Category Archives: World influence

The development of the franchise in England

Serious disquiet with the Commons’ electoral qualifications, provisions and practices began in Elizabeth’s reign and reached its highest pitch, prior to the 1640s, during the years 1621 to 1623.

The discontent was provoked primarily by the situation in the boroughs rather than the counties, Since 1430, the county electorate had been restricted to the forty shilling freeholder, which qualification had become almost sacrosanct by the end of the sixteenth century – only one proposal before the 1640s (in 1621) was made to raise or lower it. Tudor inflation had greatly lowered the barrier it represented (40 shillings in 1600 was worth perhaps 15 shillings at 1430 values) and it is reasonable to suppose this considerably increased the rural electorate. Also, there is evidence to suggest that the qualification was not always enforced and some county electorates may have had a very broad manhood franchise indeed prior to 1640.

Borough franchises were anything but uniform. In some the whole ‘commonalty’ (all householders) or even all ’potwallers’ (men with their own hearths) voted. In others the vote was restricted to all taxpayers (‘scot and lot’), freemen of the town, or those in possession of burgage property. In extreme cases the vote might be restricted to the ruling corporation. Such discrepancies of representation were aggravated by a distribution of borough seats which took insufficient account of the demographic changes of the past two centuries, during which time England’s population increased very substantially, especially during the 16th century, perhaps by as much as a third. These facts prepared a well mulched political soil for agitation for more equal borough representation, both in terms of the breadth of the franchise and in the number of seats.

Tudor monarchs, not unnaturally, did not favour larger electorates. The existence of ‘rotten boroughs’ was a source of patronage and, if the monarch could control the oligarchies who returned the MP, a means of reducing opposition to the Crown. As there was a significant number of such boroughs, this was no small advantage to the monarch.

The attitude of Parliament to the franchise was mixed. The Lords had a similar interest to the Crown in distrusting broad franchises. The peers often effectively controlled seats in the Commons. They also had a natural inclination to deny the ‘commonality’ any voice in the affairs of the kingdom. Conversely, it was obviously in the Commons’ interest to increase electorates, where such increases reduced the Monarch’s’ and the Lord’s opportunities for patronage.

There is particular evidence that the Puritans favoured larger electorates, at least in so far as it suited their own purposes. At Warwick in 1586 Job Throckmorton was elected after he threatened to invoke the right of the ‘commonality to vote. In 1587 John Field remarked to colleague ‘seeing we cannot compass these things by suit or dispute, it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which we desire.’ (J.H. Plunb. The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715). As Puritans displaced many court nominees and the creatures of aristocrats, this is significant in view of the attitude of the Commons towards electoral qualifications between 1621 and 1628.

By 1621, the Commons had gained the right to decide disputed elections and to revive lapsed borough seats and even make new creations, The tendency until 1628 was to decide in favour of wider franchise and to allow all the ‘commonality’ to vote. At Bletchingly (1624) and Lewes (1628) ‘all the inhabitants,’ were to be electors’, and at Cirencester (1624) all ‘resients:’. In the case of Pontefract in 1624 a general principle was formulated:

‘There being no certain custom nor prescription, who should be the electors and who not, we must have recourse to common right which, to this purpose was held to be, that more than the freeholders only ought to have voices in the election, namely all men, inhabitants, householders resient within the borough.’ (J.H, Plunb. The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715).

Further, in the case of Boston (1628) it was asserted that the election of burgesses belonged by common right to the commoners and only prescription or ‘a constant usage beyond all memory’ could rob them of this. (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.62).

It is true that when the Commons revived or created borough seats, they concentrated, as the Tudors had done, on small towns to promote their own advantage. But, even so, they granted ‘scot and lot’ franchises in every case (except Weobley) which meant that even small towns such as Great Marlow or Hilbourne Port had electorate of around 200.

Bills were introduced to regulate electionsand standardise,the franchise in 1621, 1623, 1625, 1628 and 1640, The 1621 Bill is of particular interest because it proposed that the 40/- freeholder qualification be increased to £4 and to admit £10 copyholders by inheritance. The borough proposals add no more than the various decisions on individual cases (in fact even less), for electors were to be freemen except where they numbered less than twenty-four, in which case all inhabitants not in receipt of alms were to be included,

In 1640 the franchise was raised again by Sir Simonds D’Ewes. It was he who first uttered the idea later made famous by Rainsborough ‘that the poorest man in England ought to have a voice, that it was the birthright of the subjects of England and all had voices in the election of Knights etc. previously.’ (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.63).

In 1641 a bill had reached second reading but was then lost. D’Ewes favoured its contents except that he ‘desired that whereas it was provided in the bill that none that took alms should have voices in elections, which I well allowed, we would likewise provide that no more monopolizing elections might be in cities and boroughs, that all men resients might have voices.’(K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.64)

The religious radical William Prynne put it even more plainly,’Before this Petition and Act every inhabitant and commoner in each county had voice in the election of Knights, whether he were a freeholder or not, or had a freehold only of one penny, six pence or twelve pence by the year as they now claim of late in most cities and boroughs where popular elections are admitted’ (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.64).

It is a sobering thought that if the Statute of 1430 did disenfranchise large numbers of county electors, the county franchise may have been wider in medieval England than it was to be again before the end of the nineteenth century and conceivably wider than the Franchise before the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

What of the position of those deemed to be dependents: the servants, wage-earners and almstakers? Resident household servants were generally considered beyond the electoral pale, although ‘servants’ were said to have voted in the Worcestershire county election of 1604. Wage-earners certainly did so, for those in the ‘potwaller’ and ‘scot and lot’ constituencies were granted the right to vote. Almstakers were excluded in the 1621 and 1640 bills, yet at Great Marlow in 1604 77 of the 245 voters were said to be almstakers, nine of them inmates of the almshouse. In 1640 the right of the Bember inmates to vote was said to have been sustained and in 1662 the St. Albans almsmen were said to have ‘had voices time out of mind’.

It is clear from all this that those who promoted the radical or democratic cause in the 1640s, most particularly the Levellers, did not enter untilled ground. There are also three points of particular interest. First, the Commons, or at least an influential part of it, was not unduly disturbed by the prospect of an enlarged electorate. Second, those deemed to be dependent such as servants and almstakers – were included on occasion in the franchise long before the Civil War. Third, that there existed even gentlemen (such as Sir Simonds D’Ewes) who had an active and unambiguous democratic spirit. The latter point is particularly pertinent because the chief Leveller, John Lilburne, was also of gentle-birth, albeit ”small gentry”, a fact he never ceased to emphasise. Clearly, democratic ideas and feeling were not foreign political bodies suddenly introduced by the Levellers and others in the 1640s.

After ferment of the Civil Wars and their aftermath had quietened, the voices of those who sought a broad franchise (especially the Levellers) faded and the Restoration in 1660 placed the franchise in aspic until 1832 when the Great Reform Act granted a franchise much narrower than that envisaged in the 1640s, with about one in six adult men being enfranchised. Indeed, the years between the Restoration and 1832 saw a squeezing of franchises as rotten boroughs with minute numbers of electors increased and the populations of the new great urban developments such as Manchester and Birmingham went largely enfranchised. The 1832 Act removed the most glaring examples of rotten boroughs and allocated seats to places such as Manchester).

In 1867 the Second Reform Act enfranchised around two in five adult men, still well short of that demanded in the 1640s. The third Reform Act of 1884 doubled the electorate. This produced the breadth of franchise wanted by the mainstream democratically inclined advocates in the 1640s. (There were those who would have gone further).

All 19^th century electoral reform was based on property qualifications and women were excluded, although ironically before the 1832 Act women arguably had the right to vote because the gender of voters was not laid down. The 1832 Act altered that by referring to males not persons. (http://www.historyofwomen.org/suffrage.html). It was not until the 1918 Representation Act that full manhood suffrage at the age of twenty-one was granted and women aged thirty were definitely enfranchised. The final Act of full adult suffrage did not occur until 1928, although the qualification was not reduced to its present age of eighteen until 1969.

The democratic spirit and the English civil war, Commonwealth and Protectorate

Stuart society was a world on the physical, economic and intellectual move and waiting to move faster if the right engine appeared. The civil wars of the 1640s was that machine.

Representative government is one thing, democracy quite another. That did not come to England in its formal form of a full adult franchise until the twentieth century. But for a brief period in the 1640s a franchise for the House of Commons broader than any used before the late nineteenth century was more than a pipe dream.

The Civil War and its republican aftermath, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, changed English politics utterly. It brought the end of claims by the English crown to Divine Right and absolute monarchy. It promoted the political interests of the aristocracy and gentry as a class. It forced those on the Parliamentary side to exercise power on their own responsibility. It created a political class which saw politics as something they could control rather than merely be part of as an adjunct to the crown. It raised the idea that there should be a law superior to that which even a parliament could pass. It began the constitutional process which resulted in cabinet government. It laid the foundations for the formation of political parties as we know them. In short, it planted the seeds of modern representative government.

Into this new world were cast men whose political philosophies ranged from acceptance of the divine right of kings to unyielding communists. In the middle were those, such as Cromwell, who though socially conservative, realised that power and political interest had shifted not merely from the king to Parliament, but also in some sense to an appreciably broader circle of people than before. Such people were willing to extend the franchise to a degree, although still restricting it to those with property for fear that the poor would dispossess the haves if they had the power to elect and that those with no material stake in the country would have no sense of responsibility and duty.

But that was insufficient from many, especially those who fought on the Parliamentary side in the wars, and something else occurred which was to be even more momentous in the long run. The belief that men generally should only be ruled by those they had themselves elected became a serious political idea.

That the idea should find expression as a serious political idea in the 1640s was, of course, partly a consequence of the disruption of society by civil war, but that was more an opportunity rather than a reason. Innumerable civil wars all over the world have come and gone without the democratic spirit being given rein. What made the England of the time unusual was the long-existing ideal of individual freedom which had reached a high degree of sophistication, including the notion that free debate, the sine qua no of democracy, was of value in itself. Here are two passages which give a taste of the way minds were working in the 1640s. First, John Milton writing in the Areogapitica in the 1640s:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the earth, so truth be in the field [and] we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter…

The second statement comes from the Leveller Richard Overton’s ‘An Arrow against all Tyrants’ (19th October, 1646). It contains as good a refutation of the power of authority without consent over the individual as you will find:

No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s….for by naturall birth all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and freedom, and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, everyone with a naturall, innate freedom and propriety….even so are we to live, every one equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege…. [no more of which may be alienated] than is conducive to a better being, more safety and freedome….[for] every man by nature being a King, Priest and Prophet in his own naturall circuit and compasse, whereof no second may partake, but by deputation, commission and free consent from him, whose naturall right and freedome it is. [An Arrow against alltyrants].

These were not odd voices crying in the wilderness. The democratic spirit was widespread in the 1640s. By this I do not mean that men were commonly calling for full manhood suffrage, much less the emancipation of women. Even the most democratically advanced of the important groups which evolved during the Civil War, the Levellers, were unclear as to whether those who were deemed dependent in the sense of not being their own masters – servants and almstakers – should be given the vote or, indeed, who counted as a servant or almstaker.

Rather, there was a sense that the social order had been rearranged by the war, that men were on some new ground of equality and had a right to a public voice. In particular, there was a belief that those who had fought for Parliament had won the right to enfranchisement. There was also a widespread feeling, which penetrated all social classes, that the existing franchises (which as we have seen varied greatly) were frequently too narrow and that the towns, particularly those most recently grown to substantial size, were grossly under-represented.

Ideas of social and political equality had, as we have seen, existed long before the Civil War, but never before had large swathes of the masses and the elite seen anything approaching representative democracy as practical politics under any circumstances. The political and social elite of the period after 1640 may have been desperately afraid of a general representation of the English people, but they did not say it was impossible, merely feared its consequences. They may have loathed the idea of every man his own political master but they were forced by circumstances to admit that a Parliament elected on a broad franchise was not a fantasy.

The Putney Debates in 1647 provide a vivid record of the political fervour and mentality of the times. Parliamentary and Army leaders including Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, met with a variety of people on what might broadly be called the democratic side. A substantial part of the debate was taken down in shorthand. It is a most intriguing and exciting document, despite its incompleteness and some confused passages. The sheer range of political ideas it displays is impressive. It shows clearly that the 1640s experienced a high degree of sophistication amongst the politically interested class and that this class was drawn from a broad swathe of English society. The ideas run discussed from the monarchical to the unreservedly democratic, epitomised in Col Thomas Rainsborough’s famous words:

… I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to lead, as the richest 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 not think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under… (Col Thomas Rainsborough Puritanism and Liberty The Putney debates p 53).

Democracy, the revolutionary idea

Why was the idea of every man being an elector so revolutionary? There was of course the age-old traditional fear, known to the Greeks, that the masses would dispossess haves if they had control of who was to hold power. But the matter went much deeper than that. The enfranchisement of a wide electorate is perhaps the most fundamental political change a society can undergo. It forces the elite to take note of the masses in a way that no other system does. Even the humblest man must be considered as a man in his own right, a person with a vote and needs and wishes. Those needs and wishes may be heeded and met to varying degrees according to the success an elite has in subverting the representative process through such tricks as international treaties and the development of disciplined political parties, but what the majority needs and wants cannot as a matter of course be ignored completely when each man has a vote.

A form of male-only democracy existed in the ancient world, but it was never inclusive because the citizens were only a part of the population of a Greek civis and the large numbers of unfree men and free men who were not citizens were excluded. The Roman Republic had enjoyed in varying degrees at various times democratic expression through plebeian institutions such as the concilium plebis and offices such as that of tribune. But that was a class based representation which arose to oppose the Patrician class, not a self-conscious representation of individual men.

Received wisdom it may be now, the idea that every man (but not woman then) should have an active voice in choosing those who would represent and govern them was to most people, poor and rich, a truly novel and disturbing concept in the middle of the 17th century.

England and the rejection of violence

Why was England so different from other countries in its political, social and economic development? How was it that only in England did parliamentary government evolve and the one and only bootstrapped industrial revolution arise? Perhaps much of the answer lies in the fact that the English, in comparison with any other large nation, have long been wonderfully adept in dealing with the central problem of human life – how to live together peaceably. A Canadian academic, Elliott Leyton, has made a study of English murder through the centuries in his book Men of Blood. Leyton finds that the rate of English (as opposed to British murder) is phenomenally low for a country of her size and industrial development, both now and for centuries past. This strikes Elliott as so singular that he said in a recent interview “The English have an antipathy to murder which borders on eccentricity; it is one of the great cultural oddities of the modern age.” (Sunday Telegraph 4 12 1994).

This restraint extends to warfare and social disorder. That is not to say England has been without violence, but rather that at any point in her history the level of violence was substantially lower than in any other comparable society. For example, the English Civil War in the 17th Century was, apart from the odd inhumane blemish, startlingly free of the gross violence common on the continent of the time during the 30 Years War, where the sacking and pillage of towns and cities was the norm. A particularly notable thing, for civil wars are notorious for their brutality.

The way that England responded to the Reformation is instructive. She did not suffer the savage wars of religion which traumatised the continent and brought human calamities such as the St Bartholomew Day’s Massacre in France in 1572, when thousands of French protestants were massacred at the instigation of the French king.

It was not that the English did not care deeply about their religion, rather that they have been, when left to their own devices, generally loth to fight their fellow countrymen over anything. English civil wars have always been essentially political affairs in which the ordinary person has little say, for the struggles were either dynastic or a clash between Parliamentary ambition and the monarch. Even the persecution of the Lollards in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the persecution of Protestants under Mary I had a highly political aspect. The former was a vastly disturbing challenge to the established social order with men being told, in so many words, that they could find their own way to salvation and the latter an attempt to re-establish not merely the Catholic order in England, which had been overturned since the time of Henry VIII’s breach with Rome, but also what amounted to a new royal dynasty with Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.

Even the prohibitions on Catholics and non-Conformists after the Reformation had a fundamental political basis to them, namely, they were predicated on the question of whether such people be trusted to give their first loyalty to the crown.

The treatment of foreigners

Compared with other peoples, the English have been noticeably restrained in their treatment of other peoples residing within their country. A few massacres of Jews occurred before their expulsion from England in 1290, but from that time there has not been great slaughter of a minority living within England. Since 1290 there have been occasional outbreaks of anti-foreigner violence. During the Peasants’ Revolt London-based Flemings were murdered. In later times an anti-Spanish “No Popery” mob was frequently got up in London and he influx of Jews and Huguenots in the 17th and 18th centuries caused riots, one so serious in 1753 that it caused the repeal of a law naturalising Jews and Huguenots. But these riots did not result in great numbers of dead, let alone in systematic genocidal persecutions of any particular group. Most notably, the English fonts of authority, whether the crown, church or parliament, have not incited let alone ordered the persecution of a particular racial or ethnic group since the expulsion of the Jews. They have persecuted Christian groups, but that was a matter of religion not ethnicity, the Christians persecuted being English in the main. The only discrimination the English elite have formally sanctioned against an ethnic group for more than half a millennium was the inclusion of Jews within the general prohibitions passed in the half century or so after the Restoration in 1660 which banned those who were not members of the Church of England from holding a crown appointment such as an MP or election to public offices such as that of MP.

This comparative lack of violence can plausibly be seen as the ground for England’s maintenance and unique development of a Parliament and the development of the rule of law a consequence of England’s political arrangements. From that sprung the gradual erosion of monarchical authority. Put those three developments together and there is arguably the ground upon which first a great commercial edeifice was built followed by industrialisation.

But even if that is the immediate cause of English development it does not explain why the English become exceptionally peaceable within their own territory. One could argue that being an island helped, not least because England has not been subject to a forced foreign conquest from the continent for the better part of a millennium. However, England has suffered a good deal of inter-nation warfare within the British Isles, especially with Scotland. She has also fought many a campaign around the world, both as England and later under the banner of Great Britain. It is not that the English are or have been naturally timid.

Perhaps the fundamental answer to English peaceableness lies in the fact that the English enjoyed a level of racial and cultural homogeneity from very early on. Long before the English kingdom existed Bede wrote of the English as a single people. The English have never killed one another in any great quantity simply because one part of the population thought another part was in some way not English. That is the best possible starting point for the establishment of a coherent community.

The favoured liberal view of England is that it is the mongrel nation par excellence. In fact, this is the exact opposite of the truth. The general facts of immigration into England are these. The English and England were of course created by the immigration of Germanic peoples. The British monk, Gildas, writing in the sixth century, attributed the bulk of the Saxon settlement to the practice of British leaders employing Saxons to protect the Britons from Barbarian attacks after Rome withdrew around 410 A.D. The English monk Bede (who was born in A.D. 673) attributed the origins of the English to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who came to England in the century following the withdrawal of the Romans at the request of British war leaders.

Archaeological evidence suggests that substantial Germanic settlement in England had a longer history and dated from the Roman centuries, perhaps from as early as the third century. What is certain is that in her formative centuries following the exit of Rome, the various invaders and settlers were drawn from peoples with much in common.

They were the same physical type, there was a considerable similarity of general culture, their languages flowed from a common linguistic well. When the Norsemen came they too brought a Teutonic mentality and origin. Even the Normans were Vikings at one remove who, if frenchified, were not physically different from the English nor one imagines utterly without vestiges of the Norse mentality. Moreover, the number of Normans who settled in England immediately after the Conquest was small, perhaps as few as 5000.

After the Conquest, the only significant immigration into England for many centuries were the Jews. They were expelled from England in 1290. There was then no really large scale and sudden immigration from outside the British Isles until the flight of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which granted limited toleration to the Huguenots within France) in 1684 by Louis X1V.

There was other immigration in the period 1066-1650, but it was small and highly selective. Craftsmen of talent were encouraged particularly in the Tudor period. Italian families with trading and banking expertise (such as it was in those days) appeared after the expulsion of the Jews. Foreign merchants were permitted, but for much of the period on sufferance and subject to restrictions such as forced residence within specially designated foreign quarters.

The upshot of all this is that for six centuries after the Conquest England was an unusually homogeneous country, both racially and culturally. This is reflected in the absence since the Norman Conquest of any serious regional separatist movement within the heart of English territory. There has been meaningful resistance at the periphery – Cornwall, the Welsh marches and the far north, but even that has been effectively dead since the sixteenth century. Englishmen have fought but not to create separate nations.

The unusual restraint of the English is also shown in their dealings with foreigners abroad. England did not routinely go in for sack and pillage as was common on the continent and occasional massacres often occurred in special circumstances, for example, Cromwell’s in Ireland happened in aftermath of a massacre of Protestants in Ulster in 1641 and the fear that Ireland would be used as a springboard for a Royalist invasion of England.

Nowhere was the restraint seen more emphatically than in the Empire. If a people were forced to become part of an empire, the British Empire was indubitably the one to join. There were of course outrages committed in the Empire’s name, but there was no general policy of cruelty and, for the final century of the Empire’s existence, official British policy towards the colonies was that the interests of the natives should come first.

If the theory that a homogeneous population long occupying a territory without suffering foreign conquest results in greater social restraint is correct, this may have a profound implication. Assuming that personality is substantially innate, natural selection will act upon the type of personality which is best suited to the environment. It could be that the native English are, on average, genetically better suited to live in a society in which politics are decided by peaceful transfer of power and business and personal disputes are mediated through the law. On top of any genetic propensity is added the culture of restraint which has developed from the genetic propensity over the centuries.

Should it be true that the English have a unique genetic national shape and a culture which uniquely plays to that genetic national shape, then mass immigration will weaken both by introducing both different genetic types an competing cultures.

English liberty and the weakness of state power

There were two great sources of general authority in mediaeval England. The Church was one, the other was the Crown. The mediaeval English man and woman had no great regard for either. This robust contempt for authority and the inability of either priest or king to exercise enough power to quell it allowed the English to develop a mentality which was not customarily subordinate.

The English who people the pages of Langland and Chaucer show a mediaeval England where commoners would not as a matter of course willingly touch their forelock or allow their lives to be circumscribed by those with social status. Later, Shakespeare’s lowlifes and the characters in Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew Fair often show a rumbustious lack of deference for their social betters. It is improbable in the extreme that the worlds depicted by these authors would not have reflected the societies in which they lived. Traits were exaggerated for dramatic effect doubtless, but the cultural story they told was fundamentally rooted in the England in which they wrote.

Langland’s Piers Ploughman is especially interesting because the work begins with a catalogue of the people who inhabited the world he knew (Prologue – The plain full of people). Here are the worldly and the devout, the high and the low. The cleric and the noble jostle with minstrels, tramps, beggars, merchants, tradesmen, and the honest ploughman who tills “the soil for the common good”. Langland’s clerics are often corrupt, the nobles capricious, the merchants avaricious, the workmen shoddy and cheating in their work, the beggars dishonest and the minstrels bawdy, but they are balanced by honest men in their various callings. In other words, it is a world not so different in terms of human personality to that we inhabit.

Before the Reformation the English were renowned throughout Europe for their anticlericism – a good example of this attitude was the response to Sudbury’s warning to Wat Tyler’s rebels that England would be put under an interdict by the Pope if he was harmed. This was met by hearty laughter followed by the grisly dispatch of the unfortunate cleric soon afterwards, whose head did not part from his shoulders until a goodly number of blows had been struck.

The contempt in which many of the servants of the Church were held can be seen in both John Wycliffe’s complaints against clerical abuse in the latter half of the 14th century and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Langland’s Piers Plowman, both written in the same century in which the Peasants’ Revolt took place. Both works are full of jibes at fat illiterate priests and cheating pardoners who peddled absolution from sins with their indulgences sold for money.

Wycliffe’s doctrine contained the fundamental ideas which were later realised internationally in the Reformation. He questioned the reality of transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that the bread and wine at Communion turn literally into the body and blood of Christ), he attacked the authority of the pope, he railed against the abuses of simony and indulgences. He advocated a bible in English and either he or his followers, the Lollards, produced a complete translation before the end of the fourteenth century.

Implicit within Wycliffe’s thought was the democratic spirit, because it is a short intellectual step from the belief that each man could be his own mediator with God to the idea that he should have a say in his earthly life. The Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries both promoted this individualist mentality in matters both sacred and profane and weakened the power of the Church as a source of authority in competition with the monarchy.

If the English were derisive of their priests, they were, as the Peasants Revolt showed, even less enamoured of the Crown with its tax collectors and the widespread existence of serfdom. But in truth the hand of the mediaeval state as embodied by the monarch was remarkably light by modern standards, especially so during the century long struggle of the houses of Lancaster and York and partly because mediaeval kingship was of necessity very limited in what it could do administratively because of a lack of funds, the power of the peerage, primitive technology, poor communications, administrative naivety and a radically different view of what government and society should be – apart from looking after his own privileges and estates, kings were expected to defend the land, put down rebellions, provide legal redress through the royal courts, maintain the position of the church and lead in war against other rulers. And that was about it.

But there was also a further check on the monarch. Perhaps the most important practical adjunct of this desire for freedom, has been that the English long hated and mistrusted the idea of a standing army as the creature of tyrants. The English were eventually content to have the strongest navy in the world because it could not be used against them, but a substantial army was not accepted as reasonable until the experiences of the Great War accustomed men to the idea. Soldiers were held in contempt before then. “Gone for a soldier” was little better than “taken for a thief”. The needs of Empire produced more ambivalence into the English view of soldiers as Kipling’s poem “Tommy” shows: “Oh, it’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, and chuck him out the brute! But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.” But the old resentment, fear and contempt remained until the stark democracy of experience in the trenches during the Great War tempered the English mind to tolerance of the soldier.

Because of a lack of a large standing army, English kings were ever dependent on the will of others, be it their nobles, parliament or the gentry. Even the most practically tyrannical of English kings, Henry VIII, was most careful to use Parliament to sanction his acts.

The consequences of this weakness was that power was localised. Incredible as it may see today, the practical governance of day-to-day life in England until well into the nineteenth century lay largely in the hands of private gentlemen occupying the post of JP, whose powers were much greater than they are today. Indeed, the central state impinged very little on the ordinary Englishman before 1914. George Bowling, the hero of George Orwell’s “Coming up for air” reflecting on how the arms of the state touched an honest citizen before the Great War could think only of the registration of births, deaths and marriages and the General Post Office.

By keeping the king dependent upon the will of others, the English ensured that a despot such as Louis X1V could not arise in England and in so doing underwrote their general liberties. Without that, it is improbable that parliamentary government (as opposed to a parliament) would have arisen. England would almost certainly have been involved in many debilitating wars for the aggrandisement of the king. In those circumstances it is unlikely that England as a modern state would have arisen.

The inability of English monarchs to create an absolute monarchy on the lines of Louis XIX’s France is a reflection of the independent spirit of the English and their natural instinct for liberty.

England: the mother of modern politics

I was tempted to entitle this essay “England – the mother of modern democracy” because the political structures of any state which calls itself democratic today owe their general shape to the English example. In addition, many modern dictatorships have considered it expedient to maintain the form of representative democracy without the content.

But democracy is a slippery word and what we call by that name is very far removed from what the Greeks knew as democracy. The Greeks would probably have described our system as oligarchy – rule by the few. Many modern academics would agree, for they tend to describe representative government as elective oligarchy, a system by which the electorate is permitted to select between competing parts of the political elite every few years, but which has little other direct say in how they are governed. It is also true that England developed her political system not on the basis of democracy but on notions of who needed to be represented and by criteria such as property qualifications.

If democracy today is a debatable concept, the very widespread modern institution of elected representative government is an objective fact. Elected representative government is an institution of the first importance, for it is a truism that the more power is shared the less abusive the holders of the power will be. Imperfect as it may often be as a reflector of the will and interests of the masses, representative government is still by far the most efficient means of controlling the naturally abusive tendencies of elites and of advancing the interests of the ordinary man or woman, by imposing limits on what those with power may do, either through legal restraints in the form of constitutional law which is superior to that of the legislature, or through fear of losing office in an election. Indeed, no system of government other than elected representative government manages that even in principle as they all fail to place meaningful restraints on an elite.

Whether democratic or not in the Greek sense, representative government is undoubtedly the only reliable and non-violent means by which the democratic will may gain at least some purchase on the behaviour of an elite. Yet however much utility it has an organising political idea, the fact that we have representative government today is something of a fluke for if it had not developed in England we should probably not have it all. In the non-European world nothing of its nature ever developed before the Western model was imported and in Europe the many nascent parliaments of the later Middle Ages either never went beyond the embryonic form of assemblies which offered advice to and petitioned monarchs or were crushed or simply ignored by autocratic rulers, for example the Estates-General of France were not called between 1614 and 1789. By contrast, England has had continuous parliamentary development for the better part of eight centuries.

The distinction of the English parliament is not that it is the oldest such assembly in the world (although it is one of the oldest), nor that it was unusual at its inception for parliaments were widespread in mediaeval Europe. The English parliament’s uniqueness lies in the fact that from the first it served roughly the area covered by England today – no other mediaeval parliament corresponded to the territory of any national state existing today – its longevity and the nature of its development. No other parliament in a country of any size was meaningfully maintained by regular meeting through seven or eight centuries, its only competitors for endurance being the tiny Icelandic assembly and the federal arrangements of the Swiss. Most importantly, before England created such an institution to act as a model, no other parliament in the world developed into an fully fledged executive – practising what we know today as cabinet government – as well as a legislature.

The English parliament made a very gradual progression to the place we know today. It began as an advising and petitioning body in the 13th century and before the end of the 14th century had come to exercise considerable power over any taxation which was considered over and above the king’s normal and rightful dues, such as the excise.

Gradually, this power transmuted into what was effectively veto over most taxation. Parliament also added the power to propose and pass laws subject to their acceptance by the monarch. These developments meant that executive power gradually drained from the King. From this came cabinet government as the monarch was more and more forced to take the advice of his ministers and by the end of the 18th century the struggle between Crown and Parliament for supremacy had been emphatically decided.

As the Parliament gained power, the Lords gradually diminished in importance and the Commons became by the latter half of the 18th century, if not before, the dominant House, although its power of obstructing Commons Bills other than money Bills lasted till 1911. The final act in the play was a century long extension of the franchise culminating in a government dominated by an assembly elected under full adult suffrage from 1928 onwards.

By 1600 Parliament had become important enough to the governing of the country for Guy Fawkes and his fellow plotters to think it necessary to blow up Parliament rather than simply killing the king and his ministers. In any other major European country of the time, the idea of destroying Parliamentary representatives rather than just the monarch and his more powerful friends would have seemed rather odd, either because a parliament did not exist or was considered of little account because European monarchs had by then been generally very successful in abolishing or curtailing the powers of mediaeval assemblies and preventing their political development.

A corrupted Parliament

Parliament, although growing in power and ambition, was suffering the ills of any ancient institution. There were accretions of privilege and it had failed to keep pace with the changing times. In 1600 it neither represented the country as it was not satisfied the growing wish of its members, especially the elected ones, to have a greater say in the management of England, or at least to restrict the power of the monarch considerably. This dissatisfaction eventually escalated into the English Civil War, an event which forced the Parliamentary side to assume sole executive power whilst continuing to govern through Parliament. This created the blueprint for Parliament to move from being a legislature to a legislature with an executive within it which was responsible to Parliament. (The Civil War also gave birth to a short-lived but powerful proto-democratic movement given the derogatory name of Levellers by their enemies. Had the Levellers succeeded – and for a couple of years they loomed large in Parliamentary thoughts because of their wide support amongst the Roundhead Army – England might have had a Parliament far more representative than that elected after the Great Reform Act of 1832. But they failed and after Cromwell’s establishment of the Protectorate, democratic ideas did not gain serious political currency in England for more than a century. )

The Restoration in 1660 did not result in serious legal abridgements of the power of the monarch, but Charles II was in practice much restricted by a Parliament unwilling to adequately open the purse strings for a monarch who, ironically, was expected to do more and more as the formal power of the state grew. It was in this period that political parties in the modern sense have their beginnings, with the names of Tory and Whig emerging from their origins as derogatory epithets to become the names of the two parties who were to dominate English and from 1707 politics until the latter half of the 19^th century.

The “Glorious Revolution” of 1689 produced a true constitutional sea-change. From then on the English monarch ascended the throne only with the acceptance of Parliament and the Bill of Rights (1690) placed restrictions on the monarch. Amongst the long list of things the king was forbidden to do were:

Dispense with and suspend of laws, and the execution of laws, without consent of parliament.

Levy money for and to the use of the crown, by pretence of prerogative, for another time, and in other manner, than the same was granted by parliament.

To raise and keep a standing army within England in time of peace, without consent of parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to 4.

To violate the freedom of election of members to serve in parliament.

To demand excessive bail of persons committed in criminal cases, “to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the subjects.”

To impose excessive fines and illegal and cruel punishments.

The abuses of power by the crown listed in the Bill of Rights are described as being ” utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes, and freedom of this realm.” That old reliance on the law and the traditional freedoms of the Englishman.

From 1689 began the century long decline of the monarchy as an executive power. Cabinet government gradually emerged in the course of the 18^th century and although George III attempted to revive the executive power of the monarch, the American War of Independence and the loss of the American colonies sealed the subordination of the monarchy to Parliament.

Americans forged a new version of the English political model, with a formal separation of powers and a written constitution to restrict what governments and legislatures might do. For King, Lords and Commons, read President, Senate and House of Representatives; for the English Bill of Rights of 1690 read the US constitution. The novelties, compared to England, was the removal of the executive from the legislature, the creation of constitutional law which was superior to ordinary law and a Supreme Court whose purpose was to ensure that the actions of President and Congress were compatible with the constitution.

The received academic opinion on the American constitutional settlement is that it was primarily the offspring of John Locke’s political philosophy. In fact, it had at least as much affinity with the ideas of the Levellers. There is no direct intellectual link, but the most important popular propagandist on the American side, the Englishman Tom Paine, shared much of his ideology with the Levellers. The Constitution is a balancing act between Locke and Paine, granting a large degree of popular involvement in politics, whilst tempering it with restrictions such as electoral colleges and granting through the Bill of Rights (which was inspired by the English Bill of Rights of 1690) constitutional protections for the individual against the state.

If the American Revolution owed its shape and inspiration to England, the French Revolution was inspired by both English constitutional development and the America revolutionary example. Most political revolutions resulting in an attempt at representative government, have been touched, consciously or not, by the legacy of the American and French revolutions.

England through control of the British Empire, ensured that the Westminster model of government was transplanted with widely differing success, to approximately a quarter of the world’s population, when the empire dissolved in the twenty years after 1945.

The astonishing upshot of the English example, the American and French Revolutions and the British Empire, is that the political structures of most modern states are broadly based on the English constitution of King, Lords and Commons, the overwhelming majority having a head of state plus two assemblies. In addition, the widespread practice of a written constitution derives from the example of the United States, which of course drew its form and inspiration from English settlements in North America, English history and political practices. These political structures apply as readily to dictatorships as they do to liberal democracies.

Of course, the balance of power between the head of state and the assemblies varies widely and there is much difference between Parliamentary and Presidential government, but they all have their ultimate origin in the example of the English system of representative government.

One last thing. Look around the world. How many countries can be said even today to have accepted elected representative government and the rule of law as a banal fact of life, the norm of their society? Britain, the USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand certainly, Switzerland and Scandinavia possibly. But where else? Not France which as recently as 1958 overthrew the Fourth Republic. Not Germany which embraced Hitler nor Italy the land of Mussollini. Not Spain so recently loosed from Franco. As for the rest of the world, that tells a sorry tale of elites who generally have such a lack of respect for the individual and a contempt for the masses that the idea of shared power with and for the people is simply alien to them.

The fact that the only really stable examples of elected representative government in countries of any size are in those countries which have their origins in English colonisation strongly suggests that it was no accident that it was in England that the institution evolved. There must be something highly unusual about English society for it both to develop in a manner so different from any other country and to export this rare and valuable difference to those colonies which were firmly rooted in English manners and customs.

The Free-Born Englishman

It may have taken until 1928 for full adult suffrage of English men and women to arrive, but the essential sentiments which feed the idea of democracy – that human beings are morally equal and enjoy autonomy as individuals and a natural resentment of privilege and inequality – are ancient in England.

If there is one outstanding trait in English political history it is probably the desire for personal freedom. This might seem odd to the modern Englishman who sees the large majority of his country men and women consistently welcoming the idea of the most intrusive forms of ID cards and who stand by dumbly as many of the age-old and ineffably hard-won rights which protect the individual, such as the abridgement of jury trial and the right to silence, being swept away by modern governments. But it was not always so and that “always so” was not so long ago. The great Austrian political and economic thinker Friedrich Hayek put it forcefully during the Second World War:

“It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that only in English society, and those societies deriving from it, is the notion of individual liberty built into the social fabric. The English have been free not primarily because of legal rights, but because it is their evolved social nature. They accept liberty because it seems natural to them.” (The road to Serfdom – chapter Material conditions and ideal ends)

In short, individual liberty has been and is part of being English and part of England. It would be going too far to claim that the English masses have ever had any highly developed sense of liberal with a small ‘l’ sentiments, but throughout English history there has been both a widespread resentment of interference, either public or private, in the private life of English men and women and an acute awareness that privilege was more often than not unearned and frequently cruelly used to oppress the poor.

Most importantly, over the centuries the elite gradually adopted the ideal of personal freedom into their ideology. Here is the elder Pitt speaking on the notion that the idea that an Englishman’s home:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow though it – the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter! – All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! (Quoted in Lord Brougham’s Statesmen in the time of George III)

The desire for liberty and a freeman’s due is seen in the constant demand by mediaeval towns for charters which would free them from aspects of royal control, most particularly taxation. In some respects it helped fuel the barons’ demand for Magna Carta. It drove the Peasant’s Revolt. It provided the emotional engine for the decline of serfdom once circumstances were propitious after the Black Death.

The Levellers made it their ideological centrepiece in the 1640s, their leader, John Lilburne, revelling in the name of “Freeborn John”. “Wilkes and Liberty” was the mob’s popular cry in that most aristocratic of centuries, the eighteenth. The Chartists held tight to the ideal in the nineteenth.

The idea that liberty was part of the birthright of the English survived until after the Second World war. Indeed, the English remained in their daily lives, once the wartime social controls such as rationing were removed, very free from until the 1960s. Apart from the laws of libel, slander, obscenity and the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of the theatre, there were no legal bars to what might be said or written. The concept of “hate crimes” was unknown. Employers might employ who they chose; those providing goods and services whom they would serve. The ideas which we now call political correctness had no hold on any but small groups of people who were at best considered eccentric and at worst fanatics.

That precious natural liberty began to be eroded in the 1960s. The mass immigration of the post-war years provided the excuse to pass Race Relations Acts (RRAs) of increasing severity in 1965, the second in 1968 and the third in 1976. The passing of 1965 RRA provided the breach in the dyke of English liberty. Through it climbed the gays and feminists to obtain, sooner or later, legal protections from equal opportunities legislation. From that has grown the immense state apparatus – all public bodies have to by law preach the political correct gospel – of enforced “equality” (in reality the granting of privileges to those approved of by the politically correct) which binds us today.

In 1972 a further lance was driven into the side of English liberty with the Heath Government’s abduction of British sovereignty as he happily gave it to what is today the European Union (EU). This has destroyed the ability of electors to hold governments to account because the British mainstream political class overwhelmingly supports British membership of the EU. That institution constantly thrusts on Britain ideas which are wholly at odds with England’s traditions of freedom, for example the judicial abomination which is the European Arrest Warrant, a legal device which allows any person to be extradited from Britain to another EU state without any meaningful test of the evidence against them.

Come the 1980s and a more diffuse and slippery weapon to undermine English freedom was introduced by Margaret Thatcher. This was a fanatic ideological commitment to laissez fair economics at home and abroad which lingers to this day. What became known as globalisation destroyed employment in Britain, especially mining and manufacturing, and provided the excuse for another great flood of immigrants from the third world. The institutionalisation of mass unemployment (the real figure has been in the millions since the late seventies, much of it disguised as long-term sickness, a device instituted by Thatcher when the employment figure soared to over three million and cynically continued by all governments since). The mass unemployment made people dependent on the state at a level never previously seen and the increase in immigration both increased the competition for work and drove the social fracture already made in the priceless homogeneity of the country massively wider.

The final nail (to date) in the coffin of English freedom is the devolution settlement which granted power to parliaments or assemblies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales whilst denying England any such privilege. The English were left with no political voice , while watching vast amounts of English taxpayers’ money being shipped to the Celtic Fringe (around £16 billion pa at present) and MPs from non-English seats making laws for England which would not apply in their own constituencies.

The upshot of sixty years of gradual squeezing of English freedoms is that an English man or woman may no longer say what they thing about race, immigration, sexual equality or sexual predilection without at least risking the loss of their employment and quite possibly being subject to criminal prosecution; employers live in fear of any member of an ethnic minority, woman or gay suing for sexual or racial discrimination; political correctness is the watchword of anyone in public life and history has become next to dead as a meaningful subject in English schools because all the parts which would embarrass immigrants or make them feel excluded from “our island story” have been excised from the curriculum.

That is the sad state of the once free-born Englishman. Is he gone for ever? Not yet, but in another generation or two he probably will be lost forever. We can revive the mentality provided we act now. The first necessity is to leave the EU and throw off any other treaty restraints which undermine democratic control. After that the stripping out of political correctness from our legal system and institutions can begin; mass immigration be ended; a judicious protection for vital industries introduced and the pandering to minorities cease. That will provide the soil in which English freedom can revive.

The future of Englishness in films

It may be that the present popularity of Englishness in films will pass, although it shows no sign of doing so soon. But even if overtly English films do not maintain their present high global profile the use of English actors, whether playing “English” or not, will surely continue for there is an immense cast list of acting talent in England – I never cease to marvel at exactly how good the average English actor is.

There is a problem with films projecting Englishness , a narrowness of subject. What is missing from most modern English films, or at least those which get a wide release, is the representation of English society outside the middle and upper classes, something which was the staple of British cinema in the Fifties and Sixties. Films set in the second world war have been long out of fashion – these by their nature tended to depict people of all classes – and there is nothing equivalent now to the flow of Ealing comedies and their ilk or even the Carry On films.

Good films which deal with a broader range of English society and character are still being made. Some of the best in the last 15 years are Croupier, Last Orders, Nil by Mouth, Twenty-four Hour People, Sexy Beast, Human Traffic, The Full Monty, Football Factory, and My Summer of Love and many of the films of by Mike Leigh, especially Life is Sweet, High Hopes, Naked, Career Girls, last orders and Vera Drake. But these, with the odd exceptions such as The Full Monty and Vera Drake, get little international exposure.

Nonetheless, the fact that films such as the Full Monty and the two Guy Ritchie “mockney” gangster films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch did have significant international success, including success in America, does suggest that the appetite for Englishness is not simply a liking for middle class and upper class Englishness. It could be that it is simply a lack of widespread distribution of films with workingclass English settings that sways Englishness in modern films towards the middle/upper class representation.

It is a great shame that such films do not get a broader release. Take a film like Last Orders. The cast alone tells you it is worth seeing: Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Tom Courtney, David Hemmings and Helen Mirren. It is a film which traces the lives of four working class Englishmen from the 1930s to almost the present day. It is a master class in showing how even the lives of the poor can carry the full weight of drama. I doubt whether it was shown on a hundred screens in England.

Sadly, the greatest problem for our filmmakers is getting their films into cinemas, not least because the main distributors in Britain concentrates almost exclusively on “safe” commercial films backed by massive marketing, which means in practice the showing of “surefire” Hollywood products. Many English films never see a cinema screen and others receive such a limited distribution they might as well have been left in the can. Many do not deserve to, especially those funded by lottery money. That public money would have been better spent buying a national distribution network. That would have given British filmmakers the reassurance that if they produced something halfway decent it would get a decent distribution. Fewer films would be made no doubt but more would be worthy of showing widely and more would be shown. A more rounded view of Englishness would also be on show. Variety being the spice of life, that would be the greatest guarantee of the continuing health of English cinema, for there can only be so much of a market for one type of Englishness.

America’s love-hate affair with England in films

When you go to the cinema think of how often English legends such as Robin Hood are used by Americans. Reflect on how, until recently at least, American universities would give as a matter of course considerable time to the study of writers such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen. These things happen naturally and without self-consciousness because English culture and history is part of American history.

Despite the recent US appetite for Englishness on film they have a schizophrenic relationship with this country. They produce Anglophobe abortions such as Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” – a film set in the American War of Independence which depicted the 18th Century British as Nazis – are vestigially paranoid about “King George” and constantly use the English in films as stage villains.

Overtly, Americans ignore their English origins. The most absurd example of this on celluloid I have come across occurred in the feature film length cartoon Pocohontas which dealt with the Jamestown settlement of 1607, the first permanent English settlement in North America. The leader of the expedition, John Smith, was given an American accent while the rest of the crew had English ones ranging from stage cockney to upper class cad.

The consequence of this denial of their origins makes America a very peculiar country in that it lacks a coherent foundation story. King George and the British are the villains and American colonists the heroes … and that’s about it. There is a great blank hole in American history, namely, where did they and their dominant culture come from? The answer of course is England.

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States. The nonexistence of the United States alone would have made a colossal difference to the history of the past two centuries and to the present day, not least because it is and has been for a century or more responsible for a tremendous proportion of global scientific discovery and technological development. If the English had done nothing more than lay the foundation of the United States it would have done a mighty thing.

At this point I can hear the cry of many: why the English not the British? Was not the United States formed as much by the Scots and Irish as by the English? There will even be those who will press the claims of the Germans. A little careful thought will show that no one but the English could have been responsible, although many peoples and cultures have subsequently added to the considerable variety of American life

The English were the numerically dominant settlers from the Jamestown settlement in 1607 until the Revolution. Moreover, and this is the vital matter, they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for the first one hundred years. Even in 1776 English descended settlers formed, according to the historical section of the American Bureau of Census, nearly sixty percent of the population and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain.

This English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the immense non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp the earlier simply because of its greater scale? The answer is no – at least until the relaxation of immigration rules in the sixties – because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA.

When immigrants enter a country their descendents will generally adopt the social and cultural colouring of the native population. The only general exception to this well attested sociological fact is in a situation of conquest, although even there the invader if few in number will become integrated through intermarriage and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. Thus at any time in the development of the USA the bulk of the population were practisers of a general culture which strongly reflected that of the original colonisers, namely the English.

Immigrants were therefore inclined to adopt the same culture. America’s English origins spread throughout her culture. Her law is founded on English common law. The most famous of American law officers is the English office of sheriff. Congress imitates the eighteenth century British Constitution (President = King; Senate = Lords; House of Representatives = The House of Commons) with, of course, the difference of a codified constitution. (It would incidentally be truer to describe the British Constitution as uncodified rather than unwritten). It is an irony that their system of government has retained a large degree of the monarchical and aristocratic principles whilst that of Britain has removed power remorselessly from King and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in the hands of elected representatives who have no formal mandate beyond the representation of their constituents.

The Declaration of Independence is full of phrases and sentiments redolent of English liberty. The prime political texts of the American revolution were those of the Englishmen John Locke and Tom Paine. The American Constitution is designed to alleviate faults in the British Constitution not to abrogate it utterly. The first ten amendments which form the American Bill of Rights draw their inspiration from the English Bill of Rights granted by William of Orange. The American Revolution was conducted by men whose whole thought was in the English political tradition.

The English influence is written deeply into the American landscape. Take a map of the States and see how many of the place names are English, even outside the original thirteen colonies which formed the USA. Note that they are divided into parishes and counties.

Above all other cultural influences stands the English language. Bismarck thought that the fact that America spoke English was the most significant political fact of his time. I am inclined to agree with him. But at a more fundamental level, the simple fact that English is spoken by Americans as their first language means that their thought processes will be broadly similar to that of the English. Language is the ultimate colonisation of a people.

Moreover, the English spoken by the majority of Americans is still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for example, far less mutated than the English spoken in India. The English have little difficulty in understanding Americans whatever their regional origin. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to many Americans that the average Englishman probably finds it easier to understand most American forms of speech than some British accents and dialects. Americans often affect not to understand English accents, but it is amazing how well they can understand them when they need something. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “America and England are two countries divided by a common language” was witty but, as with so much of what he said, utterly at variance with reality.

The English heritage in America is far from spent, not merely in its language and institutions, but also in the fact that more Americans have some form of English lineage than any other group and even if the do not think of themselves as English by descent, the personality traits of the English in as far as they are genetically determined are passed on and reinforced by those extant cultural relics of Englishness.

There is a special relationship between England and America but it is not the one beloved of politicians. The special relationship is one of history and culture. American culture is an evolved Englishness, much added to superficially but still remarkably and recognisably English.

What applies to the USA, broadly applies also to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Even American actors go English . Those old enough to remember the classic age of Hollywood will recall the habit of American stars appearing in films with an English context to resolutely refuse to make any attempt to adopt an English accent. In recent years there has been a complete reversal of this. To list just a few big names: Johnny Depp (The Libertine, From Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean and Corpse Bride), Julianne Moore (The End of the Affair), John Malkhovitch (The Libertine), Gwyneth Paltrow (Emma and Sliding Doors), Reese Witherspoon (Vanity Fair), Danny Huston (The Constant Gardener), Liv Ulman, Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood and Sam Astin (all Lord of the Rings), Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta) . Non-American foreign actors have also been doing their bit. Russell Crowe (Master and Commander), Brendan Gleeson (Troy), Eric Bana (Troy), Cate Blanchett (The End of the Affair), Nicole Kidman (The Others), Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta).

The success of English films in America also gives the lie to the American’s frequent claim that they cannot understand what the English say because they “kinda talk funny”. This fantasy is mercilessly guyed in the film The Limey where Terrence Stamp plays a cockney gangster in America and the American characters constantly say they cannot understand him. In fact, as anyone who has had dealings with Americans will know they can all understand very well – when they want something.

It is perhaps not so surprising that films with RP speakers in it should be understood by Americans, but it is noteworthy that they also watched in large numbers the two Guy Ritchie mockney gangster films which were full of the cockney vernacular. They watched in even greater numbers Johnny Depp’s hilarious take off of Rolling Stone Keith Richard in Pirates of the Caribbean.

The appetite for Englishness in films

What qualifies as a “culturally English film”? How about this: it is a film which either has an English context such as The Libertine or has a cast which consists wholly or largely of English actors playing “English”, for example, Girl with Pearl Earing.

English themes and English actors have always had a good bite of the Anglophone filmic cherry, but they are making a particularly strong showing in recent years. A look at the all time global box office, that is, money taken solely at the box office, is revealing.

Of the ten largest grossing English language films in history, six have an indubitably English ambiance: Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton), Lord of the Rings: the return of the king and two each of the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Carribean. The odd men out are Avatar, Titanic, Toy Story 3 and the Dark Knight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

Three of the odd men out have significant English flavour, whether from overtly English characters (Titanic, Shrek) , a story with English associations (Titanic) or actors using an English persona (Star Wars, for example, the characters of Obi wan Kenobi, the Galactic President and C3PO).

The six highest grossing English language film franchises are in descending order Harry Potter, Star Wars, James Bond, Shrek, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Carribean. http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/111362/highest-grossing-film-franchises . Of these only Star Wars and Shrek do not have a specifically English tone. (The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials – both very English in tone – also have the making of lasting franchises. )

It is true that those films and franchises are are ranked on revenues unadjusted for inflation.* However, that does not stop them for being a a good pointer to what was popular. What they tell us is that there is a considerable appetite for Englishness amongst modern film goers. (It is also true that adjusting for inflation has its problems because of changing exchange rates and multiplying tickets sold by an average present-day ticket price is a dubious practice because ticket sale data is often dubious, especially for older films).

What is the attraction of Englishness?

It is obvious why Englishness should have appeal within England, but why does it have international appeal? The fact that we have English is our language might seem a significant advantage internationally, but it is doubtful whether that advantage actually counts for much in practice because English films are competing against large numbers of other Anglophone films, including the output of the most potent film industry in the world, that of America.

If it is not the language is it the nature of the films themselves which attract? Perhaps part of the reason for the recent success lies in the type of Englishness that is generally depicted. What foreign audiences see most are versions of middle and upper class Englishness.

Often this is a version of Englishness which has a large dollop of fantasy such as that shown in “Notting Hill” or is Englishness in an historical setting, with Jane Austen and Dickens adaptions being perennial favourites. But even these films, somewhat distant as they may be from the realities of modern English life, still have a very English feel to them. The settings are English, the voices are English and above all the personalities are English.

Such films have the dramatic advantage of both appealing to the foreigner’s general stereotype of the English, which is largely derived from the English middle and upper classes, and of providing unusual and glamorous settings. Such themes and settings also mean these are often characters who have influence and power and a good deal to lose, all good dramatic material.

There is also the legacy of the British Empire, an institution which was not only dominated by the English in terms of personnel but also culturally – the history and literature taught to colonial peoples was English to the end and the institutions implanted – Parliaments and Common Law – were English institutions. Even after the end of Empire the BBC, particularly the World Service, continued to project the middle/upper class version of Englishness through the dominant use of received pronunciation speakers.

The Empire was an institution which affected not merely those peoples and territories which were formally colonised but other countries such as Argentina, countries which were heavily influenced by English capital and settlers. Nor was the Empire simply that which existed at its end, vast as that was in both geographical and ethnic scope. There is also the USA, which was an English founded and culturally dominated state, hence the fact that its language is English and its most important public institutions variations of English institutions. More of the USA later.

Perhaps there is also a purely aesthetic aspect of the attraction. It could be that the English middle class/upper class persona is simply arresting, interesting in itself. In particular, perhaps that persona seems specially apt for characters in position of power and privilege.

It is worth noting that important people in English language films dealing with historical subjects have long been acknowledged by Hollywood to be best played by English received pronunciation (RP) speakers. This trait began early in the history of the Talkies and continues to this day. In the recent film Troy only Brad Pitt playing Achilles “disgraced” himself by not being able to muster a serviceable RP voice. Received pronunciation and the persona it creates may naturally seem authoritative not merely to the English but to many other peoples, even if those peoples are not naturally well disposed to the English.

The dramatic shape of English films must also play its part. Take the three great English “franchises”: LOTR, Harry Potter and James Bond. In addition to their Englishness they all have very strong dramatic architecture.

Tolkein wrote the Lord of the Rings as a conscious attempt to create an English myth and he does admirably evoke a rural pre-industrial, timeless England. He also succeeded in creating an English Odyssey, a world full of the magical and fantastical. Harry Potter is the English public school story brought up to date and cunningly mixed with magic and co-education. Bond is the spy thriller plus social cachet.

The LOTR appeals to the deep human thirst for myths, of something utterly beyond the everyday. It is a world of trolls and magicians, of warriors and beautiful high born ladies. Tolkein is first rate at creating archetypes, especially Sauran (Evil), Gandulf (the good magician with a touch of the messiah) and Aragorn (the perfect hero, noble in thought and deed, beautiful, great at arms, gracious in manner, brave beyond what is human and above all utterly resolute).

LOTR attracts for the same reasons the Odyssey and Iliad have captured the imagination for the better part of three thousand years. It is epic.

The English public school story succeeds firstly because it is gives, Jane Austen-like, a small, enclosed society upon which to hang a drama. The traditional English Public school story has verve. The boys are anything but solemn. There is a good variety of personality and interest. There is competition within forms, within houses, and with other schools. Games loom large. The interplay between characters is between adults and children, something which is rare in other types of films where children are generally absent or peripheral. But the success of the public school story is more than just a setting. One only has to see an American attempt at the same theme such as Dead Poets Society to realise that merely setting a story in a boarding school is not enough. Dead Poets Society is dreadfully earnest and the boys so lacking in genuine high spirits as to be mere wraiths compared to the robust English fictional schoolboy in the line from Tom Brown and Scud East onwards through to Bob Cherry and William Brown.

There is an essence of Englishness which needs to be added to the setting. The Harry Potter phenomenon is not difficult to explain. Add magic to the traditional public school mixture and the already rich opportunities for plot and character are greatly multiplied. Children, despite the hype about adult Potter devotees, make up the large majority of Potter fans. They naturally gravitate towards school stories because it is their world. Children also adore the idea of magic, not least because the world of children, particularly young children, is subjectively magical because the child is inexperienced and deals with what they do not understand by comforting acts of imagination. The secret of HP’s success is Rowling’s creation of a convincing children’s world which includes the escape from the everyday.

As for Bond, spy stories are of course widely popular but none have the glamour or lasting power of Bond. That is because Bond is much more than a spy. He is a state authorised killer but he is also a gent, an old Etonian, expelled at the age of 14 for having an affair with one of the school’s maids, and a practised seducer of women in adult life. Such a background allows him to move in privileged circles with their concomitant glamour. Bond is a gentleman heavy just as Raffles is a gentleman burglar. He gives the viewer the thrill of violence and sex wrapped in gentility.

The irrelevance of “relevance”

The success of films such as LOTR and Harry Potter dismay those who believe that people will only show an interest in that which is relevant to their lives. How, they wail, can people be so fascinated by the depiction of societies so unlike, at least superficially, their own experience? How can the creatures of privilege be so attractive? The obvious answer is simple: human beings most enjoy dramas which are removed from the familiar mandating of their own lives.

There is nothing new in this. Shakespeare’s plays are full of the doings of kings, nobles and gentry which dominate the doings of the common man, yet from their first performances they played to audiences with a large proportion drawn from the lower ranks of society. Films from their early days have done a roaring trade in showing the great at work and play. In the heyday of the British boys’ comic, George Orwell wrote an essay wondering about the immense fascination which the Greyfriars stories (those with Billy Bunter, Bob Cherry et al) held for working class boys who bought the Magnet in vast numbers. They did so for the same reason that workingclass adults watched films of lives different from their own but not so removed from their understanding to be alien: it provided exciting novelty without weirdness. That is probably much of the answer to why Englishness is popular in film today.

*In real terms earlier films such as Gone With the Wind had world grosses larger than the films listed above, but the circumstances of modern film distribution are completely different from what they were when Gone with the Wind was made (1940), or even what they were twenty years ago. When Gone With the Wind came out the only way for the ordinary person to see a film when it was released was in a cinema, a situation which essentially remained until the advent of videotape. Now the ordinary person can not only go to the cinema, they can get the film not long after its release on DVD and often see it on television within a year.

The roots of English democracy

The beginnings of English democratic thought

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE FRANCHISE BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

THE DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

PHILOSOPHICAL AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

SERVANTS AND ALMSTAKERS

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The Civil War changed English politics utterly. It brought the end of claims by the English crown to Divine Right and absolute monarchy. It promoted the political interests of the aristocracy and gentry as a class. It forced those on the Parliamentary side to effectively exercise power on their own responsibility. It created a political class which saw politics as something they could control rather than merely be part of as a adjunct to the crown. It began the constitutional process which resulted in cabinet government. It laid the foundations for the formation of political parties. In short, it sowed seeds of modern representative government.

But something else occurred which was to be even more momentous in the long run. It was during the 1640s that the belief that men should only be ruled by those they had themselves elected first became a serious political idea, not merely in England but anywhere. Amazing as it may seem now, the idea that every man (but not woman) should have an active voice in choosing those who would represent and govern them was a novel concept in the middle of the 17th century. A form of male-only democracy existed in the ancient world, but it was never inclusive because the citizens were always greatly outnumbered by the unfree and other non-citizens.

Why was the idea of every man being an elector so revolutionary? The enfranchisement of a wide electorate is perhaps the most fundamental political change a society can undergo. It forces the elite to take note of the masses in a way that no other system does. Even the humblest man must be considered as a man in his own right, a person with a vote and needs and wishes. Those needs and wishes may be heeded and met to varying degrees, but what the majority needs and wants cannot be ignored completely when each man has a vote.

The democratic spirit was surprisingly widespread in the 1640s. By this I do not mean that men were commonly calling for full manhood suffrage, much less the emancipation of women. Rather there was a sense that the social order had been rearranged by the war, that men were on some new ground of equality and had a right to a public voice. In particular, there was a feeling that those who had fought for Parliament had won the right to enfranchisement. There was also a more widespread feeling which penetrated all social classes that the existing franchises (which varied greatly) were frequently too narrow and that the towns, particularly those most recently grown to a decent size, were grossly under-represented.

The group which gave representation to democratic feelings most successfully was the Levellers. They were a disparate and ever shifting crew, drawing their support primarily from the ranks of the Parliamentary armed forces (especially after the New Model Army was formed), small tradesmen, journeymen and apprentices. However, they also included those from higher social classes, their most famous leader, John Lilburne, being the child of minor gentry.

To call them a political party in the modern sense would be misleading. Yet they were the closest thing to it both then and arguably for several centuries. Their tactics and organisation were modern – the use of pamphletering and newspapers, the ability to get large number of supporters onto the streets (especially in London) at the drop of a hat, the creation of local associations. They also developed an increasingly sophisticated political programme in a series of documents known as The Agreements of the People. These Agreements dealt extensively with political representation and structure. The levellers were also very successful in creating an enemy and sense of grievance. They did this by portraying 1640s England as having declined from a golden age of freedom under the heel of the Normans and their French successors.

Led for the most part by a man of preternatural obstinacy, courage and unreasonableness, John Lilburne (“freeborn Jack”), the Levellers frightened the Parliamentary leaders sufficiently to force various negotiations and discussions. These culminated in the Putney Debates in 1647 when Parliamentary and Army leaders including, Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, met with a variety of people on what might broadly be called the democratic side. Unfortunately Lilburne was not able to attend. Nonetheless,the Leveller position was strongly represented. Most importantly, much of the debate was taken down in shorthand. It is a most intriguing document. The sheer range of political ideas it displays is impressive. It shows clearly that in the 1640s there was a very high degree of sophistication amongst the politically interested class. The ideas run from the monarchical to the unreservedly democratic. This document together with the Leveller pamphlets provide ample evidence of Leveller thinking.

How far did the Levellers reach in their search for political inclusion? Did they go the whole hog and seek a full manhood franchise or were they much more cautious? That is the question which I shall now examine with the aid of Prof C.B. Macpherson.

Macpherson contends in his ‘Theory of Possessive Individualism’ that the Levellers were never advocates of universal manhood suffrage, but, rather, sought a restricted franchise which excluded servants (to be equated with wage-earners) and almstakers (or beggars).

He is extremely emphatic in his conclusions. As we shall see, there are substantial reasons for doubting his certainty, both on the question of universal manhood suffrage and on the extent to which a more restricted suffrage was accepted by the Levellers.

To answer the question I shall begin by describing the attitude taken towards the franchise before the Levellers.

I will then cover, in much the same order as Macpherson, the documentary evidence he puts before us.

Having done this, I shall examine the philosophy he attributes to the Levellers in order to explain their motivations and to bring forth any further evidence and observations.

Lastly, I will deal with the definition of servants and almstakers, plus the nature of Macpherson’s statistics.

Chapter 1

THE FRANCHISE BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

Discontent with electoral qualifications, provisions and practices was not an infant of the Civil War and its aftermath, although it was greatly increased by those events, Rather it was the end of a trail which began in Elizabeth’s reign and reached its highest pitch, prior to the 1640s, during the years 1621 to 1623.

The discontent was provoked primarily by the situation in the boroughs rather than the counties, Since 1430, the county electorate had been restricted to the forty shilling freeholder, which qualification had become almost sacrosanct by the end of the sixteenth century – only one proposal outside the ‘Great Rebellion’ (1621) was made to raise or lower it. Tudor inflation had greatly lowered the barrier it represented (40 shillings in 1600 was worth perhaps 15 shillings at 1430 values) and it is reasonable to suppose this considerably increased the rural electorate. Also, there is evidence to suggest that the qualification was not always enforced1 and some county electorates may have had a very broad manhood franchise indeed prior to 1640.

Borough franchises were anything but uniform. In some the whole ‘commonalty’ (all householders) or even all ‘potwallers’ (men with their own hearths) voted. In others the vote was restricted to all taxpayers (‘scot and lot’), freemen of the town, or those in possession of burgage property. In extreme cases the vote might be restricted to the ruling corporation. Such discrepancies of representation were aggravated by a distribution of borough seats which took insufficient account of the demographic changes of the past two centuries, during which time England’s population increased very substantially, perhaps by as much as a third. All this meant that there was fertile soil for agitation for more equal borough representation, both in terms of the breadth of the franchise and in the number of seats.

Tudor monarchs, not unnaturally, did not favour larger electorates2. The existence of ‘rotten boroughs’ was a source of patronage and, if the monarch could control the oligarchies who returned the MP, a means of reducing opposition to the Crown. As there was a significant number of such boroughs, this was no small advantage to the monarch.

There is particular evidence that the Puritans favoured larger electorates, at least in so far as it suited their own purposes. At Warwick in 1586 Job Throckmorton was elected after he threatened to invoke the right of the ‘commonality to vote. In 1587 John Field remarked to colleague ‘seeing we cannot compass these things by suit or dispute, it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which we desire.’3 As Puritans displaced many court nominees and the creatures of aristocrats, this is significant in view of the attitude of the Commons towards electoral qualifications between 1621 and 1628.

By 1621, the Commons had gained the right to decide disputed elections and to revive lapsed borough seats and even make new creations, The tendency until 1628 was to ecide in favour of wider franchise and to allow all the ‘commonality’ to vote. At Bletchingly (1624) and Lewes (1628) ‘all the inhabitants ,’ were to be electors’, and at Cirencester (1624) all ‘resients:’. n the case of Pontefract in 1624 a general principle was formulated:

Bills were introduced to regulate elections and standardise, the franchise in 1621, 1623, 1625, 1628 and 1640, The 1621 Bill is of particular interest because it proposed that the 40/- freeholder qualification be increased to œ4 and to admit œ10 copyholders by inheritance. The borough proposals add no more than the various decisions on individual cases (in fact even less), for electors were to be freemen except where they numbered less than twenty-four, in which case all inhabitants not in receipt of alms were to be included,

In 1640 the franchise was raised again by Sir Simonds D’Ewes. It was he who first uttered the idea later made famous by Thomas Rainsborough ‘that the poorest man in England ought to have a voice, that it was the birthright of the subjects of England and all had voices in the election of Knights etc. previously.’6

It is also noteworthy, both for its own sake and the part it played in Leveller literature, that many believed that the Statute of 1430 had disenfranchised people. William May, in 1621, said ‘Anciently, all thecommonality had voice, but because such a multitude made the election tumultuous, it was after reduced to freeholders’. William Prynne put it even more plainly, ‘Before this Petition and Act every inhabitant and commoner in each county had voice in the election of Knights, whether he were a freeholder or not, or had a freehold only of one penny, six pence or twelve pence by the year as they now claim of late in most cities and boroughs where popular elections are admitted’8. It is a sobering thought that if the Statute of 1430 did disenfranchise large numbers of county electors, the county franchise may have been wider in medieval England than it was to be again before the end of the nineteenth century and conceivably wider than the Franchise before the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

What of the position of servants, wage-earners and almstakers in all this? Resident household servants were generally considered beyond the pale, although ‘servants’ were said to have voted in the Worcestershire county election of 1604. Wage-earners certainly did so, for those in the ‘potwaller’ and ‘scot and lot’ constituencies were granted the right to vote. Almstakers were excluded in the 1621 and 1640 bills, yet at Great Marlow in 1604 77 of the 245 voters were said to be almstakers, nine of them inmates of the almshouse. In 1640 the right of the Bember inmates to vote was said to have been sustained and in 1662 the St. Albans almsmen were said to have ‘had voices time out of mind’.

It is clear from all this, that the Levellers did not enter untilled ground when they broached the question of the franchise. There are also, for our purposes, three points of particular interest. First, the Commons, or at least an influential part of it, was not unduly disturbed by the prospect of an enlarged electorate. Second, people whom Macpherson claims the Levellers would have excluded – servants and almstakers – were ncluded in the franchise long before the Civil War. Third, that there existed even gentlemen (such as Sir Simonds D’Ewes) who had an active and unambiguous democratic spirit. The latter point is particularly pertinent because the chief Leveller, John Lilburne, was also of gentle-birth, a fact he never ceased to emphasise. Democratic ideas were not thus foreign bodies suddenly introduced by the Levellers.

Notes

I. K. Thomas. The Levellers and the Franchise answer p.62

2. J.H, Plunb. The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5 K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.62

6. Ibid p.63

7. Ibid p.64

8 Ibid p.64

Chapter 2

THE DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

The roots of Macpherson’s conclusions lie in the Putney Debates. Prior to Putney, the franchise received relatively little attention in Leveller writings, Those statements which do exist do not explicitly exclude servants and almstakers, and have the appearance of demands for universal manhood suffrage. Post Putney statements on the other hand consistently advocate, for whatever reason, the exclusion of servants and almstakers. The evidence of the Putney debates provides Macpherson with his main means of resolving, at least to his mind, this apparent inconsistency.

The question of the franchise occupied most of the second day’s debate at Putney. The first article of the (First) Agreement demanded ‘That the People of England,.,. ought to be more indifferently proportioned according to the number of inhabitants.’ This provoked Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton to say:

‘The exception that lies in it is this. It is said, they are to be distributed according to the number of inhabitants, ‘The People of England’ etc. And this doth make me think that the meaning is that every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered, and to have an equal voice in the election of those representors, the persons that are for the general representative…’2

Thus Ireton, whatever his motives, charges the Levellers atthe earliest possible opportunity, with seeking universal suffrage. Petty is the first Leveller to answer: ‘We judge that all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections’,3

Macpherson thinks it significant that Petty does not state in plain words whether he is for or against universal suffrage. Yet why should he have felt obliged to do so? Ireton has asked a plain question and Petty’s reply, no matter what construction is put upon the phrase ‘all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright’, is an adequate and reasonable answer. Surely more significant is the fact that those with Leveller sympathies did not recoil from the suggestion with horror. However, there is a note of ambiguity in Petty’s answer and it is possible, as A.L.Morton suggests4, that Rainsborough’s famous speech which follows immediately (the poorest he that is in England etc.)5 was intended to clarify the situation.

But by far the most significant passage for Macpherson occurs when the debate has turned to considering the particulars rather than the general issue of the franchise, Cromwell in what appears to be a state of some impatience suddenly says:

‘If we should go about to alter these things, I do not think we are bound to fight for every particular proposition. Servants while servants, are not included. Then you agree that he that receive alms is to be excluded?’

The first to reply is Lt. Col. Thomas Reade, who, although more progressive in spirit than Cromwell, was no Leveller:

’I suppose it’s concluded by all, that the choosing of representatives is a privilege: now I see no reason why any man that is a native ought to be excluded that privilege, unless from voluntary servitude.’ ‘

Then follow the critical words of Petty:

’I conceive the reason why we would exclude apprentices or servants, or those who take alms, because they depend upon the will of other men and should be afraid to displease (them). For servants and apprentices, they are included in their master, and so for those that receive alms from door to door’6

This passage is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, Cromwell assumes general agreement that servants were to be excluded, although, up to this point in the debate, there appears little, if any, justification for doing so. This may indeed support Macpherson’s contention that all parties, including, the Levellers were strong for exclusion. But there are alternative explanations. Cromwell’s impatience may have got the better of him and he could have made such a statement in order to browbeat any opposition. It is after all a common debating trick, and we have ample evidence from Putney and elsewhere that Cromwell was prone to behaving in a domineering and high-handed manner.

Second, what of Petty’s reply? In the first place it may merely be as J.C. Davis7 suggests, a statement of what Petty considered the grounds on which Cromwell would advocate exclusion, rather than an endorsement of them. Alternatively, if we accept that Petty was in agreement with Cromwell, which might be suggested by the alacrity of his reply, other considerations rise. Macpherson considers Petty to have been the main Leveller spokesman at Putney and by implication, fully representative of Leveller opinion.

This is a dangerous road to travel. Petty, apart from his appearance at Putney and on a number of Leveller-Independent committees, was a somewhat obscure figure in the Leveller camp, Perhaps significantly, he was involved in the drafting of the compromise Second Agreement and in later years became a member of Harrington’s aristocratic-republican Rota Club.8 None of this of course does more than suggest that Petty may have been less than representative of Leveller thought, particularly that of Overton and Lilburne.

Petty may have been an opportunist willing to support a movement whose aims and ideals he did not necessarily consider sacrosanct but merely convenient. Or he may have turned his coat when the movement failed. Whatever the truth of the matter, we may join with A.L. Morton in wishing that if Lilburne had been at Putney and in thinking that the position might well be clearer if he had been able to do so.

Then there is the position of Rainsborough at Putney, where he unambiguously embraced adult manhood suffrage. It is true that Rainsborough had, as far as is known, no direct connection with the Levellers prior to Putney, but his sympathies were clearly with the Levellers and he enjoyed a considerable reputation in the Party after Putney, His contribution to the franchise debate was by far the most forceful on the Leveller side (in the sense that Rainsborough agreed with the Leveller arguments rather than those of Cromwell et al) and greatly outweighed that of Petty. If Rainsborough’s ideas were so acceptable to Levellers after Putney, why not before and during Putney?

Macpherson uses Petty’s reply to Cromwell as a springboard to launch his theory. He admits that further sustaining evidence to support his proposition is necessary. The says quite correctly, that Levellers did believe that the right to elect could be forfeited by (freeborn) men. Up until Putney, delinquency was commonly cited as being sufficient reason, However, it must be remembered that the Levellers were in favour of reconciliation with the royalists (delinquents). The fact that they proposed to exclude them for a relatively short period of time from the franchise, (provided their behaviour was satisfactory)is scarcely surprising, for the situation was exceptional. It is reasonable to see such exclusion as simply an extraordinary measure to settle the country after a civil war. One would be very rash to assume that this attitude was indicative of Leveller opinion in general on the loss of birthright.

Macpherson continues by quoting the franchise clause (section ll) of the Petition of January 1648:

‘Whereas it hath been the ancient liberty of this nation, that all the freeborn people have freely elected their representers in Parliament, and their sheriffs and Justices of the Peace, etc. and they were abridged of that their native liberty by a statute of the 8.H.6,7. That, therefore, the birthright of all English men be forthwith restored to all which are not, or shall not be legally disenfranchised for some criminal cause, or are under 21 years of age, or servants or beggars .’9

Of this Macpherson says there could scarcely be a clearer indication that the Levellers assumed that those who became servants or beggars thereby forfeited their birthright to a voice in elections (p.124). We may well agree that at this time the Levellers were willing to do so, but as the whole point of Macpherson’s task is to establish a consistency in Leveller thinking, we are really no further down the path of enlightenment. If the Levellers from Putney onward did compromise at various points, it does not prove that they wished for anything other than a full manhood suffrage. More probably, such compromises are simply reluctant adjustments to the political realities of the time.

The seems to be on firmer ground when he turns to a letter sent from several Agitators of the Army to their respective Regiments (llth November, 1647) concerning the franchise debate at Putney. This tells us that ‘it was concluded by vote in the affirmative: viz, that all soldiers and others, if they be not servants or beggars, ought to have voices in electing those which shall represent them in Parliament, although they have not forty shillings per annum in freehold land And there were but three voices against this your native freedon’lO.

It does at first glance seem strange that the exclusion of servants and beggars should be linked with the phrase ‘this your native freedom’. However, it must be remembered that the Agitators’ prime concern was for the soldiers they represented. If it is accepted that the leading Independents were willing to include all soldiers, regardless of their status, in the franchise, it then becomes possible that the phrase ‘this your native freedom’ applied to the soldiers rather than the whole population.

‘The Grand Designe’ of John Harris (the agitators’ pointer) which appeared in December, 1647, and the Third Agreement of May, 1649, present similar problems. In the former, Harris explained that the intent of the First Article (which provoked the franchise debate at Putney) was that the electors should be:

’all men that are not servants or beggars, it being pure equity, that as all persons are bound to yield obedience to the decrees of the Representative or Parliament, so they should have a voice in the electing their Representatives or Members of Parliament’ 11,

While the franchise clause of the latter stated that the electors would be:

‘(according to natural right) all men of the age of one and twenty years and upwards (not being servants or receiving alms, or having served the late King in arms or voluntary contributions) l2.

The equating of ‘all persons’, and ‘all men that are not servants or beggars’ in the former and ‘the according to naturall right’ in the latter seem to lend weight to Macpherson’s argument. Yet in both the authors were using well tried phrases and need not have considered the full implications of them. Also, in the latter case, as A.L. Morton says, the statement of general principle occurred before any of the exceptions were detailed.

Having come this far, Macpherson feels he is in a position to interpret, as he puts it, the apparent claims of the Levellers for an ‘unqualified manhood franchise’ and their opponent’s attribution of this to them at Putney, and the lack of any explicit exclusion of servants prior to Putney. Thus, when the Levellers used phrases such as ‘every inhabitant’, ‘every person in England’ or ‘the poorest man in England’, Macpherson believes that we must assume that they really meant ‘all freeborn men who have not lost their birthright’, a loss of birthright toinclude servants and beggars. This is a great deal to read into the evidence.

Ireton and Cromwell, on the other hand, were so concerned to defend the existing franchise qualifications, Macpherson says, that for the purpose of debate they were indifferent to whether the Levellers sought an unqualified franchise or merely a broader but still restricted one. When Ireton referred to ‘all persons’, ‘any man that hath a breath and being’ , ‘all inhabitants’, or Cromwell ‘men that have no interest but the interest of breathing’13, this thinks Macpherson was hyperbole by Cromwell and Ireton to sharpen the issue, Yet if it were hyperbole, why was it not resisted more vigorously and unambiguously by Petty et al?

Macpherson fastens on to the fact that, as he puts it, “even after Cromwell had explicitly recognized that the Levellers’ proposal excludedservants and almstakers, he still spoke of it as tending to anarchy because it would give a vote to ‘all those who are in the Kingdom’”14. Now, as we have seen, it is by no means certain that Cromwell’s statement was accepted by the Levellers (p above). The fact that he continued to impute to the Levellers this position may reasonably be taken as an indication that the Levellers had not accepted it, that it was an agreed position and Cromwell words thus exaggeration. The same reasoning may be applied to the fact that the Levellers did not bother to refute these ‘apparent’ imputations of manhood suffrage. Indeed, it would seem more significant that they did not do so.

The reason why they refrained from answering such claims directly, says Macpherson, was because it would not have helped their case to have done so, being more concerned to refute the charge that their proposals would destroy property. This is conceivable yet unlikely, unless we accept that the Levellers were only concerned with a limited franchise along Macpherson’s lines. Moreover, one cannot divide the questions of the franchise and the feared destruction of property, for one stems from the other.

Neither do I find the fact that only Colonel Rich mentioned the Levellers’ ‘supposed ‘ intention to include servants necessarily indicative of a general consensus of opinion. It is surely significant that he mentioned it at all in the light of Macpherson’s position. Nor do I think he was contradicted by Rainsborough as Macpherson believes. Rich said:

’If the master and servant shall be equal electors, then clearly those that have no interest in the Kingdom will make it their interest to choose those that have no interest. It may happen, that the majority may by law, not in confusion, destroy property; there may be a law enacted, that there shall be an equality of goods and estate’

He then proceeds to point out the danger that the poor night, as in Rome, set up a dictator15. Rainsborough replies:

‘I think it is a fine gilded pill. But there is much danger, and it may seen to some that there is some kind of remedy [possible]. I think we are better as we are [if it can be really proved] that the poor should choose many [and] still the people be in the some case, be over voted still, But of this and much else, I am unsatisfied… and the[first] thing that I am unsatisfied in is how it comes about that there is such propriety in some freeborn Englishmen and not [in] others.’16

Now this is, to say the least, a messy passage, but its meaning, if we accept Woodhouse’s additions, is surely plain enough. Rainsborough is rejecting Rich’s suggestion and when he speaks of ‘being better as we are’ he is merely saying that if he was certain this would be the result of an unqualified franchise, he would reject it, but that, in fact, he does not believe this would be the result. He sees it in other words as a red herring. Indeed, if we were to accept that he did not take this position, we are forced to conclude that Rainsborough was in favour of no change at all, which would be a howling nonsense in view of his explicitly democratic ideas.

There is another passage from Putney which suggests that servants were not automatically excluded by all present. Captain Rolfe appeals for greater moderation, saying, ‘I shall desire that a medium or some thoughts of composure, [may be had] in relation to servants or to foreigners, or such others shall be agreed upon.’ Captain Clarke , who possessed Leveller sympathies, replied first, stating that he too ‘shall desire [that] before the question be stated it may be moderated as for foreigners’17. It is noteworthy that Clarke, although agreeing that foreigners should be excluded, does not mention servants and that Rolfe believes too much heat is being generated by the subject, scarcely an indication that all concerned agreed that servants were beyond the pale.

The pre-Putney documents receive similar treatment from Macpherson. The case of ‘the Army truely stated’(15th October, 1647), which ha originally accepted as a demand for full manhood suffrage18, asked that:

‘all the freeborn at the age of twenty-one years and upwards, be the electors, excepting those that have or shall deprive themselves of that their freedom either for some years or wholly by delinquency.19

This the sees as excluding servants and almstakers. This seems a most peculiar conclusion. Why on earth should servants or almstakers be described as delinquent? Delinquency in the seventeenth century meant much what it does today, namely antisocial acts(particularly criminal ones). Being a servant or almstaker could not denote delinquency, for the former was in useful employment and the latter more often than not had to prove that they were of good character before being in receipt of alms (This particularly applied to those in almshouse). Moreover, the common objection to granting the vote to servants and almstakers was one of dependency. Yet it is not mentioned here.

It is just possible that the temporary exclusion referred to apprentices. This Macpherson rejects as most of such would be under 21, but K. Thomas is favourable to the idea on the grounds that the legal age for the end of apprenticeship was 24. Again, the question arises: why should apprentices be described generally as delinquents?

For my own part, I think it probable that the exclusion of delinquents referred solely to royalists, or just possibly to civilian delinquents, that is, common-criminals. The term delinquent has a special and technical meaning in the context of the civil war, namely a royalist who was considered to be both recalcitrant and to have been a serious and persistent supporter of the King (the practical application of this definition was inconsistent, but that was the theory).

It is true that permanent exclusion seems to run contrary to the Leveller desire for reconciliation with royalists, but it is not necessarily certain that the authors of ‘The Case’ shared such sentiments. They may for instance have believed that certain royalists were so responsible for the troubles of the war, that no leniency could be extended. Such an argument could also be advanced in the case of common criminals.

Of the other documents, Lilburne’s ’England’s Birth-right Justified’ (October 1645), ‘London’s Liberty In Chains Discovered’ (October 1646), ‘The Charters of London’; or, ‘The Second Part of London’s Chains discovered’ (December, 1646), and ‘Rash Oaths Unwarrantable’ (May, 1647)20, all fall foul of Macpherson because they contain such terms as ‘freeborn’, and ‘freemen ‘, in connection with the franchise. This is another case when we must beware of reading too much into regular Leveller phraseology, which would be more suitably viewed as rhetoric, an affirmation in this case that all men were born possessed of the same birthright, and should enjoy the same, There are many instances where such phrases were used in connection with other matters, such a religion or civil liberties, which Macpherson claims the Levellers believed were inalienable, and he presumably would not wish to argue that the use of ‘freeborn’ in these contexts did not mean all men, (and indeed women).

’London’s Liberty in Chains’ is of particular interest to ship Macpherson because it bases its claim for a broader franchise on the fact that the statute of 1430 (8′H’6’7) had disenfranchised many who had previously had the vote. This, says Macpherson, cannot be a claim for manhood suffrage for it is merely a claim to remove the forty shilling qualification which does not necessarily mean servants and almstakers would be included. This is correct, but neither does it mean that it was only a plea for tenant farmers and non-corporate traders and craftsmen, if we bear in mind the evidence of the previous chapter, particularly Poynnes’ words (see above ).

The other two documents that Macpherson examines are ‘The Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, and Other Freeborn People of England’ (July, 1646), and ‘Jonah’s Cry out of the Whale’s Belly’ (July 1647). The former requests that every year in November elections should take place and that ‘all men that have a right to be there, not to fail upon a great penalty, but no summons to be expected’21. This Macpherson this significant for it states that voting would be by ‘all men that have a right’, not simply all men. Yet, in view of the circumstances of 1646 when the position of royalists had to be considered, should we expect that no exclusions would be thought reasonable then? The answer is surely no.

The latter document is concerned with the right of soldiers to vote. It states that ‘according to the principles of safety, flowing from Nature, Reason and Justice… every individual private soldier, whether Horse or Foot, aut freely to have their vote, to chuse the transactors of their affairs.’ This does not necessarily imply that the soldiers desired the same for civilians. However, we know that documents which either originated from or involved the Army, expressed concern for the population as a whole.

The documentary evidence is, to put it politely, less than conclusive. In the absence of even one unassailable statement, Macpherson is forced to rely on building up his argument by interpretation. The disadvantage of this is that in so many instances an equally plausible interpretation can be made to prove the contrary. This is not, however, to suggest that Macpherson has been proven completely mistaken, for we must not fall into the trap, which he himself falls into, of insisting on consistency to the extent where every statement must be interpreted in a certain fashion.

Notes

1 D. H ‘Wolfe, Leveller .Manifestoes .226

2 A,S.P Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty , p.52

3 Ibid, p.55

4. A,L. Morton, Leveller Democracy p.205.

5 A,S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty p.53

6. Ibid, pp. 82-3

7. J. Davis, The Levellers and Democracy ,

8. K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.67,

9 D.H. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes P,269.

10. ASP Woodhouse, p.452.

11. C .B, Macpherson, p125

12. D.H. Wolfe, p.403

13. A.S.P. Woodhouse, pp, 57, 70, 63, 77.

14. C.B. Macpherson, p.126.

15. A,S.P. Woodhouse, pp.63, 64.

16. Ibid, p,64.

17.A.S.P. Woodhouse, p,30.

18.K.Thomas, p. 212

19. D.H. Wolfe, p.212.

20. England Birthright Justified’ is printed in Haller ’Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution’, ‘London in Chains’, ‘The Second Part of London Chains discovered’ and ’Rash Oaths Unwarrantable’, are not readily available. See Macpherson pp. 131-135.

21. ‘The Remonstrance’ is printed in H.H. Wolfe , p.129, but ‘Jonah’s Cry’ is not readily available. See Macpherson, p.135,

Chapter 3

PHILOSOPHICAL AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

The philosophy which Macpherson attributes to the Levellers to explain why they proposed to exclude servant and almstakers derived from the view of a man’s capacities (i.e. his own labour) as a commodity which could be sold, This Macpherson believes was the dominant ideology in 17th Century England. Thus, although the Levellers believed that all Englishmen were born with the same birthright, certain parts of this birthright could be forfeited. Religious, civil and even possibly economic rights could not be alienated justly, and as such should be protected constitutionally. The right to elect, however, could be forfeited by entering into a condition of dependence, either by taking wages or alms. In such cases, a just dependence resulted and the subservient individual’s voice was deemed to be included in that of his master or benefactor, as far as a voice in elections was concerned, jut as that of a wife was deemed to be included in that of her husband.

That this could be considered just is further explained by what Macpherson deems to be the general contemporary opinion of what the functions of government should be. The primary function of 17th Century government, Macpherson informs us, was ‘to make and enforce the rules within which men could make the most of their own energies and cpacities’ and the secondary function, derived from the first, was ‘the protection of property in goods and estate’ (p.144). Servants and almstakers had lost the ‘property in their own had labour’ and, therefore, had presumably no land or capital, and as such could have no interest in either function of government,

At first glance this line of argument is both plausible and attractive. We are dealing with an openly acquisitive society which judged a man in large part on the basis of his material estate, and which was still pronouncedly hierarchical. Add in Man’s natural tribal inclinations, and it would not have been unreasonable for the Levellers in such a situation to be concerned with advancing those with whom they had most sympathy, the small men, while neglecting the needs of other groups. Also, the exposition is alluring because it purports to provide us with a means of assessing all Leveller aims and of removing inconsistencies using a system which is logical and neat. Yet, like all intellectual schemes which purport to show Man as a consistent political animal, the cracks soon begin to appear when compared to the reality.

First let us examine parts of Overton’s ‘An Arrow against all Tyrants’ (19th October, 1646) and his ‘Appeale’ (July, 1547):

‘No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s….for by naturall birth all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and freedom, and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, everyone with a naturall, innate freedom and propriety….even so are we to live, every one equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege…. [no more of which may be alienated] than is conducive to a better being, more safety and freedome….[for] every man by nature being a King, Priest and Prophet in his own naturall circuit and compasse, whereof no second may partake, but by deputation, commission and free consent from him, whose naturall right and freedome it is.’1

In the ‘Appeale’ 0verton adds to this splendid statement of individual liberty, the duty of all men to protect themselves ‘from all things hurtful, destructive and obnoctious thereto to the utmost of [their] power’. It is difficult to accept that any man who could express such sentiments would willingly have allowed that large numbers of men be excluded from the franchise simply because of their position in life.

However, what concerns Macpherson is ‘the proprietorial quality of the Leveller individualism’. The essence of Man to the Levellers was freedom which meant the proprietorship of one’s own person and capacities (P.142).

From this Macpherson deduces that certain rights were considered inalienable while the right to elect was not. Thus, ‘property in one’s own mental and spiritual person required freedom of speech, publication and religion’ (P.142). These rights, apart from their justification by natural law, were demanded for all because in Lilburne’s words ‘what is done to any one, may be done to every one’3. Similarly, economic rights must be demanded for everyone or monopolists would return, arbitrary taxation and regulation, introduced, even though only those had retained the disposal of their own labour could benefit from them directly,

It is a pity that Macpherson does not extend this line of reasoning to the right to elect. For surely in this case as well, provision against arbitrary disenfranchisement would be necessary and what better method, on Lilburne’s reasoning, than to extend it to all. To this, of course, Macpherson will reply that the functions of government did not concern ‘those who had lost their birthright’, Yet, neither apparently did economic rights and there would be as much reason to claim the right to elect for all on expedient grounds as there was in the case of economic rights. Further, if we examine the extent to which the Third Agreement especially shackled Parliament, what possible harm, by way of anarchy, levelling of estates etc. could come of it,

The likely answer as to why the Levellers did exclude servants and almstakers after Putney is expediency, either for the reason Petty gave, that dependant men would be afraid to displease their masters, or because they were made aware of political realities. Macpherson doubts whether the Levellers would have excluded nearly two-thirds of the adult male population on the grounds of expediency, because he believes that they were such committed idealists they could not have brought themselves to such a business.

This is a rather surprising conclusion for, as J.C. Davis4 points out, the Levellers did compromise on the tithes, an issue of principle if ever there was one for them. The March Petition of 1647 and the July Appeale demanded abolition of tithes without provision for compensation. It was not mentioned in the first Agreement5, and deliberately left out from the January Petition of 1643 so as not to ‘disengage any considerable party, and so continue our distractions’. It returned in the Humble Petition (September , 1648) and the Second Agreement, but now with provisions for satisfying all impropriations.

Also, we must remember that the Levellers compromised on the franchise, even by Macpherson’s account, in the Second Agreement. Of course, Macpherson would be quick to point out the difference between the ratepayer franchise (adopted in the Agreement) of 375,300, and the non-servant franchise he says the Levellers wanted (416,700), was so small to be scarcely worth mentioning, In that case, why should the matter have raised so much consternation at Putney. Macpherson says the dispute at Putney arose because Ireton and Cromwell wanted nothing more than the freeholder franchise. Yet Cromwell at Putney admitted he was willing to allow that ‘perhaps there are a very considerable part of copyholders, by inheritance, that ought to have a voice’6.

There is further evidence that the Levellers compromised. When all seemed lost after Burford, ‘The Remonstrance of Many Thousands of the Free-people of England’ offered amongst other things votes to ‘all that come unto us’. The tone of the ‘Remonstrance’ is savage, reflecting the bitter anger felt by the author at the betrayal of the people’s iberties. That it offered votes to ‘all that come unto us’ may merely be, in part at least, a reflection of this bitterness and also of the fact that it was a call to armed rebellion, Yet it is surely significant that such a statement should be made so soon after the ‘Third Agreement’ which although a partial compromise designed to appeal to moderate opinion, is none the less often viewed as the final position of the Levellers. It is also interesting to note that it demanded ‘that every free-commoner shall be put into a way and enabled with means for his natural subsistence’7, surely in this context meaning all commoners and thus giving added strength to the belief that the use of the word ‘free’ was merely a rhetorical device.

A further pamphlet which was Leveller in tone was ‘A Charge of High Treason exhibited against Oliver Cromwell’ (1653), which summoned all the people of England to the polls ‘as well masters, sons of servants’ which, if nothing else, reflects a radicalism that, whatever the truth of Macpherson’s case, reminds us that we have every cause to assume that the seeds of manhood suffrage were always there.

Notes

1. C.B. Macpherson, pp. 140-1

2. Ibid, p.141.

3. Haller and Davies, The Leveller Tracts, p.455.

4 J.C. Davis , The Levellers and Democracy .

5 The Agreement was concerned with short-term

measures which may well explain the exclusion.

6. A.S.P. Woodhouse, P.7.

7. Levellers and the Puritan Revolution, p.575

Chapter 4

SERVANTS AND ALMSTAKERS

Macpherson has calculated (using Gregory King’s estimate of 1688) that universal manhood suffrage in 1648 would have enfranchised 1,170,400 men. The exclusion of servants and almstakers (by Prof Macpherson’s definition, and accepting that all soldiers regardless of status were to be enfranchised) would have reduced this figure to 416,700. Thus, the Levellers on this reckoning were committed to excluding nearly two-thirds of the adult male population from the franchise. That I would suggest is a palpable nonsense.

Various criticisms may be made concerning the manner in which Macpherson has treated King’s figures. These ‘statistics’ were at best informed guesses, and King himself considerably varied his estimates of the size of social classes.1 In addition, Macpherson takes no account of a probably significant rise in wage-earners between 1648 and 1688, It may even be, as A.L. Morton suggests,2 that King’s figures are misleading for 1693, because they do not differentiate adequately between the many graduations of employment to be found between a simple wage-earner and independent producer or artisan.

However, such criticisms do not go to the heart of the matter. The crux of the problem lies in the meaning given to the terms servant and almstaker (or beggar)by the Levellers within the context of the franchise. To read Macpherson is to gain the impression that servant in common contemporary usage was given the usual meaning which he ascribes to it, i.e. wage-earner.

Yet it would appear that contemporaries used the term variously to accommodate the semantic confusion arising from an attempt to apply a social vocabulary inherited from a feudal and patriarchal past to the needs of a society in which the relationship of master and servant was steadily yielding to that of employer and wage-earner.3

In fact, as K. Thomas points out, none of the three contemporary economic writers to whom Macpherson refers, Andrew Yarranton, John Carey and Thomas Firrin (p.282), equated ‘servants’ with day-labourers, the latter actually distinguishing between single persons who earned money by pinning with ‘servants’, that is, apprentices or domestics .

The Statute of Artificers also distinguished between ‘servants ‘ who contracted for a year or similar period and ‘artificers and labourers being hired for wages by the day or week’. Richard Mayo, the author of ‘Present for Servants’ (1693), considered the normal usage concerned those who ‘….have voluntarily submitted themselves, by contract, for a certain time to the disposal of others, according to the word of God, and the laws of the realm’ 4.

Now let us refer back to the statement of Petty during the Putney debates. (p. ). His reason for exclusion was ‘because they depend upon the will of other men and should be afraid to displease then’. In the light of this, there was obviously a considerable difference between a man contracted to serve a year or so, who could only break his contract by mutual agreement with his employer or by order of a J.P on application by master or servant alone, and a wage-earner who was employed more or less casually, who, in theory at least, could change employer frequently and also could be dismissed at will. (It might appear that the contracted servant was in a vastly more secure position, but it must be remembered that unilateral application would be infinitely more likely to be granted to an employer than a servant).

There is further evidence that the Levellers were, at worst, concerned with excluding only those who were really bound to one man. The franchise clause of the Second Agreement states that electors ‘shall be Natives, or Denizen of England, not persons receiving Alms .,. not servants to, and receiving wages from any particular person’5 . It is even possible that this ‘wage from any particular person’ represents a compromise on the part of the Levellers. Only in the Second Agreement do we find wage-earners specifically excluded from the franchise. As this document was the result of bargaining between the Levellers and their opponents, the exclusion of those who received ‘wages from a particular person’ may not have been proposed by the Levellers. It may rather represent a reduction of a more extreme position by their opponents, i.e. that all wage-earners were to be excluded. In itself the distinction made between ‘servants’ and ‘wage-earners’ is evidence that the two were thought of as separate groups.

At best, it would seen that Macpherson’s definition is too broad, and that the Levellers were thinking in terns of personal servants, employees living in the master’s house and apprentices. If this was so, then the disenfranchisement of the groups would have been, for the most part, temporary. Apprentices would become journeymen and eventually masters (or at least the Levellers wished to create a situation where this could happen). Of the two other groups, there is evidence that many were below voting age, and their period of employment relatively short. At Ealing in 1599, 60 per cent of the population aged 15 – 19) were servants. At Claworth in 1676, there were 67 servants of whom only one remained by 1638, and at Cogenhoe again only one out of total of 31 in 1618 was still employed in 1628.6 The most likely explanation for this apparent mobility of labour is that when a man married he set up his own household.

If we then consider evidence suggesting that to be head of household was the mark of a man capable of voting, the significance of this is obvious. Thomas Cartwright wrote ‘All men understand that where the election is most freest and most general, yet only they have to do which are head of families’, and, John Eliot in his ‘Christian Commonwealth’ (1659) ‘servants, or sons living with their parents are in the condition of servants…. may not explicitly , politically, personally, choose public rulers…. But, if they marry or live in the state of allowed public freedmen, then are they capable of the choice of their public rulers’7. If we can accept such views as representative, then the disenfranchisement of servants in our restricted sense becomes, for at least a great part of then, a temporary affair.

The Leveller position on almstakers is, rather easier to resolve. Until the Second Agreement, only beggars were mentioned. The Putney resolution, ‘The Grande Designe’ (John Harris) and the ‘Petition of January’ 1648, used the terms ‘beggars’ rather than ‘almstakers’. This in itself might not be significant, for it is conceivable that ‘beggar’ was a term which included persons who begged casually, probably in an itinerant fashion, and men who were forced to seek parish relief temporarily or permanently. However, there are indications that this was not so. William Petty alone of the Levellers at Putney spoke of ‘those that receive alms’. That he used this phrase may be accounted for by the fact that Cromwell had just posed a question in a fashion which prompted such an answer. In any event, Petty qualified his statement by explaining that he meant ‘those that receive alms from door to door’, surely not a reference to those who received official parish relief.

Cromwell himself, according to John Say’s parliamentary diary, informed the Commons on 23rd November 1647, that the agitators ‘would exclude children and servants, Yet such as received alms they insisted on as persons competent for electors’. It could be argued that Cromwell was slandering them in the hope of discrediting the Levellers, yet in that case why not go further and say they would include servants as well?

We know also of the concern the Levellers showed for those impoverished by the war. It would seem most unlikely that they would willingly have excluded such persons simply because they were forced to take alms. Nor do they appear to have regarded almstakers in general as irresponsible. One of the demands of the January Petition of 1643 was that ‘the poor be enabled to choose their trustees’.

The inclusion of ‘almstakers’ alone, even if we are mistaken about ‘servants’, would have increased the electorate considerably. According to Macpherson, in 1643 there were 309,700 ‘almstakers’ and only 9,000 ‘beggars,’9 If we are correct in our interpretation of the term ‘servant’ then a position approaching universal manhood suffrage is in view. (Statistics for ‘servants’ as we understand the term present problems, but Peter Laslett 10 has estimated that 10-15 per cent would fall into this category, many of whom would be only temporarily disenfranchised or under age,)

There is one further point to consider, namely the Levellers’ own conception of their society and what they wished it to be. Although supporters of property, their main concern was to protect the rights of the small man. For this protection they looked, as was the habit of mind then, much to the past for answers and justifications and had constantly in their minds some ideal of a Golden Age, If the master-servant relationship was giving way to that of employer-wage-earner, this was not obvious to them. The type of society which they desired was that of the small independent man, and they believed that the safeguards they sought against monopoly and other unwarranted interference with the individual would produce such a society, and thus the electorate, even if exclusions were made in their own time, would increase over the years. Whether this was impracticable or not, is neither here nor there in assessing their intentions,

Notes

1. K. Thomas, p. 71.

2 A.L, ‘Morton , p.213.

3. K. Thomas , p.72.

4 Ibid, 3 ,71.

5. D.H. Wolfe, p.403

6 A.L. Morton, p,214.

7 P. 72-73.

8. D.H. Wolfe, p,82 ,

9. Beware of making the same mistake as Thomas does

by taking 1613 figures for 1543.

l0. P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost.

CONCLUSION

There would appear to be three possible explanations of the Levellers’ attitude to the franchise. Firstly, that Macpherson is correct, namely that the Levellers were always in favour of a restricted franchise, excluding servants and beggars. Secondly, that they were from the first in favour of a full manhood franchise, but were forced to compromise when faced with political realities. Thirdly, that the Levellers were not originally overly concerned with the franchise, or at least their ideas were not clear-cut, but came, through the trials of 1647-9, to a desire for full manhood suffrage but were then thwarted by political realities.

I suspect that the last comes closest to the truth. It is difficult to imagine most of those who followed the Levellers being content with anything less than full enfranchisement for themselves or for others like them. That being so the broad membership of the Leveller cause leads to the logical conclusion that a very wide franchise indeed must have been desired if not attained.

Macpherson claims too much for his evidence. Firstly, the consistency which he attributes to the Levellers may, I think, be safely discounted. That some men of Levelling colour did think as Macpherson believes is most probably true, indeed almost certainly so, for it would be a strange party or group which did not contain differences of opinion on such a contentious issue.

Secondly, his broad definition of servants is dubious to say the least, particularly when we bear in mind the apparent readiness of the Commons before 1640 to grant wider franchises than he claims for the Levellers, and the fact that on his definition many who voted previously would have been excluded.

The position of the almstakers is, I think, even more clear cut, remembering that Petty spoke of ‘those that receive alms from door to door’, the use of ’beggars’ until the Second Agreement , and the entry in John Bay’s diary (a piece of evidence, incidentally , not available to Macpherson ).

Thirdly, the philosophy which he attributes to the Levellers has logical flaws when examined closely, and the system he constructs makes one wonder, with Peter Laslett, whether Macpherson has not developed his theory before examining his evidence and consequently falls, albeit unconsciously, into the mistake of attempting to sustain his theory by arguing a priori that all must thus be so.

After the Restoration, democratic ideas did not gain serious political currency in England for more than a century. However, they found ready supporters abroad, most dramatically in the person of Thomas Paine, who although English made his name in the American Revolution. The received academic opinion on the Revolution is that it was the offspring of John Locke. In fact, it had at least as much in common with the ideas of the Levellers. The Constitution is a balance between Locke and Paine, granting a large degree of popular involvement in politics , whilst tempering it with restrictions such as electoral colleges.

Why did the idea of democracy based on the active consent of all men arise in England rather than elsewhere? There were good reasons why it did. In the early modern period, England was an oddity amongst European states. Representative assemblies were commonplace in the mediaeval world. By 1600 all but a few had fallen to the growing power of rulers and either ceased to exist or had been emasculated to the point of insignificance. In England alone Parliament had increased its power and status in the 16th century. Not only that, but elections were held to appoint MPs. The membership of most European assemblies was, like the House of Lords, dependent on social position.

There was also a long tradition of liberty in England. In the minds of the Levellers these went back to long before Magna Carta. They also, as mentioned in the introduction, saw this tradition as having been stifled by the Normans and their continental successors. These were and are powerful engines for action.

England was also odd in other ways. Serfdom had withered away early. Enclosure had driven men off the land and into the towns. The dissolution of the monasteries had both removed the incubus of Rome and redistributed land and property, much of which ended up in the hands of “new men”. The population had risen dramatically since 1500 and high inflation (by pre-modern standards) had caused considerable social dislocation. At the same time, the wealth of the country had grown and the foundations laid for the commercial revolution which was to lay the foundation for the industrial revolution. Stuart society was a world on the physical, economic and intellectual move and waiting to move faster if the right engine appeared. The Civil War was the right transporter.

Notes

1. Market Society and Political Theory

Bibliography

C. B. Macpherson The theory of possessive individualism

Primary Sources

D.H. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan

Revolution.

A,S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty.

W. Hall, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan evolution, Vol. III.

Secondary Sources

C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism

K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise (Chapter in the Interregnum The Quest for Settlement, Ed. G.E. Aylmer).

A.L. Morton, Leveller Democracy (In he world of the Rantors).

J.C. Davis, The Levellers ad Democracy : P. & P.X1 1968.

R. Howell and D. Brewster Reconsidering the Levellers, P. & P, 1970.

J.H. Plumb, The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715, P. & P. 1969

V.F. Snow, Parliamentary Reapportionment Proposals in The Puritan Revolution, E.H.R. 1959.

G.F. Aylmer, Gentlemen Levellers, P, & P. 1970.

P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost.

P. Laslett, Market Society and Political Theory, H.J. VII (1964).

J. Frank – The Levellers.

N.H, Brailsford – The Levellers and the English Revolution.

M.A. Gibb – John Lilburne The Leveller.

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