For over 700 years London was the scene of public executions, a practice which wove itself into the city’s history and popular culture. This excellent and imaginatively designed exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands explores all aspects of public executions in London, using a combination of artifacts, letters, informative videos, songs and voices, paintings, engravings and caricatures, and some really gruesome exhibits.
Above all, it is amazingly comprehensive – it touches on all the aspects of the subject I’d expected beforehand but goes on to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies I’d never have thought of. I’d never thought about the effort some condemned prisoners put into being well dressed for their trip to the gallows. Well, the exhibition tells the stories of condemned men and women who went to great lengths to look their best on their death day, and even has the fine dress and fancy suit worn by a female and male executionee:
- on the left, the ‘white muslin gown, a handsome worked cap and laced boots’ worn by Eliza Fenning who was hanged for attempting to poison her employers
- to the right, the ‘superb suit of white and silver, being the clothes in which he was married’ worn by Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, was hanged on 5 May 1760 for the murder of his steward John Johnson, whom he shot in a rage
Final clothing section in the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London
(The door on the right of this photo is one of the three doors you had to pass through to enter Newgate Prison. The architect George Dance thoughtfully positioned swags of chains and shackles over the main entrance door at Newgate to terrify and intimidate new prisoners.)
I’d never thought about what happened to the bodies of the hanged after their execution. Turns out that from the mid-16th century the bodies of executed criminals were given to the Company of Barber-Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection and medical research. The thought of being dissected filled the condemned with horror. Fights could break out at executions as friends and family of the deceased would attempt to stop the surgeons claiming bodies. In the same spirit I had no idea that life sized casts of the heads of the executed were often made – there’s a selection of them on display here, which, as the nineteenth century progressed, were used to study ‘criminal’ physiognomy. Alternatively, the casts of notorious criminals were kept in a special display at Newgate where they could be viewed by visitors, who included Charles Dickens.
Death masks at the ‘Execution’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London
I knew that broadsheets and leaflets were often sold at executions which claimed to give the last speech of the condemned man, along with a ballad poem describing his fate – but I’d never had the opportunity to read some of these before. Ditto the last letters condemned men wrote to their loved ones. There’s not only letters but rings and coins sent by those condemned to transportation instead of execution in the mid-nineteenth century.
I knew that prisoners in gaol were often shackled but I don’t think I’ve seen a collection of the different types of handcuffs, shackles and ‘waist belts’ used for this purpose on display before. Apparently the weight of shackles prisoners were manacled with sometimes meant they could barely move. As well as direct punishment of the prisoner, the sound of all this metalwork clanking through the echoing vaults of the grim prisoner had a demoralising and terrifying psychological effect on other inmates. The practice of routinely keeping prisoners shackled in irons ceased in the 1820s.
Shackles and handcuffs used in Newgate Prison at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London
I’ve certainly never seen a real actual gibbet before and I didn’t know that they didn’t come in a standard size, but that a gibbet ‘tailor’ took the corpse’s measurements and built the gibbet to perfectly fit. In line with the state of the art interactivity of the exhibition, the display of this real-life gibbet had a gruesome audio soundtrack with the noise of flies buzzing round the rotting corpse.
Wrought iron gibbet cage from ‘Executions’ at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London
I was at first puzzled why the gibbet was so elaborate but realised that a lifeless body would flop in all directions unless its limbs were very strictly compassed and controlled. The effect can be seen in this illustration of the body of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd.
Captain Kidd, gibbeted near Tilbury in Essex, following his execution in 1701
More criminals were gibbeted in the greater London area than elsewhere in the country. The bodies of murders and highwaymen were gibbeted on heaths located on the outskirts of London and main highways into the capital, especially on the wide open Hounslow Heath which became famous for the number of gibbets.
Capital punishments
Between the first recorded execution at Tyburn in 1196 and the last public execution in 1868, there were tens of thousands of executions in London. Nobody knows the precise number because records weren’t kept before the 18th century.
Right at the start there’s a wall-sized video which shows a scrolling list of all the offences which carried the penalty of capital punishment. By the end of the 18th century some 200 crimes were punishable by death in a list which became known as the ‘Bloody Code’. London’s courts condemned more people to die than those in the rest of the country combined.
Scrolling list of capital offences at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London
Types of execution
Most ordinary criminals were hanged. More florid ways of being despatched were reserved for VIPs.
1. Drawing, hanging and quartering
An ancient punishment for treason, the prisoner was ‘drawn’ or dragged from prison to the execution site, hanged until they were nearly dead, then castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and cut into quarters. Thee practice continued into the 19th but by then prisoners were hanged first and then beheaded.
there’s a vivid engraving of the fate of the Gunpowder Plotters who, after being found guilty in 1606, were publicly executed over two days in St Paul’s Churchyard and Old Palace Yard, Westminster, where they were dragged by horses through the streets, hanged, castrated, disembowelled and cut into pieces.
2. Burning
In 1401 an Act of Parliament made burning the punishment for heresy. It aimed to ‘strike fear into the minds’ of people who questioned the teachings of the church. Women convicted of murdering their husbands or counterfeiting could also be burned to death. By the 18th century they were strangled first.
The exhibition features illustrations of the Protestant martyrs burned at the stake at Smithfield. Over 280 religious dissenters were burned at the stake during the five-year reign of Mary I, known as ‘Bloody Mary’. Besides Smithfield others were burned to death at Stratford-le-Bow, Barnet, Islington, Southwark, Uxbridge, Westminster and throughout England.
Woodcut depicting John Rogers, the first of the ‘Marian martyrs’, being burned at the stake in Smithfield (1555)
3. Boiling
Death by boiling was a rare punishment. In 1531 a cook named Richard Roose poisoned the porridge of the household of Bishop John Fisher, causing two deaths. Henry VIII was so disgusted he declared this crime treason and Parliament passed the ‘Acte for Poysoning’ ordering those who murdered by poison to be boiled to death. Roose was boiled at Smithfield. Eleven years later Margaret Davies suffered the same fate for poisoning four people. Edward VI abolished this execution method in 1547.
4. Beheading
Members of the nobility condemned for treason were often beheaded out of respect for their high status, rather than suffering the agony and humiliation of drawing, hanging and quartering. Most beheadings took place in public on Tower Hill before a large crowd.
5. Hanging
Most ordinary criminals were executed by hanging. There appear to have been two methods. Initially the condemned were placed under a gallows (in the very early period just a tree) standing on a cart. A rope was noosed round their neck and the cart slowly pulled away by horses or oxen till the condemned fell off the back of it and was left dangling. This could be a fairly slow, excruciating death. Laster the ‘short drop’ method was introduced, where the condemned stood on a raised platform and, with the flick of a handle, a trapdoor opened underneath them, dropping them through and making it more likely their neck would snap with the sudden ratchet of the noose. But both methods were far from foolproof and family members or the executioner often pulled the legs of the hanged person to speed up their death.
Places of execution
In the City of London you are never more than 500 metres from a former place of execution. London was packed with them. Early on in the exhibition there’s a useful wall-sized video, with a bench to sit and watch it, which shows maps of London from early medieval times onwards, showing not only ow its street plan grew and developed (interesting in itself) but where the ever-growing number of places of execution were sited (indicated on the maps by entertaining ochre blotches of blood).
1. Smithfield
In the medieval and Tudor periods Smithfield was used for various public purposes, including a livestock market, fairs and executions, as in the burning of the Protestant martyrs mentioned above.
2. Tyburn
Tyburn stood slightly to one side of the current position of Marble Arch at the north-east tip of Hyde Park. It served as London’s principal site of execution for around 600 years. The earliest account records the execution of William FitzOsbert in 1196. Until the late 18th century it was a semi-rural location, easy to get to and easy for crowds to assemble and watch the spectacle.
A huge amount of popular tradition and iconography grew up around the public hanging of criminals at Tyburn. The exhibition contains umpteen engravings and pictures, stores and facts, not least about the carnivalesque atmosphere which reigned along the route of carts transporting convicted criminals from Newgate Prison, via St Giles’s-in-the-Fields church and then along what is now Oxford Street. Many of the condemned went to their execution drunk, in fact it became customary for the cart to stop off at a pub at St Giles where the executioner and victim shared a last pint of beer. This became known as ‘the St Giles Bowl’.
Bernard Mandeville wrote that ‘all the way from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continued Fair, for whores and rogues of the meaner sort.’
In 1961 construction began on new pedestrian subways by Marble Arch and the excavators found large quantities of human bones around the site of the Tyburn gallows which archaeologists presume are the remains of the executed who were buried where they died.
Execution at Tyburn by Thomas Rowlandson (1803)
A lot of slang and catchphrases grew up about the place. The scaffold was known as ‘the Tyburn tree’. To ‘take a ride to Tyburn’ (or simply ‘go west’) was to go to one’s hanging. The ‘Lord of the Manor of Tyburn’ was the public hangman while ‘dancing the Tyburn jig’ was the act of being hanged because of the wriggling, dancing movement of the hanged in their last moments.
The last execution at Tyburn was of John Austin, a highwayman, on 3 November 1783.
3. Newgate
With the closure of Tyburn London’s public executions moved to the open space in front of the rebuilt Newgate Prison. This was to be London’s principal site of public execution for the next 85 years until public executions were discontinued in 1868.
The move meant the end of the great public procession from Newgate to Tyburn. It was an assertion by the authorities of their control over the timing and atmosphere of the executions. The Newgate scaffold featured two beams with capacity for up to 12 hangings.
Newgate Prison itself closed in 1902. The demolition of one of London’s most iconic buildings aroused considerable public interest and relics of the prison were sold at auction. A keystone from the main doorway is on display here, as is one of the heavy wood-and-metal doors (see first photo).
4. Horsemonger Lane
Public executions at Horsemonger Lane in Southwark took place on the roof of the gatehouse, making them highly visible to spectators.
5. Tower Hill
A small number of noble men and women, soldiers and spies were privately executed within the walls of the Tower of London. Many more – at least 120 between 1388 and 1780 – were executed in public on Tower Hill. Beheadings and hangings, were common enough for the ‘posts of the scaffold’ to become a landmark. It was here that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, a key ally of Charles I, was executed on 12 May 1641, as part of the political divisions which opened up before the outbreak of civil war the following year.
6. Execution Dock
On the Thames near Wapping, Execution Dock was used for more than 400 years to execute pirates, smugglers and mutineers who had been sentenced to death by Admiralty courts. The ‘dock’ consisted of a scaffold for hanging. The last executions there took place in 1830. Just up the river at Blackwall Reach where it bends bodies of convicts were gibbeted so as to be more visible to boats entering the city.
7. Charing Cross
Public executions took place at Charing Cross in the 16th and 17th centuries. A pillory that locked the head and hands of a criminal into a wooden frame for public humiliation was later erected at the site.
8. New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall
The area around the Palace of Westminster was used for public executions, the display of body parts and pillorying criminals.
9. Kennington Common
From at least 1678 until 1800 Kennington Common was the principal execution site for the county of Surrey.
The execution and embowelling of Jacobite rebels on Kennington Common mid to late 18th century)
10. Cheapside
Temporary gallows were erected on several occasions at Cheapside between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were in place for over 100 days in 1554 following the execution of two rebels involved in a Protestant uprising against Mary I.
Ordinary criminals and reprieves
The exhibition contains the story of what feels like 50 or so ordinary criminals, whose names are preserved for some or other aspect of their crime or their trial or their plea for pardon or the way they died. One by one their pitiful stories build up into an upsetting profile of the generally poor and wretched who committed often petty crimes and went to their deaths miserably.
As the number convicted of capital offences rose in the later 18th century the number of reprieves increased, if only to manage down the number of executions which threatened to swamp the system. The exhibition features letters written by the condemned, their friends and relatives and influential contacts. I like the story of the Dane Jørgen Jørgenson, who was convicted in 1820 of robbery but managed to get a letter to the Duke of Wellington for whom he had worked as a during the Napoleonic wars. The exhibition includes a letter from the Duke pardoning Jørgenson on condition he ‘transports’ himself out of the country.
The most famous victim: Charles I
Probably the most famous execution ever to take place in London was not of a common criminal or aristocratic traitor but of the king himself, namely Charles I, brought to trial by the Puritan junta and found guilty of treason against his own people. The exhibition devotes a large case to his execution, on 31 January 1649, with several contemporary illustrations and a number of artefacts said to be linked to it, namely a pair of royal gloves he was said to have taken with him, and even the silk undershirt he insisted on wearing to prevent him shivering with cold (it was January in London) which, he told his attendant, Sir Thomas Herbert, might be misinterpreted as fear.
Later on in the exhibition there are several objects pertaining to the punishment of his killers. 59 leading Puritan generals and MPs signed the king’s death warrant and so came to be known by their enemies as the ‘regicides’. On his Restoration in 1660, Charles II had special agents arrest any of the regicides living in England and track down those who had fled abroad and assassinate them.
Three of the leading regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton, had already died of natural causes and been buried at Westminster Abbey, but in 1661 Charles’s Cavalier Parliament ordered their bodies to be exhumed, executed and decapitated. Their heads were displayed on poles outside Westminster Hall. Cromwell’s head remained there until 1685.
The most famous criminal: Jack Sheppard
John ‘Jack’ Sheppard was convicted of robbery in 1724, aged 22. Sheppard was one of London’s greatest criminal heroes. Notorious for escaping multiple times from Newgate, he became a symbol of freedom for London’s working classes. An apprentice carpenter, Jack fell into a life of thieving, reputably led astray by ‘bad company and lewd women’. Although eventually executed at Tyburn at the age of 22, his effrontery and skill in challenging authority ensured his story was recounted in popular books and plays for generations. The artist James Thornhill paid one shilling and sixpence to visit him in his cell to draw this portrait.
Portrait of Jack Sheppard by Sir James Thornhill (1724)
In the 1850s the campaigning journalist Henry Mayhew discovered that ‘chapbooks’ recounting Sheppard’s exploits were hugely popular in low lodging houses, where they were read aloud to illiterate youths. He interviewed 13 boys who confessed to thieving in order to pay for a theatre ticket for the current play about Jack’s life.
The most famous executioner: Jack Ketch
In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles II, led a rebellion to seize the throne from his uncle, James II. The rebellion was defeated, Monmouth was captured, condemned for high treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. Despite asking to be killed with one clean blow, Monmouth’s executioner, Jack Ketch, made a right monkeys of the procedure, failing to despatch the Duke after two strikes with an axe and being forced to resort to a knife to cut through the neck while the Duke made a grim effort to rise from the block to the horror of onlookers. As a result of this heroic failure Ketch’s name became infamous and, eventually, became a byword for public executioners, who, by and large preferred to keep their identities secret.
Transportation
A final section of the exhibition explains how crimes which had previously resulted in execution were amended to ‘transportation’ to the colonies, generally meaning Australia. In fact the first convicts transported out of England had been despatched as long ago as 1718, when they were sent to America to supply plantations there with labour. Thus Moll Flanders, heroine of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel, is convicted of a capital offence but gets it commuted to transportation to British America.
Transport to America ended when that country became independent in 1776 but, as luck would have it, just a few years earlier (in 1770) Australia had been discovered and provisionally mapped by Captain James Cook. Between 1788 and 1868 over 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia from England and other parts of the Empire.
The exhibition includes a few paintings of the first settlement, which are fairly predictable – but I had never heard about ‘convict tokens’ before. Apparently, convicts awaiting transportation presented loved ones with smoothed coins engraved with messages of affection. Often created by prisoners skilled in metalwork, for a fee, the tokens could be highly decorative and became known as ‘leaden hearts’. Half a dozen examples are on display here.
A convict’s love token from the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London
The campaign to abolish public executions
The advent of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 marked a sea change in social attitudes. The young queen consciously rebelled against the louche morals of her rakish predecessor, William IV. She wanted a chaste, sober court and her high moral tone and sincere Anglicanism set the style for the new reign among the aristocracy and aspiring upper middle classes. There was a general wish to make all aspects of public life more respectable and, in time, the new mood extended to the utterly disreputable practice of public executions, with all their opportunities for immorality of every description which this exhibition has chronicled.
In 1840 William Makepeace Thackeray attended the execution of the Swiss valet François Courvoisier, executed for murdering his master, Lord William Russell. He wrote that ‘I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight…I came away…that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.’
In 1849 Charles Dickens had attended the execution of Maria and Frederick Manning and wrote a furious letter to The Times criticising the ‘inconceivably awful behaviour’ of the crowd. Describing public execution as a ‘moral evil’, he doubted communities could prosper where such scenes of ‘horror and demoralisation’ could take place.
Prison reform had been an issue since the start of the nineteenth century and combined with the campaign to abolish public executions. The exhibition cites the MP Thomas Hobhouse in 1866 arguing that the spectacle, instead of instilling fear of crime and respect for the law, resulted in the crowds who became ‘hardened and literally acquired a taste for blood.’
The exhibition features a powerful satirical cartoon published in Punch magazine mocking the commercialisation of state executions. The scaffold is a theatrical stage with a sign for ‘opera glasses’ and a booth selling tickets while the mixed crowd is worked by hawkers and costermongers. ‘Ere’s lots o’ the rope which ‘ung the late lamented Mr Greenacre, only a penny an inch!’
The Trial for Murder Mania, illustration for Punch, 1850
After several attempts to move a bill in Parliament, the Capital Punishment Amendment Act was finally passed in 1868 public executions in Britain were officially banned. The last person to be publicly executed in London was the Irish republican Michael Barrett, on 26 May 1868. Three days later the practice was outlawed.
But it wasn’t the abolition of the death penalty, though. Another century was to pass before that occurred. Only in 1965 was the death penalty for murder in Britain suspended for five years and in 1969 was this made permanent. And it wasn’t until 1998 that the death penalty in Britain was finally abolished for all crimes. The last people executed in the UK were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on 13 August 1964.
Amnesty International
Things take a very earnest turn at the end of the exhibition with a large video screen showing an interview with Paul Bridges from Amnesty International. He reminds us that 55 countries still retain the death penalty (although, admittedly, many have not used it for some time). Nonetheless, Amnesty International recorded 579 executions in 18 countries in 2021.
Summary
This is an outstandingly interesting, comprehensive, thought-provoking, sometimes funny, but mostly grisly and gruesome exhibition, beautifully staged, with absorbing interactive elements. You have two more weeks to catch it.
Related links
- Executions continues @ the Museum of London Docklands until 16 April 2023
- The Execution Sites of London on the Historic UK website
- The History of Hanging on the Historic UK website
Books & Boots 
Political documents of the British 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 and 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 to 1649 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 to 1649
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 to 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 and Protectorate website, which covers all aspects of the subject and includes really excellent maps.
More seventeenth century reviews
Share this:
Posted by Simon on August 30, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/political-documents-of-the-civil-wars/