Pulling up the roots of sedition

In 1661 the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Edward Turnor, likened republican England after the execution of Charles I to the five-day anarchy permitted among the ancient Persians so that they might appreciate kingly rule. ‘The forms and species of government are various’, he explained, ‘monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical: but the first is certainly the best, as being the nearest to divinity itself.’ As this remark suggests, civil war and regicide made a generation of gentlemen more, not less, willing to endorse the doctrines that sovereignty lay in the crown, that rebellion was never justified, and that monarchy had something of divinity. It now seemed incontrovertible that the crown's supremacy was the guarantor of the gentry's own authority. ‘There can be nothing’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘more instructive towards loyalty and justice than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war’.

During the Civil War the Long Parliament's defenders had deployed, with increasing self-confidence, the arsenal of anti-absolutist arguments developed by Scottish Calvinist and French Huguenot radicals in the late sixteenth century. They asserted that the source of political authority lay in the community, and that the king was an officer of the commonwealth, answerable to the people. The community, incorporated in parliament, might legitimately coerce a tyrannical ruler in defence of its rights. The premise was populist, the conclusion revolutionary. In 1649 the Rump Parliament declared that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and ‘the Commons of England, in parliament assembled … have the supreme power in this nation’.

The legislation of the early 1660s, as Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, put it, ‘pulled up all those principles of sedition and rebellion by the roots’. Several statutes provided explicit affirmations of political doctrine, among them the Regicide, Militia, Treason, Corporation, and Triennial Acts. They declared that the period of the ‘late usurped governments’ had seen ‘many evil and rebellious principles … distilled into the minds of the people’, which must now be ‘prevented’. Parliament's war was not a legitimate resistance but a ‘barbarous rebellion’ bred by ‘fanatic rage’. The attempt to enforce regular parliaments had been a ‘derogation of his majesty's just rights and prerogative inherent to the imperial crown’.