came to Whitehall and Westminster. They were angered by Charles’s appointment of a court loyalist as lieutenant of the Tower, seeing this as part of preparations to subdue the capital by force. In the face of demonstrations the appointment was reversed, but more radical demands followed. Now the crowd chanted ‘No bishops! No bishops!’ – the bishops being some of the most royalist members of Parliament. As they tried to take their seats, many were physically prevented from doing so. In response Royalists attacked the crowd with swords. The crowd fought back with bricks, tiles, and cobblestones. As news of the fighting spread, London as a whole mobilized. Some 10,000 armed apprentices surrounded Parliament. The London Trained Bands were called out, but refused to disperse them. On 30 December the Commons impeached twelve leading bishops, and the Lords dispatched them to prison. Church bells pealed across the City and bonfires blazed in the streets.
Less than a week later, on 4 January, the king entered the House of Commons with a sizeable armed guard, intent on arresting the five members of the Commons identified as the leaders of the revolt. Forewarned, the five men had fled to the City and it is likely that they found shelter in the house of one of the emblematic figures of the early phase of the revolution, Isaac Penington. Penington was a wealthy merchant, an alderman of the City and an MP. He was blamed by the Royalists for organizing one of the first political demonstrations aimed at forcing the Long Parliament to adopt the Root and Branch petition. His house was near one of the centres of revolutionary activity, St Stephen’s Church in Colman Street, in the heart of the City. It is probable that it was here that the fugitives sought shelter.12
But if Isaac Penington sheltered them, it was the whole City that stood guard. ‘Gates were shut, portcullises lowered, chains put across streets. For several days, thousands of men stood ready, armed with halberds, swords, staves, and whatever came to hand. Women brought stools and tubs from their homes to build barricades, and boiled water ‘to throw on the Cavaliers’. But the Cavaliers did not come. London, it was clear, had passed to the side of the revolution. It was not to be recovered with the forces to hand. On 10 January, the king fled the capital. The following day, the five MPs returned to Westminster through cheering crowds.13
REVOLUTION AND WAR
Popular mobilization was no less important when the Civil War did break out. ‘In this summer the citizens listed themselves plentifully for soldiers . . . The youth of the City of London made up the major part of [the] infantry.’ In a single day, 26 July 1642, 5,000 enlisted at a muster in Moor Fields.14 Lilburne was in action immediately. He led a heroic defensive action at the Battle of Brentford in November 1642, personally rallying retreating forces back to the front line and buying the time for the artillery train to escape Prince Rupert’s grasp. He was captured and taken to Oxford as a prisoner, the first prominent Parliamentarian to be imprisoned.15
The following day the Royalists advanced to Turnham Green, threatening to invade London, but were halted by the mass mobilization of the London militia and the Trained Bands. They streamed out of London along the western road until 24,000 of them confronted the king’s army of half that number. In a moment of indecision Charles drew back without giving battle, his dream of an early assault on the capital dashed. As S. R. Gardiner, the great Edwardian historian of the revolution, wrote: ‘Turnham Green was the Valmy of the English Civil War. That which seemed to Charles’s admirers to be his triumphant march from Shrewsbury had been stopped in the very outskirts of London.’16
But the Royalist threat to London had retreated for the winter, not disappeared. And, as it would again when the war went badly, the London crowd could also be mobilized in favour of a peace settlement with the king. In 1643 a crowd of women were at the doors of Westminster, shouting ‘Give us those traitors that were against peace!’ and ‘Give us that dog Pym!’ The militia sent to disperse them were seen off with rocks and brickbats, and a troop of horse had to be deployed against them. This demonstration, however, was modest compared to the main mobilization of Londoners that year.17 In early 1643 Londoners began to construct defence works against any renewed Royalist attempt to take the capital. These works were on a massive scale: some eighteen miles of forts, sentry posts, earthworks, trenches and lines of communications that ringed the entire metropolitan area.
Isaac Penington was again at the forefront of promoting the work. But the construction itself was the result of an unprecedented popular mobilization. No doubt some worked out of zeal for the Parliamentary cause, others because they feared what Royalist invasion could mean for them, their families and their property: Prince Rupert’s sack of Brentford was still fresh in the memory.
But, whatever the motivation, the work was an impressive result of popular, collective effort. One contemporary recorded: ‘The daily musters and shows of all sorts of Londoners here are wondrous commendable, in marching to the fields and out-works with great alacritie . . . with roaring drummes, flying colours, and girded swords; most companies being also interlarded with ladies, women, and girls two and two, carrying baskets for to advance their labour . . .’ Obviously the guilds were involved in the mobilization: ‘The greatest company which I observed to march out according to their tunes were the taylors, carrying fourtie-six colours, and seconded with eight thousand lusty men. The next in greatnesse of number were the watermen, amounting to seven thousand tuggers, carrying thirty-seven colours; the shoemakers were five thousand and oddes carrying twenty-nine colours.’18
At times more than 20,000 people were working without pay on the construction of the forts and earthworks. The lines of defence transformed the look of the city, and the diarist John Evelyn travelled to London to view them. Streets in the modern capital commemorate them – Mount Street in Whitechapel, for instance, where the giant Civil War earthwork wasn’t demolished until the early nineteenth century. The efforts of Londoners were not in vain: the capital was never seriously threatened with invasion again. Indeed, the main threat to the revolution in its birthplace was from counterrevolution within, not military force from the outside.
REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION
The Parliamentary camp always contained some who saw the war as a militarized form of negotiation with the king, designed to get him to accept a compromise that he was unwilling to accede to in peaceful discussion. Others reckoned that the king would have to suffer an outright military defeat before he could be brought to accept the ascendancy of Parliamentary rule. Others, still more radical, came to believe that the whole system of government needed to be refounded on the basis of popular sovereignty.
At different points during the revolution, this division expressed itself over different issues. In one critical phase it was fought out over the creation of the New Model Army, with Cromwell leading the ‘win the war’ party against the compromisers. Between the First and Second Civil War the division lay between Cromwell with his son-in-law Henry Ireton and the more moderate forces who were trying to negotiate with the king, on the one hand, and the Levellers on the other. After the Second Civil War it lay between the moderates who wished to return the king to his former powers and Cromwell, Ireton and the Levellers, now in alliance, who had concluded that the king could not be trusted.
THE LEVELLERS AND THE CITY
The political conflicts of the revolution could not help but be reflected in the City of London government. The revolution exploded the quasi-democratic but fundamentally oligarchic structure of livery companies and the Common Council, nominally the representative foundation of City government. The struggle focused on the rights of the commonalty to elect its own officers and leaders: Lilburne and fellow Leveller John Wildman were campaigning for the right of citizens to elect the mayor, sheriffs and burgesses. They also wanted an end to the veto that the mayor and aldermen claimed over decisions of the Common Council. In England’s Birth-right Justified (October 1645) and in two pamphlets written while he was imprisoned in the Tower the following year – London’s Liberty in Chains and The Charters of London – Lilburne demanded reform of the City government. This was not simply a democratic issue, since the same party of compromise that dominated Parliament was also in power in the City. The Common Council was controlled
