The Triennial Act of February 1641 was the first piece of legislation passed by the ‘Long Parliament’ in its momentous thirteen-year history of reform, rule and, in 1649, regicide. Of course, none of the peers and MPs who had assembled late in 1640 anticipated that Parliament would overthrow Charles I and seize the reins of government. But what they did foresee was the need to exploit the crisis engendered by his recent and disastrous war against the Scots in order to curtail the royal prerogative – the monarchy’s traditional discretionary powers that enabled it to govern without Parliament. None of these powers was more significant than the king’s right to call and dissolve Parliaments at will. The Triennal Act was brought in to limit this right, introducing legal provisions for summoning Parliament automatically in the event that the king had failed to do so after a three-year period. Here was the first step in a hoped-for revolution in royal government whereby parliamentary laws and taxation, based upon consent, would replace what many at the time saw as the king’s ‘arbitrary’ rule over their lives and property.

The fact that the Act originated in the Commons and was sponsored by Oliver Cromwell and other radicals has persuaded some historians that it was a power-grab by MPs determined to prove that they were now ‘the active agency of Parliament’ (G. Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War (Abingdon, 2020), p. 236). Yet even supposing the Commons viewed their handiwork in these terms they faced a major obstacle, for draft legislation still required the endorsement of both the Lords and the king to become law. As sent up to the Lords early in 1641 for their consent, the triennial bill (i.e. the draft Act) was indeed a radical document. It stipulated that if the king did not call a Parliament when required then the task would fall to the county sheriffs and other returning officers and then – if they too failed in this duty – to the electors themselves. Laws for calling regular Parliaments to redress ‘Mischiefs and Grievances’ had been on the statute books since the fourteenth century (The Statutes of the Realm (1810), vol. 1, p. 374); but none, so far as is known, had authorised people this far beyond the normal circles of government to act for the crown independently of their political masters. Charles was appalled that his ‘Ancient Prerogative’ would be exercised by ‘Sheriffs and Constables and I know not whom…’ (J. Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), vol. 4, p. 155).

When the triennial bill was read in the Lords late in January 1641 it provoked ‘serious Debate’ and was referred to a committee to make ‘Additions and Amendments’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1782), vol. 4, p. 247). The king had even bigger problems with the bill and proposed to the Lords ‘that the Lawes for houlding of Annuall Parliam[en]tes be dulie kept and observed’, but that if this safeguard failed then the power of summoning a new Parliament should be vested either in the lord chancellor or the lord keeper (Parliamentary Archives, Main Papers, 28 Jan. 1641). These crown officers were royal ministers of state, appointed by the monarch, and the king seems to have calculated that if push came to shove they would remain answerable to him. The peer who chaired the committee to amend the bill was another royal minister – the lord privy seal, Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester. He was a firm believer in the authority, indeed duty, of the peerage to act for the good of the commonwealth in disputes between the monarch and the people. He and his fellow committeemen did not object to royal ministers or, if necessary, local returning officers summoning Parliament independently of the king. Instead, they inserted between the two groups their own choice as guardians of the public interest – the aristocracy.

Manchester’s committee proposed that if the king or one of his ministers did not summon Parliament as required then the peers of the realm, ‘or any twelve or more of them’, should meet at Westminster and issue the necessary writs for holding elections (The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660 ed. S.R Gardiner (Oxford, 1906), p. 147). The number twelve in this context was a highly controversial one and loaded with political significance. In 1601 a group of English noblemen led by Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, had justified their rebellion against Elizabeth I by claiming authority under a precedent of 1265 for twelve peers to seize power and summon Parliament. Five members of Manchester’s 1641 committee, among them Essex’s son, the 3rd earl, had invoked this same authority just the previous year, joining seven other noblemen – making twelve peers in all – to petition Charles, demanding that he call Parliament. This demand, backed by Scottish force, had worked; the disaffected peers of 1640, unlike their Elizabethan predecessors, had prevailed.

The Lords’ amended triennial bill was returned to the Commons where it was referred to a committee dominated by Cromwell and like-minded MPs and was approved with only minor changes. A delegation of peers then attended the king on the understanding that if he withheld his royal assent to the bill he would be threatened with ‘the most extreme designs’; Charles ‘yielded to necessity’ and complied (Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1640-1642 ed. A.B. Hinds (1924), p. 126). To him the Act represented a slippery slope towards an aristocratic republic and, in time perhaps, full parliamentary sovereignty. But a more immediate challenge to royal power – certainly once Parliament had been dissolved – was the baronial authority that the twelve petitioner peers had wielded and to which the Triennial Act now gave legal expression. The Commons had acquiesced in the Lords’ re-drafting of their bill because they shared the reformist ideals of the twelve peers. Indeed, some of the leading MPs had conspired with these noblemen to bring down Charles’s ‘personal rule’ the year before.

The two Houses were determined not just to affirm the lordly interest evident in the Triennial Act but to strengthen it. In their final overture to the king before the outbreak of civil war in 1642 they insisted on aristocratic control of royal government in the intervals between Parliaments; but Charles scorned the idea of reigning as a ‘Pupil or Ward’ of his over-mighty subjects (His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642), p. 14). On raising an army against him that summer, parliamentarian peers and MPs declared allegiance to their new lord general with the baronial pledge that they would ‘live and die with the [3rd] Earl of Essex’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1786), vol. 5, p. 206).

DS

Further reading:

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfild & Nicolson, 2007)

Esther S. Cope, ‘The inconveniences of long intermissions of Parliament and a remedy for them’, Albion, 13 (1981), pp. 1-11

Pauline Croft, ‘The debate on annual Parliaments in the early seventeenth century’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 16 (1996), pp. 163-74

Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The earl of Essex and Elizabethan Parliaments’, Parliamentary History, 34 (2015), pp. 90-110

Note: the biography of Oliver Cromwell has been published in House of Commons, 1640-60. The biographies of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex and Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester, will appear in House of Lords, 1640-60. For a study of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, see House of Lords, 1558-1603 (forthcoming).

‘The Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies’ concluded the renowned church leader Richard Baxter about the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 (R. Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, or Political Aphorisms Opening the True Principles of Government (1659), 457). Local communities in early Stuart England – ‘our streets’ – could certainly be divided and fractious places, where puritans and church-conformists, town oligarchs and merchant interlopers, often clashed, sometimes violently. But the ideas and loyalties that would mobilise these groups for war came from other sources – the royal court, the legal establishment, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the political networks of the aristocracy. These were the seminaries of government but also potential nurseries of civil strife, and in no county were the divisions they generated more profound during the 1630s than in Oxfordshire.

In the north-east of the county, in his medieval castle at Broughton near Banbury, resided its most influential nobleman, William Fiennes, 1st viscount and 8th Baron Saye and Sele. Few peers in England had a smaller estate than Lord Saye, or a greater sense of aristocratic entitlement. His viscountcy was a recent creation, but his barony was among the oldest in England and his ancestors had been companions of William the Conqueror. With this ‘ancient precedency’ he felt a baronial duty to defend English liberties and therefore to school first King James and then King Charles to abandon their claims to personal sovereignty and to rule instead solely through Parliament and the counsel of Protestant noblemen, such as himself. His piety was equally elitist. By the late 1630s he had withdrawn from the ‘grosse corruptions’ of Church of England services – indeed, he thought the very notion of a national church was ‘popish’ (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale (1641), 15-16 (E.198.16-17)). The only true ‘Churches of Christ’ were free-standing congregations of committed puritans (Ibid, 12); how the great mass of the population that fell short of his godly ideal should worship was a matter for Parliament to decide, not King Charles or his bishops.

Saye’s circle of godly grandees was centred on Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties but extended across the Atlantic to the puritan colonies of New England. As members of the most high-profile colonising venture of the day, the Providence Island Company, he and his aristocratic friends ran what amounted to their own, anti-Spanish, foreign policy, and in 1639-40 they conspired with the Covenanter rebels in Scotland to bring down Charles’s regime in England.

Some 30 miles south of Broughton Castle, at Oxford, a very different kind of network and ethos prevailed during the 1630s. The city’s most powerful figure was the chancellor of the university and archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The son of a Reading cloth-seller, Laud owed his rise to ecclesiastical eminence entirely to royal favour. He and like-minded clerics, backed by King Charles, championed a style of worship and politics that was the opposite in almost every respect to Saye’s. The Laudian bishops exalted king over Parliament, church ceremony over preaching, and enforced religious practices designed to level and integrate the entire laity, the nobility included, in due reverence to ‘his sacred Majesty’ and ‘the beauty of holiness’. Such was Saye’s determination to inoculate his sons against this ‘popery’ that he sent them to study under the Calvinist theologian William Ames at Franeker University in The Netherlands. Ames taught that bishops had ‘brought in with them the Roman Antichrist…to the utter oppressing of the Churches of God’ (W. Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642), 203-4).

Saye and Laud confronted each other face-to-face in April 1640 in the Parliament that Charles called to fund the war against his Scottish rebels. Smarting at the Covenanters’ efforts to remove the Scottish bishops from civil authority, Laud tried to assert the principle that the English bishops were integral to proceedings in the House of Lords. Saye gave this notion short shrift, insisting that ‘there was no necessity at all for the presence of the Bishops … the High Court of Parliament could proceede without [them]’ (HMC Le Fleming (1890), 8; E.S. Cope and W.H. Coates (eds.), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640 (Camden Society ser. 4, vol. xix, 1977), 220). In fact, their ‘absolute dependancy upon the King’ rendered them unfit for parliamentary duty altogether (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale, 6). After Charles dissolved this ‘Short Parliament’ a few weeks later for refusing to grant him taxes, Laud threatened Saye with violent retribution and called him ‘the Greatest [religious] Separatist in England’ (BL, Harl. 6424, f. 44v). But when the Scottish invasion of northern England that summer forced Charles to call another Parliament, it was Laud who would be at the mercy of his enemies. Denounced in the Commons as ‘the stye of all Pestilent filth that hath infected the State and…Church’, he was imprisoned in the Tower for high treason (Mr. Grymstons Speech in Parliament (1641), 2 (E.196.22)). Now it was Saye’s turn to ‘spit…venome’. In a speech in the Lords in March 1641 he derided the archbishop for his ‘mean birthe…violence and inconsiderateness’, and pronounced him fit only to ‘canvas for a Proctors place in the Universitie’ (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale, 11).

One of Parliament’s first military moves after the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1642 was to send Saye and his newly-raised regiment to seize Oxford. In propaganda terms alone the city was a great prize, never mind its strategic importance. Laud had certainly understood its value; Saye was less astute. During his brief occupation of the city he neglected to fortify it against the king, fearing to anger the university, and he allowed his soldiers to take pot-shots at the ornate Laudian porch that had been added to the University Church during the archbishop’s chancellorship. After pillaging Saye’s castles at Broughton and Banbury that autumn, royalist troops occupied Oxford, which would serve as Charles’s wartime headquarters until his surrender in 1646.

By the time that Saye helped to orchestrate Laud’s execution in 1645 he was battling enemies of his own in Parliament. He lived a further 17 years – long enough to see the monarchy and the church restored in the early 1660s along lines that would have gratified the archbishop. The final twist in their rivalry would occur posthumously in the 1830s, with the university hosting the Oxford Movement that would enshrine Laud’s legacy in modern Anglicanism, while the extravagances of the 15th Lord Saye and Sele led to the great sale at Broughton of 1837, ‘in which the castle was stripped of its contents even to the swans on the moat’ (H. Gordon-Slade, ‘Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire’, The Archaeological Journal, 135 (1978), 142). Having weathered all such storms, Broughton Castle today is still home to the Fiennes family, and to swans on the moat. It remains among the best-preserved medieval castles in England; a monument to aristocratic resilience in uncertain times.

DS

The biographies of Saye and Laud will appear in the forthcoming 1640-60 Lords section.

For a related article, see: Vivienne Larmine, ‘”Cakes, Cheese and Zeal”: Puritan Banbury, the Fiennes family and civil war radicalism’, History of Parliament,  

The Stuart brothers George Lord d’Aubigny, Lord John Stuart and Lord Bernard Stuart came from a powerful aristocratic family. Their father, Esmé Stuart, 3rd duke of Lennox, was a cousin and favourite of King James I, and their elder brother James, who succeeded as 4th duke of Lennox in 1624, became a gentleman of the bedchamber to King Charles I and lord steward of the royal household, the most senior position at court. However, only one of the six Stuart brothers would survive to see the Restoration in 1660, with three alone – George, John and Bernard – dying in combat in the English civil war.

At the outbreak of war in England in the summer of 1642 the three brothers became cavalry officers in the king’s army. All three fought at the first major battle of the war in October at Edgehill, where George was killed taking part in such a one-sided cavalry charge that it prompted suspicions that he had been accidentally shot by one of his own troopers. The royalist statesman Edward Hyde, the future earl of Clarendon, who was a friend of the 4th duke of Lennox, described George as ‘a gentleman of great hopes, of a gentle and winning disposition, and of very clear courage…’ (Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1888), ii. 368).

Lord John Stuart was just 22-years of age when he, too, made the ultimate sacrifice to the royalist cause – in his case, at the battle of Cheriton in Hampshire in March 1644. Commanding the royalist cavalry he was mortally wounded and was carried from the battlefield to Oxford, the king’s wartime headquarters. Hyde, who was then living in the city, wrote several years later that Lord John

died of his wounds within three days [of Cheriton], to the great grief of the King … He was the second brother of this noble family who had lost his life in this fatal war, and was a man of great courage, and, with a different roughness in his nature from all the rest of his race [i.e. family], had proposed to himself the profession of a soldier…’ (Clarendon, History, iii. 313)

Lord Bernard Stuart fought on and even survived the royalists’ crushing defeat at Naseby in June 1645, which ended any real prospect of the king winning the civil war. But like his two brothers, he would not live to see the war’s outcome. That September, at the battle at Rowton Heath, just outside Chester, he was killed within sight of the king himself, who was observing the engagement from the city walls. This, for Hyde, was perhaps the cruellest blow of all to the Stuart family: ‘He was a very faultless young man, of a most gentle, courteous, and affable nature, and of a spirit and courage invincible; who[se] loss all men exceedingly lamented and the King bore it with extraordinary grief’ (Clarendon, History, iv. 115-16).

By ‘all men’, Hyde meant, of course, all royalists. The parliamentarians, on the other hand, far from lamenting Lord Bernard’s death used it as a prime example of royalist hubris. Reflecting on the battle at Rowton Heath, and on Lord George’s fate in particular, the editor of the leading parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus declared that God and the nation’s destiny had pronounced against the king, and that resistance to these forces was not only futile but immoral: ‘it is not for men to fight against Heaven, and the Genius of Great Britaine’ (Mercurius Britanicus no. 100 (29 Sept.-6 Oct. 1645), 890 (E.304.2)). Lord Bernard and his brothers had merely been ‘Martyrs to this Truth’ – that is, to the futility of resisting Parliament’s victory. For the parliamentarians, their deaths only had meaning in revealing the ultimate pointlessness of their sacrifice. This interpretation would prevail, at least in public discourse, until the restoration of monarchy in 1660. Indeed, in their determination to exclude the brothers from any share in the nation’s ‘Genius’,  the parliamentarians may have erased all visible trace of their burial in Oxford’s cathedral; certainly not even the smallest inscription survives to mark their graves.

The Stuart brothers’ memory was revived after 1660 during the reign of their royal cousin Charles II, although, again, it was twisted for polemical purposes. The royalist hagiographer David Lloyd, in his 1668 publication Memoires of the Lives…[etc.], invented glorious deaths for them that likely bore little relation to fact. Lord George, claimed Lloyd, had received twelve wounds at Edgehill and had fought on until the blood had all but run from his veins. Lord John, at Cheriton, had not been ‘daunted with the fall of two horses under him, nor with six wounds given and the death of near five hundred men round about him’. Lord Bernard, we are told, had commanded the royalists’ rearguard at Rowton Heath ‘to the amazement of all that saw him’ – in fact he had been killed in a confused melee that had preceded the main battle. Regardless – in Lloyd’s telling the three brothers had ‘died Martyrs to this great Cause’ (Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings & Deaths…[etc.], pp. 321-30).

The fate of the Stuart brothers, as lords of the blood royal, was emblematic for both royalists and parliamentarians in the struggle to define and defend ‘this Truth’ or ‘this great Cause’. Their high birth and the political circumstances in which they were memorialised thus dictated what moral should be drawn from their deaths. If truth is invariably a casualty of war then Lloyd’s fanciful reconstruction of their last moments is further evidence that the conflicts of the 1640s were still being fought in the 1660s, albeit with pens rather than swords. Lloyd’s own service in this protracted war of words did credit neither to the brothers nor to himself. The Restoration antiquarian Anthony Wood thought the Memoires contained ‘almost as many errors as lines’, lending its author ‘not only the character of a most impudent plagiary [plagiariser], but a false writer and meer scribbler’ (Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis ed. P. Bliss (1820), iv. 349). Evidently the Stuart brothers continued to pay the cost of royalist martyrdom long after the true facts about their deaths had been forgotten.

Thomas Fallais and David Scott

The research for this blog was undertaken as part of a UNIQ+ internship at the University of Oxford in conjunction with the History of Parliament Trust. For further information, see UNIQ+ (UNIQ plus) | Graduate Access | University of Oxford

Further reading

Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion : a New Selection ed. P. Seaward (OUP, 2009)

C. Gray, ‘Wild civility: men at war in royalist elegy’, in J. Feather and C.E. Thomas (eds.), Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (Palgrave, 2013), pp. 169-89

E. Peters, Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658-1667 (Palgrave, 2017)

On trial for his life in 1662, the former parliamentarian statesman Sir Henry Vane referred to the ‘most great and unusual Changes and Revolutions’ of the mid-seventeenth century (The Tryal of Sir Henry Vane (1662), 40). For him, the profoundest of these unusual changes was ‘the disjoynting [of] that Parliamentary Assembly among themselves’ and the subsequent emergence of ‘formed divisions among the people’. The most serious of these formed divisions was that between the parliamentarians and royalists. But Vane also had in mind a different kind of disjointing and division – the formation of opposing political parties within Parliament itself.

The clash of contending political groups at Westminster was a prominent theme in accounts of parliamentary proceedings during the 1640s. The MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes felt compelled to persist with his parliamentary diary in 1643 ‘to transmitt not onlie the storie but the verie secrett workings and machinations of each partie … chiefelie ledd and guided by some few members of either Howse’ (BL, Harley ms 165, f. 93). But although the language of party was widespread in the 1640s, historians have generally traced the emergence of parties properly-speaking to the struggle from the late 1670s between the Whigs and Tories. Were Vane and D’Ewes wrong therefore to think and write in terms of parties? Not according to the History of Parliament’s recently published House of Commons 1640-1660 volumes, which reveal that the first age of party was indeed the civil-war period. It was evidently during the 1640s that many of the political identities, behaviours and structures that constituted a recognisable party-political system first came together in Parliament.

The emergence late in 1642 of rival factions within Parliament with contrasting programmes for national settlement had never been seen before at Westminster and was a watershed moment in English history. It coincided with and contributed to the sharp rise in contested votes in the Commons, known as divisions, that occurred from November 1642. There was a pronounced spike in the frequency of these divisions in the debates on Parliament’s peace proposals to the king during the winter of 1642-3 – and this upward trend was never reversed. Conflict between organised parliamentary factions, or parties as we might properly call them, that competed for power and political resources, and not simply to carry a particular debate, was decisive in accelerating the disintegration of the Commons’ consensual traditions and their replacement by the majoritarian tactics of party-based politics. In the life or death struggle to decide Parliament’s and the nation’s fate, winning mattered as much at Westminster as it did on the battlefield. The priority for leading politicians – the men who could expect to lose their heads if they bungled the war – was building and sustaining voting majorities. That process demanded management and organisation – in short, it both required and produced parties.

The parties at Westminster assumed their most stable and coherent form in 1645 and the rivalry between the Independents and the Presbyterians. The leadership of each party comprised small groups of politicians known as ‘the grandees’. These were the politicians in both Houses with a programme as to how and on what terms to restore Charles as king and who expected to dominate his court and counsels once they had done so. By no means all MPs were consistent followers of either set of grandees; not a few of them shifted their ground as their views and political circumstances changed. Even so, historians have probably over-estimated the number of true neutrals in the Commons.

Given their ambitious plans for settling Charles’s war-torn kingdoms and the considerable risks involved in failing to achieve them, the grandees had to resort to a variety of arts and instruments in an effort to steer the public and the generality of their less resolute or partisan colleagues. Now for the first time, Parliament-men began to use the press for propaganda purposes in a systematic fashion. In 1643, for example, a long-running propaganda war broke out between the parties in which the parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus was one of numerous weapons used by both sides to blacken their opponents and bolster public support for their own terms for settlement.

Managing business in the often divided and troubled Commons of the 1640s also required an unprecedented degree of planning and coordination, and on a scale and with a sophistication that was unrivalled before the 1670s. The dark arts of party-political manipulation worked best when they were least visible, so in an effort to cover their tracks in the Commons the grandees recruited in-House enforcers and influencers to help manage business on the floor of the chamber. By the mid-1640s a variety of informal party agents seem to have operated in the Commons, each with their own specialised role: there were ‘teazers’ and ‘sticklers’ to prompt and steer debate, ‘Beagles’ to nose out controversy, ‘dividers’ – either tellers or division-managers – and ‘vote-drivers’ to marshal the party faithful during crucial divisions. Evidence suggestive of whipping by both parties can be detected in Commons’ divisions from the mid-1640s.

The party system that emerged at Westminster during the 1640s did not survive Charles I’s execution in 1649 and the establishment of a republican regime. Yet this narrowing of the political horizon could not hide the fact that something new had occurred in the practice of politics. Most significantly, perhaps, parties had become not merely political means but to some extent ends in themselves. Their existence had been tied not to the attainment of specific rewards or policies but to the maintenance of a particular way of government and to imposing and then sustaining a permanent shift in constitutional relations between Parliament and the crown and between England and the other Stuart kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. The Independents and Presbyterians had been more than parties therefore, they had been governments-in-waiting; their rivalry had been that between competing organisations for the very future of England and its status within the British Isles.

The partisan politics born of the civil war would outlive all the purges from office and all the loyalty tests that Parliament introduced from the mid-1640s in an attempt to kill it. The clash of organised parties at Westminster ended in 1649, but the networks they had helped to create across the country survived and exacerbated the politicisation of local affairs in the aftermath of civil war. Pioneered at Westminster under the pressure of military events, the politics of majoritarian decision-making also spread to the provinces and gradually became standard practice in parliamentary elections and municipal government. A society that would long continue to define political disagreement as against the natural order was now awash with dissident groups. Political associations that had emerged from the civil war would harden again in the 1670s and 1680s. Once again, Parliament became the principal battleground in a struggle between organised parties that managed elections, mobilised public opinion, and contended for control of royal government. This time, however, unlike in the 1640s, the rage of party at Westminster would grip the entire nation – and it would never let go.

DS

Further reading:

William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (CUP, 2021),

Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns 1650-1730 (CUP, 1998)

Stephen K. Roberts (ed.), The House of Commons 1640-1660 (Boydell, 2023), volume 1

With the old frame of government shattered by civil war, the soldiers-turned-politicians of the New Model Army gathered at Putney in October 1647 to thrash out their terms for settlement not only with the defeated King Charles but also with their paymasters at Westminster. Historians have focused on the opening salvos in these ‘Putney debates’, when the Levellers – a group of radical agitators with friends among the soldiery – ambushed the army leadership with their manifesto An Agreement of the People, sparking passionate exchanges about electoral reform. Yet discussion on day four at Putney remained as vigorous as ever, and dominating the agenda was not whether the ‘poorest he’ should have the vote, but what role the king and Lords would play in any future settlement. Where the army’s blueprint for overhauling England’s ‘ancient constitution’, the Heads of Proposals, included a place for Charles and his nobles, the Agreement, with its emphasis on popular consent and political accountability, was much less accommodating. As the radical soldier William Allen put it, ‘the difference between us I think is in the interest of king and Lords’ (The Clarke Papers ed. C.H. Firth [Camden Society, new series xlix, 1891], p. 376).

What followed was a complex debate about the future constitutional status of the king and House of Lords, a debate in which the participants differentiated carefully between the two. And the records we have suggest that contrary to Allen’s opinion there was a large degree of common ground. Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton, the army’s chief political strategist, was swift to clarify that no one denied that the safety and preservation of the people must come first, before the ‘interest’ of the king and Lords. The question was rather what kind of interest they should have – and how this might in fact be consistent with the army’s political priorities.

Even the leading Leveller spokesman John Wildman was anxious to make clear that distrust of the king did not extend to the Lords. ‘None have any exception against the persons of the Lords or the name of Lords’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 386) he insisted – the issue was rather the scope of their power. He was apparently comfortable with the continuing existence of the peerage, of a society that was stratified and in which some enjoyed high status by virtue of their birth. But since, in his view, the ‘foundation of all justice is the election of the people’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 386), then it would be wrong to give peers, as members of the Lords, a special power over the definition or dispensing of such justice.

Wildman’s comments allowed Ireton to mount a staunch defence of the Lords, appealing to ideas of justice and equity. If a core principle for the Levellers was that no one could be bound by laws to which they had not consented, then, by rights, this rule should extend to the nobility as well. Assuming the continuing existence of the peerage, there needed to be a forum through which they too could consent to laws which affected their person and estates. That forum, Ireton suggested, was the House of Lords. Of course, he explained, if peers became officers of state then they would be subject to the House of Commons like anyone else; but as members of the Lords with their titles and privileges they were different, they stood apart from the body of the people as represented in the Commons. Similarly, the right to trial by one’s peers could surely not be denied to the nobility. ‘I would fain know’, asked Ireton, ‘how we can take away that right of peers to be tried by their peers when that it is a point of right for the Commons to be tried by their peers’? (The Clarke Papers, p. 392).

Warming to this theme, Ireton claimed that his position on the Lords actually had a firm basis in Wildman’s own arguments. After all, if government were based upon consent and the people had consented to set up a king and Lords, then there was no reason to abolish them. Moreover, the existence of the Lords was perfectly consistent with the safety of the people, because the exemption of some few individuals from the laws made by the Commons was a minor matter as long as every man was properly protected in their rights. But Ireton was clear that if all were to be protected by the law then all must be bound by it – no one could be completely exempt. Peers no less than the king were, as he put it, ‘suable, impleadable in any court’, though he added that ‘a Lord may be sued and tried per pares [by his peers] only’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 405). For Ireton, England was a law-governed polity, and though over time and through consent those laws might apply differently to some social groups, no one could stand above or outside the law itself.

We know little of the subsequent debates at Putney, but Ireton’s views evidently carried considerable weight in the army. The next day a committee convened and agreed that although all officers and ministers of state must be subject to the Commons, ‘the persons of peers, otherwise than in such capacity as aforesaid, shall bee tried and judged only by their peers’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 408) – with the obvious implication that the House of Lords would be necessary to this process. The clerk recorded that no one present dissented from this position.

Although the contours of settlement may have been uncertain in autumn 1647, it is clear that they were expected to include a House of Lords at least in some form. This was not simply conservative inertia, though there was no doubt plenty of that; it also reflected a genuine feeling within the army that if the principles of justice and rule by law were to hold, then this meant the retention of legal protection for the peerage and therefore of certain kinds of privilege and hierarchy. Only when the House of Lords refused to go along with these principles, and objected to the trial of the king, would positions change and the peers find themselves cast out of Parliament.

SM and DS

Biographies of John Wildman, Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell appear in the House of Commons 1640-60 volumes which are available to purchase here.

Further reading:

S. Mortimer, ‘Henry Ireton and the limits of radicalism 1647-1649’ in Revolutionary England, c.1630-c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (Routledge, 2017), pp. 55-72

P. Baker, E. Vernon, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Palgrave, 2012)

The Putney Debates of 1647: the Army, the Levellers and the English State ed. M. Mendle (CUP, 2001)

In November 1648, after a summer and autumn of hard-fought victories against royalist insurgents and Scottish invaders, the New Model Army presented a Remonstrance to the Commons, demanding justice against the author of this second civil war – King Charles I. Ending peace talks with ‘that man of blood’ and putting him on trial were the Remonstrance’s main demands. But MPs suspected that the soldiers had another target in mind besides the king. ‘I believe they will level the Lords House to the other’ was one MP’s reaction to the Remonstrance – meaning that the army was now intent on abolishing the Lords and vesting sovereignty in the Commons (British Library, Verney mss, M636/9: Sir Roger Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Verney, 20 Nov. 1648).

Levelling the Lords was not a novel idea – it had been touted for several years by the civil-war era’s most high-profile movement for constitutional reform, the Levellers. In siding with the forces of political and religious reaction after the upheaval of the first civil war (1642-6), the dominant group in the Lords earned the Levellers’ anger and mistrust – and this quickly escalated into an attack upon the House’s very existence. In pamphlet after pamphlet, radical polemicists denounced the Lords for its ‘insolent usurpations of the common liberties and rights of this nation’. The peers, they argued, owed their power and privileges not to personal merit but to ‘the common ways your ancestors gained it for you…by adhering to kings…by pleasing their lusts, malice, revenge or covetousness…’ (An Alarum to the House of Lords (1646), frontispiece and p. 4). Moreover, while the people’s elected representatives in the Commons spoke for the entire nation, ‘…every baron in Parliament doth represent but his own person and speaketh in behalf of himself alone…’ (A Defiance against all Arbitrary Usurpations (1646), 16). The Lords fined and imprisoned its radical detractors, but the printed attacks kept on coming.

The army’s grievances against the Lords developed later than those of the Levellers and for different reasons. A number of parliamentarian peers had been instrumental in creating the New Model in 1645, and they had stuck by the soldiers in 1647 when their enemies in Parliament had tried to disband them or pack them off to Ireland. But any goodwill the soldiers felt towards the Lords evaporated in the summer of 1648; for even as they battled against the king’s forces, the peers voted with the Commons to re-open peace talks with him, and a group of crypto-royalist lords refused to declare the invading Scots enemies of the kingdom. Once the army had won the second civil war, seized the king and (on 6 December 1648) purged the Commons of its opponents, the way seemed clear for a swift reckoning not only with Charles but also the ‘useless and dangerous’ House of Lords (Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-60 ed. C.H. Firth, R.S. Rait, vol. ii, p. 24).

And yet at this point the revolution stalled. Instead of proceeding rapidly against king and Lords, the army and the ‘Rump’ of MPs who had survived the purge took almost two months to execute the king, and it was not until February 1649 that legislation was initiated for abolishing the Lords. This deferred death of the upper House puzzled contemporaries; and – although little remarked upon – it poses a challenge for modern historians. For the consensus has long been that the Lords by the late 1640s was an irrelevance. Thinly attended (usually by less than 20 peers), bullied by the Commons, its constitutional legitimacy blasted by radical critique, the upper House was simply waiting for the coup de grâce.

Or at least this has been the assumption – the facts tell a different story however. Although the Levellers might ridicule the Lords’ claim to be the nation’s ‘supreme judicature’, the number of litigants and petitioners seeking redress through the House increased hugely in the years 1646-8 – precisely the period when it was supposedly in terminal decline. Politically, too, the peers remained a force to be reckoned with. Almost half of the ten most active men on Parliament’s main executive during 1648, the Derby House Committee, were peers. And they and their fellow noblemen played a leading role in Parliament’s last-ditch attempt to negotiate a settlement with the king during the second half of 1648. 

But it was not the continued vitality of the Lords that delayed its demise after December 1648; it was more the fact that several of those driving the revolution that winter had no wish to abolish it. The army’s two most powerful figures, Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, shared the landed class’s respect for the institution of the Lords even if they despised all but a handful of the peers themselves. The Lords, said Cromwell, ‘had as true a right to their legislative and jurisdictive power as he had to the coat on his back’ (The Antient Land-mark Skreen (1659), 12). Ireton, the author of the army’s November Remonstrance, had inserted a clause in it that ‘…the House of Peers are a court sitting and [are] to be consulted with…’, at least where its own interests were concerned (Lambeth Palace Library, Ms 679, p. 177). This concession had been too much for his Leveller allies, and he had removed it in order to preserve radical unity against a sell-out peace with Charles. Even so, it is telling that whereas the army purged and, in some cases, imprisoned those MPs who had voted for a peace deal, it allowed the peers who had done so to continue sitting unmolested.

What would ultimately doom the Lords was not its inability to adapt to the supposedly egalitarian environment in which it found itself from the mid-1640s, but rather a series of political miscalculations on its part early in 1649 – above all, in blocking legislation for trying the king – that allowed those MPs fearful of its continuing influence to get the better of its friends. And even then the Commons’ vote in February to abolish the Lords passed by a narrow margin – just 15 votes in a House of 73.

The Levellers had little reason to celebrate this victory, for within months of abolishing the Lords, its foremost defenders, Cromwell and Ireton, led the political and military campaign that consigned the Leveller movement to oblivion. The Lords, by contrast, would make a triumphal return with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

SM & DS

The authors will return to this subject in a subsequent blog for this series that will look more closely at contemporary arguments in defence of the Lords against its radical opponents.

Further Reading:

J. Adamson, ‘The frighted junto: perceptions of Ireland and the last attempts at settlement with Charles I’, in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ed. J. Peacey (2001)

The English Levellers ed. A. Sharp (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1998)

E. R. Foster, The House of Lords, 1603-1649 (1983)

In April of this year the History of Parliament launched the latest in its long series of biography-based research projects, the House of Lords 1640-1660. Recent sections of the History have brought out studies of the membership of the Upper House in the Parliaments of 1604-29 and of 1660-1715, and work is currently underway on the Elizabethan and Georgian Lords. But addressing the mid-seventeenth century gap in our coverage has had to wait until the completion of the House of Commons 1640-1660 project, whose volumes are due to be published next year. The new Lords section will build on the achievements of its Commons predecessor but will be smaller in scale, not least because few of the 255 individuals eligible to sit during the period had substantial parliamentary careers – the bishops were legally excluded from the House in 1642, royalist peers had abandoned their seats by the outbreak of civil war that August, and the Lords itself was abolished by the Commons in 1649 (not to be restored for another eleven years).

The demise of the Lords in 1649 had been seen as symbolic of the decline in wealth and influence that the English aristocracy had supposedly suffered since the sixteenth century. Inflationary pressure on landed income, the rising cost of lordly living (particularly at court) and a seeming erosion of peers’ military capabilities were thought to have weakened the nobility relative to both the monarchy and the gentry. But work since the 1980s has challenged this view of an aristocracy in crisis; and it is now appreciated just how well most of the titled elite adapted to the economic, political and cultural forces that were re-shaping Tudor and early Stuart society.

The nobility’s continuing authority and preeminence within that society were revealed in dramatic fashion during the early years of the civil war, when most of the forces raised by Parliament and the king were commanded by peers. Parliament’s fleet of revolted royal ships would scarcely have materialised without the leadership and reputation of England’s foremost buccaneer, the earl of Warwick. And until his removal in 1645 as Parliament’s commander-in-chief and would-be dictator, Warwick’s cousin, the earl of Essex, was widely seen on both sides as ‘the leader and the personification of the parliamentarian cause’. Indeed, Charles I can be forgiven for his belief that he faced what amounted to a baronial revolt under Essex as the archetypal over-mighty subject.

Leading peers across the British Isles undoubtedly exercised greater dominion, both political and military, than any noblemen since the Wars of the Roses. It was these quasi-warlords whom the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes had in mind when he wrote of ‘Popular ambitious’ subjects and ‘potent men breaking through the Cob-web Lawes of their Country’. The only way to quell these ‘children of pride’ and restore order to Charles’s fractured realm, Hobbes insisted, was to instate an all-powerful sovereign – what he termed Leviathan.

If the civil-war nobility successfully reprised its traditional role as military leaders, it was also able to move into, and dominate, new and more politic fields of public activity. Peers featured prominently in the bicameral factions that took centre-stage at Westminster after 1640 and that constituted England’s first ever national political parties. As royal counsellors and party politicians they helped master-mind policy and reform by both king and Parliament; and they were intimately involved in trying to reach a settlement within Charles’s war-torn kingdoms. Perhaps most striking of all was their high-profile participation in the modern (by contemporary standards) ‘fiscal-military’ state that Parliament constructed to defeat the king.

The Lords sat more or less continuously during the period 1640-8 and its business expanded considerably, becoming more politically-charged and controversial as the decade progressed. There was a marked growth in the House’s legal and petitionary business, and this, along with peers’ integral role in Parliament’s burgeoning – and highly authoritarian – war-state, provoked a powerful reaction among radicals against the peerage and its constitutional role.

A republican urge to abolish the Lords is now considered a defining feature of radical parliamentarianism. Civil-war radicalism, on this reading, was almost exclusively a sectarian-led movement for egalitarian reform which, in the case of the Levellers, provoked demands to defund the state. Yet no less radical in its implications was the programme of state-building that parliamentarian grandees pursued from the early 1640s in a concerted effort to destroy personal monarchy and to strengthen English power in the fight against international ‘popery’. Parliamentarian peers and their allies in the Commons were at the very forefront of this process – most notably in championing the formation in 1644-5 of a British wartime executive (the Committee of Both Kingdoms) and of that most hallowed of radical organisations, the New Model Army.

Recent research on the peerage in the later 1640s suggests that the Lords’ abolition in 1649 was largely the result of the peers’ own political miscalculation; it certainly did not reflect any long-term diminution in the business before the House or in aristocratic influence. The MP and legal adviser to several peers, Bulstrode Whitelocke, was voicing a commonly-held view when he claimed late in 1648 that the greatest noblemen ‘might carry a dozen or twenty of them [Commons-men] to vote as they list without any sense or reason’.

Charting the shifting nature and perceptions of aristocratic power during the civil-war era is just one of the many challenges facing the Lords 1640-1660 project. Another key issue it will have to address is the extent to which party strife and new ideological commitments to king and ‘commonwealth’ overrode peers’ institutional loyalty to the Lords and even to the nobility itself. More fundamental still is the question of how partisan politics affected peers’ relations with their regional powerbases and with their friends and clients in the Commons? Answering these and related questions will take the new section to the heart of popular as well as parliamentary politics in the English Revolution.

D.S.

Endnotes

Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 73v.

J. Adamson, ‘The baronial context of the English Civil War’, TRHS, xl. (1990), 94.

T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. N. Malcolm (Oxford, 2012), ii. 458, 544.

Late in September 1665, the Great Plague of London claimed its most famous victim. ‘I hear for certain this night’, wrote Samuel Pepys, ‘that Sir Martin Noell is this day dead of the plague in London, where he hath lain sick of it these eight days’ ( The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. R. Latham, W. Matthews (Oxford, 1971), vi. 245). The name Martin Noell has long since slipped from the national memory, but by the time of the Restoration in 1660 he was the best known, certainly notorious, entrepreneur and financier in all of England.

Noell’s rise to fame and fortune epitomised the transformation that had occurred in English maritime commerce and colonial enterprises since the early 1600s. The younger son of a Stafford mercer, he used his elder brother’s business connections in London, and his own marriage to the daughter of a wealthy City draper, to break into the burgeoning trade with the colonies across the Atlantic. While never straying too far from his London counting-house, he had established himself by the late 1640s as one of the merchant-planters on Barbados, the island at the centre of England’s sugar boom. Noell’s rapid climb from provincial nobody to metropolitan venture-capitalist, though eye-catching, was not unusual among the so-called ‘new merchants’ – men from outside of London’s established mercantile elite, often from small-town backgrounds, who had come to dominate the transatlantic trade in sugar and other colonial merchandise.

The new merchants were well-insinuated with the radical faction in Parliament that executed Charles I in 1649 and established a republican state. With friends in high places, Noell won large government contracts for collecting a range of customs and sales taxes, from which he skimmed a healthy profit. Noell’s friend and business-partner Thomas Povey thought that he had ‘swollen into a much greater person by being a farmer [i.e. collector] of the customs and excise’ ( British Library, Add. ms 11411, f. 39v.). Duties on salt were probably Noell’s biggest domestic earner. As a tax-farmer on salt and an investor in salt-production, he made money from both ends of the industry. Oliver Cromwell’s son and heir Richard Cromwell was not exaggerating when he styled Noell ‘the great salt-master of England’ ( The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell, 1655-9 ed. P. Gaunt (Camden Society ser. 5, xxxi), 308.)

But Noell’s most marketable asset by the mid-1650s was his value to the house of Cromwell – Britain’s new ruling family. He used his financial resources to make substantial loans to Cromwell’s government to cover its day-to-day running costs and keep the wheels of state turning. In fact, it is likely that the Cromwellian regime depended more upon Noell for ready cash and credit than upon any other individual. Not only that, Noell acted as private money-lender to Protector Oliver himself. Noell’s status as Cromwell’s personal paymaster rendered him (in Povey’s words) ‘considerable everywhere…a person of the most spacious interest of any merchant or citizen [in England]’ (British Library, Add. ms 11411, ff. 41v, 65v.).

Noell’s money bought him political influence. He and Povey were closely involved in directing government policy on the Caribbean colonies, particularly Barbados. And Noell played a leading part in organising and financing Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ of 1655 against the Spanish colony of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). One well-informed observer identified Noell as ‘he who suggested the design of the West Indies’ to Cromwell.

In the event, the Western Design was a fiasco – partly because profiteering by Noell and other contractors had deprived the expedition of vital supplies and equipment. Repulsed from Hispaniola with heavy losses, Cromwell’s troops took Jamaica as a consolation prize. Not that Noell was complaining. He had taken his usual cut regardless, and he was further rewarded with a grant from Cromwell of 20,000 acres on England’s new colony. The seizure of Jamaica would provide a massive boost to the English sugar-industry and to the slave trade that sustained it.

Noell’s plantation in Barbados was well-supplied with enslaved Africans to work the sugar-canes. But it was what he euphemistically termed his ‘Christian servants’ on the island, and the circumstances of their presence there, that landed him in trouble with his fellow MPs following his election for Stafford to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in 1659. Noell was forced to defend himself against accusations in the House that he had violated English ‘liberties’ as a contractor for transporting royalist prisoners to indentured servitude on Barbados. The victims of his ‘most unchristian and barbarous usage’ alleged that they been ‘bought and sold…from one planter to another…as horses and beasts’ (Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), iv. 255-73). Noell admitted transporting prisoners to the island, but denied that he had effectively sold them into slavery or that they had been harshly treated. Indeed, he claimed that labour conditions for indentured servants on Barbados were better than those of the ‘common husbandman here’. The really hard work, the ‘grinding at the [sugar]-mills and attending at the furnaces or digging in the scorching island’, was mostly undertaken by African slaves, he insisted – and as he well knew, no one in the Commons cared about them.

Noel shrugged off his grilling in the House, and he would emerge from the downfall of the protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 similarly unscathed. Pepys was surprised in 1662 to hear that Noell had been knighted, but he conceded that the former Cromwellian was still ‘a very useful man’ (Pepys Diary ed. Latham, Matthews, iii. 190.) In 1663, Noell invested heavily in England’s foremost slave-trading venture, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, and he and Povey lobbied the crown hard during the early 1660s for the establishment of a royal-sponsored West Indian company ‘for the better regulating and improving of foreign plantations’(British Library, Egerton ms 2395, ff. 107-12, 270-2; Add. ms 22920, f. 22.). Noell’s debts at his death in 1665 amounted to over £30,000 – millions in today’s money – and included the sum of £1,747 he owed ‘on a contract’ for slaves (London Metropolitan Archives, CLA/002/01/002, f. 156v; CLA/002/02/01/0500.).

Through his loans and counsel to the Cromwellian regime, Noell did more than anyone of his day to draw the state into the hitherto largely private business of colonisation and trade in the Atlantic. Securing Britain’s base in the Caribbean would prove vital in the march to global empire and represents Cromwell’s, and Noell’s, most enduring legacy to the nation – one that we are still struggling to come to terms with today.

D.S.

Further reading:

The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. R. Latham, W. Matthews (Oxford, 1971).

The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell, 1655-9 ed. P. Gaunt (Camden Society ser. 5, xxxi).

Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), iv. 255-73; available online at https://www.british-history.ac.uk/burton-diaries

Northumberland in the eyes of Stuart England’s not-so-liberal elite was one of ‘the dark corners of the land’ – a county where the light of southern Protestantism and civility still struggled to penetrate. A century or more later and the border counties, like the Scottish Highlands, would be admired by those of refined sensibility for the wild beauty of their scenery and the supposedly unaffected simplicity of their inhabitants. But a rather less romantic view of the region prevailed in the seventeenth century. The London cartographer Richard Blome described Northumberland in 1673 as ‘a county of a sharp and piercing air and…thinly inhabited, which is occasioned through its near neighbourhood to Scotland and its barrenness, being for the most part exceeding rough, hilly and very hard to be manured’ (R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 179).

‘Near neighbourhood to Scotland’ was a particularly black mark against Northumberland’s name – but not one that its inhabitants would have contested. The accession of the Scottish king James VI to the English throne in 1603 had consigned the Border Reivers and the ‘debateable lands’ to history; and gone too, or so it seemed, was the threat of invasion from Scotland. But old fears and animosities died hard. Early-Stuart Northumbrians generally shared the view of the border magnate, Algernon Percy, 10th earl of Northumberland, that Scotland was a ‘beggarly nation’, in every way England’s inferior (The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches ed. W. Knowler (1739), ii. 186).

The Scots’ friends in Northumberland were mostly confined to Newcastle and the town’s few hundred or so puritans, who looked northwards to their fellow godly Calvinists for support. Newcastle’s merchant princes, on the other hand, looked southwards to London and its insatiable demand for coal. The Tyne Valley coalfield was the largest in England, and huge profits were to be made mining, shipping and vending coal to feed the capital’s hearths and stoves. ‘This great trade hath made this part to flourish in all trades’, observed one Northumbrian in 1649, and had powered Newcastle past York as northern England’s largest and wealthiest town (W. Gray, Chorographia, or a Survey of Newcastle upon Tine (1649), 37).

Charles I’s wars against his rebellious Scottish subjects in 1639-40 brought home to Northumbrians, quite literally, the old evils of life on England’s northern frontier. When the Scots had last invaded Northumberland, in 1513, they had had been turned back just south of the border; when they did so in 1640 their victorious army occupied the entire county and garrisoned Newcastle. Having marched out of northern England in 1641, the Scots marched back in again early in 1644 – this time at the invitation of Parliament to help defeat the king in the English civil war.

Hatred of the Scots and their puritanical religion (Presbyterianism) turned Northumberland solidly royalist in the civil war and swelled the ranks of the ‘Whitecoats’ – the Northumbrian brigade that refused to surrender at the battle of Marston Moor and was wiped out by Scottish and parliamentarian cavalry. The Scots’ second occupation of Northumberland and the surrounding counties lasted fully three years, until early 1647, during which time their pay-starved troops committed such ‘infinite oppressions and extortions’ that many northern parliamentarians became as vehemently anti-Scottish as the royalists (Bodl. Nalson IV, f. 212v). At Westminster, meanwhile, the more the Scots tried to foist their authoritarian brand of Presbyterianism onto Parliament, the more convinced were some MPs of the need for at least limited religious toleration and for an end to Scottish interference in English affairs. Heading this anti-Scottish party – a faction known as the Independents – were the earl of Northumberland and the New Model Army’s second-in-command Oliver Cromwell, whose Ironsides had joined in the slaughter of the Whitecoats at Marston Moor.

The Independents’ domination at Westminster provoked yet another Scottish invasion of England, in 1648 – this time in support of the king rather than Parliament. Battered and bruised by their experiences in the first civil war, most Northumberland royalists sat this second one out. Besides, few of them were eager to fight alongside the Scots even against fanatical puritans like Cromwell. Indeed, the ruinous impact of the second civil war on the region would push some Northumbrians in a decidedly radical direction themselves. The mayor of Newcastle and 80 freemen petitioned Parliament in October 1648, requesting that ‘full and exemplary justice be done upon the great incendiaries of the kingdom [i.e. the king and his abettors], the fomenters of, and actors in, the first and second war and the late bringing in of the Scots’ (The Moderate, no. 14 (10-17 Oct. 1648), 115-16, 120 (E.468.2)). Charles’s execution in January 1649 occasioned no regret from the town’s leaders, merely disappointment that he had ‘died like a desperate ignorant Roman – nothing we can see in him tending to a true Christian or the power of godliness’ (The Moderate, no. 30 (30 Jan.-6 Feb. 1649), 295-6 (E.541.15)).

Among the 59 men who signed the king’s death warrant was Newcastle’s MP John Blakiston. The high proportion of northern MPs among the regicides may well reflect hopes in the region that cutting off the king’s head would also sever the regnal union between England and Scotland and end any further danger of the Scots invading in support of ‘their’ king. But the Scots clung obstinately to the idea of a British monarchy and invaded England a fourth time, in 1651, in the cause of Charles II. The overwhelming reaction among Northumbrians to Cromwell’s subsequent defeat of the Scots (at Worcester) and conquest of Scotland was probably one of wearied relief.

Northumberland suffered its final invasion when the English army in Scotland under General George Monck crossed the border late in 1659 en route to London and a bloodless campaign that would end with the restoration of the monarchy in May 1660. Newcastle sent a loyal address to Charles II, expressing the hope that he would ‘unite a divided church, compose a distracted kingdom and ease an oppressed people’ (CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 4). But the legacy of two decades on the front-line of Britain’s civil wars could not be wished away so easily. The threat of Scottish invasion steadily receded from the 1650s. However, the trauma of war, occupation and regicide had opened divisions in Northumbrian society that would linger for generations.

DS

You can find previous blog from our ‘Local History’ series here. Follow the work of the Commons 1640-1660 project via the James I to Restoration section of our blog.

Sexual licence and parliamentary politics have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, and not even the great puritan preachers of the seventeenth century ( who regularly addressed assembled MPs in the adjacent St Margaret’s church ) could prize them apart.  A group of egotistical men (MPs), removed from the respectable environs of their families and communities and thrust into the fleshpots of London with nothing much to do all day but thump their tubs, posture and get drunk – it was an invitation to sexual misadventure on a grand scale.

And if Parliaments were bad for their participants’ sexual probity, then this was doubly true of Parliaments that presided over rebellions and revolutions.  There was nothing like the heady whiff of lèse-majesté to raise testosterone levels in Members to new and unhealthy heights.

The 1640s, the decade of the English civil war, suffered both afflictions – a Parliament and a revolution.  Not only that, it boasted perhaps the most famous Parliament in English history, the Long Parliament – so-called because it sat almost continuously from 1640 until 1653.  Parliaments before then had been occasional events, called at the monarch’s whim and usually sitting for less than a year (often a lot less).  The Long Parliament knew no such constraints.  England’s first parliamentary government represented an unprecedented opportunity for MPs to over-indulge both politically and sexually – and some of them grasped it with both hands.

Like Parliaments before and since, the Long Parliament legislated freely for everyone else’s sexual behaviour, passing numerous laws against clandestine marriage, fornication, bastardy and so on.  But it generally kept out of its own members’ private lives.  Fortunately (for us), the London press after the collapse of censorship in 1640 was not so fastidious.  It happily exposed MPs’ sexual antics – or simply made them up when genuine dirt was in short supply.

The Westminster grandees made particularly inviting targets for the mud-slingers.  Sexual incontinence was equated with a lack of self-control and, in a political context, with tyranny.  A verse libel read in the Commons in 1643 smeared prominent Parliament-men with all manner of vices and crimes.  But when it came to John Pym, the unofficial leader of the House and confidant of the parliamentary peers, promiscuity was the libeller’s weapon of choice

…I sit and can looke downe on men

Whilst other bleed and fight

I eate their Lordshipps meate by day

And give it their Wives by night         

Anon. The Sence of the House, or the opinion of some Lords and Commons concerning the Londoners petition for peace (Oxford, 1643)

Yet Pym was a God-fearing father and widower of nearly 60 years of age.  The only woman who seems to have aroused any great passion in him besides his wife was the ‘Romish Whore’ of Catholicism.  Another great Long Parliamentarian and devoted husband, Oliver Cromwell, would be attacked in a similar way, with suggestive references to his large and fiery nose and his alleged attentiveness to the pretty young wives of his military subordinates.

Which is not to say that some MPs didn’t thoroughly deserve their reputations as sex-pests and lechers.  The Caernarvonshire MP and turncoat John Griffith was a serial molester of women, who bragged in print about his sexual exploits and, from his jail-cell, staged a public shaming of one of his victims and her husband by having a large dog ‘trimmed up with horns and other things in a fantastic fashion, and, with music and other mimical gestures, exposed to the view of multitudes of unruly people, in scorn of his own offence and to the great dishonour of public justice’ [Journal of the House of Lords, vii. 512].  So vicious were his habits that even the most cavalierish of royalists shunned his company. 

At the other end of the political spectrum was the chairman of the Committee for Plundered Ministers – Westminster’s powerhouse for godly reform – the Nottingham MP Gilbert Millington.  He scandalised his fellow puritans in 1646 when at the age of 60, ‘and having but lately buried a religious matronly gentlewoman’, he went ‘to an alehouse to take a flirtish girle of sixteen’.  At least he had the decency to marry his ‘alehouse wench’ [Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. J. Sutherland (1973), 146].  Tales of MPs cheating on their wives with serving-maids and prostitutes became commonplace – so much so that by 1648 only adulterers extraordinaire could guarantee their place in the hall of sexual infamy.  The recently-married Staffordshire MP John Bowyer rose magnificently to the challenge, taking a ‘common whore’ into the Commons ‘before the Members were come to the House’ and having sex with her in the Speaker’s chair [Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 40 (26 Dec. 1648-9 Jan. 1649), sig. Fff5v].  When MPs spoke of the Long Parliament as the cockpit of English politics, Bowyer seems to have taken them a little too literally. 

But there was one area of the parliamentary libido that not even the London gutterpress commented on – homosexuality.  Why this was so is hard to say.  We can calculate the number of lifelong bachelors in the Long Parliament, but such was the pressure on gentlemen to marry and produce an heir that it would give us, at best, only a very rough minimum of MPs who were sexually attracted to other men, and would include the aggressively heterosexual Griffith, for one, who never married.  In a Parliament of well over 500 members there must have been men who were same-sex oriented.  But who they were and how they navigated London’s treacherous sexual waters is a mystery.

No sex-survey of the Long Parliament, however brief, can omit its supposedly most libidinous member, the arch-republican MP for Berkshire, Henry Marten.  Parliamentarians and royalists alike denounced him as a libertine and ‘whoremaster’.  Yet this moral outrage owed less to his womanising than to the shamelessness with which he abandoned his wife and lived openly with his mistress, to whom he seems to have remained faithful to the end of his life in 1680.  The greatest sexual offence a Long Parliamentarian could commit was in refusing to acknowledge it an offence at all.

DS

Further reading:

• Sarah Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Sutton: Stroud, 2000)
• Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge: Abingdon, 2012)
• David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (OUP: Oxford, 1971)

Biographies of John Bowyer, Oliver Cromwell, John Griffith, Henry Marten, Gilbert Millington and John Pym, and an entry on the Committee for Plundered Ministers are being prepared for publication by the House of Commons 1640-1660 section.