Let me begin by agreeing that the origins of large-scale petitioning on political and religious matters can be found in the records of the movement for a Presbyterian settlement for the Church of England in the 1580s. This was the precedent for the later petitioning activities in the early to mid-Stuart period. However, petitioning itself was common at all levels of English and Welsh society on local and other matters by then. Recognising that such appeals were one of the common features of bargaining between the Crown, the Privy Council and other organs of the State and Church at that time is appropriate. Charles I's critics in the 1620s and again by 1640 utilised such means.
We can see this in the coordinated petitions submitted to
the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 and later in and after November 1640
when the Long Parliament met. The leaders of the so-called 'Junto', men like
the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke, John Pym,
Oliver St John and others, understood the importance of exercising pressure on
the King and his advisers to secure what they regarded as essential
concessions.
Valerie Pearl showed in her 1954 D.Phil. thesis and her 1961
book based on her thesis how these men worked together with their radical
allies in the city of London to bring popular demonstrations, charges against
recalcitrant proto-Royalists and petitioning to this end. These activities were
not necessarily as spontaneous as figures like Brian Manning and Christopher
Hill supposed. Take just one example: the M.P.s for London. Cradock and Venn
were well known to Warwick and the others from their involvement in the
activities of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Companies: Samuel Vassall
was one of Warwick's tenants; Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one of the
supporters of Samuel Hartlieb’s activities.
Owen Rowe was Warwick's brother-in-law from 1625 to 1645.
Warwick had important connections with seamen and shipbuilders in London
stretching back to the mid-1610s and onwards to the end of 1648. The Providence
Island Company's financial affairs throw a revealing light on the connections
of these peers and gentlemen with mercantile figures before 1640 and, indeed,
in later ventures after the start of the Civil War.
I ought to add that ascribing the term 'revisionist' to John
Rees creates a problem since this is the description usually applied to those
historians who, from 1976, undermined and replaced the older Whig and Marxist
explanations for the events of the 1640s. Perhaps, I may be allowed to add the
heretical thought that the English Revolution or the Great Rebellion (or, as I
prefer to call it, this 'grand soulevement') took place against the background
of a significant improvement in the position of the larger landowners since
1600, as W.R.Emerson argued and which, were I a Marxist, might explain why
these conflicts began and why the post-1649 settlements failed and the
Restoration took place.
