PICTURING PARLIAMENT: THE GREAT SEAL OF THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

Presenting research conducted by the ‘St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster’ project at the University of York, this article focuses on the Great Seal devised in 1649 and re-issued in 1651 to enable the Commonwealth to function following the execution of Charles i. As a familiar and ancient image of monarchy, the Great Seal posed an obvious challenge to the authority of the Rump Parliament. A radical new design, authorised by parliamentary committee and executed by engraver Thomas Simon, replaced royal iconography with images of popular sovereignty and nationhood: a map of England and Ireland on the obverse of the Seal, and the interior of the House of Commons chamber (formerly St Stephen’s Chapel) on the reverse. The result was a striking evocation of political authority located in the House of Commons and deriving from the English people. Engravings of the Commons chamber, in circulation since the 1620s, are identified as a probable source for Simon’s work. The Great Seal also re-asserted England’s dominion over Ireland and the waters surrounding the British Isles. Overall, this article argues for continuity as well as alteration in the iconography of the Great Seal of England, at a time of revolutionary political change.

The Cromwellian Army’s Political Role During the Interregnum

From 1649 to 1660 the Cromwellian army, which grew out of the New Model Army, was the dominant political institution in the country and the foundation for each successive government. It forced through the regicide, purged parliaments, dissolved them, restored them, summoned new legislative bodies, produced a written constitution, and briefly flirted with direct military rule under the major-generals. The army elevated Oliver Cromwell, its Lord General, to the position of Lord Protector, and then turned against his son, Richard, and demolished the Protectorate. In 1660 part of the army engineered the restoration of the monarchy. There is no other period in English history, either before or since the interregnum, when a standing army exercised so much power and influence on the politics and government of the country. Its adoption of a political role was initially defensive in terms of securing its due after the civil war in terms of pay and arrears. In the face of parliamentary hostility, that focus on material issues broadened to incorporate a defense of the army’s right to petition and defend its honor and then widened further with its conviction that, as the embodiment of the godly cause, it had a right and a duty to be involved in the settlement of the nation. But the army never felt comfortable with the messy business of politics, and it spent the 1650s trying to find a parliament with which it could coexist. The character of the army inevitably changed during the 11 years of the English republic. Death, wounds, retirement, and political differences removed many senior officers, as well as reshaping much of the junior officer corps and the rank and file. The physical dispersion of the regiments after the conquests of Ireland and Scotland led to substantially different means of political engagement and intervention compared to the years 1647 and 1648, when much of the army was quartered close together within striking distance of London. But alongside these developments there were some fundamental features of the army that remained constant: it continued to be a heterogenous institution that accommodated a wide range of political and religious beliefs among its officer corps; its veneration of Oliver Cromwell never wavered, albeit with some exceptions during the Protectorate, and, in turn, he tolerated its diversity while ruling the army with tight control; and the clarion cry of army unity as the bulwark against “the common enemy” (the Royalists) endured as a potent emotion, even for those who opposed Cromwell’s Protectorate. In 1659 and 1660, after Cromwell’s death, the restored Rump Parliament, the assembly that the army had dissolved in 1653, twice purged the army’s officer corps as it imposed tests of political correctness and fealty on an institution that it deeply distrusted. The purges wrecked army unity and left the army in England incapable of resisting General George Monck when he brought about the restoration of the monarchy.

Dating the digression in Milton'sHistory of Britain

I should first thank Professor Woolrych for his attention to my book, and also for his generous conduct in anticipating debate over his views. In particular I am grateful for his correction of a historical point on which my book proves in error: the readmission of conformist members in the first weeks of the Rump Parliament did not much extend to secluded members, and thus the backsliding of the revolutionaries after Pride's Purge and the king's trial may have been less troubling to Milton than I supposed. On this point I had mistaken Underdown and Worden's description of the revolutionaries' compromise, and had partially misunderstood their conclusion that ‘the damage to the revolutionary cause…had already been done by the end of February’. Here Woolrych now shows me wrong. But although this changes the balance it does not change the substance of my argument about Milton's stern note in theHistory. For as Woolrych renews the issue of the dating of the Digression from Milton'sHistory, he again misreads that text and its context in the larger work. He believes it an expression of despair, and thinks such despair on Milton's part could only be occasioned by the national apostasy at the Restoration. But Milton, both in the contemporaryTenure of Kings and Magistrates(1649) as well as in later tracts, proves much less sanguine about English hopes than even the passages Woolrych cites will support. The Presbyterians, whom theTenureattacks in the same terms as the Digression, were not the only problem faced by the ‘uprighter sort’ of magistrates and those ‘people, though in number less by many, in whom faction least hath prevaild above the Law of nature and right reason’.