The English Civil Wars and the Republic That Failed
In May 1660, Sir Thomas Fairfax crossed the English Channel with eleven other men to formally invite King Charles II to
reclaim the throne. Fifteen years earlier, Fairfax had commanded the army that defeated and deposed Charles's father.
What made a successful revolutionary general personally restore the monarchy he'd helped destroy?
Fairfax’s story shows how revolutions fail when their leaders sideline institutions on their path to consolidating
power. American civic education criminally ignores this story: two decades of chaos that killed hundreds of thousands of
people and devastated the lives of many more taught the liberal tradition invaluable lessons in how not to organize
society. The story isn't all negative: as Britain was grappling with the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, the
events in this era put it on the path to religious toleration.
Constitutional Breakdown
Even before both sides started trying to kill each other, King Charles I and his Parliaments never got along. While
Parliament only represented the wealthiest property-owning men in the kingdom, settled law was that taxes could not be
raised without the consent of Parliament: any King without buy-in from wealthy subjects faced an uphill climb to getting
anything accomplished.
When the King called his first Parliament in 1625,1 the House of Commons broke with over a century
of tradition and didn't grant him the authority to collect import tariffs for life. Undeterred, the King simply
collected the duties anyway until 1641. Unable to make much further progress with Parliament, the King decided to demand
extra-Parliamentary forced loans to fund the crown. When five knights challenged the loans in court with a writ of
habeus corpus, Charles fired the Chief Justice rather than risk an adverse ruling.
The plight of the five knights meant that Parliament conditioned any funding to the crown on the 1628 Petition of Right.
This document forbade taxation without the consent of Parliament, imprisonment without due process, or quartering
soldiers in civilian homes without consent. The King's assent to the Petition of Right did not prevent further
disagreements with Parliament, and he decided to rule without them. From 1629 to 1640 the King did his best to stay out
of military engagements that would require funding from Parliament and the strings that would be attached to it, so the
he used every trick in the book to raise money without Parliament in the 1630s:
- Monopolies: the King sold patents for companies to have a monopoly on a given good, relying on a loophole in the 1624
Statute of Monopolies
- Ship money: in wartime the King could raise money to build the navy from coastal counties, but King Charles I raised
it from every county during peacetime
- Wardship: if a gentry landlord was a tenant-in-chief and died without an heir, the King was entitled to the rents of
the estate and had to be bought out before a successor could take ownership
- Royal forests: fining people living in the suburbs of London and anywhere else that was technically royal forest at
some point in the misty past
It's little wonder that when the King called a Parliament in 1640 it would be less than two years before both sides
would meet on the battlefield.
How Republics Fail
The time had come for a political revolution that would restore the rule of law and check the power of an increasingly
absolutist King. But unfortunately for the history of liberalism, Parliament and later republican governments were all
too willing to run roughshod over the rule of law.
In 1638 when war broke out with Scotland, the Earl of Strafford was a trusted royal advisor who was involved with the
military response. He was convinced that hardliners in Parliament were collaborating with the Scottish
rebels.2 In response, the Commons prosecuted him for high treason. Extra seating was built in
Westminster for the whole public to see how treacherous Strafford was, but representing himself in the impeachment
proceedings he embarrassed the Commons by showing all of England how flimsy their case was. Parliament's star witness
claimed that Strafford was trying to use Irish soldiers to suppress English subjects, but every other piece of testimony
showed that Strafford was arguing for Irish soldiers to be used for the war in Scotland.
Parliament changed tactics and passed a bill of attainder against Strafford. This was an act that could declare someone
guilty of a crime without a trial or jury. Missteps by the King later that year meant that he no longer had the
political capital to both save his friend and ever expect anything from another Parliament. Royal assent of the bill
meant that Strafford was publicly executed on May 12th, 1641 in front of a crowd of 100,000 people.
After the second English Civil War, the hardliners Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton used similarly shameful tactics to
gain power. When the King lost the second English Civil War in 1648, many moderates in Parliament wanted to put him back
on the throne under the Treaty of Newport. While Parliament in this day was hardly a representative body, it was
reasonably representative of the public's view of the king: roughly half of England and Wales supported him over
Parliament, with strong majorities in many parts of the kingdom. But rather than trying to convince their fellow MPs to
draw a tougher line with the king, the army marched onto London with Cromwell and Ireton's backing. Allegedly without
their knowledge, Colonel Thomas Pride had a list of royalist and moderate MPs to physically bar from Parliament: these
rightfully elected MPs were prevented from taking their seats for eleven years. This is the exact opposite of
institutional legitimacy. This was military rule by another name, and a legislature handpicked by the army is not a
legislature in any way that matters.
This much more pliant Parliament made it possible for Cromwell and his military allies to advance their agenda, but in
doing so they weakened both the rule of law and Parliament's legitimacy. These were the very institutions that Fairfax
and Cromwell fought a war to protect, and republican government could not survive without them.
Historians name this Parliament the 'rump' Parliament on account of its diminished size, and in January 1649 it put the
King on trial. It wasn't a lawful act because it never got approval from the House of Lords, but the Commons went along
with it anyway. Adding to the legal dubiousness is that the lower house could not act as a court of law according to any
constitution in English history; when Strafford was put to trial, the Commons led the prosecution with the Lords serving
as judges. In 1649 the upper house was essentially empty, and the Lords played no meaningful role in the King's
prosecution. The commons too was a husk of its former self; not only from its purged members, but those so disgusted
that they stayed away in protest. None other than Fairfax's wife shouted ‘Not half! Not a quarter of the people of
England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!’ during the proceedings; envoys from the royal family tried to get Fairfax to
intervene to no avail.
It was a trial in name only. No due process, no lawful court, and no public confidence. This was no foundation for a
lasting republic.
After executing the King on January 30th, the rump Parliament had neither a constitution for republican Britain nor much
of a plan for putting one into place. By this point, Fairfax had become disillusioned with politics and the place that
the revolution had taken Britain. But the chaos would continue. Cromwell forcibly dissolved the rump Parliament on April
20th of 1653, and the subsequent 'Barebone's Parliament,' convened under a new constitution that July, would last less
than a year.3 By December the three realms were onto their next constitution, the Instrument of Government.
This was the first Protectorate constitution and appointed Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector and head of state for life.
The Protectorate was the most stable republican government in the interregnum, but it too faced similar problems to its
predecessors. Cromwell dissolved Parliament early in Janurary 1655 by exploiting a loophole in the Instrument of
Government: the constitution required Parliament to sit for five months before dissolution, but didn't specify whether
these were calendar months or lunar months. Cromwell counted five lunar months, allowing him to end the session weeks
earlier than intended. In a modern democracy, dissolving the legislature using a lunar-month loophole would end your
career. But in republican Britain, it was politics as usual.
Oliver Cromwell was a formidable statesman, and as of 1657 Britain was on a stable footing: the American republic
followed a similar trajectory between Cornwallis's surrender and the ratification of the constitution. But the undoing
of the republic was that no one else could balance the interests of Parliament, the army, and the people, and the
Protectorate's relative stability ultimately said more about the man leading it than anything else. Before his death on
September 3rd, 1658, Cromwell named his eldest son Richard as his successor. Richard's plans to shrink the size of the
army led to him being deposed less than a year later, and the only alternative was the equally unpopular old rump
Parliament. The rump voted to dismiss army leadership, and after a two-week stand-off in October 1659 the army forcibly
dissolved the rump.
At this point, the country went into open revolt. That December General George Monck raised an army in Scotland and
marched south not to restore the current Parliament but rather to establish order and call for free, general elections
for the first time in 20 years. When he heard of Monck's plan, the aged one-time rebel Fairfax raised troops in York in
support. Enough was enough: the time for republican political experimentation was over. The political capital and
military power of Monck and his allies was no match for the half-hearted military junta in London, and on May 1st, 1660,
the newly elected Parliament declared that "the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons" to the
surprise of absolutely no one. Fairfax and the rest of the Parliamentary delegation visited the exile court of King
Charles II in the Netherlands, and on the King's return to London the one time hotbed of revolution celebrated for three
days straight.
The lessons are clear. A republic lacking a commitment to the rule of law and institutions with broad legitimacy cannot
last, and neither can a constitution built around a once-in-a-generation political talent. When a durable republic ends
up with sub-par leadership, it has both the legitimacy as well as the checks and balances to muddle through. And durable
self-government requires stability: otherwise too many people needed to make a republican government work will take
their ball and go home. There probably was a republican constitution that Fairfax and Monck could have lived with, but
those leading the revolutionary charge proved unable or unwilling to put it into practice.
It is worth pointing out the seeds of the American Constitution planted in this era. The Petition of Right established
third and fifth amendment protections as well as Article I taxation authority of the legistlature. While civilian
control of the executive branch is established in Article II, the executive cannot disolve congress and cannot remove
judges at will. The Constitution explicitly bans bills of attainder not only in Congress but by state governments as
well.
Religious Toleration
There are also more optimistic lessons to be taken from the conflict. It was an important milestone on the path to
religious toleration, but this wasn't imposed by leading enlightenment philosophers but rather met as an exhausted
consensus after decades of tumult. The erosion of legitimacy was still a great driver, but towards more constructive
ends.
In this day a strong majority of England, Wales, and Scotland was Protestant, and Catholics were subject to recusancy
fines and other forms of persecution. While King Charles I was a devout Protestant, his marriage to the Catholic Queen
Henrietta Maria from France fomented conspiracies that he was on the cusp of reimposing Catholicism to the state Church.
In England, what would become Anglican doctrine was hotly debated inside and outside of the clergy: the puritans of the
era argued that the existing episcopal hierarchy of bishops, emphasis on sacraments in worship, and ornate churches
reeked of residual Catholicism that had to be purged. This was a broad social movement where Calvinism was the dominant
theology, and their opponents included anti-Calvinists of different stripes. Some were bishops who wanted to preserve
their standing, but others simply wanted to preserve the tradition and sacraments that had been a part of their worship
for as long as they could remember.
As the king's unconstitutional taxation was facing opposition throughout England, his heavy-handed approach to the state
Church ruffled at least as many feathers. As supreme governor of the Church, the King appointed many ceremonialist and
anti-Calvinist bishops. Few members of the clergy were as staunch supporters of the King as William Laud, whose loyalty
was rewarded by his appointment to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest office in the Church of England. Laud was
staunchly anti-Puritan and wasn't shy about using the power of the state to harass his theological enemies.
Extrajudicial punishment out of the Star Chamber4 was the order of the day, most notably against three men
in 1637 who criticised the episcopal hierarchy in print. As punishment their ears were cut off, fined £5,000, and
imprisoned for life. The shocked crowds treated them as martyrs, draping them in garlands as they made their way from
the pillory. Puritans were not inclined to turn the other cheek when they had the power to do so: an 1643 act of
Parliament commanded the destruction of altars, icons, and statues. Countless religious artefacts, both Catholic and
Protestant, were destroyed in this time by several campaigns of iconoclasm.
Once armed conflict was coming to a close in the 1650s, Parliament started stumbling in the direction of religious
liberty. The state Church was purged of many royalists and Parliament tried to ban the celebrations of
Christmas,5 but outside the abolition of bishops there was less enforced puritan doctrine onto the Church
than may have been expected. Debates about the direction of the state Church may have raged in the 1630s and 1640s, but
both political elites and the general public had grown weary. While the late King was concerned that religious
uniformity was necessary to keep his realms intact, religious toleration worked reasonably well in republican England.
Church morality courts were abolished, and mandatory church attendance was repealed. The relaxed sanctions against
independent congregations meant a proliferation of new sects.6 From Britain in Revolution:
All who professed faith in God by Jesus Christ were to be free to practise their religion, so long as they did not
abuse it to the civil injury of others, or disturb the peace, or invoke it to justify licentiousness. This liberty was
not to extend to 'popery or prelacy', but there was a widespread de facto toleration of Anglican [pre-war
ceremonial] worship throughout the 1650s
Perhaps most surprisingly, Oliver Cromwell offered assurances that recusancy laws wouldn't be enforced on London's
Jewish community, which had been underground to the extent it existed at all since the expulsion of all English Jews
in 1290. This started a small Jewish migration to London in the 1650s, paving the way to outright legalisation of their
status in 1664.
This is not what many radical puritans wanted out of revolutionary Britain. But most Protestants in all three realms
weren't keen on either Archbishop Laud or doctrinaire Calvinists using the levers of state power to oppress dissenting
Protestant views. Persecution of Catholics continued, but their treatment in practice was more lenient than the letter
of the law during the interregnum. 'Live and let live', at least for some sects, emerged from exhaustion more than
enlightenment.
Only scratching the surface
In this era, there were very few irredeemably bad or unimpeachably good characters. There were, and still are, debates
about what the wars were fought for, and many important figures switched sides as the events of those decades took on a
life of their own. This makes for a fascinating era of history, and there are many aspects of the story that didn't make
it into this post: the origin of the Quakers, communities who believed Acts 4:32 commanded proto-socialist collective
ownership, or how the Marquis of Montrose entered Scotland with two men but strung together enough victories to briefly
conquer the country. 7
While the American and French revolutions are more widely discussed, there are few better starting points for modern
constitutionalism than the English Civil Wars. Since 1640, we can see how liberal democracies live and die on how well
they learn these lessons from the past.
When people romanticize strong leaders or try to shortcut constitutional process, they’re forgetting why England’s
republic failed and how America's could too.
References
- Austin Woolrych. 2004. Britain in Revolution: 1625-1660. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
- Diane Purkiss. 2006. The English Civil War: A People's History. HarperCollins, London, UK.
- Duncan, M. 2013-2014. Revolutions: Season 1 [Audio podcast].
- Jonathan Healey. 2023. The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689. Bloomsbury, London,
UK.
-
In this era some sittings of Parliament were given names, and this one's is the 'Useless Parliament'↩
-
How true Strafford's claim is subject to debate, but the current consensus is that it is at least plausible. This
helps explain the motivation for Parliament's later action against him.↩
-
The official name was the 'Nominated Assembly', but it was better known as "Barebone's Parliament" for one of its
members, Praisegod Barbones↩
-
While this is a figure of speech in modern times, this was a literal part of the English court in the 17th century↩
-
Before the Victorian era, English Christmas celebrations involved raucous debauchery and pre-Reformation traditions
that were seen by the puritans of the day as a noxious combination of paganism and Catholicism. Parliament tried to
ban both Christmas decoration and celebrations, but enforcement was spotty on account of the riots that would often
erupt when local authorities tried to clamp down on the practice: the old Christmas celebrations had broad appeal
with the masses.↩
-
If you've ever wondered why there are so many protestant denominations, 1650s England is part of the story↩
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If you've got this far, you owe it to yourself to listen to Mike Duncan's excellent
podcast series
on the wars of three kingdoms.↩