LINDA TAAFFE reviews a book that lifts the lid on a revolutionary period of British history that the ruling class would like to keep hidden.
Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660
By Alice Hunt
Published by Faber & Faber, 2025, £12.99
The year of the French Revolution, 1789, is celebrated every year, and not only in France! Even here we socialists honour our heroic forebears who stormed the Bastille.
Unfortunately, England has no equivalent celebrations. Yet more than a hundred years previously, in the 1640s, English peasants had done the same thing. They overthrew the rich and powerful and executed the king Charles I. This was the first bourgeois revolution that allowed feudalism to be swept away and capitalism to develop. Ever since the British ruling class have assiduously used the winning back of the crown by Charles II in 1660 to wipe out all memory of the English Revolution.
The story of how the English people ‘turned the world upside down’ is tremendous. The peasants left the land, became soldiers in the New Model Army and defeated the king’s royalist forces in battle after battle. At the same time, the army was alive with debates about the future of the land – the common treasury for all. Baronial ownership of the land was coming up against the needs of merchants and traders to do business, especially with the opening of the new world; and the poor peasants were being kept down and unable to grind out a decent living.
Many in parliament, including Oliver Cromwell, MP and undisputed leader of the army, recognised it was time for action. They had to use force now in parliament itself. Having agreed the next day’s parliamentary agenda to end years of civil wars, Henry Ireton argued that Charles could not be trusted to protect the people’s liberties and freedom to believe according to their own religious conscience, and he should be brought to justice. Colonel Thomas Pride was stationed at the top of the steps leading to St Stephen’s Chapel. He stopped every MP who would not vote the right way, showed them the soldiers standing by, with muskets, matches already lit, and invited them to turn around and leave. Then this ‘Rump Parliament’ agreed to put the king on trial for treason.
After the tyrant exited, as per the inscription on the beheaded statue of Charles I at the Royal Exchange, England became a republic for just over a decade from 1649 to 1660 – and what a decade! This period, which many historians have explained as a complete aberration or an inter-regnum in British history, is described in minute detail in Alice Hunt’s book, Republic. She explains every year of that decade and what happened. The leaders had to reorganise the whole of society in a new way. Comparisons could be made to what the Bolsheviks had to do after the October 1917 revolution.
Sweeping out the old
It was very messy. Communications slow. The prejudices and customs of hundreds of years of a medieval system were not easily changed. There were undercurrents of a multitude of opinions; fragmented religious outfits eager for power; royalist skulduggery some masquerading as Catholic opposition; the king’s son Charles II fled to the Netherlands but sought every opportunity to use the rebellious Scottish and Irish nationalists as a prop to get back the throne in England.
Having committed regicide, the immediate steps for the victorious Roundheads were to get rid of everything identified with monarchy. The House of Lords, described as “useless and dangerous”, was immediately abolished. No ifs or buts. Gone. Henceforth “the people would belong to a Commonwealth and Free State, which was to be governed by the Representatives in Parliament the Supreme Authority of this Nation.”
The great seal of government that was stamped on all government documents was brought in its embroidered purse before the silent MPs and smashed to smithereens by a workman. Even the furnishings of the various palaces were sold off in a kind of royal jumble sale, although many in the know were not averse to purloining rich tapestries, works of art and even manor houses for themselves.
A council of state was set up to give leadership and guidance. Whitehall needed renovating and clearing. Also, the radical elements in the army had to be controlled – the Levellers in particular. Soldiers had taken part in the Putney debates at the headquarters of the New Model Army in 1647 where Colonel Thomas Rainborrowe had uttered the famous words “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he…” ‘Honest John’ Lillburne wanted an agreement, a written contract between the people and their representatives. They wanted annual elections to Parliament, and suffrage extended to all males over 21.
Although Cromwell listened, and may have been sympathetic to some ideas, he did not agree that voting be given to those with no land. He anticipated that this might trigger the redistribution of property, and lead to anarchy. This was in fact confirmed by Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers who, with 50 families took their spades and planted crops communally on St George’s Hill in Surrey. That bold and audacious experiment was eventually put down. The Diggers were the first primitive outlines of socialist ideas, similar to Gracchus Babeouf in the French revolution.
When Cromwell ordered that the army be sent to Ireland to crush another rebellion, soldiers threatened to mutiny. They just wanted to get paid and return to their farms that had lain fallow for several years. This was Cromwell’s chance to crush the Levellers. He rounded up a thousand mutineers from Salisbury plain in Oxfordshire and managed to lock up four hundred in a riverside church in the quaint little village of Burford. Four ringleaders were selected for the firing squad. The rest were marched onto the church roof and forced to watch the execution.
A day earlier parliament had passed a new law. Whereas once it was treasonous to imagine the death of a king, it was now high treason to declare parliament as “Tyrannical…or Endeavor to stir up or raise force against the present government……or any mutiny in the army”. Cromwell led his army to Ireland where numerous atrocities were committed under his leadership, like in Drogheda. His reputation remains tarnished to this day amongst Irish workers.
New ideas flourish
After every revolution there’s a yearning for peace. The government needed to boost the economy, collect taxes, rebuild and regulate trade and invest in the land, plant trees, drain the Fens and much more. So, the scene was set for all kinds of new ideas to be brought forward, new ways of doing things. Men with ideas and ambition had opportunities to have an effect.
One such character was Samuel Hartlib, a Polish entrepreneur who had escaped to England in 1628, married an English woman, and “flourished during the creative chaos of the 1650s when the country needed to heal, innovate and reform”. He worked with all the principal characters of the time like John Milton, the writer, and the emerging scientist, Robert Boyle. He sat with MPs on committees for trade and excise. He even had meetings with Oliver Cromwell and was neighbour to Samuel Pepys.
He was a brilliant communicator and brought people together who shared his enthusiasm for progress. They exchanged ideas about agricultural methods, economic and educational reform, unemployment and poor relief, and scientific knowledge. His motivations were intellectual, religious and public spirited. His circle thought in terms of commonwealth, and not a kingdom, where all depended on, and supported, each other. He encouraged those with ideas to go to print about the regeneration of England, from the decimalisation of the currency to rethinking crop rotation.
Another of his contacts, Henry Robinson, raised progressive ideas about state schools and a national health service. Another associate, William Potter, developed revolutionary ideas about paper money and credit, due to the lack of gold and silver for coins, anticipating the first bank notes by forty years. Hartlib was involved in more than half of new patents during the life of the Republic. Even though much was still cloaked in religious overtones, like rebuilding the garden of Eden and especially the general expectation of the second coming of the lord, much of the ground that enabled the merchants to trade more easily and profitably was truly laid in this period. The breaking of old medieval relations was paving the way for capitalism to develop into a mightily progressive, though bloodied force, over the next few centuries. The adventures in Hispaniola opened the Caribbean to plunder and trade.
Those European neighbours who had initially looked on with horror at the execution of the king, little by little saw that there was a positive side to this new government. The king’s son Charles II was in hiding. They started to send ambassadors to England obviously drawing the conclusion that things were here to stay and wanting to ensure peaceful trading and cultural relations.
Parliamentary paralysis
However, by this time all was not well in the parliamentary scene. Revolution always must be on guard against the forces of counter-revolution. Everything changed in 1653. Those MPs left in the Rump, even though they had done the business regarding the king, had been there for over 10 years and were now not popular. They were not pushing through the changes needed, like reforming the law, religion and taxes; and not deciding who would be allowed to vote and how MPs would be elected. It was they who, technically, had to dissolve Parliament and call an election, but they were consumed with fear; could royalists win seats, or just simply the ‘ungodly’; how would religious liberty of conscience be protected; who should be able to vote.
This paralysis drove Cromwell mad. He wanted changes enshrined in law. He was tolerant of religions – in which there were many splits and radicalised varieties, but this situation could not continue. The army was no longer involved in campaigns but congregating around London. They had watched their comrades die on the battlefield still awaiting pay. They demanded pay for themselves, for the wounded and widowed families and they appealed to their leader Cromwell. Something had to be done to resolve this situation.
Cromwell was infuriated. After years of battling on a huge scale this small group of MPs were too hesitant and cautious. He had taken advice from those around him in various ways and at various times in the preceding period but now he could not evade the matter. Cromwell had discussed with associates that parliament should be dissolved, but before that a small caretaker government of about 40 men appointed. So, after mostly leaving the parliamentarians to get on with things, he now took his place in St Stephens Chapel. Exasperated he could see that those MPs were clinging to power for themselves. He jumped up, paced the floor and spoke at length, angrily accusing them of corruption, procrastination and self-interest. What else could he do besides take responsibility himself. “I say you are no parliament” he shouted; then added “Call them in”. The doors opened and two files of red-coated soldiers bearing muskets marched in. The chamber was cleared and the doors locked.
In its place was proposed a Nominated Assembly of godly men, mostly unknown to each other, whose job it now was to do the business of governance. Its critics gave it the name the Barebone’s parliament after one of the more colourful characters in the assembly. From the start it showed signs of failing. The more modest leading members wanted to build bridges, even with old royalists. They could not get to grips with the most toxic issue of the times – church tithes. After a few months Barebones imploded. There was now no alternative. They had fought and died for the cause. Changes needed to be enshrined in law. Cromwell was the most successful general, beloved by the army, a powerful strategist – and there was nobody else. He had to agree to become the Lord Protector. Milton called him “our Chief of Men”, and later the poet Andrew Marvell would say “If these the Times, then this must be the Man”.
The protectorate
Cromwell governed with a protectoral council, but from the start there began signs of those near to him trying to surround him with regal trappings. His home furnishings and clothing were upgraded. An MP even suggested he be offered the title of king – which was immediately batted away. In 1655 the forces of the royalist counter-revolution began more serious plotting; a new and growing sect, the Quakers, tried the tolerance of government; after that came Baptists and Jews. Whilst gatherings of people at plays and cockpits were discouraged in case they were fronts for conspiracies, there were some who wanted to see more royalists back again to spend money in London, seeing entertainment as a means of encouraging business.
The pursuit of learning, studying nature, developing scientific enquiry continued, and culture became more popular. No doubt there were back-channel contact with Charles II. People were said to be still taken with the idea of a king, not being able to shake off hundreds of years of a monarchical system. The parliamentary group voted to discontinue Cromwell’s appointment of army generals to govern provincial areas, thereby undermining his power base.
Then in February 1657, a former lord mayor, Sir Chrisopher Packe, presented to parliament, out of the blue, a proposal – under the guise of addressing the succession to Cromwell as Protector – that has come to be known as the Grand Remonstrance. This stated that the ancient constitution of king, Lords and Commons was best suited to the English temperament; that a house of Lords, to be become known as “the Other House” be reinstituted; and that the Protectorate should be elective not hereditary i.e. Cromwell should name his successor before he died. It also gave parliament power to set laws and raise taxes, and that, amongst many other things, the army could only be deployed with parliament’s consent.
However, just a year later, on 3rd April, Cromwell passed away, aged just 59. He had suffered much from ill-health from beginning life as a farmer, then politician, and finally a soldier. He had died of a kind of malaria, but some also said of a broken heart after the death of his beloved daughter Betty and her baby son Oliver the previous summer. It is not known if he formally nominated his eldest son to take over, but Richard Cromwell did, and he was generally accepted.
A ‘Glorious’ compromise
The following year was the most tumultuous of the decade with characters who had participated in various ways, to the fore or in the shadows, coming up with ideas and proposals, sometimes accepted or beaten back. There were measures to curtail the army, ideas to keep MPs as select ‘saints’. Ideas were in the air in the taverns and new coffee houses where people were talking politics. The Rota Club met where ideas of government were debated, even going back to classical Rome. These debates could take place freely as, at that time “there was no possibility of the King’s return”.
However, things began changing even more. The election of 1658 had brought five hundred MPs, mostly too young to have participated in the battlefields, with no memory of the political dramas. Many were moderate and just wanted stability and more money so people could get on with their lives. They had little respect for the army whose soldiers had risked their lives for the cause. Young apprentices – shoemakers, grocers, apothecaries, tailors mostly in their teens and twenties rioted in London. They too just wanted money and stability. Some felt like things were going backwards.
In May, Richard Cromwell abdicated. In 1660 this cleared the way to invite King Charles II back from the Netherlands. He did not fight and win his way back to the throne. He was ready to accept any restrictions imposed by parliament. The decade of the Republic was over, but the country did not go back to the medieval relations of a monarchy. In fact, one French philosopher later described it as “a nation where the republic hides under the form of a monarchy”. The British ruling class has renamed the period “the Glorious Revolution” and wants expunged all references to revolution and common ownership of land. Under the Act of Oblivion, all regicides were viciously pursued to death; all laws enacted from 1642 onwards were wiped out, declared null and void. The Toleration Act granting freedom of worship to non-conformist protestants was not passed until 1689. Catholics would not be free for another hundred years.
Oliver Cromwell, initially interred in Westminster Abbey was dug up and hanged for treason at Tyburn, then beheaded. His head hung for twenty years at Westminster! It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that a statue of Cromwell was finally erected outside the Houses of Parliament, as if the capitalist elite, whose way to power was fought for by Cromwell and poor peasants, was only safe to be recognised two hundred years later. Although there was no working class at the time, it is worthwhile for activists to study this period in history, both of the Levellers, the Seekers and Ranters, and of reconstruction and counter-revolution. Whilst the background and context were vastly different in the seventeenth century, there are many of the same aspects which will confront revolutionaries in the twenty first century. We look forward to a second English revolution – this time socialist.