In the years of personal rule Charles, aided by his two great supporters, Strafford and Laud, did his best to organize the government of England in accordance with notions of efficient centralization and expert rule which were the chief political heritage of the Renaissance. He did a job in some ways surprisingly good. But he may, as nineteenth-century liberal historians fondly believed, have been going against the basic grain of the English character and the basic mold of English institutions; he was most certainly going bankrupt. A clash with the Scotch Presbyterians probably merely hastened the inevitable. Charles called a Parliament in the spring of 1640, but dissolved it after less than a month. A Scotch army now invaded England, and Charles had to buy it off. To get money he had to call another Parliament. The Short Parliament was, therefore, but a breaking of the ground for the Long Parliament, which met on November 3, 1640, was dissolved on April 20, 1653, and was brought briefly to life again in 1659, just before the restoration of the Stuarts. The life of this extraordinary assembly thus spans almost completely the twenty years of the English revolution.
The Long Parliament got to work at once, for on November 11, 1640, a week after it first met, Pym moved the impeachment of Strafford for high treason. The impeachment, held up by the more conservative House of Lords, was turned early in 1641 into a bill of attainder. Impeachment involved at least the forms of judicial action, whereas attainder was a simple legislative act. The Lords were willing enough to abandon Strafford, if not to try him, and on May 12th he fell under the executioner’s ax. Less than eight years later that ax was to reach his royal master.
Actual outbreak of armed hostilities between Charles and the Parliament was not to come for another year. Parliament voted by a majority of eleven the Grand Remonstrance, a long summing-up of all the grievances accumulated against the King in the seventeen years of his reign. Charles replied to this vote of want of confidence by attempting to arrest six members of Parliament, Lord Kimbolton in the Lords, Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Holles, and Strode in the Commons, who had compromised themselves by entering into technically treasonous negotiations with the invading Scotch army. Charles rashly came down to the House of Commons himself with armed men and attempted to seize the members. He was met with something of the kind of passive resistance the French Third Estate displayed at the royal session of June 17, 1789, when Louis XVI ordered them to give up attempting to form a National Assembly. The threatened members fled to the City of London, and Charles was again checkmated. The Commons were now so aggressively successful that they decided to take over the military by naming officers in the militia and train-bands. Charles, in turn, began to build up his own army, and set up his standard at Nottingham in August, 1642. The Civil War had begun.
Where in this long and closely knit series of events you wish to say the English revolution fairly began is partly a subjective matter. Somewhere between the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640, and the outbreak of the war two years later, the first critical steps in the revolution were undertaken. Perhaps the execution of Strafford is a good dramatic date, or Charles’s futile attempt to seize the five members in the Commons. At any rate, by the summer of 1642 the English revolution had taken on unmistakable form.
Events in America moved hardly more rapidly. In a sense, you can maintain that the American revolution really began in 1765 with the Stamp Act; or at any rate that the agitation which culminated in the repeal of that Act was a kind of rehearsal for the great movement of the seventies. The imperial government was determined to do something about the American colonists, and Townshend’s mild duties on tea, glass, lead and a few other articles imported into America were accompanied by an attempt to collect them in an efficient modern way. Under Townshend’s act His Majesty’s customs houses in America were equipped with a hopeful and willing bureaucracy. The result was a series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans. Tarring and feathering of informers, stealing sequestered goods from under the noses of customs officers, jeering at British troops, led up to the more dramatic incidents enshrined in the textbooks: the seizure of the _Gaspee_ at Providence, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Boston Tea Party, the burning of the _Peggy Stewart_ at Annapolis.
The closing of the port of Boston, the dispatch of Gage and his troops to Massachusetts, the Quebec Act itself, were all really measures taken by the imperial government against colonies already in revolt. You may, if you are interested in such matters, discuss at length the question as to just when the American revolution is to be considered as formally beginning. You may go as late as the first Continental Congress in 1774, or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, or even the most famous Fourth of July in 1776. But the complex group-struggles out of which revolutions actually grow only later turn into formal sources for patriotic ritual. The first steps in the American revolution were many and spread over something like a decade. Only an absolutist mind could insist that out of this long process a given detail be isolated as the beginning of the American revolution.
The French revolution of 1789 may be said to have been incubating for several decades. Overt and definite resistance to the royal government, as in the parliaments of Charles I and in the American colonial assemblies, is not to be found in France, which was wholly without such representative bodies. The nearest thing to such a body was the _parlement de Paris_, a kind of supreme court composed of judges who were nobles and held their positions by heredity. It was precisely this _parlement_, followed by the provincial _parlements_, that began in the 1780’s an open quarrel with the Crown, which culminated in a dramatic defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges. Popular opinion, at least in Paris, was overwhelmingly with the judges, and privileged nobles though they were, they became heroes and martyrs for a day.
Meanwhile, approaching bankruptcy had forced the King to call in 1787 an Assembly of Notables, a kind of hastily gathered special commission of prominent nobles, from whom Louis XVI in good eighteenth-century style no doubt expected enlightenment. This he certainly obtained, for the Assembly contained many upper-class intellectuals, like Lafayette, who were convinced that France must cease to be a “despotism,” must endow itself with an up-to-date constitution of the kind the new states of the American union were making fashionable. The Assembly of Notables was accordingly very divided and doubtful about ways of filling the empty treasury, but clear that further consultation with the nation was necessary. The Crown finally yielded, brought back into the government the Swiss commoner, Necker, who had a reputation as a financial wizard, and summoned a meeting of the Estates-General for the spring of 1789.
This Estates-General had last met in 1614, and there was some uncertainty as to how one went about electing it. The antiquarians came to the rescue, however, and three hundred representatives of the First Estate, or clergy, three hundred of the Second, or nobility, and six hundred of the Third, or commons, were chosen, practically in time for the first meeting. The double representation of the Third Estate had no precedent in 1614 or earlier. It was, in fact, a revolutionary step, a concession wrung from the King, an admission that in some way or another the Third Estate was more important than the others. In the old constitution, however, final decisions were made by the orders as units; that is, if the Clergy and the Nobles as separate houses agreed on a policy, they could carry it, two to one, even against the dissenting Third Estate. When the Estates met in May, 1789, the great question was whether to follow the old constitution and vote by orders, or to vote in one great assembly of twelve hundred members in which the doubled Third Estate, plus the “liberals” among the other two orders, would have a clear majority. Louis had characteristically permitted this problem to remain vague and unsettled, and only after the Third Estate had insisted on one great assembly did he royally insist on three separate ones.
The issue out of which the French revolution formally grew was this simple one of vote by orders or vote by individuals in one assembly. The Third Estate stood pat, and refused to transact any business until the other orders joined it in what was to be called--and the name was a sound piece of propaganda for the revolutionists--the National Assembly. There are certain dramatic moments in a two-months’ struggle which was essentially parliamentary and lacking in the more physical kinds of violence. Shut out by a royal blunder from their usual meeting place, the Third Estate on June 20, 1789, met hastily in a large indoor tennis court, and swore not to disperse until they had endowed France with a constitution.