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In 1838 the People's Charter called for "a vote for every man twenty-one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime." But what about women?

According to the autobiography of William Lovett , in a footnote no less, the leading Chartist wrote: 'I may state here that the first draft of the Bill, afterwards called the People's Charter, made provision for the suffrage of women, but as several members thought its adoption in the Bill might retard the suffrage of men, it was unfortunately left out'.

Women were no mere footnote to Chartism though. Between 1838 and 1852 there were just under one hundred Female Chartist Associations in England. Amongst these female-led groups was the Elland Female Radical Association, which was formed in March 1838 by Elizabeth Hanson, Mary Grassby and Susanna Fearnly. They agreed at their first meeting that:

"Females in all ages have been the best advocates for Liberty; for we give the first impulse in forming the infant mind; therefore, we deem it our duty, both as wives and mothers, to form a Female Association, in order to give and receive instruction in political knowledge, and to co-operate with our husbands and sons in their greatest work of regeneration ."

The Elland women, and many other female Chartists, had been driven to this cause in part by their opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. This established the workhouse as the only option for many seeking aid, with its enforced separation of wife from husband and children from parents.

According to a report in the Chartist newspaper, The Northern Star, Hanson said that the food provided to the poor in the workhouse 'was calculated not to do them good, but to hasten them into eternity, and prepare subjects for the dissecting-knife'. The 'dissecting-knife' was a reference to the 1832 Anatomy Act which gave anatomy schools and doctors free access to corpses that were unclaimed after death, including those in the workhouses.

The Poor Law also denied relief to unmarried mothers, something the women of Elland singled out in an address to the Queen : 'It is monstrously unjust to our daughters, particularly in the bastardy clauses, for it will of necessity drive them to commit suicide and child murder, which it has already done to an alarming extent'.

The women of Elland did more than just petition the Queen though. In March 1838 they ambushed Poor Law Guardians as they left a workhouse and 'treated them with a roll in the snow'. One 'stout portly man' was so alarmed that he tried to bribe the women 'with a gill of ale each' if they let him escape.' They refused.

The activities of the women of Elland were praised by the wider Chartist community. One meeting in Barnsley, so The Northern Star reported, ended with a cheer for 'the patriotic women of Elland, who set such a noble example of resistance to the infernal New Poor Law'.

Another women who made frequent appearances in the columns of The Northern Star was Susanna Inge, founding member and secretary of the Female Charter Association of the City of London. In July 1842, Inge appealed 'To the women of England' to mobilise for the good of their sex and their country. She wrote of the poor treatment of women at the hands of men, who treat women 'as an inferior creature, a slave to his pleasures and his will, and not as an equal and companion'.

'Shall we sit still and tamely submit to a slavery against which our cheeks glow with shame and our hearts burn with indignation? No! Rouse yourselves to a sense of your merits. Assist those men who will, nay, who do, place women on equality with themselves in gaining their rights, and yours will be gained also.'

While Inge was the Secretary of the Female Chartist Association, our final female Chartist was described by The Morning Post as one of its 'brightest ornaments'. 'Miss Walker might say "I got up one night and myself famous."' So observed a press report in October 1842.

Little is known about Mary Ann Walker, except that she achieved a high level of fame in late 1842, before disappearing from the historical record by mid-1843. At a meeting held in London to establish a Female Chartist Association in October 1842, Walker's passionate defence of women's right to have a role in politics even caught the attention of The Times, much to her own amazement. A flurry of public attention followed, with reporting that 'we are disposed to believe that female Chartism and Walker may be regarded as synonymous'. Her fame was such that in August 1843 attendees of Shakespeare's were hoaxed into believing that Walker would be performing, only to discover to their dismay that they had been hoodwinked.

Importantly though Walker spoke out not just for women's rights. Her speeches attacked economic inequality, corruption, the wealth of the aristocracy and even the £100,000 of taxpayer's money spent every year on the Queen Dowager. How, Walker asked, did 'an old lady' spend it? This raises an important point to end on. Women political activists are often caricatured as being solely concerned with women's rights. The truth was that these women challenged injustices in every aspect of society and were vocal campaigners for the rights of citizens.

Researched and written by Dr Katie Carpenter

Royal Holloway, Department of History.

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Female Chartists: from the 'Women of Elland' to Mary Ann Walker

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In 1838 the People's Charter called for "a vote for every man twenty-one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime." But what about women?

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National Archive collection of primary sources

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Use our timeline to discover more about the history of the British trade union movement. Click on a time period to find out more…

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Stephen Lawrence: a murder that changed the nation

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Stephen Lawrence: a murder that changed the nation

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Presented by Stuart Lawrence, Stephen's younger brother.

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GCSE Citizenship: Stephen Lawrence: The murder that changed a nation

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A series of short films from a BBC documentary examining the murder of Stephen Lawrence that explore identity, diversity, institutional racism and justice.

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The Chartists were divided over how best to achieve the passing into law of the six points of The People's Charter. Some, such as William Lovett and other members of the London Working Men's Association, advocated the use of education and 'moral force' to achieve Parliamentary reform. Others, however, believed that 'physical force', to varying degrees, might be necessary. The most infamous event in the history of Chartism was the Newport Rising, which took place in Newport in Wales on 4 th November 1839.

A number of factors meant that both the Chartists and working classes in south Wales were particularly discontented at this time. The popular Chartist speaker and publisher of The Western Vindicator, Henry Vincent, had been arrested in May 1838 for making inflammatory speeches, and sentenced to 12 months in gaol. In addition, the Chartist petition that was presented to Parliament was rejected. Furthermore, many of the people of south Wales were living in poverty and the industrial areas had become the focus for a huge amount of public anger. In an attempt to avoid a revolt, the local Newport Chartist John Frost made speeches discouraging violence, but he did agree to join a protest march on Newport.

The exact purpose of the march remains unclear. This newspaper article suggests that the marchers' intention was to seize 'the whole of South Wales to erect a Chartist kingdom', but it is unlikely that this was the march's real objective. The marchers had planned to travel in three groups and meet at a location outside of Newport before marching together, but there were delays and this had given the town's authorities time to prepare. The Chartists grouped outside the Westgate Hotel, but when they tried to enter, soldiers were lying in wait and fired shots, killing 22 marchers and wounding many more. The remaining Chartists then retreated. The leading Chartists present, including John Frost, were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, but after protests from all over the country, the sentence was reduced to transportation.

This newspaper article, published a few days after the uprising, describes the events as they happened. It is clearly written from a strong anti-Chartist perspective, referring to them as 'deluded men' and praising the military for their 'cool and determined conduct'.

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The Chartists were divided over how best to achieve the passing into law of the six points of The People's Charter. Some, such as William Lovett and other members of the London Working Men's Association, advocated the use of education and 'moral force' to achieve Parliamentary reform.

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Tolpuddle Martyrs - Timelines.tv History of Britain A13

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Katherine Viner looks at the aftermath of The Peterloo Massacre

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Peterloo: The Massacre That Changed Britain - Episode 2 - the aftermath of Peterloo - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Katherine Viner charts the story of The Peterloo Massacre

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Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner charts the story of the infamous Peterloo Massacre. In Part 1 she looks at the build-up to the devastating events on August 16th 1819.

Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner charts the story of the infamous - a devastating event 200 years ago in Manchester, which would have a huge impact on how Britain was run.

Up to 80,000 people had gathered in an area that was then known as St Peter's Field in the heart of what is now city centre Manchester. Many had walked from as far afield as Bolton, Stockport and even from over the hills in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Their mission - to peacefully demand more democracy and representation in parliament.

There was tremendous unrest in working-class communities at the time. In the cotton trade, technology had started to replace what was largely a cottage industry with huge mills. Life was hard and poverty was widespread. Areas like Manchester had no direct representation in parliament. An alliance of middle and working class people united in a common effort to find ways of raising these issues with the Government.

In the meantime, the authorities, aware of what had happened in the French Revolution, were nervous the same thing could happen in Britain. And so any sign of revolt or rebellion, however peaceful, was quashed where possible.

On August 16th 1819, troops charged the crowds in St Peter's Field - 18 people lost their lives and around 700 were injured. Within days, the press were referring to it as The Peterloo Massacre, after the battle of Waterloo just four years earlier.

In this first of two programmes, Katharine meets descendants of people who were there that day. She examines the background and build-up and hears graphic accounts of the slaughter, death and injury. There are contributions from leading historians as well as dramatic reconstructions of real testimony from the time.

A Made in Manchester production for BBC Radio 4

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BBC Radio 4 - Peterloo: The Massacre That Changed Britain, Episode 1 - The build-up to Peterloo

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Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner charts the story of the infamous Peterloo Massacre. In Part 1 she looks at the build-up to the devastating events on August 16th 1819. Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner charts the story of the infamous - a devastating event 200 years ago in Manchester, which would have a huge impact on how Britain was run.

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Melvyn Bragg discusses The Peterloo Massacre

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Melvyn Bragg discusses The Peterloo Massacre

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Melvyn Bragg discusses The Peterloo Massacre on 16 August 1819, when British cavalry charged a vast crowd of protestors in Manchester.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, a defining moment of its age. In 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: 'I met Murder on the way He had a mask like Castlereagh Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him: All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew.' As Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh had successfully co-ordinated European opposition to Napoleon, but at home he had repressed the Reform movement, and popular opinion held him responsible for the Peterloo Massacre of peaceful demonstrators in 1819. Shelley's epic poem, The Mask of Anarchy, reflected the widespread public outrage and condemnation of the government's role in the massacre. Why did a peaceful and orderly meeting of men, women and children in St Peter's Field, Manchester turn into a blood bath? How were the stirrings of radicalism in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars dealt with by the British establishment? And what role did the Peterloo Massacre play in bringing about the Great Reform Act of 1832? With Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter; Sarah Richardson, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick; Clive Emsley, Professor of History at the Open University.

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BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Peterloo Massacre

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Melvyn Bragg discusses The Peterloo Massacre on 16 August 1819, when British cavalry charged a vast crowd of protestors in Manchester. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, a defining moment of its age.

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The minutes of the first meeting of the Labour Party | People's History Museum

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Timeline of Cromwell's contribution to democracy

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Timeline of Cromwell's contribution to democracy

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A meteoric rise to the top

Oliver Cromwell was a fanatical puritan who enforced the abolition of Christmas. He rose from relative obscurity as an MP to become one of the most controversial figures in British history.

Cromwell won the first civil war involving the whole of Britain and was the key figure in the execution of Charles I. Find out how a revolutionary who toppled a king, only to become a despot himself, paved the way for parliamentary democracy.

The man who could take Drogheda could take hell

Sir Arthur Aston, Royalist commander of Drogheda

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Was Oliver Cromwell the father of British democracy?

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Oliver Cromwell was a fanatical puritan who enforced the abolition of Christmas. He rose from relative obscurity as an MP to become one of the most controversial figures in British history. Cromwell won the first civil war involving the whole of Britain and was the key figure in the execution of Charles I.

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What were the Putney Debates? | English Civil War

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Who were the Diggers, Levellers and Ranters? | English Civil War

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How successful was the Commonwealth under Cromwell?

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How successful was the Commonwealth under Cromwell?

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Create a table of successes/failures using the article attached.

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Sections

The Commonwealth
The House of Commons now passed a series of new laws. They abolished the monarchy, on the grounds that it was "unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people" and the House of Lords as "it is useless and dangerous to the people of England". Lands owned by the royal family and the church were sold and the money was used to pay the parliamentary soldiers. People were no longer fined for not attending their local church. However, everyone was still expected to attend some form of religious worship on Sundays. The country was now declared to be a "Commonwealth and Free State" under the rule of Parliament, and the government was entrusted to a Council of State, under the provisional chairmanship of Oliver Cromwell. (4)

The Levellers wanted Parliament to pass reforms that would increase universal suffrage. Soldiers also continued to protest against the government. The most serious rebellion took place in London. Troops commanded by Colonel Edward Whalley were ordered from the capital to Essex. A group of soldiers led by Robert Lockyer, refused to go and barricaded themselves in The Bull Inn near Bishopsgate, a radical meeting place. A large number of troops were sent to the scene and the men were forced to surrender. The commander-in-chief, General Thomas Fairfax, ordered Lockyer to be executed.

Lockyer's funeral on Sunday 29th April, 1649, proved to be a dramatic reminder of the strength of the Leveller organization in London. "Starting from Smithfield in the afternoon, the procession wound slowly through the heart of the City, and then back to Moorfields for the interment in New Churchyard. Led by six trumpeters, about 4000 people reportedly accompanied the corpse. Many wore ribbons - black for mourning and sea-green to publicize their Leveller allegiance. A company of women brought up the rear, testimony to the active female involvement in the Leveller movement. If the reports can be believed there were more mourners for Trooper Lockyer than there had been for the martyred Colonel Thomas Rainsborough the previous autumn." (5)

John Lilburne

John Lilburne continued to campaign against the rule of Oliver Cromwell. According to a Royalist newspaper at the time: "He (Cromwell) and the Levellers can as soon combine as fire and water... The Levellers aim being at pure democracy.... and the design of Cromwell and his grandees for an oligarchy in the hands of himself." (6) Lilburne argued that Cromwell's government was mounting a propaganda campaign against the Levellers and to prevent them from replying their writings were censored: "To prevent the opportunity to lay open their treacheries and hypocrisies... the stop the press... They blast us with all the scandals and false reports their wit or malice could invent against us... By these arts are they now fastened in their powers." (7)

David Petegorsky, the author of Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (1940) has pointed out: "The Levellers clearly saw, that equality must replace privilege as the dominant theme of social relationships; for a State that is divided into rich and poor, or a system that excludes certain classes from privileges it confers on others, violates that equality to which every individual has a natural claim." (8)

In May 1649 another Leveller-inspired mutiny broke out at Salisbury. Led by Captain William Thompson, they were defeated by a large army at Burford led by Major Thomas Harrison. Thompson escaped only to be killed a few days later near the Diggers community at Wellingborough. After being imprisoned in Burford Church with the other mutineers, three other leaders, "Private Church, Corporal Perkins and Cornett Thompson", were executed by Cromwell's forces in the churchyard. (9) John Lilburne responded by describing Harrison as a "hypocrite" for his initial encouragement of the Levellers. (10)

Ireland
Oliver Cromwell was asked by Parliament to take control of Ireland. The country had caused serious problems for English generals in the past so Cromwell was careful to make painstaking preparations before he left. Cromwell ensured that the wage arrears of his army were paid, and that he was guaranteed sufficient financial provision by parliament. On 15th August 1649, Cromwell arrived in Ireland and took control of an army of 12,000 men. (11) Cromwell made a speech to the Irish people the following day: "God has brought us here in safety... We are here to carry on the great work against the barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish... to propagate the Gospel of Christ and the establishment of truth... and to restore this nation to its former happiness and tranquillity." (12)

Cromwell, like nearly all Puritans "had been inflamed against the Irish Catholics by the true and false allegations of the atrocities which they had committed against English Protestants settlers during the Irish Catholic rebellion of 1641." (13) He wrote at the time that "all the world knows their barbarism". Even the philosopher, Francis Bacon, and the poet John Milton, who "believed passionately in liberty and human dignity", shared the view that "the Irish were culturally so inferior that their subordination was natural and necessary." (14)

Cromwell's first action on reaching Ireland was to forbid any plunder or pillage - an order that could not have been enforced with an unpaid army. Two men were hanged for plundering to convince the soldiers he was serious about this order. To control Dublin's northern approaches Cromwell needed to take the port of Drogheda. Once in his hands he could feel confident of controlling the whole of the northern route from Dublin to Londonderry. On 3rd September, around 12,000 men and supporting vessels had arrived outside the town. Surrounding the whole town was a massive wall, 22 feet high and 6 feet thick.

Sir Arthur Aston, who had been fighting for the royalists during the English Civil War, was the governor of Drogheda. On 10th September, Cromwell advised Aston to surrender. "I have brought the army belonging to the Parliament of England to this place, to reduce it to obedience... if you surrender you will avoid the loss of blood... If you refuse... you will have no cause to blame me." (15)

Cromwell had four times as many men as Aston and was better supplied with weapons, stores and equipment. Cromwell's proposal was rejected and the garrison opened fire with what weapons they had. Cromwell's reply was to attack the city wall and by nightfall two breaches had been made. The following day Cromwell led his soldiers into Drogheda.

Aston and some 300 soldiers climbed Mill Mount. Cromwell's troops surrounded the men and it was usually the custom to allow them to surrender. However, Cromwell gave the order to kill them all. Aston's head was beaten in with his own wooden leg. Cromwell instructed his men to kill all the soldiers in the town. About eighty men had taken refuge in St Peter's Church. It was set on fire and all the men were killed. All the priests that were captured were also slaughtered. (16)

Cromwell sent a letter to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." (17)

The response from Parliament was that they were unwilling to pay for a long war. He was told to take control of the large estates owned by Catholics and to sell or rent it to Protestants. This money was to be used to pay his soldiers. Cromwell decided that the best way to bring a quick end to the war was to carry out another massacre. After an eight days' siege at Wexford, around 1,800 troops, priests and civilians were butchered. (18)

Hugh Peter, a chaplain to the Parliamentary army and a passionate anti-Catholic, was with Cromwell in Ireland. He reported that the town was now available for English Protestant colonists to settle. "It is a fine spot for some godly congregation, where house and land wait for inhabitants and occupiers." (19)

During the next few years of bloodshed it is estimated that about a third of the population was either killed or died of starvation. The majority of Roman Catholics who owned land had it taken away from them and were removed to the barren province of Connacht. Catholic boys and girls were shipped to Barbados and sold to the planters as slaves. The land taken from the Catholics by Cromwell was given to the Protestant soldiers who had taken part in the campaign. Before the rebellion in 1641, Catholics owned 59% of the land in Ireland. By the time Cromwell left in 1650 the proportion had shrunk to 22%. (20)

Oliver Cromwell and the Radicals
On 9th March, 1649, the House of Lords was abolished. (21) Although the House of Commons continued to meet, it was Cromwell and his followers who controlled England. The Levellers continued to campaign for an increase in the number of people who could vote. John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince, all served terms of imprisonment. On 20th September, 1649, Parliament passed a law introducing government censorship. It now required a licence for the publication of any book, pamphlet, treatise or sheets of news. As Pauline Gregg has pointed out that the situation was little different "from the censorship they had been fighting in the King's time". (22)

On 24th October, 1649, Lilburne was charged with high treason. The trial began the following day. The prosecution read out extracts from Lilburne's pamphlets but the jury was not convinced and he was found not guilty. There were great celebrations outside the court and his acquittal was marked with bonfires. A medal was struck in his honour, inscribed with the words: "John Lilburne saved by the power of the Lord and the integrity of the jury who are judge of law as well of fact". On 8th November, all four men were released. (23)

Cromwell was also having problems with Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the group that became known as the Diggers. Winstanley began arguing that all land belonged to the community rather than to separate individuals. In January, 1649, he published the The New Law of Righteousness. In the pamphlet he wrote: "In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another." (24)

Winstanley claimed that the scriptures threatened "misery to rich men" and that they "shall be turned out of all, and their riches given to a people that will bring forth better fruit, and such as they have oppressed shall inherit the land." He did not only blame the wealthy for this situation. As John Gurney has pointed out, Winstanley argued: "The poor should not just be seen as an object of pity, for the part they played in upholding the curse had also to be addressed. Private property, and the poverty, inequality and exploitation attendant upon it, was, like the corruption of religion, kept in being not only by the rich but also by those who worked for them." (25)

Winstanley claimed that God would punish the poor if they did not take action: "Therefore you dust of the earth, that are trod under foot, you poor people, that makes both scholars and rich men, your oppressors by your labours... If you labour the earth, and work for others that live at ease, and follows the ways of the flesh by your labours, eating the bread which you get by the sweat of your brows, not their own. Know this, that the hand of the Lord shall break out upon such hireling labourer, and you shall perish with the covetous rich man." (26)

On Sunday 1st April, 1649, Winstanley, William Everard, and a small group of about 30 or 40 men and women started digging and sowing vegetables on the wasteland of St George's Hill in the parish of Walton. They were mainly labouring men and their families, and they confidently hoped that five thousand others would join them. (27) They sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans. They also stated that they "intended to plough up the ground and sow it with seed corn". (28) Research shows that new people joined the community over the next few months. Most of these were local inhabitants. (29)

Local landowners were very disturbed by these developments. According to one historian, John F. Harrison: "They were repeatedly attacked and beaten; their crops were uprooted, their tools destroyed, and their rough houses." (30) Oliver Cromwell condemned the actions of the Diggers: "What is the purport of the levelling principle but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. I was by birth a gentleman. You must cut these people in pieces or they will cut you in pieces." (31)

Instructions were given for the Diggers to be beaten up and for their houses, crops and tools to be destroyed. These tactics were successful and within a year all the Digger communities in England had been wiped out. A number of Diggers were indicted at the Surrey quarter sessions and five were imprisoned for just over a month in the White Lion prison in Southwark. (32)

Oliver Cromwell by Samuel Cooper (1656)
© National Portrait Gallery

Cromwell also had problems with the Ranters. In 1650 Abiezer Coppe published A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to all the great ones of the Earth. In this pamphlet he claimed that "the Levellers (men-levellers) which is and who indeed are but shadows of most terrible, yet great and glorious good things to come". People who did not own property would have "treasure in heaven". His main message was that God, the "mighty leveller" would return to earth and punish those who did not share their wealth. Coppe argued for freedom, equality, community and universal peace. He told the wealthy that they would be punished for their lack of charity towards the poor: "The rust of your silver, I say, shall eat your flesh as it were fire... have... Howl, howl, ye nobles, howl honourable, howl ye rich men for the miseries that are coming upon you." (33) The historian, Alfred Leslie Rowse, claims that Coppe's "egalitarian Communism" was "300 years" before its time. (34)

Laurence Clarkson, had been a preacher in the New Model Army who wrote a pamphlet he defined the "oppressors" as the "nobility and gentry" and the oppressed as the "yeoman farmer" and the "tradesman". (35) Coppe and Clarkson both advocated "free love". (36) Peter Ackroyd claimed that Coppe and Clarkson professed that "sin had its conception only in imagination" and told their followers that they "might swear, drink, smoke and have sex with impunity". (37)

Barry Coward, the author of The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714 (1980) argues that the activities of the Ranters created a "moral panic" because their activities were "often violent and anti-social" and frightened conservative opinion into reaction. They formed a "hippy-like counter culture of the 1650s which flew in the face of law and morality and which was considered with horror by respectable society." (38) Cromwell disliked the Ranters more than any other religious sect who he considered to be totally immoral. (39)

Cromwell and his supporters in Parliament attempted to deal with preachers such as Coppe and Clarkson, by passing the Adultery Act (May 1650), that imposed the death penalty for adultery and fornication. This was followed by the Blasphemy Act (August 1650). Coppe claimed he had been informed that the acts against adultery and blasphemy "were put out because of me; thereby secretly intimating that I was guilty of the breach of them". (40) Christopher Hill, the author of The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1991), agrees that this legislation was an attempt to deal with the development of religious groups such as the Ranters. (41)

Lord Protector
Oliver Cromwell became increasingly frustrated by the inability of Parliament to get anything done. His biographer, Pauline Gregg, has pointed out: "He realized that all revolutions are about power and he was asking himself who, or what, should exercise that power. He knew, moreover, that whoever or whatever was in control must be strong enough to propel the state in one direction. This he learned from his battle experience. To be successful an army must observe one plan, one directive." (42)

Major General Thomas Harrison, who had been sympathetic to the demands of the Levellers, urged the House of Commons to pass legislation to help the poor. In August 1652, he promoted an army petition that called for law reform, the more effective propagation of the gospel, the elimination of tithes, and speedy elections for a new parliament. When it failed to act on these items, Harrison began to press for its dissolution. Harrison argued that when it was established after the death of the Charles I it was "unanimous in its proceedings for the reform of the nation" but it was now dominated by "a strong Royalist party". (43)

On 20th April 1653, Cromwell sent in his troopers with their muskets and drawn swords into the House of Commons. Harrison himself pulled the Speaker, William Lenthall, out of the Chair and pushed him out of the Chamber. That afternoon Cromwell dissolved the Council of State and replaced it with a committee of thirteen army officers. Harrison was appointed as chairman and in effect the head of the English state. (44)

Major General Thomas Harrison

In July, 1653, Oliver Cromwell established the Nominated Assembly and the Parliament of Saints. The total number of nominees was 140, 129 from England, five from Scotland and six from Ireland. The nominated assembly grappled with several of Harrison's favourite issues, including the immediate abolition of tithes. There was general consensus that tithes were objectionable, but no agreement about what mechanism for generating revenue should replace them. (45)

The Parliament was closed down by Cromwell in December, 1653. Charles H. Simpkinson has argued that Harrison now believed that "England now lay under a military despotism". (46) This decision was fiercely opposed by Thomas Harrison. Cromwell reacted by depriving him of his military commission, and in February, 1654, he was ordered to retire to Staffordshire. However, he was able to keep the land he had acquired during his period of power. The total value of this land was well over £13,000. (47)

The army decided that Oliver Cromwell should become England's new ruler. Some officers wanted him to become king but he refused and instead took the title Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. However, Cromwell had as much power as kings had in the past. The franchise was restricted to those who possessed the very high property qualification of £200 and by the disqualification of all who had taken part in the English Civil War on the royalist side. (48)

When the House of Commons opposed his policies in January 1655, he closed it down. Cromwell always disliked the idea of democracy as he posed a threat to good government. "The mass of the population was totally unsophisticated politically, very much under the influence of landlords and parsons: to give such men the vote (with no secret ballot, since most of them were illiterate) would be to strengthen rather than to weaken the power of the conservatives." (49)

Richard Baxter attempted to explain Cromwell's thinking: "In most parts, the major vote of the vulgar... is ruled by money and therefore by their landlords." (50) Cromwell warned Parliament that the vast majority of the population was opposed to his government: "The condition of the people is such as the major part a great deal are persons disaffected and engaged against us." (51) One pamphlet published at the time commented "if the common vote of the giddy multitude must rule the whole" Cromwell's government would be overthrown. (52)

Cromwell now imposed military rule. England was divided into eleven districts. Each district was run by a Major General and were answerable only to the Lord Protector. Christopher Hill argues that "The Major-Generals were to make all men responsible for the good behaviour of their servants.... They also enforced the legislation of the Long Parliament against drunkenness, blasphemy and sabbath-breaking... Above all they took control of the militia, the army of the gentry." (53)

The first duty of the Major-Generals was to maintain security by suppressing unlawful assemblies, disarming Royalist supporters and apprehending thieves, robbers and highwaymen. The militia of the Major-Generals was funded by a new 10% income tax imposed on Royalists known as the "decimation tax". It was argued that a punitive tax on Royalists was a just means of financing the militia because Royalist conspiracies had made it necessary in the first place. (54)

The responsibilities of these Major-Generals included granting poor relief and imposing Puritan morality. In some districts bear-baiting, cock-fighting, horse-racing and wrestling were banned. Betting and gambling were also forbidden. Large numbers of ale-houses were closed and fines were imposed on people caught swearing. In some districts, the Major-Generals even closed down theatres. (55)

Oliver Cromwell by Peter Lely (c. 1657)

Former members of the Levellers grew disillusioned with the dictatorial policies of Cromwell and in 1655 Edward Sexby, John Wildman and Richard Overton were involved in developing a plot to overthrow the government. The conspiracy was discovered and the men were forced to flee to the Netherlands. It was later argued that Overton was by this time acting as a double agent and had informed the authorities of the plot. (56) Records show that Overton was receiving payments from Cromwell's secretary of state, John Thurloe. (57)

In May 1657 Sexby published, under a pseudonym, Killing No Murder, a pamphlet that attempted to justify the assassination of Oliver Cromwell. Sexby accused Cromwell of the enslavement of the English people and argued for that reason he deserved to die. After his death "religion would be restored" and "liberty asserted". He hoped "that other laws will have place besides those of the sword, and that justice shall be otherwise defined than the will and pleasure of the strongest". (58) The following month Edward Sexby arrived in England to carry out the deed, however, he was arrested on 24th July. He remained in the Tower of London until his death on 13th January 1658. (59)

In 1658 Cromwell announced that he wanted his son, Richard Cromwell, to replace him as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. The English army was unhappy with this decision. While they respected Oliver as a skillful military commander, Richard was just a country farmer. To help him Cromwell brought him onto the Council to familiarize him with affairs of state. (60)

Oliver Cromwell died on 3rd September 1658. Richard Cromwell became Lord Protector but he was bullied by conservative MPs into support measures to restrict religious toleration and the army's freedom to indulge in political activity. The army responded by forcing Richard to dissolve Parliament on 21st April, 1659. The following month he agreed to retire from government. (61)

Parliament and the leaders of the army now began arguing amongst themselves about how England should be ruled. General George Monk, the officer in charge of the English army based in Scotland, decided to take action, and in 1660 he marched his army to London. According to Hyman Fagan: "Faced with a threatened revolt, the upper classes decided to restore the monarchy which, they thought, would bring stability to the country. The army again intervened in politics, but this time it opposed the Commonwealth". (62)

Monck reinstated the House of Lords and the Parliament of 1640. Royalists were now in control of Parliament. Monck now contacted Charles, who was living in Holland. Charles agreed that if he was made king he would pardon all members of the parliamentary army and would continue with the Commonwealth's policy of religious toleration. Charles also accepted that he would share power with Parliament and would not rule as an 'absolute' monarch as his father had tried to do in the 1630s. (63)

Despite this agreement a special court was appointed and in October 1660 those Regicides who were still alive and living in Britain were brought to trial. Ten were found guilty and were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. This included Thomas Harrison, John Jones, John Carew and Hugh Peters. Others executed included Adrian Scroope, Thomas Scot, Gregory Clement, Francis Hacker, Daniel Axtel and John Cook. On the way to his execution, Harrison said: "I go to suffer upon the account of the most glorious cause that ever was in the world." (64)

Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Thomas Pride and John Bradshaw were all posthumously tried for high treason. They were found guilty and on the twelfth anniversary of the regicide, on 30th January 1661, their bodies were disinterred and hung from the gallows at Tyburn. (65) Cromwell's body was put into a lime-pit below the gallows and the head, impaled on a spike, was exposed at the south end of Westminster Hall for nearly twenty years. (66)

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Sections

Oliver Cromwell and Puritanism
It is claimed that he was a spoilt child because he was the only boy in a family of six sisters (three other children had died in infancy). "We may speculate on the effects of this petticoat environment; by all accounts (some of them not very reliable) he grew up to be a rough, boisterous, practical-joking boy, with no effeminate characteristics." (4) According to one source "Cromwell had an unusually close, tender and long-term relationship with his mother". (5)

In April 1616 he began attending Sidney Sussex College. The Master of the College was Samuel Ward and he was accused of making it "a hotbed of Puritanism". He did well in mathematics but does not appear to have been very interested in "the humanities and civil law" to the dismay of his parents. It seems that during this period he had a great enthusiasm for "football, cudgelling, wrestling and an early form of cricket". (6)

Cromwell left Cambridge University in June, 1617, on the death of his father and took over control of the family estate. On 22nd August 1620, Oliver Cromwell married Elizabeth Bourchier. His wife was the daughter of Sir John Bourchier, a London merchant, a fur-dealer and leather dresser, who had done well enough to be knighted and buy a country estate in Essex. In his first years of married life he consulted a London physician who recorded in his case-book that Cromwell was "depressed to an abnormal degree". Another doctor suggested that he suffered from hypochondria. (7)

Over the next few years Elizabeth Cromwell gave birth to nine children: five boys and four girls. Only one child (James) died in infancy. Little is known of the relationship between Oliver and Elizabeth beyond the unmannered deep affection of their letters to one another. His marriage brought him into contact with leading members of the London merchant community. It could have also been the reason for his conversion to Puritanism during this period. (8)

Cromwell wrote afterwards: "You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true: I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. Oh the riches of his mercy! Praise Him for me, pray for me, that he who hath begun a good work would perfect it to the day of Christ." (9)

In 1628, Oliver Cromwell's childless uncle, Richard Cromwell died, leaving his property to his nephew. The following year he was involved in a dispute with a local powerful landowner. It is believed that his new hard-line religious views was a factor in this conflict. Jasper Ridley suggests that Cromwell "championed the cause of the local commoners against the Mayor of Huntingdon who was threatening their privileges, and against the attempts of the Earl of Manchester to enclose the Fens." In December, 1630, he was called before the Privy Council and forced to apologize. In May, 1631, he sold nearly all of his land in Huntingdon for the sum of £1,800 and moved to St Ives, 4 miles away. (10)

John Morrill has pointed out: "Despite his connections with ancient riches, Cromwell's economic status was much closer to that of the middling sort and urban merchants than to the country gentry and governors. He always lived in towns, not in a country manor house; and he worked for his living. He held no important local offices and had no tenants or others dependent upon him beyond a few household servants." (11)

Conflict with the King
During this period Cromwell came into conflict with Charles I, who attempted to make money from selling knighthoods. In the 16th century, all men with land worth £40 a year were required to pay for a knighthood. However, rapid inflation pushed many into this category "who were below the social level of knights and had no relish for an honour which might well oblige them to perform functions in the local communities for which they had neither the leisure, the qualifications, nor the necessary status." (12)

Cromwell and other Puritans refused to buy what had once been an honour. Charles reacted to this by fining those who were unwilling to pay this money. In April 1631 Cromwell and six others from his neighbourhood appeared before the royal commissioners for repeatedly refusing to buy a knighthood. He was found guilty and fined £10. It was reported that Cromwell was so unhappy about this that he considered the idea of going to live in North America. (13)

Oliver Cromwell also came into conflict over the issue of the Ship Tax. In 1635 Charles I faced a financial crisis. Unwilling to summon another Parliament, he had to find other ways of raising money. He decided to resort to the ancient custom of demanding Ship Money. In the past, whenever there were fears of a foreign invasion, kings were able to order coastal towns to provide ships or the money to build ships.

Charles sent out letters to sheriffs reminding them about the possibility of an invasion and instructing them to collect Ship Money. Encouraged by the large contributions he received, Charles demanded more the following year. Whereas in the past Ship Money had been raised only when the kingdom had been threatened by war, it now became clear that Charles intended to ask for it every year. Several sheriffs wrote to the king complaining that their counties were being asked to pay too much. Their appeals were rejected and the sheriff's now faced the difficult task of collecting money from a population overburdened by taxation. (14)

Gerald E. Aylmer has argued that ship money was in fact a more reasonable tax than the traditional forms of collecting money from the population. Most king's had relied on taxes on movable property (a subsidy). "Ship money had in fact been a more equitable as well as a more efficient tax than the subsidy because it was based on a far more accurate assessment of people's wealth and property holdings." (15)

At the beginning of 1637, twelve senior judges had declared that, in the face of danger to the nation, the king had a perfect right to order his subjects to finance the preparation of a fleet. In November, John Hampden was prosecuted for refusing to pay the Ship Money on his lands in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. The court case was a test of power between sovereign and subject. The judges voted seven against five in favour of conviction but the publicity surrounding the case made Hampton one of the most popular men in England. (16) More importantly, if "ship money was legal, non-parliamentary government had come to stay". (17)

Cromwell, who was Hampden's cousin, was a strong opponent of the Ship Tax. He argued that such a tax was "a prejudice to the liberties of the kingdom" and that there should be no taxation without the consent of Parliament. One of the critics of the tax said "he knew no law besides Parliament to persuade men to give away their own goods". Cromwell agreed and said he was "a great stickler" against the tax. During this period Cromwell developed a local reputation among those opposed to Charles's government. (18)

In 1636 Oliver Cromwell's widowed maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, died childless, leaving most of his estate to him. He inherited from him leases on tithes held by the Church. Cromwell was now a man of considerable wealth and moved to a substantial glebe house close to Ely Cathedral. His income now increased dramatically to some £300 a year. (19)

However, like his uncle, he held strong views about protecting the poor people. Steward had resisted the draining of the Fens in the interests of the poor commoners and Fen dwellers and on one occasion had prevented food riots by rounding up grain speculators. In 1638 it was reported that Cromwell had argued that the poor "Should enjoy every foot of their common". (20)

Cromwell was now forty-years old. "Cromwell was of singular appearance. The London doctor whom he had consulted noted that he had pimples upon his face. These seem to have been supplanted by warts on his chin and forehead. His thick brown hair was always worn long over the collar, and he had a slim moustache; a tuft of hair lay just below his lower lip. He had a prominent nose... his eyes, in colour somewhere between green and grey... He was about 5 feet 10 inches in height" and according to this steward, John Maidstone, "his body was well compact and strong" and had a "fiery" temperament but was "compassionate" like a woman. (21)

House of Commons
In March 1640 Cromwell was elected to represent Cambridge in the House of Commons. It has been claimed that Cromwell was the "least wealthy man" who attended that Parliament. Cromwell took up the case of John Lilburne, who in February, 1638, had been found guilty and sentenced to be fined £500, whipped, pilloried and imprisoned for publishing Puritan books. The following month he was whipped from Fleet Prison to Old Palace Yard. It is estimated that Lilburne received 500 lashes along the way, making 1,500 stripes to his back during the two-mile walk. An eyewitness account claimed that his badly bruised shoulders "swelled almost as big as a penny loaf" and the wheals on his back were larger than "tobacco-pipes." (22)

When he was placed in the pillory he tried to make a speech praising John Bastwick and was gagged. Lilburne's punishment turned into an anti-government demonstration, with cheering crowds encouraging and supporting him. While in prison Lilburne wrote about his punishments, in his pamphlet, The Work of the Beast (1638). He reported on how he was tied to the back of a cart and whipped with a knotted rope. (23)

"Cromwell spoke with a great passion, thumping the table before him, the blood rising to the face as he did so. To some he appeared to be magnifying the case beyond all proportion. But to Cromwell this was the essence of what he had come to put right: religious persecution by an arbitrary court." (24) After a debate on the issue in November, 1640. Parliament voted to release him from prison. (25) Lilburne's supporters continued to protest about the way he had been treated and on 4th May 1641, Parliament resolved that the Star Chamber sentence against him had been "bloody, wicked, cruel, barbarous, and tyrannical", and voted him monetary reparations. (26)

During this period Cromwell emerged as one of the king's main critics. "In those opening months he served on eighteen high-profile committees, especially those concerned with investigating religious innovation and abuse of ecclesiastical power. His faith and trust in God made him fearless. And more than once he spoke his mind too forcefully and was reproved by the house. Sir Philip Warwick, a supporter of the monarchy, described Cromwell as someone who "wore... a plain cloth-suit, which seemed to have been made by a poor tailor; his shirt was plain, and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his collar... his face was swollen and red, his voice sharp and untunable, and his speech full of passion." (27)

Cromwell developed a close relationship with John Pym, the unchallenged leader of the Puritans in the House of Commons. Pym was a large landowner in Somerset. He was known for his anti-Catholic views and saw Parliament's role as safeguarding England against the influence of the Pope: "The high court of Parliament is the great eye of the kingdom, to find out offences and punish them". However, he believed that the king, who had married Henrietta Maria, a Catholic, was an obstacle to this process: "we are not secure enough at home in respect of the enemy at home which grows by the suspending of the laws at home". (28)

Pym was a believer in a vast Catholic plot. Some historians agree with Pym's theory: "Like all successful statesmen, Pym was up to a point an opportunist but he was not a cynic; and self-delusion seems the likeliest explanation of this and his supporters' obsession. That there was a real international Catholic campaign against Protestantism, a continuing determination to see heresy destroyed, is beyond dispute." (29)

In the last week of December it was further agreed that parliament should meet at fixed times with or without the co-operation of the king. The Triennial Act was passed to compel parliaments to meet every three years. The Venetian ambassador to London reported that "if this innovation is introduced, it will hand over the reigns of government completely to Parliament, and nothing will be left to the king but mere show and a simulacrum of reality, stripped of credit and destitute of all authority". (32)

English Civil War
Charles I realised he could not allow the situation to continue. He decided to remove the leaders of the rebels in Parliament. On 4th January 1642, the king sent his soldiers to arrest John Pym, Arthur Haselrig, John Hampden, Denzil Holles and William Strode. The five men managed to escape before the soldiers arrived. Members of Parliament no longer felt safe from Charles and decided to form their own army. After failing to arrest the Five Members, Charles fled from London and formed a Royalist Army (Cavaliers) whereas his opponents established a Parliamentary Army (Roundheads). (33)

Attempts were made to negotiate and end to the conflict. On 25th July the king wrote to the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University inviting the colleges to assist him in his struggle. When they heard the news, the House of Commons sent Cromwell with 200 lightly armed countrymen to blocked the exit road from Cambridge. On 22nd August, the king "raised his standard" at Nottingham, and in doing so marked the beginning of the English Civil War. At a time when most Englishmen were dithering and waiting upon events, Cromwell decided to take action and captured Cambridge Castle and seized its store of weapons. Soon afterwards he was given the rank of Captain and assigned to the cavalry commanded by Sir Philip Stapleton. (34)

The king marched around the Midlands enlisting support before marching on London. It is estimated he had about 14,000 followers by the time he encountered the Parliamentary Army at Edgehill on 22nd October, 1642. Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, only had 3,000 cavalry against the 4,000, serving the king. He therefore decided to wait until the rest of his troops, who were a day's march behind, arrived.

The battle began at 3 o'clock in the afternoon of the 23rd October. Prince Rupert and his Cavaliers made the first attack and easily defeated the left-wing of the Parliamentary forces. Henry Wilmot also had success on the right-wing but Stapleton and Cromwell were eventually able to repel the attack. Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, later recalled that Cromwell "never stirred from his troops" and fought until the Cavaliers retreated. (35)

Prince Rupert's cavalrymen lacked discipline and continued to follow those who ran from the battlefield. John Byron and his regiment also joined the chase. The royalist calvary did not return to the battlefield until over an hour after the initial charge. By this time the horses were so tired they were unable to mount another attack against the Roundheads. The fighting ended at nightfall. Neither side had one a decisive advantage. (36) A pamphlet published at the time commented: "The field was covered with the dead, yet no one could tell to what party they belonged... Some on both sides did extremely well, and others did ill and deserved to be hanged." (37)

After serving at Edgehill, he was promoted to the rank of colonel and served under, Edward Montagu, the Earl of Manchester, in East Anglia. He won a number of minor victories in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. In January 1644 he was appointed Lieutenant-General and second-in-command under Manchester. "Cromwell's military genius, combined with his Puritan religious zeal, made him the perfect military leader in a revolutionary war. He was fighting for liberty of conscience and freedom of worship for the extremist Protestant sects, which were threatened by his Church of England and Presbyterian allies as well as by his Cavalier enemies." (38)

On 2nd July 1644, Oliver Cromwell took part in the battle at Marston Moor. He commanded the left wing of the Parliamentary Army, consisting of his own eastern cavalry and three regiments of Scots cavalry. Cromwell himself received a nasty flesh wound in the neck early on and needed treatment, but he returned in time to take responsibility for the final, decisive charge. (39) The battle lasted two hours. Over 3,000 Royalists were killed and around 4,500 were taken prisoner. The Parliamentary forces lost only 300 men. Cromwell spoke of it as "an absolute victory obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the godly party principally... God made them as stubble to our swords". (40)

New Model Army
At the beginning of the war, Parliament relied on soldiers recruited by large landowners who supported their cause. Oliver Cromwell soon realised that these soldiers would not be good enough to defeat the Cavaliers. He pointed out in a letter to his cousin, John Hampden, about his regiment: "Your troopers are most of them old decayed serving men... the royalists' troopers are gentleman's sons, younger sons, persons of quality. Do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will be ever able to encounter gentleman that have honour, courage and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit... that is likely to go on as far as a gentleman will go, or else I am sure you will be beaten still." (41)

Cromwell recruited men who shared his "Puritan religious zeal". He also imposed strict discipline. When in April 1643, two troopers tried to desert, he had them whipped in the market place. Men who was heard to swear they would be fined "twelvepence; if he be drunk he is set in the stocks, or worse". Cromwell was careful about who he selected as officers. The Earl of Manchester complained that he did employ "men of estates" but "common men, poor and of mean parentage". He added that they were always very religious men. (42)

Oliver Cromwell by Samuel Cooper (1649)
© National Portrait Gallery

Cromwell became convinced that some of the leaders of the Parliamentary Army were not committed to the destruction of the Royalist Army. He was a strong supporter of the Self-Denying Ordinance, where all peers and MP's should be removed from army and navy commands, including, Edward Montagu, the Earl of Manchester, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex and Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick and William Waller. At first, the House of Lords threw out the recommendation but with some changes it was eventually accepted. (43)

Cromwell, as a MP, had to resign his command. However, a few weeks later, General Fairfax, gave him the rank of Lieutenant-General and he took charge of the cavalry. Members of the New Model Army received proper military training and by the time they went into battle they were very well-disciplined. In the past, people became officers because they came from powerful and wealthy families. In the New Model Army men were promoted when they showed themselves to be good soldiers. For the first time it became possible for working-class men to become army officers. Oliver Cromwell thought it was very important that soldiers believed strongly in what they were fighting for. Where possible he recruited men who, like him, held strong Puritan views and the New Model Army went into battle singing psalms, convinced that God was on their side. (45)

Oliver Cromwell by Robert Walker (c. 1649)
© National Portrait Gallery

The battle was a disaster for the king. His infantry had been destroyed and 5,000 of his men, together with 500 officers, had been captured. The Parliamentary forces were also able to capture the Royalist baggage train that contained his complete stock of guns and ammunition. The women of the royalist camp were treated with great cruelty; those from Ireland were killed, while those from England had their faces slashed with daggers. Cromwell said after the battle that "this is none other than the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory". (47)

Followed a series of defeats for the royalists, Charles I surrendered to the Scottish Presbyterian army besieging Newark, and was taken northwards to Newcastle upon Tyne. After nine months of negotiations, the Scots finally arrived at an agreement with Parliament and in exchange for £400,000, Charles was delivered to the parliamentary commissioners in January 1647. (48)

Oliver Cromwell and the Levellers
There leaders, including John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn were imprisoned. While in Newgate Prison, Lilburne used his time studying books on law and writing pamphlets. This included The Free Man's Freedom Vindicated (1647) where he argued that "no man should be punished or persecuted... for preaching or publishing his opinion on religion". He also outlined his political philosophy: "All and every particular and individual man and woman, that ever breathed in the world, are by nature all equal and alike in their power, dignity, authority and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion or magisterial power one over or above another." (50) In another pamphlet, Rash Oaths (1647), he argued: "Every free man of England, poor as well as rich, should have a vote in choosing those that are to make the law." (51)

Thomas Rainsborough, the most radical of the officers, argued: "I desire that those that had engaged in it should speak, for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly. Sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under; and I am confident that when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, in so much that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no that should doubt of these things." (53)

John Wildman supported Rainsborough and dated people's problems to the Norman Conquest: "Our case is to be considered thus, that we have been under slavery. That's acknowledged by all. Our very laws were made by our Conquerors... We are now engaged for our freedom. That's the end of Parliament, to legislate according to the just ends of government, not simply to maintain what is already established. Every person in England hath as clear a right to elect his Representative as the greatest person in England. I conceive that's the undeniable maxim of government: that all government is in the free consent of the people." (54)

Edward Sexby was another who supported the idea of increasing the franchise: "We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen - and by the arguments urged there is none. There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little property in this kingdom as to our estates, yet we had a birthright. But it seems now except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived. If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers. There are many in my condition, that have as good a condition, it may be little estate they have at present, and yet they have as much a right as those two (Cromwell and Ireton) who are their lawgivers, as any in this place. I shall tell you in a word my resolution. I am resolved to give my birthright to none. Whatsoever may come in the way, and be thought, I will give it to none. I think the poor and meaner of this kingdom (I speak as in that relation in which we are) have been the means of the preservation of this kingdom." (55)

These ideas were opposed by most of the senior officers in the New Model Army, who represented the interests of property owners. One of them, Henry Ireton, argued: "I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and indetermining or choosing those that determine what laws we shall be ruled by here - no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom... First, the thing itself (universal suffrage) were dangerous if it were settled to destroy property. But I say that the principle that leads to this is destructive to property; for by the same reason that you will alter this Constitution merely that there's a greater Constitution by nature - by the same reason, by the law of nature, there is a greater liberty to the use of other men's goods which that property bars you." (56)

Oliver Cromwell made it very clear that he very much opposed to the idea that more people should be allowed to vote in elections and that the Levellers posed a serious threat to the upper classes: "What is the purport of the levelling principle but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. I was by birth a gentleman. You must cut these people in pieces or they will cut you in pieces." (58)

Execution of Charles I
Parliament initially held Charles under house arrest at Holdenby House in Northamptonshire. Members of the House of Commons had different opinions about what to do with Charles. Some like Denzil Holles were willing to accept the return of the king to power on minimal terms, whereas Puritans like Oliver Cromwell demanded that Charles agree to firm limitations on his power before the army was disbanded. They also were committed to the idea that each congregation should be able to decide its own form of worship. (59)

The New Model Army, frustrated by this lack of agreement, took Charles prisoner, and he was taken to Hampton Court Palace. Cromwell visited the king and proposed a deal. He would be willing to restore him as King and the Church of England as the official Church, if Charles and the Anglicans would agree to grant religious toleration. Charles rejected Cromwell's proposals and instead entered into a secret agreement with forces in Scotland who wanted to impose Presbyterianism. (60)

Daniel Maclise, An interview between Charles I and Oliver Cromwell (1836)

Charles escaped from captivity on 11th November, 1647, and made contact with Colonel Robert Hammond, Parliamentary Governor of the Isle of Wight, whom he apparently believed to be sympathetic. Hammond, however, arrested Charles in Carisbrooke Castle. In the early months of 1648 rebellions broke out in several parts of the country. Oliver Cromwell put down the Welsh rising and Thomas Fairfax dealt with the rebels in Kent and Surrey. (61)

In August 1648 Cromwell's parliamentary army defeated the Scots and once again Charles was taken prisoner. Parliament resumed negotiations with the King. The Presbyterians, the majority in the House of Commons, still hoped that Charles would save them from those advocating religious toleration and an extension of democracy. On 5th December, the House of Commons voted by 129 to 83 votes, to continue negotiations. The following day the New Model Army occupied London and Colonel Thomas Pride purged Parliament of MPs who favoured a negotiated settlement with the King . (62)

General Henry Ireton demanded that Charles was put on trial. Cromwell had doubts about this and it was not until several weeks later that he told the House of Commons that "the providence of God hath cast this upon us". Once the decision had been made Cromwell "threw himself into it with the vigour he always showed when his mind was made up, when God had spoken". (63)

In January 1649, Charles was charged with "waging war on Parliament." It was claimed that he was responsible for "all the murders, burnings, damages and mischiefs to the nation" in the English Civil War. The jury included members of Parliament, army officers and large landowners. Some of the 135 people chosen as jurors did not turn up for the trial. For example. General Thomas Fairfax, the leader of the Parliamentary Army, did not appear. When his name was called, a masked lady believed to be his wife, shouted out, "He has more wit than to be here." (64)

This was the first time in English history that a king had been put on trial. Charles believed that he was God's representative on earth and therefore no court of law had any right to pass judgement on him. Charles therefore refused to defend himself against the charges put forward by Parliament. Charles pointed out that on 6th December 1648, the army had expelled several members of' Parliament. Therefore, Charles argued, Parliament had no legal authority to arrange his trial. The arguments about the courts legal authority to try Charles went on for several days. Eventually, on 27th January, Charles was given his last opportunity to defend himself against the charges. When he refused he was sentenced to death. His death warrant was signed by the fifty-nine jurors who were in attendance. (65)

On the 30th January, 1649, Charles was taken to a scaffold built outside Whitehall Palace. Charles wore two shirts as he was worried that if he shivered in the cold people would think he was afraid of dying. He told his servant "were I to shake through cold, my enemies would attribute it to fear." Troopers on horseback kept the crowds some distance from the scaffold, and it is unlikely that many people heard the speech that he made just before his head was cut off with an axe. The executioner then took up the head and announced, in traditional fashion, "Behold the head of a traitor!" At that moment, according to an eyewitness, "there was such a groan by the thousands then present, as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again." (66)

The Commonwealth
The House of Commons now passed a series of new laws. They abolished the monarchy, on the grounds that it was "unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people" and the House of Lords as "it is useless and dangerous to the people of England". Lands owned by the royal family and the church were sold and the money was used to pay the parliamentary soldiers. People were no longer fined for not attending their local church. However, everyone was still expected to attend some form of religious worship on Sundays. The country was now declared to be a "Commonwealth and Free State" under the rule of Parliament, and the government was entrusted to a Council of State, under the provisional chairmanship of Oliver Cromwell. (67)

The Levellers wanted Parliament to pass reforms that would increase universal suffrage. Soldiers also continued to protest against the government. The most serious rebellion took place in London. Troops commanded by Colonel Edward Whalley were ordered from the capital to Essex. A group of soldiers led by Robert Lockyer, refused to go and barricaded themselves in The Bull Inn near Bishopsgate, a radical meeting place. A large number of troops were sent to the scene and the men were forced to surrender. The commander-in-chief, General Thomas Fairfax, ordered Lockyer to be executed.

Lockyer's funeral on Sunday 29th April, 1649, proved to be a dramatic reminder of the strength of the Leveller organization in London. "Starting from Smithfield in the afternoon, the procession wound slowly through the heart of the City, and then back to Moorfields for the interment in New Churchyard. Led by six trumpeters, about 4000 people reportedly accompanied the corpse. Many wore ribbons - black for mourning and sea-green to publicize their Leveller allegiance. A company of women brought up the rear, testimony to the active female involvement in the Leveller movement. If the reports can be believed there were more mourners for Trooper Lockyer than there had been for the martyred Colonel Thomas Rainsborough the previous autumn." (68)

John Lilburne continued to campaign against the rule of Oliver Cromwell. According to a Royalist newspaper at the time: "He (Cromwell) and the Levellers can as soon combine as fire and water... The Levellers aim being at pure democracy.... and the design of Cromwell and his grandees for an oligarchy in the hands of himself." (69) Lilburne argued that Cromwell's government was mounting a propaganda campaign against the Levellers and to prevent them from replying their writings were censored: "To prevent the opportunity to lay open their treacheries and hypocrisies... the stop the press... They blast us with all the scandals and false reports their wit or malice could invent against us... By these arts are they now fastened in their powers." (70)

David Petegorsky, the author of Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (1940) has pointed out: "The Levellers clearly saw, that equality must replace privilege as the dominant theme of social relationships; for a State that is divided into rich and poor, or a system that excludes certain classes from privileges it confers on others, violates that equality to which every individual has a natural claim." (71)

In May 1649 another Leveller-inspired mutiny broke out at Salisbury. Led by Captain William Thompson, they were defeated by a large army at Burford led by Major Thomas Harrison. Thompson escaped only to be killed a few days later near the Diggers community at Wellingborough. After being imprisoned in Burford Church with the other mutineers, three other leaders, "Private Church, Corporal Perkins and Cornett Thompson", were executed by Cromwell's forces in the churchyard. (72) John Lilburne responded by describing Harrison as a "hypocrite" for his initial encouragement of the Levellers. (73)

Ireland
Oliver Cromwell was asked by Parliament to take control of Ireland. The country had caused serious problems for English generals in the past so Cromwell was careful to make painstaking preparations before he left. Cromwell ensured that the wage arrears of his army were paid, and that he was guaranteed sufficient financial provision by parliament. On 15th August 1649, Cromwell arrived in Ireland and took control of an army of 12,000 men. (74) Cromwell made a speech to the Irish people the following day: "God has brought us here in safety... We are here to carry on the great work against the barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish... to propagate the Gospel of Christ and the establishment of truth... and to restore this nation to its former happiness and tranquility." (75)

Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (1650)

Cromwell, like nearly all Puritans "had been inflamed against the Irish Catholics by the true and false allegations of the atrocities which they had committed against English Protestants settlers during the Irish Catholic rebellion of 1641." (76) He wrote at the time that "all the world knows their barbarism". Even the philosopher, Francis Bacon, and the poet John Milton, who "believed passionately in liberty and human dignity", shared the view that "the Irish were culturally so inferior that their subordination was natural and necessary." (77)

Cromwell's first action on reaching Ireland was to forbid any plunder or pillage - an order that could not have been enforced with an unpaid army. Two men were hanged for plundering to convince the soldiers he was serious about this order. To control Dublin's northern approaches Cromwell needed to take the port of Drogheda. Once in his hands he could feel confident of controlling the whole of the northern route from Dublin to Londonderry. On 3rd September, around 12,000 men and supporting vessels had arrived outside the town. Surrounding the whole town was a massive wall, 22 feet high and 6 feet thick.

Sir Arthur Aston, who had been fighting for the royalists during the English Civil War, was the governor of Drogheda. On 10th September, Cromwell advised Aston to surrender. "I have brought the army belonging to the Parliament of England to this place, to reduce it to obedience... if you surrender you will avoid the loss of blood... If you refuse... you will have no cause to blame me." (78)

Oliver Cromwell in Drogheda

Cromwell had four times as many men as Aston and was better supplied with weapons, stores and equipment. Cromwell's proposal was rejected and the garrison opened fire with what weapons they had. Cromwell's reply was to attack the city wall and by nightfall two breaches had been made. The following day Cromwell led his soldiers into Drogheda.

Aston and some 300 soldiers climbed Mill Mount. Cromwell's troops surrounded the men and it was usually the custom to allow them to surrender. However, Cromwell gave the order to kill them all. Aston's head was beaten in with his own wooden leg. Cromwell instructed his men to kill all the soldiers in the town. About eighty men had taken refuge in St Peter's Church. It was set on fire and all the men were killed. All the priests that were captured were also slaughtered. (79)

Cromwell sent a letter to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." (80)

The response from Parliament was that they were unwilling to pay for a long war. He was told to take control of the large estates owned by Catholics and to sell or rent it to Protestants. This money was to be used to pay his soldiers. Cromwell decided that the best way to bring a quick end to the war was to carry out another massacre. After an eight days' siege at Wexford, around 1,800 troops, priests and civilians were butchered. (81)

Hugh Peter, a chaplain to the Parliamentary army and a passionate anti-Catholic, was with Cromwell in Ireland. He reported that the town was now available for English Protestant colonists to settle. "It is a fine spot for some godly congregation, where house and land wait for inhabitants and occupiers." (82)

During the next few years of bloodshed it is estimated that about a third of the population was either killed or died of starvation. The majority of Roman Catholics who owned land had it taken away from them and were removed to the barren province of Connacht. Catholic boys and girls were shipped to Barbados and sold to the planters as slaves. The land taken from the Catholics by Cromwell was given to the Protestant soldiers who had taken part in the campaign. Before the rebellion in 1641, Catholics owned 59% of the land in Ireland. By the time Cromwell left in 1650 the proportion had shrunk to 22%. (83)

Oliver Cromwell and the Radicals
On 9th March, 1649, the House of Lords was abolished. (84) Although the House of Commons continued to meet, it was Cromwell and his followers who controlled England. The Levellers continued to campaign for an increase in the number of people who could vote. John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince, all served terms of imprisonment. On 20th September, 1649, Parliament passed a law introducing government censorship. It now required a licence for the publication of any book, pamphlet, treatise or sheets of news. As Pauline Gregg has pointed out that the situation was little different "from the censorship they had been fighting in the King's time". (85)

On 24th October, 1649, Lilburne was charged with high treason. The trial began the following day. The prosecution read out extracts from Lilburne's pamphlets but the jury was not convinced and he was found not guilty. There were great celebrations outside the court and his acquittal was marked with bonfires. A medal was struck in his honour, inscribed with the words: "John Lilburne saved by the power of the Lord and the integrity of the jury who are judge of law as well of fact". On 8th November, all four men were released. (86)

Cromwell was also having problems with Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the group that became known as the Diggers. Winstanley began arguing that all land belonged to the community rather than to separate individuals. In January, 1649, he published the The New Law of Righteousness. In the pamphlet he wrote: "In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another." (87)

Winstanley claimed that the scriptures threatened "misery to rich men" and that they "shall be turned out of all, and their riches given to a people that will bring forth better fruit, and such as they have oppressed shall inherit the land." He did not only blame the wealthy for this situation. As John Gurney has pointed out, Winstanley argued: "The poor should not just be seen as an object of pity, for the part they played in upholding the curse had also to be addressed. Private property, and the poverty, inequality and exploitation attendant upon it, was, like the corruption of religion, kept in being not only by the rich but also by those who worked for them." (88)

Winstanley claimed that God would punish the poor if they did not take action: "Therefore you dust of the earth, that are trod under foot, you poor people, that makes both scholars and rich men, your oppressors by your labours... If you labour the earth, and work for others that live at ease, and follows the ways of the flesh by your labours, eating the bread which you get by the sweat of your brows, not their own. Know this, that the hand of the Lord shall break out upon such hireling labourer, and you shall perish with the covetous rich man." (89)

Local landowners were very disturbed by these developments. According to one historian, John F. Harrison: "They were repeatedly attacked and beaten; their crops were uprooted, their tools destroyed, and their rough houses." (93) Oliver Cromwell condemned the actions of the Diggers: "What is the purport of the levelling principle but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. I was by birth a gentleman. You must cut these people in pieces or they will cut you in pieces." (94)

Instructions were given for the Diggers to be beaten up and for their houses, crops and tools to be destroyed. These tactics were successful and within a year all the Digger communities in England had been wiped out. A number of Diggers were indicted at the Surrey quarter sessions and five were imprisoned for just over a month in the White Lion prison in Southwark. (95)

Oliver Cromwell by Samuel Cooper (1656)
© National Portrait Gallery

Cromwell also had problems with the Ranters. In 1650 Abiezer Coppe published A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to all the great ones of the Earth. In this pamphlet he claimed that "the Levellers (men-levellers) which is and who indeed are but shadows of most terrible, yet great and glorious good things to come". People who did not own property would have "treasure in heaven". His main message was that God, the "mighty leveller" would return to earth and punish those who did not share their wealth. Coppe argued for freedom, equality, community and universal peace. He told the wealthy that they would be punished for their lack of charity towards the poor: "The rust of your silver, I say, shall eat your flesh as it were fire... have... Howl, howl, ye nobles, howl honourable, howl ye rich men for the miseries that are coming upon you." (96) The historian, Alfred Leslie Rowse, claims that Coppe's "egalitarian Communism" was "300 years" before its time. (97)

Barry Coward, the author of The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714 (1980) argues that the activities of the Ranters created a "moral panic" because their activities were "often violent and anti-social" and frightened conservative opinion into reaction. They formed a "hippy-like counter culture of the 1650s which flew in the face of law and morality and which was considered with horror by respectable society." (101) Cromwell disliked the Ranters more than any other religious sect who he considered to be totally immoral. (102)

Cromwell and his supporters in Parliament attempted to deal with preachers such as Coppe and Clarkson, by passing the Adultery Act (May 1650), that imposed the death penalty for adultery and fornication. This was followed by the Blasphemy Act (August 1650). Coppe claimed he had been informed that the acts against adultery and blasphemy "were put out because of me; thereby secretly intimating that I was guilty of the breach of them". (103) Christopher Hill, the author of The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1991), agrees that this legislation was an attempt to deal with the development of religious groups such as the Ranters. (104)

Lord Protector
Oliver Cromwell became increasingly frustrated by the inability of Parliament to get anything done. His biographer, Pauline Gregg, has pointed out: "He realized that all revolutions are about power and he was asking himself who, or what, should exercise that power. He knew, moreover, that whoever or whatever was in control must be strong enough to propel the state in one direction. This he learned from his battle experience. To be successful an army must observe one plan, one directive." (105)

On 20th April 1653, Cromwell sent in his troopers with their muskets and drawn swords into the House of Commons. Harrison himself pulled the Speaker, William Lenthall, out of the Chair and pushed him out of the Chamber. That afternoon Cromwell dissolved the Council of State and replaced it with a committee of thirteen army officers. Harrison was appointed as chairman and in effect the head of the English state. (107)

In July, 1653, Oliver Cromwell established the Nominated Assembly and the Parliament of Saints. The total number of nominees was 140, 129 from England, five from Scotland and six from Ireland. The nominated assembly grappled with several of Harrison's favourite issues, including the immediate abolition of tithes. There was general consensus that tithes were objectionable, but no agreement about what mechanism for generating revenue should replace them. (108)

The Parliament was closed down by Cromwell in December, 1653. Charles H. Simpkinson has argued that Harrison now believed that "England now lay under a military despotism". (109) This decision was fiercely opposed by Thomas Harrison. Cromwell reacted by depriving him of his military commission, and in February, 1654, he was ordered to retire to Staffordshire. However, he was able to keep the land he had acquired during his period of power. The total value of this land was well over £13,000. (110)

The army decided that Oliver Cromwell should become England's new ruler. Some officers wanted him to become king but he refused and instead took the title Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. However, Cromwell had as much power as kings had in the past. The franchise was restricted to those who possessed the very high property qualification of £200 and by the disqualification of all who had taken part in the English Civil War on the royalist side. (111)

When the House of Commons opposed his policies in January 1655, he closed it down. Cromwell always disliked the idea of democracy as he posed a threat to good government. "The mass of the population was totally unsophisticated politically, very much under the influence of landlords and parsons: to give such men the vote (with no secret ballot, since most of them were illiterate) would be to strengthen rather than to weaken the power of the conservatives." (112)

Richard Baxter attempted to explain Cromwell's thinking: "In most parts, the major vote of the vulgar... is ruled by money and therefore by their landlords." (113) Cromwell warned Parliament that the vast majority of the population was opposed to his government: "The condition of the people is such as the major part a great deal are persons disaffected and engaged against us." (114) One pamphlet published at the time commented "if the common vote of the giddy multitude must rule the whole" Cromwell's government would be overthrown. (115)

Cromwell now imposed military rule. England was divided into eleven districts. Each district was run by a Major General and were answerable only to the Lord Protector. Christopher Hill argues that "The Major-Generals were to make all men responsible for the good behaviour of their servants.... They also enforced the legislation of the Long Parliament against drunkenness, blasphemy and sabbath-breaking... Above all they took control of the militia, the army of the gentry." (116)

The first duty of the Major-Generals was to maintain security by suppressing unlawful assemblies, disarming Royalist supporters and apprehending thieves, robbers and highwaymen. The militia of the Major-Generals was funded by a new 10% income tax imposed on Royalists known as the "decimation tax". It was argued that a punitive tax on Royalists was a just means of financing the militia because Royalist conspiracies had made it necessary in the first place. (117)

The responsibilities of these Major-Generals included granting poor relief and imposing Puritan morality. In some districts bear-baiting, cock-fighting, horse-racing and wrestling were banned. Betting and gambling were also forbidden. Large numbers of ale-houses were closed and fines were imposed on people caught swearing. In some districts, the Major-Generals even closed down theatres. (118)

Oliver Cromwell by Peter Lely (c. 1657)

In May 1657 Sexby published, under a pseudonym, Killing No Murder, a pamphlet that attempted to justify the assassination of Oliver Cromwell. Sexby accused Cromwell of the enslavement of the English people and argued for that reason he deserved to die. After his death "religion would be restored" and "liberty asserted". He hoped "that other laws will have place besides those of the sword, and that justice shall be otherwise defined than the will and pleasure of the strongest". (121) The following month Edward Sexby arrived in England to carry out the deed, however, he was arrested on 24th July. He remained in the Tower of London until his death on 13th January 1658. (122)

In 1658 Cromwell announced that he wanted his son, Richard Cromwell, to replace him as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. The English army was unhappy with this decision. While they respected Oliver as a skillful military commander, Richard was just a country farmer. To help him Cromwell brought him onto the Council to familiarize him with affairs of state. (123)

Oliver Cromwell died on 3rd September 1658. Richard Cromwell became Lord Protector but he was bullied by conservative MPs into support measures to restrict religious toleration and the army's freedom to indulge in political activity. The army responded by forcing Richard to dissolve Parliament on 21st April, 1659. The following month he agreed to retire from government. (124)

Monck reinstated the House of Lords and the Parliament of 1640. Royalists were now in control of Parliament. Monck now contacted Charles, who was living in Holland. Charles agreed that if he was made king he would pardon all members of the parliamentary army and would continue with the Commonwealth's policy of religious toleration. Charles also accepted that he would share power with Parliament and would not rule as an 'absolute' monarch as his father had tried to do in the 1630s. (126)

Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Thomas Pride and John Bradshaw were all posthumously tried for high treason. They were found guilty and on the twelfth anniversary of the regicide, on 30th January 1661, their bodies were disinterred and hung from the gallows at Tyburn. (128) Cromwell's body was put into a lime-pit below the gallows and the head, impaled on a spike, was exposed at the south end of Westminster Hall for nearly twenty years. (129)

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A detailed biography of Oliver Cromwell that includes includes images, quotations and the main facts of his life. GCSE Modern World History - English Civil War. A-level - The English Civil War: Causes, Conflict, Consequence. (OCR) The Early Stuarts and the Origins of the Civil War 1603-1660.

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British Pathe footage of the arrival of immigrants from Jamaica

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History of the slave trade in Liverpool

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Liverpool and the slave trade - International Slavery Museum, Liverpool museums

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Description of Liverpool's involvement in the slave trade, from the International Slavery Museum website. Part of the National Museums Liverpool group, this venue explores historical and contemporary aspects of slavery.

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Timelines.tv gives some background to religious upheaval in Tudor England

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The Reformation - Timelines.tv History of Britain A07

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Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries 

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Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries 

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Timelines.tv documentary on Henry’s challenge to church power.

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Henry VIII and the Church - Timelines.tv History of Britain B07

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Timelines documentary outlining Edward II's first gathering of 'commoners' to parliament in 1295

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The First Parliaments - Timelines.tv History of Britain B04

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Timelines.tv brief documentary covering the origins of the Civil War - focusing on the role of Oliver Cromwell.

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Civil War - Timelines.tv History of Britain B08

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Religious, economic and political causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace

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Religious, economic and political causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace

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4 minute history from the Citizens Project

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Causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace | Tudor Rebellions | 4 Minute History

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Timelines.tv brief documentary covering the life of Oliver Cromwell after the execution of Charles I

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Oliver Cromwell - Timelines.tv History of Britain B09

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Citizens Project

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What was the Pilgrimage of Grace? | Tudor Rebellions | 4 Minute History

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Part 1: The Black Death

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What Caused the Peasants' Revolt? | Part 1: The Black Death | 2 Minute History

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Part 2: The Poll Tax

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What caused the Peasants' Revolt? / Poll Taxes / GCSE History

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In this GCSE History video Claire Kennan explores how poll taxes led to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

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What was the Significance of the Peasants' Revolt? | 3 Minute History

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Comparison of the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Peasants Revolt

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Comparison of the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Peasants Revolt

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The Peasants' Revolt and Pilgrimage of Grace Compared | 6 Minute History

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One of five short videos on Magna Carta from the Citizens Project.

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Was John the Worst King of England? | Magna Carta | 4 Minute History

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Magna Carta and the emergence of parliament

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Magna Carta and the emergence of parliament

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UK parliament looks at the role of Magna Carta in the emergence of democracy in Britain.

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Magna Carta and the emergence of Parliament

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Timeline.tv overview of the signing of Magna Carta.

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Magna Carta - Timelines.tv History of Britain B03

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What was the significance of the Pilgrimage of Grace? | Tudor Rebellions | 3 Minute History

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BBC bitesize summarises the arguments for and against reform.

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When concerns were raised about the working conditions in factories, especially for children, reformers began to propose changes to improve working environments.

The first supporters of factory reform were caring mill owners, many of them in the Tory Party, who were motivated mainly by their religion. One such factory owner was Robert Owen.

Robert Owen

He owned a cotton mill in New Lanark in Scotland.

He thought that if workers were treated well then they would work harder. This would then make greater profits for the factory owners.

He provided good houses and a school for his workers and their families.

He would not allow a child under ten to work in his mills.

He set up the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union for his workers in 1834.

In 1830 Richard Oastler wrote to the Leeds Mercury newspaper, complaining that the conditions of factory workers in Bradford was "more horrid than that hellish system of colonial slavery". Even so, the campaign to reform conditions achieved little attention until Sadler's Report was published. The report was written in 1832 by Michael Sadler and included testimonies from factory workers to reveal appalling conditions, especially for women and children. The report shocked public opinion.

In 1832 Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury took over leadership of the movement for factory reform in Parliament. He organised campaigns that achieved new laws to improve conditions.

Opposition of reform

The economist Nassau Senior argued that increased costs would ruin the industry, which made a major contribution to the wealth of the country. (This was later found to be wrong as better fed, less tired workers produced more, not less.)

Some people argued that the workers would only spend the extra time and money in drunkenness and crime. (This turned out to be wrong: better conditions led to less crime.)

Laissez-faire: the government believed it was wrong to interfere in the free working of the economy.

Discipline was necessary: domestic workers were not used to the needs of the factory and had to be trained.

The famous economist Adam Smith argued that children had always been employed in the domestic system, and that poor conditions in the factories were exaggerated.

Titus Salt (a manufacturer and politician from Manchester) argued that it was better for a child to work in a factory and earn a wage that provided food and clothes, than to force them to stay outside and starve or freeze to death. The work in factories (like pulling levers or tying threads) was less difficult than manual work and did not harm the children.

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grand national consolidated trades union

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When concerns were raised about the working conditions in factories, especially for children, reformers began to propose changes to improve working environments. The first supporters of factory reform were caring mill owners, many of them in the Tory Party, who were motivated mainly by their religion. One such factory owner was Robert Owen.

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Simon de Montfort and all this parliament business

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Simon de Montfort and all this parliament business

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History Vault reviews the strained relationship between Simon de Montfort and Henry II

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In this first biography of Simon de Montfort in nearly twenty years, Darren Baker reveals a revolutionary figure who did in fact play a major role in the development of the English parliament. As part of a virtual tour he is undertaking for the book, he explains in this guest article below how that came to pass.
Imagine you are about to hear a community lecture marking the 750th anniversary of the founding of Parliament. You already know, whether from school or some story in the media, that it has something to do with Simon de Montfort. Perhaps he was the one who laid the cornerstone, made the opening address, coined the term Parliament. The speaker then appears and after some brief introductory remarks, gets right to the gist of it. 'And this marked the first time that the burgesses were summoned to Parliament.' At that point, you notice other people thinking the same thing you are: what and who are these burgesses? The speaker soon clarifies it by saying this was the first time the cities, like the counties before them, had representation in Parliament. Confusion thereafter gives way to disappointment. That's it? All this hoopla over city people like Londoners being given the opportunity to throw their weight around?

If it seems like a letdown, and therefore another reason why there is no monument to Montfort outside Parliament today, the summoning of the burgesses was in fact a major step in the political development of the nation. It pointed the way towards a state free of the intricate patchwork of feudal loyalties. Historians, however, are not apt to see Montfort as any kind of visionary in this respect. He summoned the burgesses because he had lost the support of most of the baronage. But that's precisely the point. The ancestral nobility of England was loath to give up the power and privileges that came their way through feudalism and were clearly not keen on sharing them with any emerging bourgeois class. Montfort did not leave behind a draft of his thoughts to indicate where he was intending to take Parliament in the long run, but we can chart the course that made the summoning of the burgesses merely the culmination of his efforts to make Parliament an independent body of government. These efforts went back exactly five years before his famous Parliament and would, in the end, cost him his life.

The word parliament was first used in official records in 1236, a new way of describing what was essentially an old institution. The Norman kings had always had their great councils; assemblies of the great men of the realm convened to discuss petitions and the business of the realm. French was the language of government, so there's no telling who coined the term for these discussions. For all anyone knows, it might have been Montfort himself. He was one of King Henry III's most trusted courtiers at the time, the younger son of a French noble family who had arrived in England several years earlier with the most tenuous of claims to the earldom of Leicester. His continental dialect, combined with a 'courteous and pleasant way of speaking', doubtlessly set him apart from the Anglo-Norman speaking members of the court. It certainly worked wonders on the king's sister Eleanor, whom he would marry within two years.

That marriage, conducted in secret by the king, would eventually create all kinds of resentment between Henry and Simon over the next twenty years. By the time the reform movement began, Henry's resentment had turned into fear as the Montforts badgered him to no end over their private quarrels. The break finally came at the beginning of 1260, when Montfort left the king's party in France, without even saying goodbye to Henry, and returned to England with a specific purpose in mind: to hold Parliament, with or without the king.

This was indeed radical. Parliament, no matter what the form or name, had always been the king's prerogative. The Provisions drawn up in Oxford in 1258 to reform the realm took that away from him, basically made Parliament a permanent institution of the state by stipulating it to meet three times a year at regular intervals. Henry had sworn to abide by the Provisions, and so far Parliament had met as required, but when a treaty with France took him across the Channel at the end of 1259, he saw his chance to undermine them and reclaim his prerogatives. Alleging one delay or another, he ordered Parliament not to meet until he returned, even if that meant missing the February deadline under the Provisions.

Montfort was having none of it and led a party to London, which included Henry's son and heir Edward, to demand that the show go on. The magnates who had joined Simon in the original showdown with the king in 1258 were scared at the thought of outright defiance and chose to keep their heads down. In the end, Parliament was not held until the king returned in April. Montfort was not included on the list of people to invite, not to parliament anyway. Instead the king ordered him to stand trial for treason.

Nothing came of the trial for a variety of reasons, but in the summer of 1261 Henry again united the reformers by asking and receiving papal absolution from his oath to the Provisions. Montfort took the lead in fighting back by deciding that Parliament would not only be held without the king's authority, but without the king himself. 'We don't need him' was more or less his attitude, but in fact he had turned to an innovation for Parliament that had come from the king himself.

Back in 1254, Henry was overseas in Gascony and in need of money. He asked his regents to convene Parliament and to specifically ask the sheriffs to have two knights elected for the purpose of representing their counties in the discussion for a tax. He was hoping to bypass his obstinate barons by appealing directly to the patriotic sentiments of the nation. Simon was present at that Parliament and no doubt left impressed with the political potential of this new constituency. And so it was to the knightly class that he turned for his 'rogue' Parliament of 1261, a move which so unnerved the king that he quickly sent his own summons to the knights, asking them to meet him instead. In the end, the knights too preferred to keep their heads down and went nowhere. In any event, the court by this time had bought off one of the leading reformers and the whole movement collapsed again. Fed up with all the cravenness around him, Montfort took his family and went to live in France.

Had Henry's court enjoyed sharper political acumen, they would have let things be and reform might have died of its own accord. But they insisted on pursuing vendettas at home and abroad, with the result that Simon returned in the spring of 1263 to lead a campaign that forced the king to accept the Provisions once again. The twists and turns eventually led to civil war and Montfort capturing Henry and Edward at the battle of Lewes. The son, his former ally but now implacable enemy, he locked away in Dover, and the king he took with him to London in preparation for a Parliament that in many ways was even more significant than the one held after it (those burgesses).

In the events before and after Lewes, most of the barons were on the king's side, most of the clergy on Simon's, and the knights were somewhere in between. Simon had that political acumen sorely lacking among the Henry's men and knew he would need what knightly support he could muster if his radical new government was going to survive. In June 1264, with the entire royal family still in England under castle arrest, he summoned Parliament to meet and discuss what was called an Ordinance but in reality was nothing less than a constitutional monarchy. It embodied the Provisions around a two-tier system of conciliar control of the king and his family. It doesn't really matter whether Montfort intended that control to be dictated by his party. What he's doing is asking Parliament for their approval of his plan. Equally important, however, is that the knights in attendance didn't come to merely rubberstamp his initiatives. They wanted something, too.

Another of the king's cherished prerogatives was the appointment of sheriffs. The abuses committed by these crown officials, mostly with orders from above, saw his authority there stripped away as well during the reform period. Henry's determination to name his own sheriffs was understandably an even bigger flashpoint than Parliament was because it affected all members of the realm directly. Under the Provisions, now again the law of the land, the council would oversee the appointments. It was dominated by Montfortians, and since they wanted something from the knights, namely approval of their constitution, the knights wanted something from them, the right to appoint their own sheriffs. We don't know how long this discussion was in committee or what trade-offs might have accompanied it, but each side in the end got what it wanted, and all the king could do was sit by and glumly look on.

The importance of this assembly cannot be exaggerated. For the first time, a nationally elected assembly is meeting for the purpose of passing legislation worked out through compromise and after being proposed by the leader of the dominant party. It was an emergency session to be sure. The queen was busy preparing an invasion force on the continent and Edward's friends in the Welsh marches had launched an insurgency in violation of the peace terms. Montfort literally had to be in three places at once, a gift he seems to have inherited from his father, but by the end of the summer he had beaten back the threats and made sure to embody the Ordinance in a final peace treaty which, interestingly, hinted that he expected the constitutional monarchy to continue into the next reign and beyond. Against this backdrop, summoning the burgesses for what turned out to be his last Parliament was merely the next logical step.

So if all this talk about the towns getting their say in Parliament seems like a measly reason for celebrating any anniversary of it, it should be remembered that it was merely the tip of a long and costly struggle to make Parliament at least an equal partner in government. But it didn't end with Montfort's fall at Evesham. Edward was chastened by his year in captivity, where he presumably pondered his mistakes and reflected on the time when he joined his uncle five years previously in insisting that Parliament meet as stipulated by law. He knew there was no going back from as far as it had come, so when Parliament subsequently refused Henry a tax for Edward's crusade, neither sulked off as Henry was wont to do before and resort to other methods of getting the money. Now they summoned it again, and again, and again, each time hammering out legislation that would appeal to the knights and their localities, mainly with regard to Jewish finance, which was an intolerable situation created in the first place by people like Henry, Edward and the rest of the court. They finally got their tax after two full years, but the message was clear for all time to come. Parliament held the purse strings, which is to say the ultimate power in the land, and the origins of that power can be traced back to the struggle that took place between Simon de Montfort and Henry III between 1260 and 1265.

With All, For All: The Life of Simon de Montford is available to buy now.

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Simon de Montfort and all this Parliament business

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In this first biography of Simon de Montfort in nearly twenty years, Darren Baker reveals a revolutionary figure who did in fact play a major role in the development of the English parliament. As part of a virtual tour he is undertaking for the book, he explains in this guest article below how...

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Further reading over at Spartacus Education

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Sections

Dissolution of the Monasteries
The following month disturbances took place at the market town of Louth in Lincolnshire. The rebels captured local officials and demanded the arrest of leading Church figures they considered to be heretics. This included Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Bishop Hugh Latimer. They wrote a letter to Henry VIII claiming that they had taken this action because they were suffering from "extreme poverty". (4)

Lord John Hussey was at his house at Sleaford on 2nd October 1536 when reports reached him about the disturbance at Louth. His immediate reaction was to organise against the rebels. He ordered the breaking down of bridges and opening of sluices to stop the passage of people into East Anglia. However, most of the people Hussey tried to reach either had fled or were under house arrest. "Hussey offered to ride to the king and plead for their pardon if they would submit, a suggestion which they refused. It was also reported that at this meeting Hussey refused to betray Henry by joining the rebels, but he also admitted that he was impotent to resist them because his tenants would not serve against them." (5)

Geoffrey Moorhouse has argued that "Hussey certainly behaved from the outset like someone who was not at all sure which side he proposed to back." However, he refused to join the king's army being assembled in Nottinghamshire. (6) Soon the whole of Lincolnshire was up in arms, but most members of "the gentry promptly asserted their control over the movement, which might otherwise have got dangerously out of hand". (7)

Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, were was sent to Lincolnshire to deal with the rebels. In a age before a standing army, loyal forces were not easy to raise. (8) "Appointed the king's lieutenant to suppress the Lincolnshire rebels, he advanced fast from Suffolk to Stamford, gathering troops as he went; but by the time he was ready to fight, the rebels had disbanded. On 16th October he entered Lincoln and began to pacify the rest of the county, investigate the origins of the rising, and prevent the southward spread of the pilgrimage." (9)

Robert Aske
Aske now returned home and began to persuade people from Yorkshire to support the rebellion. People joined what became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace for a variety of different reasons. Derek Wilson, the author of A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women & Society in Reformation England (1972) has argued: "It would be incorrect to view the rebellion in Yorkshire, the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace, as purely and simply an upsurge of militant piety on behalf of the old religion. Unpopular taxes, local and regional grievances, poor harvests as well as the attack on the monasteries and the Reformation legislation all contributed to the creation of a tense atmosphere in many parts of the country". (12)

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Within a few days, 40,000 men had risen in the East Riding and were marching on York. (13) Aske called on his men to take an oath to join "our Pilgrimage of Grace" for "the commonwealth... the maintenance of God's Faith and Church militant, preservation of the King's person and issue, and purifying of the nobility of all villein's blood and evil counsellors, to the restitution of Christ's Church and suppression of heretics' opinions". (14) Aske published a declaration obliging "every man to be true to the king's issue, and the noble blood, and preserve the Church of God from spoiling". (15)

By the end of the month the rising had engulfed virtually all the northern counties, roughly one-third of the country. (16) Scott Harrison has suggested that: "Twenty thousand men, women and children may have actively supported the rebellion at some stages, and many more may have taken the rebel oath before returning to their homes... If one accepts an estimate for the total population of the region of approximately seventy thousand in 1536, the fact that over one-third of the inhabitants were active rebels indicates a high level of involvement." (17)

The Beginning of the Pilgrimage of Grace in Lincoln in 1537.

A. L. Morton has suggested that all the evidence indicates: "The Pilgrimage of Grace... was a reactionary, Catholic movement of the North, led by the still half-feudal nobility of that area and aimed against the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. But if the leaders were nobles the mass character of the rising indicated a deep discontent and the rank and file were drawn in large measure from the dispossessed and from the threatened peasantry." (20)

At first Sedbar refused to take the oath but after being threatened with execution he agreed to join the rebellion. Geoffrey Moorhouse doubts this story and suggests that "Sedbar was in a much less supine mood than he admitted, confident enough of the popularity of this burgeoning cause". (22) Sedbar agreed that Aske's army could take control of the abbey's horses. He also travelled with them to Darlington where he spoke in favour of the rising.

Robert Aske leading the march to York.

Robert Aske and his rebels entered York on 16th October. It is estimated that Aske now led an army that numbered 20,000. (23) Aske made a speech where he pointed out "we have taken (this pilgrimage) for the preservation of Christ's church, of this realm of England, the King our sovereign lord, the nobility and commons of the same... the monasteries... in the north parts (they) gave great alms to poor men and laudably served God... and by occasion of the said suppression the divine in divine service of Almighty God is much diminished." (24)

Fred Kirk Shaw, Pilgrimage of Grace (1913)

After discussions with Aske, Thomas Darcy decided to join the Pilgrimage of Grace. He swore the oath presented to him by Aske. It included the following: "Ye shall not enter into this our Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, but only for the love that ye do bear unto Almighty God, his faith, and to Holy Church militant and the maintenance thereof, to the preservation of the King's person and his issue, to the purifying of the nobility, and to expulse all villein blood and evil councillors against the commonwealth from his Grace and his Privy Council of the same. And ye shall not enter into our said Pilgrimage for no particular profit to your self, nor to do any displeasure to any private person, but by counsel of the commonwealth, nor slay nor murder for no envy, but in your hearts put away all fear and dread, and take afore you the Cross of Christ, and in your hearts His faith, the Restitution of the Church, the suppression of these Heretics and their opinions, by all the holy contents of this book." (28)

The oath made it clear that the rebels were loyal to Henry VIII and blamed the closing of the monasteries on the king's officials such as Vicar-General Thomas Cromwell, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, Bishop Hugh Latimer, Bishop Nicholas Ridley, Bishop Nicholas Shaxton, Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley and Solicitor-General Richard Rich. To followers of the Pilgrimage of Grace, these men were heretics and deserved to be burnt at the stake.

Geoffrey Moorhouse, the author of The Pilgrimage of Grace (2002), claims: "Aske made one more attempt to win Percy over and was at last successful in obtaining some sort of agreement that he would do nothing to injure the Pilgrimage... Percy consented to move out of Wressle and leave it in Aske's hands. Before November was halfway through he had, in fact, formally and legally made over the castle to Aske for as long as the captain needed it; and thus it became the convenient base for the subsequent direction of the Pilgrimage." (30)

Robert Aske offered the leadership of the Pilgrimage of Grace to Thomas Darcy. He refused but agreed to provide soldiers for the cause. To show his commitment to the new allegiance, one of his first acts was to send the oath that he signed into Lancashire. He also arranged for flags to be made that included the religious insignia of the Five Wounds of Christ (it depicted a bleeding heart above a chalice, both being surrounded at the corners by the pierced hands and feet).

Five Wounds of Christ flag.

The leadership of Robert Aske has been praised by historians. One of his requests was that Henry VIII should hold a meeting of Parliament in the north. Anthony Fletcher has argued: "Aske's intention throughout the campaign he directed was to overawe the government into granting the demands of the north, by presenting a show of force. Only one man was killed during the Pilgrimage. He did not want to advance south unless Henry refused the Pilgrims' petition and he had no plan to form an alternative government or remove the king. Aske merely wanted to give the north a say in the affairs of the nation, to remove Cromwell and reverse certain policies of the Henrician Reformation." (33)

Peace Talks with Henry VIII
Henry VIII summoned Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, out of retirement to deal with the Pilgrimage of Grace. Norfolk, although he was 63, was the country's best soldier. Norfolk was also the leading Roman Catholic and a strong opponent of Thomas Cromwell and it was hoped that he was a man who the rebels would trust. Norfolk was able to raise a large army but he had doubts about their reliability and suggested to the King that he should negotiate with the rebels. (35)

Robert Aske spent the Christmas holiday with Henry at Greenwich Palace. When they first met Henry told Aske: "Be you welcome, my good Aske; it is my wish that here, before my council, you ask what you desire and I will grant it." Aske replied: "Sir, your majesty allows yourself to be governed by a tyrant named Cromwell. Everyone knows that if it had not been for him the 7,000 poor priests I have in my company would not be ruined wanderers as they are now." Henry gave the impression that he agreed with Aske about Thomas Cromwell and asked him to prepare a history of the previous few months. To show his support he gave him a jacket of crimson silk. (37)

Arrest & Execution of Robert Aske
Following the agreement to disband the rebel army in December 1536, Francis Bigod began to fear that Henry VIII would seek revenge on its leaders. Bigod accused Robert Aske and Thomas Darcy of betraying the Pilgrimage of Grace. On 15th January 1537, Bigod launched another revolt. He assembled his small army with a plan to attack Hull. Aske agreed to return to Yorkshire and assemble his men to defeat Bigod. He then joined up with Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, and his army made up of 4,000 men. Bigod was easily defeated and after being captured on 10th February, 1537, was imprisoned in Carlisle Castle. (38)

On 24th March, Robert Aske, Thomas Darcy and Robert Constable were asked by the Duke of Norfolk to return to London in order to have a meeting with Henry VIII. They were told that the King wanted to thank them for helping to put down the Bigod rebellion. On their arrival they were all arrested and sent to the Tower of London. (39)

Aske was charged with renewed conspiracy after the pardon. (40) Thomas Cromwell had kept a very low profile during the Pilgrimage of Grace but there is no reason to suppose that he lost his place as the king's right-hand man. (41) However, he now conducted the examination of Robert Aske on 11th May. Robert Aske was asked a total of 107 written questions. Geoffrey Moorhouse claims that Aske made no attempt to hide his early involvement in the Pilgrimage of Grace: "The most striking thing about all of Robert Aske's testimony is how very straightforward he was, especially for one in such a predicament as his. It was as though he was not only incapable of telling a lie but even of obfuscating the truth." (42)

The government later claimed that Margaret suggested that John Bulmer should start another uprising. It was said "she enticed Sir John Bulmer to raise the commons again" and that "Margaret counselled him to flee the realm (if the commons would not rise) than that he and she should be parted". John Bulmer then contacted several local landowners to discuss his plans. At least two of the men approached, Thomas Francke and Gregory Conyers, told Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk about the planned uprising by Bulmer. (44)

John Bulmer and Margaret Cheyney were arrested in early April, 1537. They were taken to London and were tortured. "We have no record of Margaret's confession, either, though it was doubtless extracted, but Bulmer refused to say anything in his that would implicate her and he pleaded guilty to the treason charge, possibly in the forlorn hope that this would exonerate her. Both of them, in fact, originally pleaded not guilty before changing their minds while the jury was actually considering its verdict and one view is that they did so because they had been promised the King's mercy if they admitted their guilt. Bulmer referred to Cheyney as his wife and nothing else right up to the end, much to the irritation of his accusers and the judge." (45)

Thomas Darcy and John Hussey were tried in Westminster Hall. During his trial Darcy accused Thomas Cromwell of being responsible for the Pilgrimage of Grace: "Cromwell it is thou that art the very original and chief causer of this rebellion and mischief, and art likewise causer of the apprehension of us that be noble men and dost daily earnestly travail to bring us to our end and to strike off our heads." (46) The two men were also accused of having meetings with Eustace Chapuys in September 1534 and urged him to encourage King Charles V "to intervene in England" and place Henry's daughter, Mary, on the throne. (47)

Despite his spirited defence Darcy and Hussey were found guilty of treason on 15th May. Henry VIII wanted Darcy to be executed in Doncaster. However, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, told the King that as Darcy was a popular figure in the area this act might start another uprising. Henry was persuaded to have Darcy executed at Tower Hill instead. This was carried out on 30th June 1537 and Darcy's head was displayed on London Bridge. (48) Darcy's biographer, Richard Hoyle, has pointed out: "It was later claimed that Darcy had been found guilty only because Sir Thomas Cromwell, principal secretary, led the peers trying him and persuaded them to believe that he would be pardoned by the king." (49) Robert Constable was taken to Hull to be executed, whereas John Hussey was executed in Lincoln. (50)

Thomas Cromwell managed to obtain statements from some of the prisoners that implicated Robert Aske in the Sir Francis Bigod rebellion. Cromwell also found a letter signed by Aske and Darcy that called on people not to join Bigod but to remain in their homes. Cromwell argued that by urging them to stay in their homes, they were by implication telling them not to join the King's forces and not to assist in the suppression of the rising. This, according to Cromwell, this was treason.

Aske was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. Henry VIII insisted that the punishment should be carried out in York where the uprising began so that the local people could see what happens to traitors. Market day had been chosen for the execution. On 12th July, 1537, Aske was tied to a hurdle and dragged through the streets of the city. He was taken to the high upon the mound on which Clifford's Tower stood. On the scaffold Aske asked for forgiveness. Aske was hanged, almost to the point of death, revived, castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered (his body was chopped into four pieces). (51)

Margaret Cheyney was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. Madeleine Dodds and Ruth Dodds, the authors of The Pilgrimage of Grace (1915) have speculated on the reasons for this. They argued that she "committed no overt act of treason; her offences were merely words and silence". They believed that Henry VIII wanted to use the case of Cheyney as an example to others. "There can be no doubt that many women were ardent supporters of the Pilgrimage.... Lady Bulmer's execution... was an object-lesson to husbands... to teach them to distrust their wives." (52)

Sharon L. Jansen agrees with this point of view: "Margaret Cheyney's sexual power was suspect; women like her could lure their husbands into danger. Men needed to submit to their princes, and they also needed to control their wives, their mothers, their daughters, their female servants. Margaret Cheyney had violated the contemporary notion that wives should be chaste, silent, and obedient, and her death could certainly have been intended as a warning about the proper behaviour of women." (53)

The Aftermath
It is estimated that about 200 people were executed for their part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. This included Robert Aske, Thomas Darcy, Francis Bigod, Robert Constable, John Hussey, John Bulmer and Margaret Cheyney. The heads of two of the largest religious houses, Abbot William Thirsk of Fountains Abbey and Abbot Adam Sedbar of Jervaulx Abbey, were also put to death. (54) However, others like Edward Lee, the Archbishop of York, who had signed the oath, was spared.

As Jasper Ridley, the author of Henry VIII (1984) has pointed out: "Nearly all the noblemen and gentlemen of Yorkshire had joined the Pilgrimage of Grace in the autumn. Henry could not execute them all. He divided them, somewhat arbitrarily, into two groups - those who were to be forgiven and restored to office and favour, and those who were to be executed on framed-up charges of having committed fresh acts of rebellion after the general pardon. Archbishop Lee, Lord Scrope, Lord Latimer, Sir Robert Bowes, Sir Ralph Ellerker and Sir Marmaduke Constable continued to serve as Henry's loyal servants." (55)

Thomas Cromwell was determined to remove all those religious leaders who he suspected of being supporters of the Pilgrimage of Grace. In the winter of 1537 Cromwell sent out his commissioners to discover the loyalty of the people who were running the remaining monasteries. The commissioners relied heavily on information from local people. William Sherburne, a former friar, accused Robert Hobbes of being a supporter of the rebels. Hobbes was interviewed and he refused to recant: "Hobbes held firm, although in some places it is difficult to establish an exact meaning from the long and rambling depositions of a man physically ill from strangury, and to disentangle apologies for bluntness of speech from repentance on points of principle. It is certain, however, that to the very end he remained opposed to the suppression of the monasteries, the distribution of 'wretched heretic books' by Cromwell, and the royal divorce, all sufficient to make his conviction a formality. Indeed, he confessed his offences and offered no defence." Robert Hobbes was hanged, drawn, and quartered outside the abbey and its land and property was given to the Crown. (56)

Richard Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey survived this investigation. Cromwell sent his agents back the following year. This time they were more critical of Wilding's leadership. They identified divisions among the monks, especially between the older and younger ones, and that the abbot had his favourites in the community. Whiting was also accused of spending too much away from the monastery and living at his manors of Sturminster Newton in Dorset and Ashbury in Berkshire. (57)

Whiting was sent back to Somerset in the care of Richard Pollard and reached Wells on 14 November. "Here some sort of trial apparently took place, and next day, Saturday, 15th November, he was taken to Glastonbury with two of his monks, Dom John Thorne and Dom Roger James, where all three were fastened upon hurdles and dragged by horses to the top of Toe Hill which overlooks the town. Here they were hanged, drawn and quartered, Abbot Whiting's head being fastened over the gate of the now deserted abbey and his limbs exposed at Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgewater." (60) The heads of two other large houses at Colchester Abbey and Reading Abbey were also executed in 1539. (61)

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Read the essential details about the Pilgrimage of Grace that includes images, quotations and the main facts of his life. Henry VIII. Thomas Cromwell. Key Stage 3 History. GCSE History. England 1485�1558: the Early Tudors (A/S) England 1547�1603: the Later Tudors (A/2)