City, Government and National Politics, 1625-1643, by W. Pearl

[p046] City Government. and _ National Politics 1625-1643. By Valerie Pearl. Oxford University Press, 1961, 42s. Valerie Pearl has written a useful addition to the growing number of specialised books on the Puritan movement. Her concern is to outline the relations between the City Government of London and _ the Puritan Opposition in Parliament. It has often been implied by historians that the City of London was solidly behind the House of Commons in its struggle with Charles the First and from the beginning gave financial and political support to the Parliamentary cause. 163 This volume shows with a con- vincing wealth of detail that such was not the case, that right up until December 1641 the official City Government, dominated by the Aldermanic Bench, was sympathetic to the King, and that ‘the eventual alignment of London with Parliament was the result of force majeure, that is to say, of the seizing of power in the City by the parliamentary puri- tans’. It is this thesis that leads Valerie Pearl to examine the organisation of the radical puritans in the City and in doing so she brings to light fresh and interesting information as well as giving not a few leads to further research. We learn how the Puritans organised themselves in the wards and vestries of London during the 1630s, getting themselves elected to all sorts of lowly parish offices,in this way building up their influence within the machinery of government until, in the elections to Common Council on December 21, 1641, they were able to oust the older oligarchy from power, although a Royalist minority re- mained for some time to come. This change took place against a background of revolutionary crisis. The attempt of the King to arrest the five leading members of the Parliamentary opposition on January 4, 1642, heightened the tension al- ready caused by the filling of the Tower of London with cannon and artillerymen. Fearing a royal coup, the citizens prepared to defend themselves. Nehemiah. Wallington, a Puritan shopkeeper, wrote in his diary: ‘that the Aldermen and Sheriffs were up that night and the gates looked unto and the chains pulled across the streets, with knocking at the doors for men to stand upon their guard, and the next day our shops were shut up close, with every man his halberd and weapons in a readiness, and it was much feared that that night would have been a bloody night, but God of his mercy kept us’. (quoted on p.. 141.) The crisis, however, passed without violence, a fact which Valerie Pearl attributes to a combination of factors: ‘the self-imposed discipline of the citizens . .. the far from desperate character of the populace, and the somewhat restrained and

[p047] 164 ambivalent attitude of the leading classes of society’. Nehemiah Wallington probably sums it up succintly when he states: ‘it is certain enough, that had not the Lord of His mercy stirred us up to bestir ourselves, it would have gone hard enough with us’. (p. 142.) ‘Cheapside and the other main streets,’ writes Pearl, ‘were barricaded with benches, while women who entered sometimes violentiy into the political struggle . . . boiled cauldrons of scalding water to pour on the heads of marauding Cavaliers who never arrived.’ Throughout this period of crisis the Puritans in the City regularly organised citizens’ petitions signed by anything from ten to twenty thousand persons, which were used to pressurise the House of Lords and sometimes the Commons to espouse radical measures, the Root and Branch Petition being the best known of these. In organising these petitions the puritans spread their influence amongst ordinary ‘mechanical folk’ as well as merchants and shop- keepers. Unemployment attendant upon a trade depression added to the militancy of the former, and the radical leaders did not hesitate to threaten the ruling circles with the spectre of ‘mob-violence’ so long as they could be sure of their control over the ‘mob’. The defence of London during 1642 and 1643 rallied the great majority of citizens and gave further evidence of the extent and effective- ness of the puritan organisation. Thousands of men, women and children marched with flying colours and in martial order to erect the chain of forts around the City. Moderates and Radicals, Presbyter- ians and Independents, joined hands in this enterprise. The Venetian Ambassador, however, remarked that the chief use of the forts would be to control the City’s political minori- ties, radical as well as royalist. We see clearly in this book how in the period of bourgeois revolution the power of the disenfranchised people was used to put pressure upon the ruling classes. As this was a bourgeois revolution, which merely substituted one ruling class for an- other, the machinery of government remained intact with the addition of a few modifications added in the course of the struggle. But even so new revolutionary bodies such as the Militia Committee were formed and the control of the armed Trained Bands had to pass into Parliamentary hands to ensure victory. Armed force was decisive. Those who imagine that the work- ing class can overthrow capitalism by putting pressure on the capitalists and by utilising the capitalist state machine in some sort of pseudo- revolutionary take-over bid would do well to study the methods of the Puritans. They were far more re- volutionary than the theologians of King Street and their academic hangers-on who prattle about the ‘traditions of British democracy’ and in so doing distort history in the interests of a paper programme. The workers in their struggle for socialism must create their own organs of revolutionary government; they ‘cannoi simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for (their) own purposes’. This idea is central to Marxism and distinguishes it from all other brands of ‘socialism’ which these days com- bine to form a veritable utopian ordnance map complete with ‘roads’ and ‘signposts’. Marxists will find in this book a fascinating account of how the Puritans seized power in London and may draw from it useful lessons for the struggles of our time. G.W. Words, words, words