The Army Revolt of 1647

Abstract

IN order to win the civil war, Parliament had to trample on those very susceptibilities and conventional political wisdoms which it went to war to protect. The parliamentarian propaganda of 1642 is drenched in the language of civil liberties: of freedom from arbitrary taxation; from arbitrary imprisonment; from misguided paternalism; and from the centralizing tendencies of early Stuart monarchy. The dream-world of many Parliamentarians, particularly in the provinces, was of a well-ordered state comprising semiautonomous local communities meeting common problems, and seeking powers to answer local needs, through free parliaments under the general regulation of a monarch whose role was that of chief justiciar and arbiter. Instead, as I have argued in a recent book, Parliament was forced to break with all the cherished nostrums conjured up by their propaganda. They fought to protect a herd of sacred cows each of which was slaughtered to propitiate the god of war. Unprecedented fiscal demands were met by a massive invasion of property rights; rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury were swept aside by a massive introduction of droit administratif; billeting of troops, free quarter, martial law were soon widely in force. Unlike the king, Parliament abandoned all pretence of respecting the traditional modes of consultation with and delegation to the particular institutional bodies which had evolved in each county and borough. Indeed, every article of the Petition of Right, the most cherished statement of the rights of the subject drawn up in the early seventeenth century, was broken by Parliament in the course of the war. And I have argued that, as a result, there was a great revulsion against the wars in 1645 and 1646 which took two forms: the militant neutralism evident in such movements as the Clubmen, who demanded a return to the old institutions and ways, and an end to centralization and government unresponsive to local needs and sensibilities, and the radicalism of the Levellers, again demanding an end to the powers assumed by Parliament, but seeking a massive democratization as well as a massive decentralization of power and justice. They are closely related movements, both earthed in the mythology of local community consensus government, and both created by the harsh facts of war. Neither could ultimately cope with the continuing existence of the New Model Army.1