The execution of the king aroused hostility not only in England but also throughout Europe. Regicide was considered the worst of all crimes, and not even the brilliance of John Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) could persuade either Catholic or Protestant powers that the execution of Charles I was just. Open season was declared against English shipping, and Charles II was encouraged to reclaim his father’s three kingdoms.

Despite opposition and continued external threats, the government of the Commonwealth was declared in May 1649 after acts had been passed to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords. Political power resided in a Council of State, the Rump Parliament (which swelled from 75 to 213 members in the year following the king’s execution), and the army. The military was now a permanent part of English government. Though the soldiers had assigned the complex tasks of reform to Parliament, they made sure of their ability to intervene in political affairs.

At first, however, the soldiers had other things to occupy them. For reasons of security and revenge, Ireland had to be pacified. In the autumn of 1649, Cromwell crossed to Ireland to deal once and for all with the Irish Confederate rebels. He came first to Drogheda. When the town refused to surrender, he stormed it and put the garrison of 3,000 to the sword, acting both as the avenger of the massacres of 1641 (“I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood”) and as a deliberate instrument of terror to induce others to surrender. He repeated his policy of massacre at Wexford, this time choosing not to spare the civilian population. These actions had the desired effect, and most other towns surrendered at Cromwell’s approach. He departed Ireland after nine months, leaving his successors with only a mopping-up operation. His reputation at a new high, Cromwell was next put in charge of dealing with those Scots who had welcomed Charles I’s son, Charles II, to Scotland and who were soon to crown him at Scone as king of all of Great Britain and Ireland. Although outnumbered and in a weak defensive position, Cromwell won a stunning victory in the Battle of Dunbar on September 3, 1650. A year later to the day, having chased Charles II and a second Scottish army into England, he gained an overwhelming victory at Worcester. Charles II barely escaped with his life.

Victorious wars against the Irish, Scots, and Dutch (1652) made the Commonwealth a feared military power. But the struggle for survival defined the Rump’s conservative policies. Little was done to reform the law. An attempt to abolish the court of chancery created chaos in the central courts. Little agreement could be reached on religious matters, especially on the vexing question of the compulsory payment of tithes. The Rump failed both to make long-term provision for a new “national church” and to define the state’s right to confer and place limits on the freedom of those who wished to worship and gather outside the church. Most ominously, nothing at all had been done to set a limit for the sitting of the Rump and to provide for franchise reform and the election of a new Parliament. This had been the principal demand of the army, and the more the Rump protested the difficulty of the problem, the less patient the soldiers became. In April, when it was clear that the Rump would set a limit to its sitting but would nominate its own members to judge new elections, Cromwell marched to Westminster and dissolved Parliament. The Rump was replaced by an assembly nominated mostly by the army high command. The Nominated Parliament (1653) was no better able to overcome its internal divisions or untangle the threads of reform than the Rump. After five months it dissolved itself and returned power to Cromwell and the army.

The problems that beset both the Rump and the Nominated Parliament resulted from the diversity of groups that supported the revolution, ranging from pragmatic men of affairs, lawyers, officeholders, and local magistrates whose principal desire was to restore and maintain order to zealous visionaries who wished to establish heaven on earth. The republicans, like Sir Henry Vane the Younger, hoped to create a government based upon the model of ancient Rome and modern Venice. They were proud of the achievements of the Commonwealth and reviled Cromwell for dissolving the Rump. But most political reformers based their programs on dreams of the future rather than the past. They were millenarians, expecting the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Some were social reformers, such as Gerrard Winstanley, whose followers, agrarian communists known as Diggers, believed that the common lands should be returned to the common people. Others were mystics, such as the Ranters, led by Laurence Claxton, who believed that they were infused with a holy spirit that removed sin from even their most reprehensible acts. The most enduring of these groups were the Quakers (Society of Friends), whose social radicalism was seen in their refusal to take oaths or doff their hats and whose religious radicalism was contained in their emphasis upon inner light. Ultimately, all these groups were persecuted by successive revolutionary governments, which were continually being forced to establish conservative limits to individual and collective behaviour.

The failure of the Nominated Parliament led to the creation of the first British constitution, the Instrument of Government (1653). Drafted by Maj. Gen. John Lambert, the Instrument created a lord protector, a Council of State, and a reformed Parliament that was to be elected at least once every three years. Cromwell was named protector, and he chose a civilian-dominated Council to help him govern. The Protectorate tackled many of the central issues of reform head-on. Commissions were appointed to study law reform and the question of tithes. Social legislation against swearing, drunkenness, and stage plays was introduced. Steps were taken to provide for the training of a godly ministry, and even a new university at Durham was begun.

But the protector was no better able to manage his Parliaments than had been the king. The Parliament of 1654 immediately questioned the entire basis of the newly established government, with the republicans vigorously disputing the office of lord protector. The Parliament of 1656, despite the exclusion of many known opponents, was no more pliable. Both were a focus for the manifold discontents of supporters and opponents of the regime.

Nothing was more central to the Cromwellian experiment than the cause of religious liberty. Cromwell believed that no one church had a monopoly on truth and that no one form of government or worship was necessary or desirable. Moreover, he believed in a loosely federated national church, with each parish free to worship as it wished within very broad limits and staffed by a clergy licensed by the state on the basis of their knowledge of the Bible and the uprightness of their lives, without reference to their religious beliefs. On the other hand, Cromwell felt that there should be freedom for “all species of protestant” to gather if they wished into religious assemblies outside the national church. He did not believe, however, that religious liberty was a natural right, but one conferred by the Christian magistrate, who could place prudential limits on the exercise of that liberty. Thus, those who claimed that their religion permitted or even promoted licentiousness and sexual freedom, who denied the Trinity, or who claimed the right to disrupt the worship of others were subject to proscription or penalty. Furthermore, for the only time between the Reformation and the mid-19th century, there was no religious test for the holding of public office. Although Cromwell made his detestation of Catholicism very plain, Catholics benefited from the repeal of the laws requiring attendance at parish churches, and they were less persecuted for the private exercise of their own faith than at any other time in the century. Cromwell’s policy of religious tolerance was far from total, but it was exceptional in the early modern world.

Among opponents, royalists were again active, though by now they were reduced to secret associations and conspiracies. In the west, Penruddock’s rising, the most successful of a series of otherwise feeble royalist actions in March 1655, was effectively suppressed, but Cromwell reacted by reducing both the standing army and the level of taxation on all. He also appointed senior army officers “major generals,” raising ultra-loyal militias from among the demobbed veterans paid for by penal taxation on all those convicted of active royalism in the previous decade. The major generals were also charged with superintending “a reformation of manners”—the imposition of strict Puritan codes of social and sexual conduct. They were extremely unpopular, and, despite their effectiveness, the offices were abolished within a year.

By now it was apparent that the regime was held together by Cromwell alone. Within his personality resided the contradictions of the revolution. Like the gentry, he desired a fixed and stable constitution, but, like the zealous, he was infused with a millenarian vision of a more glorious world to come (see millennialism). As a member of Parliament from 1640, he respected the fundamental authority that Parliament represented, but, as a member of the army, he understood power and the decisive demands of necessity. In the 1650s many wished him to become king, but he refused the crown, preferring the authority of the people to the authority of the sword. When he died in 1658, all hope of continued reform died with him.

For a time, Richard Cromwell was elevated to his father’s titles and dignity, but he was no match in power or skill. The republicans and the army officers who had fought Oliver tooth and nail now hoped to use his son to dismantle the civil government that under the Humble Petition and Advice (1657) had come to resemble nothing so much as the old monarchy. An upper House of Lords had been created, and the court at Whitehall was every bit as ceremonious as that of the Stuarts. While some demanded that the Rump be restored to power, others clamoured for the selection of a new Parliament on the basis of the old franchise, and this took place in 1659. By then there was a vacuum of power at the centre; Richard Cromwell, incapable of governing, simply left office. A rebellion of junior officers led to the reestablishment of the Rump.

But all was confusion. The Rump was incapable of governing without financial support from the City and military support from the army. Just as in 1647, the City demanded military disbandment and the army demanded satisfaction of its material grievances. But the army was no longer a unified force. Contentions among the senior officers led to an attempt to arrest Lambert, and the widely scattered regiments had their own grievances to propound. The most powerful force was in Scotland, commanded by George Monck, once a royalist and now one of the ablest of the army’s senior officers. When one group of officers determined to dissolve the Rump, Monck marched his forces south, determined to restore it. Arriving in London, Monck quickly realized that the Rump could never govern effectively and that only the restoration of Charles II could put an end to the political chaos that now gripped the state. In February 1660 Monck reversed Pride’s Purge, inviting all of the secluded members of the Long Parliament to return to their seats under army protection. A month later the Long Parliament dissolved itself, paving the way for the return of the king.