A Revolution for a Republic in Britain 

To characterize a modern revolution in the seventeenth century and beyond, the historical title would be a shift from monarchy to a republic. The argument I want to discuss is this shift in Britain in the 17th century, as it’s one of the historical sparks of the deep social, political, and religious transformation that witnessed the birth of a new subject that transcended the patriarchal forms of subjecthood. The response from intellectuals of paramount importance was John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689), which he had philosophized in terms of already established themes, published before the publication, such as toleration and freedom of conscience. For the American and French Revolutions, to an extent, Locke's articulation has conveyed a philosophical mindset rooted in the British Revolution that emerged from societal upheavals.  To set a baseline scope for the essay, I should touch on the unity and division that generate the republic while degenerating the monarchy.

A Republic is not a historical accident; it’s a necessity to overcome the fault lines in politics, which are a culmination of cultural and economic monarchical contradictions.  However, politics is not a mere mirror; it's the processes that produce decisions, arising from “achievements and errors of commanders or better resource exploitation.”[i] which divide or unite society and the state.

It's worth noting from the outset that I am not claiming an equal force between cultural, economic, and political factors; on the contrary, historical processes are a very complex interplay, which cannot be reduced to the functionality of a specific historical factor; rather, the hard lines get materialized in a historical realities that shape the character of the revolution.

To that end, I tend to characterize the British revolution as leaning towards the religious sphere that invoked ideological redesign and the uprooting of parameters, allowing a revolution to break out into a republic by default, or that a republic arise from a demand to overcome the divide: “Religion was the central dividing line: Puritans backed Parliament, defenders of the traditional Church supported the king.”[ii] Hence, to resolve the dividing line, the form of politics should unite the cultural divide, so the revolution in Britain is a project that serves this purpose.  We don’t make a mistake if we say that a republic is a form of politics that smashed all the political privileges from society in the form of a cultural divide.

Additionally, the mid-17th-century  “debaters and pamphleteers of the 1640s were arguing a political brief and were less interested in philosophical underpinnings than in ideological consequences. ……It was, in short, an age of political persuasion, of rhetoric, rather than an age of political philosophy. It needs to be understood as such.”[iii] 

I am not saying the causes are religious; rather, what I mean by using the word “leaning” is two things: 1) the converging point is a radical shift in the religious attributes, 2) religious as a front in the sense that it’s a world of understanding for people to comprehend how to express their views and to communicate problem definitions and change. To draw an example with regard to the last “The Bible, which was the main source of ideological inspiration for most of the army, had little to say about republics but much about doing away with wicked kings.”[iv] I bring this quote to say that the army, which had a major role to play in the revolution, understood politics from a cultural perspective, i.e., the religious phenomena govern their political attitudes.

Nevertheless, the fundamentals of economy in play “Poor areas have been good recruiting grounds throughout history, as their people need to join up to make money. No wonder Wales became known as the nursery' of the king's infantry, and at the Shropshire village of Myddle twenty boys joined the royal army because they were promised four times the earnings they could make at home.”[v] It thus follows that we see in this revolution all the factors in play; however, culture plays a hegemonic role in shaping the landscape of the events.   

The political ideology that governs the constitutional decisions that were traced, to a large extent, to Charles I, who attributed his rule over the nation to a Godly imperative. The king refused to abdicate his responsibility for the Church of England “for it was essentially betraying his duty to his God,” although this could have saved him from a regicide in January 1649. Through this case, we realize that what constitutes a state monarchy is a single ruler, a religious ruler, and that “in the 1640s, religion, 'the legitimizing ideology of the rulers', threatened to become 'the revolutionary idiom of the ruled'. The religious culture permeates England from the top down; hence, a conversion to a republic implied a state that is not religious, thereby negating top-down political ideology and favoring politics for all as the nation's general concern. The aftermath will then be a democratic system that transcends the disposition of a single ruler in a monarchy. Democracy opposes a political society that arises from a single ruler's preferences; on the contrary, politics should remain the affairs of the state that grant equal rights to the members of society. Therefore, to exit from absolutism[vi] is to fight for liberty towards a democratic republic with a well-defined constitutional mechanism, which was one of the ills of the monarchical political system. 

The corresponding society for a monarchical state is a politicized society that can be viewed through three main themes: the first, the patriarchal form: “It suggested that the political authority of the King and the domestic authority of the husband were validated both by God and nature.”[vii] While the second, nobles and aristocrats, a privileged group, “regarded the people as fickle and irrational, the many-headed monster.” [viii] It was a society of a hierarchy of social superiors and inferiors. “Iconoclasts were reported to destroy also the images of the gentry, thereby betraying, it was claimed, their hostility to their superiors.”[ix]  The society witnesses the interplay between culture, economy and politics “Since many of those who campaigned against bishops also campaigned against rapacious landlords and against tithes (with implications for property rights in general), the defence of the existing Church became a defence of order and hierarchy in society and the State as well as in religion.”[x] We can extrapolate the third, that society is based on political hierarchy, which separates people from the community as a whole and then pushes them into branches such as religious groups or into competing churches “The English Civil War began as a struggle between two movements committed to two visions of the confessional state”[xi]. Civil society in a republic is a whole community sustained through citizenship of “life, liberty, and property,”[xii] such as those attributed to the American and French revolutions[xiii].  A republican civil society is not organized on a political basis, since the concept of citizenship is grounded in society as a whole for all, so people are not separated by political apparatuses as in a monarchical state.

We can read in the events that Charles I was tried on allegations of tyranny and betrayal of the kingly office[xiv]; it thus follows that kingship is stripped of its genuine legitimacy or purity and, in turn, uprooted as a system; hence, a political vacuum has to be filled by a republic which follows as a default. A republic that will face a lot of challenges, chiefly how to preserve itself not only in Britain but everywhere. In America, “A lady asked Dr. Franklin, ' Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.” [xv] The aftermath of a republic is either the restoration of an older monarchy or, in newer versions, a modern oligarchy. In France, “Any form of plotting which seeks to restore the monarchy or to set up any other kind of authority hostile to the nation’s liberty”[xvi]A tribunal court will be established to confront counter-revolutionary activities. It is a loud triumph in a republic that liberty is for the nation, hence society and the state should correspond to the people as they are the nation. To that, politics is stripped from society and elevated to the level of the state as a general concern for the whole, i.e., the nation.

The case of Britain is a negation or transcending of the cultural and political settings. During the rise of Cromwell and in 1649, it contributed to the definition of the republican subject, from being subject to the king, the church bishops, and the Catholic clergy[xvii] Religious traditions to “liberty of conscience for the godly” and “toleration” of private worship.  This means that the new Britishers are subjects in themselves, yet to be subjects for themselves. New subject in a consolidation of three kingdoms (England, Ireland, and Scotland) into the Commonwealth, a vision that Cromwell appealed for unity[xviii]. It’s worth noting that the definition of a new subject precedes John Locke's celebrated Two Treatises, 1688-89[xix]. In turn, Locke drew on political facts to give the new culture enlightenment philosophical principles, enabling the new social elites to use the power of philosophy to crowd out the power of religious discourse and reinvigorate philosophy's historical role as a flagship for modernity. The period was not free from transitional radical sects, whose intellectual response appears in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), which stresses obedience to any government effectively promoting modern totalitarianism.  Cromwell's political actions included the dissolution of the Rump Parliament in 1653, favoring a Protestant alliance and the inclusion of imperial elements in the new republic that governed foreign policy and commerce; for instance, the Navigation Act (1651) asserted English trade dominance: “Colonies like Virginia and Barbados were brought under Commonwealth control, though tensions persisted.”

The collapse of the Cromwellian state reversed the path towards a republic, restoring a monarchy and rolling back Cromwell's reforms. The space is open to monarchy and Catholicism, another face of the coin of Absolutism and Catholicism in the sentimental consciousness.   But in the historical tone at play, the past cannot command the consent of the people and the Parliament. Consent is a present imperative, as witnessed by the English Bill of Rights of 1689, in which Parliament set the tone for a foundational constitution favouring a republic rather than a monarchy. At this moment, we can infer that John Locke's Two Treatises of Government set the philosophical tone of the British republican revolution with a liberal vanguard that will make the intellectual aspiration for the American revolution in particular by arguing that government exists by the consent of the governed to protect inalienable natural rights; it thus follows as a foundation for the colonies' rebellion catalyzed by an elitist mentality.  

[i] “why did the king lose, and why did he take so long to do so? In recent years a brisk debate has broken out over the first of those, between Malcolm Wanklyn and Clive Holmes. The former held that the outcome of the war had depended on the achievements and errors of commanders; while Holmes argued that it was inevitable as Parliament had better resources and exploited them more effectively. Who seems to be the more correct?”

Hutton, Ronald (2010). Civil War and Revolution (1642-49).

[ii] IBID. Hutton, Ronald (2010). Civil War and Revolution (1642-49).

[iii] Glenn Burges (1990). The Impact on Political Thought: Rhetorics for Troubled Times.  The Impact of the English Civil War. Edited by John Morril. P 67.

[iv] IBID. Hutton, Ronald (2010). P 258.

[v] IBID. Hutton, Ronald (2010). P 247.

[vi] Source: Sir Robert Filmer, English Philosopher, Patriarcha, 1630.

[vii] Walter JOHN (1990). The impact on Society: a world turned upside down. The impact of the English Civil War. P 104-115.

[viii] Walter JOHN (1990). The impact on Society: a world turned upside down. The impact of the English Civil War. P 104-105

[ix] IBID. Walter John. P 108.

[x] J. S. Morrill, (2000, ©1984) Stuart Britain. P 12.

[xi] John Morrill (1990). The Impact of Puritanism. The Impact of the English Civil War. Edited by John Morril. P 54-55.

[xii] Source- Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress,1774.

[xiii] Source- Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, August 1789 Selected Articles.

[xiv] Worden, Blair, (2009) The English Civil Wars, 1640-1660, Pbk. ed., London: Phoenix Press. 104.

[xv] From the notes of Dr. James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. 1787

[xvi] Source: Making a New Executive: “Decree Organising a Revolutionary Tribunal, March 1793”.

[xvii] Source: Cromwell's Declaration to the Irish Catholic Clergy, 1650

[xviii] Source: Oliver Cromwell’s speech to Army officers, 23 March 1649

[xix] Source: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1688-89 Book TwoChapter 19: Of the Dissolution of Government.