Emergence and development

The ‘rise of the fiscal state’ during the second half of the seventeenth century – a development that transformed English (and subsequently British) government and society – was rooted in the Long Parliament’s creation of a system of executive committees to fund and fight the civil war. Here was a new kind of parliamentary agency, with licence to break free of the constraints that applied to select and grand committees. Given sweeping powers that allowed them to operate outside the common law, executive committees were able to imprison individuals at will, remove disaffected clergymen, sequester and dispose of private property, pay and provision armies and the navy, direct military operations on land and sea, administer crown revenues and estates, oversee affairs in Ireland, gather intelligence from abroad, and to create new colonies across the Atlantic. The executive committees of the Long Parliament enabled the two Houses to supplant the crown as the most powerful governmental institution in the British Isles and, almost as controversially, to tax and spend on a scale that Charles I could barely have conceived of. MPs themselves would come to regard their committees as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘coercive’ and derogatory to the ‘honour of Parliament and the ease and right of the people’. But by the time they tried to curb their over-mighty creations it was too late – executive committees had become an indispensible part of the burgeoning parliamentary state.

Between the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640 and the king’s departure from London early in 1642, the English privy council and most other instruments of royal government withered or fell into abeyance. In their place, the Westminster junto was compelled to create a new executive if it were to maintain the political and (by the spring of 1642) military initiative against the king and to manage the two Houses in the face of a substantial bloc of Parliament-men that was anxious to halt the slide towards civil war, if necessary by making major concessions. Effective government would require a huge growth in Parliament’s military and financial capabilities.