The relationship of the bourgeois leadership to the laboring classes was thus quite different from Guha’s presentation of it. The opposition leadership had never intended to lead a revolution; what it had hoped for was an elite pact, pushed through on the strength of Parliament’s unity and Charles’s desperation. What turned the conflict into civil war, and then a potential revolution, was the combination of Charles’s recalcitrance and the entrance of the London masses onto the scene. The opposition leadership did accept the support of the mass movement, but only reluctantly, and at the cost of driving more and more sections of the ruling class into the Royalist camp. There was no commitment to fashioning a political program that respected the authentic interests of the laboring classes. On the contrary, the energy of the leadership was directed to finding ways of securing victory while conceding as little as possible to the lower orders.
THE REVOLUTIONARY SETTLEMENT
Guha attributes the genesis of modern political liberalism to the struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudal rule, and traces the genealogy of this liberal culture to the incorporation of subaltern interests into the political program of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This is the “heroism” he attributes to British capital. At a formal level, his surmise is correct—there was a connection between the revolutionary strategy of British elites and the kind of political order they subsequently constructed. But its substance was rather different from Guha’s understanding of the matter. The continuity between the two phases of their ascent to power—the revolutionary struggle and the construction of the new state—was marked by the landed class’s efforts to constrict the political arena to the greatest extent possible, so that subaltern groups would be frozen out of the emergent political nation. This began in the course of the Civil Wars and accelerated after the Restoration in 1660.15
Civil war unleashed an explosion of popular energy, which found expression above all in a phenomenon relatively new to British political culture—tens of thousands of pamphlets, petitions, magazines, leaflets, and handbills that expressed the aspirations of the popular classes.16 To a certain extent, the landed classes and their elite allies shared in this new discourse. In so violent a struggle, in which each side was trying to muster public support for its position, there was a need to justify the actions taken and for each camp to make the case that its interests were identical with the public interest. In this broadened space for ideological contestation, the elites could not prevent the eruption of popular demands for political rights. It was in this context that groupings such as the Levellers and Diggers came to the fore—groups regarded by many scholars as the first modern proponents of an egalitarian political ideology.17 Radical ideas spread rapidly across the realm, particularly in cities, but their strongest base was probably within the army.
The influence of radical ideas—by which we mean here the demand for political and religious liberalism—was handicapped by two main weaknesses. The first was that their currency remained limited. To be sure, they found a significant mass base in London and other urban centers,18 but outside the cities they found nowhere near the same level of popular support. This made the political balance in England quite different from what obtained in France at the time of its own revolution, where peasants constituted an authentic force for radical change.
The second weakness was that, being the sharp end of the popular movement for inclusion, the spread of radical ideas only further galvanized the sentiment within the landed classes that the optimal course of action was to restore order as soon as possible. Over the course of the Civil Wars, gentry domination of local institutions had been challenged—though by no means eclipsed—by the entrance of new groupings into positions of authority. 19 This was a direct blow to the very order that the gentry had sought to protect from Charles’s encroachments, and for the sake of which it had launched its struggle. The growth of radicalism threatened not only to give ideological license to these developments but to further empower new challengers. The solution that parliamentary forces sought to institutionalize was a new political order that would restore old social hierarchies, minus the drive to an absolutist state—much along the lines of what they thought they had secured in 1641, before Charles began to amass his forces. After the beheading of Charles, the landed classes’ support for Cromwell rested on their confidence that he would stamp out radical ideas but would also respect their own anti-absolutist commitments.20 It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the former—namely, the need to eradicate the demands for subaltern political inclusion. Its weight was such that the gentry showed itself willing to revive monarchical rule less than one year after Cromwell’s death, when the Stuarts were restored to the throne in the person of Charles II.21 Clearly, by 1660 the ruling class regarded the need to push back popular forces—to roll back liberal gains—as its most pressing concern.
We must be clear about what was happening. The English Civil Wars had generated a new concept of political legitimacy. Whereas in medieval political doctrine, sovereignty had rested in the monarchy, it now was seen to reside in the nation. This was an epochal shift in the understanding of the political community. But while legitimacy was now transferred to the nation, the groupings or classes that constituted the nation was not yet settled. Gentry strategy after 1649 was to ensure that the popular classes were kept out of the new concept of the nation. As David Loades has concluded,
The bitter ideological strife of the 1640s produced a reaction which lasted many years and was not repeated in the next crisis of 1688–89. At the same time, the aristocracy had received a sharp lesson. “Posterity will say,” a royalist writer had declared in 1649, “that we overthrew the king to subject ourselves to the tyranny of the base rabble.” Thanks to Cromwell, this had not happened, but it had come close enough to constitute an unmistakable warning of the dangers which could follow if the “lower orders” were called in to settle quarrels within the ruling class. The experience was never to be forgotten and was not to be repeated in this country until the eve of the present [i.e., twentieth] century.22
The rebellion had never intended that power devolve beyond members of the ruling class. The time had come to bring the rabble back into line. In this effort to restore order, the landed classes largely succeeded. For a brief moment, from 1689 to the first decade of the next century, political space expanded, as both the electorate and the frequency of elections increased in number.23 But this opening was short-lived. The ascension of George III in 1714 inaugurated a long and suffocating process of political constriction. In essence, the Crown forged a modus vivendi with the bourgeois aristocracy, allowing them to consolidate their power in the localities in exchange for their support of far-reaching financial and administrative reforms.24 It was these reforms that enabled the construction of England’s fiscal-military state, by mid-century the most fearsome military apparatus in the Western world. The flip side of this state-building process, however, was the long-term disenfranchisement of the lower orders. As David Underdown notes, the Restoration unleashed an ongoing constriction of the political nation—not, as Guha suggests, its expansion.25
The most glaring element of the regime’s oligarchic nature was its narrow electoral base. By the time of George III’s ascension, the landed classes had begun a slow strangulation of the political arena, adding one obstacle after another to lower-class participation. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the nascent and increasingly vital electoral arena came under the tightening grip of the Whig oligarchy, only to be followed by decades of Tory hegemony. Expansion of this domain of politics did not occur again until the Reform Act of 1832, and it is sobering to contemplate that by the time it passed, the franchise in England was smaller and narrower than it had been in 1630.26 But the exclusion of the popular classes went far beyond the electoral arena. The entire structure of the political system was punitive. Trade unions did not get legal protection until 1871; indentured labor was a common practice well into the late nineteenth century (as I show in chapter 5); the legal system imposed draconian penalties, even capital punishment, for petty theft.27 The radical promise of 1640, embodied in the demands of groups such as the Levellers and the Quakers, was driven underground by the 1720s, reappearing periodically in bursts of militancy; exported to the Continent, radical ideas took root in France and elsewhere but achieved little institutional