Derek Hirst wrote:
[Introduction] In the years which Prof. Plumb has suggestively termed those of 'the rage of party' at the end of the 17th century, the political impact of the electorate was obvious … But this had just as clearly not been the case a century earlier. The Elizabethan studies of Sir John Neale reveal a political scene where the wishes of the bulk of the population counted for little, and where the alignments that mattered were those of the patrons and the gentry. Political consensus and the more or less effective workings of the patronage system averted both elections and the open agitation of issues.
The intervening century must therefore have been one of rapid electoral development. The attitudes and awareness of those active in the troubled 1640s and 1650s suggest that the first half of that period may have witnessed the decisive change. Sophisticated calculations were being made in the revolutionary years about the likely behaviour of the electorate: the timing of the issue of writs for new elections was subject to political manipulation in the 1640s, in the disputes on when, or even whether, to hold Recruiter elections to fill vacant seats in the Long Parliament. It was on a similar rock to this that the Rump Parliament foundered, for the glaringly unrepresentative image of that body contributed to the fatal alienation of the Army. Both conservative Rumpers and Army radicals had clear views on the potentially major political and social consequences of certain courses of electoral action (holding, or not holding, new elections on the old, or a new, franchise), and all parties were playing a recognisable game of electoral politics in consequence. The Army Grandees, Lambert and Cromwell, presumably had certain immediate political expectations in mind when concocting the franchise and constituency redistribution provisions of the Instrument of Government. Politicians at mid-century considered that the loyalties of voters or potential voters were of enormous national significance, but such a conclusion would hardly have been reached two generations earlier.
Marked change had taken place in certain major areas. The financial importunity of the early Stuarts, and their inability to live with any particular parliament, occasioned the summoning of yet more parliaments to replace the ones that had failed before. The membership of these parliaments was increasingly contested as the status-hungry gentry multiplied in number, and as developing polarisation along a 'Court' versus * Country’ axis meant that a further incentive to seek a seat in the House was added to that of social climbing. Gentlemen began to see the House of Commons as a means of realising political as well as social objectives. The number of contested elections rose fast; and as the gentry were beginning to manifest novel political concerns in looking for a seat, the election campaigns which they brought about tended to borrow something from those new concerns. The anxieties of the candidates were thus communicated to a wider group.
A further, but less obvious, change was that there was a growing awareness of the fact that an electorate existed. In part, this was an inevitable consequence of the more frequent contacts with the voters occasioned by more contests. The increased activity of the electors was causally related to the greater eagerness of candidates to ply for their support. But they were also becoming more conspicuous for a quite different reason — there were more of them, and this inexorably altered their role. This expansion of the electorate was itself partly a result of gentry activity, as, in pursuit of personal aggrandisement or political goals, candidates sought to extend the franchise in many urban constituencies, thus by-passing narrower groups hostile to their campaigns. The efforts of the gentry were aided by indigenous pressures building up in many communities, which culminated in domestic challenges to unpopular urban oligarchies. But the expansion was also a result of a quite unrelated development, the impersonal devaluation of the freehold qualification for the vote in the counties as inflation took its toll. And when the size and activity of the electorate had grown considerably, as was the case by the middle of the 17th century, it became … more appropriate to think in terms of voters than of interests and connections.
The fact that development was taking place in this period is itself thoroughly significant. It meant that many participants in the electoral process were unfamiliar with what were by the end of the century easily recognised features of the landscape. Consequently, a certain naïveté is commonly visible. One of the most obvious instances of this is the way in which the Levellers in the later 1640s were advocating electoral reforms whose probable political effects would have been largely counter-productive when measured in terms of their other aims. As the maypoles which greeted Charles II’s return from exile suggested, the freedom coveted by a majority of the population was one providing for ale-drinking and an implementation of the canons of good-neighbourliness, rather than for the rational exercise of political rights.
[Conclusion] England on the eve of the Civil War cannot be classed as politically closed for several important reasons. The King's government and Court certainly formed an extremely restricted world, but there were avenues of expression through parliament open to those outside, and those avenues were becoming broader … The Privy Council felt that elections were in themselves dangerously likely to disturb the tranquillity of the lower depths of society. After the disputed Buckinghamshire election of 1604 necessitated a second election, the Council warned the local JPs [Justices of the Peace] to take care, “respectinge the Mean and inferior sorte of that Cuntrie whom this busines by severall elleccions hath afflicted and troubled”. If even personal disputes risked arousing the meaner sort, the potential of more and more excited campaigns in later years cannot be underestimated. The high levels of turn-out in Wigan and Tewkesbury in 1640, the occurrence of rioting in London in the spring of 1640 and Windsor Forest in 1641 geared to the frustration of parliamentary hopes, all indicate that the common people had a very real interest in their representative.
Only the Crown seems to have viewed this state of affairs with unease, for the gentry were prepared to encourage its emergence. While it is arguable that many may not have been aware of the implications of the actions of their fellows, the gentry in their collective political capacity in the House, and individuals in the localities, were endeavouring to expand the electorate in the franchise disputes. Whether obstructing a suspected threat from the Crown at a national level, or for their own local advantage, they were prepared to employ the commons for their own ends. In this, they acted in much the same way as they did in the other main field where the commons were able to express themselves, in riots. There too, the gentry were prepared to encourage the commons to act in order to resist Crown exploitation, in the Fens and the South-West, and equally they often stirred up popular action against local gentry rivals.
But the decisive factor here is the strength of the relative threats. Before the [1642 outbreak of] war, the propertied classes, with occasional exceptions, do not seem to have been excessively frightened of the threat from below, whereas there was often considerable disquiet about the activities of the Crown … [W]hen in the Exclusion Crisis [1679-1681] at the end of Charles II’s reign the danger from above once again appeared to outweigh that from below and the Commons returned, if briefly, to their pre-war position of espousing the rights of the meaner sort in order to defend their own liberties and privileges. The commons were in effect being politically exploited by the gentry in parliament.
The outcome of this was to differentiate England markedly from the rest of Europe where power was devolving upon smaller numbers, and opportunities for political consultation through representative assemblies were being eliminated as the Estates fell. In England, parliament increased in strength while assemblies abroad became debilitated; but more singular was the expansion of the political nation, which abroad was everywhere contracting. Urban oligarchies in England, backed up by the Crown, were tightening their grips in many fields just as was happening abroad, but the self-interested intervention of the parliamentary gentry prevented them extending their hold to the electoral franchise. The representatives of the third estate in England were thus possessed of a rather wider social base, not only than their 18th-century successors, but also than similar representatives abroad, both in the 17th century and later.
Although in one sense the relationship of the Commons to the meaner sort was one-sided and exploitative, this was not true overall. While the gentry, aided by inflation, helped to create a larger political nation, they were not always able to control it, and they had to take account of its wishes. The divergent electoral histories of large, populous constituencies and small ones show that popular involvement was not a stream that could be channelled at will by the gentry. And the gentry in parliament needed the commons, not just in the obvious ways, for their votes [and] for their physical support in 1641-2 … but more generally to make sense of their claims.
Perhaps the major theme of Parliament's polemical defence against the King was its assertion that it represented England. We have seen that it was attacked on this score, but these attacks must have been far more damaging had its electoral base been narrower. The desperate quest for arguments by Parliament's propagandists in the summer and autumn of 1642 reveals the urgent need to develop a respectable legitimation for resistance to an anointed king. Part of Parliament's representative defence obviously looked back to the traditional vague, semi-mystical belief … that all men were somehow present in parliament. But the task of its critics would have been easier had it been self-evident that this was factually incorrect, for the contention that Parliament was merely a narrow clique, and that the King really represented the people, would then have been more persuasive. [Christopher] Hill has lately given weight to the royalist case by agreeing that “we no longer swallow the claim of 17th-century Parliaments to represent the people of England; they represented the propertied class, the gentry and merchants”. But I would argue that those claims cannot be so easily dismissed. Both in the numbers of people voting, in the relative freedom with which they voted and the kind of issues they voted on, and the responsiveness of members of the House to outside pressures, there was some justification for Parliament's claims to be representative. Before the reaction consequent on the mid-century troubles set in, and when under the early Stuarts the political consensus and the workings of patronage broke down, genuine consultations took place with large numbers of ordinary people.
The Source:
Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge 1975 [2005] [pp. 1-3, 191-193]
The Files Category/Series:
Exceptionalisms of England’s early modern society.