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.

V.

The Rump Dissolved and the Barebones Parliament

With Parliament becoming increasingly independent, the army leadership intervened. Hearing that the Rump was hurriedly attempting to arrange new elections without its approval, Cromwell marched to the House of Commons with a file of musketeers and put an end to their sitting on April 20, 1653. “It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place... In the name of God, go!” And pointing to the mace of Parliament, Cromwell ordered “that shining bauble” taken away. The leading figures in the Rump had been accused of corruption and self-interest, and few lamented its passing. However, politicians like Haselrigge and Vane, called “Commonwealthsmen”, bitterly resented their arbitrary dispersal at the hands of the military. This was the end of the Commonwealth.

The use of force by the army, first against monarchy and then against Parliament, raised the spectre of military dictatorship. Cromwell and his generals wanted legitimacy and the consent of the governed, not rule by the sword alone. Above all, they wanted a religious settlement more broadly tolerant than the rigid Presbyterian Church set up after the first Civil War. They wanted a new, reforming Parliament, but could not trust the people so far as to hold free elections. Instead, a small assembly of 140 members was nominated by army officers and some local churches. Meeting in July 1653 in the Commons' House, it declared itself a Parliament: it sent to Cromwell for the mace. Seen as an assemblage of “saints” it was nicknamed the “Barebones Parliament”, after one of its Puritan members, Praise-God Barbon, a wealthy London merchant and lay preacher.

It is a mistake, however, to write off this Parliament, as its opponents did, as a collection of impractical and low-born Puritan fanatics. The majority of its members were drawn from the gentry, and there were only a dozen dedicated Fifth Monarchists in it. It redistributed parliamentary seats to reflect the spread of wealth and population in the nation, and received members from Scotland and Ireland. Civil marriage was introduced, as well as the central registration of births, marriages, and deaths. These were all reforms highly acceptable to the army. However, the year 1653, like 1649, was viewed as revolutionary by religious radicals still hopeful of the dawn of the millennium. The “saints” in Parliament were able to divide the House and defeat any attempt to reform the Church. As a result, the moderate majority voted to resign their powers into Cromwell's hands in December 1653.

VI.

The Instrument of Government

Within a few days, Cromwell had been persuaded by one of the youngest and ablest generals, John Lambert, to adopt a new written constitution which he had drafted, entitled the “Instrument of Government”: on December 16, 1653, Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector. “Oliver Protector” was commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well as head of state. However, his powers under the terms of the Instrument were restricted by a Council of State, which was dominated by civilians, and a parliament to be called every three years; and Cromwell still wanted to rule by consent. Where the Rump and Barebones parliaments had failed, the new regime succeeded: in 1654 it created a widely based national Church, in which Presbyterians, Independents or Congregationalists, and Baptists had a share. Levellers, like Lilburne, and Fifth Monarchists, such as General Thomas Harrison, remained opposed, but there was official tolerance for radical sects like the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which grew strongly throughout the 1650s.

Cromwell ended the war with the Netherlands and instead embarked on a maritime war with Spain, which harked back to the great days of privateering and colonizing under Elizabeth I. In 1655 he sent a large expedition to the West Indies, the Spanish Main, and although it failed in its principal objective, it captured Jamaica. At sea, Blake was able, as the Elizabethan sea-dogs had not been, to seize part of the Spanish treasure fleet. Cromwell allied with France: a British army defeated Spain's forces in Flanders in 1658 and took Dunkerque, an important restraint on piracy in the English Channel as well as England's first Continental bridgehead since the loss of Calais a hundred years before.

VII.

The Major-Generals

The Protectorate, like earlier regimes, faced many enemies at home as well as abroad. In the summer of 1655 a Royalist rising in Wiltshire under Colonel John Penruddock was quickly put down. Plots in London to kill the Protector, and other secret conspiracies, including the Royalist “Sealed Knot”, were uncovered by John Thurloe, Cromwell's efficient head of intelligence. Following the West Country disturbances, and to keep better order in the localities, Cromwell created 10, later 11, separate districts in England and Wales, each headed by one of his most reliable major-generals. To some extent they were designed to make local government, disrupted since the civil wars and the refusal of many former magistrates to serve the republican regimes, more effective. They imposed a decimation tax (of 10 per cent of wealth) on known Royalists, which would pay for a new mounted militia in the shires and so reduce the burden of the standing army on the rest of the population. The major-generals searched out potential conspirators and strictly controlled “ungodly” activities. The Protector wanted a “reformation of manners” as well as cheaper and more efficient government. The major-general for London shot the bears which were used for the popular sport of bear-baiting.

The Instrument of Government required parliaments to be called. It extended the franchise, redistributed seats in favour of the counties at the expense of small, corrupt boroughs, and, like the Barebones Parliament, included MPs from Ireland and Scotland. The first Protectoral Parliament disappointed the high hopes of Cromwell, and passed no legislation. To make the second more amenable, the major-generals worked hard to get reliable men elected in September 1656, but the cry “no swordsmen, no decimators” indicated popular feeling. The Council of State had to exclude about a hundred MPs when Parliament met. Nevertheless, most were very critical of the major-general system, and in early 1657 Cromwell was reluctantly forced to allow it to lapse.

VIII.

The Humble Petition and Advice

Since the execution of the King in 1649, several politicians and lawyers had urged Cromwell, for the sake of stability and a return to known forms of government, to accept the crown. Parliament presented to the Protector in March 1657 a new scheme, called the Humble Petition and Advice, which would allow him to reign as king. The package of measures proposed included the creation of an Upper House of Parliament and the right of Cromwell to name his successor. The Protector realized that to accept the Petition would alienate his fellow generals, the old Rump republicans—the Commonwealthsmen—and many of the “saints”; and he himself did not want to revive what the Lord of Hosts had, as he said, “laid in the dust”—the old monarchy. In the end, he agreed to the proposals except for the crown, and was formally reinstalled as Lord Protector, with more ceremony than before, on June 26, 1657.

His Protectorate was now more civilian and less military than ever. Cromwell and his family lived in the palace at Whitehall, and other former royal houses were at his disposal. A court developed, though much less costly than that of Charles I. Lambert and other generals withdrew from public life, and some of the most prominent members of the government, nationally as well as locally, were men drawn from the traditional ruling families, some even ex-Royalists. Cromwell had not been crowned king, but many of the features of this new regime seemed like a restoration of the old royal constitution.

IX.

Death of Cromwell and the Restoration

Cromwell died on the anniversaries of his great victories of Dunbar and Worcester, September 3, 1658. It was a tribute to the new-found stability of the Protectoral regime, as reformed by the provisions of the Humble Petition and Advice, that he was peacefully succeeded by his eldest son, Richard. The new Protector was inundated with loyal messages of support from most local bodies. He called a new Parliament, which was cooperative.

However, the enemies of the Protectorate were gathering strength, and Richard possessed neither his father's abilities nor the army's respect. Ambitious and experienced men—generals like Lambert, and politicians like Haselrigge and Vane—had never accepted their fall from power. They allied to force first the dissolution of the Protectoral Parliament, then the abdication of the Protector (May 1659). The Rump was recalled as the supreme executive, and the Commonwealthsmen resumed their reign. This new political and military alliance was strong and effective enough for forces under Lambert easily to disperse a Royalist rising in Cheshire, led by Sir George Booth, in the summer of 1659.

This was their only success, however. The two partners were unwilling to cooperate with each other: the generals interrupted the sitting of the Rump, but could find little support, even among their own rank and file. The Rump resumed its session in December 1659, but the public no longer had confidence in any of these short-term regimes. London grew disorderly, merchants refused to lend and taxpayers were unwilling to pay. When Lambert led forces north to stop the commander in Scotland, George Monck, from moving his army into England to restore order, he found his troops, unpaid, deserting to the other side. When Monck reached the capital, he saw that only the restoration of the old monarchy would bring stability. The fleet at sea quietly positioned itself in readiness to bring Charles II back from exile. Monck readmitted the surviving members of the Long Parliament who had been excluded at Pride's Purge, most of whom were now Royalist in sympathy. This paved the way for the recall of the Stuarts. Charles II was proclaimed king on May 8, 1660, to general acclamation.

X.

Evaluation

The Interregnum witnessed several changes of regime, as the politicians and military men who had defeated Charles I and abolished the monarchy wrestled with the problem of providing an alternative stable and strong government. The task was complicated by the desire of many to reform England's traditional institutions, and—after their conquest—those of Scotland and Ireland. While the most radical plans, for instance those of the Levellers, were rejected, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate of Cromwell, attempted in different ways to provide more efficient and impartial administration. They reformed the legal system, widened the electoral base, redistributed parliamentary seats, and included representation from all three nations formerly under the British Crown in one Parliament. Cromwell's regime was able to effect a religious settlement which was comprehensive and tolerant. Britain's nonconformist Churches originated in these years. While the demands of war severely strained the economy, the republic's remarkable military and naval success in the 1650s led to the emergence of Britain as a great power, with colonies and commerce much enhanced.