The Fiery Spirits is a very important new analysis of the English Revolution looking at how some radical parliamentarians combined with mass protest to drive events, finds Dominic Alexander

While the remembrance of the French Revolution has given us a number of famous revolutionary leaders, Robespierre, Danton, Marat and others, the English Revolution has been left more faceless, and generally much less memorialised. Beyond Cromwell, and from the radicals, John Lilburne, few figures are widely known. John Pym, a leader of the moderate opponents of Charles I in the Long Parliament, gets a strong billing in general histories, but the radical parliamentary MPs will not be familiar to many who are not already well-versed in the events of the English Revolution: Henry Marten, Peter Wentworth, Alexander Rigby, and others (p.1).

Although standard histories might mention them, at best, in passing, John Rees has developed a powerful and detailed case for their centrality to the English Revolution, both in terms of galvanising the Long Parliament’s opposition to the King, and harnessing popular mobilisations to tip the balance in many of the crises of the 1640s. The Fiery Spirits is in many ways a companion volume to his 2016 book The Leveller Revolution, together offering a major re-interpretation of the English Revolution.

The story of the ‘fiery spirits’ begins far earlier than the opening of the revolutionary period itself in 1640. The origins of their political radicalism, can, in a few cases, be traced back even into the reign of Elizabeth I. The grandfather of Peter Wentworth, also Peter Wentworth, was imprisoned in the Tower for a month by the Queen ultimately due to his intervention on free speech in parliament, which was held to be ‘unreverend and undutiful’ (p.18). The Wentworth family were firm Puritans, and defenders of the rights of parliament across the reigns of James I and Charles I, culminating in Peter Wentworth’s time in the Long Parliament.

William Strode came from a venerably established gentry family, and his father, also William Strode, was a prominent Puritan MP who in 1606 called for financial support for the king to be dependent upon his hearing parliament’s grievances beforehand. The Strodes, father and son, were present in the 1625 parliament, opposing Charles I’s demands for financial supply (p.24). Ideas about parliamentary rights and the institution’s role in relation to the monarchy were evolving across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The views of the earlier Wentworths and Strodes were not the same as those of their progeny in the Long Parliament. The elders saw themselves as acting for the betterment of the monarchy rather than against it (p.33). Nonetheless, it is remarkable that the evolution of oppositional ideas can be traced so far back in the family careers of such prominent figures of the revolutionary period.

In one sense, this partial continuity is evidence of how deep the causative factors of the English Revolution were. The conflict was not, as many revisionist historians have tended to argue, a mere accidental product of contingent events and personalities. The Fiery Spirits is, however, not so much a riposte to that vein of argument as it is a response to a more interesting one about the autonomy of the political sphere in the unfolding of the Revolution. The long pre-history of the parliamentary opposition faction is one proof, that even granting the relative autonomy of the political sphere, causation there also runs deep into the history of early modern England.

The dress rehearsal of 1628-9

Discontent had risen considerably during James I’s rule, but Charles I’s reign began almost immediately to descend into crisis, with the King desperate to raise money to pay for the then war with Spain and also desiring to remodel the state on more absolutist lines. Already in 1625, opposition to the Court was strong enough that elections were becoming occasions for mass mobilisations. In Yorkshire, the election of that year was described as ‘more like a rebellion than an election’, and in general courtiers standing for election were finding their closeness to the crown to be a decided disadvantage. Discontent only intensified in the next few years and in the run up to the Parliament of 1628, with the King’s Forced Loan being a particular issue alongside other nonparliamentary measures of taxation. Those who had resisted the measure were seen as ‘patriots’ and were said to be ‘more likely to be elected than courtiers’ (p.31).

Although the electorate was restricted, relatively poor people such as 40-shilling freeholders could vote. The unenfranchised did sometimes also endeavour to influence elections through mobilisations at hustings and polling places. The presence of crowds supporting one candidate could influence voters in their favour in these times before the secret ballot. The King, of course, worked hard to prevent the election of as many oppositionists as possible, but these notably began to campaign actively among poorer voters and the general populace, in a sign of what was to come in the 1640s. In the 1620s, there was a beginning, particularly in Puritan circles, of a connection between, ‘parliamentary and popular politics in a new, if still embryonic way’ (p.34).

However, parliamentary politics and the discontent of the gentry with Charles’ rule was by no means the only source of the crisis of the late 1620s. England’s changing economy and society produced plentiful ground for social conflict. Firstly, fen draining and enclosures were reducing the peasantry’s access to common lands and resources, producing conflict that frequently implicated the King or favoured courtiers. Enclosure riots reached such a peak in parts of the West Country that they have been called the ‘Western Rising’ for the years 1626-32.

In some cases, local authorities appeared unwilling, or at least unable, to suppress anti-enclosure actions. On one occasion, a ‘company of soldiers billeted at Shaftsbury not only refused to supress the riot but rescued some of the detained rioters’ (p.37), while in another, difficulties mobilising men to put down the occupation of a particular hill tied up in a common-rights dispute provoked a local alliance ranging from country gentry down to ‘divers lewd and desperate persons’ against the authorities (pp.38-9).

Draining fens in Lincolnshire was also the occasion of sustained resistance in the Isle of Axholme, where ‘women boys servants and poor people whose names cannot be learned’ threw down banks and attacked the drainers over an extended period. This was again action against a project identified with the Court, with local gentry being sympathetic to the rebels. In Maldon in Essex, there were grain riots in 1629, eventually led by the wife of a butcher, Ann Carter, or popularly, Captain Ann Carter, who was later hanged for her part in the revolt (pp.43-8).

While enclosure riots and the like did not directly inform parliamentary reform, Rees makes the point that popular discontent could, particularly when it had sympathy from local elites, affect parliamentary representation, and disproves the contention of some revisionists that MPs were largely the puppets of their more aristocratic patrons (pp.49-50). Local conditions could negate court political influence, such that, despite historians’ tendency to slight or neglect these episodes, they certainly did deepen the crisis in which Charles’ government found itself, widening the increasing gulf between court and local elites. It also clearly marked the increasing involvement of lower social ranks in political matters.

Parliamentary opposition

Revolutions begin with crises within the ruling class, and in seventeenth-century England the fissure came between the king’s central government and local, shire and town, administration. In the 1628-9 crisis, the costs of war were a major precipitating factor. The billeting of soldiers on local populations, and the failure to pay sailors’ wages erupted into major rioting and the breakdown of authority in both Plymouth and London. The King’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, became a lightning rod for these discontents due to his role in running the war with France.

The issues of the pressing and billeting of soldiers, sailors’ conditions, the King’s use of martial law and unparliamentary taxation dominated the business of the parliament summoned in 1628 Future fiery spirits like William Strode came to the fore in the debates that led to the Petition of Right attacking the King’s arbitrary actions and asserting key liberties such as those enshrined in Magna Carta. The King’s unpopularity and isolation was underlined by the Lords’ support of the Commons over the Petition, forcing him to assent to it. Distrust of the Crown ran deep, however, at this stage, it was focused on attacking a proxy, the Duke of Buckingham.

The King’s support for the future Archbishop Laud and his elitist programme of religious change were also a source of outrage, and the Laudian reforms were abhorred by many Protestants, not merely the Puritans. The issue became directly political because the Laudians tended to be even more absolutist in policy as the King himself, and so were natural enemies of the Commons opposition.

The King’s attempt to backtrack on his acceptance of the Petition of Right, as soon as the Commons had granted a subsidy, led to an incendiary popular mood which issued in the assassination first of an advisor to Buckingham and then of Buckingham himself. Parliament was reconvened in January 1629, after these events, and the issues in the Petition of Right roared back to life in the Commons, as did the religious and taxation controversies. King and Parliament ‘were claustrophobically disputing fundamentally different conceptions of a state and church of which they were both a part. And that was what made the status quo untenable’ (p.87).

The King commanded parliament to dissolve, but when the Speaker attempted to comply by leaving his chair, two MPs forcibly held him in his seat, so that parliament could continue its debate. Strode put clearly what was at stake in this bout of rough behaviour: ‘we may not be turned off like scattered sheepe, as we were in the last Session’. Another insisted that ‘whomsoever shall goe about to break Parliaments, Parliament will break him’ (p.88). Here, at the close of the 1629 Parliament, the battle lines of the 1640s were being drawn up.

Personal rule

The term ‘fiery spirits’ itself appears at this point in the reactions of those on the King’s side to these disputes. One who considered the disputes between the Crown and Commons as ‘immaterial and frivolous’ blamed the uproar on ‘divers fiery spirits in the House of Commons who were very faulty and cannot be excused’ (p.89). In itself, the accusation that a minority of evil-minded people are entirely to blame for stirring up social and political conflict has a long subsequent history, but as Rees shows in the course of this book, it was repeatedly resorted to by the King and his supporters as an explanation for the troubles of the Revolution. This perspective allowed them to turn their faces firmly away from the realities of the changing society of seventeenth-century England. As their absolutist drive increasingly split the monarchy from its traditional ruling-class local representatives in the gentry, the tensions therefore rose between king and parliament. This meant that  ‘the eruption of popular action into the realm of national and local politics’ (p.91) became a factor, and began to inform the actions of the more radically minded MPs like William Strode, or later, Henry Marten.

Following the dissolving of the 1629 Parliament, Charles I embarked upon a period of personal rule without a parliament, and resorted to arbitrary actions and forms of taxation that further entrenched the divisions that had been laid bare by the crisis of 1628-9. What followed were eleven years of personal rule by Charles, which began with a series of vindictive punishments of prominent Puritan figures, and leading parliamentary radicals; William Strode was one of those who would spend the entire period of personal rule in prison until released by the Short Parliament of 1640.

Once again, wars wrecked the government’s finances, requiring Charles to call a parliament again, but the latest one, the Bishop’s war with Scotland, was very much an extension of the King’s ambition to bring about a religious settlement more to his liking in the attempt to impose the Laudian model on Scotland. The resultant entanglement of the Scots in English politics did much to bring about the Civil War, and complicated politics throughout the 1640s.

The bulk of The Fiery Spirits concerns, of course, the Revolution itself, but Rees’ re-interpretation of 1628-9 as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for those events was worth discussing in some detail as the essential conflicts of the 1640s all came to the fore then. Additionally, it marked the origin of a large oppositional parliamentary group; ‘Of the sixty MPs who expressed themselves in opposition to the Crown in the 1628 parliament, just over half were also returned to either the Short or Long Parliament’ (p.182), including fiery spirits like William Strode, and more moderate figures like John Pym. To them were added also some 1628 MPs who had become embroiled in conflict with the Crown during the period of personal rule.

Committee men and popular protests

Oppositionists therefore had experience both of the political exigencies of conflict with the King, and also of parliament and its procedures. Parliamentary committees became very important vehicles for organising during the 1640s, and as Rees shows throughout, were also key points of contact with the popular movements. Already in 1628, eighty-five Commons committees ‘were concerned with grievances, investigations, privileges and the drawing up of petitions. Only sixty-four dealt with legislation’ (p.182). This was a ‘substantial reversal’ of the proportions of the 1626 Parliament. Committees like these were a relatively new machinery for managing the Commons’ business, and oppositionists tended to populate them to a high degree, effectively turning them into a replacement for the government executive, the core of the Royalist camp, and managing key parts of Parliaments’ wars with the King, its financing and so on.

Pym was able to use the committee system to manage his support in parliament, sometimes with the support of the radicals, or sometimes with the moderates, when he wanted to hold the radicals back. This was, however, only a successful strategy ‘in a political context where it was realistic to assume that some compromise with the king was possible – otherwise the case for allying with the moderates would evaporate’ (p.183). Eventually, this position was untenable, but Pym died late in 1643, at a point where the radicals’ strategies were more crucial than ever. Most prominent among them, and among MPs involved in committee business was the radical Henry Marten; between 1641 and August 1643 ‘he had been named to committees over 300 times’ (pp.183-4).

The radicals were not, of course, simply operators within parliamentary politics, but were connected to the popular protests without which the Revolution could not have occurred. This began as early as the elections to the Long Parliament. Popular support for Alexander Rigby marked a moment when ‘a layer of the middling sort were independently campaigning in an organised manner for inclusion in the electoral process’ (p.124). Henry Marten’s republican views were apparently known, while the King’s animus against him appears to have helped rather than hindered his popularity in his home seat (pp.125-6).

Rigby took the lead at an important moment early in 1641, when the ‘Puritan martyrs’ were freed from their harsh imprisonments to rapturous reception by huge crowds in a popular mobilisation that revealed the degree to which Laudian Church policy and its persecution of dissident belief were regarded as illegitimate and oppressive. Behind this mobilisation lay a robust clandestine organisation of the gathered or separatist churches. Rigby’s parliamentary efforts thus connected the mass popular movement with the opposition in the Commons, as well as being part of a legal attack on Archbishop Laud, itself a prong of the Commons’ assault on the executive authority in general.

The connections between the activities of the radicals in the Commons and the popular movement became, as Rees shows, the key dynamic driving events in the years 1640-1. The fiery spirits were indeed a minority in the Commons, but the weight of popular support behind their moves, such as Henry Marten’s during the struggle over the attainder of the King’s chief advisor Earl Strafford, meant that, as in this instance, ‘the course of events proceeded on the path that Marten advocated, not that which Pym still trod’ (pp.163-4). Indeed, during this confrontation, which led to Strafford’s execution, Pym lost control of parliament. Clearly, popular mobilisations against Strafford made the difference; one MP wrote, ‘unless this Earl be sacrificed to public discontentment I see not what hopes we have of peace’ (p.165).

Crisis of November-December 1641

Petitioning was a key way in which popular support for radical courses in the Commons’ struggle with the king was concentrated at several points, and by the end of 1641, it is clear that popular action ‘was now being consciously organised and directed’ (p.203). A petition defending protestors’ conduct at a point of particular tension and danger again tipped the balance of forces in Parliament: ‘The protestors’ defence of themselves, and the work of the MPs that supported them, suppressed or marginalised effective criticism of their actions. Now, the enemies of the people stood out clearly demarcated: the Crown, the Lords, and the moderates in the Commons. Equally clear were their allies: the most determined among the Commons majority’ (p.209). The most determined were, of course, fiery spirits such as Strode, Marten and Rigby.

The petitioning campaign at the end of 1641 moved almost directly into a contest over who had the right to guard the Commons, with the King’s attempt to reassert his control over London and Parliament being challenged by a sustained series of armed demonstrations around the Commons, supporting the latter’s passing of a Militia Bill which insisted that all military appointments be under parliament’s control. The organisation of these demonstrations seems to have centred around the networks of gathered churches and illegal printing, some of the individuals involved being future Levellers.

The King attempted to regain the initiative by appointing a much-hated royalist, Thomas Lunford, to command of the Tower. The scale of the popular mobilisation against Lunford was such that the King had to retreat, but the armed demonstrations around Parliament only increased in size and anger. These overrode the Lords’ attempt to block the Commons’ resolutions, and the escalating situation led to the King’s attempt to arrest the ‘five members’ of the Commons perceived by him to be the main instigators of the movement against him. Ultimately, the Commons’ and the people’s willingness to defend these MPs led to the King’s defeat, his flight from London, and thus the beginning of the Civil War.

Society, religion and politics

The King and his courtiers were, of course, wrong that their troubles stemmed only from a small minority of troublemakers in the Commons. They could not see the deep structural crisis that doomed their attempt to impose an absolute monarchy on seventeenth-century England, but their misapprehension also stemmed from the political logic of the struggle over several decades, and the crisscrossing of the various causes of discontent, which seemed to create a nexus around a handful of prominent individuals.

Religion played a vital role in animating and organising popular protests, but wasn’t in itself a unifying factor among the radicals. Henry Marten was not at all a Puritan, Wentworth was a mainstream Protestant, while Strode and Rigby were Presbyterians but remained committed to the War party even when that was at loggerheads with the compromising ‘Presbyterian’ party in parliament (p.308). Religion did not map neatly onto political positions. Nonetheless, it was the political sphere that served to tie the various contradictions of state and society into a single struggle between King and the Commons.

Thus it made sense, on the surface of things, for Royalists to blame a disparate collection of individuals, inside and outside the Commons, for the scale of opposition to the King. However, the belief of the King and Court, dating back to James I’s reign, ‘that trouble in the realm stemmed from the behaviour of a minority of fiery spirits who animated distrust of the monarchy both in the Commons and beyond’ led to Charles I’s repeated strategic mistakes during the crisis, and thus to loss of control of the capital (p.220).

In the course of the Civil War, it was only the determination of the fiery spirits to push the conflict to a conclusion, interacting always with popular mobilisations in London, which prevented the compromisers in parliament from settling with the king at several points (p.284). A peace short of the King’s decisive defeat would have been a disaster likely ending in the total ruin of even the most moderate of the parliamentary programmes.

Examining the Civil Wars through the lens of the political struggles between moderates and radicals gives up fresh insights into how the war was fought and won. In particular, the detailed examination of the conduct of the war in Rigby’s Lancashire gives a rich texture to the nature of the balance of forces in society (pp.246-9). It does more to explain how Parliament ultimately won than standard narratives of the major battles do.

The Fiery Spirits is unquestionably a major contribution to the history of the English Revolution. It combines a great deal of new, detailed research, with important re-interpretations of many of the major episodes and stages of events, not least the 1620s. In foregrounding the fiery spirits, Rees has found a thread through which it is possible to see how the social struggles underlying the English Revolution became manifest in the political conflict between King and Commons.

For the French Revolution, we are well served by many comprehensive left-wing accounts of its course, but despite the many classic books by historians like Christopher Hill, Brian Manning and others, we don’t have similar single-volume left histories of the English Revolution all the way to 1649. The Fiery Spirits fills that gap with a highly readable and thorough narrative that should surely engage specialists and general readers alike.