10.1 — England and the First Constitutional Revolution

On 30 January 1649, on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, Charles I of England was beheaded after a trial by a court his own subjects had convened.

The point was not the killing. Kings had been murdered before — quietly, by rivals, and then it was denied. This was a public trial, in which a king was charged with waging war against his own people, refused to recognise the court's authority, and was convicted and executed in front of a crowd on a written sentence.

A legal proceeding had found a monarch accountable to law. That had never happened, and every constitutional argument since runs through it.

What the fight was about

Money, principally, and religion, and the two were entangled.

The English crown had a specific fiscal problem. The king was expected to "live of his own" — to fund government from crown lands and customary revenues — and could only levy new taxes with Parliament's consent. In the ordinary course this was manageable. In war it was not (Chapter 8.3), and inflation from the American silver influx had eroded the crown's fixed revenues (Chapter 8.5).

So the king needed Parliament, and Parliament used the need. Every request for money became an occasion for grievances, and this bargaining is the mechanism by which English representative institutions acquired real power. Chapter 8.3 stated the general rule: a ruler who must ask for money must give something in exchange.

Charles I tried to avoid asking. He ruled without calling Parliament for eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, funding himself by reviving obsolete feudal dues and by extending "ship money" — a levy traditionally raised from coastal towns for naval defence — to the whole country in peacetime.

John Hampden refused to pay and was prosecuted. He lost the case narrowly and the trial made the constitutional argument public: whether the king could tax without consent in an emergency he himself declared.

Religion. Charles and Archbishop Laud pushed ceremonial reforms that Puritans regarded as a return to Catholicism. When they tried to impose an English prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland in 1637, Scotland rebelled, and fighting a war required money, which required Parliament.

Parliament, recalled in 1640, refused to fund the war without redress, and the confrontation escalated to civil war in 1642.

The wars, briefly

Parliament won, chiefly because it held London and the customs revenue, and because it built a professional army.

The New Model Army, from 1645, is the significant institution. Officers were promoted for competence rather than birth, it was paid regularly, and it was ideologically committed. Oliver Cromwell rose through it.

And it produced political ideas its commanders had not anticipated. The Putney Debates of 1647 — recorded verbatim by a stenographer, which is why we have them — saw ordinary soldiers argue with their generals about who should have the vote. Colonel Rainsborough's statement is the one that survives: that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he, and therefore every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.

The generals' reply was that only men with property should vote, because a man with no stake would vote to redistribute. That argument — the property qualification — was the mainstream position in Britain for another two hundred years.

The Levellers demanded near-universal male suffrage, equality before the law, religious liberty and biennial parliaments. The Diggers went further and occupied common land, arguing that the earth was a common treasury. Both were suppressed. Their arguments reappear in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and eventually win.

Cromwell governed as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658, having dismissed Parliaments that displeased him — which is the honest record: the man who fought against arbitrary rule ended by exercising it.

And his campaign in Ireland in 1649–50 was exceptionally brutal, with the storming of Drogheda and Wexford involving massacres of garrisons and civilians, followed by land confiscation on a scale that transferred most Irish land to Protestant owners. It is remembered in Ireland in terms that have not softened in four centuries.

The monarchy was restored in 1660 because the alternative had collapsed into military government that nobody wanted.

1688, and what actually changed

James II, a Catholic, alienated the political class by claiming a power to suspend laws, appointing Catholics to office and maintaining a standing army in peacetime.

In 1688 a group of English notables invited William of Orange, the Dutch ruler and James's Protestant son-in-law, to intervene. He landed with an army, James's support collapsed, and he fled.

Calling it the "Glorious Revolution" is English self-congratulation about the absence of bloodshed in England, and it should be noted that it involved a foreign invasion with an army of around twenty thousand, and that the subsequent war in Ireland was not bloodless at all.

What it settled is what matters.

The Bill of Rights of 1689: no suspending or dispensing with laws without Parliament's consent; no taxation without parliamentary grant; no standing army in peacetime without consent; free elections and freedom of speech in Parliament; no cruel and unusual punishment; and the right to petition.

Parliament, not the king, became sovereign. And the monarch was now on Parliament's terms, since the settlement itself had determined the succession.

Why it mattered economically

This is the connection to Chapter 9.2 and Chapter 9.5 and it is one of the most cited arguments in economic history.

Douglass North and Barry Weingast's argument, from 1989: the settlement made property rights secure against the crown, because the crown could no longer tax or confiscate arbitrarily, and this made investment and lending safe.

The financial consequence was immediate and measurable. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to manage a debt guaranteed by Parliament rather than by the king (Chapter 9.2). British government borrowing costs fell substantially, and the state could then outspend France militarily throughout the eighteenth century despite a much smaller population.

The criticisms of the thesis are real. Property rights in England were reasonably secure before 1688, and the change may be more about the state's borrowing capacity than about private property. And the immediate beneficiaries were a narrow landed and commercial elite, not the population.

What is not disputed is the fiscal transformation, and Chapter 9.5 shows what it funded.

What it did not do

This section is necessary because the standard account stops at the good news.

It was not democratic. The electorate was a small fraction of adult men, on a property qualification, in constituencies wildly unequal in size — some "rotten boroughs" had a handful of voters and returned two members. The franchise was not meaningfully extended until 1832, and universal adult suffrage arrived in 1928.

Religious toleration was partial. The Toleration Act of 1689 permitted Protestant dissenters to worship. Catholics and Jews remained excluded from office and from the universities into the nineteenth century.

Ireland was governed as a subordinate kingdom with a Protestant landed minority ruling a Catholic majority under penal laws restricting land ownership, education, office and worship.

And the same Parliament presided over the expansion of the slave trade (Chapter 8.6) and the conquest of India (Chapter 6.16). A country that had established that its own king was subject to law then governed a quarter of the world without consent. That contradiction was pointed out at the time by Americans, by Irish nationalists and later by Indians, and it was the strongest argument available to all of them (Chapter 6.20).

The ideas that came out of it

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689, was written partly before the events and read afterwards as their justification (Chapter 8.9). Natural rights, government by consent, and the right to resist a government that violates the trust.

And these ideas were exported immediately. The American colonists were reading Locke and citing the Bill of Rights. The French philosophes admired the English constitution — Montesquieu's separation of powers is a somewhat idealised reading of it (Chapter 8.9). Indian nationalists in the nineteenth century quoted English constitutional history back at British administrators, which was the most effective rhetorical position available (Chapter 6.20).

Where this shows up in your life

Parliamentary sovereignty, ministerial responsibility, a monarch or president who reigns without governing, and the principle that taxation requires legislative consent are in the constitutions of dozens of countries, including India's — the Westminster system India adopted is the direct descendant of this settlement (Chapter 13.3).

The phrase "no taxation without representation" is the American version of the 1689 principle, and Chapter 10.2 is what happened when it was applied to a Parliament that thought it did not apply to colonies.

And the deepest inheritance is the idea in the first paragraph. That a ruler can be tried. The Nuremberg trials, the International Criminal Court, and every prosecution of a former head of state anywhere rest on the proposition established on a scaffold in Whitehall in 1649, and it was regarded as monstrous at the time.

What the next page covers

Eighty-seven years after the Bill of Rights, thirteen colonies of the same country decided that its principles applied to them and that their Parliament disagreed. Chapter 10.2 covers the American Revolution — what the actual dispute was, why "no taxation without representation" was a constitutional argument rather than a complaint about money, how a colonial rebellion became the first modern republic, what the Constitution actually created and what it deliberately left out, and the contradiction that a declaration that all men are created equal was written by a slave owner in a country where a fifth of the population was enslaved.