To Kill the King

On a chilly January afternoon, King Charles I appeared before the black-draped scaffold that had been hastily constructed just for him. The King of England who had lost a civil war to the Parliamentary Puritans led by Oliver Cromwell was ready to meet his Maker. He bowed his head and the axman swung, the heavy blade speeding down from the air. The King’s head was chopped off and a loud groan and gasp sounded from the crowd which had assembled to witness such a shocking event.

The execution of Charles I turned the world upside down. But it was a long time coming. Since the reign of Elizabeth I, tensions inside England were brewing. Religious persecution against Catholics had caused believers in the now minority faith to seek retribution. At the same time, the compromises of the Church of England were running on empty. Although the Church of England was doctrinally Reformed (Calvinistic), it was rife with internal conflict and contradictions. There was a growing restoration movement in its theological scholarship, attempting to recover the faith of the patristic fathers which smacked of crypto-Catholicism to hardline Puritans. There was conflict between the reformist Puritans and separationists, between those who remained in the Church of England hoping to purify it and those who felt the Church of England was a tool of Satan and an ungodly monarchy and that the call of the true believer was to leave Babylon for a new Jerusalem. Some of those Anglican separatists came to America—the Pilgrims. At the same time, a new class of Englishmen and Englishwomen were arising from the mundane toil of subsistence farming. A new “middling sort” of “literate” and educated people, many of them with Puritan religious sympathies, were beginning to occupy what we, today, would call the professional middleclass.

In 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, thus establishing the Stuart Dynasty on the Throne of England, “nine out of ten of James’s subjects lived in the countryside, mostly engaged in farming. The vast majority were illiterate.” These people also lived under the constant scourge of famine and plague, “towns frequently burned to the ground,” and life was filled with daily hardship from birth to death. However, by 1650, “London was growing into a politically engaged and unruly metropolis.” Technological advancements, the rise of education and literacy, the emergence of networks of printing and media, not to mention the wealth acquired by both toil and plunder, was beginning to bring about a new world. In the face of these social, political, religious, cultural, and economic upheavals the fragile political institutions of England frayed and civil war erupted.

The story of the English Civil Wars, as told by the Whig historians, is thoroughly bankrupt. An oppressive and oppressing monarchy was overthrown by the spirit of liberty, thus setting in motion the unwritten constitution of liberty of England, the ascendancy of liberal parliamentarism, and the eventual emergence of democracy. It’s a seductive story, one many of us living in the wake of the English Civil Wars like to believe—if not in part because of its own influence on the birth of the United States of America (the Whig mythology of English history and politics was a major influence over various Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson). That story, though, is deceptively misleading.

In his new book, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, Jonathan Healey retells this familiar but unfamiliar story. In just the first few pages of the opening introduction, Healey highlights the more complicated nature of how the English Civil Wars came about. Social, religious, and economic transformations were just as much part of the story as the Whig concentration on mere politics and the rolling stone of liberty. Further, it wasn’t as if the Stuart kings were out of the blue despots. Elizabath I was a tyrant herself—utilizing the force of law and state to punish her detractors, execute Catholics, and fine Englishmen and Englishwomen who didn’t attend church services in the Church of England. The Protestant rulers of England’s underdeveloped and fragile monarchy publicly displayed their power through callous acts of violence, like when the Gunpowder Plot conspirators were hanged, “They were hanged to the brink of death, castrated, disemboweled, beheaded and cut into quarters, all before an expectant crowd of Londoners.” Part of the heavy hand of the state monarchy that was part of the problem that led to civil war was because of the lack of a stable and widespread system of politics, law, and social support in a world that was rapidly transformed and transforming. The heavy hand of the monarch, then, was the only thing to keep a disparate and disgruntled kingdom together. Couple this reality with the emergent middleclass of merchants, lawyers, teachers, and students—many of whom held religious sympathies antagonistic to the English monarchical establishment—the tinder box of England was ready to explode. The king made an easy scapegoat for a world transformed and transforming.

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The Puritans stand as the central movement in the English Civil Wars. Social and economic change, wherein England’s population more than doubled in a century—a century still plagued by famine and disease—causing crippling inflation and land speculation, led to the elevation of the yeomanry into the emergent middleclass of the blazing world. “Perhaps naturally,” Healey writes, “many members of the gentry and middling sort were drawn to Calvinism, taking their growing wealth as evidence of their predestined salvation.” While not all middleclass yeomen were Puritan, many were. Puritanism allowed these new men and new women to assert themselves as different from the established social hierarchies that they were distinct from because of the rigidity of the medieval social order.

Puritanism, though it took influence from the Reformed theology of Geneva and Scotland, caused a lot of consternation with its non-Puritan neighbors. Non-Puritans looked upon the Puritans as “dangerous” and even “revolutionary.” The relative “irreverent” outlook of the Puritans to the established order and their want “to reform society widely [and] stamp out practices they felt were damaging to the commonwealth and offensive to God” made few friends in a country split between Anglicans and Catholics, aristocrats and peasants, merry drunks and violent drunks, homeowners and the homeless and landless who had lost their farms in debt due to land speculations. Puritanism, in short, was an energetic movement for reform when reform was needed, but it also sought to end various traditions and ceremonial games that allowed the toiling and laboring masses to blow off steam. This led to bitter tastes in the mouths of those who depended on the games and alehouses as a release from their suffering. The stereotype of the joyless Puritan trying to eradicate “merry old England” is true.

How did Puritanism become such a potent force in seventeenth century England? As Healey notes, the changing economic dynamics of England were part of it. The rise of the yeoman middleclass naturally disposed this new social class of Englishmen and Englishwomen to embrace a new religion and theology that accepted their difference from the lower class peasants and the upperclass aristocracy while affirming their newfound wealth as a sign of God’s grace. The theological cosmos of Puritanism equally allowed Puritans to make sense of a changing world that was rapidly distinct from the medieval cosmos of scholastic Catholicism, the same medieval cosmos still preached by the Church of England even though it now had a Protestant monarch.

Furthermore, the social changes wrought by the explosive population growth of the previous century led to the rise of schools, many of whom were now staffed and serving the “middling sort” that many Puritans were themselves members of. “There were more schools now than ever before, and more children of the gentry and yeomanry attended Oxford and Cambridge or the Inns of Court…As they experienced the world of education, culture, print, and the bright lights of London, members of the middling sort were able to dream, quite literally, about future prosperity for themselves and their children.” Among these new schoolmasters was the Puritan Thomas Beard and his student-pupil Oliver Cromwell.

Additionally, political changes helped lead to the rise of Puritan power. The growth of England’s economy and its population boom meant that a new political system needed to be created to accommodate these changes since the existing political order was insufficient to meet such rapid changes. “Because the English state had no standing army, no professional police force, and precious few bureaucrats, it depended for its functioning on households willing to serve office. The gentry would supply the magistrates and grand jurymen, the middling sort the constables, petty jurymen, overseers of the poor, churchwardens and various urban offices.” As England’s population grew and the demands for a larger social-political order arose with it, lo and behold it was Puritans—the generally educated and well-to-do in the towns now needing legal offices to be filled, churches to be administered, and law officers to keep the peace—who stepped up and served to fill these new demands.

Thus, by the death of James I, though the king held moderate Calvinist sympathies despite embracing anti-Puritan policies, the Puritans were now well-represented in England’s semi-democratic political structure and system that had been built by the needs of a world transforming away from the static and rigid medieval economy. As the new Stuart kings pushed an ever more aggressive anti-Puritan program, which had the effect of destabilizing the relatively new socio-political and economic order that many Puritans found themselves serving and benefitting from, the stage was set to kill the king and overthrow the Stuarts. The social, political, economic, and religious changes that were all occurring in seventeenth century England were now racing toward an ideological battle.

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How did Charles I become an enemy of the Puritans? His father, James, left the Crown nearly bankrupt, saddled with debt, with even more debts accruing. Additionally, as Charles began his reign, theological disputes within the Church of England were expanding and couldn’t be contained. Arminianism and ceremonialism began to make headway at the highest levels of the English clergy even if a majority of the parish clergy remained Calvinistic. This widening gap between episcopal leaders embracing what seemed to be Catholic views (emphasis on free will in salvation and the rituals of the Liturgy) and the small church Calvinist clergy (many of whom were Puritans or sympathetic to Puritanism) caused some leading Puritans to believe the king was a secret Catholic in promoting episcopal leaders who held beliefs similar to Catholicism. Further, the Thiry Years’ War in Europe was turning Protestant hearts against the pacifist policies of the king; while King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden would eventually rescue the Protestant cause in Germany, many English Calvinists had been putting pressure on the king (James and Charles) to intervene on behalf of beleaguered Protestants on the continent.

Although England had avoided formal entry into the Thirty Years’ War, English and Scottish volunteers were permitted to serve in the Protestant armies. Eventually, England got into war with France and Spain on side issues, which included the French use of loaned English ships to oppress their own Protestant subjects and the English hope to successfully raid Spanish treasure ships and use the plundered gold and silver to pay off its rising debts. Needless to say, the conflicts with France and Spain did not go well. Mounting debts which required new taxes, religious disputes which saw Charles advocate on behalf of Arminian and ceremonialist clergy, and his eventual dissolution of Parliament as its newly elected members were opposed to his many policies led to the burning flame that eventually consumed England.

To be fair, while Charles did act with absolutist tendencies his actions were not as arbitrary as the Whig historians of the past single-mindedly portrayed. As Healey highlights in the first part of his book, England was a country and monarchy in transformation with deep social, political, economic, and religious unrest. A growing population with a new social class that was increasingly antagonistic toward the aristocratic establishment, political divisions and disputes which arose from domestic and international crises, and internal religious unrest in the Church of England showed no signs of abating. Charles, therefore, did what he thought necessary to quell the storm and restore order and harmony across England. His actions, however, ended up fueling the storm. Rather than alleviate these many problems his actions pushed the country into war as the Puritans, many of the middleclass yeomanry subjected to new taxes, and elected MPs in the now dissolved parliament reacted against Charles rather than keel over in deference to the king’s royal prerogatives.

The Puritans too, found themselves in the middle of this turbulence. Poor weather leading to bad harvests, continued social unrest caused by the recent spike in population growth, and poor military performances against the supposed anti-Christ forces of Catholic France and Spain led many to blame the king for the confusion and disorder running amok over England. Their answer to bring about order and harmony was different from the king’s “personal rule,” but the Puritan desire to curtail the power of the king, restore Parliament’s primacy, and continue to seek the purification of the Church of England was equally brought about by this perfect storm of transformational unrest occurring in the kingdom. It’s not as if the Puritans were instinctively democratic and favoring limited government even though the Whig historians spun the Puritan ideology as entailing this.

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War erupted first not in England but in Scotland when Charles tried to enforce church reforms on the Scottish Church, the Kirk, by instituting the ceremonialist reforms that had been undertaken in the Church of England. A new prayer book, personally endorsed by Charles, was also to be promulgated. The presbyterian Scottish Church didn’t take to the imposition of bishops, altar and communion reforms, and a new prayer book with the deference expected by loyal subjects. They rioted. Soon, a Scottish army united by a covenant had formed. The once moderate Presbyterianism that had arisen in Scotland now became solidified, and the resulting Bishop’s War, though relatively bloodless compared to the eventual English Civil War, pushed Charles’s government to the brink.

Defeat on the battlefield and concessions to the Scots led to the reconvening of Parliament in England. The “Short Parliament,” as it became known, was recalled largely to pay for the debts accrued in the Bishop’s War. It included Oliver Cromwell. The Earl of Strafford, a friend of the king’s and the Lord Deputy of Ireland, was tasked with managing the Parliament to help the king’s cause. However, the restored Parliament was cantankerous. Many Puritans were members and they had not forgotten the grisly treatment of their comrades, William Prynne, John Bastwick, and Henry Burton, who had been whipped and pilloried for libel—their ears cut off and made a bloody mockery in front of crowds of enthralled and disgusted people. The newly reconvened Parliament sought to address royal abuses and longstanding social, cultural, and religious grievances. Charles dissolved Parliament in response, leading to even more unrest.

When Parliament was reconvened again, the “Long Parliament” was now in session. The Puritan junto that had come to dominate its proceedings moved to impeach Strafford for his personal (mis)conduct in Ireland. Tried for treason, he managed to survive, though the trial set in motion further conflict between Parliament and the king. The Puritan party, seeing its failures, dropped the impeachment charges against Strafford and replaced it with a bill of attainder, something that could easily be approved given Strafford’s unsavory reputation and royalist leanings. He was found guilty and condemned to execution. Charles had little choice but to oversee the execution of his friend to forestall the brewing conflict.

Healey, in retelling the conflict between Parliament and the king, makes clear that it was really a rambunctious minority of militant Puritans in Parliament who went ahead with the conflict. The Puritan junto claimed to speak for the people, but they were really advancing their own personal causes and grievances. This alienated even some of the moderate reformers, former allies in the cause against Charles and Strafford for personal abuses, but who remained warm toward the idea of monarchy. Thus, the Long Parliament was dissolving into two camps: the Parliament Party (led by the Puritans) and the Royalist Party (opposed to the Puritans more than anything else). Parliament was now a place of intense debate for these two factions and Charles was caught in the middle of it.

Emboldened by their success if getting Strafford killed, the Puritan junto pushed more and more reprisals in the guise of parliamentary legislation. The Royalist Party managed to defeat many of these bills in the House of Lords, but it hardly blunted the militancy of the House of the Commons, which was, even if narrowly, controlled by the Puritans and their supportive allies which decried the episcopacy, sought the abolition of the episcopal offices in the Church of England, and wanted to limit the juridical power of the king by abolishing the offices most loyal to him. The rise of Puritan power in the House of Commons worried Catholics, especially in those in Ireland, who feared abuses from their Protestant neighbors. An Irish Catholic rebellion, seen as sympathetic to the king who was according to Puritan propaganda a crypto-Catholic anyway, pushed Charles and his supporters to clamp down on Puritan Parliamentary excesses; civil war finally erupted.

As previously mentioned, the path to civil war was complex and complicated. A country in transformation without the social and political institutions to accommodate a growing population, a new middleclass, and longstanding debts and tax disputes were part of the tinder box. As was Charles’s “Personal Rule” which included heavy-handed religious reforms imposed on a religiously diverse nation: Anglicans (Calvinist, Armininian, and ceremonialist), Catholics, Presbyterians, and Separatists all had their own desires and disgusts. The rise of literacy and education among the “middling sort,” most of whom had Reformed Calvinist sympathies, led many to read and interpret the Bible themselves instead of the traditional reliance on bishops and members of the clergy. Literalist readings predominated the apocalyptic passages of Daniel and the Book of Revelation leading many to believe that the troubles plaguing England were signs of the end times which fueled the urgency of action. Personal grievances and Machiavellian politics—from both the Parliamentarians and the Royalists—prevented any hope of compromise in the newly reconvened Long Parliament.

Beneath the manifold conflicts that were tearing England, Scotland, and Ireland apart was the problem of social transformation and how the monarchy was incapable of dealing with the stress of a world truly transformed and transforming. Because there was a lack of strong and widespread institutions of political, economic, and social clout, personal rule—whether by the king, his ministers, or even a handful of militant Parliamentarians—was the path taken to try and ensure some degree of order in the land. Of course, when personal rule meets personal rule, conflict erupts. War ensues. Death abounds. Out of that conflict would emerge the institutions that could effectively govern and maintain order and permit people to live their lives in the new world they found themselves inhabiting.

This desire to live new lives in a new world, though, clashed with the vision of living in the old order. The king and the royalists still envisioned a medieval world of the “Great Chain of Being” and a dream to return England to the joyful and merry place before it was ruined by the anti-festival and anti-theatre Puritans. The Puritans and their Parliamentarian allies envisioned a new world where commerce, material self-improvement, and global trade and communication would permit the ascendancy of the “middling sort” to which they belonged. Healey, therefore, argues that class conflict gave way to the first ideological war:

The Civil War wasn’t a class struggle. It was a clash of ideologies…The Royalists were anti-Puritan, they stood by the old hierarchies in the Church, notably the bishops. They were nostalgic for ‘Merry England’ before it was ruined by the Puritans moping at their books. The Parliamentarians claimed they were fighting for God and the constitution; Royalists did, too, but added loyalty to the king and the fact their Parliamentarian enemies were cuckolds.

What makes the English Civil Wars, then, so modern, so unique, so close to home is that even though there were class divisions, those class divisions gave way to more urgent ideological battles: how was the world understood and governed? how should the country reflect the worldview of its political rulers and wannabe rulers? would ancient customs and traditions remain in a new world quickly giving way to innovation and change? Any hope of a peaceful resolution to these ideological battles faded as muskets and cannons erupted in roaring fire and the clash of pikes and swords echoed over the fields of England hurling thousands of men and beasts to their bloody deaths. To the Puritan and Parliamentarian junto, their fight for God, the constitution of liberty, and the new middling way could only come about by overthrowing the king. Eventually, for Cromwell and others, this meant killing the king since he wouldn’t relent. In January of 1649 that became reality when the captured king was beheaded.

The beheading of the king is what propelled Oliver Cromwell to leadership over the British Isles. His meteoric rise from obscure parliamentarian to head of the New Model Army to lead conspirator in killing the king was so unexpected as to deserve its own major motion picture film—which he got, though deeply misleading in its presentation of Cromwell’s importance. For over 200 pages in Healey’s history, Cromwell is barely mentioned at all. Yes, he rose to prominence as a commander of cavalry at several key battles against Prince Rupert and King Charles but his rise to prominence began in 1647 when the first wave of hostilities had ended.

From 1647-1649, the radicalization of the New Model Army turned the revolution toward anti-monarchical republicanism. Although Reformed Anglicans, dissenters, and Presbyterians had allied together to defeat the Royalist cause, they quickly began fighting among each other. The Presbyterian leadership in Parliament, fearful of the New Model Army, sought to disband it. They failed. The officer corps, made up of many of the “middling” Puritans, rallied to its cause. Cromwell was hailed as one of the two officers to whom the army pledged its loyalty. The New Model Army then marched into London, a scene reminiscent of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, putting to flight the parliamentarians who were seeking to crush the New Model Army. This is something the Whig interpreters always seem to hide and neglect: if the Parliamentarian victory over the king in the 1640s set England and the Anglosphere on the path toward parliamentarian liberty, it wasn’t the unwritten constitution that pushed England and the democratic Anglosphere in that direction but a military coup that did so.

The reality of the power of the New Model Army was then the next focus of contention with Charles beheaded and moderate parliamentarians arrested or exiled. Radicals attempted to sway the New Model Army to its cause, making inroads with some of the rank and file. They ultimately failed. This left Cromwell in even greater control as he managed to outmaneuver his rivals within the New Model Army and the Long Parliament. He was the undisputed commandant of the army now. And he used that power to go beyond social reconciliation to personal retribution.

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The end of the First English Civil War didn’t end the ideological conflict. Cromwell’s Commonwealth Protectorate quickly alienated the people it governed. Although the Puritans had led the Parliamentarians to victory, their own ideology was at odds with the majority of the English population. This makes sense given Puritanism was always a minority movement, even among the more radical Protestant sects within England. Anglicans and Presbyterians didn’t share the same concerns as the Puritans. Neither, naturally, did Catholics. Likewise, the aristocracy still yearned for the restoration of their ancient privileges stripped away by Parliament. The peasantry too, instinctively desired the games of “Merry England” that the Puritans were rapidly doing away with. Cromwell’s Commonwealth failed from its own intransigence every bit as similar to that of King Charles. Add in the brutal military campaign in Ireland and the unresolved problem of English debt, and it is unsurprising that within a decade Charles II was invited to sit on the throne and inaugurate the Restoration—reviving the ideological battles that had just spilled so much blood and destroyed the English countryside. Cromwell, the heroic face of the revolution, was now persona non grata. Though dead, he was burned in effigy by an angry English population.

The march to the “Glorious Revolution” is as complex and complicated as the English Civil Wars fought in the 1640s. Charles II was King of Scotland until Scotland was defeated by Cromwell’s Commonwealth armies. However, the death and downfall of the Cromwellian commonwealth meant he was the ancestral heir to the throne of Charles I. He was restored as king of England and Scotland. Another of Charles I’s sons, James, would succeed his elder brother in 1685, thereby becoming James II. There was a problem with this: James was Catholic.

Religious disputations had not ceased. There was still conflict within the Church of England between puritans and ceremonialists. Dissenting separatists were also growing every day spawning new religious movements like Baptists and Quakers. The Church of Scotland remained steadfastly Presbyterian, refusing submission to the Church of England. There were still many Catholics in England, Scotland, and, especially, Ireland. Catholics, more-so than any other group, felt violently persecuted and oppressed (especially in Ireland). Political squabbles were still arising. Did Parliament still have the same authority that it had declared for itself after killing Charles and abolishing the monarchy now that the monarchy had been restored?

The Glorious Revolution is a brilliant name for what was the last successful invasion of a foreign power of England; it should equally be pointed out that the Glorious Revolution was an act of treason—it’s not remembered as an act of treason simply because the traitors who invited a foreign power to conquer England won. William of Orange, the Stadtholder of the Netherlands and veteran of the religious and political wars on the continent, was invited by renegade parliamentarians to take the throne from James. Fear of James’s Catholicism was the pretext given to the Dutch leader to invade the British Isles. He, of course, accepted. William assembled his veteran army which had been fighting the French for decades and crossed the English Channel, launching an invasion from the English beaches that would lead to his being proclaimed king. James II didn’t relent and assembled his own army of loyalists to wage a war to take back his throne. As we know from history, James was defeated in Ireland at the Battle of the Boyn which would ensure another three centuries of religious and political conflict on the island between Protestants and loyalists to the British Crown and Catholics and Irish nationalists seeking independence from British rule.

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The Blazing World by Jonathan Healey is a remarkable book, a brilliant history that dispenses with the old whiggish narrative of the English Civil Wars and reveals the manifold complexities that led to a century of “famine, sword, and fire” to apply a quote from Shakespeare deeply appropriate to the seventeenth century context. A population explosion, the birth of a new socio-economic class of people, religious revival and tension, economic opportunity and decline, all coincided to form the first truly modern political ideologies of how to live and govern a nation whose existing laws and institutions were unable to meet the demand of environmental, social, and political change.

The English Civil Wars also provide a warning for us living in the twenty-first century. “The political world we live in today, with regular Parliaments and elections, ideologically defined parties, a vibrant press and mass campaigns centred on large protests and petitions, was born in the seventeenth century.” But the relative stability and proliferation of a democratic and “free” Anglosphere was the byproduct of war and tyranny, military coups and foreign invasions. The English Civil Wars and the bloodshed that followed was because the laws and institutions that help ensure political-social order out of which liberty flourishes were incapable of preventing conflict and resolving disputes without force of arms. We forget, but Healey reminds us, that the world of democratic liberty and freedoms we enjoy were not the natural outgrowth of a predetermined path of history but the result of a “blazing world.” Only after a century of on and off war, bloodshed, death, and destruction was a political order established to prevent the worst of that return. Even after that political order was established, there were still periodic rebellions and uprisings by supporters of the Stuarts. As we experience our own social and political discomfort because our own world is transformed and transforming from what it used to be, we can learn from the failures that led to the English Civil Wars so as to not make the same mistakes and experience the same failures.

Lastly, Healey notes the oddity of how the revolutions of the seventeenth century were both conservative and radical. That has to do with the understanding of the term “revolution” in the seventeenth century. When I have taught and explained John Locke in the past, I have noted what Healey said about the idea of revolution, “In the seventeenth century the word ‘revolution’ was used more literally than it is today. Instead of drastic change, it usually meant a cycling back, a turning of the wheel of power. It could be restorative as much as transforming, conservative rather than radical.” The irony of the English Civil Wars is found in both sides claiming the ancient constitution and its liberty and principles for their side. It remains the case, though, that the Parliamentarians also included innovation and progress within their claims of restoration, providing the greater dynamism that helped ensure their victory. A victory that, in the end, was ultimately ideological, bequeathing to us the ideological politics we now inhabit, take for granted, and grow tired of. We have much in common with the seventeenth century even if we do not like to think it so.

The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689
By Jonathan Healey
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023; 493pp

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