In the second part of the Great Revolutions series, Dominic Alexander charts how plebian radicals drove parliament to take the war with the king to victory

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 3: The English Revolution completed

Although the first major battle of the English Civil War, Edgehill, in October 1642, was indecisive, it laid London open to Charles’ army. The royal forces advanced up the Thames valley, and Prince Rupert’s forces attacked and sacked Brentford in Middlesex. John Lilburne played a very notable role in rallying the parliamentary troops to stand firm, preventing a total rout, but he was captured and the parliamentary forces defeated, nonetheless.

The sack of Brentford stiffened the resolve of Londoners to resist the king’s forces. There was a popular mobilisation to an assembly point in Turnham Green on 13 November 1642, and when it came to it, the royal army faced an ordered force twice its size. The king withdrew rather than risk the battle. Despite some enthusiasm to pursue the king on the parliamentary side they were not sufficiently organised to go on the offensive.

The early period of the English Civil War was indecisive and marked by hesitancy. This was partly down to failures of military organisation. However, on the Parliamentary side, the ‘peace’ party in parliament and the aristocratic generals hoped to reach a compromise with the king, avoid a total break with the old order, and stem the unruliness of the common people. Thus the Earl of Essex, a leading parliamentary general, worried whether ‘this will be the reward of all our labours and our posterity will say that to deliver them from the yoke of the king we have subjected them to that of the common people. If we do this the finger of scorn will be pointed at us and so I am determined to devote my life to repressing the audacity of the common people.’

It was the radical tendency in the parliamentary ‘war’ party which was instrumental in mobilising popular enthusiasm for the defence of London, and opposing the peace party, which also had popular support during 1643. The war brought hardship for poorer people in London and elsewhere, and some of them were mobilised for peace demonstrations. However, the radicals’ campaign ultimately proved stronger. This culminated with the building of fortifications around London, which was only possible because of a massive and coordinated effort from the populace. Major radical demonstrations also helped prevent parliament from voting for peace. The radicals’ efforts to rebuild parliamentary military forces enabled London’s Trained Bands to march across the country and relieve the royalist siege of Gloucester in September 1643. Nevertheless, the radical wing of the war party was outmanoeuvred by their moderate allies around John Pym, so historians have often dismissed their efforts at this stage.

Crucial to parliament’s ability to build a capable military force was the nature of recruitment. Here it was the MP Oliver Cromwell, operating in the east of England, who perfected an approach which threw away the old principles based on social rank and concerns about religious propriety, still influential on the parliamentary side. Cromwell, like the radicals in London, grasped that, for them to win against the royalists, the parliamentary armies had to be strongly committed to the cause and willing to be disciplined. Cromwell famously stated in a letter to supporters in Cambridge: ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.’ Most of Cromwell’s own troops were freeholders or the sons of freeholders, the rural middling sort, who joined out of allegiance to the cause. Ultimately, out of this principle came the New Model Army. Also, it meant that religious radicals, who were very often those most committed to the parliamentary cause, and frequently relatively low born, became prominent in the ranks and as officers in this army.

Religious radicals came in many different flavours. As a shorthand, the different religious divisions mapped roughly, but not by any means exactly, onto political tendencies. If the main tendency of the overall parliamentary side can be labelled ‘Puritan’, that breaks down into subsections. The more conservative-minded side tended towards Presbyterianism, while the more radical like Cromwell tended to align with the ‘Independent’ churches. These were generally Calvinistic (belief in a predestined elect), or ‘Puritan’, but advocated freedom of choice in religion, so that individuals could choose which ‘independent’ congregation they preferred. To the ‘left’ of the Independents lay a great variety of ‘sectaries’, often broadly anabaptist in nature (or labelled as such), and many abandoning Calvinistic theology for a variety of more egalitarian theologies.

Parliamentary victories and divisions

Cromwell’s forces were instrumental in the first major royalist defeat at Marston Moor in July 1644, which resulted in the royalists losing control of the north of England. However, this victory also began the breach with the parliamentary general the Earl of Manchester. The earl was increasingly at odds with the many religious radicals (Independents and anabaptists or other sectaries) in his army, and had begun to fear what a decisive victory over the king would bring in terms of a settlement of the kingdom.

Manchester’s increasingly obvious and disastrous derelictions and refusals to press forward from parliamentary victories put him at odds with the war party in the Commons, who had previously trusted him. Cromwell, by November 1644, was prepared to denounce both the Earls of Essex and Manchester in parliament. Manchester reacted by attacking Cromwell as wanting ‘to see the day when there should not be a lord in England’, and of aiming ‘to form an army of Independent sectaries’ that would dictate to parliament itself. This pushed the division in and outside parliament between the war-party Independents and the conservative Presbyterians to a crisis point. It was fought not just in parliament, but within the army as Presbyterians tried to rid the army of radical Independents and sectaries, and the vice versa.

The crisis was resolved by Cromwell’s proposal of the ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’ which both sides of parliament were happy to pass. This stripped all members of parliament of their military commands. This meant Cromwell and his allies had to give up their commands. However, the committee that was overseeing the war decided to make some exceptions, including Cromwell, whose term in command was renewed, eventually on a permanent basis.

The Ordinance did, nonetheless, remove the vacillating Earls Essex and Manchester, and further, it laid the basis for a more concerted effort to win the war for parliament, in the form of the New Model Army. The ranks and much of the officer corps remained full of those with radical religious, and increasingly, political opinions. Moreover, in terms of class, the greater gentry tended to be shut out of the county committees managing the war effort, with men of lesser rank taking their place. The Presbyterians, to whom the more conservative minded on the parliamentary side increasingly grouped around, wanted to maintain the social hierarchy as it stood, but without royal absolutism. The Presbyterian ‘party’ became the new version of the earlier peace party.

The Independents and sectaries were a direct challenge to the Presbyterian agenda, since they stood for freedom of conscience, and therefore of speech in general. This threatened the ability of the landowning gentry to order and dominate rural communities through a compulsory national religion. The sectaries were even more dangerous than the Independents, as they tended to reject Calvinist doctrines of predestination and the spiritual election of the ‘godly’, who strangely enough, tended to be those with a certain degree of property and authority. Presbyterianism was the ideal religion for a conservative gentry who wished to order society without an absolutist monarchy, as it enjoined a social hierarchy with respected ‘elders’ in positions of ecclesiastical, and therefore, social, authority.

The Independents often remained Calvinists, but their demand of relative freedom of faith was more likely to appeal to the lesser gentry and the middling sort. The sectaries also appealed to the middling sort, but also sometimes to the labouring poor, with their tendency to radical egalitarianism in their approach to religion. Sectaries in particular were prone to shockingly seditious behaviour, such as refusing to doff their hat before social superiors. While this might sound like a trivial ritual, at the time, it seemed for many to be a dangerously pointed subversion of the social order.

Presbyterians vs sectaries

The issue of church organisation began to have serious military implications, since parliament was allied with the Scots, whose army did much to turn the tide against the king, but which was also led by highly committed Presbyterians. The conservative faction of the parliamentary side welcomed the implications of this alliance, of course, and attempted to ban preaching except in public churches (where it could be kept out of the hands of dangerous free thinkers). However, the ban would not hold in London, not least because of the increasingly adept organisation and determination of illegal printers and clandestine churches.

Attempts at censorship also roused a good deal of opposition, most famously from John Milton in his Areopagitica. The future Leveller leader Richard Overton was probably the author of a pamphlet called Pore Parliament how Art thou Betrai’d? in which he complained ‘We have brave Generalls who fight for the King, and make pore people pay for their own destructions’. Calls to dissolve the House of Lords accompanied attacks on the Earls of Manchester and Essex, while others, like another future Leveller, William Walwyn, objected to the Presbyterians’ evident attempts to resurrect ecclesiastical discipline by use of ‘Fines Imprisonments, Pillories &c. used by the Bishops.’ Radical religion and radical politics were for these reasons firmly locked together. At this point, the sectaries and the Independents were well aligned, but the difference between Independents like Cromwell and the proto-Levellers, was the latter’s focus on appealing straight to the mass of people, rather than seeing parliament itself as the preeminent authority.

The Presbyterians carried on trying to enforce their standards of rule, with Lilburne being arrested in January 1645 to come before the parliament’s Committee of Examinations, which was meant to enforce censorship. His case wasn’t heard until May, when he was discharged with a caution as, at this point, he still had the support of the Independents in parliament, particularly Cromwell. Despite other arrests, the pamphlet wars continued, with Richard Overton inveighing against the rule of ‘the fatt Priests’ with ‘Ordinance upon Ordinance for their ends, they have the sweat of other mens browes confirme’d on them by an Ordinance, while others cannot have their just requests or their owne Rights answered, though their wives and children perish, our Presbyters wives must goe like Ladies’. This was openly and consciously becoming a class struggle between the poor and middling people and the wealthy gentry of the Presbyterian party.

On 14 June 1645, the king was defeated at the battle of Naseby, the beginning of the end of the civil war, and parliament started to work to pay off and discharge the Scottish army, to whom the king surrendered in May 1646. Ironically, this led to a weakening of the political influence of the Independents on the parliamentary side, since the king’s defeat seemed assured. For many in parliament and elsewhere, this made containing the growing expression of radical opinion in the army and London, in particular, the greater priority. The Presbyterian party in parliament and the City of London, aiming at a conservative settlement and a reestablishment of religious conformity and social hierarchy, was duly strengthened in this situation, and was able to go on the offensive.

Birth of the Levellers

During the same period, various politically active individuals and combinations were beginning to coalesce as an organised current, notably, around figures like John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn. The label ‘Levellers’ would not be applied to them until 1647, but these and others were already clearly distinguished from the Independents by their consistent attempts to rouse popular support for the parliamentary cause, and a clear commitment to popular sovereignty as the basis for their political programme.

While the Independents tended to be from the more substantial end of the middling sort, the Levellers appealed to poorer and more plebian ranks of people, particularly with such demands as the abolition of tithes. They were democrats, and consistent and unwavering revolutionaries. Their writing was also increasingly escaping from the theological register to base arguments explicitly on reason, or natural law. Richard Overton even advanced a ‘frankly materialist’ argument in the 1644 pamphlet Man’s Mortalitie, part of whose (typically long seventeenth-century) subtitle asserted that ‘the present going of the soule into Heaven or Hell is a meer fiction.’ The previously unthinkable was now printable.

Levellers and other sectaries were making disturbing claims, including for example that the division between rich and poor ‘hath no ground neither in Nature or in Scripture’. It is no surprise, in this context, that landowners in parliament or rich merchants of the City would cleave to the Presbyterian cause in the hope of restoring a social hierarchy safe for their interests. In the summer of 1646, first Lilburne and then Richard Overton was brought before the House of Lords. They both scorned the House, denying its right to try them, but were imprisoned under harsh conditions. The Lords’ campaign against the proto-Levellers provoked, in turn, a campaign to free them. This campaign further broadened the base of Leveller support and sharpened their organisational capacity. The intransigence of the Presbyterian faction and their peremptory dismissal of the Leveller petitions led to a new turn by the latter towards cultivating support among the army rank and file.

At this point, the Presbyterian campaign to bring an end to the Revolution ran into an immovable object. This was the radicalism within the New Model Army. The Commons decided on 18 February 1647, less than a week after paying off the Scots army, to begin to disband the army without first paying the soldiers their arrears. There were also plans to create a new force to counter the army that had won the civil war, partly through gaining control of the Trained Bands in London, which the Presbyterian faction in parliament and the City were able to do. The northern army was also under Presbyterian command, and was thought therefore to be available for this counterrevolution. The commander-in-chief, Thomas Fairfax, Cromwell and other leading commanders of the army expressed their assent to the disbandment, showing no appetite for resistance.

This moment marks a new stage in the English Revolution, where events were once again driven by mass activism from below. In some ways, Cromwell was at the centre of events, but he was far from driving them. Instead, he ended up pushed into a position that he was trying to resist, which was to overthrow the monarchy altogether.