English Civil War

(in Russian, the English Bourgeois Revolution of the 17th century), a victorious bourgeois revolution which led to the consolidation of capitalism and the establishment of a bourgeois system in England; one of the early bourgeois revolutions. The first revolution of European scope, it ushered in the era of the decline of the feudal structure in Europe, initiating the replacement of the feudal structure by the capitalist structure.

By the middle of the 17th century, England had achieved significant success in the development of industry and trade. The development of new forms of production—capitalist manufacturing (mainly scattered)—was the basis of the country’s economic progress. However, the system of industrial monopolies cultivated by the Stuart kings, in addition to guild regulation which held sway in the cities, narrowed the field of activity for the manufacturing entrepreneurs. The principle of free competition and free enterprise thus became one of the bourgeoisie’s main demands in the revolution. The early penetration of capitalist elements into the countryside led to the development of capitalist renting and the appearance of classes of capitalist tenants on the one hand and rural hired farm laborers on the other. The English nobility split into two groups, one of which—the “new nobility”— adjusted to the conditions of capitalist production and made an alliance with the bourgeoisie. Peasant ownership in England was threatened with extinction; the liberation of the copyhold and its transformation into the freehold was the basic condition for the preservation of the peasantry as a class in England.

One of the most important features of the English bourgeois revolution was the distinctive ideological draping given to class and political aims. It was the last revolutionary movement in Europe which was carried on under the medieval banner of a struggle of one religious doctrine against another. The assault on absolutism in England began with the assault on its ideology, its ethics, and its morals, which were embodied in the doctrine of the semi-Catholic state Anglican Church. Bourgeois revolutionaries came forward as church reformers—the Puritans. The preaching of the Puritans laid the basis for the revolutionary ideology of a popular anti-feudal uprising. By the start of the 17th century, two basic groups had taken shape in Puritanism: the Presbyterians and the Independents.

The Tudor kings had managed to mask absolutism in parliamentary forms of government. But the Stuarts—James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49)—came into conflict with Parliament. The conflict became particularly sharp under Charles I. A nonparliamentary regime embodying a decadent form of absolutism was established in England as of 1629. Charles I, along with his advisers, the earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud, began to implement a firm course in England, Scotland, and Ireland. The policy produced discontent and rebellion and increased emigration to North America.

The plundering of Irish landowners continued, and the policy of church uniformity in a country where Catholicism was dominant and which was oppressed by foreign conquerors strained relations to the limit.

In Scotland the attempts to introduce church uniformity led to a national uprising against Charles I in 1637, to the establishment of the so-called Covenant, and, in 1639, to the Anglo-Scottish war, in which English absolutism suffered a defeat. This defeat and the peasant and city uprisings which erupted in the 1620’s and 1630’s hastened the start of the revolution. The Short Parliament (Apr. 13–May 5, 1640) refused to grant subsidies for the conduct of the Scottish war. The lack of funds on the one hand and discontent among both the lower classes and the financiers and merchant class on the other made Charles’ situation hopeless. A new parliament was called, which subsequently received the name of the Long Parliament (Nov. 3, 1640–Apr. 20, 1653), and the revolution began.

The Long Parliament destroyed the basic instruments of absolutism: the prerogative royal courts—the Star Chamber and the High Commission—were liquidated; all monopolistic patents and privileges were eliminated and their holders dismissed from Parliament; and a bill preventing the dissolution of an existing parliament without its consent was adopted. Strafford, the king’s closest adviser, was brought to trial in Parliament and executed on May 12, 1641. Later, Archbishop Laud and other advisers of the king shared his fate.

However, differences in Parliament began to appear even in 1641. The landlords and the bourgeoisie thwarted the resolution of the elimination of the episcopy and reorganization of the church on Calvinist principles; they feared that the principle of equality and self-government, after triumphing in church affairs, would influence the political system in the country as well. The fear of deepening the revolution was still more obvious in the bitter struggle which developed in the Long Parliament in the discussion of the so-called Grand Remonstrance, which was adopted Nov. 22, 1641, by a majority of only 11 votes.

By August 1641 power in the state had in effect passed to Parliament. The secret of its victory lay in the fact that the insurgent people—first and foremost London—stood behind it and foiled, in particular, the king’s attempt in January 1642 to arrest the opposition leaders, including Pym and Hampden. On Jan. 10, 1642, Charles went north to the protection of the feudal lords.

On Aug. 22, 1642, the king, who was then in Nottingham, declared war on Parliament. The first civil war between the royalist Cavaliers and the parliamentary Roundheads began. The economically developed southeastern counties, led by London, supported Parliament, while the comparatively backward counties of the south and north supported the king. Regular armies were created. The indecisive policy of the “moderate” majority of the Parliament, the Presbyterians, led to the defeat of the parliamentary army in the first battle at Edgehill on Oct. 23, 1642; furthermore, it allowed the royalist army to establish a base in Oxford. At this critical moment, the mass peasant movement in the countryside and the plebeian movement in the cities unfolded; it was echoed in Parliament by the revolutionary democratic line of the Independents led by O. Cromwell. Cromwell strove to transform the army into a popular revolutionary force capable of achieving victory. The old command—mainly Presbyterian—was broken up. It was decided on Jan. 11, 1645, to create a new parliamentary army, the so-called New Model Army. On June 14, 1645, the reorganized parliamentary army routed the royalist army at Naseby. By the end of 1646, the first civil war had ended in a victory for Parliament. Charles I surrendered himself to the Scots, who delivered him to Parliament on Feb. 1, 1647.

The new nobility (the gentry) and the bourgeoisie considered the revolution basically concluded: their primary aims had been achieved. The Ordinance of Feb. 24, 1646, eliminated knightly holding and all the duties to the throne which stemmed from it, and by the same ordinance large landowners appropriated the right of bourgeois private property to the land, which had previously been their feudal property. The abolition of monopoly rights partially reestablished the principle of free competition in industry and trade; the operation of legislation against enclosure was suspended. The entire weight of taxes for military needs was shifted to the shoulders of the working people.

This was the context in which the popular masses took up the revolutionary initiative themselves. They not only foiled all the plans of smothering the revolution; they even attempted to turn it on to a democratic course. The autonomous party of Levelers, whose leaders included J. Lilburne, separated from the Independent Party.

In an effort to suppress the revolutionary strivings of the people, Parliament attempted to disband part of the revolutionary army in the spring of 1647. Threatened by disarmament and suspicious of the Independent officers, called the “Grandees,” the soldiers began to choose so-called Agitators, who gradually gained the leadership of military units and of the army as a whole. A conflict between Parliament and the army began. The threat of political isolation moved O. Cromwell, who had initially supported the subordination of the army to Parliament, to head the soldiers’ movement in the army in order to halt any further movement to the left. At a general review of the army on June 5, 1647, the so-called Solemn Oath not to disperse until the demands of the soldiers were met and the rights and freedoms of the English people were secured was adopted. Together with the broad peasant and plebeian masses, the army became the basic moving force of the revolution in its bourgeois democratic stage (1647–49). In June 1647 the army took the king captive; in August it launched a march on London, which resulted in the expulsion of Presbyterian leaders from Parliament.

The extent of the gulf between the Independents and the Levelers in their conceptions of the goals of the revolution became evident at the council of the army in Putney, Oct. 28–Nov. 11, 1647, at the Putney Conference. As opposed to the Levelers’ demand for the establishment of a parliamentary republic with a single-chamber parliament and the introduction of universal suffrage (for men), which was formulated in their project for the political structure of the country (the Agreement of the People), the “Grandees” laid out their own program, the Heads of Proposal, which would have retained a two-chamber Parliament and a king with the right of veto. The conflict between the “Grandees” and the Levelers led to the dissolution of the council. The disobedience of certain regiments demanding the adoption of the Leveler program was cruelly suppressed. The army was in the hands of the “Grandees.” At this time the king fled from captivity, having concluded a secret compact with the Scots.

The second civil war, which erupted in the spring of 1648, forced the Independents to seek a temporary reconciliation with the Levelers. But the acceptance of a considerable part of the Levelers’ program by the “Grandees” meant that the social program of the Levelers—in particular, with respect to the question of the fate of the copyhold—was only a more radical variant of the “Grandee” program and “... that only the intervention of the peasantry and the proletariat, ‘the plebeian element of the cities,’ could seriously advance the bourgeois revolution . . .” (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 17, p. 47). In the battle at Preston (Aug. 17–19, 1648), Cromwell inflicted a decisive defeat on the Scots and English royalists. On Dec. 1, 1648, the king was taken into custody. The army again occupied London and decisively purged the Long Parliament of its Presbyterian majority (Pride’s Purge, Dec. 6, 1648). On Jan. 6, 1649, a high court was established to review the case of the king. On January 30, Charles Stuart was executed as “a traitor and a tyrant.”

On May 19, 1649, England became a republic in which supreme power was vested in a single-chamber parliament; the House of Lords shared the monarch’s fate. In actuality, the republic of 1649 was an Independent oligarchy. Executive power was exercised by the State Council, which consisted of “Grandees” and their parliamentary confederates. The confiscated lands of the king, the bishops, and the Cavaliers were sold off for next to nothing; thus the republic enriched the bourgeoisie and the new nobility. At the same time, it did not satisfy a single demand of the lower classes. The Leveler leaders were thrown into prison, and Leveler uprisings in the army in May 1649 were suppressed. The Levelers were defeated, in particular, because they bypassed the basic question of the revolution—the agrarian question. They opposed the socialization of property and the equalization of wealth. It was the so-called true Levelers, the Diggers, who expressed the interests of the popular lower classes in the period of the revolution’s ascendance. They demanded the abolition of copyhold and of the landlords’ power, insisting that communal lands be turned into the common property of the poor. The Diggers’ ideas were reflected in the works of their ideologist, G. Winstanley, in his Declaration From the Poor Oppressed People of England. The destruction of the peaceful Digger movement for the collective cultivation of communal wastelands (1650) marked the final victory of the antidemocratic force with respect to the agrarian question.

The Independent republic combined socially protective functions in internal policies with annexationist strivings and a policy of suppressing the liberation movements of peoples under English domination. Cromwell’s military expedition to Ireland (1649–50) was aimed at the suppression of the national liberation uprising of the Irish people. The regeneration of the revolutionary army was completed in Ireland. A new landed aristocracy was created there as a stronghold for counterrevolution in England itself. The English republic dealt equally mercilessly with Scotland, annexing it to England in 1652. The republic’s antidemocratic course in the resolution of the agrarian and national questions narrowed its social base, leaving only an army of mercenaries as its support, maintained at the expense of the popular masses. The dispersal of the Rump of the Long Parliament and the unsuccessful experience of the “Grandees” with the Short (Barebone) Parliament of 1653—which, unexpectedly for its creators, embarked on a path of social reform, including the abolition of tithes, the introduction of civil marriage, and so on—paved the way for a military dictatorship, Cromwell’s Protectorate (1653–59).

The constitution of the Protectorate—the so-called Instrument of Government—gave such broad powers to the protector that it could be considered a direct preparation for the restoration of the monarchy. Cromwell dissolved the first (1654–55) and second (1656–58) parliaments of the Protectorate and assented (1657) to the reestablishment of the House of Lords, all but assuming the throne of England himself. Within the country, he struggled against both royalist conspiracies and popular movements. Continuing the expansionist policy of the republic, the Protectorate declared war on Spain and organized an expedition to seize its West Indian possessions (the Jamaica Expedition, 1655–57).

Shortly after the death of Cromwell on Sept. 3, 1658, the regime met its downfall. The republic was formally reestablished in England in 1659, but the entire course of events determined in advance that it would be short-lived. Frightened by the strengthening of the democratic movement, the bourgeoisie and new nobility began to incline toward “traditional monarchy.” In 1660 the Stuarts were restored. They agreed to sanction the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution, guaranteeing economic domination to the bourgeoisie. The coup of 1688–89, the so-called Glorious Revolution, formalized the compromise between the bourgeoisie, which henceforth would have access to state power, and the landed aristocracy.

The English revolution gave powerful impetus to the process of so-called primary accumulation of capital—that is, the “depeasantization” of the countryside, the transformation of peasants into hired workers, the acceleration of enclosure, and the replacement of peasant holdings by large farms of the capitalist type. It guaranteed complete freedom of action for the bourgeois class and paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, just as Puritanism broke the soil for the English Enlightenment. In the area of politics, the revolutionary struggle of the popular masses in the middle of the 17th century secured the transition from the feudal monarchy of the Middle Ages to the bourgeois monarchy of modern times.