CHAPTER XII
THE REPUBLIC AND ITS ENEMIES
1649
The execution of Charles I. was followed by the abolition of monarchy. On February 6, 1649, the House of Commons voted that the House of Lords was useless and dangerous, and that it ought to be abolished. On February 8th, it resolved that the office of a king was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of this nation. Acts abolishing both followed, and on May 19th a third Act established the English Republic. “England,” it declared, “shall henceforth be governed as a Commonwealth, or a Free State, by the supreme authority of this nation, the representatives of the people in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as ministers under them for the good of the people.” Henceforth all writs were to run in the name of the Keepers of the Liberty of England, and the Great Seal was to bear the picture of the Parliament with the legend, “In the first year of Freedom by God’s blessing restored.”
Exactly what they meant by “a Free State” the founders of the Republic did not explain. Hobbes and Harrington agreed in defining the new government as an oligarchy. A pamphleteer praised it as an aristocracy. But the principles on which it was ostensibly based were the principles of democracy. In their resolutions of January 4, 1649, the House of Commons had declared that the people were, under God, the original of all just power, and had based their claim to override the Lords on that ground. In their declaration of the reasons for establishing a republic, they asserted that kings were officials, instituted by agreement amongst the people they governed, whom the people had therefore a right to dethrone in case of misgovernment. Milton, who became one of the Secretaries of the Council of State, echoed the same principles. In his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, he asserted “that all men were naturally born free, being the image and resemblance of God Himself,” and anticipated Rousseau in tracing the origin of government to a social contract. Yet, in spite of democratic professions, the Republic was simply the rule of the Long Parliament under a new name. All the power which the King and the three estates of the realm had formerly possessed, the little remnant of the House of Commons claimed as its own. All the checks which the existence of King and Lords, or the share of the Church in legislation, had once imposed, were now swept away. The one new institution established was simply a further development of that system of government by committees which the Civil War had made necessary. The Council of State was neither a senate nor a cabinet; it possessed no power either to balance or to control the Parliament, but was only an annually elected committee, to which the Parliament had entrusted executive and administrative duties. Of the forty-one persons composing it, all but ten were members of the Parliament itself.
Thus the Long Parliament possessed an authority which no political assembly in England has ever possessed before or since. Its power of legislation was unlimited. It exercised the executive power indirectly through the Council, and directly through its own resolutions. By interference with private suits, and by the appointment of committees with quasi-judicial functions, it also exercised the judicial power. Its sovereignty was undivided and uncontrolled.
“This was the case of the people of England at that time,” said Cromwell, eight years later, “the Parliament assuming to itself the authority of the three estates that were before. It had so assumed that authority that if any man had come and said, ‘What rules do you judge by?’ it would have answered, ‘Why, we have none. We are supreme in legislature and judicature.’”
What made this authority still more burdensome was that there was no prospect of its ever ending. Instead of sitting for about seven months in the year, as Parliaments do now, it sat all the year round, never taking more than three or four days’ holiday. Moreover, by the Act of May 11, 1641, it could not be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved, save by its own consent, and though the King, who had passed the act, was dead, it was held to be still in force. So, in Cromwell’s phrase, the country was governed by “a perpetual Parliament always sitting.”
Although the claims of the Long Parliament had reached their highest, the theory on which they rested had ceased to be in accordance with facts. “The Commons of England in Parliament assembled,” said the resolution of the House on January 4, 1649, “being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation.” But the House was never less representative than at the moment when it passed this vote. By the expulsion of royalist members during the war, and of Presbyterians in 1648, it had been, as Cromwell said, “winnowed, and sifted, and brought to a handfull.” When the Long Parliament met in November, 1640, it consisted of about 490 members; in January, 1649, those sitting, or at liberty to sit, in the House were not more than ninety. Whole districts were unrepresented. In the list of sitting members given in a contemporary pamphlet, there were none from the counties of Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Cumberland, and Lancashire, or from any borough within their limits. Wales was represented by three persons, and London by but a single citizen. In later years, a few readmissions and a few new elections swelled the total of sitting members to about 125, but at no date between 1649 and 1653 was the Long Parliament entitled to say that it represented the people. Its power rested not on popular consent, but on the support of the army, and on the superstitious reverence which Englishmen paid even to the shadow of a Parliament.
Politically the all-important question was how long the army would continue to maintain this remnant of the Long Parliament in power. The agreement between the two covered a fundamental difference in their political views. The army regarded the maintenance of the existing assembly as a temporary expedient. The Parliament looked upon itself as a legitimate sovereign with an indefeasible right to rule. By a Free State, the army meant a democracy, and could not understand a republic without republican institutions. Above all it demanded that the new State should be based on a written constitution defining the rights of the governed and the powers of the government. In the Agreement of the People, drawn up in January, 1649, it sketched the outlines of the republic it desired. The Long Parliament was to come to an end in April, 1649. All ratepayers assessed to the relief of the poor, and every man not a menial servant or a pauper, were to have votes. Electoral districts were to be made more equal. Parliaments were to be elected every two years, and not to sit for more than six months in the year, and a Council of State was to hold power when they were not sitting. If the State chose, it might provide for the maintenance of a national Church, but with the exception of Popery and prelacy, all forms of Christianity were to be tolerated. Finally, as a safeguard against arbitrary power, certain fundamental rights were enumerated with which no government might interfere: freedom from impressment, equality before the law, and freedom of worship.