The Century of Revolution

1603–1714

Christopher Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134941674
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

There is an immense range of books about the English Civil War, but one historian stands head and shoulders above all others for the quality of his work on the subject. In 1961 Christopher Hill first published what has come to be acknowledged as the best concise history of the period, Century of Revolution. Stimulating, vivid and provocative, his graphic depiction of the turbulent era examines ordinary English men and women as well as kings and queens.

1: INTRODUCTORY

But how can I explain, how can I explain to you?
You will understand less after I have explained it.
All that I can hope to make you understand
Is only events: not what has happened.
And people to whom nothing has ever happened
Cannot understand the unimportance of events.

T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

History is not a narrative of events. The historian's difficult task is to explain what happened. The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. The dates are arbitrary, since they relate to the deaths of queens, not to the life of the community. Nevertheless, during the seventeenth century modern English society and a modern state began to take shape, and England's position in the world was transformed. This book tries to penetrate below the familiar events to grasp ‘what happened’ – to ordinary English men and women as well as to kings and queens or abstractions like ‘society’ and ‘the state’. What happened in the seventeenth century is still sufficiently part of us today, of our ways of thinking, our prejudices, our hopes, to be worth trying to understand.

It may help if we start with a bird's-eye view of the period. It begins with the accession of King James, who united the crowns of England and Scotland: in 1707 Parliament achieved that more solid union of the two kingdoms which James had failed to bring about. James succeeded by hereditary right, confirmed by Elizabeth's nomination; in 1714 George I owed his throne to an Act of Parliament which passed over many persons with a better hereditary claim. James, like the Tudors before him, chose ministers and favourites as seemed best to him; by the early eighteenth century ministers could not govern without a Parliamentary majority. James was still expected to ‘live of his own’, to finance government from crown lands, feudal dues, and the customs: no distinction was drawn between the public and private capacity of the King. Parliament, summoned at the King's absolute discretion, expected to vote taxes only in an emergency (though here theory already lagged behind practical necessity). By 1714 Parliament, in almost permanent session, had complete control of finance. In James's reign members of the landed class themselves admitted to being absurdly undertaxed; in Anne's the gentry paid for Marlborough's wars. By then Parliament had established a degree of control over the executive and over all its actions – including foreign policy, which early Stuart kings had regarded as their private preserve. James and Charles acted arbitrarily in matters affecting the stability of the country's economic life – raising or lowering the customs, granting industrial monopolies, controlling prices, prohibiting land enclosure. The economy was highly regulated. At the end of the period economic policy was formulated by Parliament, and laissez-faire had succeeded regulation in most spheres. This made possible the appearance of the Bank of England, the National Debt, and other modern financial institutions.

The England of 1603 was a second-class power; the Great Britain of 1714 was the greatest world power. Under James and Charles English colonisation of America was just beginning; under Anne England held a large empire in America, Asia, and Africa, and colonial questions were decisive when policy was formulated. The East India Company was formed in 1601; a century later it was the most powerful corporation in the country. At the beginning of our period men noted as evidence of the topsyturviness of the times that some merchants were as rich as peers; before the end, many a noble family had salvaged its fortunes by a judicious marriage in the City. Englishmen's diet was transformed in this century by the introduction of root crops, which made it possible to keep cattle alive and so to have fresh meat in winter. Potatoes and many new vegetables were introduced, as were tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco. Port- and gin-drinking became national habits. Plague was frequent in the first half of the century, extinct by the end. The modern arrangement of meals – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – dates from the seventeenth century. So does the modern pattern of male costume – coat, waistcoat, breeches.¹ Calico, linen, and silk came in for clothes; leather went out. By the end of the century pottery and glass had replaced pewter and wood at table; many families used knives, forks, mirrors, and pocket handkerchiefs; at Chatsworth the Duke of Devonshire had installed a bath with hot and cold running water.

In 1603 all English men and women were deemed to be members of the state Church, dissent from which was a punishable offence. Heretics were still burnt at the stake, just as suspected traitors were tortured. By 1714 Protestant dissent was legally tolerated: the Church could no longer burn, the state no longer tortured. Church courts, powerful in all spheres of life since the Middle Ages, lost almost all their functions in this century. Under Charles I Archbishop Laud ruled the country; under Anne it caused a sensation when, for the last time, a Bishop was appointed to government office.

Under the early Stuarts Justices of the Peace were subjected to direction from Whitehall, and had to answer in Star Chamber for recalcitrance; by Anne's reign country gentlemen and town oligarchies were virtual dictators of local government, responsible only to men like themselves in Parliament. James I and his son dismissed judges who were too independent of royal wishes; after 1701 judges could be removed only by address of both Houses of Parliament.

James I preached that kings ruled by Divine Right, and many political writers argued that subjects’ property was at the king's disposal. Parliamentarians countered these positions by Biblical texts or medieval precedents. By 1714 politics had become a rational inquiry, discussed in terms of utility, experience, common sense, no longer in terms of Divine Right, texts, and antiquarian research. James wrote a treatise on witches, and was no more credulous than most of his subjects, with whom astrology and alchemy were still in high repute. The second half of the century saw modern science triumphant; by 1714 fairies, witches, astrology and alchemy were no longer taken seriously by educated men. The majestic laws of Newton made nonsense of the traditional idea that the earth was the centre of the universe in which God and the Devil intervened continuously. Shakespeare had thought of the universe and of society in terms of degree, hierarchy; by 1714 both society and the universe seemed to consist of competing atoms. A man like Richard Cromwell, who was born under Charles I and lived into the eighteenth century, ‘had seen the end of the Middle Ages, the beginnings of the modern world.… Between his birth and his death the educated person's conception of nature and of man's place in nature had been transformed.’²

So we could go on through every phase of life and thought. T. S. Eliot thought that a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ occurred during the century. For the ‘metaphysical poets’, from Donne to Traherne, Eliot argued, thoughts were experiences which modified their sensibility. By Dryden's time poets had lost this ability to devour and digest any kind of experience: there were ‘poetic’ subjects and there was poetic diction. ‘The language became more refined, the feeling became more crude’ as we pass from the tortured doubt of Donne and Shakespeare's tragic period to the superficial certainties of Pope. Prose became less poetic as poetry became more prosaic. At the beginning of our period the fashionable style was scholarly, leisurely, rolled out in the elaborate periods of Richard Hooker or Sir Thomas Browne. When it ends the plain, straightforward prose of Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe is unmistakably that of modern English. Under James I, Roger North says, ‘most sober families’ practised both instrumental and vocal music; by the end of the period household chamber music was ‘utterly confounded’ by public performances of opera, by virtuoso violinists and singers. It was a great century in English musical history; but by its end native creative talent appears to be dead. On the other hand, the first part of the century saw an increasing dominance of foreign masters and models in painting and architecture, the latter part the re-emergence of a native tradition and styles that were to survive.

The transformation that took place in the seventeenth century is then far more than merely a constitutional or political revolution, or a revolution in economics, religion, or taste. It embraces the whole of life. Two conceptions of civilisation were in conflict. One took French absolutism for its model, the other the Dutch Republic. The object of this book is to try to understand the changes which set England on the path of Parliamentary government, economic advance and imperialist foreign policy, of religious toleration and scientific progress.

NOTES

1 I owe these points to Miss K. Briggs's The Anatomy of Puck (1959), p. 2.

2 H. Baker, The Wars of Truth (1952), p. 366.

Part I: 1603-40

2: NARRATIVE OF EVENTS

The computation of times is not of so great moment, figures are easily mistaken; the 10 of July and the 6 of August, with a year over or under, makes not a man the wiser in the business then done, which is only that he desires.

Samuel Daniel, Collection of the History of England (1612)

Queen Elizabeth died on 24th March 1603, and James VI of Scotland succeeded without opposition. An alleged plot of 1604 to put Arabella Stuart on the throne, for which Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh were imprisoned, was widely suspected to have been manufactured, or at least grossly exaggerated, by Sir Robert Cecil to strengthen his own position. Cecil, later Earl of Salisbury, son of Elizabeth's great minister, Burghley, had been largely responsible for James's peaceful succession, and the King retained him as Secretary, advancing him to the office of Lord Treasurer in 1608.

James had been brought up a Presbyterian, and his accession was greeted hopefully by English Puritans, who sympathised with Presbyterian criticisms of the established Church. They presented him with the Millenary Petition – a very moderate request for changes in ceremonies, which was alleged to have been signed by a thousand ministers. At the Hampton Court Conference (1604) James met the Puritans’ representatives on some points, but the bishops failed to carry out his compromise policy. Many Puritan ministers were deprived of their livings in the years which followed, despite a shortage of preaching clergy. By concluding peace with Spain in 1604 James ended a war which had lasted nineteen years. The revolt in Ireland led by Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, which had begun in 1598, was finally suppressed in 1603. So James met his first Parliament with no outstanding financial obligations except a debt of £100,000 inherited from Elizabeth. Nevertheless, relations were not harmonious. The King's proposal for a legislative union between England and Scotland was rejected. A clash over the right to determine disputed elections led the House of Commons to declare that their privileges were inherited of right, and were not due to the King's grace. The Catholic Guy Fawkes's attempt to blow up King, Lords, and Commons in 1605 caused a reconciliation; but there were financial quarrels, and James's high view of the royal prerogative aroused opposition. The Commons showed their alarm by attacking The Interpreter, a law dictionary published in 1607 by Dr Cowell, Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge: this stated the royalist position in terms of which James probably approved, but which he ultimately agreed to condemn.

Parliament was dissolved in 1610, with the financial problem unsolved. Salisbury died in 1612. He had already been succeeded in James's confidence by the conservative family of the Howards (Northampton, Lord Privy Seal and Commissioner for the Treasury, 1612, who was a pensioner of Spain; Suffolk, whose wife was too). Allied with the Howards was James's Scottish favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. In 1614 the ‘Addled Parliament’ was dissolved after nine weeks, voting no supplies. The reputation of the government sank low, the Howards being justly suspected of corruption. Somerset was first involved in a divorce scandal, and then was condemned with his wife for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury. From 1616 onwards the Cokayne Project led to a crisis of over-production and unemployment in the clothing industry, England's major industry. The handsome George Villiers succeeded Somerset as royal favourite, rising rapidly to become Duke of Buckingham, the first non-royal duke in England since 1572.

In 1613 James married his daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick, Elector Palatine, a leading German Protestant. In 1618 Frederick was invited by Czech Protestants to accept the crown of Bohemia, hitherto almost hereditary in the Catholic Habsburg family. Frederick accepted, and the war which followed lasted for thirty years (1618–48). James disapproved of his son-in-law's action, and tried to mediate between him and the Spanish–Austrian Habsburg alliance. In London and among Protestants all over the country there was strong support for the Elector Palatine, which was expressed in the Parliament of 1621. The Commons were also critical of government economic policy, and impeached Lord Chancellor Bacon for bribery. With his disgrace James lost one of his ablest councillors. The House of Commons tried to make its vote of taxation conditional on a declaration of war on Spain; and in January 1622 James dissolved Parliament without obtaining supplies.

Then followed the ridiculous expedition of Prince Charles and Buckingham to Madrid in an attempt to marry Charles to the King of Spain's daughter, and so seal an alliance by which James hoped to bring peace to Europe. After six months of negotiation the scheme broke down humiliatingly, and Charles and Buckingham returned to England determined on war with Spain. In the 1624 Parliament they obtained financial grants in return for allowing the impeachment of Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, the merchant financier who had come near to balancing James's budget. They also accepted the Statute of Monopolies, which made illegal all monopolies not granted to corporations.

Buckingham had established himself securely in Charles's favour, and the two had wrested control of the government from the ageing James; so his death in February 1625 made little difference. But the alliance with the Puritans did not last. Buckingham negotiated a marriage for Charles with Henrietta Maria of France, the price of which was English help to Louis XIII in suppressing the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, and the granting of liberty of worship to Catholics in England. There was strong opposition to these policies, and the Parliament of 1626, under the leadership of Sir John Eliot, directly attacked Buckingham. It was dissolved without voting supplies – not even the customs dues (tunnage and poundage) normally voted to every king for life at the beginning of his reign. But Charles continued to collect them, and also raised a forced loan. Refusals to pay led to the Five Knights’ Case (Darnel's Case), in which the judges reaffirmed the principle laid down in 1591, that the king had the right to commit men to prison without cause shown. This produced the Petition of Right in the Parliament of 1628–9. The Petition declared illegal both arbitary imprisonment and the collection of taxes without Parliamentary consent. It also prohibited billeting and martial law, for Buckingham was now engaged in war against France as well as Spain, and the troops levied to relieve besieged La Rochelle were a burden on the southern counties both before and after the disastrous failure of English intervention.

In August 1628 Buckingham was assassinated. But his death altered nothing. Renewed quarrels led to the dissolution of Parliament and eleven years of personal government. Charles's chief minister in this period was William Laud, Bishop of London (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1633), though he never won the King's confidence in the way Buckingham had done. At the beginning of the reign Laud and the Puritan John Preston had competed for Charles's favour. Buckingham at one time appeared to favour Preston. But the King's personal predilection was for Laud, whose emphasis on the more traditionally Catholic ceremonial aspects of worship appealed to Charles no less than did the resolute championing of royal authority by Laud's proteges in the Church. Laud made Juxon, Bishop of London, Lord Treasurer in 1636, and saw that men of his faction were promoted, in Church and state. Charles's other outstanding servant was Sir Thomas Wentworth, who became Earl of Strafford in 1640. Wentworth had led a centre group in the Commons in the sixteen-twenties, and his acceptance of office and a peerage in 1628 was regarded as treachery by Pym and the more radical M.P.s Wentworth was made President of the Council in the North, in 1632 Lord Deputy of Ireland. ‘Black Tom Tyrant’ ruled Ireland with a heavy but efficient hand, reducing the Irish Parliament to submission and building up an army of Papists which aroused apprehension in England.

Charles's government was far from being united. Laud and Wentworth co-operated in working for what they called a policy of ‘thorough’; they were opposed by a group of courtiers around Lord Treasurer Weston, a Catholic who died in 1635, and later by Lord Cottington and Henrietta Maria. The Queen succeeded Buckingham as Charles's evil genius. Under her protection Catholicism became fashionable at court. The recusancy laws which fined Catholics for not coming to church were not enforced. In 1637 a papal agent was received at Whitehall. The Puritans blamed Laud for this policy, and for England's failure to give support to the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War. Simultaneously critics of the state Church were savagely punished. In 1637 the lawyer William Prynne, the Reverend Henry Burton, and Dr John Bastwick were mutilated, heavily fined, and imprisoned for life.

One reason for the feebleness of Charles's government in foreign affairs was lack of money. Weston effected numerous economies and a variety of financial expedients was adopted which alienated all sections of the population. It was Ship Money that at last made the government solvent. Originally an occasional tax on port towns in lieu of providing a ship for the royal navy, Ship Money was extended in 1635 to inland towns. Repeated in the next three years, it looked like becoming a regular tax not voted by Parliament. In 1637 John Hampden and Lord Saye and Sele, in concert with a group of opponents of the government, brought a test case. The judges decided in favour of the legality of Ship Money.

But events in Scotland intervened to thwart Charles. Despite opposition, James had re-established episcopacy there. At the beginning of his reign Charles had tried to recover Church lands from the nobles who had seized them, and so roused hostility: in 1637 he introduced a slightly modified version of the English Prayer Book, and touched off a national resistance movement. In 1638 the National Covenant was signed all over Scotland and an army was raised. Next year war broke out. Charles collected an army to oppose the Scots, but he had no money to pay the reluctant troops. In June 1639 he had to sign the Treaty of Berwick. But he would not agree to abolish episcopacy in Scotla...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE CENTURY OF REVOLUTION
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• AUTHOR'S PREFACE
• 1: INTRODUCTORY
• PART I: 1603-40
• PART II: 1640-60
• PART III: 1660-88
• PART IV: 1688-1714
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDICES
• BOOKS FOR FURTHER READING
• ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS