Showing posts with label 1600-1700. Show all posts

5 December 2014

Oliver Cromwell remains an intensely controversial figure - the subject of ongoing debate. But what was it like to be a woman at that time, and especially to be the Lady Protectress - wife of the Lord Protector himself, asks Samira Ahmed.

There's a special mystery around the life of Elizabeth Cromwell.

She was a genuine commoner and very few documents survive other than records of her marriage and death. Born in 1598 to an Essex merchant family, Elizabeth might well have been named after Elizabeth I. But she would live to become a consort like no other in British history - a queen who was not a queen.

The England of the mid-17th Century was "a country in which patriarchy was absolute in the original sense", says Laura Gowing, professor of early modern history at King's College, London. "The father is comparable to the king of the country. An orderly household should be a replica of an orderly nation. And a nation is made up of such households."

Historians think it likely that Elizabeth would have modelled her home on that ideal. She and Oliver married in St Giles Cripplegate in London in 1620 and had nine children together. Details of her £1,500 dowry survive, but we don't know if it was a love match or arranged. Still the three letters that survive between them, written 30 years later, speak of their love. "Truly my life is but half a life in your absence," she wrote to him while he was on military campaign.

Love letters

From Oliver Cromwell to Elizabeth, September 1650: "Thou art dearer to me than any creature; let that suffice."

From Elizabeth to Oliver, December 1650: "Truly my life is but half a life in your absence, did not the Lord make up in Himself, which I must acknowledge to the praise of His grace."

From Oliver to Elizabeth, May 1651: "My Dearest, I could not satisfy myself to omit this post, although I have not much to write; yet indeed I love to write to my dear, who is very much in my heart.

Sources: The Cromwell Association, Cromwell Museum Huntingdon

From a young MP's wife in Huntingdon and Ely to the wife of a general in the New Model Army, it wasn't until their 40s that she was to find herself elevated to the wife of the most powerful man in the country and soon housed in apartments at both Whitehall and Hampton Court.

It was a time when "whore" was an easy and dangerous label hurled at women who were deemed to be acting above their place. Avoiding comparison with her predecessor Henrietta Maria, Charles I's queen, might have been an important thing for Cromwell's Lady Protectress.

Elizabeth Cromwell 1598-1665

• Eldest child of Sir James Bourchier and his wife Frances
• Very little is known of Elizabeth's childhood, but her father was a prosperous businessman and landowner
• After her marriage to Oliver Cromwell, the couple lived in Huntingdon, St Ives and Ely, by the early 1650s they had moved to lodgings adjoining Whitehall Palace and in 1654 they moved into apartments in Whitehall Palace
• Hostile accounts published during her lifetime criticised her for her simple ways, and for being and feeling out of place in her elevated role

Sources: The Cromwell Association, Cromwell Museum Huntingdon

Elizabeth seems to have stayed out of state affairs. There's no evidence her relatives benefited in privileges from her connections, though, interestingly, her sole surviving letter to Oliver from December 1650, diplomatically reminds him to write to key political figures, the lord chief justice and Speaker of the House of Commons. "You cannot think the wrong you do yourself in the want of a letter, though it were but seldom."

The Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon holds a court portrait of Elizabeth from about 1653 by Robert Walker. It's not very flattering. She looks uncomfortable in a formal pose and plain dark dress, large pearl earrings and a necklace, and it's hard to read it as an anti-Royalist statement.

As Curator John Goldsmith observes: "Jewellery was terribly fashionable. The bling in the middle of the 17th Century was just incredible. The thing about Puritans having a plain style is hard to sustain. Black was actually a fashionable colour."

An exquisite box of Italian marquetry (inlaid work) is almost the only verifiable court possession of Elizabeth's that survives, passed down unused through her family until today. The collection of rich, perfumed soaps was a gift from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, who wanted to align himself with the Protectorate. It's tempting to imagine Elizabeth being too devout to indulge in such vanity, but unable to resist keeping it.

Our image of the Protectorate - enshrined in popular culture - is of religious fundamentalism and witch-hunting. It was arguably the last period in which religion was manifestly the centre of public life.

Adultery - defined as illicit sex with a married woman - became a capital offence, although there were very few prosecutions. But because there was no censorship during the Civil War and Protectorate, Gowing says, women's voices were more prominent than ever in pamphlets and petitions on Parliament.

"They were involved in starting religious movements such as the Quakers and later the Levellers. They were often quite poor women which actually gives their religious voice more authority." It was only in the Restoration, when rights were being formalised by the centralised state, that women were formally excluded from the public arena.

Elizabeth's status was to change dramatically too, after the death of Oliver in 1658 and the end of the Protectorate under her son, Richard, months later.

In the Restoration, with the aristocracy firmly back in power, Elizabeth was crudely mocked in a satirical pamphlet cookbook The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, Commonly called Joan Cromwell, the Wife of the Late Usurper. She was drawn with a monkey on her shoulder to show her a crude upstart, "a hundred times fitter for a barn than a palace".

"The whole point of the curious pamphlet," says John Goldsmith, "is that she's this ordinary Fen housewife and how ridiculous [it is] that she's elevated to this position."

Elizabeth lost her home and her pension. Her husband's body was dug up and mutilated. Other men who had signed Charles I's death warrant were hanged, drawn and quartered. It must have been a terrifying time. Elizabeth had to petition Charles II to be allowed to leave London, denying rumours that she had stolen any royal jewels. Her low profile in the Protectorate court may have saved her life.

She was to live out her widowhood with her married daughter's family at Northborough Manor in Northamptonshire, dying in painful illness in 1665, seven years after Oliver.

Oliver Cromwell 1599-1658

• Married Elizabeth Bourchier in 1620, with whom he had nine children
• Raised an army in 1642 in support of parliament against Charles I during English Civil War and was instrumental in trial and execution of Charles I
• Became Lord Protector of England in 1653, later refused to be king
• Died at home in Whitehall in 1658 and was exhumed and posthumously "executed" in 1661

Find out more

Over the centuries books, paintings and later films have either ignored Elizabeth (she barely appears in the 1970 Richard Harris film Cromwell) or imposed their own contemporary fantasies - notably the sentimental 19th Century painting by William Fisk which portrays her kneeling with her children begging Oliver to spare the life of Charles I.

What would Elizabeth tell us? Her kitchen in Ely where she lived her early married life is now a museum.

Her modest grave in Northborough's village church has no inscription, possibly because it was desecrated. The church warden wonders if Oliver's decapitated body might have been quietly brought and buried with her.

We may never know. But it adds to the haunting mystery about a loyal wife and a witness to extraordinary times.

BBC News - Elizabeth: Oliver Cromwell's 'queen'

Richard Cromwell (1658-1659 AD)

Richard was the third son of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Born on the 4th October 1626, he served in the Parliamentary Army in his younger days, being admitted as a member of Lincoln's Inn in 1647. Upon his marriage to Dorothy Major, the daughter of a country squire from Hursley in Hampshire, he turned to the life of a gentleman farmer, representing Hampshire (1654) and then Cambridge University in Parliament (Nov. 1655 & 1656).

Richard was not brought forward into public life until the deaths of his elder brothers and the establishment of the second Protectorate in 1657. He succeeded his father as Chancellor of Oxford University and was made a member of the Council of State. He also received his own regiment and a seat in the House of Lords. Eventually, on his deathbed, Cromwell Senior nominated Richard as his successor.

On 3rd September 1658, Richard Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector of the Realm. His appointment, however, was resented by the military officers on the council who showed open animosity towards their civil counterparts. In order to raise money and settle such differences, Richard was forced to dissolve the Protectorate and reinstate the Rump Parliament in January 1659.

Anarchy ensued: bitter arguments between the men of substance and the military resulted in a break-away Army Council which took Richard into their power and forced him to dissolve the Rump in May. The Army Council then agreed with a reassembled Long Parliament on the Lord Protector's dismissal. Richard, passive throughout, submitted to Parliament's decision on 25th May 1659.

Many of the nobility, middle class tradesmen and army were disgusted with rule by force, while the generals found it impossible to unite behind a single policy. General Monck then became the chief mover behind a push to restore the monarchy. He marched his troops to London in support of the Rump, breaking the stalemate and reinstating the Rump for a third time. Monck entered London in February 1660 and opened the doors of Parliament in the following April to those members that were barred ten years earlier. The House of Commons set up a monarchist Council of State authorized to invite Charles II to take the crown. The Long Parliament finally dissolved itself following these actions and a Stuart once again sat on the throne.

Richard found it wise to leave England's shores in the Summer of 1660. He lived in France under the name of John Clarke for many years, before moving on Spain, Italy or possibly Switzerland. He was only finally allowed to return home, without recriminations in 1680. He paid ten shillings a week for lodgings at the house of one Sergeant Pengelly at Cheshunt near his Hertfordshire estate. It is said that, in old age dressed in his poor farmer's clothes, he once saw Queen Anne sitting on the very throne that he himself had once graced. No-one suspected the old farmer of ever having occupied such a high position. He died on 12th July 1712 at the age of eighty-five and was buried in the chancel of Hursley Parish Church.

Britannia: Monarchs of Britain

Oliver Cromwell (1649-1658 AD)

Oliver Cromwell, born in Huntingdon in 1599, was a strict Puritan with a Cambridge education when he went to London to represent his family in Parliament. Clothed conservatively , he possessed a Puritan fervour and a commanding voice, he quickly made a name for himself by serving in both the Short Parliament (April 1640) and the Long Parliament (August 1640 through April 1660). Charles I, pushing his finances to bankruptcy and trying to force a new prayer book on Scotland, was badly beaten by the Scots, who demanded £850 per day from the English until the two sides reached agreement. Charles had no choice but to summon Parliament.

The Long Parliament, taking an aggressive stance, steadfastly refused to authorize any funding until Charles was brought to heel. The Triennial Act of 1641 assured the summoning of Parliament at least every three years, a formidable challenge to royal prerogative. The Tudor institutions of fiscal feudalism (manipulating antiquated feudal fealty laws to extract money), the Court of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission were declared illegal by Act of Parliament later in 1641. A new era of leadership from the House of Commons (backed by middle class merchants, tradesmen and Puritans) had commenced. Parliament resented the insincerity with which Charles settled with both them and the Scots, and despised his links with Catholicism.

1642 was a banner year for Parliament. They stripped Charles of the last vestiges of prerogative by abolishing episcopacy, placed the army and navy directly under parliamentary supervision and declared this bill become law even if the king refused his signature. Charles entered the House of Commons (the first king to do so), intent on arresting John Pym, the leader of Parliament and four others, but the five conspirators had already fled, making the king appear inept. Charles travelled north to recruit an army and raised his standard against the forces of Parliaments (Roundheads) at Nottingham on August 22, 1642. England was again embroiled in civil war.

Cromwell added sixty horses to the Roundhead cause when war broke out. In the 1642 Battle at Edge Hill, the Roundheads were defeated by the superior Royalist (Cavalier) cavalry, prompting Cromwell to build a trained cavalry. Cromwell proved most capable as a military leader. By the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, Cromwell's New Model Army had routed Cavalier forces and Cromwell earned the nickname "Ironsides" in the process. Fighting lasted until July 1645 at the final Cavalier defeat at Naseby. Within a year, Charles surrendered to the Scots, who turned him over to Parliament. By 1646, England was ruled solely by Parliament, although the king was not executed until 1649.

English society splintered into many factions: Levellers (intent on eradicating economic castes), Puritans, Episcopalians, remnants of the Cavaliers and other religious and political radicals argued over the fate of the realm. The sole source of authority rest with the army, who moved quickly to end the debates. In November 1648, the Long Parliament was reduced to a "Rump" Parliament by the forced removal of 110 members of Parliament by Cromwell's army, with another 160 members refusing to take their seats in opposition to the action. The remainder, barely enough for a quorum, embarked on an expedition of constitutional change. The Rump dismantled the machinery of government, most of that, remained loyal to the king, abolishing not only the monarchy, but also the Privy Council, Courts of Exchequer and Admiralty and even the House of Lords. England was ruled by an executive Council of State and the Rump Parliament, with various subcommittees dealing with day-to-day affairs. Of great importance was the administration in the shires and parishes: the machinery administering such governments was left intact; ingrained habits of ruling and obeying harkened back to monarchy.

With the death of the ancient constitution and Parliament in control, attention was turned to crushing rebellions in the realm, as well as in Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell forced submission from the nobility, muzzled the press and defeated Leveller rebels in Burford. Annihilating the more radical elements of revolution resulted in political conservatism , which eventually led to the restoration of the monarchy. Cromwell's army slaughtered over forty percent of the indigenous Irishmen, who clung unyieldingly to Catholicism and loyalist sentiments; the remaining Irishmen were forcibly transported to County Connaught with the Act of Settlement in 1653. Scottish Presbyterians fought for a Stuart restoration, in the person of Charles II, but were handily defeated, ending the last remnants of civil war. The army then turned its attention to internal matters.

The Rump devolved into a petty, self-perpetuating and unbending oligarchy, which lost credibility in the eyes of the army. Cromwell ended the Rump Parliament with great indignity on April 21, 1653, ordering the house cleared at the point of a sword. The army called for a new Parliament of Puritan saints, who proved as inept as the Rump. By 1655, Cromwell dissolved his new Parliament, choosing to rule alone (much like Charles I had done in 1629). The cost of keeping a standard army of 35,000 proved financially incompatible with Cromwell's monetarily strapped government. Two wars with the Dutch concerning trade abroad added to Cromwell's financial burdens.

The military's solution was to form yet another version of Parliament. A House of Peers was created, packed with Cromwell's supporters and with true veto power, but the Commons proved most antagonistic towards Cromwell. The monarchy was restored in all but name; Cromwell went from the title of Lord General of the Army to that of Lord Protector of the Realm (the title of king was suggested, but wisely rejected by Cromwell when a furore arose in the military ranks). The Lord Protector died on September 3, 1658, naming his son Richard as successor. With Cromwell's death, the Commonwealth floundered and the monarchy was restored only two years later.

The failure of Cromwell and the Commonwealth was founded upon Cromwell being caught between opposing forces. His attempts to placate the army, the nobility, Puritans and Parliament resulted in the alienation of each group. Leaving the political machinery of the parishes and shires untouched under the new constitution was the height of inconsistency; Cromwell, the army and Parliament were unable to make a clear separation from the ancient constitution and traditional customs of loyalty and obedience to monarchy. Lacey Baldwin Smith cast an astute judgment concerning the aims of the Commonwealth: "When Commons was purged out of existence by a military force of its own creation, the country learned a profound, if bitter, Lesson: Parliament could no more exist without the crown than the crown without Parliament. The ancient constitution had never been King and Parliament but King in Parliament; when one element of that mystical union was destroyed, the other ultimately perished."

Britannia: Monarchs of Britain

King Charles I was his own worst enemy. Self-righteous, arrogant, and unscrupulous; he had a penchant for making bad decisions. His troubles began the moment he ascended the throne in 1625 upon the death of his father James I. Charles simultaneously alienated both his subjects and his Parliament, prompting a series of events that ultimately lead to civil war, his own death and the abolition of the English monarchy.

Charles I and family

Charles' problems revolved around religion and a lack of money. His marriage to the Roman-Catholic French princess Henrietta Maria in 1625 did not please his Protestant subjects and led to suspicions of his motives. In 1637 he totally misgauged the sentiments of his Scottish subjects when he attempted to impose an Anglican form of worship on the predominantly Presbyterian population. Riots escalated to general unrest; forcing Charles to recall Parliament in 1640 in order to acquire the funds necessary to quell the Scottish uprising. This so-called "Short Parliament" refused Charles' financial demands and disbanded after only one month.

The continuing civil unrest in the north forced Charles to again convene Parliament in December 1640. The following year the Irish revolted against English rule while the determination of King and Parliament to assert their authority over the other led to open conflict between the two in 1642.

The tide of the Civil War ebbed and flowed for the next six years, culminating in the defeat at the Battle of Preston of Charles' army in August 1648 by Parliamentary forces under the command of Oliver Cromwell. The King was charged with high treason against the realm of England. At his trial, Charles refuted the legitimacy of the court and refused to enter a plea. Not withstanding the absence of a plea, the court rendered a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death declaring:

"That the king, for the crimes contained in the charge, should be carried back to the place from whence he came, and thence to the place of execution, where his head should be severed from his body."

Three days later, the king was led to the scaffold erected at Whitehall, London.

" I go to where no disturbance can be"

January 30, 1649 was a bitterly cold day. Charles went to his execution wearing two heavy shirts so that he might not shiver in the cold and appear to be afraid. The following account of the event comes from an anonymous observer and begins as the doomed King addresses the crowd from the scaffold:

"[As for the people,] truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them; a subject and a sovereign are clear different things. And therefore until they do that, I mean that you do put the people in that liberty, as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves. Sirs, it was for this that now I am come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore I tell you (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) that I am the martyr of the people. . .

And to the executioner he said, 'I shall say but very short prayers, and when I thrust out my hands - '

Then he called to the bishop for his cap, and having put it on, asked the executioner, 'Does my hair trouble you?' who desired him to put it all under his cap; which, as he was doing by the help of the bishop and the executioner, he turned to the bishop, and said, 'I have a good cause, and a gracious God on my side.'

The bishop said, 'There is but one stage more, which, though turbulent and troublesome, yet is a very short one. You may consider it will soon carry you a very great way; it will carry you from earth to heaven; and there you shall find to your great joy the prize you hasten to, a crown of glory.'

The king adjoins, 'I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.'

The bishop: 'You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown, - a good exchange.'

The execution of Charles I

Then the king asked the executioner, 'Is my hair well?' And taking off his cloak and George [the jeweled pendant of the Order of the Garter, bearing the figure of St. George], he delivered his George to the bishop. . .

Then putting off his doublet and being in his waistcoat, he put on his cloak again, and looking upon the block, said to the executioner, 'You must set it fast.'

The executioner: 'It is fast, sir.'

King: 'It might have been a little higher.'

Executioner: 'It can be no higher, sir.'

King: 'When I put out my hands this way, then - '

Then having said a few words to himself, as he stood, with hands and eyes lift up, immediately stooping down he laid his neck upon the block; and the executioner, again putting his hair under his cap, his Majesty, thinking he had been going to strike, bade him, 'Stay for the sign.'

Executioner: 'Yes, I will, and it please your Majesty.'

After a very short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the, executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people, was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging.

His blood was taken up by divers persons for different ends: by some as trophies of their villainy; by others as relics of a martyr; and in some hath had the same effect, by the blessing of God, which was often found in his sacred touch when living."

References:
   The anonymous account of Charles' death appears in Robinson, James Harvey, Readings in European History (1906); Schama, Simon, A History of Britain vol. II (2001); Wedgwood, C. V, A Coffin for King Charles; the Trial and Execution of Charles I (1964).

The Execution of Charles I, 1649

By J.A.R. Pimlott | Published in History Today Volume:10 Issue: 12 1960 

Both the religious and the secular celebration of Christmas was forbidden by the English Puritan republic, but by no means everywhere with success.

A sixteenth-century Puritan family

There has been no stranger episode in the long history of the English Christmas than the attempt to suppress both the religious and the secular celebrations during the period between 1644 and 1659. Why was it made, and how far did it succeed?

John Knox was alone among the great Reformers in condemning all Church festivals and, at any rate until the Civil Wars, few English Puritans seem to have wished to do away with Christmas as such. To others than their sympathizers it must sometimes have been a distinction without much of a difference. The Puritans objected to the Popish associations of Christmas and to the excesses such as play-acting, gambling and dancing with which as the great national holiday it was associated more than any other season. But neither of the chief Puritan critics of Christmas before 1640 went so far as to advocate abolition.

Philip Stubbes' complaint in the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), which dealt with the celebrations as part of a broad attack on the theatre and other follies of the nation, was that Christmas was the time of the year when the abuses were most flagrant. "Who is ignorant," he asked, that at Christmas time "more mischief is committed than in all the year besides? What masking and mumming? whereby robberies, whoredom, murder, and what not, is committed? What dicing and carding, what banqueting and feasting, is then used more than in all the year besides!" In Histriomastix in 1632, William Prynne took Christmas as the worst example of the festivals that were devoted to the theatre and spent in "amorous, mixed, voluptuous, un-Christian, that I say not, pagan dancing." Why, he asked, could not the English nation observe festivals and especially Christmas" without drinking, roaring, healthing, dicing, carding, masques and stage-plays? which better become the sacrifices of Bacchus, than the resurrection, the incarnation of our most blessed Saviour." If Turks and infidels were to behold the Bacchanalian Christmas extravagances would they not think our Saviour to be a "glutton, an epicure, a wine-bibber, a devil, a friend of publicans and sinners?" The celebrations were derived from the Saturnalia and the Bacchanalia. Christmas, as it was kept, could be more truly termed Devil's mass or Saturn's mass.

Exaggerated though they were, there was much force in these criticisms of the contemporary celebrations-particularly in high society. Moderate opinion agreed that there were excesses that needed to be curbed, and if the critics had stopped there, they would have had a large measure of support. They forfeited sympathy-and foreshadowed the extravagances of the forties and fifties-when they extended their objections to customs that were harmless arid pleasant, and the pedantry in which some of them indulged made them easy targets for ridicule. It was one thing to carry their convictions into practice themselves like, for example, the eccentric Lady Margaret Hoby, who in the latter years of Elizabeth's reign devoted Christmas Day to prayer, Bible reading and self-examination. It was another to inveigh against New Year gifts and evergreens; or, like a. Puritan caricatured by Sir Thomas Overbury, to attack the Pope by refusing to eat plum-broth; or to condemn those who ate mince-pies . as Papists and idolaters. As Thomas Warmstry pointed out, the remedy for anybody who objected to receiving New Year gifts was to make this known and not to trouble further the consciences of possible donors. There was also the objection to the word "Christmas" because it incorporated the Popish "mass." "Christ-tide, I pray you," said the Puritan Ananias in Jonson's The Alchemist.

Sir Toby Belch gave the unanswerable reply to pedantry run mad: "Dost thou think," he asked Malvolio, "that because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale ?" Serious exponents of the case for Christmas wisely did not contend that the celebrations were in all respects worthy of the Nativity feast, but they made essentially the same point as Sir Toby. A custom was not necessarily to be condemned because it was heathen, said Warmstry. "It is a Custome with Heathens to kneele at prayer, yet this is no Heathenish custome." Nobody put the case into better perspective than George Herbert. "The country parson is a lover of old customs, if they be good and  harmless; and the rather because country people are much addicted to them, so that to favour them therein is to win their hearts, and to oppose them therein is to deject them. If there be any ill in the customs, that may be. severed from the good, he pares the apple, and gives them the clean to feed on."

The Puritan leaders must have been aware of the risks that they took, not perhaps so much in proscribing the religious celebrations - this, after all, was inseparable from their general policy towards the Church of England - as in trying to stop the majority of English people from keeping the most popular of all holidays in ways that were hallowed by tradition and sentiment. But they were impelled by the logic of their own policies and the pressure of their more extreme supporters, and their position was made more difficult by the skill with which Royalist propagandists identified the celebration of Christmas with the good old days and the cause of King and Church.

The ban on the performance of plays, which was imposed in 1642, inhibited the keeping of Christmas, particularly in London: Christmas had been the peak of the theatrical season. In 1643, to the dismay of some of the Scots, the Assembly of Divines decided to adjourn over Christmas Day, the majority resolving (said the Scottish Presbyterian, Robert Baillie) that they would preach "that day, till Parliament should reform it in an orderly way," but none the less the minority had the satisfaction of being able to persuade both Houses of Parliament to sit. It was not, however, until 1644 that Parliament took any positive action against .the general observance of Christmas. Its hands were forced by an accident of the calendar and pressure from the Scots. In Scotland the Presbyterians had secured a ban on Christmas celebrations as long ago as 1583, though they had not found it easy to put down snowballing, football, guising, carol-singing and other profane pastimes. In 1618 they had been compelled to accept an order of the King that Christmas and certain other festivals should be kept, but the General Assembly had set this aside in 1638. They came to England with rigid views which in the circumstances of 1644 they were in a position to press. For some time the Parliamentary leaders were able to resist demands that Christmas should be abolished in England, but it happened that in 1644 Christmas Day fell upon a Wednesday, and the last Wednesday in each month was by law to be kept as a day of solemn fast and penance. The question was whether December 25th should be an exception to the general rule. In deference to the Scots, Parliament decided with evident unwillingness that it should not.

This decision does not seem to have been of much importance in practice. It was widely disregarded, and according to one account all the London shops closed as usual: in the previous year: some are said to have opened, presumably because of the convictions of their owners. In 1645 the religious but not the secular celebrations were outlawed as a result of another general measure-  the substitution of the Presbyterian Directory of Public Prayer for the Book of Common Prayer. " O blessed Reformation! " commented a friend to Sir John Oglander, " the church doors all shut, and the tavern doors all open!" Parliament met as usual, and the Commons sat in Committee of Privileges. At least one enthusiast, General Browne, who was a Presbyterian, took it upon himself to proclaim the abolition of Christmas. This was at Abingdon, and he "sent out his warrants for men to work on that day especially."

The first big test of the determination of the regime and of popular affection for Christmas was delayed until 1647, when the authorities tried to enforce general legislation, passed in the summer, under which all festivals or holidays "heretofore superstitiously used" were no longer to be kept. The effect was that for the first time Christmas Day could lawfully be observed neither as a religious nor a secular holiday. The timing was unpropitious. That winter there was a wave of popular sympathy for the King. When Christmas came there was both passive and active resistance. Some London shops closed in defiance of Parliament and some that opened were attacked. In one incident the Lord Mayor was met with jeers, and made an undignified departure when his horse bolted. Officers had to be sent to remove the evergreens from a number of London churches, including St. Margaret's in the shadow of Parliament itself; In the' proceedings that followed, the churchwardens and clerk of St. Margaret's advanced a provocative defence. The parishioners, they said, thought that so few people would be at work on Christmas Day that it would be better to draw people to a sermon than that they should misspend their time in taverns.

Lives were lost in riots at Ipswich, skulls were broken in Oxford, there were disturbances in Ealing, and ten thousand men of Kent and Canterbury passed an ominous resolution: "If they could not have their Christmas day, they would have the King back on his throne." This came after disorderly scenes in Canterbury, where crowds defiantly played football in the streets and frustrated the attempts of the Mayor to enforce the opening of the market. Twelve shops at most opened, but the mob threw their wares "up and down" and forced them to shut. They also knocked down the Mayor and rescued some prisoners from gaol. The sequel to these events suggests that the central government was more prudent than the local authorities and is evidence of the sympathy that was felt for the rioters in the county. Parliament refused to agree to a proposal of the County Committee for Kent that the ringleaders should be dealt with summarily under martial law, but insisted that they should be tried by jury in the normal courts. But the grand jury twice refused a true bill, and in the end the prisoners had to be discharged.

It is difficult to say who won this trial of strength. There was to be no repetition of the outbreaks of 1647, and if some Royalist writers are to be believed, the suppression of Christmas was effective. On the other hand, to judge from some of the opponents of Christmas, the law was widely disregarded; and if aggressive disobedience was uncommon, there is much evidence of non-compliance.

The authorities were in a dilemma. The issue was not simply - as Royalist propaganda liked to suggest - whether harmless old customs should be permitted. The religious observances were flatly inconsistent with the proscription of the Book of Common Prayer, and secular celebrations might be a demonstration of sympathy with King and Church. Yet it was a mistake to alienate support by rigid insistence upon the letter of the law, and moderate opinion among the Puritan leaders was not opposed to some of the Christmas customs, including even dancing and the theatre within limits. There is some evidence that Cromwell actually went out of his way to celebrate the New Year, notwithstanding that it fell within the Twelve Days and the objections that some fanatics had to New Year gifts: in 1656 drummers and trumpeters were sent to play for· foreign embassies on·New Year's Day, and the Protector sent handsome gifts to the ambassadors and ministers.

Yet the leadership could not disregard the constant pressure from extremists or ignore the political implications of ill-judged tolerance. The extreme point of view was expressed in the "terrible Remonstrance against Christmas day, grounded upon divine Scriptures," which was presented to Parliament in 1652. This spoke of "Anti-Christ's Masse, and those Masse-Mongers and Papists who observe it." It led Parliament to enact that December 25th should not be solenmized in churches or observed in any other way, and that town criers should each year remind the people that Christmas Day and other superstitious festivals must not be kept and that the markets and shops should remain open on December 25th.

In practice a middle course seems to have been pursued. Bishop Duppa, who was responsible to Charles II for the maintenance of the Church of England, wrote just before Christmas in 1655 that Church people were ''yet suffered to offer up the public prayers and sacrifices of the Church, though it be under private roofs, nor do I hear of any for the present either disturbed or troubled for doing it." But policy fluctuated according to the circumstances, and it is likely that for understandable reasons the authorities were stricter in London than elsewhere. In 1659 Duppa drew a distinction between Richmond, where he was living, and London, where the worship of God had been prohibited with such severity on "those days" that some had begun to doubt whether "they shall be suffered to be Christians any longer or no."

John Evelyn's experience supports this view. Each year from 1652 to 1655, he noted the absence of Christmas Day services in London, though in 1652 he found an "honest" divine who preached at Lewis ham on Boxing Day. In 1656, however, he went especially to London to receive the sacrament at "Dr. Wild's lodgings, where I rejoiced to find so full an assembly of devout and sober Christians." In 1657 his friends were bolder. The sacrament was actually being administered in Exeter Chapel when soldiers placed the congregation under arrest. When Evelyn was examined, he was asked why "contrary to the ordinance made, that none should any longer observe the superstitious time of the Nativity ... I durst offend, and particularly be at Common Prayers, which they told me was but the mass in English, . and particularly pray for Charles Stuart."

Too much should not he read into this episode. The assembly was obviously provocative. Like others which were similarly raided, it was held in direct defiance of an express order by the Protector and the Council, and the stress that was laid on the prayers for the King will be noted. Clearly, however, public services could not be held without serious risk, and it may be assumed that for all practical purposes Christmas, like other church holidays, ceased to be observed as a religious festival except in the privacy of the home. It might be supposed from some Royalist writings that Christmas was also virtually dead as a popular holiday. "Old Christmas now is come to town," said the broadsheet Mercurius Democritus in 1652, "though few him do regard." The theme of a pamphlet called The Vindication of Christmas in 1653 was the rejection of old Father Christmas and his failure to find anyone to welcome him until he reached a remote farm in Devonshire. Here Christmas was being kept in the old style and in pursuits that could give offence to nobody. It is probably true, too, that many people were easily reconciled to the abolition of Christmas. As early as 1646 Ralph Josselin noted that many London families were "weaned " from the old "sports and pastimes".

The evidence to the contrary seems, on the other hand, to be conclusive. Too much importance need not be attached to the fulminations of the extremists, but, judging from the most visible sign of passive resistance, the closing of shops, the majority of people never acquiesced. In 1650 the Council of State complained of the "very wilful and strict observation of the day" in London and Middlesex by "a general keeping of their shops shut up." In the same areas the ordinance of 1652 was ostentatiously disobeyed. According to the Weekly Intelligencer, almost all the shops in the City of London were shut, "and so were the churchdoors." It was as rare, said the Flying Eagle, to see a shop open, "as to see a Phenix, or Birds of Paradice." And of two shops that did open it was said that one shopkeeper had better have given fifty pounds, "his wares were so dirtied." In 1656 it was suggested that there were even defaulters in Parliament itself. It was observed that the House was thin, "much, I believe, occasioned by observation of this day," and a Bill was read "for the abolishing and taking away of festival days, commonly called holy days." One speaker in the debate said that he could not rest all night "for the preparation of this foolish day's solemnity," and another that in many places the day was kept more strictly than the Sabbath and that it was possible to go from the Tower to Westminster without a shop being open or a creature stirring. " We are, I doubt, returning to popery," he concluded. In 1657 the Council ordered the authorities of London and Westminster to enforce the law, but once again it was reported that all the shops were shut.

What happened behind the closed shutters? Ralph Josselin, who himself conformed, but retained his old sympathies, heard in 1652 that Londoners bought "bay, holly and ivy wonderfully for Christmas, being eagerly set on the feast." A botanical work published in 1656 referred to mistletoe being transported long distances for sale at Christmas-time. Of one thing it is possible to be reasonably certain. The English Christmas was not complete without the roast beef or the goose or the turkey, the plum-broth and the mince-pie. According to the Vindication of Christmas, the Puritans assumed "power and authority to plunder pottage-pots, to ransack ovens, and to strip spits stark naked." That this was not entirely fanciful is shown by the case of the minister in Scotland who in 1659 searched houses that they might not have a Christmas goose.

The likelihood is that the analysis made by the Flying Eagle in 1652 was substantially sound. The citizens made the belly their God, it said. For its sake they disobeyed Parliament 'and the Ten Commandments. "Yea, the Theefe will steale and rob his own father against Christmas, and the poore will pawn all to the Cloaths of their back to provide Christmas pies for their bellies, and the broath of Abominable things in their Vessels." There was no telling who would yield to this most insidious temptation of the Devil. None other than Hugh Peters was charged in 1652 with preaching against Christmas Day and then eating two mince-pies for his dinner.

It was indeed ironical if, as Bishop Duppa said in 1655, "though the religious part of this holy time is laid aside, yet the eating part is observed by the holiest of the brethren." It is certainly plausible.

Christmas under the Puritans | History Today

By Siân Ellis 

Originally published by British Heritage magazine. Published Online: June 15, 2011 

In the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, King James received the petitions of the Puritans in January 1604. Though he completely rejected their requests, he authorized what would become known as the King James Bible.

 

 

a Jacobean committee of scholars created the single greatest, most influential work of English prose ever written

Many moons ago, in the summer before I went up to Oxford to study modern languages, my tutors sent me a reading list. Alongside the expected tomes in German and French, I found: King James Bible (King James underlined). Why so prescriptive, methought; it was a time when trendy new versions were all the rage, after all: how about those for a handy reference? What a clunking dullard.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, aka the James I Authorized Version or the King James Version (KJV). And while you won't find one specific birthplace with a venerable monument to such a major historic undertaking, you can certainly add its genesis to your list of reasons to visit Oxford and Cambridge.

For here, amid the dreaming spires, a Jacobean committee of scholars created the single greatest, most influential work of English prose ever written: a translation that is a literary achievement in its own right. Okay, a third of the work was farmed out to folk in Westminster, but many of them had links to Oxbridge and, unless you inveigle your way into the Abbey's Jerusalem Chamber (not open to the public) where they met, there's not much else to look up there.

Trip along to the university cities, with greater insight into their palimpsests of history and culture than I showed when I first arrived, and the KJV story is all around: part of the golden-stone fabric, the aura, the heady year-upon-year ferment of ideas that has so often shaped the world beyond the college doors. Catch fleet shadows of the academics, the movers and shakers who hurried to their Bible sessions at Merton or Corpus Christi colleges in Oxford. Christ Church, Lincoln, Magdalen; Cambridge's Emmanuel, Sidney Sussex, Trinity—these and many more were all touched by the committeemen's web.

I did take my tutors' hint and discovered the KJV's resonant, majesty- and mystery-evoking language. Away with flat, thin-of-meaning modern stuff. Here is something far richer, whose archaic poeticism yet lives, moves and fires heart, mind and soul. It's surprising, too, how many phrases from the KJV even now populate the day-to-day English language: "the skin of my teeth," "how are the mighty fallen," "rise and shine," "sour grapes." The reach of its music and rhetoric went well beyond the pulpit and right around the English-speaking world, beyond England's historical contribution to the Renaissance and right down to the present day.

So how did the KJV come about? Even into the Middle Ages, the Holy Scriptures transmitted in the Bible remained something of a closed book to the common English man: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin Vulgate translation were simply incomprehensible without a priestly class to interpret and impart their messages. Bits of the Bible had been translated into Anglo-Saxon as early as the 7th century, but otherwise mere monoglot mortals were left in the dark.

Indeed, whether or not God's Holy Word should be made accessible to the natives in their vernacular at all became a dangerous topic. Surely, it was averred, the grubby language of the laborer was unfit to convey such precious pearls. Church and political rulers maybe also had a concern to keep the plebs in their place: what on earth might someone think if they could read or hear—unmediated —ticklish questions like Acts 4:19, "Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto [religious leaders] more than unto God, judge ye." Better to protect the hierarchy, otherwise revolution could ensue.

Some courageous souls nevertheless determined to translate the Bible into English. John Wycliffe, one-time Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and inspiration behind the "heretical" Lollards, produced his translation in the 1380s. Even in death he was persecuted, his body exhumed from its grave at Lutterworth (Leicestershire) and burned.
William Tyndale's English language Bible began to appear from 1525 amid the upheaval of the Reformation. Printed on the Continent, it was smuggled into England between bales of cloth and became widely popular. Tyndale, who had been educated at Oxford's Magdalen College, was eventually betrayed by an English spy, strangled and burned for his troubles in 1536.

It was a deadly business to be a translator, but precedents were being set. The English language was being enriched, too: Wycliffe's "flesh and blood" and "the twinkling of an eye," and Tyndale's "my brother's keeper," "the powers that be" and "pearls before swine," were catching hold.

By the time Henry VIII was stirring trouble with Rome, the moment for an English Bible was becoming politically ripe. Miles Coverdale, a former assistant to Tyndale, dedicated his translation to the King, and in 1537 another of Tyndale's friends on the Continent, John Rogers, published the so-called Matthew's Bible under the pseudonym of Thomas Matthew. Henry licensed 1,500 copies, and it became the first Bible in English to be sold legally in England. Indeed, Bluff King Hal now began to get in on the act, ordering that a Bible be placed in every church in England—cue another revision, the 1539 Great Bible

The King James Bible: Still The Word After 400 Years

By Adrian Tinniswood | Published in History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 5 2010

Early 17th century England saw the emergence of pirates, much romanticised creatures whose lives were often nasty, brutish and short. Adrian Tinniswood examines one such career.

The execution of a pirate at Execution Dock in Wapping, London

Where are the days that have been ... when we might do what we list, and the law would bear us out in it? When the whole sea was our empire, where we rob at will?’

(Andrew Barker, A True and Certaine Report of ... two late famous Pirates, 1609)

One consequence of the Somerset House Conference, which brought an end to the ‘long and most cruel ravage of wars’ between England and Spain in the summer of 1604, was the cessation of privateering. This legal variant on piracy, whereby private individuals carrying letters of marque from their government were permitted to seize goods and ships belonging to an enemy, was big business. In the late 1590s at least 85 privateers were operating out of London and the south coast ports and the prizes they brought home accounted for between 10 and 15 per cent of English imports.

Eager to show himself the strong, authoritative Rex Pacificus that he so conspicuously was not, James I quickly issued a stream of strident proclamations outlawing privateering by his subjects and promising the direst penalties against those who persisted in harassing Spain and its allies. His words had the effect of pushing hundreds – possibly thousands – of English sailors into outright piracy. Resentful of the fact that James ‘hath lessened by this general peace the flourishing employment that we seafaring men do bleed for at sea’, as one put it, they adapted to their change of status and continued as before, the only difference being that many no longer felt the need to confine themselves to robbing the Spanish.

One of these Jacobean privateers-turned-pirates was Captain John Jennings. He wasn’t famous; there were no broadside ballads written about his exploits and, as far as I know, the full story of his brief but eventful career has never been told until now. He wasn’t even particularly good at piracy: his judgement was poor, his leadership skills were worse and his single-minded determination to indulge himself proved to be his undoing. But his tragi-comic career offers an intriguing sidelight onto the chaotic and arbitrary world of Jacobean piracy.

Nothing is known of Jennings’ early life except that, by his own account, dictated shortly before his death, he was from childhood ‘wholly addicted to martial courses, especially in the manly resolution of seafaring men’. He duly went to sea and, after a ten-year privateering career in which he bore arms for England, then Spain, then Holland, he finally tipped over into downright criminality in 1606, capturing a French merchant ship in the Channel and killing her entire crew. While the French ambassador in London demanded his immediate arrest, Jennings set sail south to Safi on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

Jennings and his crew spent the late autumn and winter of 1606-7 at Safi, sailing out the following spring and returning at intervals with prizes ‘which amounting to so great a sum, it is incredible to report’, he later said. ‘I will only satisfy you that the most part was consumed in excess.’ He worked together with another Englishman, Gilbert Roupe, who had just relocated from Tunis, a favourite base for pirates since the beginning of the century, when the Tunisian bey, ‘Uthmân, began to establish the city as one of the most important international centres of piracy on the Barbary Coast. Why Roupe was in Safi we don’t know, although the prospect of easy pickings in the busy shipping lanes leading through the Straits of Gibraltar probably played a part in his decision.

Towards the end of 1607 the first in a string of disasters struck the partners when Roupe’s ship sprang a leak off the Isles of Scilly.‘ Captain Roupe and his company were compelled to come aboard of mine,’ said Jennings, ‘and his ship sunk immediately after.’ Uncomfortable but undaunted, the pirates set a course for south-west Ireland, wreaking havoc as they went. They took an English merchant ship, the John Evangelist off Scilly and a few days later captured a French vessel ‘laden with brass and other rich commodities’. Both required a prize crew, easing the overcrowding on Jennings’ ship; but neither suited Roupe as a decent replacement for the ship he had lost and both were sold along with their contents when the pirates put in at Baltimore, County Cork in early December 1607. The men spent the winter there, negotiating with local merchants over the sale of their stolen goods, disposing of their prizes and refitting their ship.

The townsfolk of Baltimore were known to be sympathetic to pirates, especially those with plenty of money to spend. One local woman proved so sympathetic that when spring came Captain Jennings offered her gold and promises and ‘so far prevailed with her, that he won her to spend her company at sea with him; and so hoisting sails, away they depart’.

The voyage was not a happy one. Roupe was still without a ship of his own and he and his crew had to sail with Jennings. They narrowly escaped capture by one of the king’s ships, which was waiting for them outside Baltimore harbour. They then got into a savage fight with two Spanish vessels and, with their own ship badly damaged, ten or 11 crewmen killed and another 20 hurt – including Jennings himself – they were forced to cut their losses and break off the engagement.

Some of Jennings’ company argued that this humiliation was ‘a just judgement of God against them, in suffering their captain to bring his whore aboard and there to wallow in his luxury’. Others asked how come their captain could have a woman aboard and they couldn’t? Gilbert Roupe, with an eye to usurping Jennings’ command, quietly egged them on until, at last, a group of seamen burst into their captain’s cabin and, paying no heed to the fact that he was actually in bed and in the arms of his Irish mistress, began to lecture him on his loose morals.

Jennings’ reaction was to pick up a truncheon and hit the nearest crewman over the head. Then he charged at the rest and cleared them out of the cabin, shouting ‘Captaine Roupe, will you suffer me to be thus taunted and abused?’ But Roupe was curiously slow to come to his aid and the angry sailors chased the unfortunate Jennings out of his cabin and into the ship’s gun room, where they locked him up.

The mutineers offered command of the ship to Roupe and he accepted. But, as the days lengthened on the voyage southwards to the safety of Morocco, they began to have second thoughts. Their ex-captain was a hard, self-centred man; but Roupe turned out to be worse and he favoured his own crew over them. Jennings, who was now allowed the liberty of the ship (although not, presumably, the liberty of his mistress, who disappears abruptly from the story at this point), worked hard to regain their trust. But by the time the pirates caught up with a French fishing boat off the Portuguese coast and Roupe gave the order to board her there were deep divisions between the two crews – so deep that while Roupe’s company stormed the French vessel, Jennings persuaded his own men to hold back. Roupe offered Jennings the command of his ship again and, after some awkward moments, the two captains were reconciled. They agreed to sail back to Ireland together to sell their plunder.

There was no uniform moral code among Jacobean pirates, but there was a hierarchy of scruple. The more principled pirates confined themselves to robbing Spain and its allies. Others maintained a toe-hold on the moral high ground by robbing everyone but the English. A third group – the group to which Jennings and Roupe belonged – would take anything they found afloat. Their contemporary, the powerful pirate Peter Easton, caused panic in the financial markets in 1610 when he announced that he regarded Englishmen as legitimate targets, ‘no other than as Turks and Jews’.

Worst of all, in the eyes of English society at least, were the ‘runnagates’ who turned Turk and settled permanently in one of the Islamic states along the Barbary Coast: Morocco, Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli. These men customarily joined a ta’ifat al-ra’is, one of the guilds of corsairs which engaged in exactly the kind of state-sanctioned privateering outlawed by James I. Only now they were crusaders against Christendom, warriors ‘who went on the sea jihad and found fame’, in the words of the 17th-century Algerian chronicler Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari.

It is impossible even to guess how many English pirates converted to Islam, but judging by the uproar caused in England when the notorious pirate John Ward turned Turk in 1610, it was a relatively rare event. The news of Ward’s conversion met with ‘the great indignation of the whole nation’, according to the Venetian ambassador in London. Clergymen in their pulpits thundered that Ward would end his days in drunkenness, lechery and sodomy in his opulent Tunisian palace, while congregations wondered idly if drunkenness, lechery and sodomy were really such a bad way to go. The apostate was portrayed in verse and on the London stage as part-demon, part-Faustian anti-hero. Captain Jennings remained a rather conventional Protestant, although how he reconciled his religious beliefs with his piratical activities remains a mystery.

He and Roupe got back to Baltimore just after Christmas 1608, by which time they had acquired a Dutch prize of some 180 tons. Jennings sent four men ashore to spy out the lie of the land. None of them came back. (He found out later that three of them deserted; the fourth was found in a country lane with his throat cut.) After waiting for several days the captain put back out to sea, followed by Roupe and the captured vessel. Still looking for supplies and a market for his goods, they sailed round the coast to Broadhaven Bay in County Mayo and sent another reconnaissance party ashore. It was ambushed by soldiers as soon as it landed.

Nothing was going right for Jennings and he decided the time had come to give up piracy. But what was he to do? He might settle in Safi or Algiers or Tunis; or start a quiet new life in Cornwall or Connacht, hoping that no one would recognise him. Or he could ask the king to pardon him.

On January 23rd, 1609, Jennings anchored outside Limerick at the mouth of the Shannon and set out his terms in a letter to the Earl of Thomond, the governor of County Clare and the military commander in Munster. He offered to give up everything: his Dutch prize, his cargo of sugar, pepper, cinnamon, wool, soap and brass; his ordnance and ammunition; his cables, anchors ‘and all necessaries fitting a ship of her burden’. All he asked in return was a pardon for himself, Roupe and their company.

As with so much of Jennings’ career, his timing was unfortunate. Over the previous couple of months the government in London had come under increasing pressure to do something about the problem of piracy. Reports arrived from the West Country complaining that ‘merchants are daily robbed at sea by pirates’; the Levant Company sent petitions begging for naval support to protect them from corsairs based at Algiers; the Venetians lobbied for a general embargo on trading ‘to any ports where the pirates resort’.

As a result, on January 8th, 1609 James I announced sweeping measures designed to stamp out ‘the many depredations and piracies committed by lewd and ill disposed persons’. Pirates, he said, were ‘most hateful to his mind, and scandalous to his peaceable government’. This was just 15 days before Jennings asked for his royal pardon.

Unaware of these developments in Whitehall, Jennings came ashore in Limerick offering to negotiate directly with Thomond if the earl would provide a safe conduct pass and send two of his kinsmen aboard the pirate ship as hostages. Thomond agreed and for the next two weeks Jennings ‘rioted in pleasure and revelled in the town’ while he waited confidently for his pardon to arrive. He entertained one of Thomond’s sons and various other local gentry aboard his ship, brandishing the earl’s letter of protection and doling out all manner of gifts.

While Jennings rioted and revelled, the earl was having a discreet chat with Roupe. He had got wind of the differences between the two men and, since Jennings was the more notorious, he offered Roupe a pardon if he would betray his comrade. Roupe agreed; but some of the company remained loyal to Jennings and Thomond’s kinsmen were still held hostage aboard their ship.

The safe conduct pass was valid for two weeks and on the day it expired, ‘having feasted voluptuously with [the hostages] aboard, and drunk hard, [Jennings] out of his own motion made the offer unto them, that that night they should go with him and revel it ashore’. His men, who were more sober and more sensible than their captain, tried to dissuade him, but he would have none of it and he duly set off with the two Thomond hostages for a night out in Limerick.

Roupe and the other turncoats seized their opportunity and set sail. When the sun came up the next morning Jennings found himself hung over and hung out to dry. The hostages had escaped and after a brief fight the unfortunate pirate was overpowered by the earl’s soldiers and packed off to London for trial.

But as Jennings was passed from Limerick to Dublin, from Dublin to Chester and from there to London to await trial something rather curious happened. Debauched, violent, base-born and barely literate, he elicited sympathy and fellow-feeling wherever he went. The Earl of Thomond took pity on him and, mindful that he had nothing but the light doublet and hose he was wearing when he was arrested, gave Jennings £100 to defray his expenses. At Dublin Castle, where he was held for three months, he freely confessed his crimes ‘and pleaded for mercy since he came in voluntary’, which was stretching the truth a bit. Even so, the lord deputy, who had previously been adamant that Jennings must hang, changed his mind when the man was actually brought before him. His contrition, his insistence that he had always respected the king’s subjects (a downright lie) and the notion that he would better serve royal policy alive than dead convinced the lord deputy that the prisoner deserved that pardon. In the meantime, Jennings was allowed out to hawk and hunt in the Dublin countryside like a nobleman, on the understanding that he would return to his lodgings in the castle each night.

After Jennings reached the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark in May 1609 he continued to impress his captors and they continued to press the king for a pardon. He was kept in the Marshalsea until December, sitting around in summer, getting drunk with his fellow prisoners, having snowball fights in the prison yard in winter and reminiscing about his glittering career. ‘Faith, Captain Jennings, and how did you live when you were at sea?’ he was asked. ‘I rejoiced more to hear the cannon’s voice that bid me to fight, than the church-bell that called me to prayer,’ he replied. ‘I fought not as chickens fight, for their meat to sustain nature, but for store of gold, to maintain riot.’

Through it all he maintained an endearing and, as it turned out, misplaced faith in the future. He came to trial at the beginning of December along with 19 others, all of whom were charged with piracy. Three co-defendants were members of his own company. One was a Cork shoemaker who claimed he had fallen asleep aboard Jennings’ ship and woken to find himself at sea. He was found not guilty, unlike several others who came after him and pleaded exactly the same excuse.

And unlike Jennings. But even with a guilty verdict and a death sentence pronounced, he was sure he was not going to hang. The Earl of Northampton, Lord Privy Seal and Earl Marshal, personally asked the king to reprieve him. He would be more use alive than dead, argued Northampton. And the word in the taverns and alleys of London was that James I agreed.

Ironically enough, it was a fellow-pirate who was the death of Captain Jennings. In November Sir William St John in the king’s ship Advantage was patrolling the coast of County Waterford when he came across the pirate Richard Bishop and his crew in Ardmore Bay. There was a furious battle and by the beginning of December Whitehall was ringing with the news that Bishop’s crew had boarded the Advantage and killed St John.

The reports were greatly exaggerated: St John was back in action against the pirates the following spring. Nevertheless, it was the news that one of the king’s officers had been killed which hardened James I’s heart against Jennings and which, in spite of all the petitions and pleas for clemency, made him determined to see him hang.

Captain Jennings’ death possessed a nobility which his life so conspicuously lacked. On Friday December 29th, 1609 he climbed the scaffold at Execution Dock in Wapping, directing a rousing final speech towards two loyal crewmen who waited their turn below:

You fearlessly and venturously have followed me, your Captain, who have as bravely brought you off as I have boldly brought you on. Be not dismayed now to do the like, for where heretofore I have driven you through the footsteps of transgression on earth, I now wish you be all as resolv’d as I go before you the highway to my salvation in heaven, where we shall meet amongst the fellowship of angels.

Then he said a prayer, sang the first few verses of Psalm 51, ‘Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness’, and stepped off the ladder into eternity and into a small but well-deserved place in the history of piracy.

Captain Jennings Causes Chaos | History Today

The Glorious Revolution

To modern eyes the complex web of religious and political loyalties which underpinned Jacobitism can seem alien and unsympathetic. The whole movement might be said to span the century from the deposition of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the lonely alcohol-sodden death of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1788.

A Catholic himself, James decided that by promoting edicts of religious tolerance, he would be able to surreptitiously re-establish Catholicism as the official faith of the British Isles. This notion produced near-hysteria in James's Protestant subjects - who had been taught to abhor this faith. When a son was born to the King and Queen, British Protestants were faced with the prospect of never waking up from their worst nightmare: a Catholic dynasty.

They turned to James's Protestant son-in-law William of Orange. In 1688 he led a successful invasion of England. James panicked and fled. As Scotland wavered, James wrote an utterly tactless letter to the Scottish National Convention in Edinburgh. They declared for William. James's most zealous Scottish supporter, Viscount Dundee, turned to a military solution. The first Jacobite rising broke out. But it was not very popular at all. Most Scottish nobles took the attitude of wait and see.

Dundee's forces destroyed William's with a devastating highland charge at the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, but their leader died in his hour of glory. This left the movement headless. The wait and see-ers kept waiting, and the rising petered out.

So how did Jacobitism come back from the political grave in Scotland? In a few words: William and The Union.

So how did Jacobitism come back from the political grave in Scotland? In a few words: William and The Union. The new King's Scottish reign was characterised by government tactlessness and economic disasters. The most important of the latter was the Darien Scheme. William refused all English assistance to this Scottish venture to found a colony in Panama. When the scheme failed, leaving most of the would-be colonists dead, the King was widely blamed.

Thus to the die-hard believers in the hereditary right of James were added the dissatisfied. Jacobitism became a magnet for almost anyone with a grudge against the government. The Union of 1707 then produced what was for many Scots the grudge to end all grudges.

The ink was hardly dry on the treaty before it was being widely denounced, and Scotland was ripe for sedition. The French, who were at war with Britain, suddenly saw an advantage to be gained here. They would land the new Jacobite heir, James III 'The Old Pretender' in his ancestral kingdom and start a rebellion. It was an excellent opportunity to unite much of the nation, even many Presbyterians, on the Jacobite side against the Union.

The abortive 1708 rising was dogged with bad luck, however, and possible sabotage. The invasion fleet arrived tardily in the Firth of Forth to find the Royal Navy waiting for them. The French commander refused to put the furious James ashore. The invasion that might have united Scotland against the Union was a damp squib.

The '15 Rebellion

Contemporary newspaper account of the Battle of Glen Sheil in 1719  ©

However Jacobitism was still very dangerous. The promised benefits of the Union had failed to arrive for many people. Instead, heavy excise duty and increased tax caused much ill feeling. Added to these were humiliations at the hands of the English-dominated Westminster parliament.

Yet rebellion when it came, sprang from a most unexpected quarter. When George I of Hanover succeeded to the throne in 1715, he sacked one of Scotland's most influential politicians: John Erskine, Earl of Mar. Mar decided to retaliate by raising the standard for the house of Stuart. On one side of his banner he put the arms of Scotland and on the other 'No Union'. Thousands flocked to it. Soon almost the entire north of Scotland was in his hands. He did this without even bothering to warn the Jacobite court.

This was not a phenomenon of a backward rural people rising for archaic notions of loyalty to the king over the water. There was strong support for the Jacobite cause in the trading burghs of north-east Scotland, as well as in the Highlands.

Historian Bruce Lenman characterised the backbone of the rising as 'Patriotic Scots and Disgruntled Britons'. The government commander, the Duke of Argyll warned his own side that 'Beyond the Forth the rebels have a hundred to one at least against us'. The Union was in serious danger.

Argyll seized the strategically vital ground around Stirling, but he was heavily outnumbered. Then at the battle of Sheriffmuir, when all seemed lost, Mar lost his nerve and suddenly withdrew. The belated landing of the Pretender couldn't retrieve things, and the leaders of the rising fled ingloriously to France.

The 1715 was like no other Jacobite rising since Killiecrankie. It was totally indigenous to Britain and not started from abroad. It was also the only occasion when a sizeable rebellion also broke out in England - in heavily Catholic and financially broke Lancashire.

This was not a phenomenon of a backward rural people rising for archaic notions of loyalty to the King over the water.

The moment had passed, however, and the exiled Stuarts now became no more than useful pawns in foreign hands. The next European power to play the Jacobite card was Spain in 1719.

Unluckily for the Spanish, their main invasion fleet was destroyed by a storm before it ever set sail for England. Only a tiny diversionary force made it to the north-west of Scotland. There they garrisoned the ancient fortress of Eilean Donan but were scattered by the energetic response of the local Hanoverian commander at the battle of Glen Shiel.

Lowland Scotland had settled down under a Hanoverian regime, which though sometimes unloved, did not move it to outright revolt. Faced with the Stuart association with foreign enemies, most Scots preferred to keep a hold of their Hanoverian nurse 'for fear of finding something worse'. But what George II and his ministers could not inspire was enthusiasm, and this was to prove near-calamitous when the Jacobite card was played again.

The '45 Rebellion

Engraving of the Duke of Cumberland who defeated the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden  ©

After major French invasion plans collapsed in 1744, Charles Edward Stuart put together his own tiny invasion force to land in Scotland. The Prince came without the men, money and guns that he had been expressly told that he needed. Instead, he brought himself and his unassailable self-belief.

Guaranteed by Charles that he would be compensated if the rising failed, the Chief of Clan Cameron committed his people to the cause. In this case, the support of a few key western clans was crucial to the rising. Without them, the Jacobite standard could never have been raised: with them, the '45 was begun.

The rebellion had remarkable initial success. Many Hanoverian troops had been withdrawn to fight the regime's wars abroad, and only a handful remained to defend Scotland. This, plus the general reluctance of the population to martyr themselves for George II, allowed Charles to occupy Edinburgh virtually unopposed.

In a move to whip up popular support, he decreed the Union to be abolished. Meanwhile, the government forces under General Cope appeared belatedly to take him on. They were surprised by the Jacobite army at the battle of Prestonpans and torn apart, according to one observer in the space of 'seven or eight minutes'.

Execution of the rebel lords at Tower Hill in 1746  ©

The Jacobite army now possessed Scotland. There was nothing to stop them marching into England - but was this a wise decision?

Charles Edward assured his commanders that his loyal English subjects would join them, and that massive French military aid would be forthcoming. It soon turned out that the Prince's promises were mostly empty.

The Jacobite army was in danger of being cut off from Scotland and massacred. At Derby, his military council forced a retreat. The decision sowed discord between the prince and his most gifted commander, Lord George Murray. Murray managed to carry off a successful retreat to Scotland, and then to win the battle of Falkirk against superior government forces. Little gratitude he got, however.

Finished cause

Battle of Culloden - a contemporary coloured print giving an artist's impression of the battle  ©

At Culloden, the fruits of Charles's rancour with Murray appeared. After the failure of a surprise night-attack on the government forces, the Prince insisted on taking command.

He chose to give battle on the most unsuitable terrain possible for a Highland charge. Hanoverian artillery cut the Jacobite troops to pieces, and Culloden was a slaughter. The prince became the hunted fugitive in the heather, so well known to romantic legend.

Ironically, the savage government repression after Culloden was as unnecessary as it was brutal.

Ironically, the savage government repression after Culloden was as unnecessary as it was brutal. Many former Jacobites were only too willing to seek terms with the State.

Within a relatively short time a large number of them were to be found serving the Hanoverians in a military capacity abroad. Jacobitism had been exposed by the '45 as no longer militarily viable. With the exception of a few half-hearted plots, it continued withering away.

The Bonnie Prince died, a sad old drunkard, in Florence. His brother Cardinal Henry later effectively recognised the Hanoverians, although theoretically he maintained his own claim to the throne. Eventually admiration for Jacobitism was adopted, along with tartan, by the Hanoverians themselves as part of a general nostalgia for the good old days. There could be no more telling comment on the decease of Jacobitism as a political force.

About the author

Louise Yeoman is curator of early modern manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland. In 1996 she was curator of the Library's Jacobite exhibition A Nation Divided. She is co-director of A Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563-1736 at Edinburgh University, and a frequent contributor to Scottish radio and television. She is also the author of Reportage Scotland: History in the Making (Luath Press and National Library of Scotland, 2000).

BBC - History - British History in depth: The Jacobite Cause

The Glorious Revolution was when William of Orange took the English throne from James II in 1688. The event brought a permanent realignment of power within the English constitution. The new co-monarchy of King William III and Queen Mary II accepted more constraints from Parliament than previous monarchs had, and the new constitution created the expectation that future monarchs would also remain constrained by Parliament. The new balance of power between parliament and crown made the promises of the English government more credible, and credibility allowed the government to reorganize its finances through a collection of changes called the Financial Revolution. A more contentious argument is that the constitutional changes made property rights more secure and thus promoted economic development.

Historical Overview

Tension between king and parliament ran deep throughout the seventeenth century. In the 1640s, the dispute turned into civil war. The loser, Charles I, was beheaded in 1649; his sons, Charles and James, fled to France; and the victorious Oliver Cromwell ruled England in the 1650s. Cromwell's death in 1659 created a political vacuum, so Parliament invited Charles I's sons back from exile, and the English monarchy was restored with the coronation of Charles II in 1660.

Tensions after the Restoration

The Restoration, however, did not settle the fundamental questions of power between king and Parliament. Indeed, exile had exposed Charles I's sons to the strong monarchical methods of Louis XIV. Charles and James returned to Britain with expectations of an absolute monarchy justified by the Divine Right of Kings, so tensions continued during the reigns of Charles II (1660-1685) and his brother James II (1685-88). Table 1 lists many of the tensions and the positions favored by each side. The compromise struck during the Restoration was that Charles II would control his succession, that he would control his judiciary, and that he would have the power to collect traditional taxes. In exchange, Charles II would remain Protestant and the imposition of additional taxes would require Parliament's approval.

Table 1

Issues Separating Crown and Parliament, 1660-1688

Issue	King's Favoured Position	Parliament's Favoured Position
Constitution	Absolute Royal Power (King above Law)	Constrained Royal Power (King within Law)
Religion	Catholic	Protestant
Ally	France	Holland
Inter-Branch Checks	Royal right to control succession (Parliamentary approval NOT required)	Parliament's right to meet (Royal summons NOT required)
Judiciary	Subject to Royal Punishment	Subject to Parliamentary Impeachment
Ordinary Revenue	Royal authority sufficient to impose and collect traditional taxes	Parliamentary authority necessary to impose and collect traditional taxes.
Extraordinary Revenue	Royal authority sufficient to impose and collect new taxes.	Parliamentary authority necessary to impose and collect new taxes.
Appropriation	Complete royal control over expenditures.	Parliamentary audit or even appropriation.

In practice, authority over additional taxation was how Parliament constrained Charles II. Charles brought England into war against Protestant Holland (1665-67) with the support of extra taxes authorized by Parliament. In the years following that war, however, the extra funding from Parliament ceased, but Charles II's borrowing and spending did not. By 1671, all his income was committed to regular expenses and paying interest on his debts. Parliament would not authorize additional funds, so Charles II was fiscally shackled.

Treaty of Dover

To regain fiscal autonomy and subvert Parliament, Charles II signed the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV in 1671. Charles agreed that England would join France in war against Holland and that he would publicly convert to Catholicism. In return, Charles received cash from France and the prospect of victory spoils that would solve his debt problem. The treaty, however, threatened the Anglican Church, contradicted Charles II's stated policy of support for Protestant Holland, and provided a source of revenue independent of Parliament.

Moreover, to free the money needed to launch his scheme, Charles stopped servicing many of his debts in an act called the Stop of the Exchequer, and, in Machiavellian fashion, Charles isolated a few bankers to take the loss (Roseveare 1991). The gamble, however, was lost when the English Navy failed to defeat the Dutch in 1672. Charles then avoided a break with Parliament by retreating from Catholicism.

James II

Parliament, however, was also unable to gain the upper hand. From 1679 to 1681, Protestant nobles had Parliament pass acts excluding Charles II's Catholic brother James from succession to the throne. The political turmoil of the Exclusion Crisis created the Whig faction favoring exclusion and the Tory counter-faction opposing exclusion. Even with a majority in Commons, however, the Whigs could not force a reworking of the constitution in their favor because Charles responded by dissolving three Parliaments without giving his consent to the acts.

As a consequence of the stalemate, Charles did not summon Parliament over the final years of his life, and James did succeed to the throne in 1685. Unlike the pragmatic Charles, James II boldly pushed for all of his goals. On the religious front, the Catholic James upset his Anglican allies by threatening the preeminence of the Anglican Church (Jones 1978, 238). He also declared that his son and heir would be raised Catholic. On the military front, James expanded the standing army and promoted Catholic officers. On the financial front, he attempted to subvert Parliament by packing it with his loyalists. With a packed Parliament, "the king and his ministers could have achieved practical and permanent independence by obtaining a larger revenue" (Jones 1978, p. 243). By 1688, Tories, worried about the Church of England, and Whigs, worried about the independence of Parliament, agreed that they needed to unite against James II.

William of Orange

The solution became Mary Stuart and her husband, William of Orange. English factions invited Mary and William to seize the throne because the couple was Protestant and Mary was the daughter of James II. The situation, however, had additional drama because William was also the military commander of the Dutch Republic, and, in 1688, the Dutch were in a difficult military position. Holland was facing war with France (the Nine Years War, 1688-97), and the possibility was growing that James II would bring England into the war on the side of France. James was nearing open war with his son-in-law William.

For William and Holland, accepting the invitation and invading England was a bold gamble, but the success could turn England from a threat to an ally. William landed in England with a Dutch army on November 5, 1688 (Israel 1991). Defections in James II's army followed before battle was joined, and William allowed James to flee to France. Parliament took the flight of James II as abdication and the co-reign of William III and Mary II officially replaced him on February 13, 1689. Although Mary had the claim to the throne as James II's daughter, William demanded to be made King and Mary wanted William to have that power. Authority was simplified when Mary's death in 1694 left William the sole monarch.

New Constitution

The deal struck between Parliament and the royal couple in 1688-89 was that Parliament would support the war against France, while William and Mary would accept new constraints on their authority. The new constitution reflected the relative weakness of William's bargaining position more than any strength in Parliament's position. Parliament feared the return of James, but William very much needed England's willing support in the war against France because the costs would be extraordinary and William would be focused on military command instead of political wrangling.

The initial constitutional settlement was worked out in 1689 in the English Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, and the Mutiny Act that collectively committed the monarchs to respect Parliament and Parliament's laws. Fiscal power was settled over the 1690s as Parliament stopped granting the monarchs the authority to collect taxes for life. Instead, Parliament began regular re-authorization of all taxes, Parliament began to specify how new revenue authorizations could be spent, Parliament began to audit how revenue was spent, and Parliament diverted some funds entirely from the king's control (Dickson 1967: 48-73). By the end of the war in 1697, the new fiscal powers of Parliament were largely in place.

Constitutional Credibility

The financial and economic importance of the arrangement between William and Mary and Parliament was that the commitments embodied in the constitutional monarchy of the Glorious Revolution were more credible that the commitments under the Restoration constitution (North and Weingast 1989). Essential to the argument is what economists mean by the term credible. If a constitution is viewed as a deal between Parliament and the Crown, then credibility means how believable it is today that Parliament and the king will choose to honor their promises tomorrow. Credibility does not ask whether Charles II reneged on a promise; rather, credibility asks if people expected Charles to renege.

One can represent the situation by drawing a decision tree that shows the future choices determining credibility. For example, the decision tree in Figure 1 contains the elements determining the credibility of Charles II's honoring the Restoration constitution of 1660. Going forward in time from 1660 (left to right), the critical decision is whether Charles II will honor the constitution or eventually renege. The future decision by Charles, however, will depend on his estimation of benefits of becoming an absolute monarch versus the cost of failure and the chances he assigns to each. Determining credibility in 1660 requires working backwards (right to left). If one thinks Charles II will risk civil war to become an absolute monarch, then one would expect Charles II to renege on the constitution, and therefore the constitution lacks credibility despite what Charles II may promise in 1660. In contrast, if one expects Charles II to avoid civil war, then one would expect Charles to choose to honor the constitution, so the Restoration constitution would be credible.

Figure 1. Restoration of 1660 Decision Tree

A difficulty with credibility is foreseeing future options. With hindsight, we know that Charles II did attempt to break the Restoration constitution in 1670-72. When his war against Holland failed, he repaired relations with Parliament and avoided civil war, so Charles managed something not portrayed in Figure 1. He replaced the outcome of civil war in the decision tree with the outcome of a return to the status quo. The consequence of removing the threat of civil war, however, was to destroy credibility in the king's commitment to the constitution. If James II believed he inherited the options created by his brother, then James II's 1685 commitment to the Restoration constitution lacked credibility because the worst that would happen to James was a return to the status quo.

So why would the Glorious Revolution constitution be more credible than Restoration constitution challenged by both Charles II and James II? William was very unlikely to become Catholic or pro-French which eliminated many tensions. Also, William very much needed Parliament's support for his war against France; however, the change in credibility argued by North and Weingast (1989) looks past William's reign, so it also requires confidence that William's successors would abide by the constitution. A source of long-run confidence was that the Glorious Revolution reasserted the risk of a monarch losing his throne. William III's decision tree in 1689 again looked like Charles II's in 1660, and Parliament's threat to remove an offending monarch was becoming credible. The seventeenth century had now seen Parliament remove two of the four Stuart monarchs, and the second displacement in 1688 was much easier than the wars that ended the reign of Charles I in 1649.

Another lasting change that made the new constitution more credible than the old constitution was that William and his successors were more constrained in fiscal matters. Parliament's growing ‘power of the purse' gave the king less freedom to maneuver a constitutional challenge. Moreover, Parliament's fiscal control increased over time because the new constitution favored Parliament in the constitutional renegotiations that accompanied each succeeding monarch.

As a result, the Glorious Revolution constitution made credible the enduring ascendancy of Parliament. In terms of the king, the new constitution increased the credibility of the proposition that kings would not usurp Parliament.

Fiscal Credibility

The second credibility story of the Glorious Revolution was that the increased credibility of the government's constitutional structure translated into an increased credibility for the government's commitments. When acting together, the king and Parliament retained the power to default on debt, seize property, or change rules; so why would the credibility of the constitution create confidence in a government's promises to the public?

A king who lives within the constitution has less desire to renege on his commitments. Recall that Charles II defaulted on his debts in an attempt to subvert the constitution, and, in contrast, Parliament after the Glorious Revolution generously financed wars for monarchs who abided by the constitution. An irony of the Glorious Revolution is that monarchs who accepted constitutional constraints gained more resources than their absolutist forebears.

Still, should a monarch want to have his government renege, Parliament will not always agree, and a stable constitution assures a Parliamentary veto. The two houses of Parliament, Commons and Lords, creates more veto opportunities, and the chances of a policy change decrease with more veto opportunities if the king and the two houses have different interests (Weingast 1997).

Another aspect of Parliament is the role of political parties. For veto opportunities to block change, opponents need only to control one veto, and here the coalition aspect of parties was important. For example, the Whig coalition combined dissenting Protestants and moneyed interests, so each could rely on mutual support through the Whig party to block government action against either. Cross-issue bargaining between factions creates a cohesive coalition on multiple issues (Stasavage 2002).

An additional reason for Parliament's credibility was reputation. As a deterrent against violating commitments today, reputation relies on penalties felt tomorrow, so reputation often does not deter those overly focused on the present. A desperate king is a common example. As collective bodies of indefinite life, however, Parliament and political parties have longer time horizons than an individual, so reputation has better chance of fostering credibility.

A measure of fiscal credibility is the risk premium that the market puts on government debt. During the Nine Years War (1688-97), government debt carried a risk premium of 4 percent over private debt, but that risk premium disappeared and became a small discount in the years 1698 to 1705 (Quinn 2001: 610). The drop in the rates on government debt marks a substantial increase in the market's confidence in the government after the Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years War in 1697 and left William III and the new constitution intact. A related measure of confidence was the market price of stock in companies like the Bank of England and the East India Company. Because those companies were created by Parliamentary authorization and held large quantities of government debt, changes in confidence were reflected in changes in their stock prices. Again, the Treaty of Ryswick greatly increased stock prices and confirms a substantial increase in the credibility of the government (Wells and Wills 2000, 434). In contrast, later Jacobite threats, such as the invasion of Scotland by James II's son ‘the Pretender' in 1708, had negative but largely transitory effects on share prices.

Financial Consequences

The fiscal credibility of the English government created by the Glorious Revolution unleashed a revolution in public finance. The most prominent element was the introduction of long-run borrowing by the government, because such borrowing absolutely relied on the government's fiscal credibility. To create credible long-run debt, Parliament took responsibility for the debt, and Parliamentary-funded debt became the National Debt, instead of just the king's debt. To bolster credibility, Parliament committed future tax revenues to servicing the debts and introduced new taxes as needed (Dickson 1967, Brewer 1988). Credible government debt formed the basis of the Bank of England in 1694 and the core the London stock market. The combination of these changes has been called the Financial Revolution and was essential for Britain's emergence as a Great Power in the eighteenth century (Neal 2000).

While the Glorious Revolution was critical to the Financial Revolution in England, the follow up assertion in North and Weingast (1989) that the Glorious Revolution increased the security of property rights in general, and so spurred economic growth, remains an open question. A difficulty is how to test the question. An increase in the credibility of property rights might cause interest rates to decrease because people become willing to save more; however, rates based on English property rentals show no effect from the Glorious Revolution, and the rates of one London banker actually increased after the Glorious Revolution (Clark 1996, Quinn 2001). In contrast, high interest rates could indicate that the Glorious Revolution increased entrepreneurship and demand for investment. Unfortunately, high rates could also mean that the expansion of government borrowing permitted by the Financial Revolution crowded out investment. North and Weingast (1989) point to a general expansion of financial intermediation which is supported by studies like Carlos, Key, and Dupree (1998) that find the secondary market for Royal African Company and Hudson's Bay Company stocks became busier in the 1690s. Distinguishing between crowding out and increased demand for investment, however, relies on establishing whether the overall quantity of business investment changed, and that remains unresolved because of the difficulty in constructing such an aggregate measure. The potential linkages between the credibility created by the Glorious Revolution and economic development remain an open question.

References:

Brewer, John. The Sinews of Power. Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1988.

Carlos, Ann M., Jennifer Key, and Jill L. Dupree. "Learning and the Creation of Stock-Market Institutions: Evidence from the Royal African and Hudson's Bay Companies, 1670-1700." Journal of Economic History 58, no. 2 (1998): 318-44.

Clark, Gregory. "The Political Foundations of Modern Economic Growth: England, 1540-1800." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 55 (1996): 563-87.

Dickson, Peter. The Financial Revolution in England. New York: St. Martin's, 1967.

Israel, Jonathan. "The Dutch Role in the Glorious Revolution." In The Anglo-Dutch Moment, edited by Jonathan Israel, 103-62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Jones, James, Country and Court England, 1658-1714. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Neal, Larry. "How it All Began: the Monetary and Financial Architecture of Europe during the First Global Capital Markets, 1648-1815." Financial History Review 7 (2000): 117-40.

North, Douglass, and Barry Weingast. "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England." Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4(1989): 803-32.

Roseveare, Henry. The Financial Revolution 1660-1760. London: Longman, 1991.

Quinn, Stephen. "The Glorious Revolution's Effect on English Private Finance: A Microhistory, 1680-1705." Journal of Economic History 61, no. 3 (2001): 593-615.

Stasavage, David. "Credible Commitments in Early Modern Europe: North and Weingast Revisited." Journal of Law and Economics 18, no. 1 (2002): 155-86.

Weingast, Barry, "The Political Foundations of Limited Government: Parliament Sovereign Debt in Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century England." In The Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics, edited by John Drobak and John Nye, 213-246. San Diego: Academic Press, 1997.

Wells, John, and Douglas Wills. "Revolution, Restoration, and Debt Repudiation: The Jacobite Threat to England's Institutions and Economic Growth." Journal of Economic History 60, no 2 (2000): 418-41.

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