On the 7th of May 1659 the Protector, Richard Cromwell, was defenestrated by an English army that then went about setting up a parliament more to its liking. By 11th of October, that same parliament was giving the army the finger by voting to limit the authority it claimed in the name of God. In response, the republican political theorist Algernon Sidney lamented that circumstances had “put them upon soe contrary a course destructive unto themselves and dangerous to our Long defended cause”. Indeed, it was this conflict that wound up killing that cause. Between them, parliament and army were two millstones that ground the English Republic to a flour for other political players to bake into a royal cake. But, as well as detailing this conflict, Henry Reece’s The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic points out the way stations whereby British history could have swerved the Restoration. England’s republican experiment nearly succeeded.
Summaries of the period can be misleading as any omission seems to leave out something crucial; but to do justice to Reece’s narrative, I’ll make the attempt. The parliament elected after Richard Cromwell assumed leadership of the Protectorate on 4th of September 1658 was larger and more diverse than what had preceded it. But despite the country finding itself in a financial predicament, especially with the army’s pay being months in arrears, parliament busied itself with constitutional matters and didn’t look to immediate concerns. The army, by this point used to considering itself at least semi-autonomous of civilian rule, eventually dissolved parliament and restored the smaller Rump parliament; but when the Rump also came to clash with the army, it too fell foul of its proclivity for coups and England came to be governed by its armed forces.
Not very many people were content with the arrangement, least of all the army’s commander in Scotland, General George Monck; he marched south to London and essentially restored the Rump parliament. But this only put England back on the same troubled ground as before. To remedy matters, a larger parliament seemed necessary; but Monck restored, not Richard Cromwell’s parliament, but the Long Parliament, which had not sat since 1648. Perhaps unavoidably, this group of MPs did what they had been banished from Westminster for attempting: coming to an accord with a Stuart. The monarchy was eventually restored on the 8th of May 1660 with Charles II proclaimed king.
But what part of this indicates that England’s republic could have survived the seventeenth century? Henry Reece argues that the root of the republic’s failure was parliament’s intransigence with the army. Had parliament simply voted in the tax increase to pay its wages and resisted arrogating to itself the power to grant commissions, the army would have had little cause to act how it did. Parliament had borne a grudge against the army since for its treatment under Oliver Cromwell, and one may argue that this grudge was too big to drop; but coming to an accord does not seem to have been impossible and was ultimately in most of the political nation’s interest. When the decision came to restore the monarchy, Reece points out that this was not done out of love for the crown, but simply to come to a settlement that would stop the political chaos.
It is the extreme contingency of the Restoration that should be emphasised in the above. Not only does Reece convincingly suggest alternative choices that the Republic’s leadership could have made, he goes as far as asserting the near total importance of the agency of politicians and officers over and against the force of circumstances. For Reece, the inability to reach a settlement can be laid at the door of “the shortcomings of politicians” rather than any “structural weakness in the body politic”. For him, “the determinist assumptions about the period after Oliver Cromwell’s death need to be discarded”. Royalism is not an innate part of the English (or British) national character. As with one notable and recent near miss, things need only have been turned by an inch and we would be worlds apart from our current reality.
But before moving on perhaps it’s incumbent on an author in a journal of such Hegelian pedigree as Sublation to consider Reece’s stance on these “determinist assumptions”. I don’t think it’s obvious from his narrative that “structural weaknesses” were absent from the fabric of the English Republic. Reece himself identifies the politicisation of the New Model Army as a uniquely English feature, and even describes the conflict that arose between its officers and the Lord General as “intrinsic”. How to discern a more than semantic difference between “structural” and “intrinsic” eludes me. The army’s political significance appears to be what drove its belief that it needn’t necessarily be beholden to the civilian authority (i.e. parliament); given that this significance was the result of Cromwell’s using the army for political ends, I should say its causes were “structural” as much as anything that can be labelled so.
We might consider the issue of legitimacy under the same light. If a sitting parliament focussed on constitutional questions rather than the immediate issue of how it was going to pay its army, we might ponder why that parliament chose to do that rather than satisfy thegold-hungry men outside with the guns and swords. Once we do that, it seems that the very lack of “settlement” that dogged the republic starts looking very much like a structural (or “intrinsic”) issue. But, but, but: of course, Reece is right to assume that neither of these problems necessarily doomed kingless rule. He convincingly demonstrates what could have gone differently. But who argues otherwise? I fear the main weakness in the book is this muddle between structural issues and human agency that seems to rest on a straw man “determinist”. I doubt any historian takes the opposite, vulgar determinist view that the Restoration was as certain as 2 + 2 = 4.
Then again, perhaps Reece’s attack on determinism isn’t confined to the professional historian. In his defence, it’s the popular story of the Restoration that comes coloured with more than a tinge of necessity. Thanks to the inevitable myth-making that emerged from this period, the average Briton’s understanding of the Republic is that it was doomed the moment the Puritans banned Christmas. Or something. Beyond this, the myth of “Oak Apple Day” is the story not only of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy but of “Merrie England” also. When we read Reece’s injunction not to read the events of 1658-60 in light of the what we know followed, we might say that he isn’t only addressing dubious historiography but that very same myth.
In the cases of many, that myth making emerged as a means of political (as well as bodily) survival. This was most obviously the case with the protagonist of the closing pages of Reece’s narrative: General George Monck. Although his coup was the decisive factor in the monarchy’s eventual return, his “hagiographers” found it prudent to put about the “polite and necessary fiction” that his intention had always been service to the Stuarts. In truth, even he appears to have been working until very late in the day to find a republican solution to England’s deadlock. Urged by Devonshire gentry to restore the excluded MPs (who would likely invite Charles Stuart back, as did eventually happen), he refused. In Reece’s words:
The form of government most able to comprehend and protect the interests that now existed in the nation was a republic. The return of the secluded members would ‘obstruct our peace and continue our War’ because so many of them ‘assert the Monarchical Interest, together with the abolition of all Lawes made since the seclusion’.
As welcome as the monarchy might have been to the people of England as a solution to their material problems, public statements such as this are proof that the Restoration was not the result of some mass conversion to royalism.
This prompts us to wonder what happened to all this republicanism after 1660, but we need only look less than thirty years after the end of Reece’s narrative to find an answer. Despite the commonly held view that the Restoration was not a new beginning, but a resumption of traditional government that (with an expanded franchise and altered upper house) continues to this day, the revolution of 1688 marks the real end point of the seventeenth century’s constitutional fighting. The forces that deposed James II for William III cemented parliamentary sovereignty and Britain’s status as a constitutional monarchy. Though these terms are endlessly debated, one conclusion is certain: the dispute between crown and parliament ended with victory unquestionably on the side of the latter.
I would go further and add that for “constitutional monarchy” one should read “crowned republic”, and that our settlement in this direction has a lot to do with the country having once been an un-crowned republic. Thus, the monarchy owes its survival to the present thanks a swift defanging in 1688, which in turn relied on the same bedrock of scepticism towards royalty that kept the Stuarts in exile for nine years. In short, Charles III has his crown because Charles I lost a head to put one on. The High Tory view of the British Constitution as an organic artefact, in accord with unvarying principles, was never right; the constitution was demonstrably shaped by violent trespasses upon authority.
Reece ends his book on a similar point: “the transition from republic to monarchy rested on the foundation of two military coups”, he says, pricking the notion of “the essentially consensual nature of (English) political history”. Whether the country lurched towards monarchy or republic, armed force was its perennial agent. The relative peace that Great Britain has enjoyed since the end if the seventeenth century is proof of the motto of the Cromwellian Protectorate: pax quaeritur bello (peace is obtained through war).
Clouding Reece’s last pages are scenes of Albion seemingly outdoing herself in perfidy as he narrates the various attempts politicians, officers and courtiers made to appear amenable to the new king. While it seems unlikely that the transition from republic to monarchy could have been done without some recanting, “some were so shameless and brazen that they attracted scorn”. He cites the example of Luke Robinson MP; a parliamentarian throughout the years of republican rule, he had once denounced Charles Stuart “as a ‘declared traitor to this Commonwealth'”, but in 1660 we find him lachrymosely delivering a speech of contrition to his new lord.
But some rays do shine undimmed. “Algernon Sidney’s high-minded choice of voluntary exile”, serves as a reminder of the very real virtue and idealism punctuating the Good Old Cause. He did return to England in 1677, but rather than seeking favour he continued in his determination to be rid of a regime he despised. Eventually he would be executed for the attempted assassination of Charles II and the future James II, an act arguably vindicated by the latter’s dethronement.
His writings on liberty became the intellectual drivers of the Glorious and American revolutions, and alongside those of the other republican writers of Reece’s narrative (men like John Milton, James Harrington, and Marchamont Nedham) they form the tradition of neo-republican liberty Quentin Skinner identified in his “Liberty before Liberalism”. To us on the other side of the industrial revolution from Algernon Sidney, his strictures against arbitrary rule become the starting point for powerful critiques of wage slavery and the influence of money. The Anglo-American Left would do well to retrieve this concept of liberty to anchor its own politics. In the case of Britain at least, Henry Reece’s narrative is a reminder that this retrieval amounts to discovering something we have forgotten about ourselves.