Most people generally have heard of the English Civil War, but what is less known is that it wasn’t just a war – it was a revolution which destroyed one system and replaced it with another.
Even nearly 400 years on, the ruling class has done all it can to bury England’s real revolutionary traditions. We are often told that, as opposed to other countries, England and Britain don’t have revolutions. The mainstream view, fed through schools, the media and capitalist historians, is that, besides a couple of decades in the mid-1600s where things went off the rails, English history is completely non-revolutionary. The real history of the working class in England – from the Chartist movement to the 1926 General Strike and beyond – all reveal the opposite.
These traditions trace their point of origin to the English Revolution. From 1640 to 1660, the whole structure of English class society as it existed was turned upside down. Through war, mass movements and insurrection, the old feudal order was upended and a new, emerging capitalist system born in its wake. Even after so much time, essential lessons can be drawn from this period for socialists in the working-class movement today.
Feudalism to Capitalism
At its core, the English Revolution was a class revolution. It was an expression of the conflict between a declining feudal ruling class and a newly emerging capitalist class.
For 600 years, England (along with much of Europe) had been dominated by different variants of feudalism. Its economy was, for the large part, centred on agriculture, with political power in the hands of a landowning aristocracy. Rather than land being bought and sold on a market, land ownership was assigned to nobles by the monarch. The only way a noble could gain ownership over land was either by inheritance, marriage into an aristocratic family or tenure granted by the king. For the most part, landed estates had been held by the same families for hundreds of years.
Sitting at the bottom of society were the peasants. Under serfdom especially, the lords didn’t just own their lands; they basically owned the peasants living on them as well, who were forbidden from moving from one estate to another. The lords derived their wealth from a mixture of unpaid labour and rents extracted from their subordinates. Trade between different estates was limited, which placed a limit on the development of a national market economy.
One of feudalism’s big strengths was that it appeared stable and permanent to the lower classes, but this started to change over an extended period of time. Early pockets of capitalism took shape in the towns around a merchant class who invested in trade and hired wage labourers as a source of monetary profit.
But for as long as this market was limited to petty commodities, it was quite possible for it to exist in the framework of feudalism without fundamentally challenging the system. This only started to shift when those economic changes expanded into the countryside. As Christopher Hill, the leading Marxist historian on the English Revolution, put it: “Land was becoming a highly attractive field for investment of capital. People who had money wanted to buy land with it, and there were more and more people with money”. (The English Revolution 1640)
Wool, cloth and other commodities were increasingly produced on the land through wage labour, either to be sold at home or exported for profit. Meanwhile, a new ‘yeoman’ class of relatively well-off small-to-medium farmers looked to cash in on this by ‘improving’ their land and maximising its productivity.
This small but growing emerging capitalist class increasingly objected to the constraints imposed by feudalism. They resented their lack of political power compared to the aristocracy and the king, whom they (correctly) saw as a parasitic force holding back the development of the national economy.
Revolution Begins
These grievances reached boiling point in 1640. In response to the king’s disastrous and unpopular war with Scotland, London exploded into revolt. Crowds of apprentices, labourers and artisans rioted, attacking royal buildings and breaking open the King’s jails.
King Charles I responded to this unrest by convening Parliament for the first time in eleven years. Though he hoped this would resolve the crisis, Parliament stepped in to try and curb the biggest excesses of royal authority. Within a year, relations deteriorated to the point that the House of Commons issued the Grand Remonstrance – a political manifesto listing the grievances of Parliament. These included unchecked rule without parliamentary consent, episcopacy (control of the Church by bishops) and the perceived influence of Catholicism in the royal court.
From the perspective of the landowners and commercial interests in the Commons, this wasn’t about abolishing the monarchy, nor did the Remonstrance call for the king to be removed – it simply called for his powers to be limited. But this proved impossible when Charles refused to recognise the legitimacy of Parliament, eventually withdrawing his royalist followers from Parliament entirely and forcing a split within the state machine. The result was a declaration of war.
Was It About Religion?
Historians who downplay or ignore the role of class struggle in the English Revolution point instead to the role of religion. There is no doubt that religion was indeed very important. Each side saw the fight for its cause as being required and approved by God. The Parliamentarian leader Cromwell saw himself as building ‘God’s army’, while the royalists followed the doctrine of the divine right of kings.
But it’s fundamentally misleading to stop there. Marxists always avoid taking the religious language of leaders and history at face value and leaving things at that. It’s necessary to dig deeper and look at the objective forces which explain the way people see the world around them.
The revolution took on a religious character because religious ideas were fundamental to the way everybody understood the world at that time, so it was inevitable that class struggle would be expressed in a religious form. Religious ideas were the language through which different classes articulated and expressed their interests.
Religion and the state were, at this time, so closely bound together that they weren’t understood as separate things. The Church did more than just preach; it was a central pillar of the feudal state. Bishops and priests weren’t just Bible men – they were powerful landowners and state officials who controlled the flow of information, shaping how people felt, thought and believed.
In those conditions, ideas about how to run the Church were, by extension, ideas about how to run society. As such, different class interests tended to find their way to their own view of Church and state.
The aristocracy found their natural home in the Anglican Church and particularly high-church Anglicanism, which placed great emphasis on strict hierarchy and ritual. It wasn’t for no reason that this was often considered an English variant of Catholicism, as the Catholic Church played a central role on the continent as a prop of feudalism. As Engels said:
“It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully one-third of the soil of the Catholic world”. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
The rising capitalist class, likewise, found its main expression in the Presbyterian movement, which opposed episcopacy and favoured church governance by elected elders, primarily drawn from the urban merchant classes and men of wealth.
Although more democratic than the aristocracy’s state Church, it still reflected the perspective of men of property, who generally possessed conservative instincts and, for the large part, came to abandon the parliamentary cause and sided with the king as the revolution unfolded.
The middle classes in English society, the ‘middle sort’ who were poorer than the elite but richer than the peasants and labourers, found their main home among the Independents. Their ‘middle’ position in English society found its expression in a form of religion which emphasised simple living, thrift and hard work over aristocratic luxury. The Independents emphasised the independence of local churches from state interference, with the most radical wing – the ‘root-and-branch men’ – calling for the total abolition of the state Church. These people of moderate wealth provided the main source of energy for the revolution.
The New Model Army
And when the Presbyterian bourgeoisie largely fled from the Parliamentarian cause, it fell to the ‘middle sort’, led by Cromwell, to advance the struggle against the king. The base of Parliament’s New Model Army was largely made up of the radical ‘root-and-branch’ men who understood the fight not just as a war for Parliament, but for a fundamentally transformed society.
The army’s strength – and the reason it ultimately won the war – came from the conviction of its rank-and-file soldiers. Unlike the king’s forces, which were made up of peasant conscripts and landed gentry, the typical New Model Army soldier was a blacksmith, a farmer, carpenter or weaver, and its structures broke with the previous feudal model of warfare. Soldiers were promoted on the basis of merit rather than social status – as Cromwell famously remarked during the war: “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than what you call a gentleman who is nothing else”.
Rise of the Levellers
By drawing the lower orders together in a common organisation, a new democratic ferment developed in the army. Regiments held open discussions on religion and politics and elected their own representatives – ‘agitators’ – to negotiate and present demands to the army command.
This revolutionary mood took political shape with the emergence of the Leveller movement, which organised not just in the army but through the towns and cities as well. Apprentices and artisans, many of them women, built Leveller clubs around the City of London. Leveller newspapers and petitions sprung up calling for the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, for a democratic republic, and for a radical expansion of voting rights.
This ferment also gave rise to some of the first modern socialist ideas in history. A small splinter of the Levellers, who called themselves the ‘True Levellers’ (more commonly known as the Diggers), agitated for a form of rural socialism based on the common ownership of land, which they attempted to put into practice at St George’s Hill outside London in 1649.
These revolutionary left-wing views were certainly not accepted by Cromwell and the other generals of the New Model Army, who were nicknamed the “Grandees” for their relative conservatism. At the famous Putney Debates of 1647, a Leveller colonel in the New Model Army, Thomas Rainsborough, debated with Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton over radical reforms, including universal male suffrage, that the Grandees were unwilling to accept.
This reflected a period of dual power opening up, where two contending forces – Cromwell’s Parliament and the agitators of the army – were vying over the course of the revolution. A third force was the conciliators in Parliament, who were desperate to find a peace deal with the monarchy and secure the return of the king. Cromwell’s intervention finally settled this with repression.
Role of Cromwell
When the Leveller soldiers mutinied in May of that year, their movement was snuffed out by repression and its leaders jailed. The remaining conciliators in Parliament who were against the trial of Charles I were likewise driven out of Parliament and arrested under the orders of the army.
The decisive moment which symbolised the final defeat of the aristocracy came when Charles I was finally beheaded in Whitehall in January 1649. The political significance of this became clearer not long after, when England was declared a republic by Parliament and the people to be “under God, the original of all just power”.
Gallons of ink have been spilt trying to explain why Cromwell, who had opposed Charles’ execution until the last moment, ultimately decided it was necessary. Though the ‘subjective factor’ in history – the role of individuals – can’t be discounted, Engels summed it up best by pointing to the role of the Levellers:
“Had it not been for the yeomanry and for the plebeian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further”. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
With the counter-revolution defeated and the Levellers out of the way, Cromwell’s republican regime was consolidated. The English Revolution had been one of the most democratic events in English history, but the fundamental character of it as a bourgeois revolution meant the regime which rose from it retreated from the democratic ambitions of the masses. And that was for an important reason: Cromwell’s regime was instrumental in laying the foundations for British capitalism.
His brutal colonial occupations of Ireland and Jamaica, the expansion of English naval power, along with the growth of the transatlantic slave trade – all these were fundamental for the growth and consolidation of the capitalist class at home. Feudal barriers to capitalist development were largely broken up, and land held by the nobility was largely confiscated for sale on the commercial market.
Cromwell’s rule only lasted for a relatively short period of time. After his death in 1658, within two years the royalists had been welcomed back into Parliament. As punishment from the afterlife, the new regime sentenced him to death for a second time, and he was dug up, hanged and beheaded for good measure as a symbol of the restoration of monarchy. By 1660, Charles II – son of the beheaded king – was back on the throne.
But the changes brought by the revolution were so drastic that even after this change in political regime, the clock couldn’t be turned back to feudalism. The political form of the monarchy sat on a new economic foundation.
Despite what we’re told, the key lesson of 1640–1660 is that a rising class can only take power and transform society through social revolution. Just as the king, court and nobility didn’t willingly give up power to the bourgeoisie, the capitalists today won’t voluntarily give up theirs to the working class. The unfinished tasks of the English Revolution – abolition of the monarchy and House of Lords, separation of Church and state, and real democracy for the majority – must fall to the working-class movement, armed with revolutionary socialist ideas.
