English Commonwealth and Protectorate

I

Introduction

English Commonwealth and Protectorate, republican governments of England introduced after the English Civil War during the Interregnum (1649-1660). The Commonwealth (1649-1653) was founded on the execution of Charles I in 1649, and was followed by the two Protectorates of Oliver Cromwell (1653-1658), and his son Richard Cromwell (1658-1659). The Commonwealth was briefly revived (1659-1660), before the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II in May 1660.

II

The Execution of the King

The First Civil War had resulted in the victory of the Long Parliament over the forces of the King; but the victorious parties—Scots, Parliament, and army—did not long remain united, and the King, though defeated, was able to exploit their differences. It was only after a Second Civil War in 1648, and the crushing of the invading Scots army by Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Preston in August 1648, that a solution was found. The army leadership, the rank and file, and the Levellers (London civilian radical agitators and pamphleteers) accused the King of bad faith, plotting a foreign invasion, and trying to overturn the judgment of the Lord in the first war. He was tried and convicted of making war on his subjects, and—as “a man of blood”—beheaded outside his palace of Whitehall on January 30, 1649.

III

The Rump

To achieve this judgment with the aid of Parliament, the army leaders had prevented the majority of Members of Parliament (MP) from sitting on December 6, 1648: this event was called “Pride's Purge” after the officer responsible, Colonel Thomas Pride. The resultant much-reduced House of Commons was nicknamed the Rump Parliament, and after the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords (March 1649) it ruled alone. To act as an executive, a nominated Council of State, consisting of about 40 leading members of the Commons, was set up. The removal of the king, monarchy, and aristocracy was a revolutionary and unpopular step, which could be achieved only by force: fewer than 10 per cent of all MPs were willing to take part. The other regicides (those who agreed to condemn the King) were army officers.

As only a minority of even the army's political allies, the Independents, approved, Cromwell and the other army leaders sought the support of radical groups who had their own agendas: the Levellers, who proposed a written, near-democratic constitution, called the “Agreement of the People”; and the religious enthusiasts, or “saints”, members of sectarian Churches and millennarians, such as the Fifth Monarchists, who expected, and worked for, the second coming of Christ. The Rump was viewed as a stopgap regime, soon to be replaced by a more permanent settlement, which would embody the Puritan and Parliamentary ideals for which two civil wars had been fought. The year 1649 was viewed by radicals as a revolutionary year, a step on the way to the building of a new Jerusalem.

However, once the Rump was in power, many MPs who had not been involved in the revolutionary act came back to claim their seats. The new government welcomed their support. In this way both the Rump and the Council of State came to be dominated by those politicians who had not necessarily approved of the setting up of the republic, but who wanted to share in the continuing tasks, and profits, of government. Only 12 of the first 41 Councillors were regicides. Among the leading figures restored to their places were Sir Arthur Haselrigge, Sir Henry Vane, and Thomas Scott. About 200 MPs attended on occasion, though only 50 or so came regularly to the Commons. The Rump was therefore a much more conservative body than its origins might suggest. It rejected the Leveller proposals, even those taken over and toned down by the army's council of officers.

IV

War and Conquest

The first need of the new regime, as unwelcome abroad as at home, was to obtain defence and security against its many enemies. It put down radical activists. Thomas Fairfax, the supreme commander, and Cromwell dealt firmly with Leveller-inspired mutinies in the army in May 1649. The leading London Levellers, including the best known, John Lilburne, were thrown into the Tower of London. Another radical group, the Diggers or True Levellers had founded an agrarian community in Surrey on Old Testament lines, with wealth and produce held in common: they were dispersed by troops. The new regime accepted without question that the Crown's responsibilities devolved upon it. High among these was the welfare of Ireland, still racked by a civil war which had started with the Ulster uprising of the Catholic Irish in 1641. Cromwell was sent with part of the army, well paid and equipped, to re-establish order, this time in the name of the Commonwealth.

Ireland was heavily fortified, with hundreds of strongholds and garrisons belonging to the different warring parties. Not only the Catholic Irish, Ulster Scots, and a Scottish army, but also the remnants of the defeated English Royalists under James Butler, Earl of Ormonde, were present. Arriving in August 1649, Cromwell's forces proceeded to the Siege of Drogheda. When the town was stormed, Cromwell permitted his troops, as the current laws of war allowed, to sack it and kill the civilian inhabitants. The same bloodshed marked the taking of Wexford. The reduction of Ireland, completed later when Cromwell had departed, transferred land to new English planters, some of them ex-soldiers. The Cromwellian plantation, as it is called, created a new Protestant-dominated social structure in Ireland.

The Scots had been outraged by the execution of their own king, of the Scottish Stuart dynasty, in 1649. They welcomed his son and heir, and crowned him as Charles II. Fairfax declined to lead an army against Parliament's old allies, and Cromwell, returned from Ireland in May 1650, accepted supreme command of the expedition. Supported by the English navy, he was victorious over superior forces in the Battle of Dunbar, on September 3, 1650. The main force of the King was able to slip past him into England, but at the Battle of Worcester, a year after Dunbar, Cromwell won his “crowning mercy”, the decisive battle which ended almost a decade of civil warfare. The young Charles and his court were to spend the rest of the Interregnum in increasingly impoverished and disreputable exile on the Continent.

The reputation of Cromwell and the army was at its height. Buoyed up by their success and impatient for reform at home, they expected the Rump, as promised, to frame a new constitution and proceed to its own dissolution. However, the politicians at Westminster had other priorities. They had embarked on a war—the first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars—with the nation's greatest trade rival, the Netherlands, in 1652, following the Navigation Act of 1651, which had restricted trade with England to English ships. The government, with the proceeds of the sale of confiscated Church, Crown, and individual Royalists' lands, enlarged the navy until it was the strongest in the world and, under admirals such as Robert Blake and George Monck, challenged Dutch supremacy at sea. There was a big increase in the English mercantile marine as a result. Haselrigge could boast that, in newly prosperous England, it was scarcely possible to imagine that a civil war had been fought only a few years before.