English revolution
The English Revolution of the seventeenth century was the first manifestation of systemic crisis of the modern era, identified with absolutism . The monarchical power, severely limited, ceded most of its powers to the Parliament and brought to the parliamentary regime that remains today.
The process began with the Puritan Revolutionof 1640 and ended with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The two are part of the same revolutionary process, hence the name of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and not Revolutions Spanners.
This revolutionary movement created the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, clearing ground for the advance of capitalism. It should be considered the first bourgeois revolution in the history of Europe.
The English Revolution
The Great Rebellion, The Puritan Revolution and the Civil War are three consecrated expressions historically, when one thinks of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. If they join the Cromwell Republic and the Restoration, we are indicating the basic components and the steps taken by this revolution.
The Great Rebellion (1640-1642) designates the revolt of Parliament against the absolutist monarchy, after a dispute over the ownership of sovereignty.
The Puritan Revolution designates both the religious conflicts between the Anglican Church and the puritan ideology - Calvinist - as one of the intellectuals of the revolutionary process bases.
The Civil War (1642-1648) indicates the confrontation between Parliament and the Monarchy. The Cromwell Republic (1649-1658) indicates the logical development of the process is the creation of a revolutionary army (New Model Army), and the emergence of the radical ideology of the Levellers (Levellers), which led to the trial and execution of the king and the proclamation of the Republic.
The Restoration (1660), points to the closure and the limits of the revolution.
The Economic Transformations - Social
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries England had a decisive and economic transformations. Take this period, the largest textile industry in Europe and to produce more than four-fifths of all the coal from the mainland. The textile industry had spread through the villages initiating the call domestic production system. In this system, the production technique is still handmade, and there are a division (specialization) of labor and capital dominated the production. Coal was used as the basis for a whole range of industries, new and old, demanding huge sums of capital. The newbuildings were developing rapidly.
In the field, capitalist development, was also intense, driven both by the wool business and the creation of a market for agricultural products. If the trade was until recently the only economic activity under the rule of capital, now also the industry and agriculture began to be controlled by it. From an expansion of the internal market and an increasing division of labor, it had originated inside a still feudal economic structure more dynamic incipient capitalist core.
The rapid economic changes, on the one hand and inflation on the other, caused a major redistribution of wealth from one class to another and an intense process of social mobility. What happened in England "in the late sixteenth century was a shift of the wealth of the Church and the Crown, and the people very rich or very poor, to the hands of the middle class."
The social changes that were transforming the English society of the time were based on the land, its ownership and its use. Land ownership still the main form and source of wealth, gave those who had social prestige (status) and power (political). In England, as indeed throughout the continent, there was a real compulsion, by the bourgeoisie, to acquire land. This phenomenon, rather than cause a refeudalization; accelerated the disintegration of the property and feudal relations.
In the English social hierarchy, the gentry formed a status of nobility rather than blood .Its members, gentlemen, were landowners, but many had their origins and their fortunes linked to sectors other than the earth.
Above the gentry, the couple were the nobility or aristocracy. Large landowners, were the only ones still enjoyed legal privileges.
Among the peasants, while the richest layer of small and medium freeholders (yeomen) prospered, the majority made up of tenants and laborers, fell in pauperism. Were the main victims of economic development, the well-known fencing process of the properties, once started in the sixteenth century, continued intermittently and spasmodically until the mid-nineteenth century. Once set in motion this continuous process of disarticulation of the village community, which separated the peasant land, meant that the country was the first to not have, since the nineteenth century, a peasant class. Hence the reason the English peasantry ceased to be very early a political force.
In the cities, there was a hand, a powerful and rich mercantile bourgeoisie and the other, a large contingent of urban workers and also disinherited. In England only a small fraction of the bourgeoisie depended on monopolies and the Crown of protection for the realization of their big profits.
The Monarchy, the parliamentarism and the Reformation
When the Stuart dynasty ascended the throne in 1603, she received an inheritance from the previous dynasty, Tudor (1485-1603), a state that, although he had accompanied the process of centralization and strengthening of monarchical power, had failed in achieving the three basic instruments, required for their full realization: standing army, bureaucracy and financial autonomy (body-dependent state officials and faithful to him).
The Stuart kings also received an expanded Parliament in number and strengthened in its power and Reformed Church, the Anglican Church, unable to control and shelter in its bosom the few Catholics on the right and the numerous Puritans left. These negative elements to the absolutist pretensions of the first two Stuart kings, James I (1603 - 1625) and Charles I (1625 - 1649), had its origin in the reign of Henry VIII (1491 - 1547) and Elizabeth I (1558 - 1603) . Some reasons and historical circumstances explain this particular evolution of the English monarchy.
The absence of a strong and permanent army.During the reign of Henry VIII, England suffered a series of military disasters and catastrophic diplomatic retreat in great power position that the country had enjoyed in the Middle Ages .With the evolution in technical and military art, the Renaissance wars demanded increasingly mobilizing armies granes the maintenance, supply and transportation made its exorbitant cost. But at the critical moment of transition to absolutism, while for continental monarchies the creation of powerful armies was an indispensable condition for their survival, to the English monarchy thanks to its insular geographical position, was neither necessary nor possible to build a military machine comparable to the French and Spanish absolutism. Neither the Tudor had at the time of economic and financial resources of the first two.
Her daughter, Queen Elizabeth, whose rule was marked by a less ambitious foreign policy, abandoned all pretense of keeping a large army and accomplish great feats, settling in achieving well-defined goals and defensive character. On the one hand, prevent Spain to regain the United Provinces, to prevent the French from becoming established in the Netherlands and prevent the victory of the Catholic League in the French civil war. On the other, the war fought without quarter with Spain to prevent this accomplished the invasion of the island. To support these goals were not needed great armies. Attention was all directed at building a large naval fleet capable of meeting the Spanish threat.
While the country was preparing for the future maritime hegemony, early demilitarization of English nobility reinforced the trend already underway within the class, in the sense of trade, as now, could also direct their interest to marine . The consequences of useless and costly wars in which Henry VIII was involved were also decisive.
To support their efforts to the king war appealed not only to forced loans and currency devaluation, like, what is more important, he was forced to bring to market the huge funds from confiscated property to the Church during the Reformation (1536 - 1539) and representing a quarter of the kingdom's land.When disposing of these assets, the monarchy not only wasting a precious opportunity to establish a solid economic base, independent of the taxes voted by Parliament as increasing the strength of the gentry, the main buyers of the divested lands.
In the reign of Elizabeth the situation, this plan has remained unchanged since, though the queen had reduced spending on the army, building a powerful navy demanded huge resources. His government continued using the sale of property of the Crown and loans Parliament. The other source of resources for the State was to grant and sale of trade monopolies and industry. But its use, while more favored groups entrenched in the Court of the monarchy itself, raised huge opposition among party groups of economic freedom. The Tudor failed to develop alternative and permanent sources of funds, as did the other European powers.
Bureaucracy was very low in England.Although Tudor had submitted to the local government to a certain control, thanks to interference in the choice of peace and surveillance judges about their behavior, were not up to the decisive step. This was to replace the justices of the peace for their own paid staff. As this did not happen, the justices of the peace expressed, of course, much more the interests of the landed gentry than the Crown.
The political revolution - administrative undertaken by Tudor creation of a unified central government, through the establishment of new judicial courts (as the Star Chamber) and political bodies (such as the Privy Council), was halfway precisely the absence of a paid bureaucracy and linked to the State. In England the existence of a relatively powerful and centralized monarchy in the Middle Ages and the limited territorial dimensions of the island prevented the emergence of local potentates semi - independent and autonomous regions, as was common on the continent. In short, there were in the country threatening centrifugal forces to political unity and whose submission require the establishment of a powerful bureaucratic and military machine.The only danger, that represented by the anarchic tendencies of the feudal barons, was largely eliminated part, during and after the War of the Roses (1455-1485).
The same factors that during the Middle Ages enabled England to have a relatively strong centralized monarchical power, also ensured the existence of a vassal of Assembly, which soon would become a collective and unifying institution of the feudal ruling class of the island - the Parliament. But what it became a private institution, distinct from the others, was, on one side. The fact that in England there was only a single meeting of this kind, coinciding with the country's borders, and not several, each corresponding to the different provinces; the other, the fact that the English Parliament did not exist the traditional threefold division that had on the continent - clergy, nobility and bourgeoisie. In turn, the two chambers systems - Lords and Commons - which is a further development, drew a distinction within the nobility itself.
The House of Lords was reserved for the high clergy and nobility. The House of Commons belonged to the bourgeoisie of the towns and the gentry of the field. The rural aristocracy not only dominated the local administration through the justices of the peace, as well as the Parliament. The English Parliament, since the Middle Ages, also enjoyed the prerogative - negative - to limit the real legislative power. On the occasion of the royal power forward during the Tudor dynasty, Parliament managed to preserve both the right to vote for the laws as to make approve taxes. And while the reign of Henry VIII and the Reformation wars forced the king to look in Parliament economic and political support livelihoods, strengthening - the, the Queen allowed the number of deputies to rise 300-500 about.
With regard to the reform, the reasons Henry VIII to realize it was all basically much more political character than religious. To consolidate the national state, Henry VIII sought to submit to the power of religion and the power of the Church to state interests. For the absolute monarchies of the modern era, the Church was, or should become, a real ideological apparatus of the state performing the functions of social control and political legitimacy.
In this sense constituted is a power instrument absoluto.Também, Henry VIII and Elizabeth were not successful, despite the efforts to create a National Church conscious of itself and unify the country around the king. This is because the Anglican Church, founded on a political and not religious idea, remained a dangerous middle ground between Catholicism and Protestantism. Anglicanism was forced to sustain a fight on two fronts: against Catholicism because the break with it had been with the Pope and not sound its principles and the danger of the country recatolização remained possible; against Protestantism, because it can not meet the needs of a hungry for spiritual food population, Anglicanism could not prevent the growth of Puritanism, despite all the repression.
After the brief restoration of Catholicism ordered by Mary Tudor (1553 - 1558), Elisabeth returned to Anglicanism, but kept - it away from any contact with the Protestant ideas.Although convinced of the importance of the hierarchy of the Church and the need for subordination to the state, the queen has not done anything in order to provide the Anglican Church of economic and moral means to become able to compete in the religious domain Catholics and Puritans.
The emptiness of religious zeal that characterized the Anglican Church, which preached did not proselytize, was filled by Catholics, and especially the Puritans. Over the long reign of Elisabeth, apparently full of successes, can - say that "some of the problems of the Stuarts had their direct cause in the very successful Elisabeth policy. The Queen won many battles, but died before losing the war "(L. Stone).
The Absolutist Politics of Kings Stuart: 1603 - 1640
James I and Charles I ruled with a single directive: to establish in England a real absolutist monarchy. They sought to reverse those negative trends discussed above. Both failed. Jaime I managed to convey the position to son to son Carlos I, this plunged the country into civil war and paid with his life his determination to rule as absolute. The government of James I, with its policy of rapprochement with Spain, his failed attempts to create an independent economic base, accompanied by the extravagance and corruption of the Court, caused violent disputes with Parliament and aroused considerable discontent among the gentry and the urban bourgeoisie .
There were three intellectual bases of the revolution approached, these ideas were taking shape just in the first three decades of the seventeenth century and expressed in the political and ideological level, both economic transformations - social as a reaction to the absolutist policy of the Stuart kings. The first of these ideas was focused Puritanism.Although the process of diffusion between social classes is not well known, there is no doubt that his greatest penetration was found between the groups linked to manufacturing.Puritanism also spread intensely between the gentry and its practitioners have developed the conviction of the need for a sense of independence based on conscience and Bible reading, he offered not only ideas and moral conviction, but also from Elisabeth's reign, direction and organization.
The other aspect of the intellectual revolution was the common law. In England, unlike what occurred on the continent, the Roman law was not adopted. Later, although the Tudor and Stuart had introduced new legal institutions inspired by Roman law, could not supersede the common law. The conflict that developed between the monarchy and Parliament was based on these two legal systems. The victory of Parliament established the victory of the common law. The Common Law was the traditional right of rural character, regulating legal relations between the nobility and the peasantry and the forms of land ownership.
The third intellectual component of the revolution was the ideology of the "country" as opposed to the "Court" - court versus country - according to which the country was virtuous, the court depraved, the country defender of old habits and freedoms, the Court of administrative news and tyrannical practices, puritanical country, sloping cut to popery, etc.
When Charles I ascended the throne in 1625, Britain was experiencing a general situation, an ideological climate and a distinctly unfavorable balance of forces all attempts to deploy in the country a political program of absolutist character. But it was that the king endeavored to do. Already in 1628 its loans forced imposition of policy, arbitrarily imprisoning those who refused to pay, he led the Parliament to adopt the famous Petition of Rights declaring the fixing rates without their consent and arbitrary arrest, illegal acts. Faced with this declared disruption of Parliament, the King went on the offensive, responding to its dissolution in 1629 and with a personal power politics based only on the prerogatives of the monarchy. For eleven consecutive years (1629 - 1640), based on this policy, known by the Global Policy name, Carlos I with the help of two energy ministers, the Archbishop Laud and Thomas Wentworth, he sought to create instruments that monarchical power lacked to control the economic, social and religious forces whose development direction and walked in the opposite direction to the interests of absolutism. The result of this policy ended in complete disaster and allowed all opposition forces to unite against the king.
To control the economic life and obtain the financial resources necessary for their program, that is capable of sustaining an expanded state machine and without going through Parliament, the king appealed to all possible expedients, of feudal and neo-feudal character, restoring rates and taxes, multiplying monopolies, imposing fines, regulations of all kinds and selling crafts. One of these taxes, the ship money, was transformed into a yearly national tribute. Its application caused a wave of national discontent among all the propertied classes.And the refusal, in 1637, one of the leaders of Parliament, John Hampden, to pay ship money, so it is tried and convicted ended up being the beginning of a general uprising in 1639/1640 against the payment of this fee.
To put a brake on the existing social mobility, Charles I forbade land enclosures and restricted the sale of securities; expelled the gentry of the Court, strengthened the couple privileges and reinforced the hierarchy of classes, fixing their duties, access to the Court and other authorities. These measures, insufficient to attract the sympathies of the peasants to the side of the monarchy, were enough to displease the majority of the gentry.
To regain the power and prestige of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop Laud proceeded on the one hand, the revision of the value of tithes and the recovery of territorial possessions of the Church, and on the other, a reorganization of the clergy hierarchy and fixation a solemn ritual for the ceremonies and other religious services. With this scandalized the puritans.
With an alliance of foreign policy with Spain, not involvement in the Thirty Years' War alongside the Protestant approach to the Papacy (his French wife was Catholic), scandalized the nation began to consider it increasingly as papist . On the other hand, its colonization policy of Ireland, carried out with efficiency and brutality by the Earl of Strafford, was against the interests of the bourgeoisie Londrina, since its purpose was to deploy on the island an authoritarian and feudal regime and constitute a powerful army.
Carlos I was used the privilege of Justice (Chamber Starry, North Council and Wales Court of High Commission) and the Privy Council, or the monarchical powers to crack down, prosecute and imprison those who did oppose him, or resisted their actions.
In the last years of 1630, the absolutist policy of Charles I had led the nation to a dead end.The growing political upheaval, totaled up to aggravate it, a responsible economic crisis, from 1620, the decline in export trade and tissue manufacturing. In 1638, when Charles I and Archbishop Laud, to seek to extend to Scotland the Presbyterian Anglicanism, they caused between the Presbyterian clergy and the nobility a revolt on a large scale against England. The formation of the Covenant (religious-military pact) was followed by the Scottish invasion of England in 1639. But England lacked sufficient military strength to face the powerful and disciplined Scottish army. But England also lacked the political will to face the Scots.
Bankrupt economically, with the Scottish Presbyterian army stationed in the country, demanding ransom to withdraw, and the bourgeoisie on strike, refusing to pay ship money, Carlos I was completely beaten and isolated. With no other alternative, called Parliament, but when he saw that he could not negotiate an agreement with the Common without heavy concessions in its prerogatives, dissolved it. Then he met a Grand Council of the Kingdom of nobility to advise it against the existing crisis. And the nobles advised him to again convene Parliament. When in 1640 the Long Parliament came into operation, the great parliamentary rebellion against absolutism would start.
The Great Rebellion: 1640 - 1642
With the convening of the Long Parliament in November 1640, the political initiative passed into the hands of the parliamentary opposition, centered in the House of Commons. With a large majority of MEPs, with an experienced leadership and a unity of views against the Crown, the opposition was determined to win for Parliament to political sovereignty. His first step in this sense was the challenge Strafford and Laud ministers. Parliament abolished the main instruments of monarchical power, privilege courts or courts of more than 150 years of existence prerogatives. Also abolished the ship money and all other taxes and fees used by the king in the eleven years of personal rule and not voted by Parliament.And, to ensure their own independence as power, Parliament adopted two acts: the Triennial Act, which made automatic convening of Parliament if the monarchy did not do so within three years and the Act Against Long Dissolution of Parliament No Your Consensus itself.
With all these measures the opposition held a political-constitutional revolution whose preparation had been developed for decades.Although Charles I had no strength to react to this revolution that stripped of all authority and while the opposition maintained its unity, the struggle between the two powers not overflowed the constitutional ground. And that's what the parliamentary majority wanted.But the Puritan radicalism provided the gunpowder and the revolt of Ireland the fuse that blew up the unity of the opposition. With the split, the king, until then isolated, gained strength to counter - attack and civil war became irretrievable.
Ireland's Catholic revolt created to Parliament an extremely sensitive issue. Who would command the army to crush the rebellion and reconquer Ireland? Legally the commander of the armed forces was the king. If Parliament trust his army, put at risk the newly victory - won on the monarchy. Carlos I, seeking to exploit the situation, did not open more right to command the army.
Pym and other leaders of Commons were willing to accept the popular capital support to definitely defeat Carlos I. to force him to capitulate did approve a document to the nation, the solemn warning, which contained violent accusations against Carlos I. Frightened by the unrest popular in London, many MPs voted against Solemn Warning, adopted by only 11 votes of difference.Encouraged by the division of Parliament, Charles I immediately counter - attacked. With an armed group broke into the House of Commons to arrest Pym, Hampden and three other opposition leaders. Warned in time, the five took refuge in the capital. With this failure and has lost control of London, Charles I retreated to the North. There gathered a realistic army and prepared for civil war.
The Civil War: 1642 - 1648
From the religious point of view it is very clear and sharp division that separated the British during the civil war between supporters of the realistic cause and the parliamentary question.Virtually all Anglicans and Catholics were on the side of the monarchy and all moderate Puritans (Presbyterians) and radicals (sects) on Parliament's side. From the social point of view the division presents obscure and complicated. Because the members of one and the other band basically belonged to the same social classes, the gentry, the nobility (aristocracy) and the bourgeoisie and all three were propertied classes, economically dominant.
The exploited classes, or were out of the conflict, or when it participated, next to the Parliament, were far from playing the same role of sansculottes in the French revolution.And the controversy which opposes the non-Marxist historians of the English Revolution to Marxists. The first deny (unlike seconds) that the civil war has had a class struggle character. For them the Civil War was a conflict basically political (constitutional) and religious (ideological) between the same ruling classes.Regions and men still predominantly feudal were the king and those areas where capitalism predominated were with Parliament.
"You can not find fundamental social divisions in a traditional Assembly as the House of Commons, intended to represent the propertied class and chosen according to an electoral system that changed no two centuries. The real divisions existed outside of Parliament and its social nature is difficult to be denied.The party regions of Parliament were the South and East, economically advanced; to the realistic strength lay in the North and West, still semi-feudal. All major cities were 'parliamentary'; often, however, their privileged oligarchies supported the king ... Only one or two episcopal cities, Oxford and Chester, were realistic. The ports were all by Parliament ... Navy remained solidly parliamentary side ... The same division found within the counties ... the industries were by Parliament, but the farm by the King. " (Christopher Hill)
In war, the balance of power was substantially favorable to the parliamentary question, given its superior financial resources, human and strategic (marine and ports). But until 1644-45 parliamentary forces were unable to exploit this superiority, they sought to face the realistic using only traditional militia of the counties and their respective financial and administrative apparatus. Therefore, the initiative of the actions was with the realistic, which could not, however, get no decisive victory.
Side of the parliamentary forces during the war, were formed two parties, the Independent and the Presbyterians. This division was both religious and political. Behind these religious and political differences between Presbyterians and independent manifest is marked social differences.
To face the realistic, Presbyterians and independent sought alliance with the Scottish Covernant, whose army was powerful. English Presbyterian party was ready to accept the price of Scottish aid: establishment of an official church identical to the Scottish. When in 1644 the army of Parliament, helped by the king of Scotland, defeated the royalists at the battle of Maston Moor, changing the course of the war in favor of Parliament, who played a decisive role in the fight was the cavalry of Independents, led by deputy Oliver Cromwell.The army led by Cromwell had a revolutionary and democratic structure. This is because, on the one hand, its members, all volunteers, were recruited mainly among small and medium farmers of puritanical radical tendencies and on the other, the criteria for promotion is based on merit, talent and military efficiency of the soldiers. Cromwell encouraged the religious discussions among the soldiers so that everyone had "the roots of the matter"; "I'd rather have a simple and rustic captain, who knows why fight and loves what he knows, than one of those whom you call gentle - man and that is just that."
This new army, New Model Army, was viewed with suspicion by the Presbyterian party, whose military chiefs were chosen in the Parliament by aristocratic criteria.Presbyterians feared the democratic advance, and always looking for a compromise with the king, did not rush to win the war. Or rather, did not want an absolute victory, they did not want to take the war to its ultimate consequences.Throughout the course of the war, until the king's execution in 1649, the Presbyterians incessantly sought a compromise with the king.
But the first military successes of the New Model Army, unbeatable on the battlefield, and the very logic of events that required a definition of the fight forced the results, "it came time to speak, or shut up forever," said Cromwell Parliament. In 1645, Parliament approved the Selflessness Act by which renounced the command of the army, and delivered him to the military, the generals.Under the pressure of events, also the old state system was partially destroyed and modified.
Thanks to these measures, military and political, imposed by the party Independent, "the war until victory" the realistic army was finally defeated in 1645 at the Battle of Naseby.
With the military victory over the royalists created is a new political situation: on one side, left the scene the danger posed by absolutism, and on the other, entered in its place a new force: the New Model Army and in its wake a new party, the levelers (Levellers), democratic party that was formed in London in 1646. the common enemy of defeat incited between Presbyterian and independent, the struggle for power. While the former continued to control the Parliament where they had majority, the latter had control of the army. These two powers coexisted as rival powers.
Presbyterians, aiming to take control of the situation, entered into negotiations with the prisoner king (Charles I had surrendered in 1646 the Scots, who negotiated with Parliament). To get rid of the army, inflated by levelers, who had penetrated their ranks mutinied, refusing to demobilize and leave for Ireland. "Led by the cavalry formed by small landowners, the privates were organized, were appointed Members of each regiment ( 'agitators') to a central council, committed to maintaining solidarity and not enter license until their demands were met" . (Christopher Hill)
For a time (1646 - 1647) the generals leading independent party wavered between Presbyterians Parliament and army soldiers.But when they saw that the first negotiating with the king and that the latter were determined to advance their claims, allied to the latter, looking, however, to control its democratic program. As a result of this alliance between independent and levelers in 1647 the king was removed from the prison controlled by the Parliament and held hostage in the hands of independent. At the same time, within the New Model Army was forming an Army Council, which sat lada by side elected representatives of the soldiers and officers, in order to decide on political issues.
Aligners whose influence grew within the army, presented to the Council in Putney a draft constitution, called the Agreement of the People. This project was formulated the political program of leveling: extinction of the monarchy and the House of Lords and in its place the Republic, with the extension of political rights (participation in Parliament) and voting for all free men; the religious level, the abolition of tithes and the complete separation of church and state, and the economic plan wanted free trade, protection of small property and reform of the law of the debtors.
With the army occupying London, Presbyterians heads away from the House of Commons, allowing Cromwell and independent to take control of the situation. In November 1647 the attempt of the levelers to take control of the army was frustrated by the generals and the Army Council was dissolved (and this meant the end of democracy in the army and the end of leveling). But the flight of the king did start the civil war and maintained the alliance between independent and levelers.
With the new, and this final time, the king's defeat in 1648 (Charles I was captured by the army), Cromwell and the army, supported by leveling, decided to purge Parliament of all realistic (from now the Long Parliament passed the be known by the Rump Parliament, that is Purged) and end the monarchy declared "unnecessary, oppressive and dangerous to freedom, security and public interest of the people." The House of Lords was also abolished, it was simply "useless and dangerous". On May 19, the Republic was proclaimed.
Despite these measures, independent, with Cromwell ahead, they were not seeking to meet the demands of the levies, which, however, were brutally crushed by Cromwell and the generals in 1649. From this moment the English revolution entered reflux. The reasons for the shift to the right of the independent generals and the leveling of defeat are not hard to explain. The first, once achieved its immediate political goals: war until victory and complete capitulation of the monarchy, overcome the differences that separated the conservative Presbyterians. Their social interests coincided, as both defended the rights of the property and its free operation.They were therefore enemies of democracy.
Cromwell was called with some justification Robespierre and Napoleon of the English revolution. As the first, he led the revolution to victory and, as the second, crushed democracy, preserving its original character.
From his part the leveling had no economic power and ideological consistency sufficient to impose its program. They represented the interests of urban artisans and laborers and their radical ideology was typically small - bourgeois and as such contradictory. They wanted democracy, political rights to all free men, but their conception of freemen was not universal. Women, and all those who were not owners of their means of production and his body were out of their democracy. In 1649, when the leveling movement was already defeated, emerged from its aftermath another move even more utopian and restricted, but even more radical and democratic time, the Diggers (diggers) or "True Levelers," whose leader, Gerrard Winstanley He came to the formulation of a true communist society based on common ownership of the land. Although defeated, the ideas of the levellers and diggers underground remained alive and his legacy reappeared in both the French Revolution and in the English Chartist movement of the nineteenth century.
The Cromwell Republic: 1649 - 1658
The dictatorial government of Cromwell was important for its internal and external achievements. Domestically, they were suppressed once the still existing feudal structures, eliminating all institutional obstacles to the free development of capitalist forces. Externally, England consolidated its natural vocation, maritime and imperialist power.
The Republic, despite all the government's achievements Cromwell, did not survive the death of its founder. He could not say because it represented only the power of the army and this, to rule, needed the support of Parliament, traditional political representative of the interests of the ruling classes. So Cromwell could not help but appeal to Parliament. On the other hand, while the army lived capital obtained with the confiscation of property of the Crown, Church and realistic, his stay did not weigh on taxpayers, ie the ruling class. But after the money ran out, their cost has risen to the English owners used to not pay heavy taxes. With the army in power, not only had to pay far higher taxes, but also to accept a centralization of power that hampered its traditional local autonomy.
The Restoration and the Glorious Revolution of 1688
With the Restoration, the social and political conservatism, in increase in the country since the 50s, reached its logical end. But the return of the monarchy, despite all the conservatism she represented, did not mean a return to the Old Regime. The absolutism is definitely defeated in England. With the Restoration of the country returning the existing legal situation in 1642, that is, with the Parliament and the political ruler of the nation. But not all of the English, it was an oligarchic Parliament representing only the interests of the propertied classes, especially rural. Charles II, the new king, was deprived of all instruments of absolute power. Although it autodenominasse king by the grace of God, I knew he was king by the will of Parliament. His son James II sought to ignore the limitations of his position and that was enough to have to travel in 1688, leaving the throne.
The big losers of the Revolution was the democratic movement and the Puritan movement. Both had, during the Revolution, evolved and fed together. The fear aroused in the ruling classes explains the Restoration and the return to Anglicanism, an established church and tithes. This raised Anglicanism was deprived by the former power and Parliament had to give up the claim to be the only Church of England. Church and State, that is, politics and religion were tab. However, and it manifests all the conservative character of the Restoration, only members of the official church had access to the local and central government and universities. The nonconformists, dissidents (people who profess a religion other than the Anglican), although officially recognized and tolerated, became a kind of "passive citizens," excluded from political life. The superficial religious conviction dissidents were able to return to the bosom of Anglicanism, the others gave their energies to the business world.
"James II was removed by the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688, 'glorious' because without bloodshed or social disorders without 'anarchy', without revivals possibilities of revolutionary demands - democratic.
Since then, the orthodox historians have done their best to accentuate the 'continuity' of English history, to minimize the revolutionary outbursts by want the 'interregnum' (the word itself shows what they sought to do) was an unfortunate accident, which in 1660 we went back to the old constitution in its normal development, that in 1688 only corrected the aberrations of a demented king. Whereas, in fact, the period between 1640 and 1660 saw the destruction of a type of state and the introduction of a new policy framework within which capitalism could develop freely. For tactical reasons, the ruling class was simulated in 1660, that was simply the restoration of old forms of the Constitution.However, with this restoration intended to confer a sacred character and a social trait to a new social order. What was really important was the fact that the social order is new and could not have been achieved without revolution. " (Christopher Hill)
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