Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England by Caroline Boswell (review)

The republican regimes that followed the execution of Charles I in 1649 are often overshadowed by the civil wars that preceded them and the Restoration in 1660. That makes Caroline Boswell's book, her first, all the more welcome. Her subject, popular disaffection, provides material in abundance. While Oliver Cromwell had many admirers, he had far more enemies from across the political spectrum. Instead of focusing on conspiracies by disaffected royalists and radicals, Boswell explores how the interregnum regimes, their servants, and their policies provoked widespread popular resentment, and how personal clashes between locals were often coloured and exacerbated by political insults.

The first section of the book focuses on sites of disaffection—the marketplace, street, and alehouse—with the second exploring some of its targets. The unpopularity of the central government meant that many of the problems were existential. A large standing army was essential for survival, which in turn necessitated heavy taxation to pay for it. Two chapters examine "the meddling soldier" and "the 'unnatural' Excise-man"—figures deeply resented yet indispensible for the survival of the republican Commonwealth and the Cromwellian Protectorate (1653–9) that followed it. A standing army in peacetime was something new in England and doubly resented as it served primarily to maintain an unwanted regime. Though by the mid-1650s much of the army was stationed in Scotland and Ireland, the presence of solders in garrison towns was inflammatory. Taxes are never popular, and the new excise (introduced in 1643), levied on a wide range of essentials, hit ordinary people harder than traditional parliamentary taxes. Both soldiers and excise-men were also frequently accused of abusing their position by violence or extortion. Many clashes occurred in the alehouse, the focus of one of the chapters in the first section. Such quarrels were all too likely when locals encountered soldiers or excise-collectors in the alehouse, with all parties lubricated by drink.

The alehouse was often a site of conflict even without the presence of meddling soldiers. Royalist sympathisers who drank a defiant health to the king and confusion to Cromwell might well trigger an angry confrontation. Such gestures might also be exploited by opportunistic neighbours to pursue a private quarrel, by reporting the offender to a constable or local magistrate. Similarly, purely private disputes were often coloured by the parties using coarse political insults to smear and dehumanize their adversaries. The personal and political became thus repeatedly intertwined. The interregnum years saw thousands of disorderly alehouses suppressed, the intensification of long-standing attempts to reduce drunken disorder. Such attempts had always provoked local resentment, but whereas in the past anger had been directed at zealous local magistrates, it now became associated with resentment toward the central government in Whitehall. Boswell shows how royalist pamphleteers and balladeers set out, with considerable success, to identify the royalist cause with a traditional popular culture of drink and merry-making, both targeted by puritan reformers. Her final chapter focuses on another resented figure, the "fanatic," a loose term that covered religious and political radicals of every hue, and prominent on the eve of the Restoration. Movements such as the Quakers had already provoked widespread resentment, partly through their confrontational tactics. Cromwell's constitution enshrined religious toleration, so disaffected locals resorted to physical violence, often with the connivance of local magistrates and ministers.

In the first section of the book, on the sites of disaffection, Boswell shows how disputes over mundane issues such as a fruit and vegetable market in London's Cheapside might see everyday clashes entangled with civic and national issues. Disputes over the Cheapside market had begun before the civil war and continued long after it. Similarly, popular agitation against Sir Arthur Haslerige, a grasping prominent republican, had numerous parallels both earlier and later. What Boswell's stories show is how such frictions, endemic in early modern society, were exacerbated by the novel political circumstances of the period, giving them an additional dimension that fused...