When Sir Walter Raleigh sacked the isle of Trinidad in the Spanish Caribbean during 1595, he took inventory of the edible plants and animals that future sailors would find there. Along with other flora and fauna, the island “hath also for bread sufficient maize, cassavi, and of those roots and fruits which are common everywhere in the West Indies.”1 Exploring the mouth of the Orinoco, Raleigh recorded the local food prices. “They also trade in those rivers for bread of cassavi, of which they buy an hundred pound weight for a knife, and sell it at [Isla] Margarita for ten pesos.”

The Spanish had Panama, but their power along the northern coast of South America did not extend to the Orinoco. Raleigh published his pamphlet to promote his colonization scheme for what is now Venezuela and Guyana. Along with fabled cities of gold, he held out the prospect of profitable cash crops: sugar, tobacco, cotton, flax, pepper, and other species that were unfit for the English climate could be grown in the tropics, indeed the natives were already growing them and happy to trade for European goods. Some Native Americans were eager to form friendships, even alliances against their enemies.

Conquest was possible because nonperishable, nutritious foods were available in South America for sailors to eat on a river expedition or during the Atlantic journeys home. Cassava in particular had conquered the region in advance of the Europeans, making way for new actors by creating a food economy. Emulating Cortez, Englishmen could plunder fortunes and seek cities of gold. By plantation, on the other hand, they could also create great fortunes more safely. Raleigh lost his head in the end, a victim of King James I’s politics, and El Dorado never existed. But the latter idea — settle, plant, and reap the rewards in London — survived him because there was food to eat upon crossing the ocean. Usually, it was cassava.

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The beginning of the end of the Royalist army is the beginning of Mark Turnbull’s story. The King’s Spy, first book in his novel trilogy set during the English Civil Wars, begins with Captain Maxwe…

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My academic advisor sent me “a big congratulations to you for completing this project,” my thesis on the most interesting man in English Civil War London. “It is one of the most ambitious and best M.A. theses I have worked with in my career.” My university does not make it easy to get a thesis to the finish line, so “I admire the way you stuck with it until the end,” he wrote. It was a nice note from a serious scholar.

Read my thesis at ProQuest

East India Company v John Fowke and the Origins of the English Civil War makes a rather substantial claim right in the title. The question of why the war happened has frustrated historians for centuries, and some of them — most prominently Christopher Hill — have even dismissed Fowke as a worthy subject of study.

Still, the name John Fowke appears all too prominently in the more recent academic works on the English Civil War. Most recently, in 2021 Jordan Downs examined the politics of revolutionary London. While Downs is focused on Sir Isaac Pennington, Fowke appears in Mobilizing for Parliament as Pennington’s key political partner.

Respectively, Robert Brenner and L.H. Roper have established an understanding of Fowke’s business partnerships in the London “war party” during the conflict and then their exploitation of their victory into the Restoration.

To my knowledge, I am the first historian to write a full biography of John Fowke, bringing together all the available primary and secondary sources I could find. While historians have noted that Fowke was litigious, and that he had a long legal war with the East India Company, it seemed that no one had ever examined the case. Fowke became the subject of my interest when I opened the very first volume of Company court minutes and discovered the case had begun with a cargo of imported saltpeter. Fowke was exactly what I was looking for. So I hired Susan Moore, a very talented researcher, and obtained the original Chancery Court documents to formulate a thesis.

What I found may very well explain both the cause and the course of the English Civil War — a gunpowder war that launched a gunpowder empire.

John Fowke was deeply involved in the gunpowder trade as an importer merchant when he entered history at the beginning of the reign of Charles Stuart in 1627. He was a key military entrepreneur during the war, 1642-1648, as well as the most prominent Alderman on every committee responsible for running the London war machine. He was instrumental in the creation of the New Model Army and one of two men with the final decision on their famous red uniform coats.

Fowke also married a son into the London militia on the eve of the war, when the Trained Bands were radicalizing. John Fowke Jr. served as an officer under Henry Ireton in Ireland, then supervised a substantial new estate after the Irish Settlement — a key political wedge that Fowke and Pennington used to split the larger London business community from King Charles I.

The Chancery Court documents in my thesis reveal that Fowke was at the center of a political split within the larger London business community over the Courteen cartel in the 1630s. The split between Royalists and Cavaliers largely fell on these same lines after 1641. Along with his neighbor and constant business partner Maurice Thompson, Fowke dispatched the last Courteen fleet to India, where the ships filled their holds with saltpeter for the war. It was their final act as a corporation. After the regicide, Fowke and Thompson installed the Courteen model of colonizing and interloping trades on the nascent British gunpowder empire.

Fowke’s war with the East India Company endured much longer than his war with Charles I. My thesis argues that for John Fowke, the English Civil War was merely an enlargement of this war with the royal trade monopoly. Historians have missed the plot. Now they must reexamine his career and reconsider the question of war responsibility.

Read my thesis at ProQuest

This is a podcast version of the original term paper that started me down the John Fowke rabbit hole. I was curious to understand why the British “military historians” dominating the previous generation of English-language historiography were so dismissive about the artillery branch in this conflict even though the Battle of Edgehill began and ended with cannon fire. So I wrote a material history of the English Civil War — the “gunpowder reason.” Stephen Bull’s The Furie of the Ordnance was particularly helpful in this regard. The war of 1642-1645 was not some bizarre outlier from the early modern military revolution in Europe that historians debate. The same things were going on there that were going on everywhere else.

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During my follow-on research into the material victory of Parliament, the name John Fowke kept appearing in the historiography of revolutionary London. Then, as I began to read the official records of the East India Company, I discovered that Fowke had interests in the gunpowder trade decades before the war. He is not as well-known as his contemporary Wallenstein, but Fowke’s career in treason and gunpowder was at least as colorful — and ultimately, far more successful.

Apologies for the audio quality, as my production equipment was rudimentary. This paper on the Company’s lawsuit against Fowke unlocks for free subscribers tomorrow. I am presenting it this weekend at the Ohio Valley History Conference; normal publishing will resume next week.

I presented this paper at the Ohio Valley History Conference on 5 October 2024.

ABSTRACT: The East India Company’s 1630 lawsuit against military entrepreneur John Fowke is contextualized as lawfare, broadly defined as the manipulation or exploitation of legal systems to achieve political and/or military objectives, such as damaging or delegitimizing opponents.

John Fowke became a political threat to Charles Stuart at the beginning of his reign by leading the agitation over tonnage and poundage rates.[1] Fowke’s Atlantic mercantile activities likewise threatened the royal gunpowder and saltpeter monopolies. Fowke had only just finished paying his way out of the first trouble when a royal ally of the court serving as Company counsel attacked Fowke’s illicit trade in gunpowder.

The Honorable Company sued John Fowke in Chancery Court, which had evolved out of the royal scriptorum.^[2] Religious courts were hostile to medieval merchants squabbling over the interest rates in their contracts, spurring the rise of secular courts in Europe as venues for men of high finance to sue one another, and the Chancery was one of these.^[3] Royal chancellors held the privy power over royal charters and commissions, so by Fowke’s era the merchants of London used the Chancery Court as their arena for business disputes.^[4] Sir Edward Coke, one of the most formative English legal minds of the age, set the course of English law towards a separation of powers in 1608 when he denied King James I “authority to participate in the judicial decisions of his own courts.”^[5] Businessmen wanted a judge who was free of royal interference, too.

Sir William Acton attended the case as Company counsel.^[6] Previously, as a sheriff of London, Acton had refused to recognize a parliamentary order to release Fowke and his fellow agitators from the Fleet.[7] Charles I rewarded Acton for this intransigence with a baronetcy, an unprecedented reward for a Londoner who had not served as an alderman yet.[8] Acton complained about the “impertinent discourse of Mr. Fowkes” during the case.^[9] In 1640, Acton became the first political victim of John Fowke’s political machine.[10] Fowke resumed his quarrel with the Company in the House of Lords as the siege of Oxford began in 1646.[11] The dispute was not resolved until 1657, when Action was still serving as Company counsel.[12]

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According to the Bill of Complaint, “about the beginning of September [1630]” the Company had imported a load of saltpeter, “and after several treaties between” the parties, had “trusted” the defendants, Fowke and Daniel Bonnell, with their cargo.^[13] Saltpeter was a royal monopoly, as was gunpowder, the primary product made from it. Normally, saltpeter was a “ready cash” item. However, this saltpeter had been sold on credit, and the bill left unpaid.^[14]

Bonnell is accused of “having transported all or most part of his estate beyond the seas” in preparation “to leave this kingdom” and skip out on his obligations.^[15] Bonnell was dodging his debts in France at the time.[16] Fowke is responsible for Bonnell’s actions, the Company alleges, “this practice being purposely done by confederacy between them.”^[17] Bemoaning “the great trust and confidence they did repose in” the defendants, the Company asks the court to require both men “at a certain day and under a certain pain therein” to “make perfect answers to the premises, upon their corporal oaths” about the alleged agreement.^[18] The Company wanted to compel their testimony, preferably with a bit of torture.

Bonnell avoided arrest for four years until he was finally remanded to the Fleet by an order of the Lord Keeper dated 7 March 1634.^[19] It is unclear why he had returned to England. Joseph Carron was still representing both Fowke and Bonnell in February 1635.^[20] But then in June 1636, a new lawyer, Thomas Kynaston, represented Bonnell in the Company court as well as the privy council.^[21] Kynaston reappears in the Company court minutes during 1637 representing the Courteen cartel in their dispute with the East India Company over a piratical interloping venture.^[22] At the same time, Fowke fitted out a flagship, The Dragon, for the second Courteen interloping fleet.^[23] These are close business links.

L.H. Roper has established that the “new modelers,” the faction of merchants which set the terms of imperialism under the Restoration monarchy and included Fowke, got their model of colonization and plantation from the Anglo-Dutch merchant William Courteen. ^[24] Robert Brenner has also identified this same faction of London import merchants as the motive force of revolution in the City. Most notable of these merchants was Maurice Thompson, a neighbor and business partner of John Fowke. Thompson led the Courteen merchants of London, absorbed the surviving Courteen operations and interests, and took physical possession of Courteen’s papers after his death.^[25] The Honorable Company was existentially opposed to the Courteen group and resisted policy changes sought by the new modelers. The case of EIC v John Fowke was lawfare by the Old Guard of the London oligarchy, namely Levant Company merchants who were uninterested in overseas expansion, against the rise of the new modelers.[26] The outbreak of war would find Fowke and the “London merchants who were not members of the privileged inner ring” leading the takeover of the City and the rebellion against Charles.^[27]

Case documents reveal early signs of that split. Carron indicates that he met with hostility from other traders over his business relationship to Fowke. He writes that “some merchants free of the said Company meeting him upon [...] and chance persuaded him to break of the said bargain, threatening him that he should not enjoy it, or to that effect, it being then within this defendant’s power so to do, as he conceived.”^[28] Eight months after the verdict, an order of the Lord Keeper agreed to an extraordinary ex parte meeting with “Mr Alderman Perry and Mr Alderman Andrewes,” who “had been employed by the said Company in business touching the premises.”[29] The Aldermanic Court was a constant obstacle to reform. During the first year of the war, freshly minted Alderman Fowke and Lord Mayor Sir Isaac Pennington led the campaign to remove opponents of radical reform from the Court to replace them with radicals and new modelers.[30]

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Carron states that “he bought of the said other defendant Fowke his the Fowke’s stock and adventures in and with the said company for a valuable consideration of money” before the original Bill of Complaint had been filed.^[31] Furthermore, both men say that the Company knew about the arrangement.^[32] Fowke “did notify and declare unto the Governor and committees of the said company” that he had made the deal with Carron, they claim.^[33] Offered £717 to settle the debt, “the Company had “refused to accept.”^[34] The defendants argue the East India Company lacks “sufficient authority by law to make such orders or constitutions” that would nullify their private contract.^[35] Fowke and Carron “were not privy or consenting to the making of any such orders or constitutions,” they argue, “nor do know that any such constant custom and usage have [been] put in execution” before this case.^[36]

Today, this kind of legal claim could fall under the heading of tortious interference, which the Cornell University School of Law defines as “a common law tort allowing a claim for damages against a defendant who wrongfully interferes with the plaintiff's contractual or business relationships.”^[37]

Fowke denies all knowledge or responsibility for any saltpeter imported from India.^[38] He disowns responsibility for any agreement involving the Company and Bonnell, or any consequences deriving from it.^[39] He denies receiving any profit or benefit from saltpeter, or even taking any risk “to undergo any hazard [...] at all in the transportation” thereof.^[40] No “confederacy” with Bonnell ever existed, he says.[41] “Neither has this defendant any cause or reason for to do selling of saltpeter,” Fowke insists.^[42] His denial is total.

It is also hard to believe, for the Company consulted Fowke in 1636 during its dispute with the royal court over permission to start up their own gunpowder mills at Chilworth.[43] Fowke succeeded as the fixer in this affair.[44] The clear implication is that Fowke had been involved in the underground gunpowder trade before 1630 and the case of the missing saltpeter.  

Contradicting Fowke, Bonnell says that they did enter an arrangement “to be joint partners therein both for profit and loss” by insuring (“policies of assurance”) a “vendible commodity” of saltpeter.^[45] Rather than a “conspiracy” or a “practice and confederacy” to abscond with the profits from a sale of saltpeter, “some accident whereby the said profit was diverted another way” has resulted in both men being charged for it.^[46] Neither of them, Bonnell insists, has sold the saltpeter to someone else, or made use of it themselves.^[47]

More is at stake in these pleadings than mere reputation or profit. The Company charges Fowke and Bonnell with a complex scheme to defraud their Honorable accounts, and by implication, the Crown monopolies on saltpeter and the most common product made from it, gunpowder. For this reason, Fowke was compelled to deny knowledge of “whether his majesty were duly satisfied all or any moneys due for customs, subsidies, and imposts thereof, upon the importation thereof or no,” or whether the saltpeter “did remain in their hands or no, or whether the necessary occasions and stores of this kingdom were sufficiently furnished.”^[48]

Meanwhile, The Calendar of State Papers volume for 1633 and 1634 contains more than eighty entries regarding saltpeter, for the royal court was defending this monopoly from interlopers.^[49] Outside of cities, “the spread of nitre beds into the countryside meant that small-scale but enterprising gunpowder makers were able to make illicit purchases of saltpeter beyond the control of the Crown and its Patentees.”^[50] Beginning as “craftsmen working first in the urban environment and then in the countryside as the processes became water-powered,” the underground gunpowder industry was too widespread for the weak centralized authority of the Stuart kingdom to reign in.^[51] With unlicensed saltpeter and gunpowder producers coming under royal investigation and Star Chamber prosecution, Fowke’s utter negation of any contractual relationship to a cargo of saltpeter makes sense. He would have resisted being implicated in yet another potential crime against the state and royal authority. Furthermore, total denial would have strengthened the existing ties of trust with his merchant community. Fowke was the man who could get much-needed gunpowder, “just don’t ask too many questions about where it came from.”[52] Denying everything meant not naming names. No doubt Fowke’s suppliers and customers would have been grateful.

A colorful counter-narrative emerges. Fowke says that he heard “Bonnell confess that he had made some bargain for saltpeter with one Mr Thomas Stiles. who was one of the committees and trusted by the said complainant in that behalf.”^[53] This “familiarity was between the said Mr Stiles and the said Bonnell by occasion of a treaty of marriage that was between the said Bonnell and kinswoman of the said Mr Stiles.”^[54] Fowke avers that “the said Bonnell, to gain a good opinion with the said Mr Stiles, had sent him diverse presents of good value, and that by that means he became so inward with the [said Stiles] that by his means he obtained his freedom of the said company for a moderate fine.”^[55]

Having finagled this membership discount from Thomas Stiles, Bonnell negotiated alone “for a parcel of saltpeter at a price then propounded by the said company or some of them,” and Stiles thereafter acted as Bonnell’s agent “to get an abatement of the price demanded or a longer day of payment for the same, and that the said Thomas Stiles did agree to accept the sole security of the said saltpeter.”^[56]

“Thomas Stiles has also confessed the same to this defendant,” Fowke says.^[57] “And this the said Bonnell has also confessed to this defendant,” who has “also credibly heard that the said saltpeter was delivered to the [mills by] some or one of the servants officers or ministers to the said company, by direction of the said Stiles, and that an entry thereof was made in the Company’s books, by them to be sold [in the name of] the said Bonnell, without any mention of this defendants name,” the answer states.^[58] “And this defendant has seen the entry in the said book to be accordingly.”^[59]

Company minutes show that in November 1632 Fowke openly “scandalized Mr. Styles to all men he spoke with.”^[60] The East India Company stood by its man. On 6 January 1633 the Company solicitor reports that “John Fowke threatened to complain to the General Court that the proceedings against him for recovery of the Company's debt were without the Company’s allowance, and by instigation of his enemy Mr. Styles; the [Company] Court therefore declared that what [Styles] hath done was by their joint direction.”^[61]

Bonnell only mentions Stiles twice, admitting it is “true … that several treaties did pass between this defendant and the said master Stiles,” and that the deal for the “saltpeter was made by this defendant alone and by the said Master Thomas Stiles.”^[62]

Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry came down on the side of the Company on 21 November 1631, awarding them Fowke’s “adventures in their hands, by him alleged to be sixteen hundred pounds in their second joint stock, and twenty-one hundred pounds more in three of their voyages.”^[63] Bonnell is not named as a defendant in this second Bill of Complaint, for although he remains liable, he still is “not able to pay any part of the debt,” whereas Fowke is an investor in the East India Company with “£1,460 remaining in stock and adventure liable and subject to pay” it.^[64] This focus on Fowke as the deep pockets to sue began early in the case, for “Daniel Boneall” had petitioned the Honorable Company “concerning his debt to the Company for saltpeter, which he was utterly unable to pay and desired the Company would, like his other creditors, accept his estate and divide it amongst them.”^[65] In 17^th century England, “estate” referred to a person’s landed income and “constituted the barometer of social and political status.”^[66] Bonnell was flat broke. However, the Company “saw no reason to waive their suit, conceiving they had a good man (Mr. Fowkes) obliged with him to satisfy it.”^[67] Fowke lost this lawsuit in a process not wholly dissimilar from the Star Chamber, from his perspective. Experiences of arbitrary legal process were becoming a pattern to his life.

As 1633 began, the Chancery Court was focused on financial settlement.^[68] The plaintiffs agreed to hold an adventure of Fowke’s “towards satisfaction of the decree,” allowing him to sell it for “the best rate he can make it appear to be worth and assent that the same shall go towards satisfaction of the decree and supply what shall be wanting of the money decreed.”^[69] In exchange, Fowke would avoid prison.^[70] However, within reasonable limits, this settlement would also “permit and suffer the defendant to have view and take copies of the particular orders made by the company as concerned the detaining of the said adventure and the business now in question upon this bill as well those that are repealed [and] those that be in force.”^[71] Fowke was springing documents loose from the Company.

He had demanded transparency throughout, for example by compelling the Company to present him with “a copy not only of the oath administered to every free brother, but taken by Mr. Governor and other officers” as well.^[72] Carron and Fowke unveiled this strategy in their Joint and Several Answers, dated 20 October 1632. Fowke asserts that the Company has not “valued” his investment with them “as a true account were made.”^[73] Until he is able to “see and examine” the Company’s books, “he is not nor shall be able to [assess?] the true value thereof.”^[74] Fowke doubted “the stock of any freeman of the said company was ever detained for to satisfy a decree made in this honorable court, until now, by woeful experience, this defendant does find the same put in execution against him.”[75] Fowke claims he has “heard that in other cases, when freemen of the said company become indebted unto the said company by other means, there is former such custom and [usage?] in the said company as in the bill mentioned, and that the same has at some times been put in execution, but this defendant cannot now certainly depose of his own knowledge when and in what case” this happened ”because he cannot to this day obtain a sight of the said company’s written authentic acts and orders of their courts and other written books, though he often desired” to see them.[76]

In search of answers, Fowke says, he has asked “both of the said officers that have the keeping of their orders, and of the Governor and Committees at their public court, to see” the Company policies that allow this, “but could never be admitted thereunto, [and he has been] utterly denied a sight of them.”^[77] Instead, “a solicitor for the said company, diverse months after the said sale, and after notice given thereof as aforesaid, did deliver to him this defendant a note in [...] of paper, without any name subscribed thereunto, which he pretended to be a copy of one of their orders” that forbid “the transferring of adventures.”^[78] This alleged fraud involved “touching therein a printed book out of which the same was supposed to be copied, which book this defendant was promised a sight of.”^[79] Yet despite “having sundry times requested their bookkeeper” show him the book, neither the bookkeeper “nor any other in his presence at a court of committees affirmed it to be … the same” as what Fowke had been shown, and Fowke “could never obtain a sight” of it.^[80]

Armed with the Chancery Court’s order to provide documents as requested – what would today be called a discovery order – Fowke began to push back. On 23 January 1633, he requested “to have copies of the orders for detaining his adventure and concerning the saltpeter” delivered, as was his right.^[81] Although the Secretary agreed to let him copy anything, he would not let Fowke go through all the documents.^[82] Fowke alleged there had been “an extraordinary practice with the register” for calculating the Chancery Court verdict.^[83] He worried that the Company would “overbear him in their countenance and purse … because the Court and Mr. Fowkes could not understand each other concerning the copies desired.”^[84]

The Lord Keeper heard Fowke’s complaints of Company stonewalling and “ordered that the defendant shall set down a note of what orders and other writings he desires to see, of which the Plaintiff shall permit the defendant to have copies and for that purpose the defendant shall be admitted freely to come unto” Crosby House, where the East India Company kept its books.^[85] An order compelling the Honorable Company to give Fowke access to requested documents was issued on 1 May 1633.^[86]

As was to be his pattern, Fowke’s efforts ultimately bore fruit in an acrimonious dispute. During a meeting of the Company Court in February 1635, investors demanded that the books be opened for their review.^[87] One result of their demand for transparency is that Ethel Sainsbury’s multi-volume record of the East India Company court minutes begins in 1635. Fowke and Carron were not doing something particularly new. New merchant communities frequently challenged the Old Guard in City institutions through transparency demands like this.[88] Emerging from the chrysalis of an unpaid delivery bill, the activist investor John Fowke spreads his wings. His war with the Company was not just a contest of wills among hard-nosed men of business, or a dodgy deal in controlled substances, but a principled crusade against abuse of process. The author’s thesis explores how a strong belief in justice resulted from these experiences and shaped John Fowke’s politics.

Charles I tolerated a second-order business association with Fowke through his own friendship with the Courteens during 1636-1637, when the Company’s war with the late William Courteen and his son – by then a debt-dodger in France, like Bonnell before him – was at its most intense. Royal favor for the Courteens was the only alternative to the royal monopoly for East Indies trading and access to Gangetic saltpeter. Fowke’s ties to the Courteens were likely older than the Company’s saltpeter bill, as Fowke was already trading in sugar during 1629.[89] After 1638, however, the value of royal favor diminished for the new modelers as the Courteen cartel declined, war broke out in the three kingdoms, and the interests of the new modelers increasingly diverged from the policy of the king. Five Courteen ships delivered “3600 hundred weight of rough saltpeter or thereabouts” to London in January 1644, in the middle of the First English Civil War.[90] It was their final act as a corporation.

Before 1638, Fowke may have held out hope for an eventual reversal of the Chancery Court verdict by winning the king’s favor. By the end of 1641, however, he was an outspoken political enemy of the weakened king. During January 1643, when the shock of the first battles led to peace talks, Charles Stuart offered to return to London if he could have the heads of four revolutionary leaders, one of them being John Fowke, who was “notoriously guilty of schism and high treason.”[91] Victory instead enabled the new modelers to impose their trade policy on the East India Company as well as Britain’s new gunpowder empire. It also allowed Fowke to resume, and ultimately win, his legal dispute with the Company.

John Fowke engaged in lawfare with the East India Company for 28 years. The six years of war between Parliament and Charles I took place in the middle of that span. During the wars, Fowke personally agitated to create the New Model Army, oversaw its kit and financing, and became the mortal military threat that lawfare by friends of the royal court had failed to nullify. Fowke was a colleague and business partner to everyone who was anyone in London’s revolution during his political rise and he shrewdly thrived in the Restoration. Per the title of this writer’s thesis, East India Company v John Fowke and the Origins of the English Civil War, we may at last stand at the threshold of answering a question that has frustrated historians for centuries: Why? Perhaps the war happened because John Fowke chose a strategy of enlargement to win his lawfare conflict against the Company. History has missed this plot because Fowke did not advertise his gunpowder business. In the best tradition of shady business, he denied there was any business at all.

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[1] Popofsky, Linda S. “The Crisis over Tonnage and Poundage in Parliament in 1629.” Past & Present, Feb., 1990, No. 126 (Feb., 1990), pp. 44-75. 57

^[2] Baker, J. H. An Introduction to English Legal History. Butterworth & Co. Ltd., 1979. 84

[3] Tawney, R.H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1926. 51-52

^[4] Baker 89

^[5] Baker 83

^[6] Ibid

[7] Downs, Jordan S. Civil War London: Mobilizing for Parliament, 1641-5. Manchester University Press, 2021.  110-111

[8] Ibid

^[9] Bruce, John. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I, 1634-1635. Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, 1858. 387

[10] Downs 111

[11] Stephen, Leslie, editor. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 1921-22. 521 cit Journals of the House of Lords Vol. IX,185

[12] Sainsbury, Ethel Bruce, editor. Calendar of Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1655-1659. Press, 1907-1938. 145

[13] Bill of Complaint, Pleadings. Folio C 8/68/67

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid

[16] Sainsbury, Ethel Bruce, editor. Calendar of Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1635-1639. Clarendon Press, 1907-1938. xxi

[17] Ibid

[18] Bill of Complaint

[19] Order C 33/165 folio 403d

[20] CCMEIC 1635-1639 14

[21] CCMEIC 1635-1639 181-182, CCMEIC 1635-1639, 190-191c

[22] CCMEIC 1635-1639 215

[23] Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Verso Books, 1993.173

[24] Roper, L.H. Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688. 111

[25] Ibid

[26] Brenner 386-387

^[27] Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1990. 30

[28] Ibid

[29] Order C 33/165 folio 875

[30] Pearl, Valerie. London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625-43. Oxford University Press, 1961. 120

[31] Ibid

[32] Ibid

[33] ibid

[34] Ibid

[35] Joint and Several Answers

[36] ibid

^[37] Tortious interference. Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tortious_interference Accessed 24 March 2024

[38] Answer of John Fowke, Pleadings. Folio C 8/68/67

[39] ibid

[40] Roper 111

[41] Answer of John Fowke

[42] Ibid

[43] CCMEIC 1630-1634 46

[44] CCMEIC 1630-1634 59,76

[45] Answer of Daniel Bonnell, Pleadings. Folio C 8/68/67

[46] Ibid

[47] Ibid

[48] Answer of John Fowke, Pleadings. Folio C 8/68/67

[49] CSPDS 1634-1635 passim

[50] Buchanan 2005 240

[51] Buchanan 2066 1

[52] Clarke, Alex. The Drydock - Episode 279 (Part 1). YouTube, uploaded by Drachinifel, 31 Dec 2023, LINK

[53] Answer of John Fowke

[54] Ibid

[55] Ibid

[56] Ibid

[57] Ibid

[58] ibid

[59] Ibid

^[60] CSPDS 1634-1635 274

^[61] CSPDS 1634-1635 349

[62] Ibid

[63] DNB 521

[64] Ibid

^[65] CSPDS 1643-1635 18

[66] Roper 17

[67] CSPDS 1634-1635 18

[68] Order C 33/163 folio 254

[69] Ibid

[70] Ibid

[71] Ibid

^[72] CSPDS 1634-1635, p. 274

[73] Joint and Several Answers of John Fowke and Joseph Carron, C 8/68/67

[74] Ibid

[75] The Further Joint and Several Answers of John Fowke and Joseph Carron, C 8/39/63

[76] Ibid

[77] Ibid

[78] Ibid

[79] Ibid

[80] Ibid

^[81] CSPDS 1634-1635 385

[82] Ibid

[83] Ibid

[84] Ibid

[85] Order C 33/165 folio 403d

[86] Order C 33/163 folio 446

^[87] Ibid

[88] Brenner 214

[89] DNB 521

[90] Roper 106

[91] King’s Letter and Declaration to the City, 17 Jan. 1642-3

This is the introduction to my thesis on John Fowke being published soon in ProQuest.

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ABSTRACT: This is a summary of the life and career of London merchant adventurer and military entrepreneur John Fowke. It illuminates his role in the outbreak of the English Civil War, the parliamentary victory, and the birth of mass politics. Fowke and his partners shaped the nascent British gunpowder empire through the Restoration.

Born in 1596 according to Parliamentary records, John Fowke was not the most powerful man in London.[1] He was also not the richest or the most respected. He never fought a battle and his core motives throughout the period of study were profitable ones. Whether through business or politics, however, Fowke was connected to everyone in London who became important during the 1640s. He was instrumental in creating the New Model Army and then admitted them into London twice to restore his own political fortunes. After the execution of Charles I, Fowke and his ‘new modelers’ impressed their aggressive colonizing and mercantile trade policy on the Commonwealth, shaping the foreign policy of the Cromwellian state. Fowke was an increasingly prominent figure in London politics from the coronation of Charles in 1627 until his death in 1662. He is the most interesting man in English Civil War London.

Fowke was born and probably raised to youth in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.[2] While he maintained affection and ties with his natal community, Fowke’s father was a London haberdasher, so he likely matured in the English capital and attended the Christ Church Hospital school in London where his portrait hangs today.[3] He was apprenticed to another haberdasher for the standard seven years.[4] Haberdashery had changed significantly in the previous 70 years and the success of the shipping trades was integral to the shift.[5] Maurice Thompson, one of the most consequential traders of the period, was Fowke’s neighbor and constant partner.[6] They were the core of the colonizing-interloping segment of the London merchant community identified by Robert Brenner.

Fowke’s political mentor Isaac Pennington was a Coleman Street radical. Fowke engineered the coup that made Pennington Lord Mayor in 1642.[7] Fowke was skilled in dealing with radicals, but it was his deep and abiding ties to the London militia community that remain unappreciated by historians. His business relationships to major militia figures such as Thomas Skippon are one set of important connections.[8] Another connection was his son’s marriage to the daughter of a sergeant major in the Trained Bands during 1638.[9] During the war, the militia quite literally became Fowke’s personal business. The nature of his trading had changed from imports to the care and feeding of regiments. Thompson’s merchants were obscenely rich, but they were not old money. Fowke himself was a “man of great trading” in 1627.[10] However, he was only among the third rank of traders in the City on the eve of war, when his interests had changed.[11]

Fowke’s affection for Gloucester was manifest in his successful agitation for the Trained Bands to relieve that city after Charles laid siege to it in 1643. Skippon led the march and succeeded in forcing Charles to raise the siege.[12] This success exhausted the ability of London’s livery companies to pay for the war, forcing the Parliament to find new revenue sources.^[13] Fowke was nominated to deliver the Parliamentary invitations for a public thanksgiving after the relief succeeded.^[14] Fowke therefore stands at the intersection of diverse material interests in London which broke with King Charles I and prosecuted the war against him. This coalition quite overwhelmed Royalist resistance in the City, allowing Fowke and Pennington to remove the Old Guard from power and enforce a new regime.[15]

A metropolitan, Fowke proved to be an Independent when the Scots forced the Presbyterian question.[16] He was described as “not much noted for religion, but a countenancer of good ministers.”[17] Some of the ministers he countenanced were influential New Model Army preachers, such as Hugh Peters.[18] Pennington was also a fanatic.[19] Faith thus inspired Fowke’s political machinery, whatever his personal views may have been.

Fowke appears again and again after 1640 as a community organizer within a discernible news-action cycle, forcing Parliament to respond to mass political action.[20] Fowke and his faction were inventing partisanship. First, a pamphlet would appear in midweek; on Sunday, the contents of London sermons would reflect the contents of the pamphlet.[21] Within a week of the pamphlet’s publication, a crowd of London citizens would present a petition at Westminster.[22] Fowke was usually among the presenters of these petitions.[23] Royalists in London never developed the same level of organization and Charles “conflated a handful of displays of loyalism and demands for peace with a willingness among them to take action,” Downs says.[24] Fowke maintained this political machinery to the end of his life.

Radical and proprietary interests were always entangled in this alliance. Fowke’s interests in the Irish settlement, gunpowder, and saltpeter all appear in the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, printed by Parliament at the behest of the London masses, led by John Fowke, among others.[25] We can also discern his directing role in the Guildhall election of 1640, when a boisterous crowd of young “mechanics” (workers) prevented the election of Sir William Acton to the office of Lord Mayor.[26] As explained below, Acton had made an enemy of Fowke a decade before, and the events at the Guildhall were political revenge. “If this be permitted,” the royal secretary told the king in a hasty note, “the government of the City is utterly lost.”[27] His words proved prophetic, as this model of mass action was repeated again and again in the years to come.

London’s business community was deeply invested in Ireland and the plantations when the Irish rebellion broke out.[28] Fowke, who had already formed his ties to the London militia community, now used the issue of an army to pacify Ireland as a political wedge to break the larger London business community from the king in 1642.[29] However, it is important to note that London’s merchants were hardly united against the king.[30] On the contrary, as Robert Brenner spent his career demonstrating, Fowke and his faction were the consistent opponents of Charles in the City.[31] Fowke spent the next five years perfecting the war machinery of London from his place on the Militia Committee.[32] He led the agitation to create the New Model Army and name Oliver Cromwell commander of the cavalry.[33] According to L.H. Roper, after the English Civil Wars the Fowke-Thompson faction was known as “the new modelers,” suggesting a strong personal connection through Fowke to the establishment of that force.[34]

Fowke thus held tremendous political leverage, becoming a major moral and material actor in London during the wars of 1642-1654. We may add multiple political upheavals to this list. Although we cannot hold Fowke solely responsible for the dissolutions of Parliament in 1629 and 1654, or Pride’s Purge in 1648, he stood at the center of all three controversies. Then, having shaped Cromwell’s policy, Fowke moved to end the brief Fleetwood dictatorship during 1659.[35] Filling the vacuum of executive authority, Fowke smoothed the way to Restoration and was serving in the Cavalier Parliament when he died.[36] “Never knew so small an affair create such prattle,” the Calendar of State Papers observed on Fowke’s final political campaign.[37] Fowke left behind a substantial Irish estate.[38] His son John Fowke Jr., who served in Ireland with the New Model Army, inherited that Cromwellian settlement estate, which he had managed as his father’s agent.[39]

Tracing a neat career arc, Fowke entered history as a tax protestor.[40] He would end as a tax collector. In 1627, importers such as the future “new modelers” were making fortunes in the Atlantic trades.[41] Freshly anointed, Charles told his customs officials to raise the impost rates (‘tonnage and poundage’) without parliamentary knowledge or approval.[42] The issue fit into the king’s larger dispute with Parliament over his profligate spending, Arminian love of bishops, and Catholic wife. Fowke and his fellow merchants claimed that the rates had been unduly imposed and they were vindicated in parliamentary testimony.[43] However, they remained in custody at the Fleet after Sheriff William Acton refused to recognize Parliament’s order to release them.[44] Charles rewarded Acton for this deed with a baronetcy, bucking tradition, for it was a royal plum that had never been extended to any alderman who had not yet served as Lord Mayor.[45] Fowke had only just bailed himself out of these troubles when the now-Sir William Acton returned to haunt him, this time on behalf of the Honorable East India Company as corporate counsel.[46] Fowke thus went from Star Chamber to Chancery Court in a process that was supposed to be a punishment. Reversing this injustice preoccupied Fowke until 1655.

A reading of Chancery Court documents and East India Company minutes reveals two plotlines that bear out in the events of 1640-1642. One is the early split of what would become the “new modelers” from the rest of the London merchant community as the interests of Fowke, Thompson, and their colonizing-interloping trader community diverged over the East India monopoly.[47] This split becomes fully visible in the controversy over the Courteen interloping and piracy expeditions.[48] Fowke fitted out a flagship for one of these fleets, The Dragon.[49] Harassed by the Dutch, she did not return.[50] However, Fowke’s partner in this venture, William Cloberry, was an investor in the Kent Island trading post located in modern-day Maryland, which was to be the scene of the very last battle fought in the English Civil Wars.^[51] Robert Moulton, second in command of this second interloping fleet, was a Maurice Thompson associate; like many of them, he became a parliamentary privateer during the war.^[52] This aggressive approach characterized the new modelers.

Fowke’s involvement in shipping and colonizing-interloping trades further explains how he became associated with gunpowder before 1630. The Chancery Court litigation against Fowke concerned a third party, Daniel Bonnell, who had failed to pay for a cargo of Company saltpeter purchased on credit that year, with Fowke as the alleged verbal co-signer (“insurer”) of the loan.[53] Bonnell’s attorney was Thomas Kynaston, who also represented the Courteen faction and their interloping fleets.[54] Fowke and his former Courteen collaborators took up fifteen of the eighteen seats on the Committee of Public Safety in January 1642.[55] Meanwhile, the younger William Courteen went bankrupt that same year, leaving his affairs in their hands.[56] The Courteen cartel had seamlessly transitioned to revolutionary new modelers.

Brenda J. Buchanan has established that during the time that the East India Company sued Fowke over that unpaid saltpeter bill, the Caroline court was cracking down on black market saltpeter and gunpowder, especially around Bristol.[57] Gloucester was a maritime trade rival to Bristol, which was second in maritime trade to London, making Gloucester the ‘third tier’ trading city of England with a chip on its shoulder, much like Fowke. As shipping cities, Bristol and Gloucester were both allowed to manufacture a small amount of gunpowder, but there was never enough to meet market demand.[58] Gunpowder was nevertheless essential to the oceanic economy. For example, ‘Guinea powder’ was traded for slaves on the West African coast.[59] Thompson had pioneered the English role in the Atlantic slave trade as early as 1627.[60] Access to Indian saltpeter remained a concern for the new modelers. Courteen shippers associated with Fowke and Thompson returned from India with a large supply of saltpeter in January 1644.[61] By contrast, the East India Company, a center of Royalist sympathy in the City, sent only “around twenty” ships to the India Ocean from the Company docks during the 1640s and 1650s.[62] Thanks to this copious saltpeter, the New Model Army had more than enough gunpowder to finish putting down all resistance. After the wars, the “new modelers” continued to make Gangetic saltpeter a bastion of English trade and nascent empire when they took control of the East India Company.[63] Indian nitrates remained a staple of British imperialism until the end of the 19^th century.[64]

Fowke’s role as gunpowder provider is most visible in 1636 when the Company faced an impasse with a royal court over the operation of the Company gunpowder mills at Chilworth.[65] Despite the Company’s bitter litigation with Fowke, which had seemingly concluded the year before, as well as his role in the Courteen cartel, or perhaps because of these things, the East India Company thought Fowke was the right consultant to deal with various royal administrators all demanding various fees to permit operation.[66] Fowke’s involvement ended the bureaucratic logjam in just two weeks and so the mills began to make gunpowder.[67]

Charles, who never made any money as an investor in the Courteen expeditions, nevertheless shared a business interest with John Fowke until the collapse of the cartel and seems to have tolerated the second-order association with him during the period. This near reconciliation resulted in speculation that the king’s nephew might lead a settlement effort on Madagascar, which was a pet project of Fowke and Thompson.[68] After 1637, with his trading in decline, Fowke gravitated towards the London militia. He never joined the Honorable Artillery Company as Thompson and many other men in his circle did.[69] However, Fowke married his namesake son into what became the New Model Army.[70] By proxy, Fowke became married to the London militia at the very moment it was radicalizing. As Samuel Butler recalled in 1643, the Trained Bands were “were instantly filled with few or none but men of that Faction” bent on “the blessed Reformation” that “could not be effected but by the sword.”[71] Rather than join those men in battle, Fowke would manage their mobilization.

During the war with Charles, Fowke was among the most radical figures in the City. In the doldrums of 1644, when the parliamentary cause was at its nadir, Fowke petitioned the House of Commons to have the officers under Lord Essex “weeded and mangled” to increase political loyalty, in the wry observation of royalist chronicler Bulstrode Whitelock.[72] So total was the war party’s grip on the means of production that the 25 December 1643 edition of the royalist newsletter Mercurius Aulicus justifiably accuses Fowke, Oliver St. John, and Sir Henry Vane of “engrossing all the City to themselves.”^[73] The radicals of London wanted “to make the armed forces of Parliament peculiarly their own,” MacCormack writes.^[74] Jordan Downs describes the New Model as the “culmination of nearly three years of radical trial and error” by Fowke and his war party “seeking to agitate and implement new initiatives to mobilize the metropolis.”^[75] During the abortive Second Civil War, when the champion of London’s militia community was removed from the militia committee, the New Model Army marched into London and restored Fowke to that post, forcing Denzil Holles to flee.[76] Fowke’s place on the committee was never challenged again.

During each phase – before, during, and after the wars – Fowke was a partner or investor in privateering. His activities in the 1630s have already been mentioned. In 1642, Fowke and Thompson organized the Additional Sea Adventure against Irish rebels.[77] As such licenses were normally a royal prerogative, Brenner considers this project “perhaps the most striking evidence” that a “party of radical opposition” had begun a revolution.[78] During the wars, they sent Capt. William Jackson on his famous raiding expedition against the Spanish in the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico.[79] Sixty ships serving in the Royal Navy during the English Civil War belonged to this same faction of “new merchants,” once more showing the overlap of private and public interests.[80] Shipmasters associated with the new modeler faction were leaders of the privateering trade throughout the English Civil Wars and the First Anglo-Dutch War.[81]  Trade interests put the new modelers into conflict with the Dutch, their former partners, once the civil war had concluded. The predicate to this conflict was the 1651 Navigation Act, a product of lobbying by new modelers in Parliament and an expression of their mercantile policy in the colonies.[82] Fowke and Thompson also successfully lobbied Cromwell to pursue an ill-fated “Western Design” against the Spanish in the Caribbean.[83] They renewed their efforts to settle Madagascar.[84] Although the new modelers failed in their ultimate plan to engross the Indian and Atlantic trade markets this way, they had set a pattern of state involvement in overseas empire-building that would continue after the Restoration.[85] In particular, the so-called ‘Guinea trade’ Thompson had pioneered in Africa would be “the nexus of seventeenth-century English overseas activities and imperial comprehension,” Roper writes.[86]

Whereas Fowke entered history as a tax protestor, during the English Civil War he was appointed to ‘farm’ Parliamentary war taxes. Tax collection (‘custom farming’) was a primary source of discontent between the ‘new men’ of London, who were frozen out of this activity before 1642, and the Old Guard, which enjoyed favorable access to it.[87] Under the parliamentary scheme of 1643, Fowke and a core group of the new modelers on the militia committee, as well as Thompson, loaned set amounts to Parliament for the war and then paid themselves back at a profit by collecting the taxes.[88] Parliamentary terms proved too onerous for Fowke and his associates in 1645 but it was not the end for them.[89] When the king’s trial began in January 1649, the Thompson clique assumed ten of the sixteen seats on the new committee for naval regulations and the customs, interfacing directly with the Royal Navy and setting impost rates.[90] Fowke’s career as a custom farmer then continued after the war, producing a colorful controversy when he was briefly jailed again at the Fleet for sketchy accounting practices.[91] The scandal did not derail his career.

            John Fowke saw no clear line between public interest and his own private interest, but this was hardly unusual for the time. Nor did he display the slightest shame about profit or plunder. After the war, he was deeply involved in the sale of bishops’ lands.[92] Appointed to the king’s jury, Fowke refused to attend the trial of Charles I, and so avoided the fate of a regicide.[93] However, after the Regicide, he was happy to liquidate the late king’s estate for Parliament, earning a substantial commission.[94]

Fowke finally resolved his old score under the Cromwell dictatorship by entangling his personal dispute with the East India Company in the final settlement of decades-old claims it held against the Dutch East India Company.[95] The war between John Fowke and the Honorable East India Company had lasted 28 years and contributed to the fall of a king and three parliaments. Indeed, Cromwell’s dictatorship began when the so-called Barebones Parliament dissolved over his interference in Chancery Court matters, most notably Fowke’s reactivated dispute with the Company.[96] Fowke had been a radical reformer on the Hale Commission in 1652 but these efforts were derailed by the controversy.[97] Too far ahead of its time, the Hale Commission’s report failed to gain any traction as legislation.[98] However, the Hale Commission also fits a broader pattern of Fowke being the interface between power and interest on the one hand, and God-charged street radicalism on the other. At least five other known radicals, including New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peters, were on the Hale Commission.[99] A booster of the Puritan Massachusetts colony as well as the Additional Sea Adventure, Peters was bold enough to contemplate the end of monarchy out loud.[100] Marchamont Nedham noted Peters repeating “much of the contents” of radical petitions in his sermons during 1643, such as demands to abolish monarchy.[101] Peters was a close collaborator of Henry Ireton, the direct superior to Lt. Col. John Fowke Jr., as well as a collaborator with Cromwell’s camp when the New Model marched on London in 1647.[102] He might as well have been Fowke’s personal representative.

A second scene also captures this dynamic. During his second stint as Lord Mayor of London, Fowke wrote the warrant to arrest John Lilburne. Writing to Fowke from the prison at Newgate in 1653, Lilburne denounced the “evil custom” of grand jury indictments, arguing that exculpatory witnesses should be examined.^[103] Lilburne wanted to face his accusers in court with attorney assigned to defend him.^[104] These were radical ideas of the pre-Civil War period, fledgling ideas of legal due process rights that would take centuries to establish. Upon receiving a deputation of Lilburne’s supporters, Fowke validated the reasonableness of his demands, even if he could not enforce them on his own. “I see what it is he desires, and for my part I do declare unto you, that I shall not go about to hinder him of anything that is his right; but this he desires I cannot do alone,” Fowke said. “I shall, tomorrow being the [common court] sessions, communicate this letter to the Recorder and the Sheriffs, and he shall have my best assistance.”^[105] The effort succeeded. Writing in 1893, Colin Firth said that Lilburne had “performed the great feat which no one else ever achieved, of extorting from the court a copy of his indictment, in order that he might put it before counsel, and be instructed as to the objections he might take against it.”^[106] Lilburne’s successful defense became a political problem for the Cromwell government, which kept him prisoner regardless. What is striking to this writer, having read Fowke’s complaints against the Honorable Company, is how they resonate with Lilburne’s complaint to Fowke much later.

Whether villain or villainized, John Fowke stood on his principles and remained popular for it. Never a saint, Fowke was a ‘merchant adventurer,’ which has the modern meaning of an investor. The complete blending of personal and public interests in the career of John Fowke suggest that the larger story of the English Civil Wars and the Cromwellian burst of empire-building should be understood as Fowke’s ‘adventures.’ His role in the militia community, and the creation of the New Model Army, are consistent with military entrepreneurialism across Europe in the same period. All the wars and political upheavals of London consistently served the interests of Fowke and the new modeler faction.

The Grand Remonstrance accuses Charles of “engrossing” all the gunpowder in the kingdom in the Tower of London because it was in fact the central control point for all gunpowder in England.[107] That made it very interesting to Fowke and his friends. Control of the Tower became another fractious issue when Charles named a loyalist, Col. Charles Lunsford, as Lieutenant of the Tower. Fowke reacted immediately, presenting a petition against Lunsford to Parliament the very next day.[108] All of the London merchants who were signatory to this petition were also members the Fowke-Thompson clique.[109] “There can be little doubt that much the same group responsible for the petition campaign … guided the London crowds in the decisive days of later December 1641 and early January 1642,” Brenner writes.[110] On 26 December, Lord Mayor Richard Gurney convinced the King he would have to remove Lunsford for the sake of public order.^[111] Unsatisfied with his dismissal, the next day a crowd outside Whitehall pressed for the King to heed petition of Fowke and Pennington against “bishops and popish lords.”^[112] Later that day, future Leveller leader John Lilburne led an armed gang to confront Lunsford and his guards in the street.^[113] It was “the first of several clashes in this climactic period in which Lilburne would be involved,” Brenner writes.^[114]

Lunsford’s replacement, Sir John Byron, was explaining himself to Parliament on 28 January 1642 when Thomas Skippon, captain-leader of the Honorable Artillery Company, arrived with 500 men and convinced the Tower guard to leave.[115] He was added to Fowke’s Militia Committee the same day.[116] Thus we can see two very different men, the Leveller Lilburne and the soldier Skippon, both serving the interests of Fowke and the war party, the former with a mob and the latter with a march, to secure the single most important means of war in the City.

Fowke’s party “took over the military stores of the Tower, Woolwich, and Greenwich, and profited from the expertise of the workers there,” Buchanan writes.^[117] During 1643, the Ordnance received 2,122 barrels of gunpowder from domestic sources and imported another 1,771 barrels of powder, an amount that probably tripled Royalist procurement.^[118] By 1645, Parliament was receiving well over 3,000 barrels of domestically supplied gunpowder every year, at least three or four times as much as Charles mustered in the same period.^[119] Altogether, the Ordnance Office issued more than 8,000 barrels of powder from 1640 to 1649.^[120] This quite overmatched the Royalist war effort.

Of course, the Tower also had political significance too. Ownership of the Tower was power to oppress. When Pennington left the office of mayor in July 1643, it was to assume the office of lieutenant of the Tower.^[121] When the political Presbyterian Francis West was restored to the office in the brief absence of the New Model army during 1648, Skippon moved everything of value out of the Tower before he got there.^[122] Thus while Fowke had no direct hand in the struggle for control of the Tower, everyone who took a hand in that struggle was a friend of Fowke.

What was personal was also political. After turning London against the King in 1641, and being elected to the Aldermanic Court, Fowke went out of his way to confront Charles in person.[123] When Charles entered Parliament on 4 January 1642 expecting to arrest five MPs for treason, he found John Fowke instead.[124] The missing men were likely at Isaac Pennington’s home on Coleman Street, the center of radicalism in the City.[125] According to Samuel Butler, Fowke responded to the royal inquiry after the men with a “saucy, insolent speech” expressing hope that the accused would “be tried but in a Parliamentary way” (emphasis original).[126] Charles turned on his elevated heel and walked out after this verbal sting. He did not return to Westminster until his trial.

The ego wound must have been deep. During peace negotiations with Parliament in January 1643, Charles declared Fowke and three other men “notoriously guilty of schism and high treason,” offering peace in exchange for their deaths.[127] Ham-fisted, this approach undercut the king’s support in London and empowered the war party.[128] Weeks later, Mercurius Aulicus called Fowke “the most seditious of the whole packe” of Londoners behind an anti-monarchist, pro-war petition drive.[129] Four days after the Battle of Edgehill, the Royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus declared “alderman Fulke” unforgiveable for agitating the City to make war on their king.^[130] Edward Walker, secretary to Charles, picked out Fowke from among the rabble and called him its ringleader.^[131] A personal war had been subsumed into a wartime propaganda scene. When Charles called Fowke a “traytor” during the 1643 peace negotiations, at least seven pamphlets appeared in the City defending him.[132]

Despite this prominence in the primary sources, Fowke has never been subject of a standalone historical volume or biography. Other than his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is amazing but does not do Fowke justice, this writer could not locate a comprehensive essay outlining his career. “We are in no danger today of forgetting Alderman Fowke and his like,” Christopher Hill, dean of Marxist historiography of the English Civil Wars, wrote in a review of two books about the Long Parliament in 1956. Rather, “we are in danger of forgetting those who fought well because they thought they were fighting God’s battles.”[133] Hill was begging the question: if the masses were misled, then who misled them?

While decades of historical research failed to produce the early bourgeoisie or proletariat expected by Hill’s school of historiography, Fowke has defied this deprecation by emerging in every major historical work on Civil War London published since Hill wrote those words. For example, Fowke has the longest entry in Valerie Pearl’s 1961 book on London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution. His name appears dozens of times in Merchants and Revolution by Robert Brenner. In his 2021 book Civil War London: Mobilizing for Parliament, Jordan Downs is focused on Pennington, but makes prominent mentions of Fowke and his role in Pennington’s rise. No historian has ever begun at Fowke, working their way outwards to explore his connections to absolutely everyone of consequence in Civil War London and see if that explains history in a new way. His wars with King Charles I and the Honorable East India Company remain unexamined in contemporary historiography. The most interesting man in English Civil War London remains criminally understudied.

This author submits that Fowke’s ties to the militia community, as well as the radical communities of the City, served as a formidable political power base. Fowke oversaw the funding inputs and spending outputs from his place on the Militia Committee, giving him further political power across London. Fowke’s evident relationships with printers and preachers establish his legacy as an early figure in the invention of mass politics. His personal war with Charles lit the fuse on Parliament’s war with Charles, while the English Civil Wars made it possible for Fowke to win his second personal war against the East India Company. We can even discern the historical shift to overseas empire in the military adventures which followed the English Civil Wars under the Cromwellian state. While we cannot hold Fowke solely responsible for all of these events, everyone important in them is connected to Fowke by shared interest, remaining a friend or becoming a foe depending on his interest.

John Fowke is the most interesting man in the world of revolutionary London. He is too consequential to remain ignored any longer.

[1] https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/fowke-john-1596-1662

[2] Boyd’s Inhabitants of London 1626 9446; Visitation of London Vol. I, 288-289

[3] DNB 522

[4] Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) 521

[5] Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Verso, 2003. 46

[6] Farnell, J.E. “The Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community 1964.” The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1964), pp. 439-454. 441

[7] Downs, Jordan S. Civil War London: Mobilizing for Parliament, 1641-5. Manchester University Press, 2021. 61

[8] Pells Ismini. Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: The “Christian Centurion.” Routledge, 2020.  84

[9] Boyd’s Inhabitants 1638 6725

[10] DNB 521

[11] Pearl, Valerie. London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625-43. Oxford University Press, 1961. 130-131

[12] Pells 116-117

^[13] Downs 234

^[14] Downs 245

[15] Downs 113-114

[16] Brenner 415; MacCormack, John R. Revolutionary Politics in the Long Parliament. Harvard University Press, 1973. 41

[17] Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series 19 March, note 105

[18] Brenner 517

[19] Downs 48-49

[20] Downs 186-187

[21] Downs 190-191

[22] Downs 186-187

[23] Downs 193

[24] Downs 106-107

[25] Brenner 366-367

[26] Downs 110-111

[27] Downs 111

[28] Kenyon, John and Ohlmeyer, Jane. The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Oxford University Press, 1998. 13

[29] Downs 41-42

[30] Brenner 344

[31] Brenner 373

[32] Brenner 372

[33] MacCormack 75

[34] Roper, L.H. Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688. 136-137

[35] Mercurius Politicus 8-15 December 1659 945

[36] Sharpe, Reginald Robinson. London and the Kingdom: A History Derived Mainly from the Archives at Guildhall in the Custody of the Corporation of the City of London, Volume 2. Longmans, Green & Company, 1894. 365-366

[37] CSPDS 19 March, note 105

[38] Murray, Rev. L.P. “The Dawsons of Ardee.” Journal of the County Louth Archaeological Society

Vol. 8, No. 1 (1933), pp. 22-33. 24

[39] Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1647-60, 581

[40] DNB 521, Acts of the Privy Council, Jan-Aug. 1627, pp. 103-4, 136

[41] Brenner 103

[42] Popofsky, Linda S. “The Crisis over Tonnage and Poundage in Parliament in 1629.” Past & Present, Feb., 1990, No. 126 (Feb., 1990), pp. 44-75. 57

[43] ibid

[44] Downs 110-111

[45] Ibid

[46] CCMEIC 1630-1634 69

[47] Brenner 274

[48] Brenner 174

[49] Brenner 173

[50] Roper 100

^[51] Ibid

^[52] Brenner 538

[53] Osborne, Matt. “East India Company v John Fowke and the Origins of the English Civil War.” Forthcoming thesis 2023

[54] CCMEIC 1630-1634  190-191

[55] Brenner 370

[56] Brenner 175

[57] Buchanan, Brenda J. Gunpowder, Explosives, and the State: A Technological History. Routledge, 2006.

[58] Ibid

[59] Buchanan, Brenda J. “The Africa Trade and the Bristol Gunpowder Industry.” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society. Vol. 118, 2000. pp. 133-156.

[60] Roper 33

[61] Roper 106

[62] Keay, John. The Honourable Company: a History of the English East India Company. Macmillan, 1991. 113

[63] Frey, James W. “The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and the Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower.” The Historian Vol. 71, No. 3 (Fall 2009), pp 507-554. 527

[64] Frey 548

[65] CCMEIC 1630-1634  50

[66] CCMEIC 1630-1634  46

[67] CCMEIC 1630-1634  59,76

[68] CCMEIC 1635-1639 245

[69] Pells 84

[70] Boyd’s Inhabitants 1638 6725

[71] A Letter From Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus, 1643

[72] MacCormack, John R. Revolutionary Politics in the Long Parliament. Harvard University Press, 1973. 20

^[73] MacCormack 14

^[74] MacCormack 45

^[75] Downs 280-281

[76] DNB 521; Holles, Denzil. Memoirs, 1699. 110, 160

[77] Brenner 401, 410-411

[78] Brenner 400

[79] Brenner 410-411

[80] Brenner 434

[81] Brenner 583

[82] Farnell, J.E. “The Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community 1964.” The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1964), pp. 439-454.

[83] Brenner 411

[84] Brenner 175-176

[85] Roper 161

[86] Roper 5

[87] Brenner 42

[88] Ibid

[89] Brenner 454

[90] Brenner 553

[91] DNB 521

[92] DNB 522; Journal of the House of Lords Vol. IX,185

[93] Mercurius Politicus 22-29 March 1660, p 1199

[94] DNB 522; Calendar of Clarendon State Papers vol ii, 171

[95] CCMEIC 1655-1659 25

[96] MacCormack 230

[97] Cotterell, Mary. “Interregnum Law Reform: The Hale Commission of 1652.” The English Historical Review

Vol. 83, No. 329 (Oct., 1968), pp. 689-704. Passim

[98] Brenner 573-574

[99] Cotterell 691-692

[100] Brenner 405

[101] Mercurius Aulicus 2 April 1643

[102] Brenner 512, 564

[103] Second Letter of John Lilburne 3-4

[104] Ibid

[105] Second Letter of John Lilburne 7

[106] Firth 1893

[107] Grand Remonstrance

[108] Brenner 369

[109] Brenner 364

[110] Brenner 369-70

[111] Downs 131

[112] Brenner 367

[113] Brenner 368

[114] Ibid

[115] Pells 92

[116] Ibid

[117] Ibid

[118] Buchanan 247

[119] Edwards 177

[120] Edwards 111

[121] Pearl 274

[122] Pells 188

[123] A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus 16, 19-20

[124] Downs 27

[125] Downs 29

[126] Downs 27

[127] King’s Letter and Declaration to the City, 17 January 1643

[128] Downs 121-123

[129] Mercurius Aulicus 2 April 1643

[130] Downs 91

[131] Downs 34-35

[132] Downs 128-129

[133] Hill, Christopher. “Recent Interpretations of the Civil War.” History, New Series, Vol. 41, No. 141/143 (February-October 1956), pp. 67-87.

Previous posts about John Fowke, all free and shareable:

Polemology Positions

The Trials Of John Fowke

I am scheduled to present the following paper at the Southern Historical Association conference in Baltimore today. It is not about John Fowke. However, as I kept researching the topic intending to write a thesis based on the paper, I noticed this very interesting fellow lurking around every corner of English Civil War London. Once I opened…

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3 years ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

This is the first published work based on original research for my thesis, the first draft of which is complete at nearly 50,000 words. It is based on one chapter of the thesis and was only available to paid subscribers. It is now unlocked.

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Evolving out of the royal scriptorum,…

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I am scheduled to present the following paper at the Southern Historical Association conference in Baltimore today. It is not about John Fowke. However, as I kept researching the topic intending to write a thesis based on the paper, I noticed this very interesting fellow lurking around every corner of English Civil War London. Once I opened The Court Mi…

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It was a dramatic scene by design. On the fateful day in January 1642 that King Charles I swept into Parliament expecting to arrest his enemies, he was embarrassed by their absence. Instead of the more famous John Pym, Denzil Holles, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, and William Strode, Charles found an older and even more dedicated op…

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Before I go any further with the John Fowke project, I would like to present subscribers with a podcast version of the original term paper that started me down this rabbit hole. It’s above the picture.

I was curious to understand why the British “military historians” dominating the previous generation of English-language historiography were so dismissive about the artillery branch in this conflict even though the Battle of Edgehill began and ended with cannon fire. After a bit of research, it was possible to write a material history of the English Civil War — the “gunpowder reason.” Stephen Bull’s The Furie of the Ordnance was particularly helpful in this regard. The war of 1642-1645 was not some bizarre outlier from the early modern military revolution in Europe that historians debate. The same things were going on there that were going on everywhere else.

During my follow-on research into the material victory of Parliament, the name John Fowke kept appearing in the historiography of revolutionary London. Then, as I began to read the official records of the East India Company, I discovered that Fowke had interests in the gunpowder trade decades before the war. He is not as well-known as his contemporary Wallenstein, but Fowke’s career in treason and gunpowder was at least as colorful — and ultimately, far more successful.

My researcher has just delivered an enormous trove of material related to Fowke’s lawsuit against the Honourable Company and other matters of his biography. Subscribers will be the first to know what I find out. Apologies for the audio quality, as my production equipment was rudimentary.

Polemology Positions

How to Succeed in Regicide Without Even Trying (Audio Version)

Listen now (12 min) | …

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4 years ago · Matt Osborne

Having done as much as any Londoner possibly could to prepare for war with the king, to raise an army to meet the king in battle, to bypass the normal rules of governance in London to do that, urging action and raising troops and even collecting taxes for the purpose, agitating all the while for an open rebellion against Charles instead of halfhearted insurrection, John Fowke finished his long personal war with the king by … staying home.

Polemology Positions

How to Succeed in Regicide Without Even Trying

Mercurius Politicus is considered an early newspaper, but today we might see the format as a newsletter, for each edition was printed with articles in sequence, as a single column. John Fowke, merchant adventurer of London, purchased an advertisement in the 22-29 March 1660 edition of the paper to refute widespread misinformation about his role in the t…

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4 years ago · Matt Osborne

Mercurius Politicus is considered an early newspaper, but today we might see the format as a newsletter, for each edition was printed with articles in sequence, as a single column. John Fowke, merchant adventurer of London, purchased an advertisement in the 22-29 March 1660 edition of the paper to refute widespread misinformation about his role in the t…

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This is another podcast version of a selected post. I will be doing this for all of my posts about Fowke from now on, as the chair of my thesis committee is blind. (Have you ever seen someone give a 60-minute lecture on English Civil War historiography without notes? I have, and it’s amazing!) I will begin recording posts on other topics soon enough. Don’t expect superior audio quality, however, as I am using a phone to do this and there’s no room in the budget for real recording equipment.

Polemology Positions

John Fowke and the Invention of News

The Mercurius Aulicus newspaper was published in Oxford and within London during the English Civil War. Like everything else organizational to the royalist war effort, it peaked in 1643 and disintegrated during 1645, lasting down the ages as an alternative view to the military victors of the conflict — and inspiring the creation of news as an industry. …

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4 years ago · Matt Osborne

I am now recording select posts as podcasts. First up is my long post from last week about John Fowke, a Puritan merchant of London whose personal war with King Charles I and the East India Company ignited a slow fuse that exploded into the English Civil Wars.

Polemology Positions

The Piracies of John Fowke

There are few solid facts about John Fowke before 1627. We know he was born at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire some time around 1598 to William Fowkes and Alice Carr. We are sure that he was a merchant in the Haberdashers livery company, and that he was married to Catherine Briggs, daughter of Richard Briggs. The rest of what we know about Fowke before this…

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4 years ago · Matt Osborne