and hegemonized the local Church; and they had real national representation. As long as the national-level institutions could be kept in line with the basic conditions of lordly domination at the local level, the rural gentry’s position would be unassailable for the foreseeable future.10 The lords’ goal was, in effect, reformist: to bring the state back into line with earlier patterns of rule by dismantling the instruments that gave Charles increased power over them. This was not a trivial matter, to be sure. It entailed a direct confrontation with the Crown. But it did not impel them to launch an assault on the social order—since it was their social order.
THE POLITICAL COALITION
If Guha’s characterization of the conflict as antifeudal is misleading, so is his understanding of its political base. In his account, the bourgeoisie launches its confrontation with the feudal state by building a coalition with other classes, including peasants and urban labor—and they agree to its leadership. He takes this consent to have rested on the parliamentary leadership’s construction of a program that represented the authentic interests of popular forces. The central planks of the program were the dismantling of feudal economic restrictions and the expansion of political rights for the lower orders. Guha credits the bourgeoisie for initiating these elements, and this is the basis for his criticism of the Indian capitalist class, in that they refused to promulgate a similar program. But here, too, his presentation steers wide of the facts.
It is true that the revolution unleashed an avalanche of popular initiatives, which, for a while, did expand the political order. This was not, however, because of a bourgeois commitment to cobbling together a broad social coalition. In fact, the intention of parliamentary leaders in 1640 was to keep the social coalition on their side as narrow as possible. What they wanted was to push Charles into accepting their demands for parliamentary and religious reform without having to mobilize popular forces. It was to be an elite pact. Within the House of Commons, gentry support for reform in 1640–1 was widespread, and given Charles’s desperate situation with regard to the invading Scottish forces, a unified opposition was quite effective in pressing its demands. By the summer of 1641, the parliamentary opposition had achieved most of its political objectives by legislative means. Hardly a sword had yet been drawn. If anything, the early and easy success of the parliamentary initiative was evidence that a revolution was unnecessary. There is considerable evidence that the leadership wanted to complement legislative changes with positions for John Pym and a few other MPs on Charles’s Privy Council, the immediate body of advisors on whom the king relied for policy. This was not revolution; it was reform backed by a change in the power elite.
The matter could have perhaps ended there, but for the fact that Charles gave every signal that although he had agreed to the anti-absolutist measures as a temporary expedient, he would likely move to reassert his power once the balance swung back in his favor. That this was a real danger was made clear in the fall of 1641, as evidence mounted that he was plotting a military coup against the parliamentary opposition. Parliamentary forces led by Pym saw little choice but to press for further powers, if only to defend themselves, and so, by the end of 1642, they were demanding greater control over the military as well as ministerial appointments. In addition, and perhaps most important, the opposition began to respond to rapidly building popular pressure in London, which was mobilizing to defend the measures passed during the early phase of the rebellion, and also pushing for greater haste and ambition in the reform process—by force, if need be. London quickly became the center of a powerful mass movement, buoying the spirit and strength of the opposition.11
The entry of the London crowds unalterably changed the character of the conflict. Thus far, Pym and his colleagues had kept it an elite affair, intended to shift the balance from king to Parliament, but with no serious ambitions beyond that. The arrival of the popular classes forced a shift in the rebellion’s entire structure—but the change was double-edged. While it emboldened some parliamentary leaders to press their demands further, their confidence bolstered by the acquisition of a new mass base, the movement also had the effect of diluting support for the rebellion within the ruling class. As long as the “meaner sort” had been kept out of the conflict with Charles, the parameters of the negotiations could be carefully managed, so that the reforms under consideration did not reach beyond the balance between two distinct segments of the ruling class—the monarchy and the landed classes. Now, however, demands made on the leadership by the swelling crowds raced ahead of the leadership’s initial designs.12 A victory by Parliament could thus betoken a deep transformation of the existing religious, political, and social hierarchies.
For much of the parliamentary leadership, such an outcome was beyond the pale. They now had to weigh which outcome was the more detestable—the possibility of Charles’s emerging from the conflict unscathed, though perhaps weaker, or the likely losses in the event that a radical mass movement took power. For most of the aristocrats in Parliament, the prospect of the former was distinctly preferable to the latter. Even while a resuscitated Stuart rule would be obnoxious, it would at least defend lordly dominance over the rabble. As a result, in 1642 a large section of the parliamentary leadership defected from the rebellion. They did not all go over to the Royalist side. In fact, most seem to have settled into an anxious neutrality as the conflict escalated. But there is no doubt that a substantial number preferred to join the Royalist camp against the rising power of the popular forces. Hence, in the summer of 1642, as it became clear that Charles was assembling an armed force to march into London, 302 MPs remained with the opposition to prepare for its defense while 236 MPs left London altogether, most of whom probably joined Charles.13 Whereas the members of Parliament had been almost totally united in the early months of the conflict, they were now almost evenly split. Thus, the London crowds saved Pym and his colleagues from Charles’s military coup, but at the cost of driving other members into the arms of the monarchy.
As for those who remained committed to the parliamentary cause, their willingness to lean on popular forces in its defense did not by any means suggest an embrace of radical demands. Indeed, even though their disdain for “the meaner sort” was less intense than that of the defectors to the Royalist side, opposition leaders still regarded the mass movement as a necessary evil at best. The core strategy of the gentry leadership over the duration of the conflict was to push for victory while simultaneously containing the spread of radicalism. These leaders had never wanted a revolution, had never countenanced taking up arms against the monarchy, and had certainly not intended to unleash the fury of mass radicalism. What they had wanted was to push back the drive to an absolutist state, and they had achieved that goal in 1641. It was Charles’s obstinacy that had forced them to turn to the crowds for support. Now the key was to restore the balance, suitably modified by anti-absolutist legislation.
In the earlier phase of the war with Charles, the preferred route to this end was to reach a settlement with the deposed monarch as quickly as possible. As long as he agreed to the measures passed by Parliament in the early months of the conflict, his return to the throne was the best way to restore order. For months, the parliamentary leadership sent out feelers to the Royalist forces seeking just such a truce—but Charles would have none of it. The war thus continued to its gruesome end as Cromwell finally secured victory in the fall of 1648. Meanwhile, as the opposition gained strength and radical forces extended their influence, gentry support for the opposition grew correspondingly thinner. By the time Cromwell ordered the beheading of Charles, parliamentary power rested on a wafer-thin section of the English ruling class. 14
The relationship of the bourgeois leadership to the laboring classes was thus quite different from Guha’s presentation of it. The opposition leadership had never intended to lead a revolution; what it had hoped for was an elite pact, pushed through on the strength of Parliament’s unity and Charles’s desperation. What turned the conflict into civil war, and then a potential revolution, was the combination of Charles’s recalcitrance and the entrance of the London masses onto the scene. The opposition leadership did accept the support of the mass movement, but only reluctantly, and at the cost of driving more and more sections of the ruling class into the Royalist camp. There was no commitment to fashioning a political program that
