When England had a republic

Submitted by AWL on 28 June, 2002 - 10:57 Author: Lucy Clements
Putney Debates

The Putney Debates of October-November 1647, the high point of revolutionary radicalism after the English Civil War


This was published, at the time of Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee 2002, as two articles in Solidarity 3/9 and 3/10.

Had enough of Golden Jubilee sycophancy? Three hundred and fifty years or so ago they'd had enough of Royalty too. In 1649, the English Parliament cut off the King's head, abolished the House of Lords, and proclaimed a Republic.

The seventeenth century saw a spectacular change in the English political system. In 1603 the King summoned Parliament when he thought it necessary - in particular when he had need of money and needed Parliament to vote taxes. By 1714 Parliament ran the show: the King was a glorified civil servant, more or less employed by Parliament, which was in almost permanent session. A revolution had taken place - and political power had moved from the control of king and aristocracy to the control of the bourgeoisie and its representatives in the House of Commons.

The background to that revolution was a massive expansion of capitalised industry in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It's hard to underestimate just how dramatic this was. The cities, centres of manufacturing, grew. In 1500 the population of London was about 50,000: by 1650 it was 400,000. New industries sprang up: paper manufacture for the new printers, clock-making, watch-making, sugar-refining, fast-dyeing. The City of London registered new companies for these new trades: in 1629 the spectacle-makers established their guild, in 1637 the gun-makers did likewise.

Capitalism expanded abroad, too. London gained from the collapse of Antwerp as a trading city in the 1570s. In 1600 the East India Company was established by Ciy merchants. From 1630 overseas trade began to expand. New imports included tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco.

All these new industries required capital. Coal-mining, tin-mining, sugar-refining, paper-making - these were not small home-based businesses, but big enterprises (although at this stage, England's biggest industry, cloth manufacture, was still based on the "putting out" system). The capitalist system was extending itself, too, to the land. Formerly common ground was enclosed and wage-labourers employed to cultivate it. Enclosure forced many peasants off the land, to the towns and cities to work, or into vagrancy or crime. The credit system grew: in the late 16th century there were specialist moneylenders in most market towns; by the 17th century credit had expanded into country areas too.

For all this new enterprise, the merchants of the City of London supplied capital. Politically, they were hugely important. The royal court, which a little more than a century earlier had progressed around the country wherever the king or queen fancied doing a bit of hunting, settled itself in Westminster, a convenient mile or so from the power and money in the City.

These days, it takes a little imagination to get to grips with the idea that the Square Mile could be a hotbed of revolution. But that's pretty much what it was. The bourgeoisie was getting to resent the court: neither the King nor his government took their money-making seriously enough. In some cases they were positively hostile.

In 1621 there were 700 monopolies in England. These were granted by the king - not on the basis of promoting capitalist development, but as rewards for his favourites. It was not merely the capitalist class which objected. There was resentment, too, among artisans and small farmers who were particularly hit by high prices. But despite the official lack of support for developing capitalism, the bourgeoisie still got richer - and the king relatively poorer. He became more dependent on Parliament for the taxes which were his income.

Kings had faced rebellions over taxes before - in 1525 Henry VIII had been unable to raise the ironically-named "Amicable Grant" because the population wasn't feeling too amicable towards his increasingly hopeless attempts to conquer France. But whereas in that case Henry had backed down, Charles I decided to force the issue.

In 1625-6 Parliament was dissolved without voting supplies to the king. Charles tried to raise a forced loan, which proved hugely unpopular. In 1628 five knights were imprisoned for refusing to pay, and Parliament issued the Petition of Right. It asserted that the king had no right to raise taxes without reference to Parliament, and declared arbitrary imprisonment, billeting and martial law to be illegal.

In 1629 Charles dissolved Parliament once again and for the next eleven years governed personally. In 1635, though, his attempts to raise a tax known as Ship Money began his downfall. Ship Money had been an occasional tax on those ports which did not provide a ship to the navy. Charles now tried to extend it to inland towns and cities. As Christopher Hill puts it in his book A Century of Revolution, "almost the whole propertied class united in opposition". The rate of default quickly rose. In 1636 3.5% didn't pay. In 1637 the figure was 11%.

And by 1638, when war with Scotland broke out 67% of those required to pay Ship Money defaulted.

The bourgeoisie was no longer prepared to stand for such arbitrary taxation by the king. Parliament met in 1640, ready to rebel. The capitalist class had support from the economically-advanced south and east and from the industrial towns of the north.

The bourgeoisie, however, could not beat the royalists on its own. It needed an army - it needed to appeal to the "ordinary people". And those ordinary people provide some of the most fascinating history of the English Revolution.

It wasn't only the merchant class which had become exasperated with the government's policies. Waged workers and smallholders were unhappy too. For years wages had lagged behind rising prices.

Although comparisons are difficult, it is estimated that in the early seventeenth century, wages had half the purchasing power they'd had in the 15th century. It wasn't until 1750 that real wages properly recovered. Enclosure of common land had hit the lower classes hard.

And so there was what Hill describes as a "permanent background of political unrest". In 1622 unemployed people had rioted in Gloucester, seizing goods from the rich. Between 1640 and 1643 there would be anti-enclosure riots over large areas of England.

It would be wrong to describe these "ordinary people" - yeomen, journeymen, artisans, farm labourers, as a working class. There was waged labour in England - and it had been growing. The bourgeoisie's new economic projects and industrial expansion had created new, waged, jobs. In the new industries there were many journeymen - workers employed by the day. There was a big expansion of women's and children's work too.

The development of small capitalist enterprises and the increase in wage-labour served to break down old customs, as the profit motive began to play a bigger part in individual lives. Ideologies of self-reliance and self-betterment began to develop. But as yet these workers didn't have a clearly-defined class consciousness as a working class against the bourgeoisie. As we will see when we look at the radical opposition during the Revolution, the class lines were rather more fluid.

That said, in the period of the English Revolution, there is no doubt that the radicalised lower classes are the beginnings of what will become, over the next 150 years, the English working class.


By 1640, King Charles had personally ruled England for eleven years. His policies were proving hugely unpopular. In 1638 67% of those required to pay his Ship Money tax had defaulted. The bourgeoisie's campaign against the King was growing.

In November 1640 what became known as the Long Parliament met. It quickly impeached the king's leading minister - the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop William Laud. Strafford was executed in May 1641. In October of that year there was a rebellion in Ireland. Parliament refused to endorse a royal nominee to lead an English army against the rebels; instead the Commons passed the "Grand Remonstrance", an indictment of royal policy. The king tried to arrest the Parliamentary leaders; they took refuge int he City of London, from which they drew important support, and Charles was forced to flee the capital.

In 1642 the civil war proper began. The first engagement was a battle at Edgehill on 23 October. It would be almost three years before Parliament's armies had decisively beaten the Royalists, and another two before Charles was finally handed over to the English Parliament - by the Scots, to whom he had surrendered.

In the process of the war the class divisions within the Parliamentary troops had become clear. The experience of fighting the King - the self-styled representative of God in England, the head of the Church - had caused many people to question received wisdom far beyond the limited issues which concerned the bourgeoisie. But the conservatives (known as Presbyterians) in Parliament had become suspicious of these army radicals.

When they attempted to demobilise the army - without paying the solders' wages - the regiments refused and a General Council of the Army was set up. It called for a purge of Parliament, an early dissolution and new elections. The rank and file elected Agitators - two for each regiment - to negotiate with Parliament alongside the Generals. In August 1647 the army occupied London and forced eleven Presbyterian leaders out.

The alliance between Agitators and Generals, however, would be short-lived. The General were proposing to accept a limited monarchy. The radical refused.

The army was not simply a fighting machine. The historian Christopher Hill described it as "probably a more representative cross section of the people of England than the House of Commons was. Thanks to freedom of organisation and discussion the Army became a hothouse of political ideas."

The issues were debated out in late 1647, at Putney, where the army discussed the Agreement of the People, the more democratic constitution proposed by the radicals which included a significant extension of suffrage. (There were demands, too for manhood suffrage, although some of the Levellers, a group of London radicals, would have excluded paupers and servants from the vote.)

Rank and file soldiers argued for restrictions on income, in particular that "no duke, marquis or early should have more than £2,000 per year". However, the king's escape from prison gave the Generals an opportunity to end the Putney debates - by force in some cases: one Agitator was shot.

The alliance between Generals and Agitators was temporarily renewed in early 1649: negotiations to restore the monarchy were going nowhere and it suited the Generals to get rid of the king. He was executed on 30 January 1649. Monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished. But after Leveller demonstrations over the lack of further democratic reforms, in March 1649, the Leveller leaders were imprisoned.

Who were the Levellers? In general, they represented the petty bourgeoisie. They defended property, albeit small property, against the encroachments of the aristocracy. Their petition of 11 September 1648 "repudiated any idea of of abolishing property, levelling estates or making all common, though it declared in favour of laying open recent enclosures of fens and other commons, or of enclosing them chiefly for the benefit of the poor". While some of the Levellers supported manhood suffrage, many would have restricted the vote to property owners.

Unlike the Levellers, the Diggers, another group of radicals, opposed private property. A pamphlet published in August 1649 attacked the government for not having established "an equality of goods and lands@. In that year the Diggers began communal cultivation of land at St George's Hill, near London. They argued for the abolition of wage labour, too.

Read what the Diggers or Levellers wrote, and it is possible to see why their ideas were limited. They expressed their views in the language they had, which was, largely, that of religion. Society's problems were due to the "sin" of the ruling class, or of priests and kings... not to the existence of such a class in the first place. Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley, for example, said: "These great ones are too stately houses for Christ to dwell in; he takes up his abode among the poor in spirit and despised ones of the earth." The solution was not to smash the ruling class, but to persuade them to be more godly.

From 1649 onwards negotiations continued between the different Parliamentary factions as the bourgeoisie worked outs its strategy in the new situation. In 1657 Cromwell was offered the crown, which he refused. Eventually, after Cromwell's death, in 1660 the monarchy was restored. The House of Lords was established once again, albeit with Royalist peers excluded. Within 30 years, Parliament would formalise its supremacy and the capitalist class consolidate its power.

We could of course see it as a tragedy that the Levellers or Diggers didn't win - or at least that they did not make greater gains. But they hadn't the ideas yet, nor the economic base, nor the class consciousness. There was, in the 1640s, very little of a working class in England. What they did was to lay the basis for the struggles of the working class in the future.

And in a sense the Revolution did that too. The English Revolution - the establishment of Parliament's supremacy, of bourgeois control of political life - was a prerequisite for the further growth of English capitalism and in turn for the growth of the English working class.

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