Part IV: The Age of Revolution

When transformation became an ideology

Between 1688 and 1871, revolution became a self-conscious project. People didn't just resist bad governance — they developed theories of revolution, wrote manifestos, organized movements, and attempted to redesign entire societies from first principles. This is the era the Governance chronicle covered from the governance side; this chronicle covers it from the revolution side — the experience of those who broke the system, not those who tried to maintain it. The central tension: revolutionary ambition versus revolutionary reality. Every revolution in this period discovered that destroying the old order is easier than building the new one.

Chapter 9: The English Rehearsal

On a grey October afternoon in 1647, in the parish church of St Mary the Virgin in Putney, a remarkable thing happened. Common soldiers argued with generals about who should be allowed to vote.

Not metaphorically. Not in the abstract language of political philosophy. A trooper named Edward Sexby — a man who had risked his life in battle and had no fixed property to show for it — stood in that church and said to the most powerful officers in the New Model Army: "We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen — and by the arguments urged there is none." He paused. "If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers."

Across the aisle, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough went further. In a sentence that would echo through three centuries of democratic thought, he said: "For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government."

Henry Ireton — Cromwell's son-in-law, a lawyer by training and a propertied man by conviction — shot back that only those with a "fixed permanent interest" in the kingdom should have a voice in governing it. If you extended the franchise to men without property, he warned, you would destroy the very basis of political order.

The argument continued for five days. Thirty-six speakers are recorded across the sessions. Six of them were common soldiers. William Clarke, the army secretary, and a team of stenographers transcribed the debates in shorthand — verbatim for three days, then recording abruptly ceased on November 2. The manuscript was lost for over two centuries, discovered in a cupboard at Worcester College, Oxford, around 1890.

Nothing like this had ever happened in European history. Nowhere in the record — not in Athens, not in Rome, not in the medieval commons — had ordinary soldiers sat alongside their commanding officers and debated the constitutional foundations of the state, with the proceedings recorded for posterity. The Putney Debates were not a revolution. They were something more unsettling: a rehearsal for every democratic argument that would follow.

The question is: how did England arrive at a church in Putney?

The short answer is that Charles I had spent eleven years governing without Parliament — the "Personal Rule" from 1628 to 1640 — and when he finally needed Parliament to fund a war against Scotland, the accumulated grievances were too vast to contain. But the short answer misses the structural story. The Stuart monarchy claimed divine right — absolute authority derived from God. The lived experience of governance under that claim was arbitrary taxation, religious persecution, and a court that had lost contact with the country it ruled. The gap between claimed coherence and actual coherence had been widening for a generation.

When the gap finally ruptured into civil war in 1642, something extraordinary happened. The war itself became a laboratory. The New Model Army — formed in 1645 by fusing three existing forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax — was unlike any European army before it. Officers were promoted on merit rather than birth. The Self-Denying Ordinance separated military from parliamentary leadership. Religious and political radicalism permeated the ranks. Independent, Congregationalist belief flourished — the conviction that no bishop, no king, no hierarchy stood between the believer and God. If spiritual authority was personal, why not political authority?

By the spring of 1647, the army had become the most democratic institution in Europe. Each regiment elected two representatives — called Agitators — who sat alongside generals in the Army Council. Soldiers and commanders debated policy as equals. This was workplace democracy inside a military institution, an extraordinary paradox that would leave a permanent scar on English political memory. When civilian Leveller activists joined forces with the Agitators, the result was the Agreement of the People — the document debated at Putney — which proposed something that had never been attempted: a written constitution for England.

The Levellers deserve more than their footnote.

Their proposals, laid out across three versions of the Agreement of the People between 1647 and 1649, anticipated modern constitutional thought by over a century. They called for a written constitution superior to Parliament — the idea that some rights exist beyond the reach of any legislature. They proposed separation of legislative and executive power. They demanded religious toleration — not as a royal concession but as an inherent right: "Matters of religion and the ways of God's worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power." They insisted on the right to silence, on freedom from impressment, on biennial elections, and on something approaching universal male suffrage.

Approaching — but not reaching. Even the third and most radical Agreement, signed in the Tower of London on May 1, 1649, by John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and Thomas Prince — all four of them prisoners at the time — excluded wage-earners, servants, and beggars from the franchise. The reasoning reveals the limits of even the most radical imagination: those who depended on a master for their livelihood could not, the Levellers believed, exercise independent political judgment. The franchise was vastly expanded compared to existing practice, but it stopped where economic dependence began. Even the revolutionaries could not see past the world's architecture to the architecture itself.

The Leveller women saw further than the men credited them. Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Lilburne, and Mary Overton organized what may have been Britain's first all-women political petition in 1649, gathering over ten thousand signatures. They justified their participation on the basis of "our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the freedoms of this commonwealth." The MPs told them to go home and wash their dishes. One woman replied: "Sir, we have scarce any dishes left us to wash."

But the Levellers were not the most radical voices. Not by a considerable distance.

Gerrard Winstanley, a failed cloth merchant ruined by the war and reduced to herding cattle in Surrey, looked at the revolution and saw that it had not gone nearly far enough. On April 1, 1649, Winstanley and a small group of about thirty men and women walked onto the wasteland of St George's Hill in Walton, Surrey, and began planting parsnips, carrots, and beans. They pulled down hedges and filled in ditches that marked the enclosures — the privatization of formerly common land.

Winstanley's philosophy was breathtaking in its simplicity. "In the beginning of time God made the earth," he wrote. "Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another." The earth was the common treasury of all people. Private property was not a natural right but the original sin of politics. Wage labor was a form of unrighteousness: "He that works for another, either for wages, or to pay him rent, works unrighteously." Only common ownership could restore what had been stolen.

The Levellers wanted political reform within the existing economic order — extend the franchise, limit the state, protect individual rights. Winstanley wanted to abolish the economic order itself. He called his group the True Levellers — a deliberate rebuke — because he believed the Levellers' political radicalism was meaningless without economic transformation. Political freedom without economic equality was, in his view, a shell.

The Diggers lasted less than a year. Local freeholders destroyed their crops, smashed their houses, scattered their possessions. General Fairfax visited and found them harmless — but harmlessness did not save them from neighbors who saw common ownership as a threat to their own enclosures. On Good Friday 1650, fifty men were sent to burn what remained. Winstanley survived. He wrote The Law of Freedom in a Platform, addressed it to Cromwell, and proposed an agrarian communist republic: elected government, planned economy, compulsory education, abolition of buying and selling. Some of his provisions were remarkably humane. Others — capital punishment for those caught engaging in trade — revealed the coercive logic that lurks inside every utopia.

Around the Levellers and the Diggers swarmed a constellation of other movements, each pushing the revolutionary imagination in a different direction.

The Ranters rejected all external authority — political, religious, moral. Abiezer Coppe, their most incandescent writer, published A Fiery Flying Roll in 1649, a tirade against hierarchy and property that claimed the overthrow of king and lords foreshadowed a far greater revolution. The House of Commons ordered his book burned and had him imprisoned at Newgate. Whether the Ranters constituted an actual movement remains debated — the historian J.C. Davis argued in 1986 that they were largely a moral panic projected by anxious authorities — but their writings, real or amplified, marked the outer boundary of what the revolutionary moment made thinkable.

The Fifth Monarchists read the execution of Charles I in January 1649 as a sign that the Fourth Monarchy prophesied in the Book of Daniel had ended and the kingdom of Christ was at hand. Drawn largely from artisans, apprentices, and laborers — reaching lower on the social scale than any contemporary movement except the Diggers — they believed it was their duty to prepare the ground for divine government. Major-General Thomas Harrison, a regicide who had signed the king's death warrant, was their most prominent champion.

Together, these movements formed a complete spectrum of revolutionary response to a single crisis. The Levellers sought political reform. The Diggers sought economic transformation. The Ranters sought existential liberation. The Fifth Monarchists sought divine governance. Cromwell and the army grandees sought institutional pragmatism — keep order, win the war, find a workable arrangement. Each represented a different theory of what was broken and how far the repair needed to reach.

The suppression came in stages. Levellers defeated at Burford, 1649. Diggers destroyed at Cobham, 1650. Ranters silenced by the Blasphemy Act, 1650. Fifth Monarchists crushed after Venner's Rising, 1661. Each suppression closed a door that would not reopen for generations. The revolutionary imagination narrowed year by year, from its radical peak in 1649 to the conservative settlement that finally arrived four decades later.

Between the radical peak and the settlement lay Cromwell's republic — and its failure.

The Rump Parliament, what remained after Pride's Purge removed unsympathetic MPs, tried Charles I, executed him on January 30, 1649, abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords, and declared England a Commonwealth. Then it accomplished almost nothing. Cromwell dissolved it by force in April 1653 — "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... In the name of God, go!" — and tried something novel: Barebone's Parliament, 140 members nominated rather than elected, a legislature of the godly. It lasted five months before tearing itself apart over whether a state church should continue to exist.

The failure of the saints produced England's first written constitution: the Instrument of Government, drafted by Major General John Lambert, forty-two articles establishing the Protectorate with executive power vested in a Lord Protector constrained by a Council of State. It was the first detailed written constitution adopted by a modern state. It was replaced within four years by the Humble Petition and Advice, which offered Cromwell the crown — he declined — and restored a second chamber.

When Cromwell died on September 3, 1658, his son Richard inherited a 2.5-million-pound debt and an army demanding 890,000 pounds in back pay. Richard lasted eight months. Within two years, General George Monck marched south from Scotland and facilitated the Restoration of Charles II.

The republic failed for structural reasons. Without hereditary monarchy, there was no widely accepted basis for legitimacy — each successive government was imposed by military force. The army that created the republic could not be subordinated to it. Independents, Presbyterians, Fifth Monarchists, and moderate Anglicans could not agree on a religious settlement. Puritan social reforms — closing alehouses, banning theater, strict Sabbath observance — alienated ordinary people. The state could not pay for the standing army it needed to survive.

The Interregnum's lesson for the story we are tracing is precise: a revolution that destroys an existing legitimation framework must build a replacement. England tried four frameworks in seven years — parliamentary sovereignty, rule by the godly, constitutional protectorate, quasi-monarchy — and none generated broad enough consent to stabilize. The system could not find its footing because no proposed architecture could hear enough of the population to claim their allegiance.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 succeeded where the republic failed — by aiming lower.

When James II's overt Catholicism, suspension of legal rights, and the birth of a Catholic heir pushed English elites past their threshold, seven peers invited William of Orange to invade. William's fleet — larger than the Spanish Armada — landed at Brixham in Devon on November 5, 1688. James's army outnumbered William's roughly two to one, but after Lord Churchill's defection shattered his confidence, James chose flight over battle. By December 7, he had decided to flee; by December 23, he was in France.

The Convention Parliament debated for three weeks how to transfer power legally. The solution was the Bill of Rights — the condition upon which the throne was offered to William and Mary. Its provisions would echo through centuries: the suspension of laws without parliamentary consent is illegal. Taxation without Parliament is illegal. A standing army without parliamentary consent is against law. Elections ought to be free. Parliamentary speech cannot be questioned in any court. Excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments are prohibited.

It was a revolution. It redesigned the governance architecture. And it was profoundly conservative.

What changed: the location of sovereign authority moved from king to Parliament. The legal framework acquired enforceable limits. Religious toleration expanded — for Protestant Dissenters. What did not change: the class structure. The distribution of property. The exclusion of women from political life. The colonial system. The enclosure of common land. The fundamental architecture of economic power.

The Toleration Act of 1689 granted relief to Protestant Nonconformists but intentionally excluded Catholics, Jews, Unitarians, and atheists. Even tolerated Dissenters remained barred from public office under the Test Acts — only Anglicans need apply. Catholic emancipation would not come until 1829. Universal male suffrage until 1918. Women's suffrage until 1928.

And then there was Ireland.

What was "glorious" for the English Protestant establishment was a catastrophe for Irish Catholics. The Williamite War ended in 1691. The Treaty of Limerick offered guarantees to Catholics, then broke them. The Penal Laws that followed were systematic: Catholics could not bear arms, enter the legal profession, own a horse worth more than five pounds, buy land, or lease it for more than thirty-one years. The Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery mandated that Catholic estates be divided equally among all sons — unless one converted to Protestantism, in which case the entire estate went to the convert. Before the Williamite Wars, Catholics owned twenty-two percent of Irish land despite forming seventy-five percent of the population. By 1776, they owned five percent. The revolution's institutional elegance in England was underwritten by colonial dispossession across the Irish Sea.

The gap between Putney and 1688 is the gap this chapter measures.

At Putney, soldiers argued that every person living under a government should consent to it. The 1688 settlement answered: every propertied Protestant man in England should consent to it. The question of whether the people were sovereign — raised by Rainsborough, extended by the Levellers, radicalized by Winstanley — was shelved for two centuries.

The English pattern became a template: revolution, overreach, restoration, institutional compromise. It was called "successful" because it ended the cycle of civil war and created conditions for commercial expansion, financial innovation (the Bank of England, 1694), and imperial growth. By the criteria of political stability, it worked.

By the criteria of the question we have been asking — did the revolution change the value system, or just the operators? — the answer is more complicated. The 1688 settlement changed the governance machinery while preserving the social order. It redesigned the dashboard without touching the engine. Property remained the basis of political power. Hierarchy remained the organizing principle of society. Extraction remained the engine of economy. The feedback loop between rulers and ruled was restored — but only for the fraction of the ruled who owned enough property to count.

The Putney Debates articulated the democratic promise. The Glorious Revolution delivered the institutional minimum. What separated them was not a failure of imagination — the imagination was there, in 1647, vivid and recorded nearly verbatim. What separated them was the question of who had the power to make imagination real, and the answer, in 1688 as in most revolutionary settlements, was: the people who already held it.

But the words survived. Rainsborough's sentence — "the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he" — waited in a cupboard in Oxford for two hundred and forty years. When it was found, it sounded not like an artifact but like an argument still in progress. It still does.