Fifth Monarchists - Overview

Overview

The Parliamentary victors of the First English Civil War failed to negotiate a constitutional settlement with the defeated King Charles I. Members of Parliament and the Grandees in the New Model Army, when faced with Charles's perceived duplicity, tried and executed him.

Government through the King's Privy Council was replaced with a new body called the Council of State. Due to fundamental disagreements within a weakened Parliament, this new body was dominated by the Army. There was a considerable political ferment in the country, much of it religiously conditioned, and no lack of proposals for alternative forms of government to replace the old order. These ranged from Royalists who wished to place King Charles II on the throne, to men like Oliver Cromwell, who wished to govern with a Parliament voted in by an electorate determined by property ownership, similar to that enfranchised before the civil war, to the Levellers, influenced by the writings of John Lilburne, who wanted parliamentary government based on an electorate constituted of every head of household (normally though not necessarily male as was acknowledged in the Putney Debates), through to other groups with smaller followings like the Fifth Monarchists, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, the Ranters, and the Society of Friends (Quakers).

These were not political parties as that term is understood today, but groups clustered around one or more beliefs, some of the believers attaching themselves to more than one group. Although the pre-war establishment had been split by the Civil War, both of the opposing main factions regarded all radical groups as agitators for change, and they are described as such in the Historical Collections of John Rushworth that document events of the early period, and by the Journals of the House of Commons which cover the period of the Republic itself.

The Fifth Monarchists were a group of believers in a geopolitical theory which maintained that four world rulers had already come and gone according to the prophecies of Daniel 2 in the Old Testament. This text recounts a prophetic dream by Nebuchadnezzar, in which the previous empires had been Babylonian, Persian, Grecian and Roman; the last empire, they concluded, would be established by the returning Jesus as King of kings and Lord of Lords to reign with his saints on earth for a thousand years. The Fifth Monarchists saw themselves as those saints of that soon to be dawning millennium. Among prominent Fifth Monarchists were Thomas Harrison, Christopher Feake, Vavasor Powell, John Carew, John Rogers and Robert Blackborne, Secretary of the Admiralty and later of the British East India Company.

Fifth Monarchists believed that the timing of the events of the Interregnum were significant because the calendar year 1666 loomed large on the near horizon. The number 666 had been identified in the Book of Revelation with the ultimate human despot to rule the world, but who would be replaced by the second coming of the Messiah; this only added to the belief that the Fifth Monarchy was about to begin.