By A.L.Morton
FOREWORD - By Harry Pollitt
TODAY, the Communist Party celebrates one of the greatest events in
Britain's revolutionary history, the three hundredth anniversary of the
English Revolution. When the growing capitalist class, the poor farmers
and craftsmen, led by Oliver Cromwell, shattered the system of
feudalism, and executed King Charles I in the process, reigning monarchs
and ruling nobilities everywhere saw the pattern of future history
unfolding. The name of Cromwell was reviled, then, as much as Stalin's
is today, by the ruling powers of the old and doomed order of society.
The English Revolution is "great", because it broke the barriers to
man's advance. It allowed the capitalist class to open the road leading
to modern large-scale industry. It permitted science to serve the needs
of the new, capitalist society. And, because of these developments, it
provided the basis on which, for the first time, a new class, the
working class, began to grow, to organise and itself to challenge the
prevailing system of society. Capitalism, at first progressive, in so
far as it led the way for technical advance, developed to the point
limited by its own structure. It became, as feudalism was before it, a
barrier to the further advance of man. It ceased to serve a useful
purpose. It had built up enormous productive forces, but was incapable
of providing the majority of the people with a decent standard of life.
Throughout the world, the working class, with the Communist Party at its
head, now goes forward to put an end to capitalism and to build
Socialism. The English Revolution set this train of historic events in
motion. That is why our Party is proud to honour its memory.
The Story of The English Revolution
THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO
When the executioner, holding the head of Charles Stuart high above the
crowds thronging Whitehall, pronounced the ancient formula: "Behold the
head of a traitor!", a cold shudder ran down the spine of every
constituted authority in Europe. That was on January 30, 1649--three
hundred Years ago--but they have never been properly warm since. For
that moment marked one of the turning points of history, the definite
and unqualified emergence into full daylight of a revolution whose
consequences are still by no means exhausted.
It was not merely that a king had been put to death by his subjects:
that was not an uncommon happening. In England, too, kings had been
deposed and afterwards murdered, as were Richard II, Edward II, and
Henry VI. But here was a new class coming to the front, demanding
political power and challenging in the most decisive and symbolic way an
order of society and a conception of authority that had existed
unchallenged for a thousand years.
It was feudal England that perished that day on the scaffold in the
person of England's last feudal king. For the monarchy had a double
character: practically the king was the effective head of the feudal
State. He commanded its armies, he presided at its Council, the judges
and officers of State were his servants. But besides all this he was in a
sense a sacred figure. " Such a divinity doth hedge a king ",
Shakespeare had written only half a century earlier. In 1649 the king
still retained some of his divinity, a relic of times far older even
than feudalism, when the king was actually both god and man. So Charles,
in his last words, scornfully declared: "A subject and a sovereign are
clean different things." Yet the very act of his execution was already
making his belief a thing of the past. For the new class, the merchants
and manufacturers and gentry, with the yeoman farmers and craftsmen
behind them, stood for a quite different conception.
They declared that the people were the source of all power and that
kings and governments existed only for and by the consent of the people.
It is true that for many of them "the people" meant the people with
property: that is a point to which I shall have to return later. My
present point is that by putting Charles on ,trial and executing him by
due process of law the new ruling class overturned all the old
conceptions of kingship and put in its place the revolutionary idea that
the king is merely a part of the apparatus of the State, who may be
tolerated or dispensed with according to their needs and wishes. In 1649
the king was inconvenient to this class, and monarchy was abolished. In
1660, when it appeared likely to be a useful weapon against the danger
of a rising of the masses, it was restored -- on conditions.
In 1688 the person of the monarch was changed by Act of Parliament and
still more stringent conditions were imposed. And today, a corrupt and
decaying capitalism finds it convenient, while not, of course, allowing
the monarchy any real power; to glorify and refurbish it, to give it a
new halo of bourgeois sanctity, in order that it may act as a rallying
point for reaction and a bulwark against the rising power of the working
class. In this the bourgeoisie denies its own revolutionary past, but
it cannot undo it. They themselves destroyed the sanctity of kings and
it cannot be recreated. Meanwhile the work they began remains to be
finished by others. The object of this pamphlet is to tell the story of
the English Revolution, to show what was done and how, and to indicate
something of what, still remains to do.
2. HOW THE CHANGE BEGAN
The English Revolution neither began nor ended on that January
afternoon, and to understand it we have to go back quite a distance into
the past. England in the Middle Ages was a feudal country -- that is to
say, a country where the land was held by lords and worked by serfs,
where, in fact, the serf-lord relationship was the basis of society. And
this society had naturally a corresponding form of State machine, with
the lords as the ruling class and the king at the head as the greatest
of all feudal magnates.
Gradually, as towns grew new classes came into the picture, craftsmen,
traders, industrialists. And with the growth of industry, especially of
the cloth industry, many of the landowners changed, too. Instead of
living on their estates in the old feudal way, surrounded by their
retainers and serfs, they began to grow wool, corn, and other things for
sale, and to employ wage labourers. All these classes in town or
country, depending on money and on producing goods for sale, naturally
had quite different interests from the lords whose wealth and power came
from the ownership of feudal estates. As the new classes grew, feudal
society began to decay, yet the new and the old existed for a time side
by side, And the rising bourgeoisie, as we can call them conveniently,
supported, and were supported by, the power of the monarchy.
This was natural so long as they were too weak to aim at power for
themselves. But as feudal society decayed the feudal monarchy changed
also, and, instead of protecting the rising bourgeoisie, began to be a
burden upon them, barring their advance. While they in turn, growing
stronger, became impatient of restraints they had previously tolerated. A
revolutionary crisis developed, in short, because the rulers could not
continue to rule in the old way and the ruled were unwilling to go on
being ruled in the old way. This was the point reached early in the
seventeenth century when the Stuarts came to the throne.
3. THE REVOLUTION STARTS
The issue on which the struggle turned was that of property. The
"sacred" feudal monarchy claimed the right to dispose of the property as
well as the lives of its subjects. The bourgeoisie, to whom money was
even dearer than life, stood firm for their absolute right to property.
This meant in practice that they should only pay such taxes as were
agreed to by Parliament--and that more and more on the condition that
government policy followed lines which they approved. At the same time
they were demanding the stopping of all sorts of practices by which the
king used feudal laws in new ways so as to skim off for himself and his
nobles and courtiers the cream of the profits which the merchants and
manufacturers were now making. James I and Charles I after him tried by
every sort of means to avoid giving way to these demands, and to govern
in the old feudal way against the wishes of the property-owning classes.
For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, Charles managed without a
Parliament. Then a rebellion in Scotland forced him to call one, and the
famous Long Parliament began its sittings in November of that year. It
is at this point that the active stage of the English Revolution began.
The Long Parliament in its first year swept away the machinery by which
the king had governed, executed his principal Minister, attacked the
State church and abolished many of the feudal restrictions from which
they had suffered. But it must be noted that what was abolished was what
oppressed mainly the well-to-do: the demands of the masses for the
abolition of tithes and of the game laws, or for greater protection for
copy-hold tenants or for the stopping of enclosures, went unsatisfied.
For over a year Charles gave way sullenly, step by step. Then, after a
futile attempt to overawe Parliament by armed force, he left London and
both sides began to prepare for war. In the war that followed, though it
seemed on the surface to be fought largely over religion, and though
political parties often took a religious disguise, the real class and
revolutionary nature of the struggle is easily apparent. On the side of
the king was the bulk of the older nobility, especially from the still
warlike North and from Wales and Western England. These nobles with
their servants and tenants and many of the more old-fashioned gentry
formed an army still essentially feudal.
The forces on the other side were more complex. No revolution in history
has ever been made by one class alone, but always by an alliance of
classes. These classes begin with a common immediate aim, but as the
struggle develops their interests tend to conflict and their ways to
diverge. It is this fact which gives to all revolutions, and especially
to all bourgeois revolutions, the peculiar character of their internal
development. So here the progressive gentry and the merchants and
manufacturers of the towns could not long have withstood the forces of
the king without drawing behind them the mass of the radical artisans,
small traders, and yeomen farmers. And to do this they had to fight
under the slogans of freedom and democracy. In this way the keenest,
most active and most politically awakened sections of the population
were drawn headlong into the struggle against the monarchy.
At first the king, whose men were better trained and more accustomed to
war, had the better of the fighting. His victory seemed certain and the
richer gentry and the great London merchants who formed the right wing
of the Parliamentary alliance (they are known to history as the
Presbyterians) began to look for a way out. They did not want to defeat
the king, only to clip his wings a little and find an early compromise.
Against them the Left (the "Independents"), led by Cromwell, stood for
an all-out war. And Cromwell and his friends saw that for this a real
People's Army was needed. So was born the famous New Model Army which
was able to set against the daring and experience of the king's soldiers
a disciplined resolution and a deep political conviction that soon made
them invincible.
For the first time England saw an army where a poor man ("a plain
russet-coated captain") could rise to a positions of command, and where
there was, a thing previously undreamt of, open political and religious
discussion with all ranks meeting on equal terms. This army democracy
reached its highest point when the rank and file of each regiment
appointed delegates, Agitators as they were called, who sat alongside
the higher offcers to form the Council of the Army. It was at once the
best disciplined land most democratic army that England had ever known.
It is not surprising that this New Model smashed the Royalists at
Marston Moor, Naseby, and other battles till, by the spring of 1636, the
war was over and Charles himself forced to surrender. From this point
the Revolution entered a new stage.
4. THE LEVELLERS APPEAR
So far there had been two parties--the Presbyterians representing the
rich landowners and merchants; and the Independents, in whose ranks were
included the more progressive gentry and industrialists as well as the
increasingly revolutionary "lower orders", the farmers and the
craftsmen.
The issue between them had been: How should the war be fought? Now that
the war was over a new issue appeared: What kind of a peace should be
made and how far was the revolution to go? This is a development of a
kind we find it rather easy to understand today.
On this issue a new political party of the left appeared--the Levellers,
standing for the exploited small producers and rapidly coming into
conflict with the gentlemen Independents or 'Grandees', the group who
gathered around Cromwell. The Levellers demanded a wide democratic
franchise, full religious toleration, democratic control of the army,
abolition of tithes and of all taxes except one on property, limitation
of the monopoly rights enjoyed by the great London companies and
protection for small farmers and tradesmen. They embodied these demands
in a programme called The Agreement of the People, which they demanded
should be adopted as a basis for a new constitution.
For three years there was a bitter and complicated struggle. The
Presbyterians, still strong in Parliament, wished to prevent any further
revolutionary advance because they could see already that their
property rights were beginning to be in danger. The Levellers tried to
push forward to full political democracy as a means of improving the
conditions of the masses. The Grandees, between the two, had certainly
no sympathy with Leveller aims but frequently needed their support,
especially since the soldiers of many of the best regiments were
Levellers almost to a man. Charles, who though a prisoner remained king
and still hoped to be able to regain power, made every possible use of
this conflict to play off one party against the others.
By 1648 he had succeeded in winning over the Presbyterians, playing on
their fears of the Levellers and the Army, and was able to begin a new
war in alliance with the Scots. In this crisis the gap between the
Levellers and the Grandees, who in the autumn of 1647 had been disputing
bitterly over the question of democracy, was temporarily closed, and
the whole Army turned in a cool fury to meet this treacherous attack.
In Kent, Essex, and Wales Royalist risings were crushed, and in a swift
and brilliant campaign Cromwell smashed a Royalist Army which had
invaded the North of England from Scotland. Victorious, the soldiers
returned to London in no mood for trifling, though many believed that
the death of Charles might still be avoided. Charles himself quickly
destroyed that belief. He had learnt nothing from his second defeat but
began his intrigues all over again. This was more than the Army could
endure.
The Presbyterians in Parliament, however, were still preparing to
compromise. By what is known as Pride's Purge they were expelled, and
the remaining Independents passed a resolution declaring: "That the
people are, under God, the original of all just power; that the Commons
of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing
the people, have the supreme power in this nation; that whatsoever is
enacted or declared law by the Commons in Parliament assembled, hath the
force of law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby,
although the consent of the King, or House of Peers be not had there
unto." With the Army leaders they began to prepare for the trial of
Charles as a traitor to and an enemy of the people of England. After his
execution the monarchy and the House of Lords were formally abolished
and England was proclaimed a republic or Commonwealth.
5. THE FIGHT OF THE LEVELLERS
Here, thought Cromwell and his fellow Grandees, the Revolution should
end. What was now needed was a firm, stable Government on " sound" lines
to restore normal conditions and to protect property. But for the
Levellers the execution of Charles was only a beginning.
In the last months of 1648, needing all the allies they could find
against the Royalists and Presbyterians, the Grandees had agreed in
principle to accept The Agreement of the People with some small changes.
Now they felt strong enough to go back on their undertaking. A new
body, the Council of State, dominated by the Army officers, was set up,
and to this all effective power passed.
The Levellers began an intensive campaign for their policy. In the Army
they were still strong and in London they had the enthusiastic support
of the lower classes. Elsewhere in the country their influence was not
nearly so great. On March 20 the Leveller leaders, Lilburne, Overton,
Walwyn, and Prince were arrested in their houses at daybreak and dragged
before the Council of State. They refused to recognise its legal right
to examine them and were sent to the Tower without any definite charge
being laid against them.
Widespread protests and riots in London were followed by mutinies in the
Army. Several regiments refused orders to go to Ireland. A regiment of
Dragoons mutinied in London and were only overpowered by superior force.
In May an even more serious rising took place. Several regiments
stationed at or near Salisbury mutinied and marched north to meet others
under a Captain Thompson. Some units were dispersed by Government
troops. The rest met at Burford on the Upper Thames. Here they were
surprised at night by a strong force commanded by Cromwell in person,
and scattered or surrendered. Two hundred under Thompson held together,
rode north, and captured Northampton. Here they were surrounded by
overwhelming forces and had to surrender. Thompson alone cut his way out
and continued for several days a single-handed struggle that ended only
with his death.
The defeat of the Levellers in the Army put an end to any hopes they
might have had of ultimate success. In London they were still strong
enough to secure the acquittal and release of Lilburne when he was
brought to trial in October, but the tide was flowing against them. Nor
was their backing in the country wide enough to make them dangerous once
the movement in the Army had been crushed.
The final blow came when the regiments most affected were sent to
Ireland to suppress the rebellion there. It was by diverting their
energy into a colonial war that the struggle for democracy at home was
finally defeated. This is certainly one of the instances Marx had in
mind when he declared that no nation which oppresses others can itself
be free.
A word should perhaps be said about Cromwell's part in all this. To the
Levellers he seemed a mere betrayer: today we can see that things were
not so simple as that. True, he hated and feared the Levellers because
they threatened the interests of his class. "I was by birth a
gentleman", he declared. "You must cut these people in pieces or they
will cut you in pieces." But it is also true, as he proved during the
Civil War and many times afterwards, that he was sincerely concerned for
the victory of the revolution up to the point which he thought it could
safely go. And there is no doubt that he believed that the Levellers,
by trying to push it beyond that point, were creating the danger of a
counter-revolution and the destruction of the Commonwealth. In this he
was probably correct.
The tragedy of the Levellers is that though their objectives were those
of the future they had to base themselves on a class - the small
independent producers - that already belonged to the past. There was not
at that time in England a developed working class which alone could
have afforded a firm basis for a fully democratic revolution such as
they desired.
6. THE END OF THE STORY...
The tragedy of the Levellers was part of the tragedy of the Revolution,
as a whole. Though their defeat was inevitable it also involved the
ultimate defeat of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy.
For without their courage and enthusiasm the new regime could not
survive long enough to win the support of the majority of the nation.
It did last for another ten years. Cromwell revealed an extraordinary
talent for political manoeuvre, for the delicate balancing of opposed
class forces one against another. This and the continued loyalty of the
Army, with the confusion and disunity of the opposition, were sufficient
to maintain the Commonwealth in being so long as he lived. But he was
never able to give it a firm and permanent political basis. He is often
described as a dictator, but this is untrue. He always hoped to give the
Commonwealth a regular Constitution and made repeated attempts to do
this. They failed because of narrow class foundations on which it
rested. On his death the whole unstable structure collapsed.
Faced with growing disorder which threatened a new revolution from
below, the upper classes bethought them of a king whose coming might
ensure social stability and protect them from this worst of all dangers.
So the Restoration of 1660 was the work of a new alliance of all the
propertied classes; the old nobility, now very much weakened, as well as
the new money-making nobility and gentry, the merchants, and the
industrialists.
The Revolution in its first stage had destroyed feudalism and cut the
road for capitalism to advance to power: now the Restoration in its turn
helped to provide the conditions for a continuation of that advance. At
bottom it was a sequel rather than a reversal, and, though Charles II
was restored to the throne of his father, it was with very different
powers and at the head of a very different social order. The truth of
this was shown in 1688 when James II, not realising the nature of the
change that had taken place, tried to stage a counter-revolution. In a
very short time and without serious difficulty he was sent packing and a
new king, William III, was appointed by vote of Parliament, upon terms
that made it clear that he was the mere servant of the men of property.
From this time the way was clear for the Industrial Revolution and the
full development of capitalism as we know it today.
7. ... AND THE BEGINNING OF THE NEXT
On the face of it, it seems a gloomy story: so much heroism, so many
sacrifices, so much glory, and at the end of it - Capitalism. But that
is only one side of the picture. And much as we hate capitalism because
we have suffered from its cruelty and oppressions, we have to remember
that nevertheless capitalism is an advance on feudalism. It is a higher
form of social life, it gives freedoms and opportunities that, however
limited, were previously unknown.
If the Revolution in the Seventeenth Century had failed, England's
development would have been set back for generations, perhaps centuries.
The country would have become cramped and stagnant, with every economic
advance held back, perhaps rather as Spain was decaying at this very
time. As it was, the Revolution not only set England on the path of
rapid economic advance, it also helped to shake the power of the old
regime throughout the world. Without it the American Revolution could
hardly have taken the shape it did, and its influence on the French
Revolution, though less direct, was scarcely less profound. Above all,
the victory of capitalism opened the path to Socialism, which could
never have developed directly from feudal society.
We have to understand that what happened three hundred years ago was not
a socialist revolution that failed but a capitalist revolution that
succeeded. It was by their very victory that the capitalists created the
working class and the conditions in which it in turn can advance to
victory. It is important to note also that even in the middle of the
bourgeois revolution Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, a group of
primitive Communists, worked out a conception of Socialism and a
criticism of the still immature capitalism of the time which we
recognise as a remarkably foresighted anticipation of the essentials of
our own Socialist conceptions.
Nor is this all. As I said earlier, the Revolution could not be carried
through without arousing the masses. For the first time in our history
great numbers of people took an active part in national politics, which
previously had been regarded as the preserve of a select few. The
bourgeoisie were forced to open the battle for democracy, and once that
battle was opened it, must continue to final victory, though democracy
becomes in the process something which they fail to recognise as
democracy at all, as we very well see today.
The Levellers were defeated, but they first introduced a new conception
into politics--the conception of democracy as the continuous activity of
the whole people. In doing so they made themselves the first of a
glorious' succession that has continued unbroken right down to our own
time: the masses who fought against "Popery and wooden shoes" at the
close of the seventeenth century, the Wilkesite Radicals, the English
and Scottish Jacobins, the Reformers of the age of Cobbett, the
Chartists, the early Socialists, and the Communists today all draw their
inspiration from their predecessors and ultimately from the Levellers.
And because they developed their democratic ideas in the middle of a
revolution they were broad, living ideas.
Democracy for them was not a mere counting of votes, it was the
all-round struggle for a better life. It was freedom in arms, the will
of the common people to stand together and fight for their rights. It is
assuredly no accident that the very heart and centre of this
revolutionary democracy lay in the rank and file of the New Model Army.
The Levellers could be defeated but what they stood for can never be
defeated and is today visibly approaching victory. Three hundred years
ago, then, the bourgeoisie began a revolution in England. It made real
and solid gains -- it cannot, I believe, be disputed that the condition
of the common man was appreciably better in the century after the
Revolution than it had been in the century before -- and if it only
partly succeeded this is because the bourgeoisie by its very nature as
an exploiting class can never finish the revolution it must begin. That
is our job.
We have, in Marx's words, "to win the battle for democracy ". And we
have to win it in opposition to that very class which began the battle
but which in its decline becomes increasingly reactionary and
parasitical. That is why the celebration of the Tercentenary of the
English Revolution is left to the Communist Party as the representative
of the working class. We celebrate it best by carrying its work forward
in our new conditions, and we help ourselves to do this by studying and
profiting from the splendid lessons given us in democracy by our
forefathers three hundred years ago.
First published by Farleigh Press 10/12/1948.
