spearheaded by James I to replace them with commercial leasehold arrangements had become bogged down in legal wrangles. In Cumberland, to cite an extreme case, most farmers still held their land by customary tenure at the close of the eighteenth century.46 The continuing weight of agrarian custom may do more to explain the conservativism of the rural North, and the absence of a parliamentary party within it, than the ancient battles invoked by Musgrove.
If the tenant-right controversy tempered the popular reception of the king’s cause in the region, Catholicism afforded a counterbalance.47 The old religion survived in gentry households and out-of-the-way upland areas. In Lancashire, unusually, it retained a mass following, particularly in the western fringe of the county which traded with Catholic Ireland.48 For its adherents, if neutrality wasn’t a viable option, the choice between Charles’s High Church Anglicanism and Westminster’s intolerant evangelism – the latter, in effect, a super-sized version of the old Pilkington regime in Durham – wasn’t difficult, and the Crown offered a better muster point than a pair of already diminished noble lineages had in 1569.
Charles handed command of the far north to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, a London patron of the arts whose West Riding family had risen up the social ladder through service under Henry VIII, profiting from the dissolution of the monasteries. In circumstances that are obscure, Newcastle quickly raised a ‘papist’ northern army of some 8,000 men after being instructed to enlist loyal subjects without examining their consciences. Two-thirds of gentry families in Lancashire who engaged for the king were Catholic, as were one-third in Yorkshire.49 ‘Royalism in the North of England cannot be reduced wholly to religion or economics’, insists Musgrove. But it is altogether inexplicable without them.50
In London, by contrast, evangelical merchants operating outside the framework of royal trading companies helped to swing opinion behind Parliament. The affinity of Puritanism with commerce, and the chafing of small clothiers at Crown restrictions on manufacture and trade, also brought growing textile handicraft towns in the North onto Parliament’s side. The country linen weavers around Manchester rebuffed James Stanley, the king’s commander in Lancashire and Cheshire, when he laid siege to the town in September 1642, their resolve stiffened by a Puritan preacher. Stanley was also thwarted in Bolton, ‘the Geneva of Lancashire’, which Prince Rupert would ultimately storm en route to Marston Moor. In keenly contested Yorkshire, Bradford and Halifax gave essential manpower and supplies to parliamentary forces under the Fairfaxes, who were short of backing from their own gentry class. The denizens of the cloth-working parishes were ‘the only well-affected people of the country’, Ferdinando Fairfax advised Westminster.51
Musgrove highlights the fact that the North provided relatively few men of national standing between Parliament’s execution of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, in the run-up to the Civil War and the return of high Cavaliers with a Wentworth connection after the Restoration. He makes an exception for Thomas Fairfax, son of Ferdinando, commander-in-chief of the parliamentary army. According to Charles I’s Secretary of State, he was ‘the man most beloved and relied upon by the rebels in the North’. Fairfax sat out the Cromwellian interlude in the bucolic surroundings of his Nun Appleton home, a former nunnery seven miles south of York. Andrew Marvell, tutor to Fairfax’s daughter, wrote a poem celebrating its ‘fragrant gardens, shady woods / Deep meadows, and transparent floods.’52 To take Fairfax’s place in the new republic, the crowded ranks of Yorkshire’s gentry class offered up John Lambert, a minor gentleman landowner from Calton in the Yorkshire Dales. Lambert, ignored by Musgrove, authored the 1653 Instrument of Government, the original template for Cromwell’s protectorate and England’s first written constitution. It defied Leveller demands for universal manhood suffrage but struck a modern note by redistricting English and Welsh constituencies, the towns of Leeds and Manchester among the beneficiaries. The scheme lapsed under the replacement constitution of 1657, the Humble Petition and Advice, the adoption of which caused Lambert to part company with Cromwell and retire from public life. Another 175 years would elapse before key northern cities regained parliamentary representation.
When the republic imploded after Cromwell’s death in 1658, Fairfax joined the bulk of England’s landed classes in opting to stabilise the social order by reinstating the Stuart monarchy. He raised the Yorkshire gentry to prevent Lambert, ‘inveterate against the king’, from impeding the progress of George Monck’s army from Scotland to London, from which the Restoration would issue. Monck crossed the border into England the day after York capitulated to Fairfax’s troops.53 But although Yorkshire’s outsize county community was an appreciable factor in the national political balance, only London carried decisive weight. By far the most important reserve of popular and financial support for the Roundhead cause, effectively bankrolling the New Model Army, the capital controlled four-fifths of England’s foreign trade and was a magnet for people as well as commodities, on its way to supplanting Paris as Europe’s largest city. John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley, leaders of the Leveller and Digger movements respectively, both migrated from northern England to the City as apprentices in the textile trade.54 It was the moderate majority opinion in the City that gave the necessary ballast to Monck’s decision, in February 1660, to settle matters by throwing open Parliament to Royalist opinion. Fairfax joined the delegation sent to invite Charles II back from The Hague, supplying the king with the horse he rode at his coronation. For all the talk of clemency that surrounded the Restoration, Lambert was kept under lock and key until his death in 1684.
The Restoration settlement, even when modified in Parliament’s favour by the Glorious Revolution, created the paradox of a monarchical ancien régime coexistent with a modern capitalist society in the South East. When large-scale industry made its advance in the nineteenth century, a wider contrast would open up between northern economic modernity and southern political archaism. Until then, however, pressure for parliamentary reform proved to be containable. Christopher Wyvill, a wealthy North Riding gentleman landowner and an absentee Essex clergyman, raised the question of reform in 1779 as the American War went from bad to worse, but had to take no for an answer. Unlike the Anti-Corn Law League of the Lancashire mill owners, fifty years into the future, Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association wasn’t based on the emerging factory towns but instead addressed itself to ‘gentleman of weight and character’ in England’s largest county community, drawing the bulk of its support from the lesser gentry and clergy – including the deans of York and Ripon, much to the embarrassment of their archbishop. Through this extra-parliamentary vehicle, a sizeable landed interest threatened with higher taxes sought to impose economy measures on the royal court and on the Tory administration of Lord North.55
The Yorkshire Association was the first provincial outfit to wrest the leadership of extra-parliamentary agitation from London, vying for control of the reform agenda with metropolitan radicals active in the Quintuple Alliance of London, Middlesex, Southwark, Surrey and Westminster who urged annual parliaments and universal manhood suffrage. Wyvill wanted more modest changes – triennial parliaments, a purge of Crown placemen from the Commons, additional MPs for the counties and large towns – to clean up politics and reduce royal influence. Much of his campaign work was innovatory, but hitched to an ideology no less traditional than the reverend’s social base: ‘the restoration of national morals’ and ‘the preservation of our Constitution on its genuine principles’. He abhorred the root-and-branch democratic ideals associated with Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and wished to keep the vote restricted to men of property.56
Wyvill’s energetic, if fruitless, campaigning moved the Whig reformer Charles James Fox to remark that ‘Yorkshire and Middlesex between them make all England’. A couple of generations later the statement couldn’t stand without alteration. ‘You may add Lancashire,’ advised mill owner Richard Cobden in 1846.57 The failure of the Yorkshire Association proved that the aristocrats and merchants who ruled from London’s palaces and counting houses weren’t going to be dislodged by the provincial squirearchy or by curates of advanced opinions. If anyone was going to storm Britain’s constitutional citadel, it would be a task for the industrial classes who were about to take centre stage.
