THE FIERY SPIRITS : POPULAR PROTEST, PARLIAMENT AND THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

By John Rees  Verso. 548 pages. £30. ISBN 978-1-83976-315-1

Reviewed by Jim Burns

 

England in the early seventeenth century was a place of rising tensions between peasants and landlords. John Rees says that “Some of the richer farmers began to increase their wealth, while others found that their plots of land, were no longer able to support their households. Landlords in turn began to try to increase the wealth they could draw by transferring copy-hold tenancies  - the traditional, perpetual, secure form in which peasants held land – into leaseholds, which were fixed-term and whose cost to the peasant could more easily be increased”.

Peasants were forced from land they had held through generations. And it caused them to depend on common land for sustenance. But the landlords, including the “greatest landlord of all, the king”, viewed the common land as “a gigantic, underdeveloped economic resource”. A process of “disafforestation”, which removed peasants from the “protection of Forest Law, which guaranteed their rights to common land”, got under way. Inevitably, this led to what Rees describes as a “backlash”, as anti-enclosure riots broke out. The rioters were often well-armed and organised and stood up to troops sent to disperse them. Rees refers to one encounter where the rioters shouted, “Here we were born, and here we will die”.

It was into this setting that “the Fiery Spirits” stepped, though the question of enclosure of the common land wasn’t the only one on their minds. The relationship between the king and the House of Commons was to play an increasingly important part in what eventually led to revolution, as did the role of religion. There were deep suspicions that the king, in this case Charles 1, under the influence of his French-born wife, was attempting to re- introduce Catholicism into England. “No Popery” was a popular cry to be heard as matters developed.

Who were these Fiery Spirits? Rees names four leading ones – Henry Marten, Peter Wentworth, William Strode, and Alexander Rigby - along with fifteen others he classifies as their “allies.” And perhaps of almost equal importance to his account of the road to 1649 and the execution of the king were the Levellers, including such leading figures as John Lilburne and Richard Overton, both noted for their pamphleteering on behalf of the Leveller cause, and Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, a prominent spokesman for the Levellers at the Putney Debates in 1647 as they called for universal male suffrage. It was Rainsborough who spoke the words that have echoed down the ages and are still relevant today: “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”.

Rees devotes space to Alexander Rigby, a member of the Puritan branch of the Rigby family in Goosnargh near Preston. Born in 1594 he was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1610 and became a lawyer. In April 1640 he was elected MP for Wigan in the Short Parliament (so-called because it was closed down by Charles) and re-elected in November 1640 to the Long Parliament where he remained until his death in 1650.  During the Civil War he was a colonel in the Parliamentary Army and, among other things, conducted the siege of Lathom House which was defended by Charlotte Stanley, Countess of Derby.  When the siege was raised by the arrival of Royalist forces led by Prince Rupert the Parliamentary troops retreated to Bolton. The town became famous because of the “Bolton Massacre” when Rupert’s soldiers followed his orders of “no quarter” and killed men, women and children.

Rigby was present at other battles. In October 1643 he led his troops against Royalists at Swarthmoor, near Ulverston, and later reported that “God so struck the hearts of these our enemies with terror” that they broke and ran before much actual fighting had started. That reference to God’s intervention on the side of the Parliamentarians points to the conviction of being involved in a just cause that motivated their actions. Interestingly, despite Rigby’s obvious dedication to the Parliamentary desire to oppose Charles’s belief in the divine right of kings, Rees says that he and Peter Wentworth “drew back as the trial of the king loomed. Their motives for doing so were never explicitly stated, but they are likely to have resulted from fear of a Royalist backlash, concern about the ability of the radicals to generate sufficient support for regicide, pressure from moderate Parliamentarians locally and nationally, and sympathy for the Levellers’ unease at the prospect of a military republic”. Neither of them signed the death warrant when Charles was found guilty.

The question of what the Civil War was fought for is a fascinating one. It seems to me that the aim to limit the king’s powers to override Parliament was, even if in an indirect way, always a key factor in the popular discontent that cropped up due to a range of problems. Peasants opposed enclosure of common land.  Sailors rebelled when they weren’t paid, soldiers likewise. Townspeople were prone to protest against compulsory billeting of troops, something which they often weren’t compensated for. And, needless to say, citizens at all levels took issue with the taxes that Charles and his ministers attempted to extract from them. Rees looks at the “widespread tax strike by important mercantile interests. The import-export duties Tonnage and Poundage were at the centre of this agitation – specifically the Crown’s simultaneous attempts to impose surcharges on them, and to claim them as a right, rather than a tax dependent on parliamentary consent”. Rees sums up the situation in the country generally: “all such unrest added to a social and political crisis at the end of the 1620s”.

It might, at this point, be useful to stress that opposing the king was not an easy thing to do. Take the case of Dr Alexander Leighton, a Puritan who was “associated with Henry Jacob’s radical church in Blackfriars, the mother church of all separatist congregations”. As such, he was “already in the sights of the authorities” for having published two pamphlets advocating the abolition of episcopacy, opposition to Charles’s marriage to a Catholic, and military support for the Protestant cause in Europe”. Described as a “Fiery Spirit”, he was arrested when he published another pamphlet which called for wholesale reform of the Church and abolition of the roles of Bishops and Archbishops, among other things. Leighton was accused of being “a schismatic, and a blasphemer; he had insulted the queen; he was guilty of treason”.  Found guilty, “he was to be imprisoned for the rest of his life and fined £10,000, but that was the least of it. He was also to have his ears cut off, his nose slit in both nostrils, to be whipped at a post and afterwards to be stood in the pillory. His face was to be branded with the letters ‘SS’, for Stirrer-up of Sedition”.     

This brings us back to that question of how far the king could claim that his “divine right” as a king allowed him to act without consulting Parliament? There’s no doubt that it loomed large in the thinking of the Fiery Spirits and their supporters. And led to at least some of them believing that getting rid of the king, and establishing a republic, was a legitimate aim. It was probably always a minority concept, but it gained some support at the time of the Civil War when the king’s actions in waging war against his subjects began to raise doubts about him – this ”man of blood”, as he would be called -  in many minds.

I’m jumping ahead to 1642 by which time the king, facing growing opposition, had left London for Windsor. When asked by the Commons to return he refused, giving as one reason, the “many seditious Pamphlets and Sermons” in circulation. In Rees’s words : “The king was not wrong to see beneath, and connected to, the parliamentary opposition a growing network of activists, writers and printers engaged in popular mobilisation against the monarchy”. It was the profusion of pamphlets, and other printed material such as petitions, which frequently caused crowds, sometimes armed, to congregate around Parliament to demonstrate their support for the MPs standing firm against Charles. It needs to be noted their presence was not always welcome to those MPs who took a more moderate stance regarding relations with the king.

The Fiery Spirits does not claim to present a military history of the Civil War, though some details do necessarily occur in the narrative. The Levellers arose out of agitation in the forces, including when it was formed the New Model Army, that Cromwell and Fairfax led to victory at  Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645), and determined the fate of the king when, during the Second Civil War, Cromwell defeated a combined Royalist and Scottish army at Preston in 1648. (As an aside, when I was young in the 1940s I used to often study the painting of the battle in the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston). Rees doesn’t devote a lot of commentary to the Levellers – he has written an earlier book about them – though they have intrigued more than one historian. The Levellers, or at least the more adventurous and militant among them, had a radical programme and argued about it with Cromwell and Ireton at the Putney Debates in 1647. How far many of the others who, for a time wore the sea-green ribbons of the Levellers, were similarly committed may be open to debate.

Much of the discontent in the New Model Army perhaps rested on the fact that the troops were owed back pay. And, later, that they objected to being sent to Europe or Ireland to fight. There always had been nervousness in Parliament about the power that had accrued to the army during the wartime years, and how it was likely to be used when the fighting was over. Elements in Parliament were keen to disband the army once the king had been safely defeated. Rees sees it in these terms : “The plan of the Presbyterian majority in the Commons, aided by sympathetic peers, the Scots and the peace party in the City, was simple and brutal: to move against the New Model Army by disbanding its regiments or shipping them to Ireland. They planned to do so without having met the back pay the soldiers were owed”. 

Rees’s closing chapter, “To Kill a King?”, is a detailed examination of the arguments and other activities that took place as the various groups and individuals presented their plans for, in some cases, a total restructuring of society, in others a few adaptations and adjustments to the existing order. Not everyone wanted a complete disposal of the monarchy. The situation was complex and can’t easily be summarised here. Rees says : “The trial and execution of the king superseded all other political strategies, and the new Republic was born of these acts, not brought into the world by a new constitutional arrangement. The changes to the constitution, the abolition of the House of Lords and the declaration of the Republic came as a result”.

What happened to the Fiery Spirits?  Of the four leading ones named by Rees, Alexander Rigby died in 1650, “possibly from a fever caught from prisoners while presiding over the assizes at Chelmsford, in Essex”.  William Strode died of fever in 1645, and Peter Wentworth passed away in 1675. As noted earlier he wasn’t one of those who signed the king’s death warrant. But when the monarchy was restored in 1660 he retired to his country estate and a quiet life. Henry Marten was a regicide and his name was on the warrant. He was arrested in 1660 and spent the remaining years of his life in prison, dying in 1680.

The Fiery Spirits is a book packed with details of the lives of not only the leading fiery spirits but others like them. At times, especially as regards activities in and around Parliament, we almost follow events on a daily basis as opinions shift and clash, pamphlets advocating one cause or another circulate in the city, and violence erupts with fighting on the streets and in the Commons. It was a turbulent time and, until it happened, no-one really knew what the outcome was likely to be. There are over sixty pages of notes to supplement Rees’s text. And that text is never less than clear in its intention to tell an important and fascinating story.