This is Stuart England The Civil Wars episode two point one hundred and seven,
as hot as they can suffer it. On the thirteenth of October sixteen fifty
nine, the complex at Westminster played host to an armed standoff. The night
before, Parliament had voted to reorganize England's army. Charles Fleetwood was removed as
Commander in Chief and numerous high ranking officers were purged. Authority over the army
passed to a seven man commission dominated by dedicated rumpers like Thomas Scott, Edmund
Ludlow and most of all, Arthur Hasselrigg. But while parliamentary supremacists like Hasselrigg
considered the House of Commons to be the final voice on such matters, not
everyone in the army agreed. When the new commission called on troops to defend
Westminster against a possible coup, only a handful of soldiers showed up. Neither
did the London militia rally to the cause of the rump Since the summer,
Parliament had been trying to cultivate these cities militia as a rival military force to
the army, but popular sentiment within London was not sympathetic to the rump.
Just two weeks earlier, Parliament's attempt to extend the tenure of its ally,
Lord Mayor John Ireton had failed in the face of popular protests. In the
dispute between the army and the rump, the people of London stood more or
less aloof neither side seemed likely to deliver the free Parliament that was increasingly seen
as the only path out of England's perpetual turmoil. As Parliament assembled its defense
force overnight, the army leaders they sought to protect themselves from gathered their own
troops. John Lambert, the hero of the recent counterinsurgency and one of the
men targeted by Parliament's purge, took command. Hasserig claimed that Lambert was the
mastermind behind yet another army coup, and as his troops surrounded the Westminster Complex
in the early hours of the thirteenth, it seemed like a hard charge to
refute. Had Hasserigg sniffed out a dastardly army plot or had he merely delivered
a self fulfilling prophecy. The tenth standoff that followed offered little in the way
of clarity. What's curious about the confrontation is that both major players, Hasselerigg
and Lambert, seemed to have acted counterintuitively. Hasselerigg remained defiant even as his
poultry military forces melted away over the course of the day. Meanwhile, Lambert,
who seemed to hold the dominant position at Westminster, didn't simply seize control
of government as you would expect of a man leading a coup. There is
more going on here than a simple fight over power. Hasselerigg's intransigence is perhaps
the most explicable on the surface. On multiple occasions in the build up to
the confrontation, Hasserigg was given opportunities to de escalate or compromise with army leaders,
especially Charles Fleetwood, and yet he continued to go out of his way
to provoke the armymen. The folly of that policy became apparent on the thirteenth
of October, when the men with guns chose loyalty to their commanders over hastily
passed parliamentary resolutions. But that outcome was thoroughly predictable. Why at hasselrigg Force
day confrontation he was almost guaranteed to lose? That question becomes even more perplexing
when you consider that it was a mistake Hasserig had made before. In sixteen
fifty three, despite repeated warnings from officers, he had pushed Parliament towards a
confrontation with the army, which led to Oliver Cromwell storming into Westminster and shutting
the rump down. After patiently waiting six years for return to politics, why
would Hassig immediately make the same choice that had left him banished in the first
place. One answer might be Hasserigg's ideology and character. No one could question
the man's principles, the key one being the absolute supremacy of the people as
represented in the House of Commons. Well, you could question why his principles
directed him to put absolute authority in this House of Commons rather than a new
one which would be more representative of the people. But to keep things simple
for now, Hasseigg was devoted to the idea that Parliament, not army officers,
ruled England. From this perspective, Hasserigg is an uncompromising idealocke. He
provoked the army because he had no other choice. They demanded to say in
governance, and in Hasselrigg's world that was impossible. A constitution that sacrificed its
fundamental principles was no constitution at all. Of course, the other side of
the coin is that Hasserigg was simply a stubborn stubborn man, which would explain
why he had always clashed with the consummate pragmatist Oliver Cromwell. But there's another
explanation for Hasselerigg's defiance, one that doesn't rely on psychological analysis. In the
hours before the arms standoff, debate at Westminster centered around the impending army coup
and the need to prepare for a violent confrontation. But just as influential on
the course that confrontation would take was a private note hasselrig received during the course
of the day. It came via courier directly from George Monk, the commander
of the army in Scotland. The contents of that letter are crucial to understanding
Hasselrigg's decision making in the hours and days that followed, which means its past
time we visit Scotland and get to know this shadowy figure who's been lurking in
the background of the story for the past few episodes. Who was George Monk
and what was he up to. Monk's role in the events of sixteen fifty
nine sixteen sixty have long bred speculation among contemporaries historians, in large part because
there's very little evidence to go on. The general kept his cards close to
his chest. It's a testament to Monk's cagunists that nearly everyone thought they could
win him over to their side. Monk's name was included in the Derby petition.
He was one of the officers the soldiers demanded to be immune from any
parliamentary purge. Meanwhile, Arthur Hesselrigg made sure to include Monk in the seven
man commission to run the Army that Parliament created in October, and finally,
Royalist agents continually reached out to Monk in this period, hopeful that an alliance
could be struck. The ambiguity surrounding Monk's intentions have led some to see him
as an unprincipled mercenary. Rather than making a stand, he held out for
the most personally advantageous outcome. Certainly you can frame his career in those terms.
As you may recall, Monk entered our narrative fighting for the crown first
in Ireland, then briefly in England. It was only after he was captured
by Parliamentary forces at the Battle of Nantwich that Monk changed his allegiances. But
that explanation is too neat. Changing sides in the sixteen forties or sixteen fifties
was not necessarily evidence of opportunism or self interest, Considering how many factions were
vying for power, and how quickly what those factions stood for could change,
Being constant in both your principles and your partisan loyalties was more or less impossible.
A more satisfactory explanation of Monk's actions in sixteen fifty nine and sixteen sixty
requires a deeper investigation of his politics. In a sense, Monk shared a
lot in common with Oliver Cromwell. The thread that ran throughout his political life
was pragmatism, but not in the narrow sense of following the path of least
resistance in the short term. Like Cromwell, Monk elevated practical politics to its
own kind of ideology. Neither man was all that interested in the details of
abstract political theory, nor were they wedded to a particular constitutional model. They
were interested in outcomes, not process. What was the best way to deliver
political stability without sacrificing some core principles, in Cromwell's case, independent religious conscience.
In other words, the calculations Monk was making in sixteen fifty nine weren't
necessarily working out how he would personally benefit from events, though of course those
kinds of considerations were never entirely absent. Rather, Monk was trying to determine
which course was best for England. Historian Richard Hutton argues that Monk wasn't interested
in any particular political settlement so much as he sought a disciplined and united England.
From his perspective, abstractions like Hausarregg's absolute supremacy of the House of Commons
or the good old cause of the New Model Army were irrelevant. What mattered
was what the future of England would look like in the hands of the various
factions, and in sixteen fifty nine, more than any other time in our
story, those potential English futures were changing by the day. Perhaps most of
all, Monk refused to commit himself because he didn't really like any of the
options on offer. The current Parliament was hardly a firm basis for legitimacy,
Hauserwigg's claims of representative government rang hollow when the rump only represented a tiny minority
of England. Meanwhile, army coups could perhaps be forgiven if they brought stability,
But the standoff in October looked like the second one of the year.
It was clear that the army men had no real plan aside from clinging to
power, and finally, Monk had little desire to simply reopen a third Civil
War by backing the Stewart exile. So instead of intervening, Monk sat back
in Scotland, carefully husbanding the most cohesive army in Britain, and waited for
the least of three evils to emerge, Which leads us to that message Hasserig
received on the twelfth of October, just before he decided to precipitate parliament standoff
with the army. In it, Monk made his most definitive statement yet in
the current dispute between Parliament and the army. Monk assured Hasselig Scotland's army stood
with Parliament. It's likely that by this point Monk had identified the army as
the major threat to political stability There's little evidence that he had much confidence in
the leaders of the Rump, like Hasselig, but it was perhaps conceivable that
the current parliament offered a way to move forward with at least a shred of
legitimacy, ideally by dissolving itself and holding fresh elections. More army coups would
only whittle away what legitimacy of the regime still held, throwing England into chaos.
Stirred by Monk's show of support, Hasselerigg was unfazed by the sight of
John Lambert's men surrounding Westminster. The Rump may have lost the battle to mobili
soldiers in the capital, but Lambert's national position was just as precarious as parliaments.
The result was a confrontation where Lambert held all these short term military cards
but was keenly aware of his weak political position in the long term. Meanwhile,
Hasserigg, confident that he had Monk and Scotland on his side, refused
to budge. Even when the Rump's bodyguards started defecting to Lambert's camp in large
numbers. Hasselrig held firm. In a sense, the die hard Rumper had
a good read on the situation. Lambert and the other army men had the
power to simply shut down Parliament, but they were hesitant to use it.
For forty eight hours, the two sides engaged in an awkward, fruitless negotiation.
Hassel Rigg refused to concede anything, and Lambert hesitated to simply occupy Westminster.
Really, Lambert was in the same position his old ally, Oliver Cromwell,
had been in the past. It was clear that the rump had to
go, but the general had no real plan for what will come next.
Cromwell had at least been confident in the army's control over England, and so
had been able to indulge in experiments like the Nominated Assembly or Lambert's own instrument
of government. But now Lambert was keenly aware of the weakness of his position.
The only path forward he could see was re establishing some kind of cooperation
with Parliament, albeit on his terms. Hasselrig's defiance had him flummixed. Finally,
Lambert and the other officers decided that they had to move forward without Parliament.
On the fifteenth of October, the Army formally proclaimed the Parliament dissolved,
as well as its associated Council of State, a new executive body, the
Committee of Safety, took over, populated by ten armymen. In any chronological
list of the governing bodies of England, this was a fairly neat transition.
The Rump was once again crossed out and the Committee of Safety written in its
place. But the reality was far more complex than that. For one thing,
Parliament's Council of State continued meeting in private despite the Army's declaration. In
fact, Lambert and his ally were still eager to draw some legitimacy from the
now officially defunct Parliament. Negotiations to poach counselors were ongoing, and by the
twenty fifth of October the new regime had won over some key defections. Henry
Vane, who had been growing closer to John Lambert in recent weeks, joined
the Committee of Safety, as did Bulstrode Whitelock, Westminster's resident constitutionalist. The
most significant defection was Edmund Ludlow, a committed Republican and longtime ally of Arthur
Hesselrigg. None of these men were especially enthusiastic about the quasi government they were
joining. Vane saw the Army as the best hope for his radical religious agenda.
Whitelock wasn't a fan of illegal army coups, but hoped to steer the
generals towards a constitutional settlement, as he had done with Oliver Cromwell, and
Ludlow likely saw Hesselrigg's Rump as a lost cause. In other words, even
after the Committee of Safety dissolved the Rump, England's new rulers still saw Parliament
as playing an important role in legitimizing their government. But more importantly, all
this talk of new governments, who was taking place within a smaller and smaller
circle. The Committee of Safety claimed to be the government of England, but
the evidence that could actually whield that kind of power was thin on the ground.
For instance, the court system saw a little reason to recognize the coup.
Half the judges at Westminster closed up shop after the coup. Their commissions
came through Parliament, not this unconstitutional Committee of Safety, and those who stayed
at their posts were hardly any more cooperative. They looked to the twentieth of
November as the day when their parliamentary mandated terms came to an end. If
there was no Parliament in session at that time, to renew their commissions,
they'd stopped their work as well. London wasn't very cooperative either. Neither the
rump nor the army had been especially popular in the city, and it quickly
became apparent that the Committee of Safety could expect neither loans nor tax revenue from
that quarter. On hearing news of the coup, London's apprentices immediately began petitioning
for free elections and a new parliament. The story was the same in the
provinces. JP's postponed or suspended quarter sessions until the status of parliament was clarified.
In many counties, local organizations followed the lead of London and declared tax
strikes on the size or assessment until parliament was restored. In some instances,
soldiers were able to collect taxes by force, but it was impossible to execute
such measures on a national scale, and besides, that kind of work sapped
the morale of the men. Some officers who ordered their men to forcibly collect
taxes reported threats of mutinies or even physical violence against them personally. When the
story of the sixteen fifty nine coup is told from the perspective of John Lambert
and Arthur Hesselrigg. You get the sense of history repeating itself. Almost from
the second the Civil War ended in sixteen forty six, English political life was
defined by a series of coups, the dueling coups of Independent and Presbyterian factions
in sixteen forty seven, the Purge of sixteen forty eight, and Cromwell's shuddering
of the Rump in sixteen fifty three. This one, in sixteen fifty nine
followed the same script and even had some of the same actors, most notably
Arthur Hesselrigg, reprising his role from six years earlier. But if you take
a step back from the arms stand off at Westminster, sixteen fifty nine was
entirely different. Whether the Rump's shadow Council of State or the Committee of Safe
he one out was virtually irrelevant if neither could exercise control over England. Parliament
got its legitimacy from the people, and the army drived its power from the
taxes that fed its troops. Both of those sources of power could be cut
off if the people of England simply refused to cooperate. Historians have long debated
why, after more than a decade of at least tacitly supporting various regimes,
England withdrew its support for this latest one. Some have pointed to a rising
fear of religious radicalism which coalesced around the Quaker movement. The Quakers presented a
unique danger to English society. On the one hand, they seemed to reject
all forms of hierarchy, whether spiritual or material, and on the other they
were far better organized than any of the radical groups that had come before.
These weren't individual crackpots spouting nonsense on street corners. This was a well organized
group that rather confusingly, sought to implement anarchy throughout society. Some suspected that
the Army coup was actually a Quaker coup in disguise. For the conspiratorially inclined,
there were dots out there to connect. In September, the Rump had
released to James Naylor, the radical Quaker who'd been condemned by Parliament in sixteen
fifty seven. Henry Vane was seen as the driving force behind this reversal of
parliamentary policy. Vain had long advocated for virtually absolute toleration in religion. In
fact, in early October, just days before the coup, Vain presented to
Parliament a motion calling for full toleration for all religious sects. The motion was
defeated thanks to Hassagan as allies. The setback was part of a longer series
of battles that drove Vain to abandon the Rump for the Committee of Safety.
As we've seen, but rumors world that Vain wasn't just a defector. He
and his Quaker friends were the puppet masters behind the coup. The end game
was for Henry Vane to be declared king of a dystopian England marked by the
absolute anarchy the Quakers dreamed of. There's little evidence of a Quaker conspiracy at
the heart of the Army coup, but paranoia about Quakers in the fall of
sixteen fifty nine was widespread throughout England. In London and elsewhere, Quaker owned
shops were attacked, especially on Sundays, when God fearing businesses ought to be
closed. Fear of Quakers and their potential involvement in the Army coup almost certainly
played a role in the widespread rejection of the Committee of Safety as a legitimate
body of government. But the crucial difference in sixteen fifty nine was that England
had had enough. There was no confidence that this latest coup bring any kind
of stability to the nation. Each successive coup had alienated another segment of the
population, to the point that Lambert and Haselrig were fighting over the loyalty of
a minuscule collection of interests. The rest of England had no desire to participate
in that process. In fact, people were questioning the future direction of the
nation like never before, not just idealogs, but men and women who had
previously been willing to accept a Cromwellian or Republican regime so long as it delivered
peace and stability. Perhaps Cromwell could have delivered that kind of pragmatic margain,
but since his death, his would be successors had shown no ability whatsoever to
rule England. While the Committee of Safety tried to convince England of its authority
in October and November sixteen fifty nine, completely different visions of England's future sprang
up all over, especially in London. The variety of models and ideas being
discussed is an indication of how the path of perpetual army coups was widely seen
as a dead end. But The proliferation of free wheeling political discussions was also
an indication of how deficient the Committee of Safety was as a government. In
the absence of any kind of effective censorship regime, discourse had never been freer.
Which sounds like a lead into a section on political philosophy, but you
know, high struggle with complex, abstract ideas, so instead, I'll steer
us towards a more tangible aspect of these philosophical debates. Because the sharing of
new ideas wasn't just fueled by the uncertain political climate. It was also fueled
by a new miracle drink, coffee. I've long wanted to make a commodity
a central focus of the podcast. I suppose we sort of did that with
coal and fuel more generally a while back, but I've always regretted not spending
more time with tobacco exploring why it played such an important role in the politics
and economics of Transatlantic English history. So to make up for that, we'll
turn to coffee. Its story brings together some disparate threads. This podcast has
thrown up international trade, public health, and emerging consumer society, and the
development of a modern civil society where an informed public takes an active role in
politics. Coffee emerged from the highlands of Ethiopia, but took off as a
commercially cultivated and traded commodity on the other side of the Red Sea on the
Arabian Peninsula in the fifteenth century. Initially, production was localized to modern day
Yemen, and it was primarily used at nearby Sufi monasteries to aid in spiritual
contemplation. In the fifteen thirties, the Ottoman Empire sees control of Yemen part
of a deliberate policy of expanding Turkish influence in the Indian Ocean to counter the
sudden appearance of Portuguese traders. In fact, coffee became an important element of
the empire's pivot to the south. The development of the new commodity somewhat offset
the European intrusion into the lucrative spice trade of the East, but in many
ways the Ottomans found coffee to be a frustrating product. The problem had to
do with local politics, as we've seen in North Africa. Outside of its
Turkish heartland, the Ottoman Empire tended to work through local powerbrokers. On paper,
these men were loyal to estambul but in practical terms, the exercise of
power required sensitivity to local interests. The situation in Yemen was further complicated by
the fact that while the Ottomans had a strong presence along the coast, they
had little political influence in the interior, where the coffee was actually grown.
Extracting value out of Yemeni coffee was therefore a constant struggle of local diplomacy and
imperial power politics. This instability culminated in the rise of an independent state in
Yemen run by the Zadie of the Interior Highlands. In a series of conflicts
between fifteen ninety seven and sixteen thirty eight, the Zadis pushed the Ottomans entirely
out of Yemen. With the exit of the Ottomans, European traders quickly descended
on the port of Mocha, the world's largest and virtually only wholesale market for
the new miracle drink coffee. The first reference to coffee in any English source
comes from a letter written by a Levant Company merchant in Aleppo in sixteen hundred.
He reported that the locals were obsessed with the stuff. They drank it
as hot as they can suffer it. Ten years later, coffee made an
appearance in a widely read travelock written by George Sandus, the younger brother of
Edmund Sandis, the great disruptor of James's reign. George spent two years traveling
through Turkey, Syria, and Egypt and published an account of his voyage.
He noted that coffee was a ubiquitous presence throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. However,
Sandis was thoroughly befuddled by its popularity. He described the drink as black as
soot and tasting not much unlike it. Sandus's account was widely read and spruct
an interest in the Levant. In fact, an English trade boom was about
to kick off there, but coffee didn't play much of a role in that
process. Sandus and other commentators tended to compare coffee to ale and found the
drink lacking. Perhaps more importantly, coffee became associated with the Turk, which
in England meant on the one hand, vicious tyranny and on the other a
kind of asiatic effeminacy. The Levant company treated coffee as an exotic curiosity,
but not a product worth importing to England in any great quantities. But if
coffee wasn't considered viable for the English market, that didn't mean it didn't have
value. The first English merchants the season the new opportunity were the Levant Company's
cousins in the East India Company. As was often the case in the early
history of the company, it was Thomas Rowe who led the charge. You
may remember him as the ambassador to the Mughal Court in the sixteen tens,
who was so important in getting the East India Company off the ground. One
of Roe's suggestions to the East India Company was to build local trade networks within
Asia rather than focusing solely on long haul trade between England and India, and
coffee was a great place to start. As early at sixteen seventeen, Roe
urged the company to make Mocha a key strategic base. The Yemedyport was useful
as a base of resupply for ships coming from Africa before completing the final run
to India itself. But more importantly, coffee was emerging as a major commodity
in the Indian Ocean. Consumption was exploding in Persia and India. The company
was slow to follow Row's advice, but by the sixteen thirties, English merchants
were making good money shipping coffee out of mocha. Not all of them were
East India company men, though. The interlopers who spread into the Asian market
around that time had a nose for profit and were naturally drawn to the exploding
coffee market. By the late sixteen fifties, the English were some of the
most active coffee merchants in the world. England itself, however, accounted for
a very little of their sales. In fact, probably the only coffee drinkers
in England were to Levant or East Indie company men, who had picked up
the habit while in the East. As there was no retail market in London,
they had to get their fixed through personal deliveries from friends who still did
business in Asia. The missing ingredient was the development of an English consumer base.
Instrumental in that process was a group of inquisitive and unconventional thinkers we've met
before, the intellectual circle surrounding Samuel Hartleb. As we've seen before in this
podcast, English intellectuals had a long running interest in the Arab world. The
Universities Oxford especially had dedicated programs for the study of Arabic to better understand the
oldest available translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts, and in the process of
brushing up on their Arabic scholars continually came across references to this wonder drink coffee.
Of course, for the majority of students who saw Arabic as a means
to an end a greater understanding of Christian scripture, these references to coffee were
of little interest, but a handful of scholars were curious to learn more.
Some of them were physicians who wanted to know more about the many physical and
psychological effects of the drink that the Arabic authors described. Some were just generally
curious, seeking exotic knowledge for its own sake. Samuel Hartlib and Robert Boyle
were especially fascinated by coffee. Like other Englishmen, they used ale as a
point of comparison. But while previous reviewers like George Sandis had found coffee bitterly
deficient in terms of taste, Heartlib and Boil focus more on its mental and
physical effects. From that perspective, coffee seemed to be the superior drink.
It wasn't as dangerous as alcohol. There weren't any stories of drunken brawls in
the Arabic texts. If anything, coffee improved social discourse. It fostered civil
and sober conduct, the perfect lubricant for the kind of interactions successful business and
politics were required. And if coffee didn't produce violent drunks the way liquor did,
it didn't seem to produce lecherous drunks either. In fact, it was
commonly assumed that coffee was a kind of anti aphrodisiac. Some speculated that the
drink could even lead to impotence. That was hardly a selling point, but
the more moderate take on coffee struck a favorable contrast of chocolate, another exotic
drink that was coming on the market that was closely tied to lustful impulses.
As with standard procedure for the heartlib Circle, plans were immediately drawn up to
unleash the power of the new drink. The man for the job was John
Beale, the group's expert on orchards and agriculture. More generally, he suggested
that plantations could be established in New England, Virginia and Jamaica. This would
be more cost effective than bringing coffee from Mocha or through Turkish middlemen. Beale
discounted the concerns that coffee was a temperamental plant and wouldn't grow anywhere outside of
Yemen. That was clearly misinformation spread by Yemeny farmers looking to protect their monopoly.
Like many of the schemes cooked up by Heartlib and his friends, this
one never got off the ground. Coffee seeds were closely guarded and it was
illegal to carry them out of Yemen, and for the moment, the English
market for coffee was confined to a few eccentric scholars and a handful of addicts
in the Levant Company. The first step towards an English coffee market was therefore
a tentative. In sixteen fifty, the Angel Inn in Oxford became the first
establishment in England to sell coffee. It's clientele almost exclusively consisted of the oddballs
who had been turned on to coffee by Arabic texts. It's likely that coffee
could only be procured irregularly from private contracts in one of the trading companies.
Gatherings at the Angel were probably more like a social club experimenting with straight coffee
beans that had come across, rather than men patronizing a business. Coffee as
a commercial enterprise came a bit later, and unsurprisingly emerged in London. The
key driver in the city was Daniel Edwards, a Levant Company man who had
just returned home from a decade long stint in Turkey. Edwards had been stationed
in Smyrna on the Aegean coast. As you might recall, Smyrna had played
host to a kind of civil war within the Levant Company. Rival factions loyal
to either Parliament or the Crown battled for control over the Ottoman trade. Smyrna
was usually the base for whichever faction had been pushed out of the capital.
At his stembul Edwards had sided with Parliament the clear winners. By the time
he'd returned to England in sixteen fifty two. Like many other Levant companymen,
he had picked up a taste for coffee during his stay in the East.
By one estimate, Smirna housed more than forty coffee houses. Edwards found it
impossible to give up coffee and kept a strategic reserve in his London home,
supplied through his contacts in the East, and maintaining his stockpile was a constant
battle. Edwards himself drank as much as nine cups a day and provided his
guests with as much coffee as they could drink. In fact, he had
brought back a coffee specialist as a servant, Pascal Rose, a Greek Man
who had acted as his translator and personal assistant in Smyrna. Edwards found that
his friends were as enthralled by the drink as he was, and quickly saw
business opportunity. With his connections to coffee suppliers and Rose's expertise in producing a
good cup, they could take London by storm. With financial backing from Edwards,
Rose set up a stall by Saint Michael's Parish Church just outside the Royal
Exchange. The choice of location was no accident. Edwards and Rose identified merchants
as their primary customers. Some of them would already be familiar with coffee through
their international connections, and the drink stimulating properties were a perfect match for the
frenetic deal making they went on at the Exchange. Within days, churchwardens were
complaining that talkative merchants were disrupting services and generally making a nuisance of themselves leaning
on the church walls. Luckily for the churchmen, Rose's operation very quickly outgrew
his little stall. The Greek entrepreneur found more partners and established a more permanent
coffee house. He even inspired imitators the beginnings of London's coffee culture, but
initial progress was slow, partly because coffee hawkers like Rose faced stiff resistance from
London's traditional purveyors of refreshment. The city's ale housekeepers were well organized and formed
an influential lobbying group. Coffee houses were a potential threat to their business,
and so found few friends at Guildhall. But a larger problem was that supply
remained irregular and expensive. The East India Company, which had direct access to
the main wholesale market of Mocha, was in disarray. As we've seen in
the middle of the sixteen fifties, the company's new leadership was struggling badly.
Only after a massive reorganization in sixteen fifty seven was the company able to take
advantage of the growing market for coffee in London. It was only in the
summer and fall of sixteen fifty nine that the conditions finally aligned for coffee to
hit the mainstream. Trading companies were now bringing beans into London on regular shipments,
and the chaotic politics of the past few months created the perfect atmosphere for
a caffeinated frenzy of discussions on England's future. At the leading edge of this
marriage between coffee and politics was a partnership between James Harrington and Henry Neville.
Harrington we've met before. He was the political philosopher who published The Commonwealth of
Oceania three years earlier, the first truly Republican vision of England's past, present
in future. Henry Neville had similarly Republican inclinations, which had got him purged
with the rest of the Rumpers in sixteen fifty three. But where Rumpers like
Arthur Hasserig rarely went beyond a fairly simplistic claim that the House of Commons was
the sole representative of the people, Neville the larger consequences of Republican ideology.
This had often gotten him into trouble. For instance, he was accused of
being an atheist, largely because he claimed there was little difference between the Bible
and the Koran. Practically speaking, the morality they espoused was fairly similar.
Neville's goal was to build a society based on equitable laws, not blind adherence
to religious dogma or traditionalist political ideologies. In the Protectorate elections of sixteen fifty
nine, Neville returned to Parliament. Then, when the rump was restored,
he won a seat on the Council of State. But the idealistic take on
Republicanism that he and his friend Harrington espoused was drowned out by the power politics
of Arthur Hesselrigg and the Army Grandees. As England once again hurtled towards Civil
War, Nevill's attention drifted away from Westminster or Whitehall and towards a new project
he and Harrington were working on. Its initial iteration in the summer of sixteen
fifty nine was the Commonwealth Club, a society for the discussion of political ideas
that met regularly at a tavern and common garden run by the old leveler John
Wildman. The deal was to get together the finest Republican minds in England away
from the hot house of Westminster and draw up a workable constitution. This time
their work would be insulated from the conniving and factional in fighting that had undermined
every previous attempt. In October, as an army coup once again threatened England,
Harrington and Neville moved their operation from the fashionable West End to the center
of the action, right outside the Westminster complex. The new location was the
Turk's Head, where a proprietor named Miles ran a coffeehouse within sight of Westminster
Home. Harrington and Neville also changed the name of their group to the Road
A Club and advertised their meetings as an attempt to fashion a model of a
free state or equal commonwealth. Harrington published pamphlets outlining the topics to be discussed
in a daily schedule and invited interested parties to come debate, prepared with written
proposals. Borrowing from the original Oxford coffee house clubs, Harrington described the club
as a free and open academy unto all comers, though in reality there was
a membership fee of eighteen pence and men deemed unfit could be turned away.
Harrington also warned and potential members in advance that this academy is to be governed
according to the rules of good breeding or civil conversation. Members sat at a
large circular table with a gap in the medal for Miles to distribute coffee at
the end of each night. When everyone had had their say on the day's
resolution, a ballot box was passed around to collect votes. A twenty six
year old Samuel Peeps, who was just beginning to record the events of his
life in a diary, attended often drawn by the admiral discourse and exceeding good
argument, and he wasn't the only one. The Turk's head was crammed just
about every night with visiting intellectuals like William Petty, the man behind the Great
Irish Survey, or spectators looking to hear a good debate. In many ways,
the Road of Clubs set the model for political associations and corresponding societies in
the future. In fact, coffeehouse clubs would soon move into all aspects of
English life. Imitators of the Road of Club entered the fields of news,
finance, the stock exchange, and, most famously, in the case of
Lloyd's Coffeehouse insurance. There's also a connection to be drawn between the rules of
debate and association Harrington drew Up and the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural
Knowledge, the great intellectual institution of the Restoration period, founded almost exactly a
year after the Road a Club, but to return to a current narrative.
The Road to Club had no official sanction from any government authority. But really,
in the fall of sixteen fifty nine, it wasn't clear that England had
a government authority. It was just as likely that the future of England would
be determined at the Turk Set as it would by the increasingly irrelevant Committee of
Safety. John Lambert and Charles Fleetwood had managed to close down the Rump and
set up their own government, but whether that government could actually do any governing
was very much in doubt. The army regime seemed powerless to stop men from
planning new constitutions in the coffee houses of London. The courts and national administrative
system had grown to a halt, and worst of all, the Committee of
Safety had no long term plan for how to continue paying the soldiers. The
taxes coming into the treasury had slowed to a trickle. The Committee of Safety
faced a troubling question, what happens to an army coup when the army disappears?
Next time they'll get their answer delivered by the only man in Britain who
commanded a well paid, loyal army, George Monk