The City was already a great port. Shipbuilding yards stretched along the Thames at Blackwall, Wapping and Limehouse. South of the river food and drink businesses clustered in Boroughside, watermen congregated in Clink Liberty and Paris Garden, seamen in St Olave’s, along with leather-makers, tanners, candlemakers and soap boilers. Dutch immigrants with new or specialized trades – brewing, felt and hat making, dyeing and glass making – settled in East Southwark.7
THE LONDON CROWD AND THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION
In November 1640 the Root and Branch Petition, calling for radical reformation of Church and state, was presented to Parliament by 1,000 Londoners and signed by 15,000 of their fellow citizens. It was of the pattern that was to become so familiar in the revolution: mass petitioning followed by mass demonstrations in support of the petition. Petitions had traditionally been a method of raising private grievances with MPs or the Crown, but the revolution made them into popular political tools. Hence Sir Edward Dering’s shocked reaction to the printing of the Grand Remonstrance by the Long Parliament in November 1641:
When I first heard of a Remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful Counsellors, we should hold up a Glass unto his Majesty: I thought to represent unto the King the wicked Counsels of pernicious Counsellors . . . I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the King as of a third person.8
Dering was right to worry. Petitions were promoted by radical preachers in sermons, and signatures were collected after services; alehouses were another favourite petitioning site. House-to-house canvassing was also used. Masses of people far beyond the political elite were now being asked, at the very least, to express an opinion about the nation’s affairs of state. Indeed when Lord Digby spoke against the Root and Branch, it was precisely the ‘manner of delivery’ that bothered him. ‘No man of judgment’, he said, ‘will think it fit for a Parliament, under a Monarchy, to give countenance to irregular, and tumultuous assemblies of people. . . . Sir, what can there be of greater presumption, than for petitioners, not only to prescribe to a Parliament, what and how it shall do; but for a multitude to teach a Parliament, what, and what is not, the government, according to God’s word.’ Digby added, unnecessarily, that he did not intend to ‘flatter a multitude’.9
By May the following year, demonstrations were at once more numerous and featured more of the ‘poorer sort’ who were pressing that justice be done against Charles’s advisor, the earl of Strafford. Parliamentary leader John Pym pressed the charge of treason. Crowds variously estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000 blockaded and barracked members of both Houses calling out for ‘Justice and Execution’. Charles, who had intended to come to Parliament, thought better of it, and the Lords sent out a messenger to tell the crowd that they were going to accede to the petition to execute Strafford. John Lilburne had been one of the leaders of the crowd that day; he was arrested and brought before the Lords for the speech he had made to the protestors. Fortunately, the witnesses against him differed in their evidence and he was discharged.10 When the bill proposing Strafford’s execution was debated in the Chamber, many of the earl’s friends were absent – for fear of the mob, they claimed. And when Charles reluctantly signed his confidant’s death warrant it was, explained Charles’s nephew, because ‘the people stood upon it with such violence, that he would have put himself and his, in great danger by denying the execution’.11 But Strafford’s death did not stop the protests.
In the closing days of December 1641 massive crowds of Londoners, often spilling down Ludgate and along Fleet Street and the Strand, came to Whitehall and Westminster. They were angered by Charles’s appointment of a court loyalist as lieutenant of the Tower, seeing this as part of preparations to subdue the capital by force. In the face of demonstrations the appointment was reversed, but more radical demands followed. Now the crowd chanted ‘No bishops! No bishops!’ – the bishops being some of the most royalist members of Parliament. As they tried to take their seats, many were physically prevented from doing so. In response Royalists attacked the crowd with swords. The crowd fought back with bricks, tiles, and cobblestones. As news of the fighting spread, London as a whole mobilized. Some 10,000 armed apprentices surrounded Parliament. The London Trained Bands were called out, but refused to disperse them. On 30 December the Commons impeached twelve leading bishops, and the Lords dispatched them to prison. Church bells pealed across the City and bonfires blazed in the streets.
Less than a week later, on 4 January, the king entered the House of Commons with a sizeable armed guard, intent on arresting the five members of the Commons identified as the leaders of the revolt. Forewarned, the five men had fled to the City and it is likely that they found shelter in the house of one of the emblematic figures of the early phase of the revolution, Isaac Penington. Penington was a wealthy merchant, an alderman of the City and an MP. He was blamed by the Royalists for organizing one of the first political demonstrations aimed at forcing the Long Parliament to adopt the Root and Branch petition. His house was near one of the centres of revolutionary activity, St Stephen’s Church in Colman Street, in the heart of the City. It is probable that it was here that the fugitives sought shelter.12
But if Isaac Penington sheltered them, it was the whole City that stood guard. ‘Gates were shut, portcullises lowered, chains put across streets. For several days, thousands of men stood ready, armed with halberds, swords, staves, and whatever came to hand. Women brought stools and tubs from their homes to build barricades, and boiled water ‘to throw on the Cavaliers’. But the Cavaliers did not come. London, it was clear, had passed to the side of the revolution. It was not to be recovered with the forces to hand. On 10 January, the king fled the capital. The following day, the five MPs returned to Westminster through cheering crowds.13
REVOLUTION AND WAR
Popular mobilization was no less important when the Civil War did break out. ‘In this summer the citizens listed themselves plentifully for soldiers . . . The youth of the City of London made up the major part of [the] infantry.’ In a single day, 26 July 1642, 5,000 enlisted at a muster in Moor Fields.14 Lilburne was in action immediately. He led a heroic defensive action at the Battle of Brentford in November 1642, personally rallying retreating forces back to the front line and buying the time for the artillery train to escape Prince Rupert’s grasp. He was captured and taken to Oxford as a prisoner, the first prominent Parliamentarian to be imprisoned.15
The following day the Royalists advanced to Turnham Green, threatening to invade London, but were halted by the mass mobilization of the London militia and the Trained Bands. They streamed out of London along the western road until 24,000 of them confronted the king’s army of half that number. In a moment of indecision Charles drew back without giving battle, his dream of an early assault on the capital dashed. As S. R. Gardiner, the great Edwardian historian of the revolution, wrote: ‘Turnham Green was the Valmy of the English Civil War. That which seemed to Charles’s admirers to be his triumphant march from Shrewsbury had been stopped in the very outskirts of London.’16
But the Royalist threat to London had retreated for the winter, not disappeared. And, as it would again when the war went badly, the London crowd could also be mobilized in favour of a peace settlement with the king. In 1643 a crowd of women were at the doors of Westminster, shouting ‘Give us those traitors that were against peace!’ and ‘Give us that dog Pym!’ The militia sent to disperse them were seen off with rocks and brickbats, and a troop of horse had to be deployed against them. This demonstration, however, was modest compared to the main mobilization of Londoners that year.17 In early 1643 Londoners began to construct defence works against any renewed Royalist attempt to take the capital. These works were on a massive scale: some eighteen miles of forts, sentry posts, earthworks, trenches and lines of communications that ringed the entire metropolitan area.
Isaac Penington was again at the forefront of promoting the work. But the construction itself was the result of an unprecedented popular mobilization. No doubt some worked out of zeal for the Parliamentary cause, others because they feared what Royalist invasion could mean for them, their families and their property: Prince Rupert’s sack of Brentford was still fresh in the memory.
But, whatever the motivation, the work was an impressive result of popular, collective effort. One contemporary recorded: ‘The daily musters and shows of all