(at times) about the virtue of kings and the idleness of nobles.
Over many decades the boundaries of lordship were being driven back and the commercialization and monetization of all exchange and social relations proceeded to undermine the structure of feudal society. The challenge to the old Catholic Church, the shift to the individual’s own Bible-led relationship with God at the expense of the prelate-dominated, hierarchically mediated relationship with God, was one ideological reflection of this change. The growth of Universities and Inns of Court, and the invention of the printing press, meant that Church was no longer the sole repository of knowledge. Printing, for instance, meant that one of the Church’s key services to the monarchy, the handwritten reproduction of documents, was rendered an anachronism. The English state at first benefited from putting itself at the head of these changes, most obviously through the Reformation.
The Tudors, especially Elizabeth I, enjoyed the crystallization of these elements as a period of national, Protestant, reaffirmation. English nationalism, in the era of Drake and Raleigh, was reborn. The Stuarts faced the dissolution of this temporary stability. There was still another century before all these elements would fuse in the mighty Civil War against monarchy but by 1540 the seeds had been sown. And ideas that were first mummered by Lollards in the 1380s would be cried aloud by Levellers in the 1640s.48
3
‘The Head and Fountain of Rebellion’
The only and sole legislative law making power is originally inherent in the people.
John Lilburne
LONDON’S REVOLUTIONARY REPUTATION
If ‘posterity shall ask’, said one Royalist, ‘who would have pulled the crown from the king’s head, taken the government off the hinges, dissolved Monarchy, enslaved the laws, and ruined the country; say, “twas the proud, unthankful, schismatical, rebellious, bloody City of London”.’1 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon and Charles I’s advisor, was inclined to the same view. He saw London as ‘the fomenter, supporter and indeed the life of the war’.2 For the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was obvious that ‘but for the city the Parliament never could have made the war, nor the Rump ever have murdered the King’.3 Sir Edward Walker described London as ‘the head and fountain of this detested rebellion’.4
It is certainly true that King Charles I was driven from London at the start of the Civil War, eventually establishing his headquarters at Oxford. And it is also true that at the end of the civil wars London was the scene of his execution and the establishment of a Republic. But the radicalism of London was not inevitable nor was it uncontested. London was the site of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution. At the outset of the conflict the City had to break its ties to the Crown, which were considerable. Later on, there were pro-peace demonstrations at various times during the war. In 1647 those moderates who wished to conclude a treaty which would ‘re-inthrone’ Charles organized an effective counterrevolutionary petitioning campaign.5 And if it is true that, in general, the forces of revolution were victorious, it is also true that they did not win alone. On two occasions, in 1647 and again in 1648, the New Model Army had to enter the capital in force to restore the fortunes of the revolution.
The London of the revolutionary 1640s was a fast-expanding city, but it was still composed of three distinct areas separated by open country. The old walled City remained the core of the metropolis, but it was spilling eastwards beyond its stone boundary in the Tower Hamlets and along the river, through the seafarers’ town of Wapping, to Limehouse. Ribbon development was spreading towards the new buildings of the Strand, that were themselves the outgrowth of the second governmental centre of the city at Westminster. But this development was limited, with Covent Garden, where Leveller John Wildman’s Nonsuch Tavern was located, as its newest centre completed in the 1630s. South of the river, Southwark stretched along the banks of the Thames and was expanding, but it was still only connected to the north bank of the river by London Bridge.6
In 1640 the population of the old City and its associated parishes was 135,000. But the population of the suburbs was already larger. The main trades were clothing, metal and leather working, and building. Manufacture engaged 40 per cent of the working population, retail another 36 per cent. In one parish, St Botolph Aldgate, the proportion of manufacturing workers increased from 48 per cent to 72 per cent between 1600 and 1640.
The City was already a great port. Shipbuilding yards stretched along the Thames at Blackwall, Wapping and Limehouse. South of the river food and drink businesses clustered in Boroughside, watermen congregated in Clink Liberty and Paris Garden, seamen in St Olave’s, along with leather-makers, tanners, candlemakers and soap boilers. Dutch immigrants with new or specialized trades – brewing, felt and hat making, dyeing and glass making – settled in East Southwark.7
THE LONDON CROWD AND THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION
In November 1640 the Root and Branch Petition, calling for radical reformation of Church and state, was presented to Parliament by 1,000 Londoners and signed by 15,000 of their fellow citizens. It was of the pattern that was to become so familiar in the revolution: mass petitioning followed by mass demonstrations in support of the petition. Petitions had traditionally been a method of raising private grievances with MPs or the Crown, but the revolution made them into popular political tools. Hence Sir Edward Dering’s shocked reaction to the printing of the Grand Remonstrance by the Long Parliament in November 1641:
When I first heard of a Remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful Counsellors, we should hold up a Glass unto his Majesty: I thought to represent unto the King the wicked Counsels of pernicious Counsellors . . . I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the King as of a third person.8
Dering was right to worry. Petitions were promoted by radical preachers in sermons, and signatures were collected after services; alehouses were another favourite petitioning site. House-to-house canvassing was also used. Masses of people far beyond the political elite were now being asked, at the very least, to express an opinion about the nation’s affairs of state. Indeed when Lord Digby spoke against the Root and Branch, it was precisely the ‘manner of delivery’ that bothered him. ‘No man of judgment’, he said, ‘will think it fit for a Parliament, under a Monarchy, to give countenance to irregular, and tumultuous assemblies of people. . . . Sir, what can there be of greater presumption, than for petitioners, not only to prescribe to a Parliament, what and how it shall do; but for a multitude to teach a Parliament, what, and what is not, the government, according to God’s word.’ Digby added, unnecessarily, that he did not intend to ‘flatter a multitude’.9
By May the following year, demonstrations were at once more numerous and featured more of the ‘poorer sort’ who were pressing that justice be done against Charles’s advisor, the earl of Strafford. Parliamentary leader John Pym pressed the charge of treason. Crowds variously estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000 blockaded and barracked members of both Houses calling out for ‘Justice and Execution’. Charles, who had intended to come to Parliament, thought better of it, and the Lords sent out a messenger to tell the crowd that they were going to accede to the petition to execute Strafford. John Lilburne had been one of the leaders of the crowd that day; he was arrested and brought before the Lords for the speech he had made to the protestors. Fortunately, the witnesses against him differed in their evidence and he was discharged.10 When the bill proposing Strafford’s execution was debated in the Chamber, many of the earl’s friends were absent – for fear of the mob, they claimed. And when Charles reluctantly signed his confidant’s death warrant it was, explained Charles’s nephew, because ‘the people stood upon it with such violence, that he would have put himself and his, in great danger by denying the execution’.11 But Strafford’s death did not stop the protests.
In the closing days of December 1641 massive crowds of Londoners, often
