a spokesman of the oppressed “mere gentry,” have been a Royalist in the Civil War.) A further feat of prestidigitation enables the “radical recusant gentry, after their vain risings in 1603–5,” to relapse “into Roman Catholic quietism and become the most devoted royalists”; while the “radical puritan gentry” who killed the King and created the republic relapse after 1660 “into gentry quietism” and become “high-flying, non-resisting tories.”

19 Gardiner, S. R., History of England, 1603–1642 (10 vols.; London: Longmans, Green, 1887), X, 129.Google Scholar On Barrington and Holles, see Hexter, J. H., The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941)Google Scholar, and Keeler, M. F., The Long Parliament 1640–1641: a Biographical Study of its Members (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1954)Google Scholar, s. v. Holles was one of the Presbyterian leaders; cf. Gardiner, S. R., History of the Great Civil War (4 vols.; London: Longmans, Green, 1898), III, 216Google Scholar, and Holles, D., Memoirs (London, 1699).Google Scholar

20 The Gentry, pp. 26ff, 32–34.

21 A. H. Dodd, Studies, pp. 2–4, 111—12.

22 Trevor-Roper, The Gentry, p. 41. Hoskins, W. G., “The Estates of the Caroline Gentry,” in Hoskins, W. G. and Finberg, H. P. R., Devonshire Studies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 353.Google Scholar An equally striking instance is Sir John Oglander, whom Trevor-Roper appears to regard as the very prototype of the “mere” gentry and whose well-known lament about his economic difficulties he cites (The Gentry, p. 26). Yet this classical declining country gentleman, who had neither office, nor trade, nor the law as strings to his bow, was a Royalist.

23 Cf. Hexter, J. H., “The Problem of the Presbyterian Independents,” American Historical Review, XLIV (1938)Google Scholar, where the complexities underlying the party labels, Presbyterian and Independent, are examined.

24 Brunton, D. and Pennington, D. H., Members of the Long Parliament (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), pp. 38–41.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., p.41. This number is not a small minority, but represents 42 per cent of those sitting in December 1648 before the purge. Normal attendance was, of course, smaller than this total. Ibid., pp. 41, 43. The largest single attendance I have noticed during the period of the Rump's sitting was on 24 November 1652, when 122 members were present for the election of the fifth Council of State. Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons Journals, VII, 220.

26 Brunton and Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament, pp. 52, 182, 45–47.

27 The names of those chosen to the first Council of State are given in the Commons Journals, VI, 140–41, 143. Its members were elected by the Commons on 14 and 15 February 1649.

28 Ibid., VI, 146–47. Mulgrave, though refusing subscription to the Engagement of loyalty to the Commonwealth, was reported prepared to take part in the government. However, the table of attendance of the Council of State (Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1649–1650, ab init.) shows that he never appeared at any of its sittings. Unwillingness to subscribe to the Engagement was no obstacle to membership in the Council, and a number of other Councillors refused it, including Sir Henry Vane the younger, Whitelocke, Fairfax, Skippon, Masham, Haselrig, Denbigh, Pembroke, Salisbury, Sir James Harrington, Pickering, Wilson, Bond, Lord Lisle, and Popham. Commons Journals, VI, 146–47; Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1649–1650, p. 9. In its original form the Engagement was objectionable to many because, in addition to a pledge of loyalty to the existing government, it required retrospective approval of the acts by which the Commonwealth came into being. Whitelocke, B., Memorials of English Affairs (4 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1853), II, 537.Google Scholar As a result, this version was soon withdrawn and another inoffensive one apparently substituted. Gardiner, S. R., History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (4 vols.; London: Longmans, Green, 1903) I, 6.Google Scholar Though the matter is somewhat unclear in the Commons Journals, it appears that some of the Councilors did not subscribe to this either and that these were allowed to enter office without oblightion to take the Engagement. Cf. Abbott, W. C., Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell 4 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937–1947), II, 16.Google Scholar

29 The classification of the members of the Council of State in the following three notes is based mainly on information derived from the Dictionary of National Biography and M. Keeler, The Long Parliament.

30 Lord Fairfax (listed here among the gentry because his was of the Scottish peerage), Sir William Masham Bt., Sir Arthur Haselrig Bt., Sir James Harrington, Sir Henry Vane the younger, Sir John Danvers, Sir William Armyn Bt., Sir Henry Mildmay, Sir Gilbert Pickering Bt., Sir William Constable Bt., Henry Marten, William Heveningham, Robert Wallop, William Purefoy, Alexander Popham, Anthony Stapley. Perhaps Edmund Ludlow should also be added, despite Trevor-Roper's inclusion of him in the declining gentry. The Gentry, pp. 33, 47. Ludlow was the son and heir of Sir Henry Ludlow, also a member of the Long Parliament, who is described by Keeler (The long Parliament, s. v.) as apparently “a man of means.” The family was an important one in Wiltshire.

31 Henry Rolle, Oliver St. John, John Wylde, John Bradshaw, John Lisle, Bulstrode Whitelocke.

32 Isaac Penington and Rowland Wilson of London (though Wilson was elected to the Long Parliament for a Wiltshire borough), and Dennis Bond of Dorchester.

33 Oliver Cromwell, Valentine Walton, John Hutchinson, John Jones, Luke Robinson, Thomas Scott. The two remaining members, unaccounted for in the classification in the text, were Cornelius Holland, a former royal official, and Philip Skippon, a professional soldier.

34 Commons Journals, VI, 141.

35 On Ireton, cf. Ramsey, R. W., Henry Ireton (London: Longmans, Green, 1949)Google Scholar and Ashley, M., Cromwell's Generals (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), ch. iv.Google Scholar Ireton was the author of the army manifesto of November 1648, which foreshadowed the coming of the Commonwealth; cf. Zagorin, P., A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1954), pp. 78–79.Google Scholar The reason for the rejection of Ireton and Harrison was doubtless their connection with the army. There are numerous indications in the Commons Journals of the resentment felt in the House at its subjection to military pressure; cf. Gardiner, Great Civil War, IV, 270.

38 The Gentry, p. 43.

37 Cf. Everitt, Committee of Kent, pp. 25–30, for a suggestive account of how the triumph of the center was reflected in the changing composition of the Committee of Kent.

38 The Long Parliament, p. 22; cf. also Table 5.

39 Sir Arthur Ingram, Sir Miles Fleetwood, Sir Benjamin Rudyard, Sir Henry Vane the elder, Sir Richard Wynn Bt., Sir Robert Pye, Sir Henry Mildmay, Sir John Hippisley, Sir John Trevor, Sir Robert Harley, Lawrence Whitaker, Giles Green, Gilbert Millington, John Downes, Cornelius Holland.

40 Keeler, The Long Parliament, s. v.

41 Vane, Mildmay, Hippisley, Whitaker, Trevor, Millington, Downes, Holland. Cf. Brunton and Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament, App. VI, for a list of all members of the Long Parliament, including the Rump.

42 For a similar view of the significance of the English revolution, cf., inter alia, McIlwain, C. H., The High Court of Parliament and its Supremacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1910)Google Scholar; Keir, D. L., The Constitutional History of Modern Britain (London: A. & C. Black, 1938), PP. 230–33Google Scholar; and Thomson, M. A., A Constitutional History of England 1642–1801 (London: Methuen, 1938), pp. 53–55.Google Scholar

43 Cf. Unwin, G., Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904)Google Scholar; Nef, J. U.The Rise of the British Coal Industry (2 vols.; London: Routledge & Sons, 1932),Google Scholar Part IV; and the same writer's “The Progress of Technology and the Growth of Large Scale Industry in Great Britain 1540–1640,” Ec. H. R., V (1934),Google Scholar and Industry and Government in France and England 1540–1640 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1940)Google Scholar; Lipson, E., The Economic History of England (3 vols.; London: A. & C. Black, 1928–1931), II-IIIGoogle Scholar; and Fisher, F. G., “The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages in English Economic History?,” Economica, n.s.. XXXIV (1957).Google Scholar Also Mathew, D., The Social Structure of Caroline England (Oxford: University Press, 1948),Google Scholar ch. i, and The Age of Charles I (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), p. xv.Google Scholar

44 Nef, Industry and Government, pp. 1, 145.

45 L'ancien régime, trans. Patterson, M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), p. 21.Google Scholar

46 Hill, C, The English Revolution 1640 (3d rev. ed.; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955)Google Scholar; and Hill, C. and Dell, E., The Good Old Cause (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1950)Google Scholar: cf. the conclusions of a conference of British Marxist historians in 1947, cited in Fisher, “The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages in English Economic History?,” pp. 5–6.

47 Hill, The English Revolution, p. 6.

48 The Age of Charles I, p. 323.

49 History of the Rebellion, ed. Macray, W. D. (6 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), I, 204.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., VI, 74; cf. Sir Warwicke, Philip, Memoires of the Reign of King Charles I (2d ed.; London, 1702), pp. 230–31.Google Scholar

51 This is the general impression derived from Clarendon; cf., besides his remarks about particular counties (thus, History, IV, 340; VII, 157), his statement, ibid., VII, 99, that “most of the gentry … throughout the Kingdom” was “engaged against” Parliament. Clarendon was, of course, prejudiced and could have been wrong. Cf. also in support of this impression Warwick, Memoires, pp. 216–18; SirOglander, John, A Royalist's Notebook, ed. Bamford, F. (London: Constable, 1938), pp. 104, 105–6Google Scholar; Hutchinson, Lucy, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. Firth, C. H. (2 vols.; London: 1885), I, 141Google Scholar; Baxter, R., Autobiography (Everyman ed.; London: Dent, 1931), p. 34.Google Scholar Many other contemporary testimonies to the same effect might be cited.

52 Clarendon, History, V, 385; T. Hobbes, Behemoth, in Maseres, F., Select Tracts (2 parts; London: R. Bickerstaff, 1815), II, 459, 477, 576.Google Scholar

53 Cf. Hardacre, P., The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), pp. 5–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 Gardiner, History of England 1603–1642, X, 83, 107–8; but cf. Wren, M., “The disputed Elections in London in 1641,” English Historical Review, LXIV (1949).Google Scholar Clarendon remarks (History, IV, 340) on the strength of Royalist attachment among the “most important citizens of London” in the controversy over the Militia Bill.

55 Extracts from the Records of the Company of Hostmen at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ed. Dendy, F. W. (Surtees Society, Vol. CV [1901]), pp. 80–83.Google Scholar Among the Newcasde Royalists were such important colliery owners and financiers as Sir John Marley, Sir John Mennes, Sir Thomas Riddell, Sir Francis Anderson, the Tempests, the Coles, and the Lidrells (Records of the Committee for Compounding … in Durham and Northumberland, ed. Welford, R. (“Surtees Society,” Vol. XCI [1905])Google Scholar, s. v.

56 For Royalism in Bristol, see Latimer, J., The Annals of Bristol in the Seventeenth Century, (Bristol: W. George's Sons, 1900),Google Scholarpassim. Bristol's original members in the Long Parliament, Humphrey Hooke and Richard Long, were both Royalists. On their expulsion from the House of Commons, the city elected two other Royalists, John Glanville and John Taylor. Ibid., p. 157; cf. Brunton and Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament, p. 222. Also the biographical accounts of Bristol merchants in The Deposition Books of Bristol, 1643–1647, ed. Nott, H. E. (Bristol Record Society, Vol. VI [1935]),Google Scholar App. I; Records Relating to the Society of Merchant Venturers of … Bristol, ed. McGrath, P. (Bristol Record Society, Vol. XVII [1952]), p. xxxGoogle Scholar; and the remarks of McGrath, P., Merchants and Merchandise in Seventeenth Century Bristol (Bristol Record Society, Vol. XIX [1955]), pp. XXVI–XXVIII.Google Scholar Perhaps the outstanding Bristol Royalist was Humphrey Hooke, a city magnate, owner of much landed property, twice mayor, and seven times master of the Society of Merchant Venturers.

57 On these, cf. Keeler, The Long Parliament, s. v.

58 The Rise of the British Coal Industry, I, 279 n.; cf. Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. Winter held patents of monopoly and was a beneficiary of royal grants, as were a number of other merchants and industrialists who supported the King. About Royalists such as these, Dobb, Maurice says that they “paradoxically were apt to be the proprietors of the most capitalistically advanced enterprises.” Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 170.Google Scholar The paradox vanishes, however, once the idea is given up that Royalism represented die interests of a distinct and economically retrogressive class.

59 This distinction was made in the sense indicated above in the 1620's. Notestein, W., “The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XI (1924–1925),Google Scholar 152 n. Sir John Eliot employed it (Hulme, H., The Life of Sir John Eliot [London: Allen & Unwin, 1957]Google Scholar;, passim) as did Clarendon (e.g., History, IV, 180). The terms came into general use after the Restoration; cf. Airy, O., ed., Burnet's History of My Own Time, Part I: The Reign of Charles II (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), I, 489; II, 82 n.Google Scholar; Foxcroft, H. C., A Supplement to Burnet's History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 99 n., 151, 258Google Scholar; and T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (5 vols.; Philadelphia, n.d.), I, 190.

60 For the opposition among the peers, cf. Firth, C. H., The House of Lords during the Civil War (London: Longmans, Green, 1910)Google Scholar, ch. ii. On the resistance of the gentry to the forced loan, see Gardiner, History of England, VI, 155–57.

61 For Eliot, see Hulme, Sir John Eliot, chs. v-vi and Ball, J. N., “Sir John Eliot at the Oxford Parliament, 1625,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XXVIII (1955)Google Scholar; for Wentworth, Gardiner, History of England 1603–1642, VI, 126–27; VII, 25–27.

62 These connections show that it would be quite mistaken to consider Court and Country as rigid groupings or to suppose that Court office necessarily entailed political support of the crown. Sir Miles Fleetwood, for instance, was an official of the Court of Wards, but he was related by marriage to a Puritan family, and in the later 1620's, as in the Long Parliament until his death, he sided with the opponents of the Court. Keeler, The Long Parliament, s. v. Sir Benjamin Rudyard, another official of the Court of Wards, was associated with the opposition through his political dependence on the third and fourth earls of Pembroke, by whose influence he was elected both to the earlier Parliaments of Charles I and the Long Parliament. Ibid., s. v.; and Rowe, V., “The Influence of the Earls of Pembroke on Parliamentary Elections, 1625–1641,” English Historical Review, L (1935), 242–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The position of the third earl of Pembroke also illustrates some of the complexities involved in an understanding of the Court-Country relationship. Because of his great wealth, high social standing, and extensive territorial influence, he was inevitably in the Court and held the office of Lord Chamberlain under James I and of Lord Steward under Charles I. But in political matters he was not consistently with the Court and used his electoral patronage—which was greatly enhanced by his office of Warden of the Stannaries—on behalf of the Country opposition. Ibid. Clarendon says that “he was … celebrated in the country for having received no obligations of the Court which might corrupt or sway his affections and judgment, so that all who were displeased and unsatisfied in the Court or with the Court were always inclined to put themselves under his banner….” History, I, 121, 124. Pembroke's brother and heir, the fourth earl, was a Parliamentarian and sat in the Rump and the Council of State after the abolition of the House of Lords.

63 Cf. Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War, p. 37 ff. The hatred of Buckingham felt by many peers is strikingly illustrated in the letter in which Henry Percy, a younger son of the ninth earl of Northumberland, conveyed the news of the Duke's assassination to his brother-in-law, the earl of Carlisle, a Court nobleman who was personally close to the King: “I believe it will be … not … unpleasing for your Lordship to hear that the desirer and plotter of your ruin and destruction is possessed with a death not unfit for him, because correspondent to his life, which was granted by all men to be dishonourable and odious.” Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Addenda 1625–1649, pp. 292–93. Cf. also the account of the earl of Clare's attitude by his kinsman, Gervase Holles, in Wood, A. C., ed., Memorials of the Holles Family (“Camden Society,” 3d ser., Vol. LV [1937]), pp. 99–106.Google Scholar

64 Nef, Industry and Government, p. 149.

65 Cf. Darby, H. C., The Draining of the Fens (Cambridge: University Press, 1940), pp. 38–64.Google Scholar The attempt in pursuance of the King's command to enclose royal forests in Dorset, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire led to considerable resistance; cf. Allan, D. G. C., “The Rising in the West, 1628–1631,” Ec. H. R., 2d ser., V (1952).Google Scholar

66 History, I, 204.

67 Cf. Wedgewood, C. V., “The Causes of the English Civil War, a New Analysis,” History Today, V (1955).Google Scholar

68 Thus in Wales, as Dodd points out, at the elections to the Long Parliament, the country was not “divided into Royalists and Roundheads; on the contrary, all the evidence points to a remarkable unanimity against the grievances of the day and a strong desire to avoid hampering divisions.” Yet “within twenty months the Welsh united front at Westminster had been reduced to seven members, the rest [seventeen members] having ‘deserted’ their seats to join the King at Oxford …” Studies, p. 190. A similar process occurred in the Southwest; cf. Brunton and Penningston, Members of the Long Parliament, p. 132. Keeler remarks on the large number of original members of the Long Parliament who, after having opposed the King's policies before 1640, were Royalists in the war. The Long Parliament, p. 15.

69 Such, for instance, was the elder Sir Henry Vane, the King's Secretary; cf. Clarendon's comment, History, VI, 411. Some of the royal patentees also abandoned the Court, and Clarendon describes how, when monopolists and projectors were expelled from the Commons, Pym and his associates “never questioned Sir Henry Mildmay, nor Mr. Laurence Whitaker, who had been most scandalously engaged in those pressures,” because it was thought they might cooperate in the “violent courses which were intended.” Ibid., III, 13.

70 Malbon, T., Memorials of the Civil War in Cheshire, ed. Hall, J. (“Lancs. and Cheshire Record Society,” Vol. XIX [1889]), pp. 31–34Google Scholar; Clarendon, History, VI, 257–59; Pennington and Roots, The Committee at Stafford, p. xx. It is possible that the bulk of the nation was inclined to neutrality in the first years of the war; cf. Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution, pp. 1–2. Only among men strongly moved by Puritanism, urban people, for example, such as those to whom John Goodwin preached, was the war viewed from the beginning as a great struggle against evil. See Goodwin's summons to resistance, Anti-Cavalierisme, published in October 1642, reprinted in Haller, W., Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (3 vols.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), Vol. II.Google Scholar

71 The Social Structure of Caroline England, p. 28.

72 Collins, A., ed., Letters and Memorials of State (2 vols.; London, 1746), II, 664.Google Scholar

73 Cf. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym, p. 19.

74 Letters and Memorials of State, I, 667. Spencer was created Earl of Sunderland in 1643, shortly before his death.

75 Clarendon, History, VII, 231.

76 Written in February 1643; Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1641–1643, p. 445.

77 Cf. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, chs. ii-iii.

78 Firth, C. H., Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (“World's Classics”; Oxford: 1953), pp. 169–71, 185, 211–12Google Scholar; cf. the discussion in Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, ch. ix, part 2.

79 For instances of Royalists and other opponents of Cromwell who returned to political and public life during the Protectorate, cf. Dodd, Studies, pp. 161, 191–92, and Hexter, The Reign of King Pym, 41–42, 172–73; also Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution, ch. vi.

80 Firth, C. H. and Rait, R., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (3 vols.; London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1911), I, 833Google Scholar; 12 Charles II c. 24.

81 Bell, H. E., An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries (Cambridge: University Press, 1953), p. 137 ff.Google Scholar

82 Thirsk, J., “The Sales of Royalist Lands during the Interregnum,” Ec. H. R., 2d ser., V (1952),Google Scholar and “The Restoration Land Settlement,” Journal of Modern History, XXVI (1954),Google Scholar correct the views of Chesney, H. S., “The Transference of Lands in England 1640–1660,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser, XV (1932).Google Scholar

83 Thirsk, “The Sales of Royalist Lands,” p. 193 n.; Hill, C., “The Agrarian Legislation of the Interregnum,” English Historical Review, LV (1940).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

84 Hexter, The Reign of King Pym, p. 22.

85 Hill, “The Agrarian Legislation of the Interregnum,” p. 232.

86 Ibid., p. 241.

87 Cf. Brunton and Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament, p. 152. An exception was Philip Jones of Swansea, “the most notorious of all the traffickers in Welsh sequestration … who founded a new county family on the fortune he made during the interregnum.” Dodd, Studies, pp. 121–22.

88 Thirsk, “The Restoration Land Settlement”; Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution, pp. 97–98.

89 Prendergast, J. P., The Cromwellian Settlement in Ireland (3d rev. ed.; Dublin: Mellifont Press, 1922).Google Scholar