Now the fact that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents are in the English revolution respectively conservatives, moderates, and extremists, is a bit confusing to the modern reader. For the extreme idealists, these seventeenth-century Englishmen are fighting over religious matters, fighting for ideals, and he finds it absurd to equate them with Frenchmen fighting for worldly liberty, equality, and fraternity, and shocking to compare them with Russians fighting for crude economic interests. On the other hand, the modern convert to the economic interpretation of history is likely to regard these religious differences as mere “ideologies,” or pretexts for a quarrel which was really a simple economic one. To him, the Presbyterians were small gentry or bourgeois business men, the Independents petty bourgeois traders, artisans, and yeomen farmers who quarreled after they had disposed of the feudal upper classes. Both the idealist and the materialist are here clearly wrong. Politics, economics, church government, and theology are inextricably mingled in the minds and sentiments of seventeenth-century Englishmen. Their conflicts are conflicts between human beings, not between the abstractions of the philosopher, the economist, or the sociologist. We must here observe the ways in which these conflicts worked out. From many points of view, it is profitable to regard these conflicts as exhibiting the sequence of domination first by conservatives, then by moderates, then by extremists. Naturally these conservatives, moderates, and extremists were not identical with similar groups in later revolutions. As compared with the men of 1789 or of 1917, they read different books, disputed over different ideas, just as they wore different clothes. Yet the course of their revolution does display a striking identity with our other revolutions in the relation between political organization and human temperaments. The Presbyterian “compromisers” were pushed aside by more determined and extreme men, just as were the Feuillants and Girondins in France and the Kadets and compromisist Socialist groups in Russia.
Under the leadership of the Westminster Assembly, a Presbyterian synod which began its meetings in the summer of 1643, that part of England under parliamentary control was brought under the famed Scottish Covenant. Crosses, images, crucifixes were torn down, the stained glass removed from the churches, sermons lengthened, and liturgy simplified. Parliament became the supreme law of the land. But already there were signs that the Presbyterian rule was not to go unchallenged. Marston Moor was not a Presbyterian victory. It was won by Cromwell and his “Ironsides”; and these men were not good Presbyterians. They were Independents, and some were Anabaptists, Antinomians, Heaven knows what! It is said that someone complained to Cromwell because one of his officers was an Anabaptist, and received the reply, “Admit he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Take heed of being too sharp ... against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.”
When the New Model Army was constructed from the nucleus of Cromwell’s Ironsides, and had won the Battle of Naseby, army and Parliament, Independent and Presbyterian, extremists and moderates, found themselves in opposition on various questions, notably on religious toleration and on what was to be done about Charles I. The Presbyterians wanted an established state church, built on their own notions of church government and theology, with a minimum of toleration towards papists and prelatists on the right and the sects on the left. And they most certainly wanted a king, even if that king were Charles Stuart. The Independents wanted what they called toleration. They certainly didn’t mean what a nineteenth-century Englishman or an American meant by religious toleration, and when they got into power they were very far from practicing toleration, even in the sense in which they had preached it. But at least while they were in opposition they agreed that religious belief was a personal matter and that the state should not seek to impose identical religious practices and organization on its citizens. As for the King, most of them by 1645 were sure Charles Stuart would never do. Cromwell was probably never a doctrinaire republican, but a great many of his men certainly were.
No single event marks exactly the transfer of power from the moderates to the extremists in England. The process had gone pretty far when Cornet Joyce of the army in June, 1646, seized the King at Holmby House as he was about to yield to the Parliament and consent for three years to govern as a Presbyterian king. It was almost completed when two months later Parliament at the dictation of the army reluctantly consented to the exclusion of eleven of its own members, conspicuous leaders of the Presbyterian group. Charles took the occasion of the quarrel to attempt to further his own interests. His complicated intrigues ended in nothing better than a brief war between the Scottish Presbyterians and the Cromwellians, in which for a moment the moderates could look up hopefully. Cromwell defeated the Scotch at Preston Pans in August, 1648, and the army was in undisputed control in Great Britain. After this the formal end of the moderates at Pride’s Purge in December was unimportant. Colonel Pride and a few soldiers were stationed at the door of the House of Commons to turn back the unsuitable members as they came. Ninety-six Presbyterians were thus excluded, leaving a group of fifty or sixty regular voting members on whom the extremists could rely. The Long Parliament had become the Rump.
In America the conflict never took quite such clear lines. We may say that the conservatives were those Tories who never really complained about the imperial government, the moderates those merchants and prosperous landowners who in a sense began the whole movement by their agitation against the Stamp Act, and the radicals that by no means united group which finally put through the Declaration of Independence. There was thus a kind of three-way struggle going on among these groups in the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities with the British Army. In this struggle the radicals exhibited an extraordinary technical skill in the practical politics of revolution. As John Adams later wrote of the organizations which, starting with local committees of correspondence and committees of safety, worked up to the continental congresses: “What an engine! France imitated it and produced a revolution.... And all Europe was inclined to imitate it for the same revolutionary purpose.”
The radicals really won their decisive victory by organizing as they did the first Continental Congress in 1774. Professor A. M. Schlesinger admirably summarizes the work of this Congress: “The radicals had achieved several important ends. They had reproduced on a national scale a type of organization and a species of tactics that in many parts of British America had enabled a determined minority to seize control of affairs ... they had snatched from the merchant class the weapons which the latter had fashioned to advance their own selfish interests in former years, and had now reversed the weapons on them, in an attempt to secure ends desired solely by the radicals. Finally, they had defined--nationalized--the issue at stake in such a manner as to afford prestige to radical groups, wherever they were to be found, and to weaken the hold of the moderate elements, on the ground that the latter were at variance with the Continental Congress.”
The taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in France sealed the defeat of the most conservative group, the true Royalists. The victorious revolutionists did not long remain in harmony, and the process of transfer of power to the left began in a few months. In October of the same year the King and Queen were riotously brought back to Paris from Versailles in what are known as the October Days. These events sent into exile the leaders of the moderate conservatives, men like Mounier who greatly admired the English Constitution, and wished France to have a bicameral legislature with a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and a real king. For the next few years a group of moderates centering about men like Mirabeau, Lafayette and the Lameths, were opposed by a group of radicals centering around men--Pétion, Robespierre, Danton, Brissot--soon to be leaders of the rival republican groups of Gironde and Mountain, but at present united against the moderates. The moderates succeeded in making the Constitution, and starting the new regime off. But war between France and the Central European powers of Austria and Prussia broke out, certain provisions of the Constitution, notably those concerning religion and the monarchy, failed to work well, Louis himself was suspected of treason by many of his subjects, and in the general political turmoil the active and well-organized radicals overthrew the monarchy in the famous attack on the Tuileries Palace in Paris on August 10, 1792.