In 1987 cartoonist Posy Simmonds brought down the curtain on the weekly strip cartoon she’d been drawing for the Guardian newspaper and which featured the everyday lives and woes of a gaggle of well-meaning middle-aged, middle-class mums and dads, coloured by a feminist slant on the tribulations of being a stay-at-home mum, or a working mum, or a young woman, or just a woman, in a sexist, man’s world.
The strip focused in particular on the married couple George and Wendy Weber, he an earnest, hunched-over, mustachioed lecturer in sociology at a London polytechnic, she an ex-nurse and harassed mother of six trying to do night school classes, the pair of them united by a commitment to touchy-feely liberal socialism, and vegetarianism and environmentalism. They felt a bit out-dated when they first appeared in the paper in 1977, and they and their world had failed to move with the times, with the triumph of Thatcherism, the unashamed declaration that ‘greed is good’, the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation in the City of London which brought tsunamis of new money coursing through the capital, out into the Home Counties and bought tens of thousands of holiday homes around the countryside, while the Thatcher government did its best to dismantle the post-war welfare state, demonised single mums and welfare scroungers, and huge tranches of heavy industry were denationalised or scrapped.
In 1987 Simmonds axed the Posy strip and concentrated on writing and illustrating children’s books. She continued to do miscellaneous illustrations for the Guardian and other newspapers and magazines. Then in 1992 she returned to the paper with a new strip which lasted a year, chronicling the misadventures of a grumpy, middle-aged, male novelist, J.D. Crouch. (Why, I couldn’t help thinking, does a vehement feminist devote a strip to a man, and a grumpy, middle-aged man at that? Is it because men are more interesting to write about – but surely that’s feminist heresy. Or is it because men, middle-aged grumpy men, are such fun to lambast and satirise?)
This volume, Mustn’t Grumble, brings together that miscellaneous work, plus some of the Crouch series, so feels a bit bitty.
I think the title, Mustn’t Grumble, is ironic. I assume it is an ironic comment on what would nowadays be called the white privilege of most of the characters, who are members of the comfortably-off, London, middle-classes – with a particular focus on Crouch and the London world of writing and publishing – who, despite living what a lot of the rest of the British population would regard as a life of luxury, still manage to be unhappy and find fault with everything.
A calendar from 1988
Simmonds created large-format, monthly cartoons – more illustrated texts – for the Spectator magazine through 1988 and 1989. The calendar format allowed Simmonds to focus on a completely new range of characters, one a month, whose lives are taken to typify the ‘greed is good’ decade as it ended and gave way to the 1900s. Thus:
- January Miles Upmaster (42) LMX broker at Johnson, Duff, Morant, lives in Parsons green with wife Vanessa and daughters Jojo and Davina
- February Chloe Banister (37) design consultant at a top Soho consultancy, a house in Dulwich Village with husband Hugo (TV commercials director) and son Jack, who’s down for Westminster.
- March Jackie Green (29) bed and breakfast landlady, husband’s off work ill, Jackie’s doing lots of jobs to make ends meet and can no longer afford to live in the seaside village of her birth.
- April Desmond Duff (82) retired engineer and resident of Deddingham Court Rest Home.
- May Mr Robin Chutney-Darke, a dealer in 18th and 19th century paintings, educated at Eton.
- June Katie Gilleyman (7) is having a birthday party, which in true bilious Simmonds style, is an opportunity for her to describe the snobbery, hypocrisy and showing off among the various mums.
- July Tony McVitie and Lorraine, waiting exhausted in the departure lounge for the plane back to England from Malta, where they’ve been on holiday and Lorraine’s lovely long legs got a) sunburnt b) bitten by mosquitoes.
- August Farmer Hughes facing financial ruin.
- September Prissie Rugeley, mother of four and wife of a British Army infantry officer stationed in Germany.
- October James Dalston Crouch (59) fading novelist, is at Euston accompanied by sexy young publicity girl from his publishers, having arrived back from a dismal outing to a book signing in Manchester where only six people turned up.
- November Simon Sandercock (33) single, company director, rugger player, in blue and white striped tie and bright red braces, what a hoot he is!
- December A characteristically cynical and downbeat take on Christmas, Simmonds focuses on an ageing failed actor named Gerald, who had high hopes, played a number of roles in provincial theatres and a few sitcoms, and now is reduced to working as Father Christmas in a department store.
What’s striking is how wordy these profiles are, how densely worked-out everyone’s backstory is, as if they are characters in a novel. There’s nothing particularly comic or even entertaining about the characters, except, maybe, the wry smile of recognition which I identified earlier as the prime pleasure from a Posy Simmonds cartoon.
And they’re in colour, full colour, unlike all the Posy strips, attention to colour which will come into its own in the later graphic novels.
Six bounden duties
I had to look up the meaning of this phrase. A ‘bounden duty’ is ‘a responsibility regarded by oneself or others as obligatory’. Each of the six is in the page-sized format of the Posy strips.
- Conservation A message from Aubrey Shyte, owner of Grade II listed Rakesham Hall, in which he spouts the usual crap of owners of very big houses which are largely funded from the public purse, and explains why it is necessary to close the public footpath through his deer park.
- Numeracy and literacy As if for children, the strip compares the world of Smilies (1st class travel, 1st class service, 2nd homes, 2nd cars, 3 hour lunches etc) and Grumblies (1 parent families, 2nd class citizens, 3rd world conditions etc) i.e. the gleeful rich and the miserable poor. The sentiment is hardly novel, and the tone is bleak and bitter. The entertainment, such as it is, comes in the format and in the satirical use of child-style drawings to convey this bitter truth.
- A sense of humour Simmonds parodies a range of different comic styles with dead humourless, depressing, grim content i.e. the first little strip is about the gender wage gap, then how we’re killing the planet with radiation, then the health gap between the rich and the poor, then a working class woman complaining about male chauvinism… Hard to see who this kind of thing is aimed at… Is it preaching to the choir to make them feel more bitter and angry?
- Keeping the lines of communication open Middle class parents in the kitchen with a bottle of wine open discussing their awful children, lazing around reading porn all day… while the teenage kids are in the living room saying their parents are grumpy because they’re going through the menopause and mid-life crisis – both teams saying it’s just a phase the others are going through. This just feels bleak and depressing.
- Not to change one’s spots A comfortably off middle class family claim they haven’t changed a bit, well, they’ve sold the old C CV and bought a Volvo, sold the bean bags and Che Guevara posters, and built a new conservatory on the back of the house, still running a poster shop which is doing frightfully well, and as to politics it’s not them that’s changed, it’s the Labour Party. — Obviously the point is to show how they have changed out of all recognition from their young adult selves.
- To record Some kind of satire on the middle class compulsion to record everything with a camera and on video, with a bit of extra satire / bitterness thrown in at the end saying there are some events too traumatic to be photographed… and that’s when the bloodsucking media step in… Odd, because Posy did of course work most of her life for the bloodsucking media.
The cherry orchard A satire on Londoners and their second homes in the country, cast in the form of a parody of the Chekhov play, with the middle class couple lamenting the fact that the orchard across the road was sold by the farmer to a developer who’s built a bloody great garden centre there! The couple can’t wait to sell up and get back to London.
Hard Times (1992)
As mentioned above, Simmonds returned to the Guardian with a new strip rotating about the failing novelist J.D. Crouch, but giving herself the freedom to feature other ad hoc characters and even – the occasional cameo appearance from the old Weber favourites.
- Hard times An ironic strip in which reinsurance broker Miles Upmaster gets home and berates his young wife for having friends round, eating expensive food etc, seeing as he’s had no bonus for two years, the firm’s reorganising and he might even be sacked. In the final picture he lies back on an elaborate, swagged and bow-tied four-poster bed and laments how hard his life is.
- An explanation by J.D. Crouch, Author Crouch explains that the recent interview and photos of him at home with his family are a travesty, that he dislikes his grown-up son and is going through a rough patch with his second wife.
- Mid-life libido in forward and reverse J.D. Crouch first of all rants to his wife that their son had a pretty young woman over to stay and how dare he use the place as a knocking shop. When his wife puts him right, that they’re not shagging, just friends, he slept on the floor etc, Crouch switches to the polar opposite position and says, Good God, why on earth is his son not knocking off such a fabulous ‘piece’, lovely bum in figure-hugging leather. In other words, Men, eh! Lascivious hypocrites.
- Mens sana Crouch and his adult son have an argument because the old man is always having epic baths, which triggers a trip down memory lane, remembering all the baths he’s had in all the cheap shitty flats, and how much he cared about Thom Gunn and Suez in the 50s, and Ferlinghetti and Czechoslovakia in the 60s, and the more luxury bath he got when his first novel made it big and was adapted for TV. Now we find Crouch splashing about in a huge jacuzzi!
- Literary party Crouch tells us about a literary party he went to, giving his version of events in which he nonchalantly sailed through the crowd – but this is counterpointed by sub-titles pointing out what really happened, which is that Crouch barely got close to the people he said he talked to, and nobody was interested in talking to him except a waitress who said she thought her granny liked his stuff. Depressing portrait of a man on the way down.
- Club ability Crouch’s wife Sophie is invited to his club where a crusty old cigar-smoking bore explains to her why they don’t allow women members and she proceeds to take the mickey, yes, my God, what would happen if women were allowed in to remind men of their child-rearing responsibilities or maybe drinking all alone at the bar or… Feminism = helping middle-class women join exclusive London clubs.
- Haves and have-nots An idealistic young teacher is trying to teach a junior school class to pretend to be flower buds in the soil which slowly wriggle upwards and burst into the light. One little boy gets it, but when she asks the others to do the same they explain he’s only showing off because he’s got a brand new pair of Nike Air trainers.
- Lost Eden A Victorian picture of children playing in the street is criticised by do-gooding modern parents, tut tut, they might be knocked down by a lorry or abducted by a paedo… contrasted with a picture of today’s young people, packed inside onto a sofa, eating junk food and watching violent videos on TV.
- Noises off A well-off middle class woman is in bed with her husband and the can hear the coughing of the vagrant who sleeps in their doorway all night, and she then has an aria describing how awful it is and how awful she and her husband feel, and that’s why they’re double glazing the window so they won’t be able to hear him any more.
- The vileness of penury Vanessa, blonde wife of reinsurance broker Miles (who we’ve met several times by now) answers the door to her ex-cleaner. Miles has been laid off so they’ve had to sack all their staff and the strip consists of a sequence of speeches in which Vanessa asks the tracksuit-bottomed cleaner to feel sorry for her, now that they’re both in the same boat and all.
- Common market A stuck-up posh mum walks round a London market lamenting the scruffy way the common fruit and veg are displayed and comparing everything negatively with the simply super markets you get in France (where she, of course, has a second home) – and wonders why all the stall-keepers scowl at her.
- Insecurity Miles and Vanessa Upmaster (again) she wakes up in the middle of the night (in their wonderfully curtained and beribboned double bed) because she hears something outside and her subsequent fears give a list of all the burglars and criminals a posh white lady can imagine, up to and including the hiss of an ocy-acetylene kit until they realise… it’s the sound of someone having a piss in their doorway.
- Beneath the ivory tower The life of a writer is a hard one, grinding away, wasting time in all kind of displacement activities. And so grumpy J.D. Crouch goes to the grocers where he buys some peas and some such while listening to customers discussing the ups and downs of Lady Di’s marriage to Prince Charles (they were married on 29 July 1981, during 1992 the book about her by Andrew Morton, plus leaked phone recording revealed their marriage was a sham). Crouch takes a characteristically pompous and high line that he doesn’t read ‘newspapers’ or mucky his fingers with current affairs. Whereas we then see him take the groceries home wrapped in a newspaper which he feverishly unfolds, straightens out and reads.
- Agony and ecstasy The Webers haven’t completely disappeared. Here George makes a reappearance. An old friend from the poly took early retirement and was irked when, shortly afterwards, the poly upgraded to a university. Now he meets George and colleagues in the pub who set him right about how working conditions are ten times harder, no-one will fund their course, the seminar room is always booked, the students are doing so many other modules they can’t concentrate on your courses, and so on…
- Object lesson A mum who bears a resemblance to an older, grey-haired Wendy Weber, tries to comfort her daughter who’s convinced she’s fat and ugly, the mum telling her she’s not and she should be glad not to be treated as a ‘sex object’, the result of all the battles her mum and the feminists of her generation fought, and any way she’s bombarded with phone calls from boys. That, mum, the girl is explained, is because I can drive. They want me to be their taxi driver. As she slopes away she sobs, ‘I’d rather be a sex object.’
- Dating a single parent Man arrives to take a woman on a date. Her little one bursts out crying and needs to be comforted. When she asks the teenage daughter to look after the toddler, the teenager bursts out that mum doesn’t care about her revision or her exams. So they all end up crying in a cuddle, and when the mum eventually extricate herself to go with her date, she looks frazzled. Being a woman is so hard!
- Coming cleanish Crouch is having an affair with a young woman (do writers do anything else, in Posy Simmonds?) and spends the strip working through different scenarios how to tell his wife, ending up with bottling out and not telling her at all.
- Acquiring the habit Crouch comes across his teenage children quietly reading books and is astonished and delighted and tells wife Sophie to keep quiet, but she insists they’re a load of old rubbish they found at the jumble sale, full of nauseating stereotypes and their bickering puts the kids off reading so they turn on the TV and get glued to the box.
- Fireworks At a fireworks party a grandad is arguing with his teenage grand-daughter, complaining about her generations’s pessimism, they’ve never had it so good etc. The mother intervenes to break up the fight but finds both the others turning on her, the grandad saying the 60s generation had it lucky, with an economic boom, growth in higher education, jobs galore, cheap flats, sex on tap thanks to the pill, yes and all before AIDS says the daughter and before you know it, old and young have ganged up on the middle-aged mum. It’s tough being a middle-aged woman!
- Sunbeam corner A bizarre strip in which a balding middle-aged man conducts a smiling exercise, in order to keep optimistic, although the words underneath spell the grim news headlines of the day (Maastricht, wages freeze, subsidiarity, British steel, Downing Street, Public spending freeze, Price increases etc.
- We’re dreaming of a white Christmas Aubrey Shyte, the pompous rich landowner, has become a real hate figure for Simmonds, and leads this hypocritical rendering of ‘White Christmas’, against the backdrop of a dingy, rundown street somewhere in London with a couple of homeless people sleeping in doorways, until the snow covers up the homeless and the street looks remarkably scenic and festive. God, Simmonds hates Christmas! Of the ten or so Christmas cartoons she’s done, all are dyspeptic.
A calendar from 1989
Another series of page-large pieces, each featuring a person of the month, described in immense wordy detail and accompanied by a full-scale, colour cartoon, with a spattering of other smaller ones illustrating the text.
- Janvier Mme Rutherford, harassed French teacher, two young children in daycare, husband works at a garden centre, worn down with stress by the horrible kids, growing class sizes, LEA cuts so she has to cover other teacher’s lessons, and soon. God, it’s hard being a woman (teacher).
- February Conversation among a gaggle of middle-aged men and women attending a health spa in the country, ending with the sort of comedy that they sneak out to scoff a packet of Maltesers in the car park.
- March A soliloquy from Australian dentist Warren McMurdo moaning about the bad state posh patient Simon Sandercock arrives in.
- April Rachel (14) on her horse Sultan, at this year’s First Gashford Hunt.
- May Dido is 18 from Haverstock Hill and at a super private school.
- June Etiquette for the new landed gentry: Dealing with trespassers i.e. if you’re nouveau riche and bought a whopping house in the country you need to clear trespassers off your land but be damned certain they’re oiks and walkers, and not other members of the gentry who you need to keep buttered up.
- July Gillian Button (25) with a first in French and Drama, is now a PA at the BBC, and a surprisingly heavy smoker.
- August Clive Troutley (37) a golf addict.
- September When harassed housewife Pippa gets to W in the alphabet book she’s reading her kids, she realises everything named in it is either a health hazard or threatened with extinction (panda, whale etc). Depressing.
- October Adam Nubleigh (27) went to a North London comprehensive but dresses and sounds as if he went to a posh private school and flogs fake antique furniture to the over-rich.
- November Posh Naomi Padfield is a big opera fan. She is given a soliloquy about how she’s driven up to Covent Garden from Beaconsfield despite the beastly traffic on the M40.
- December Colin Cockley is managing director of Retouché Studios, here he is at the firm’s Christmas party.
Note:
- how everyone is white, heterosexual and all are either Londoners or from the sunny Home Counties. Black, Asian or immigrant experience, lower-middle or working-class experience, are things beyond Simmonds’s ken and which she therefore, wisely, avoids.
- The use of rich deep colouring.
- The very heavy use of text. At least half, sometimes more, of the space is text. There’s little funny or amusing about these caricatures, but a great deal of effort has gone into thinking through each of the characters’ backstories.
Bumping along the bottom
Being a further set of the weekly strips Simmonds devoted to failing novelist J.D. Crouch, with appearances from other characters, and a few cameo appearances from our old friends George and Wendy Weber.
Does ‘bumping along the bottom’ refer solely to Crouch, or to the entire middle class which was hit hard by the recession of 1991-2?
- Bumping along the bottom Miles Upmaster, who we’ve met a number of times, is now officially unemployed and trying to sell his house, reduced to scrubbing and cleaning it and then keeping his temper while prospective buyers walk round it poking and prying.
- Scene from a literary life J.D. Crouch takes his dog for a walk on the common and, noticing people stopping and staring, egotistically assumes because he was on TV last night doing an interview. Simmonds gives him plenty of room to preen and swank before pulling back to reveal that all this time his dog is being shagged by another dog. That’s why people are staring and pointing.
- Missing persons Canvassers for political parties are shown working their way along a busy road of suburban houses, and the inhabitants making all kinds of excuses for not speaking to them. Only at the end does one of the frustrated canvassers explain they’re all dodging the poll tax (which required that you had to register to pay the council tax in order to get on the electoral register. An estimated million people preferred to have no vote and so avoid paying the tax).
- Election fever A satire on the Crouch household getting ‘election fever’, told from the point of view of the wife, Sophie, who feels dizzy and nauseous for three weeks (being a Labour voter) compared to grumpy old Crouch the novelist who votes Conservative (Why? ‘Because of my wallet’), the strip follows through election night when, contrary to all the opinion polls, the Conservatives under John Major returned to power (9 April 1992).
- Tired old sociologist George Weber sits, alone and alienated, in a shopping centre and marvels that people are still continuing on the same mindless consumerism which characterised the 1980s, despite the economic crash, unemployment, bankruptcies and so on. His musings are transformed into those of a naturalist studying the great herds of the African savannah.
- Topped balls Crouch is trying to get membership of an exclusive golf club but his attempts are ruined by his wife, Sophie, who insists on coming along, bring the two small children and picking mushrooms.
- Spot the difference Using the split screen or binary technique she’s used elsewhere, Simmonds contrasts the fortunes of a dealer in oil paintings and watercolours at their 1988 ‘view’ and the same event four years later in 1992 i.e. at the 1992 view, he can’t afford canapés, the wine is cheap and nobody is buying.
- Terminal belly ache Waiting at the airport department lounge with his wife and children, Crouch volunteers to go and get a magazine for his wife to read. When he returns after some delay he is in a filthy mood, complaining about the junk people watch and read and eat and drink. Wife Sophie knows what this means. He didn’t find a copy of one his books in the bookstall.
- Déjeuner sur le patio A simply lovely English middle-class couple lament that their simple holiday hideaway in rural France has been ruined by all kinds of pollution (from the septic tank, the chlorine in the swimming pool, the copper sulphate they spray the vines with), there seem to be endless repairs, snarling dogs if you go for a walk and they’re the only ones in the village who didn’t vote for Le Pen. God how they wish they could return to the simple life in London!
- Old rose-tinted spectacles Two big pictures contrasting Then and Now. Once, grown-up folk cast friendly eyes on children… Now they’re scared of them.
Old rose-tinted spectacles by Posy Simmonds (1993)
- One man’s meat A middle-class couple agonise about what to take to their kids’ school’s International Picnic to represent British cuisine. Everything they think of (bacon, ham, sausage rolls, pork pies) will offend one or other religious or cultural sensitivity.
- The brood Seems to be the Weber family’s kitchen in which are Wendy Weber, now that much older and with grey hair, talking to her married daughter Belinda, who appears to have had a baby, and the eldest daughter Sophie. Sophie’s thinking about having a baby and has seen something on the telly about how over-50s can be fertilised. Belinda and Sophie both think that’s gross and, more to the point, both think Wendy should be investing her time and savings in them and their babies.
- P.C. PC 43 A heavy-handed satire about a police constable who uses only politically correct language e.g. referring to the homeless as ‘the involuntarily undomiciled’.
- A lecture Crouch is invited ‘all the way out here’ to the polytechnic where George Weber works to deliver a lecture. Now, afterwards, George is accompanying him to the train station. Initially Crouch complains about the poor attendance and the bad food and the crappy wine and slowly George – an older, grey-haired George Weber – turns the tables and starts to lecture Crouch about how hard it is trying to keep an underfunded university lit and working despite not having the advantage of fancy-ancy Oxbridge colleges.
- Sour grapes of wrath Crouch is at a book signing and seethes with jealousy because no one is asking for his signature but crowds are flocking around comedian Nigel Doyle and working mum and TV presenter Denni Welch. His loathing bursts out into muttered insults and abuse with his PR people telling him this isn’t going to persuade people to come over. This struck me as sad, not funny and is, I think, the third book signing strip we’ve seen.
- The perfect present As usual, Christmas brings out the bilious, cynical and bad-tempered in Posy Simmonds, as she describes the tribulations of a young woman who has become the girlfriend of a married man who left his wife for her. This Christmas the ex-wife is holidaying with her lover in Luxor and the girlfriend knows that, whatever she buys and no matter how much effort she goes to, her boyfriend’s kids will vent all their rage and anger at their parents’ break-up onto her.
- I’m dreaming of… Packed with resonance for fans of the Posy strip, this shows Belinda, eldest daughter of George and Wendy Weber, now married to her banker, (options trader) Alistair Razor-Dorke and director of her own upmarket catering company, as they ponder whether to spend Christmas with her parents (George and Wendy in their poky terrace conversion) listening to them moan against the government, or with his parents (frightfully posh but live in a draughty old country house and will serve posh but decrepit old food) – or stay in their swish two-bedroom, waterfront, duplex apartment, hmmm, it’s not a difficult decision.
- I’m dreaming of… Reappearance of the appalling alcoholic Edmund Heep who rings work to say he’s too sick to come in and describes the night before when he went on a pub crawl with a friend, downing an appalling amount of booze, nearly getting into a fight with skinheads before stumbling into a late night caff and ordering scrambled eggs. Now he is claiming it was the eggs, the eggs that made him ill.
- Christmas: The adoration of the general public As usual, Simmonds’s take on Christmas is jaundiced and cynical. Her Christmas strip for 1988 consisted of one large cartoon showing two sides of Christmas (this binary juxtaposition of past and present or idealised and actual, is an extremely common device). On the left we see the crib with the baby Jesus in it and Mary worshiping surrounded by angels, in the style of a Renaissance painting. On the right we see the identical stable but in this one Father Christmas is doling out presents to excited kiddies whose parents are queueing up in front, under the watchful eye of a security guard with walkie-talkie. There is a comic touch in that many of the mums and dads are saying ‘aaah’ at the religious scene, but the security guard is saying into his walkie-talkie ‘aaah… over.’
The end of January 1989
Once again, this is done in a calendar format, with one strip for every month of the year. I didn’t understand why they’re titled ‘The end of…’ January, February etc. The pictures are smaller than ever and overwhelmed with explanatory text, which sometimes begin to read like short stories.
- The end of January A wordy sequence explaining the career of Kevin Penwallet, once an anthropology lecturer who quite working at the same polytechnic as George Weber to set up a shop in the sweet Cornish?) seaside village of Tresoddit. He started with health foods in 1979, but was forced to bend to prevailing commercialism and in 1989 turned it into Ye Olde Gift Shoppe full of twee knick-knacks before, in 1988, turning it into an upmarket delicatessen catering to the ever-increasing numbers of wealthy Londoners, to a chorus of disapproval from the locals, and from his old friend George Weber who accuses him of ‘collaboration with the consuming interests of the over-rewarded.’
- The end of February George Weber is appalled by the mother’s day cards his daughters are browsing and points out to Wendy that they all present reassuring images of motherhood, mostly from the 19th century, and this is because we, as a society, are traumatised and sacred of numerous new hazards – streets full of muggers and addicts, paedophiles, country full of radioactive sheep and cows with BSE, rivers full of junk and pesticides, ozone layer being eaten away, sex is dangerous (AIDS) – and so need mummy’s hand to cling on to. Trouble is, when he tries to envision a perfectly up-to-date vision of mother caring for her young ones, what he sees is… a child-minder.
- The end of March A sustained blast against the comprehensive pollution and desecration of the countryside, as seen by the endless flow of bumper-to-bumper traffic heading down our polluted motorways.
- The end of April A soliloquy from an unbearably posh upper-class lady telling us how they’ve done up their house, and the whole neighbourhood is gentrified and you can buy decent prosciutto and the tramps have been kicked out of the square which has been turned into a wildflower garden and they can afford the best private education for their kids, mind you all this comes at the high cost of security, security locks, security buzzers, a panic room and an electrified truncheon.
- The end of May: Jerusalem A satire on the new young rich and their passion for redecorating their stonking new homes, set to a parody of Blake’s Jerusalem: ‘And did those brogues in ancient times, Walk upon Nigel’s verdant sward, Or were they only just acquired, In Bond Street with an Access card…’ and so on.
- The end of June: Our friendly neighbourhood Use of the frequent juxtaposition technique, two large pictures showing past and present or appearance and reality, in this case showing the polite greetings made between a cross-section of modern young people out walking, set against…the ferociously aggressive messages conveyed by their huge and frightening dogs.
- The end of July: Turning back the floral clock A history of the floral clock on the seafront parade of some coastal town, as it evolved from 1959, 1969, 1979 to 1989, with tut tutting comments from each generation of locals.
- The end of August This is a laboured satire on a middle-class family with two older children, just back from shopping at their local organic grocers’ with their right-on dad, who proceed to find various slugs and maggots in all the fruit and veg, much to the children’s disgust, but the patronising father assures them this is a good sign, shows no pesky pesticides were used.
- The end of September: A Jeremiad for the new academic year We’re in the staff room of George Weber’s poly where the staff are grimly depressed about the start of a new year, and where the principal lecturer in information design brings them even lower by revealing that his students are doing signs for the new massive ‘Phosco’ superstore being built on the edge of town.
- The end of October Soliloquy by one of Simmonds’s trademark posh mums with massive hairdo who spends the first half lamenting what blood-sucking bastards the people who bought their house are… and the second half explaining how they’ve screwed a great deal out of the people they’re buying from. Hypocrisy doesn’t come much purer.
- The end of November: The march of feminism as shown by the changing shape of women’s shoes from 1969 to 1989, with a bit of satire thrown in about how the Forward March of feminism seems to be being held up by sisters in the 1980s. Tut tut.
- A Christmas Carol A typically sour Simmonds take on Christmas in which the spirit of Christmas, looking very much like our old friend, the alcoholic Edmund Heep, appears to a sleek, well, manicured City banker, all to the accompaniment of a parody of the festive hymn: ‘While Shepherd watched his stocks by night, And monitored the pound, The other chaps went down the pub, And Gloria stood a round…’
As mentioned, there’s so much text and information in some of these cartoons that they read almost like short stories. This affects the size of the pictures, which are often very small and crammed with narrative text, and then further filled with speech or thought balloons – quite a stuffing of text and meaning until the ‘reading’ experience becomes quite complicated or demanding.
All this anticipates the style of her graphic novels with their dense interplay of different types of text (narrative, dialogue, thoughts, along with parodies, songs and quotes) with very tightly-drawn pictures arranged in very precise and rather cramped compositions.
Thoughts
Negative and depressing
When I first read through the six books collected in Mrs Weber’s Omnibus I came to the end deeply disliking Posy Simmonds for her unremitting negativity and satire which I felt lacked wit but overflowed with bile.
Having taken the time and trouble to go through and itemise pretty much every cartoon in Mrs Weber’s Omnibus, I now realise the negative feeling I took away largely stems from this final collection, Mustn’t Grumble, for in it the tone really darkens, she stops being very funny at all and the satire – for example against brutal rich bastards like Aubrey Shyte – becomes genuinely bitter.
Meanwhile the extended series of cartoons about the failure and self-loathing of past-it novelist J.D. Crouch also – for me – had nothing redeeming about it, it’s just episodes from the life of a middle-aged man who is failing and angry against the world.
And the twenty-four calendar characters from the Spectator similarly have next to nothing humorous about them but are all-too-accurate barometers of a society becoming steadily, relentlessly more greedy, self-serving, and shamelessly unequal.
So I realise now that it was mainly this last book which left such a bitter aftertaste in my mind, and overshadowed the fact that most of the earlier collections are much lighter in tone, and do contain genuinely comic moments which are worth savouring and remembering.
Abandoning the Weber family meant, to some extent, abandoning the containment of her bitter vision of the world within the cosy arena of the regular gallery of comic characters.
Set free, unconstrained, but also unsoftened, by the mollifying filter of the Weber characters, Simmonds’s vision emerges in this final collection, as one of real anger and bitterness at the social injustice and the revolting hypocrisy of the new, rich middle classes of Thatcher’s Britain.
Books & Boots 
Political documents of the British civil wars
Political documents of the civil wars
What follows are summaries of some of the key political documents produced between the start of Charles I’s conflict with Scotland in 1637 and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Instead of a chronological or thematic approach to the period, this is a different angle from which to consider events, a record of the proliferation of plans and constitutions cooked up by all sides in their attempts to find a solution to the nation’s deep divisions.
Lining them up like this brings out one of the central ideas of Mark Kishlansky’s history of the 17th century, namely the collapse of consensus, the collapse of belief in a central set of political and religious values which characterised the era, and the countless attempts made by different political players to rebuild it.
In the last few documents of the series you can see the realisation emerging that the late-medieval idea of a hierarchical and completely homogeneous society was permanently broken and that only a system which allowed for some measure of tolerance and pluralism could replace it.
The question of just how much pluralism and tolerance could be permitted and society remain, in some sense, united or coherent, remained an open question – in fact, arguably, it’s one of the main threads of British social and political history right up to the present day.
To me what this proliferation of documents indicates is how very difficult it is, once you abandon tradition and precedent, to draw up a new political constitution in a period of crisis. It’s one of the reasons revolutions are so tumultuous. Getting rid of the ancien regime, especially if it’s embodied in one hated ruler (Charles I, Louis XVIII, Czar Nicholas II, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi) is relatively easy. Finding a successor system which all the competing factions can unite behind… almost impossible.
Which is why revolutions often become uncontrollable by all except the most ideological, ruthless and uncompromising: Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Ayatollah Khomeini. Or collapse into civil war: Iraq, Libya.
I’m aware that the documents are in a broad range of genres – from constitutions enacted by central government to the manifestos of fringe groups (the Levellers and even more so, the Diggers), from religious oaths to political treaties. A proper study would take this more into account. I am concerned simply to give an indication of a) the sheer number of them b) their range and variety, and – as said above – the way they show how, once a shared consensus has collapsed, it is so very difficult to create a new one.
1638 The Scottish National Covenant
In 1637 King Charles I and Archbishop Laud tried to bring the separate churches of England and Scotland closer together, firstly by the introduction of a new Book of Canons to replace John Knox’s Book of Discipline as the authority for the organisation of the Kirk, and secondly by the introduction of a modified form of the Book of Common Prayer into Scotland. Charles and Laud consulted neither the Scottish Parliament or the Assembly of the Kirk with the inevitable result that the proposals met with outrage from Scots determined to preserve their national and religious identity.
At the first service where they were introduced, on 23 July 1637 in St Giles’s cathedral in Edinburgh, Jenny Geddes flung her prayer stool at the dean as he read from the book, and started a riot. Similar demonstrations took place in churches all across Scotland where the new liturgy was introduced.
This spontaneous protest was soon organised by Presbyterian elders and aristocrats into a campaign of petitions denouncing the Laudian prayer book and the power of the bishops. These coalesced into a committee which drew up a National Covenant to unite the protesters. The Covenant called for adherence to doctrines already enshrined by Acts of Parliament and for a rejection of untried ‘innovations’ in religion.
In February 1638, at a ceremony in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, large numbers of Scottish noblemen, gentry, clergy and burgesses signed the Covenant, committing themselves under God to preserving the purity of the Kirk. Copies were distributed throughout Scotland for signing on a wave of popular support. Those who hesitated were often intimidated into signing and clergymen who opposed it were deposed. By the end of May 1638, the only areas of Scotland where the Covenant had not been widely accepted were the remote western highlands and the counties of Aberdeen and Banff, where resistance to it was led by the Royalist George Gordon, Marquis of Huntly.
An Assembly was held at Glasgow in 1638 where the Covenanter movement became the dominant political and religious force in Scotland.
In 1643 the objectives of the Covenant were incorporated into the Solemn League and Covenant which formed the basis of the military alliance between the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters against the Royalists.
1641 The Grand Remonstrance
A Remonstrance against King Charles I was first proposed by George Digby, MP for Dorset, soon after the Long Parliament assembled in November 1640. The idea was taken up by John Pym in 1641. Pym planned to use it as part of his campaign to transfer control of the armed forces to Parliament by undermining confidence in the King and his ministers and by demonstrating the integrity of Parliament.
The Remonstrance was drafted between August and November 1641 by Pym and his supporters. These included John Hampden, John Glynn, Sir John Clotworthy, Arthur Goodwyn and others who later formed the ‘Middle Group’ that was associated with Pym’s efforts to bridge the parliamentarian ‘War’ and ‘Peace’ parties during the early years of the English Civil War.
The Grand Remonstrance was a long, wide-ranging document that listed all the grievances perpetrated by the King’s government in Church and State since the beginning of his reign. Rather than blaming the King himself, the Remonstrance emphasised the role of bishops, papists and ‘malignant’ ministers and advisers who were alleged to have deliberately provoked discord and division between King and Parliament.
In contrast, the Remonstrance described the measures taken by the Long Parliament towards rectifying these grievances during its first year in office, including the abolition of prerogative courts and illegal taxes, legislation for the regular summoning of Parliament, and a partial reform of the Church. Thus the House of Commons was presented as the true defender of the King’s rightful prerogative, of the Protestant faith, of the privileges of Parliament and the liberties of the people.
In order to continue its work, the Remonstrance called for the setting up of an Assembly of Divines, nominated by Parliament, to supervise ongoing reform of the Church; furthermore, it demanded that the King’s ministers should be approved by Parliament, with the right of veto over those it considered unsuitable.
On 22 November 1641, after a stormy debate that lasted long into the night, the House of Commons passed the Remonstrance by a narrow margin of 159 votes to 148. The King’s supporters who tried to enter a protest were shouted down in a bad-tempered confrontation that almost ended in a riot. Oliver Cromwell is said to have remarked that if the Remonstrance had not been passed he would have sold all he had and gone overseas to America.
Opponents of the Remonstrance, who included Viscount Falkland and Edward Hyde, formed what was, for the first time, a recognisable Royalist party in Parliament. The Remonstrance was presented to the King on 1 December 1641. He ignored it for as long as possible, so Parliament took the unprecedented step of having it printed and circulated in order to rally outside support. On 23 December, the King finally presented his reply. Drafted by Edward Hyde, it rejected the Remonstrance but in reasoned and conciliatory tones calculated to appeal to moderate opinion.
1643 The Solemn League & Covenant
The alliance between the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters was sealed with the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant by both Houses of Parliament and the Scottish commissioners on 25 September 1643. It was a military league and a religious covenant. Its immediate purpose was to overwhelm the Royalists, who in 1643 seemed in a strong position to win the English Civil War.
An alliance between Parliament and the Scots was first proposed by John Pym early in 1643. Parliament was anxious to secure military help from Scotland in order to counter Royalist victories in England. The Convention of Estates in Edinburgh favoured the alliance after the discovery of the Earl of Antrim’s conspiracy to bring over an Irish Catholic army to support a projected uprising of Scottish Royalists. However, the Covenanters regarded the alliance principally as a religious union of the two nations. They hoped to unite the churches of Scotland and England under a Presbyterian system of church government.
In August 1643, the four commissioners appointed by the House of Commons arrived in Edinburgh. They were Sir Henry Vane, Sir William Armyne, Thomas Hatcher and Henry Darley. They were accompanied by two clergymen, the Presbyterian Stephen Marshall and the Independent Philip Nye. Although the House of Lords had voted in favour of the alliance, no peers were prepared to go to Scotland to take part in the negotiations. Sir Henry Vane emerged as the leading spokesman of the English delegation.
Both sides were eager to defeat the Royalists so the negotiations proceeded quickly. The Westminster Parliament ratified the new covenant within two weeks of receiving it at the end of August 1643. Certain alterations were made to avoid an immediate commitment to strict Presbyterianism and these were accepted by the Convention of Estates.
The Scots agreed to send an army into England on condition that Parliament would co-operate with the Kirk in upholding the Protestant religion and uprooting all remaining traces of popery. Although it was implied that Presbyterian forms of worship and church government would be enforced in England, Wales and Ireland, the clause was qualified to read that church reform would be carried out ‘according to the Word of God’ – which was open to different interpretations.
Reform of the Anglican church was debated at the Westminster Assembly, but a Presbyterian religious settlement for England was strongly opposed by Independents and others. The settlement that was eventually imposed was regarded as a compromise by the Covenanters.
In January 1644, the Army of the Covenant marched into England to take the field against the Royalists. Parliament decreed that the Covenant was to be taken by every Englishman over the age of eighteen. Although no penalty was specified, the names of those who refused to sign were to be certified to Parliament. Signing the Covenant became a prerequisite for holding any command or office under Parliament until King Charles I made his own alliance with the Scots in 1648.
After the execution of Charles I, Kirk leaders pressed the Solemn League and Covenant on his son Charles II at the Treaty of Breda (1650). However, the defeat of the Royalist-Scots alliance at the battle of Worcester in September 1651 ended all attempts to impose Presbyterianism in England.
1646 The Newcastle Propositions
The Newcastle Propositions were drawn up by the Westminster Parliament as a basis for a treaty with King Charles I in July 1646 after the defeat of the Royalists in the First Civil War. The King had surrendered to Parliament’s Scottish allies rather than to Parliament itself and was held in semi-captivity at Newcastle.
There was resentment among English Parliamentarians that the King was in the hands of the Scots, and tension had increased after an intercepted letter revealed that secret negotiations had passed between the King and the Scots earlier in the year. Fearing that the alliance with Parliament was under threat, the Committee of Estates in Edinburgh instructed the Scottish commissioners in London to consent to Parliament’s proposals, even though they fell short of the Covenanters’ ideals in the settlement of religion.
The Propositions put to the King consisted of nineteen clauses. The main points were:
1647 The Heads of the Proposals
These were a set of propositions intended to be a basis for a constitutional settlement after King Charles I was defeated in the First English Civil War. The document was drafted by Commissionary-General Henry Ireton and Major-General John Lambert. during the summer of 1647 when the Army was engaged in a political power struggle with Presbyterian MPs over the settlement of the nation. The proposals were termed the ‘Heads’ to indicate that they were a broad outline, to be negotiated in detail later.
Although the Army proposals were more lenient than the terms offered in Parliament’s Newcastle Propositions, the King regarded them as too restrictive and rejected them outright. During the negotiations, Ireton and Cromwell lost the support of the Army radicals, who were disappointed that the proposals made no concessions to Leveller demands for a wider franchise, and who criticised the Grandees’ ‘servility’ in their dealings with the King.
Meanwhile, Charles continued his attempts to play off the Army and Parliament against one another. He also began secretly negotiating with a faction among the Scots, which was to lead to the Second Civil War in 1648.
At the Putney Debates (October-November 1647), where the Army Council discussed a new constitution for England, Ireton promoted the Heads of the Proposals as a moderate alternative to the Leveller-inspired Agreement of the People.
Six years later, elements of Ireton’s proposals were incorporated into the Instrument of Government – the written constitution that defined Cromwell’s powers as Lord Protector. The religious settlement proposed by Ireton in 1647 was virtually identical to that finally adopted in the Toleration Act of 1689.
1647-49 An Agreement of the People
The Agreement of the People was the principal constitutional manifesto associated with the Levellers. It was intended to be a written constitution that would define the form and powers of government and would also set limits on those powers by reserving a set of inalienable rights to the people. It would take the form of a contract between the electorate and the representative, to be renewed at each election. The Agreement developed over several versions between October 1647 and May 1649.
Original Draft, 1647 An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right was first drafted in October 1647 when Agitators of the New Model Army and civilian Levellers collaborated to propose an outline for a new constitution in the aftermath of the First Civil War. It was probably drafted by John Wildman though its authorship is not known for certain. Stating that sovereign power should reside in the people of England rather than with the discredited King or Parliament, the original Agreement consisted of four clauses:
Certain constraints were placed on Parliament: it was not to interfere with freedom of religion; it was not to press men to serve in the armed forces; it could not prosecute anyone for their part in the recent war; it was not to exempt anyone from the ordinary course of the law; all laws passed by Parliament should be for the common good.
The proposals were debated at the Putney Debates of October and November 1647 where the Grandees Cromwell and Ireton tried to curb Leveller extremism, particularly over a proposal to extend the franchise to all adult males. Parliament denounced the Agreement as destructive to the government of the nation and ordered Fairfax to investigate its authorship. Attempts to gain wider Army support for the Agreement at the Corkbush Field rendezvous were forcibly suppressed by the Grandees.
The Whitehall Debates, 1648-9 During 1648, civilian and military supporters of the Agreement continued to debate and refine its proposals. The Armies Petition or a new Engagement was drafted by a group of Agitators at St Albans in April 1648 and was published in tandem with a related civilian broadside, A New Engagement, or Manifesto. These documents expanded upon the original Agreement to include more specific proposals for legal and economic reform.
After the King’s defeat in the Second Civil War, John Lilburne promoted an extended version of the Agreement which was discussed by a committee of Levellers, London Independents, MPs and army Grandees at Whitehall in December 1648. These discussions took place in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge when the King’s trial was imminent.
Lilburne wanted to secure Parliament’s acceptance of the Agreement before the King was brought to trial so that the trial would have a basis in a legitimate and legal constitution. However, Lilburne and his colleague Richard Overton walked out of the discussions when Army officers led by Henry Ireton insisted upon making further modifications to the Agreement before it was presented to Parliament.
The discussions continued in Lilburne’s absence. While Ireton appeared to make concessions to the Levellers over the franchise, it is probable that he was playing for time to distract the Army Levellers while preparations for the King’s trial went ahead. The revised Agreement was finally presented to the House of Commons as a proposal for a new constitution on 20 January 1649, the very day that the public sessions of the High Court of Justice began. As Ireton had calculated, MPs postponed discussion of the Agreement until after the trial, and it was never taken up again by Parliament.
Final version, May 1649 The Grandees’ modification of the Agreement of January 1649 was the Army’s last official involvement in its evolution. However, Lilburne and the civilian Levellers regarded Ireton’s intervention as a betrayal and continued to refine their proposals. A fully developed version of the Agreement – An Agreement of the Free People of England, tendered as a Peace-Offering to this distressed Nation – was published in May 1649, signed jointly by John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince. Its proposals included:
The final version was published after the Leveller leaders had been imprisoned by order of the Council of State and a few weeks before the suppression of the Army Levellers at Burford on 17 May 1649, after which the Leveller movement was effectively finished.
1648 The Army Remonstrance
The Remonstrance of General Fairfax and the Council of Officers was a manifesto adopted by the New Model Army in November 1648 to justify its intention to abandon treaty negotiations with King Charles and to bring him to trial as an enemy of the people. Although it was issued under the authority of Fairfax and the Council of Officers, the Remonstrance was primarily the work of Henry Ireton.
In September 1648, Parliament opened negotiations for a settlement with King Charles at the Treaty of Newport. However, Army radicals demanded that the negotiations should be abandoned and the King brought to justice for inflicting the Second Civil War upon the nation.
Ireton wrote to General Fairfax proposing that the Army should purge Parliament of MPs who supported the Treaty. After Fairfax rejected the proposal, Ireton began drafting the Remonstrance. Several petitions from radical regiments demanding justice against the King were presented to Fairfax during the following weeks, possibly under Ireton’s direction. Under pressure from the radicals, Fairfax agreed to call a meeting of the General Council of the Army at St Albans to discuss the situation. In contrast to the Putney Debates of the previous year, representatives of the common soldiers were excluded from the discussions.
The General Council convened in St Albans Abbey on 7 November 1648. After discussion of the petitions and general grievances of the soldiers, Ireton presented the draft of the Army Remonstrance on 10 November. It was initially rejected by Fairfax and the moderate officers but their opposition evaporated after 15 November when the House of Commons voted to allow the King to return to London on completion of the Newport Treaty and to restore his lands and revenues.
Fearing that Parliament intended to grant an unconditional restoration, the Army united behind Ireton’s Remonstrance. After some last-minute amendments to ensure the support of the Levellers, the Remonstrance was adopted by the General Council on 18 November 1648.
Under the maxim salus populi suprema lex (‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’), the Remonstrance proclaimed the sovereignty of the people under a representative government. Divine providence would prove the righteousness or otherwise of the government’s actions, and would also thwart unjustified rebellion against authority. Thus, the defeat of King Charles in the Second Civil War vindicated the actions of the Army as the defenders of the people. It was argued that the King should be brought to account because he had broken the sacred covenant with his people and attempted to place himself above the law.
The Remonstrance also proposed a set of Leveller-inspired constitutional reforms, including the possibility of an elective monarchy. Parliament was to set a date for its own dissolution, to be followed by annual or bi-annual Parliaments elected on a reformed franchise. There was to be a written constitution with a declaration of parliamentary authority over the King and Lords. All office-holders, including the monarch, were to subscribe to the Levellers’ Agreement of the People.
A delegation of officers headed by Colonel Ewer presented the Remonstrance to Parliament on 20 November. After an initial flurry of opposition led by William Prynne, Parliament postponed further discussion until treaty negotiations with the King at Newport were completed. Meanwhile, the Army moved its headquarters from St Albans to Windsor. On 28 November, the General Council of the Army resolved to march into London. With Parliament still refusing to discuss the Remonstrance and apparently intent on implementing the Treaty of Newport, Ireton initiated the train of events that led to Pride’s Purge in December 1648.
1649 England’s New Chains Discovered
On 26 February one of the leading radicals in the army, John Lilburne, published this attack on the new Commonwealth, in which he asserted the illegality of the High Court of Justice, the Council of State (which, he pointed out ,rested solely on the diminished or Rump Parliament) and the Council of the Army, which he accused of having become an instrument for the rich officers against the rank and file.
His agitation did not go unnoticed. In March 1649, Lilburne and other Leveller leaders were arrested. In October, Lilburne was brought to trial at the Guildhall, charged with high treason and with inciting the Leveller mutinies. He conducted his own defence, during which he raised strong objections to all aspects of the prosecution and quoted directly from Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes, or commentaries on the laws of England. The jury found Lilburne Not Guilty, to enthusiastic cheers from crowds of his supporters and well-wishers.
April 1649 The True Levellers Standard Advanced
This was the manifesto of the splinter group of Levellers who decided to put theory into practice and claimed a patch of common land near Weybridge in Surrey and began digging it. It was written by their leader Gerard Winstanley who has gone down as a hero to Marxists and left-leaning liberals. They thought all hierarchy should be abolished, wealth should be redistributed to abolish poverty, that the land was a common treasury and all the land parcelled out to households who would have equal rights to cultivate them and share the proceeds. As a result they were nicknamed the Diggers. Within months they’d been driven from the original site by the local landowners, and attempted their communal experiment in various other locations until fading away.
1650 The Treaty of Breda
After the execution of Charles I in January 1649, the Scottish Parliament proclaimed his son the new king, Charles II. However, the government of Scotland was dominated by the covenanting Kirk Party, which was determined that Charles should take the Covenant and agree to impose Presbyterianism throughout the Three Kingdoms before he could be crowned King of Scots or receive Scottish help to regain the throne of England.
Initial negotiations between Charles and representatives of the Scottish government were held at The Hague in March 1649 but broke down because Charles did not accept the legitimacy of the Kirk Party régime. However, his hopes of using Ireland as a rallying ground for the Royalist cause were thwarted by Cromwell’s invasion in August 1649. Various European heads of state offered sympathy but no practical help for regaining the throne, so Charles and his council were obliged to call for another round of negotiations with the Scots.
Negotiations between Charles II and a delegation of Scottish commissioners opened at Breda in the Netherlands on 25 March 1650. Aware of Charles’ desperate situation, the demands made by the Scottish Parliament were harsh:
Bad-tempered wrangling continued through March and April. Charles tried to gain concessions that would allow a reconciliation with the Engagers, who were excluded from office in Scotland by the Act of Classes. He would not impose Presbyterianism in England nor would he annul the Irish treaty. But to the dismay of English Royalists, Charles finally agreed to take the Oath of the Covenant. Other contentious issues were to be discussed upon his arrival in Scotland. He signed the Treaty of Breda on 1 May 1650 and took the Covenant immediately before landing in Scotland on 23 June 1650.
Charles then led a Scottish army into England which was comprehensively crushed at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, the final engagement of the war in England which had started in 1642. Charles escaped the battlefield and was on the run for 45 days till he managed to take ship to France and nine years of exile.
1653 The Instrument of Government
England’s first written constitution, the Instrument of Government was a constitutional settlement drafted by Major-General John Lambert during the autumn of 1653 and adopted by the Council of Officers when the Nominated Assembly surrendered its powers to Oliver Cromwell in December.
Lambert’s original intention had been that the old constitution of King, Lords and Commons should be replaced by one of King, Council and Parliament. In discussion with a few trusted advisers after the abdication of the Nominated Assembly, Cromwell amended the Instrument to avoid reference to the royal title, which was likely to be unacceptable to the Army.
Under the terms of the Instrument of Government, executive power passed to an elected Lord Protector, in consultation with a Council of State numbering between thirteen and twenty-one members. Cromwell was declared Lord Protector for life, though it was stressed that the office was not hereditary. He was required to call triennial Parliaments consisting of a single House of 400 members from England and 30 each from Scotland and Ireland, to remain in session for at least five months.
Parliamentary constituencies were re-arranged in an attempt to lessen the influence of the gentry in favour of the emerging middle class who, it was hoped, would be more inclined to support the Protectorate government. The number of MPs from towns and boroughs (where voting was traditionally influenced by the local gentry) was significantly reduced and representation of the universities was limited. To balance the representative, the number of MPs from the counties was correspondingly increased.
In a direct repudiation of Leveller ideas, the county franchise was restricted to persons with land or personal property valued at £200 or more. The borough franchise remained with aldermen, councillors and burgesses. Furthermore, Roman Catholics and known Royalists were declared ineligible to vote or seek election.
Under the Instrument, Parliament was charged with raising revenue for establishing and maintaining a standing army of 10,000 horse and dragoons and 20,000 foot for the defence of England, Scotland and Ireland.
Liberty of worship was granted to all except Roman Catholics and those guilty of ‘licentiousness’ (i.e. the extreme sectarians).
The Instrument of Government was England’s first written constitution. It was adopted by the Council of Officers on 15 December 1653 and Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector the next day. The First Protectorate Parliament duly assembled on 3 September 1654. However, the abrupt termination of Parliament in January 1655 meant that MPs never finished revising the Instrument of Government and so it was never legally endorsed. Doubts regarding its legal authority led to the resignation of the Lord Chief Justice Henry Rolle in June 1655.
The Instrument was superseded in 1657 by the Humble Petition and Advice.
1657 Humble Petition and Advice
The Humble Petition and Advice was a constitutional document drawn up by a group of MPs in 1657 under which Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was offered the Crown. It represented an attempt by civilian Parliamentarians to move back towards traditional forms of government after the imposition of various army-led constitutional experiments, in particular the unpopular Rule of the Major-Generals.
The offer of the Crown was intended to limit Cromwell’s power rather than extend it, because as King his power would be defined by precedent. The Humble Petition aimed to legitimise the constitution since it came from an elected Parliament, unlike its predecessor the Instrument of Government.
The first version of the Humble Petition was known as the Humble Address and Remonstrance. It was drafted by a small group which included Lord Broghill, Edward Montagu and Oliver St John. The Remonstrance was brought before the Second Protectorate Parliament on 23 February 1657 by Sir Christopher Packe, a former lord mayor of London. It included proposals for the re-introduction of a second House of Parliament and for the establishment of a national church regulated by a Confession of Faith, but its most controversial proposal was that the Protector should be invited to assume the office and title of King.
This proposal was supported by most lawyers and civilian MPs but was fiercely opposed by Major-General Lambert and other army officers as well as by republicans and religious radicals.
Cromwell agonised over the decision for several months and finally declined the offer of the Crown on 8 May. A revised version of the proposal, which avoided reference to the royal title, was adopted on 25 May. Cromwell was re-installed as Lord Protector in a ceremony still reminiscent of a royal coronation on 26 June 1657.
Under the new constitution, Cromwell was to remain Lord Protector for life and could now choose his own successor. He was required to call triennial Parliaments which were to consist of two chambers: the elected House of Commons and a second chamber, or Upper House (referred to only as the ‘other house’), of between forty and seventy persons nominated by the Protector but approved by Parliament. The Upper House was intended to mediate between the Lower House and the Protector. It had the right to veto any legislation passed in the Lower House and was roundly condemned by republicans as too reminiscent of the old House of Lords. The Council of State was to become the Protector’s privy council, consisting of 21 members chosen by the Protector and approved by Parliament.
After the Instrument of Government, the Humble Petition and Advice was England’s second – and last – written constitution. It differed significantly from the Instrument in that it was drawn up by civilian parliamentarians rather than by army officers and also in that it was legally endorsed by Parliament. It remained in force throughout the remainder of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and during the brief jurisdiction of his successor Richard Cromwell.
1660 The Declaration of Breda
This was a manifesto issued in April 1660 by the exiled Charles II in which he outlined his initial terms for the Restoration of the monarchy. The Declaration was drawn up by Charles himself and his three principal advisers, Sir Edward Hyde, the Marquis of Ormond and Sir Edward Nicholas.
In March 1660, shortly after the final dissolution of the Long Parliament, General George Monck entered into secret negotiations with Charles’ representative Sir John Grenville regarding the possibility of the King’s return to power. Grenville was authorised to offer Monck high office in return for his help, while Monck himself claimed to have always been secretly working towards the Restoration – a view that came to be widely accepted later.
Monck’s terms were geared primarily towards satisfying the material concerns of the army:
Following Monck’s advice to move from Spanish territory to Breda in the Protestant Netherlands, Charles and his principal advisers prepared a conciliatory declaration that touched upon the major issues of indemnity, confirmation of land sales and the religious settlement. A free pardon and amnesty was offered to all who would swear loyalty to the Crown within forty day of the King’s return.
However, Charles skirted around all points of contention by referring the final details of the Restoration settlement to a future Parliament. Charles was aware that any legislation passed by the forthcoming Convention Parliament would have to be confirmed or refuted by a later Parliament summoned under the King’s authority, and that the blame for inevitable disappointments in the Restoration settlement would then be borne by Parliament rather than by the Crown.
Smart thinking.
The Declaration was signed by Charles on 4 April 1660. Copies were prepared with separate letters to the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the army, the fleet and the City of London. Monck was offered a commission as commander-in-chief of the army. When Sir John Grenville delivered the Declaration to the newly-elected Convention Parliament on 1 May, both Houses unanimously voted for the Restoration.
Sources
The period 1649 to 1658 is covered by pages 189 to 212 of A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 – 1714 by Mark Kishlansky. I’ve also sourced information from Wikipedia. But the main source for a lot of this information was the excellent British Civil Wars, Commonwealth & Protectorate website, which covers all aspects of the subject and includes really excellent maps.
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Posted by Simon on August 30, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/political-documents-of-the-civil-wars/