When Shakespeare turned the assassination of Julius Caesar on the dictator's rejection of petitions, he gave dramatic force to a political commonplace.Footnote 1 The encounter of supplicant and superior imparted a dynamic element to early modern visions of order, and although the rhetoric of rule changed markedly across the decades, the responsiveness and care expected of magistrates did not.Footnote 2 In extreme cases, rulers who stumbled over petitions might face consequences. Only with difficulty did Charles I recover from his first grudging answer to the Petition of Right in 1628, and a generation later the army justified its expulsion of the Rump in 1653 by citing the latter's failure to respond to the Council of Officers’ petition the previous August.Footnote 3 In more auspicious circumstances a petition could even reshape regimes, and the role of the Humble Petition and Advice in remodeling the Protectorate needs no comment. That was of course the work of parliament men, who chose to proceed by petition; but not long before, civilian petitioners from outside parliament had first redirected the Protector's course toward constitutional reform. On Christmas Day, 1656, Oliver Cromwell carried with him into the council chamber a petition from divers “well-affected” London godly and drew on it as he wrote his letter questioning Parliament's rush to punish the hapless Quaker James Nayler.Footnote 4 We are well acquainted with the complex interrelations of rulers and ruled in the countryside, but we sometimes assume that the only central meeting ground worth thinking about lay at Westminster, in St. Stephen's Chapel. That assumption reflects modern conventions. The newly self-empowered officers in May 1653, like the newly enthroned James I in May 1603, moved to establish procedures for dealing with petitions before they prepared to go to Westminster.Footnote 5 There is much to learn from their priorities.
Petitioning has recently been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. A new generation of parliamentary historians, concerned with the interactions of central institution and a variegated public, has been steadily exploring the process of petitioning to Westminster.Footnote 6 Historians of political crisis, whether in the 1640s or a generation later, have seen in mass petitions crucial instruments of partisan mobilization.Footnote 7 And David Zaret has celebrated those mass petitions of the 1640s as the measure and the means of the formation of a politically discursive public sphere in England.Footnote 8 Such approaches have abundant merits, though they also have their limitations as paths to understanding political processes and experience. Parliament was not the only recipient of petitions, nor were all petitions participants in or indices of mass political arousal. Furthermore, whatever its timing, the emergence of a public sphere did not signal a revolutionary transformation of politics or political culture. England remained as well the site of a self-conscious and powerful elite far into the modern period, and within that elite privileged communication continued. More signally, what Zaret might discount as privileged communication between the elite and others also continued, the traditional alongside the innovatory. Such communication has a tale to tell.
Some petitions sought sweeping reform, named enemies, urged their signatories quite as much as their recipients to action, and were printed and circulated for mass subscription, or at least mass acquiescence. The overwhelming majority of other petitions—though they may have been printed—were bread-and-butter affairs of a kind familiar to regimes across the centuries; but while they may have been predictable in form and aspiration they were scarcely insignificant. A broader study of petitioning is particularly warranted when the prevailing narratives—as of the years of the republic of 1649–60Footnote 9—concentrate on revolution, coercion, and exclusion and thus put a singular slant on the relations of rulers and ruled. Indeed, despite Gerald Aylmer's carefully nuanced analysis of the personnel and practices of the central administration, and despite Austin Woolrych's denial that Oliver Cromwell ruled as a military dictator, scholars have by and large yet to revise their accounts of governance; shaped by long-standing prejudices, these assume the fundamentally exclusionary and coercive nature of power in the republic.Footnote 10 The sword certainly put the republic in place, but it neither wrote all its history nor dictated all its practices. In fact, familiar patterns and mechanisms of reciprocity counterpointed the disturbances of revolutionary change, held groups and individuals together, and constituted assets on which the republic could draw. Urging the Protector and his council to move fast to answer the petitions of various midlands grand juries in 1656, Major General Whalley advised, “When you expect great thinges from them, you shall doe well to gratify them with as many smal things as you can.”Footnote 11 To Whalley the mundane mattered, even for those claiming large visions of rule.
This article will take petitions and the responses they elicited as a measure of the openness, of the responsiveness, of the regime, and in so doing will question some conventional understandings of the republic. In its examination of petitioning—the process, problems of access, tactics, and language used—the article will work within certain narrow limits. Wartime exigencies had proliferated committees and commissions (accounts, army, excise, indemnity, navy, and plundered ministers, to name but a few) to which countless parties petitioned, before which they pleaded, and from which they often appealed to higher authorities. This article confines itself for several reasons to solicitations of those higher authorities, and not simply because life is short. Petitions and addresses to senior figures demanded calculations and rhetoric of a different order from those required in approaches to minor functionaries, and in turn the responses of the recipients—because these were first and foremost political figures rather than functionaries—offer more insights into the premises and assumptions of those in power. For although this article does draw certain conclusions from outcomes, with who managed to get what, it is more concerned with process, with how people went about the getting or not getting, and it does so on the assumption that tactics and responses cast light both on the way regimes worked and on the way those outside thought they worked. The instability of authority in the period has occasioned one further limit to this article's focus. Petitions that, while protesting tangible objectives, such as pensions for soldiers’ families, were also part of a public campaign to change major features of the government—the most obvious examples are Leveller petitions—seem to belong to a different category from more pragmatic appeals. Some contemporaries certainly thought as much, and the Leveller William Walwyn had repeatedly to defend himself from the charge that he had said he “never would petition the Parliament if [he] thought they would grant what [he] petitioned for.”Footnote 12 Encounters between such petitioners and authority were different from those where supplicant or solicitor was genuinely supplicatory. The descent of Leveller petitioners on parliament, whether in 1649–50, 1653–54, or 1659, certainly produced some revealing exchanges—on each side coercive intentions and language tended to run high—but what was revealed tends to reinforce the traditional picture of an embattled and exclusionary order.Footnote 13 This article will accordingly look elsewhere, to more mundane business of governance.
Although England's new rulers were variously tugged by millenarian or republican zeal or by conservative conformism, those creeds provided neither for every season nor circumstance. Over them all stood a more august pattern, a divine one that went beyond the conscience and care associated with the phrase “godly magistracy”: for God indeed responded to all contingencies, ruled by mercy as well as fiat, and provided a model against which all magistrates were judged.Footnote 14 Addressing the Rump Parliament, Richard Baxter showed all his skill with conventional pieties: “These things we humbly and earnestly request of this Honourable Assembly, in the behalf of Jesus Christ (to whom we doubt not but you are daily Petitioners) and of this Commonwealth.” What is more remarkable is the agreement he found, across the political spectrum, from a group of Leveller sympathizers who advised the Rump in similar terms: “Those in Authoritie can in nothing more resemble God, then in their readiness to heare and receive the complaintes and Petitions of any that apply themselves unto them.”Footnote 15 In a scriptural ideal that gained meaning as the regime's institution of high courts of justice cried out for balancing acts of mercy, the encounter of sovereign and supplicant formed the very stuff of life.Footnote 16 It is surely a testimony to the power of the ideal that the godly Nominated Assembly in 1653 moved promptly to establish a committee for petitions and regularly received (and sometimes acted on) lengthy, detailed, and time-consuming reports on individual causes, even as it set itself to reform the land; the Rump Parliament, by contrast, had condemned itself by waiting until August 1652 to establish a committee for petitions and then quickly allowing it to become sidetracked.Footnote 17
The divine proved a hard act to follow. The remorseless increase in petitioning almost gives a certain bureaucratic rationality to the Rump's provocative slowness to institutionalize appropriate procedures. Those in power must not have known which way to turn. Taxation maintained at near wartime levels in a time of economic distress, an army in strength and on station, and a burgeoning navy whose wars projected its demands for men and supplies deeper into the hinterland all ensured that for increasing numbers the state was not just some distant entity “above” but a real and felt presence whose doings all too often demanded some form of negotiation. And worst of all there were the aftereffects of Parliament's decision to finance the early stages of the Civil War by appealing for loans on “the public faith” and by failing to secure these on tangible sources of revenue. Creditors large and small desperately seeking repayment, taxpayers demanding relief, agents for towns hoping to vindicate their jurisdictions: these and many more clamored for redress or aid.
Getting a hearing in changing times
In the first flush of optimism after the revolution of 1648– 49, some of the regime's publicists actually encouraged petitioners. The radical publicist Henry Robinson promised that, in an aristocratic republic such as the Rump, “the people have a more immediate way to the redress of all their grievances, and are not forc’d to clime too high, so not to go to far about, or through so many mercenary Favorites, or rooms of State, or be fear’d with the suddain beams of supposed Majesty, but come to their own Representatives that themselves have chosen.” Such hopes were soon dashed, and one critic claimed, surely fancifully, that ten thousand unanswered petitions piled up at the Rump's doors, with another five thousand given only temporizing answers.Footnote 18 Radicals’ complaints about the irresponsibility of Rumpers whose self-interest blighted chances of reform found echoes in the laments of supplicants. Although himself supremely energetic, Robinson could observe sourly in 1652 that “it hath been almost impossible for any one to get a Petition to be read either in Parliament or Counsell of State, unlesse he had a Saint there to befriend him, who if he were not both very eminent and zealous, would likely either refuse to promote it, or not prevaile to get it granted.” Even the eminent and zealous might come up short in these conditions: John Rushworth, lately secretary to Lord General Fairfax, reported to a friend with a private cause to advance that he “was with the President [of the Rump's council of state] in the same rome an hower yesterday, and could not gett oportunity to speake they are so throng.” Not surprisingly, many gave up. “Want of dispatch in matters depending before you, is (as men commonly talk) one of the Nations most fundamental grievances,” a disgruntled petitioner told the Rump in 1651; the unresponsiveness of the powerful made ordinary people “even weary of our Parliamentary Government, and to linger again after Pharaoh,” that is, after monarchy. One who rejoiced at the expulsion of the Rump wrote of “thousands” of petitioners near starving as they waited for a hearing at committees’ doors.Footnote 19
The relief at the Rump's departure in the spring of 1653 could not have lasted long outside partisan circles. The officers who dispatched it moved speedily to set up a committee for petitions, meeting at least the first demand of the anxious, but the officers’ interim council of state offered little prospect of immediate relief of accumulated complaints, let alone of the new ones generated in the Dutch war.Footnote 20 During that twilight of authority even one of the generals at sea could “question whether in this great revolution, anybody takes care of us and the naval affairs.”Footnote 21 The tribulations of those seeking to do business in these circumstances give us some idea of the practical meaning of regime change. The east coast ports that had to deal with the casualties and prisoners of naval war probably experienced the gravest pressures, and throughout the late spring of 1653 the bailiffs of Ipswich sought reimbursement for expenditures incurred under the now defunct Rump. They received scant encouragement from subordinate naval officials: “The Committee being dissolved as we are informed that formerly ordered those affaires, we must go another way to worke.” Their agent in London reported nearly managing to get a letter to Lord General Cromwell in the crush in early July before being forced to leave it, vainly, “with his gentleman.” At this bleak juncture, aid came from the town's recorder, Nathaniel Bacon, who from his lawyer's chambers managed to intercept—on the patent assumption that it would offend somebody and only make matters worse—the letter the bailiffs addressed helplessly “to the Higher powers for the present.” Such a generic salutation had its appeal to satirists but scarcely to those in power.Footnote 22 That such uncertainties could be prolonged is indicated by a petition for arrears from a group of former soldiers, whose “long and tedious attendance producing no fruit from the [Rump] Parliament, after their dissolution, they then made their humble Addresses to his Highnesse [the Lord General], and Honourable Council, who were pleased to refer their Petition to the Council of the Army, who upon mature consideration and conference had with your Petitioners, returned their sense and results thereon to his Highnesse, and the said Council, by whose Order the same was transmitted … to the late [Nominated] Parliament, who after daily solicitations” included them in a draft settlement of Irish lands. But this was lost in the deluge, so “after the late Parliament dissolved themselves, they then made their humble Addresses to his Highnesse, who was pleased to recommend them … unto … his Council”—before they found that another group of soldiers was gaining legislative aid from the new Protectoral parliament of 1654, to which they themselves then turned.Footnote 23 For the anxious petitioner, political stability could not be a matter of mere ideology.
The inauguration of the Protectorate brought a measure of stability; it also seems, ironically, to have eased some of the Rump-era cynicism about motives, since governmental rhetoric of liberty and reform shifted into a minor key. But the logjam of business did not clear. The available evidence suggests that in fact the Protector and those around him spent more time dealing with petitions—for arrears, for pensions, for compensation, for charitable briefs, for naval convoys, for augmentation of church livings, for the uniting of parishes, and so on—than did any other early modern regime, but their labors were dwarfed by the demands on them. The expenditure of time and energy was such that it surely reflected not just the drift and inertia that has been assumed but also a real sense of priorities.Footnote 24 Nevertheless, the human consequences were manifest and familiar. A disillusioned northern activist lamented, altogether plausibly, “We can have no access unto [the Protector] to present either private or publick grievances and abuses, so as poore people are wasted and spent out with fruitlesse attendance.”Footnote 25 For most of those with business to do, the experience of dealing with the republic, in any of its phases, was exhausting.Footnote 26
Petitioners who hoped to break through the throng at the council or parliament door needed help, advocates, and, above all, interested parties to advance them ahead of competitors. Towns were perhaps freer than individual supplicants to sweeten their words with material substance, since they were less susceptible to imputations of bribery—Hull in particular seems to have exploited the turbulent conditions of the 1640s, deploying what seems to have been a massive political slush fund (perhaps the fruit of arbitrary port duties) to impressive effect.Footnote 27 Urban archives abound in the humdrum details of gift giving, of sugar loaves and pies sent to senior figures, to the assize judges, and, in 1656, to the major generals too.Footnote 28 Occasionally, an individual solicitor like the colonial projector and sometime parliament man Thomas Povey might hint at the role of material consideration in the petitioning process, though Povey's voluminous papers indicate that the vital resources of the solicitor were endurance, an acute sense of timing, and, above all, contacts.Footnote 29
Despite the upheavals, connections and local attachments remained of fundamental importance.Footnote 30 Those particularist or sectional measures that were advanced in the Rump Parliament can be associated fairly directly with members tied to local constituencies—here the attenuation of membership following Pride's Purge had results that were as obvious to contemporaries as they are to historians. Giving voice to the widespread conviction that parliamentary representation entailed representing the locality to the central government at least as much as it entailed larger concerns, the corporation of Great Yarmouth in 1652 resolved to petition the Rump for a new member “to agitate for them in the publick affaires of the Towne.”Footnote 31 For the lucky few who retained a sitting member—and one with whom they were in political sympathy—doors might still open to the speaker's chamber, with advice delivered along the way on what to ask for.Footnote 32 But even the mighty found such services hard to come by. On learning in July 1649 that one of its MPs who had absented himself at Pride's Purge had returned to the House, London's corporation took the remarkable step of ordering that the two common councillors from his ward “shall in theire gownes goe up to Parliament” daily to lobby him to get an answer to the city's petition for the poor.Footnote 33 For the rest there was little to do but voice frustration, and the magistrates of Cheshire were blunt in their protest: “This County is burthened beyond its proportion, for want of fit persons to represent in Parliament their Condition.”Footnote 34
Although the institutional structures of government changed markedly in 1653, the rules of the game did not. Access remained constricted, not least by geography—the Yorkshire members who declared in the 1656 parliament that “Yorkshire does not often trouble you with petitions” were not just engaging in proverbial Yorkshire hyperbole.Footnote 35 True, the expansion in membership of parliament since the days of the Rump meant that, when parliaments met, more points of contact were available for those seeking to do business. But, as always, well-placed backers were needed if a cause was to go forward. The first local bill read in the 1656 parliament was for the establishment of courts of law and equity at York—the city of which Speaker Widdrington was recorder.Footnote 36 Few seem to have found their own interest an embarrassment as they went about their parliamentary business: Major General Lambert coupled his introduction of a bill for the Yorkshire woolen trade in 1656 with the observation that he derived most of his income from that trade; Speaker Widdrington commented matter-of-factly early the same session, “Here are two private bills, concerning two of the members, which I suppose you will admit to be read of as the first business.”Footnote 37 But the spotty legislative record of the Protectoral parliaments—and the realities of power once the parliament-based executive of Rump and Nominated Assembly was displaced—meant that, for most purposes, Whitehall mattered more than did Westminster.
At Whitehall the Protector and his council of course offered, numerically, even fewer points of contact than had the Rump; nevertheless, they tried to maintain a high level of responsiveness by means both formal and informal. There was one potentially significant expansion in the network of communication, for the military origins of the Protectorate created distinctive channels running from well-connected officers stationed locally—the major generals provide the most obvious instance.Footnote 38 Probably more important for politically less-favored suitors in the Protectorate was the master of requests, an institutional holdover from days of kingship, whose duty it was to receive, winnow, and advance the causes of the poor and, by extension, of anyone. It has been suggested that the masters’ positions were honorific, but the number of their endorsements to petitions suggests that this was far from the case. In March 1654 the newsbook Mercurius Aulicus paid ironic tribute to the importance of the two masters as conduits, even as it acknowledged the Protector's sense of his role: “This day his Highness (according to his propensity to relieve the Oppressed) could not give Audience (being impeded by other occasions of State) unto the Master of Requests, concerning Petitions; which occasioned storms of sighs from the passive Breast of expecting Aulicus.”Footnote 39 The masters seem on the whole to have reported directly to the Protector himself, but abundant evidence shows that individual councillors, like councillor-MPs under the Rump before them, had, took, or were allocated responsibility for causes and petitions originating in their home area.Footnote 40 The paucity of councillors meant that their local remits extended—or were assumed to extend—beyond their own county boundaries: so the inhabitants of Barnard Castle in County Durham petitioned their Yorkshire neighbor General Lambert to use his influence with the Protector to secure an augmentation to the living of the town's minister.Footnote 41 Local responsibility clearly did not depend entirely on relationships of formal representation such as those to be found in parliament. And, of course, most informal of all were the unmarked back channels along which some communication flowed in ways familiar to students of Stuart politics—thus, Lieutenant General Brayne in Jamaica sent via John Barrington, gentleman of the bedchamber, a request for some bloodhounds in 1657 “for the finding and killing of the wild Negroes,” along with the lament, “I have no interest in any other freind [sic].”Footnote 42
Most supplicants were of course like Brayne and in need of assistance to help them to a hearing. Clergy played a part at all levels. Foremost were the chaplains who attended Cromwell and who surely made their voices heard on the many petitions dealing with religious provision that he referred to his council.Footnote 43 The city of York in 1654 counted on the broad lobbying services of its well-regarded Presbyterian minister, Edward Bowles, while at a humbler level job seekers needed testimonials to their spiritual state, litigants could count on the plausibility of clerical witness, and public servants needed spiritual prompts.Footnote 44 In October 1649 a group of officers at army headquarters in Whitehall solicited fellow officers scattered in garrisons to join with godly and like-minded soldiers under their command, and to take deeply to heart the godly cause: “Your Christian Brethren that shall … assotiate themselves att the hedquarters will waite for and to that end have desired Mr Isaac Knight (who allwaies attends the Generall) to receive and Comunicate what the Lord shall putt into your hearts to write to them.” Knight, Lord General Fairfax's chaplain, acted as conduit, even as sounding board, for the godly. Other officers were quick to take the hint, and the commanders of the Wallingford garrison relayed to Knight their political fears, “which wee the rather mencion to yow being the nighest unto those who are most imediately concerned in it.”Footnote 45 But most groups and individuals in the localities wanting to spare themselves the hazard of attending for weeks on end had little choice but to pay fees to a broker, who probably assured them, with that experienced solicitor Thomas Povey, that all depended on whether an address was “dextrously insinuated.” Footnote 46
Great ones could afford the best, as they always had—the modern military-industrial complex did not invent the revolving door connecting the state's service and the privileged. Thus, the earl of Warwick's solicitor was William Jessop, clerk of the Protector's council, while the earl of Devonshire was said to have retained sometime MP William Purefoy for £200 per annum.Footnote 47 Others did what they could. Facing decimation in 1656 and judging that “any eminent person … doe[s] not love to be too much troubled,” a Buckinghamshire gentleman advised Sir Ralph Verney to find a friend “to bring you to the little officers, & to acquaint you with some little waies.”Footnote 48 Such means were widely available, for the republic's origins in ill-organized borrowing and war created a new class of advocate, those who had worked tedious “apprentiships” as “Solicitors for the Public Faith” urging petitioners’ claims to payment;Footnote 49 they were joined by former army officers, ideal intermediaries not just with ex-colonels on the councils of state but also with the officials with whom so many had dealt for regimental arrears, debentures, and the like.Footnote 50 “Being troubled with Excise,” in need of a “comfortable” way of living, and “being dayly applyed unto by friends for counsel,” John Lilburne reflected in 1653 that he had determined to pursue the “honest causes” of others, “wherein I gave satisfaction.” His confident tone contrasts with the anxiety other agents or solicitors expressed as they hung around the council door hoping to catch the eye of one among the great, or—once they had achieved that—their frustration at “the charge and the travaile … and the Interest which [they would] spend” in pushing further.Footnote 51
Conditions of revolutionary change presented particular difficulties even to the most assiduous solicitor. What this could mean we can infer from the experience of Ipswich in the wartime crisis of the late spring of 1653 or from Thomas Povey's protest in mid-1659 (that other moment of acute turmoil): that he had made his approaches “to his Highness that is dead, and to him that is last extinct, to the Councell of State, to Mr Secretarie, and almost everie individuall member thereof, to the Admiraltie, and in breife to all Authorities and Persons which had any Capacitie to effect, compass, or perswade.”Footnote 52 Yet even in slightly quieter times the lobbyist's road map proved hard to make out.
The efforts of plague-stricken Haverfordwest, in Pembrokeshire, to persuade the Rump to reduce the fiscal burden of the monthly assessment illustrate the way national crisis could disrupt paths to the center; they also illuminate the workings of both Rump and Protectorate. Plague in 1651–52 had caused the flight of most of the port town's surviving “better sort,” payers to the poor-rate, and this at a time when frightened buyers shunned the local “high frieze” cloth, “the winter coat liveries of this nation.” The corporation moved fast, using all the influence it could muster; since it had long ago lost its MPs to purge, it looked—and perhaps with some confidence—to the army for a mediator. The town was fortunate in that Colonels Goffe and Pride were former residents, and both had visited again during the 1648 campaign in south Wales; Cromwell himself had embarked at the port for Ireland in 1649, and he had reported on its poverty to parliament in support of the town's successful bid to reduce its swingeing 1649 tax assessment, even as the town's magistrates had been involved in supplying his Irish expedition. But those influential friends were as nothing to the new foe the corporation had acquired by inadvertently treading on the toes of Major General Harrison, the rising power in south Wales. Harrison's prime agent of godly evangelism in the region was Vavasour Powell, and the then mayor, “having had no knowledge of the gent[leman] and that it had pleased God to send [him] into these partes,” had affronted him—a “miscarriage of the late mayor,” the corporation assured Harrison earnestly, for which they had suffered heavily “by the intermission of [Harrison’s] assistance, haveinge none ells to speake for us soe that now we are near utterly ruined.”Footnote 53 The scale of the danger is apparent in the scale of the corporation's counter—it implored Harrison to take upon himself oversight of the town's civil and religious affairs, presumably in the hope of obtaining his backing for an address to the Rump—who alone would revise the assessment—through Speaker Lenthall. But in late April 1652 the town's agent in London reported that “the Major Generall doth much delay” any consideration of reassessment, so he proposed turning instead to Cromwell as a path to Lenthall. Accordingly, the corporation prepared a petition that belabored the lord general's visit to the port.Footnote 54 A week later their luck seemed to turn, at least temporarily, when Harrison belied expectations and secured from the army committee a respite on the town's payments until parliament made further order. The following day the mayor, who had himself gone up to the capital, was able to get a petition to Cromwell by way of Goffe the native son; but—in a gesture that speaks volumes of Cromwell's respect for spheres of influence—the lord general passed it on to Harrison, instructing him to “put him in mind of it in the house.” Perhaps affronted by the town's disrespect in approaching Cromwell as well as himself, the major general “by reason of some extraordinary occasions would not come that day to the house.”Footnote 55 It took unexpected clerical intervention to revive the town's morale. On 4 May, Hugh Peter, the radical Independent divine and bellwether of the revolution of 1648– 49, received a letter from Haverfordwest's minister relating the town's plight, which Peter forwarded to Harrison; that jealous plenipotentiary handed it back “without answer,” so Peter determined to go public. The following Sunday, the congregation in Whitehall chapel found itself urged to invoke the Lord “in relation to the sadd condition the towne is at present in.” Although this was an extension of an established charitable technique, it was also an end run around Harrison to a wider godly audience—and it worked, for in the following week reports came of “manie good friends & all lament the townes case.”Footnote 56 It must have been that wholly informal appeal to Peter that did the trick, for on 17 May a rank outsider, John Ireton—sheriff of London, the late commissary-general's brother, and an Independent in Peter's mold—took the town's petition to Cromwell and gained from him the essential invitation for the town's agents “to attend him at the Parliament doore tomorrow to put him in minde of it.” True to his word, the lord general then introduced them to Speaker Lenthall.Footnote 57
Access even to the speaker's chair and at the lord general's behest brought Haverfordwest no relief. The new assessment act of December 1652 left the town's tax burden as it had been. David Scott has recently written forcefully of the crude balance of power at Westminster on local matters during the Long Parliament, the work of parliament men who watched anxiously lest another constituency steal an advantage over their own. The Rump's practice of leaving relative valuations untouched as it raised or lowered the totals of the assessment across the board suggests that Pride's Purge did not change habits. The accession of Haverfordwest's army friends to power in the Protectorate brought the town what it had worked so hard to obtain during the Rump. While surrounding Pembrokeshire and the neighboring counties of Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire saw their assessments reduced by a half in the next assessment, under the ordinance of February 1655, Haverfordwest's fell to just over 20 percent of its previous level—and the relative proportions held throughout the Protectorate.Footnote 58 The concentration of executive and legislative authority in well-disposed hands clearly had something to recommend it. But under the Rump other conventions had held. Cromwell conformed to the etiquette of petition and address, deferred in parliamentary matters to the speaker, and respected the interests of a subordinate. Meanwhile, Haverfordwest's petitioners had to listen acutely to the way the wind was blowing and clutch at the straws carried to them, ever ready to exploit visits made to their town long ago and to struggle for an invitation to attend the powerful at the door of the House.
Petitioning in print
The harshness of the competition for the favor of the powerful in the hurly-burly of the capital—particularly as the implications of Rumper oligarchy for representation and responsiveness became clear—turned the attention of many petitioners to the printing press. We have lately learned much about the increasingly sophisticated uses of print for partisan purposes in the seventeenth century;Footnote 59 and print, propaganda, and petitioning came together to impressive effect in 1641–42 and again in 1647–48 in what has been called for a later period “a struggle to represent the will of the nation” in dangerous campaigns for political and sometimes military support.Footnote 60 The Levellers’ discovery of the sovereignty of the people impelled them to make particular use of the mass, and therefore printed, petition. (It inclined them as well to a lofty tone with the people's representatives that grated on parliament-men, especially Rumpers who had discovered their own claim to sovereignty, with results that can be seen in the number of Leveller petitions unceremoniously “laid by” and of Leveller presenters committed to jail.Footnote 61) But though supporters of John Lilburne in his various tribulations at the hands of authority continued to print and petition for him through 1653, on the whole overtly politicized petitioning dwindled after the consolidation of the revolution of 1648– 49 until the final resurgence in 1659–60. England in the 1650s was therefore no longer prey to that “petitioning disease” in deeply politicized print that Zaret has claimed; nevertheless, there were many who continued to find their own uses for print.Footnote 62
A growing readiness to go public in private, local, or sectional causes characterized the Commonwealth, and it must be traced to the Rump's oligarchic nature, and not just to a growing frustration at the failure of redress after years of peace.Footnote 63 When Pride's Purge broke the ties between localities and elected representatives who might serve as sponsors, petitioners in numbers changed course. Hoping to strike it lucky somewhere, many endeavored to press a separate—and therefore almost necessarily printed—copy of their texts into each parliament man's hand at the door to the House.Footnote 64 Printed petitions of private grievance thus constituted efforts to increase the efficiency of lobbying as much as to appeal to a wider public (although the egregious Lilburne and his friends provide a familiar exception to the rule). One petitioner protested to Lord General Cromwell in 1653 that he had twice presented printed accounts of his sufferings to each member of the displaced Rump, but to no avail.Footnote 65 Certainly, some—like the fenmen who in 1650 protested at having “attended many moneths at Committee” without a single witness called—chose to go into print out of an understandable frustration;Footnote 66 others cited more sinister obstructions as the spur to print.Footnote 67 Nevertheless, by the end of the Rump a printed appeal to “every individual member” had become a common refrain for petitioners.Footnote 68 The early order of the 1656 parliament “That no private Petition, to be directed to the Parliament, be printed before the same be read in [the] House” and the arrests of those presenting books to members at the door in 1654 and 1656 show what parliament men thought of the practice and argue significant continuity with the Cavalier Parliament's 1661 act to restrict petitioning.Footnote 69 Activists compensated further for the Rump's exclusions by focusing on parliament's committees and printed not just petitions but also the membership list of the committee concerned in order to ease access for those seeking to follow them, turning on its head the House's own prewar practice of posting committee lists in the lobby.Footnote 70 Petitioners moved steadily to develop and even systematize this practice during Barebone's Parliament and published not just lists of members but also of the membership of standing committees; indeed, they even published the committees’ meeting places. Prompts to other potential petitioners even included the publication in early October 1653 of a brief guide for those intending to approach the committee for petitions.Footnote 71 Such guides to access confirm the alertness of the nominated members and their supporters to the weaknesses that had most damaged the Rump; they also underscore the practical utility of print as revolutionary change blocked other channels.
The relation of print and politics was of course both more various and more complex than the mere diffusion of news and opinion.Footnote 72 Print allowed supplicants to appeal even to targeted individual readers—the members as they approached parliament's doors—but it also offered a show of rational persuasion that suited the prevailing rhetoric of public good and public interest. The Rump's “absolute Oligarchie of a Hogen Mogen,” as one print-ready supplicant called it, might seem to have offered him scant opening for direct appeals; nevertheless, he insisted that it was better to follow “this way of publike address.”Footnote 73 Suspicious of merely dancing attendance on the powerful, complainants combined printed and personal appeal: thus, a group of London soapmakers whose petition was already before the Rump's excise committee opted to publish at the same time “for the better and clearer information of the judgments and understandings of every individual member of Parliament”—presumably it too was to be thrust into members’ hands.Footnote 74 There seem to be hints here of a conviction that what one petitioner called “that pack-horse-road of private sollicitations … that Lacquey employment of officious attendances, and tedious trotting from place to place” was neither the most effectual nor indeed the most proper way to work in a commonwealth.Footnote 75 But the gains that print publication offered in its putative appeal to rationality were offset by the sacrifice of personal and tactical immediacy. One academic petitioner who made a virtue of choosing what he claimed to be the openness and clarity of print simultaneously lamented his choice “wherein I shall deny my self all advantages by prejudiciall and private informations, saying and unsaying.”Footnote 76 Lobbying, as its modern practitioners know well, depends on disinformation quite as much as on information, and the sophisticated petitioner recognized that intimacy—where it could be gained—might hold advantages over print.
Status, service, and sympathy
Rational persuasion therefore was never the whole or even most of the story of petitioning. The petitioner's identity and posture mattered hugely. Just as under monarchy, the petition was at least formally a socially cohesive device, available to all, up and down the social ladder. Despite the Rump's abolition of the House of Lords and despite the prevailing rhetoric of godliness and selfless service, status still constituted a powerful claim. While London housewife petitioners to parliament were brusquely dismissed, the countess of Holland “with divers other Countesses and Ladies” in March 1649 formed a stately procession to the very bar of the House, petitioning—albeit in vain—for the lives of some of the grand delinquents of 1648.Footnote 77 Indeed, noblemen petitioned assiduously for special treatment, and occasionally succeeded, to the frustration of those major generals who found themselves thwarted by Protectoral discharges of the great men they sought to decimate in 1655–56.Footnote 78 At this level, too, many parties found it easy to reinforce verbal with material arguments. We may wonder how much the tulip bulbs that the renowned gardener and former exile Sir Thomas Hanmer exchanged with that other great florist, General Lambert, and with Secretary of State Thurloe's wife contributed to his own discharge from decimation and to the naturalization of his son.Footnote 79
Among the less elevated, those who could allege constancy and commitment tended to be the ones who secured a hearing. Since the republic in its successive manifestations made some effort to relieve the hardships of the deserving, ordinary men and women competed with claims of service and suffering in the victorious cause.Footnote 80 These could be subject to quite searching interrogation, as the widow of one Yorkshire tradesman who had lent heavily to a local parliamentarian colonel found to her cost; her petition to the Protector's council was referred to a nicely providentialist subcommittee that dissected the record not of the tradesman and his loan but of his debtor colonel on campaign—and found that sadly wanting.Footnote 81 Nevertheless, the basic principle of partisan service was clear, it often worked for petitioners, and as it lent itself to formulaic recitation it spread to matters of more general import.Footnote 82 In 1654 some Middlesex JPs, including Colonels Pride and Barkstead, petitioned for a market at Westminster and expressed the hope “that they that have adventured their lives and fortunes for the service of the Parliament, and present Government as far as any other, shall … have this their just request granted, being for publick good, and no private interest.”Footnote 83
The stress on personal attributes and service particularly characterized the Protectorate, thanks in good part to the priorities of the Protector himself. Endorsements to surviving petitions indicate that, far from petitions flowing up with recommendations from councillors and council to the Protector, in fact the Protector referred many requests to his council, especially once the 1654 peace with the Dutch freed his energies, and even some material resources, for the task. The studied accessibility of Charles II, forecast so brilliantly in Clarendon's closing speech to the Convention of 1660, with its promise of an ever open royal window through which the subject's every complaint, every whisper, could, should, would flow, seems to invite a contrast with Cromwellian narrowness epitomized in Major General Kelsey's determination “to maintayne the interests of God's people (which is to be preferred before a thousand parliaments).”Footnote 84 But the Protector insisted on his duty to bring good government to the nation as a whole, and unlike Charles he limited his other pursuits; he prided himself on knowing local ways firsthand since he had himself traversed every county in the land,Footnote 85 flourished his approachability in his well-publicized common touch and in his striking display of self in his printed speeches,Footnote 86 and opened himself throughout his career to petitioners.Footnote 87 Cromwell's continuing concern for the well-being of Haverfordwest suggests a genuine solicitousness, and this seems similarly evident in his dealings with individuals. In July 1656 the wife of a participant in Penruddock's Rebellion petitioned to inform the Protector that, though he had referred to the council her earlier petition to him, that body had been too busy to act on it; her second approach seems to have had an effect, for the following week she petitioned the council acknowledging her husband's release on bail but requesting relief from the consequences of sequestration. There are signs that for Cromwell such a concern for the alleviation of petitioners’ sufferings was personal as well as official. One petition from Penruddock's own family gained the endorsement—“out of Charity”—of “My lord Rich,” by that point part of the Protector's family circle but scarcely of his government.Footnote 88 This was a Protector, as J. C. Davis has recently reminded us, who thrived on personal contact, and indeed the account of one Norfolk gentleman who petitioned against decimation makes it clear that Cromwell was more interested in chatting about the petitioner's family than he was in the petition itself. Whatever Cromwell's motives, effectual contact was made and the petition was quietly successful.Footnote 89
Making addresses
The ground rules for communities were little different from those that applied to individual petitioners: argument and mediation both played a part. Where individuals or communities urgently sought something out of the ordinary—material relief of some kind—then like Haverfordwest and countless ordinary folk they sought intermediaries to help them explain why their pleas should suddenly be heard. Where the cause was of less critical moment, communities often sought an occasion to make a loyal address, the corporate equivalent of the individual's claim of selfless service. Thus, the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge watched each other during the 1650s lest one steal a march on the other by publishing a volume of commendatory verses that had no echo from its sister.Footnote 90
Gestures of address were prime counters in what participants hoped would be an exchange of benefits. Great Yarmouth wished to persuade the government to compel the neighboring counties to contribute to the repair of its harbor, a long-standing concern, and early in 1650 the corporation resolved on a petition “to owne the Parliament” and to pray for aid. There follows in the town's assembly book the text of a quite partisan petition to the Rump, though a petition whose bottom line lies in the harbor. A similarly strategic move to acknowledge government came from York at the end of June 1659 when the city's decision to own the restored Rump was coupled with an attempt to have the 1657 act for navigation on the River Ouse confirmed. Ideally, of course, the exchange should be a continuing one. Failing with the Rump, the corporation of Great Yarmouth tried again in 1654 when it coupled the offer of its high stewardship to Henry Cromwell with a petition to “acknowledge Gods goodness to this Nation under his Highnesse government,” before pitching again the request for aid with the harbor and various other desiderata.Footnote 91 In a similar attempt to build an open-ended commitment, Gloucester linked the offer of its high stewardship to Henry Cromwell early in 1654 with a “cordiall declaracion and humble addresse” to the Protector, and a plea for the reinforcement of the “liberties and Priviledges” of the city.Footnote 92 Such gestures of “owning” and dependency aimed to elicit attention, acknowledgment, and, with luck, dialog, in a return from the target audience.
The flow of addresses into Whitehall—petitions from ordinary suitors at all times, formal declarations from counties and boroughs at great moments such as the succession of Protector Richard—was, because many-stranded, necessarily fraught with uncertainty for those who made them. Indeed, in a revolution it might even be fraught with danger, and in the developing crisis of 1659 Thomas Povey repeatedly urged his clients not to attract attention: “trouble the Parliament as little as you can with importunat Addresses, because you will thereby but accuse your own weakness and give advantages against your selves, to some who may make ill use thereof.”Footnote 93 The decline in addresses and petitions after the outpouring that had greeted Richard Cromwell's succession suggests that others came to a similar conclusion. Care in language and gesture was therefore essential. An intermediary or supplicant who pressed in “importunately … as one who would have no nay but would speak with that great man” risked being “laid by the heeles … for his peremptoriness and malapertness.”Footnote 94 The consequences of Haverfordwest's rebuff to Vavasour Powell showed that towns as well as individuals might lose from misplaced words.
The successful address needed somehow to combine seemliness with a godly authenticity appropriate to those who distrusted polished rhetorical exercises.Footnote 95 It was a difficult undertaking, and Thomas Povey judged that in the last resort none could tell whether “words bee so luckely placed, as to be able to please and effect any good thing.”Footnote 96 Pious—or perhaps just hopeful—petitioners appear to have counted on the prevalence “above” of the assumption that in a moral community language and gesture flowed from heart as well as head, and that the heart would be taken to show through the words. All too aware of the political danger their loyalties in the 1640s had put them in, the freeholders of Barbados pleaded with Captain General Cromwell in the spring of 1653 to put aside “any other character of our harts then what appears in this our addresse.”Footnote 97 Like increasing numbers of others, they thus strove to manifest the loyalty and attachment that was craved by a regime eager for reassurance of the nation's reform into peaceability and even righteousness. Nowhere is recognition of the political importance of words clearer than in the striking choices made by two most favored places, Gloucester and Leicester, hero cities of the struggle against the king. Gloucester had clinched its position by parlaying its corporate heroism in the siege of 1643 into a successful offer of its high stewardship during the Rump to the then Lord General Cromwell.Footnote 98 As Protector, Cromwell relinquished this honor to his younger son Henry, but the corporation continued to enjoy the fruits—bucks from the Protector's park at Woodstock and support in its jurisdictional squabbles with the gentry of the cathedral close. With Oliver's death the city stood to lose much—his generosity to the city had led his son Henry to warn from Ireland in 1657 that he sought to “give away all Galway”—and it needed to move both expeditiously and carefully to establish ties with the great man's heir.Footnote 99 Accordingly, the corporation drafted an address to the young Protector Richard ringing with zealous flourishes. The draft recited Oliver's achievements and Gloucester's fidelity to the cause, and it trumpeted Richard's honor and sovereignty. But it went further, in ways that call in question an earlier generation of historians’ assumptions of urban neutralism and in ways that clearly alarmed some contemporary readers. Rejoicing in Richard's succession, which had mitigated their grief at Oliver's death, the corporation gave joy and grief an unusual slant when it begged “that your Highness speciall care and serious endeavours may be that all your free borne people may enioy their ancient Birthrights.” Such language was to resound in the London presses in the brief Leveller resurgence of late 1659, but it rang oddly on this occasion in late 1658. The corporation's legal counsel—one of them the Rump's Speaker, William Lenthall—headed off this tactless clarion, and the final petition, entered ten days later, was suitably sanitized.Footnote 100
Communities thus believed their words would be noticed and carefully observed their reception themselves. Such behavior might seem counterintuitive: after all, editorial interventions like those of Lenthall were scarcely unknown, and few of those in power would have been shocked had they known of the advice Thomas Povey gave in the summer of 1659 to his client the governor of Barbados that the latter's “choice Friends here … may, as occasion shall serve, time and improve, and perhaps give alterations to such Papers, as you shall transmit.”Footnote 101 Language could be, and was, manufactured to suit the occasion. Yet, if we are to believe Colonel Charles Howard, close scrutiny was given to address and reception alike: forwarding a congratulatory address from the Cumberland grand jury in Oliver's last months, Howard assured Secretary Thurloe that it would be “a great favour to me and the gentlemen subscribers to hear from you what acceptance it getts.”Footnote 102 Indeed, the importance all parties attached to petitioning throughout the century's turmoils suggests that just as the localities sought to secure the goodwill of those “above,” so government sought to be reassured of the goodwill of those below.Footnote 103 The reciprocating political needs of locality and center are nowhere more clearly manifested than at Leicester, ideologically privileged as a result of its martyrdom in the sack of 1645 on the eve of the great victory at Naseby. Like Gloucester, Leicester was anxious to confirm its status on the death of Oliver Cromwell. Early in October 1658 the mayor consulted not just with the town's solicitor but also with the town's clergy in order to hit the right note. At the end of the month the recorder reported from London his dissatisfaction with the product, for all its tribute to the new Protector, Oliver's son Richard Cromwell, as the fruit of “an auspicious smile of Providence” and “another Joshua.” Clearly, anybody could deploy such tropes; the address failed to press the town's advantage in its central role in the providentialist Oliverian myth, “being the first place after many doubtfull conflicts betwixt the Armyes that god shewed himself for the prevaleing partie was from Leicester to Nasbie.” The recorder assured the corporation he would fill the gap in his speech; as important, he would arrange an appropriate presentation, with a delegation of London-based Leicester men whom he would round up and transport to Whitehall in coaches. As he confided to the mayor after the event, this took some effort: “the truth is such notice is taken of these things … that if they bee not presented in an eminent and Cordiall grand way there is [not] much notice taken of them by his highnes and Councell, And when I had none to accompany mee as members of your Borrough, I was constrained to gather upp such I could find fitt persons in habite and gravity.” The effort paid off, for all in this seventeenth-century version of rent-a-crowd played the parts allotted to them. With a broker's advice on timing from Nathaniel Bacon, the recorder's “intimate friend” and the Protector's master of requests, the delegation gained admission and presented the address. Then, to the palpable excitement of the recorder,
his highnes made a pithy pious and excellent speech in which hee took notice of the true and harty affeccions and sufferings of the towne of Leicester in the eminent tymes of danger and that God begunn to shewe himselfe the Lord of hosts in that place and from thence to Nasbie the Lord beginne [to] shewe himself in his instrument his late father etc. of which I gave him a hint in my speech to him, but then his highnes went on with most excellent sayeings for half an hower sheweing his affeccion to the Corporacion in every close of his speech.
Contact had categorically been made, and the recorder could not contain himself: “I pray Mr Maior thinke of these things … use [your] good opportunity; for I am [sure] this tyme you may rectifie many things that are amisse in your Corporacion. … I am sory former tymes did not rectifie them … but nowe lett not the synne lye att your dores.”Footnote 104
Conclusion
If we are to understand the relation of high and low, of center and periphery, we must open our eyes to the way things work even as we register the noise of revolution. The flow of petitions and addresses testifies to a widespread assumption, spanning the political spectrum, that the obligations of government included benevolence and mercy; governors must, in practical terms, do business, look for compromise, and grant rewards and concessions, as well as protect and punish. That assumption was scarcely one-sided. Appeal and solicitation, and gracious response, fell within the canons of reciprocity through the ages; they also replicated the doings of the Lord's people and their God. The hold of such patterns and models on the consciences and calculations of those in power and those who looked to them went some way to offset the presence of the sword in the political calculus of the 1650s.
Working relationships could therefore be built. Indeed, we can go further. The recorder of Leicester's conviction that the reaction to the town's address presented an unsurpassed opportunity reinforces Ian Roy's argument that there existed a real potential for alliance between urban interests and republican governments.Footnote 105 Even as nobles and gentry, who had been and were to be again the local leaders, lay under something of a political cloud, the Protectoral policy of calling in and reforming borough charters compelled many towns to look anew to the center.Footnote 106 And if a revised charter were not enough to win over leading townsmen, the newly remodeled state offered material attractions (naval convoys to protect merchant shipments appealed as far inland as Leeds, building materials from some “vast and altogether useless Cathedrall” like that in neighboring Norwich that enticed Great Yarmouth); thus, the prospect of adjustment to the grinding burden of the assessment certainly drew Haverfordwest closer to the capital.Footnote 107 We may detect political consequences of such burgeoning relationships in Leicester's ostentatious refusal to join the gentry of the county in welcoming General Monck's march to the restoration of monarchy early in 1660, perhaps too in Great Yarmouth's strange willingness to elect the regicide Miles Corbet to parliament later that year; still more striking is Coventry's extraordinary eleven-hundred-signature declaration of devotion to the Protector's “person and … counsels” and “the interest of the Protestant cause”—surely an adequate return on the tax benefits against which the Warwickshire county gentry were to protest vengefully at the Restoration.Footnote 108 We may wonder therefore whether the state building that forms such an unmistakable feature of this decade drew on integrative processes extending far beyond parliament's doors, as well as on the more familiar aversion to renewed domestic conflict. Some sense of integration was surely needed to permit the decade's mobilizations of resources—not just fiscally but in the impressive militia response to the crises of 1651 and 1655Footnote 109 and also in the massive charitable collections for the “Protestant cause” as exemplified by the persecuted Protestants of Savoy.Footnote 110 The republic may have failed to sustain a recognizably republican culture, and it manifestly appalled a good number of those over whom it ruled, even before the disreputable days of late 1659.Footnote 111 Nevertheless, the ligaments that bound regime and nation were not woven merely of partisan fervor and an instinctual acquiescence, but also of a complex of ideology and interest, above and below. State and society were not two distinct orders, for instrumental contacts clearly were made.
