An Introduction To John Fowke
An Introduction To John Fowke
Military entrepreneur in revolutionary London
This is the introduction to my thesis on John Fowke being published soon in ProQuest.
Born in 1596 according to Parliamentary records, John Fowke had political power, even if he was never the most powerful man in London.[1] He was also not the richest, though he was rich, nor was he the most uniformly popular among the masses, even though he remained popular in London. Fowke 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 in the parliamentary victories of the 1640s. He was instrumental in creating the New Model Army and then admitted that force into London twice to restore his own political fortunes. Fowke oversaw the war machinery of London from his place on the Militia Committee.[2] He championed Oliver Cromwell to command the New Model cavalry.[3] 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 between the establishment of that famous army and John Fowke.[4] Maurice Thompson, one of the most consequential traders of the period, was Fowke’s neighbor and constant partner.[5] They were the core of the colonizing-interloping segment of the London merchant community identified by historian Robert Brenner as the wellspring of revolutionary power in London. After the execution of Charles I, Fowke and his faction impressed their aggressive colonizing and mercantile trade policy on the Commonwealth, shaping the foreign policy of the Cromwellian state and then the Restoration government. Fowke was a prominent figure in London politics from the coronation of Charles in 1627 until his death in 1662.
Fowke and Thompson were ‘merchant adventurers.’ In the 17th century, the term adventure had our modern meaning of an investment. In 1627, the future new modelers were making huge fortunes in the Atlantic imports economy.[6] Freshly anointed, King Charles I told his customs officials to raise the impost rates (‘tonnage and poundage’) on the import merchants of London without parliamentary knowledge or approval.[7] Fowke and a handful of his fellow merchants claimed that the rates had been unduly imposed, and these defendants were ultimately vindicated in parliamentary testimony.[8] However, they remained in custody at the Fleet anyway, for Sheriff William Acton refused to recognize Parliament’s order to release them.[9]
No sooner had Fowke bailed himself out of these troubles at tremendous expense when the now-elevated Sir William Acton returned the next year to persecute him again, this time on behalf of the Honorable East India Company as corporate counsel.[10] Fowke went from Star Chamber to Chancery Court in a process that was meant to be a punishment. Whether he was villain or villainized, reversing this perceived injustice preoccupied Fowke until 1655, seven years after the regicide. Documents from that litigation, along with the general court minutes of the East India Company, inform the core of this thesis.
Research here reveals two “emplotments,” as the philosopher of history Hayden White would call them, emerging 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 traders diverged from the Old Guard of the City over the conservative policies of the East India monopoly.[11] This split becomes fully visible in the controversy over the Courteen interloping and piracy expeditions.[12] Fowke fitted out a flagship for one of these fleets.[13] Harassed by the Dutch, she did not return.[14] However, Fowke’s partner in this piratical 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.[15] Robert Moulton, second in command of the Dragon interloping fleet, was another Maurice Thompson associate; like many of them, he became a parliamentary privateer during the war.[16] Many more of them will be named below. Aggressive pursuit of profit and plunder at the expense of the royal monopoly (‘interloping’) characterized the new modelers.
The second theme is how these new modelers split with the court of Charles I. Defined by an endless state of fiscal crisis and the consequent controversy over “ship money,” the administration of Charles declined as Fowke’s political star rose. Religion was a major force in this process. A metropolitan, Fowke proved to be an Independent when the Scots forced the Presbyterian question.[17] He was described as “not much noted for religion, but a countenancer of good ministers.”[18] This statement has been taken by some to suggest that Fowke lacked piety. However, his mentor Isaac Pennington was a Coleman Street religious radical.[19] Fowke engineered the coup that made Pennington Lord Mayor in 1642.[20] The ministers he “countenanced” were influential New Model Army preachers, such as Hugh Peters.[21] As we shall see, Fowke had great and lasting support among the radicals of the City.[22] We might even imagine them as his ‘foot soldiers.’ This would not have been the case if he had been impious.
Fowke was a “man of great trading” in 1627.[23] However, he was only among the third rank of traders in the City on the eve of war, when his interests had largely shifted to military entrepreneurship.[24] His business relationships to major militia figures such as Thomas Skippon started before the war with the king.[25] His son married the daughter of a sergeant major in the Trained Bands during 1638.[26] Boyd’s Inhabitants shows three children, Mary, James, and another Mary, all apparently born of this marriage and then died from 1646 to 1651.[27] (A grandson of our John, confusingly also named John, survived this John Fowke Jr when he died in 1667.[28] Untangling the genealogy of the Fowkes is one academic contribution of this thesis.) Fowke’s namesake son first married into the militia and then went to Ireland with the New Model.[29] He appears on the muster rolls at Leinster.[30] Thus our John Fowke never joined the Honorable Artillery Company himself, as Thompson and many other men in his circle did.[31] Rather, he forged a family connection to the armies of Parliament through his son’s marriage.
That marriage coincided with a new Puritan spirit in the London militia community. As Samuel Butler recalled later in 1643, the Trained Bands had “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.”[32] Rather than join those men in battle, then, Fowke managed their mobilization, becoming a civilian father to the militia. The nature of his trading had changed from imports to the care and feeding of regiments. With the Fowke family fortune so closely bound up to all the most militant communities of Puritans in London, Fowke was in a unique position to organize the first modern mass political actions in England.
English Civil War historiography is already aware of John Fowke. That study begins with the classical split between Whig and Tory views of the origins of the conflict. The Whig view, which prevailed into the 18th Century and has proven enduring, is that Charles I was not very good at being king. This was Fowke’s own view. Marxists had a very different idea. Most famous of these, British historian Christopher Hill dominated English Civil War studies by the middle of the 20th Century. He discerned a nascent class struggle, a potential bourgeoisie in the gentry, a rising proletariat in the Levellers. A generation of historians set out to find these theoretical anachronisms of modern political philosophy hidden in the past, but they failed. By the end of his career, Hill looked to the revisionist historians with fresh hope for a breakthrough. He remained dismissive of Fowke, however. “We are in no danger today of forgetting Alderman Fowke and his like,” historian Christopher Hill wrote in 1956. Rather, “we are in danger of forgetting those who fought well because they thought they were fighting God’s battles.”[33] But Hill was wrong. They were fighting Fowke’s battles.
Revisionist historians have been criticized for doing a better job of explaining why the English Civil War did not have to happen than why it did, in fact, happen. Still, the careful research of specialists within discrete silos of study produced some important new insights. For example, Valerie Pearl’s London and the Outbreak of Revolution showed that the London merchant community was the central scene of struggle for control of Parliament and war policy throughout the period of conflict. Fowke appears throughout the text, and his entry in Pearl’s appendix on the new modelers, or the “New Men” of London as she calls them, is by far the longest in that section. Pearl reveals that in June 1641, a younger, more radical contingent of London’s elites was at the height of their campaign to take over the Aldermanic Court, the upper chamber to the Common Council of London.[34]
At the beginning of the 21st Century, a new generation of historians focused on wartime London in more detail. In 2003, Brenner published Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653, a 720-page volume in which Fowke’s name appears dozens of times. Brenner was answering the revisionists, who had thrown up their hands and abandoned the question of war responsibility altogether, by illuminating the overlap between Fowke, Thompson, and other consequential men in the “colonizing-interloping” trades – that is, the very architects of what was to become the British Empire – with the war party in London. The Venn diagram is close to a circle.
Fowke bears mention in Robert Ashton’s The City and the Court 1603-1643, a 2008 book examining the divide within London politics leading into the City’s war against the king. Building on Pearl, Ashton shows that trade guilds were host to contentious disputes between a discernible “Old Guard” versus a rising class of innovators over access to lucrative royal posts.[35] We shall see how Fowke and friends pursued these “custom farming” offices during the wars, in his case creating a public controversy.
Most recently, Jordan Downs shows how this political faction around Isaac Pennington during his 1642 coup transformed into the war party in London and radicalized Parliament against the king. Although Downs’s book is focused on Pennington, Fowke emerges as the mayor’s key partner on the Aldermanic Court as well as numerous common council committees.[36]
Downs identifies the question over Irish Settlement as the crucial issue which split the larger London business world from the king during 1641.[37] The political dispute over Ireland magnified the crisis of the king’s weakness and inspired the Puritan merchants of London to providentialism.[38] Anxious to keep the Irish on his side against Parliament as his own situation deteriorated, Charles did not have the same policy as Fowke and the Irish investors. They moved the City against Charles over the Ireland issue, then built an army controlled by Parliament instead of Charles, actions which “bridged the ideological gap” between the political revolution inside the City in 1641 and the outbreak of war across the country in 1642.[39]
Military weakness was a persistent problem for Charles. Technology historian Brenda J. Buchanan’s work on the Caroline state saltpeter and gunpowder monopolies has enriched our understanding of what was at stake. The English Civil Wars took place during the ‘pike-and-shot’ era of gunpowder warfare. Military historians have debated just how ‘revolutionary’ this period was; even the term ‘revolution’ is contested. Jeffrey Black has argued that no military revolution occurred at all until after 1660, neatly cutting the English Civil War out altogether.[40] That is fine with some British military historians, such as Malcolm Wanklyn and Stuart Reid, who deprecate all material questions about the English Civil War.[41] Opposing these anti-materialists is a new generation of military historians. Stephen Bull, Ben Cohen, and others have produced convincing research that London enjoyed material advantages from the beginning of the war, and that after some struggle within London and Parliament over the nature of the conflict, those advantages ultimately made Royalist victory impossible by the end of 1644. The greatest of all these advantages was gunpowder production capacity. As this writer established in “The Gunpowder Reason, A Plot?: Reassessing the English Civil Wars as Materialschlacht,” a vastly more powerful Parliamentary ‘war machine’ eventually overwhelmed Royalist forces through firepower.[42] Researching the origins of this gunpowder advantage is what led the writer to discover John Fowke.
Gunpowder was a vital John Fowke adventure from his earliest days as an associate of Maurice Thompson. This can be discerned from East India Company General Court minutes related to Fowke’s relationship with that royal monopoly. The Company sued Fowke in Chancery Court over an unpaid bill for a cargo of saltpeter, the main raw material needed for gunpowder. The case has not been explored by historians. Documents from the Chancery Court related to the case form the core of this thesis.
However, the gunpowder businessman had to be discrete in prewar London. “As an acquirer or procurer of gunpowder, Fowke would have been absolutely vital to his associates,” says naval historian Alex Clarke, better known by his moniker Drachinifel.[43] If this thesis is correct, then Fowke would have been “halfway between an incredibly influential stock market broker and a back-alley arms dealer with...the financial potential clout of both” before the war.[44] Then, during the conflict, Fowke would have been vital to “denying the King access to powder” by persuading “most of the shady backhanded third-party artisan gunpowder makers … to either come over completely to the parliamentary side, or at least sell primarily to them.”[45] Historiography has utterly missed this consequential aspect of Fowke’s career because he did not advertise it. In his Chancery responses, Fowke flatly denies any gunpowder business at all. As we shall see, his denial is difficult to believe.
Upon locating documents from the Chancery Court held at Kew University, this writer engaged Susan Moore, an experienced reader of 17th Century Chancery script, to provide images and rush transcripts of the East India Company’s lawsuit against John Fowke. The images were enlarged and printed on the largest paper available. Most of the original documents are damaged along the left side, leaving small gaps in our understanding of the text. Wherever this author is convinced of the wordage, or at least the meaning, of what is lost, it has been included in the brackets as suggested text. Where the meaning is unclear and the author is guessing, it is marked as questionable. Where the meaning has not been reconstructed, ellipses in brackets appear. Fortunately, the damage is minimal enough, and the legal language windy enough, for them to remain reasonably intact documents that convey important information. For clarity, the writer has continued Moore’s practice of substituting arcane verbal constructions (“has” for “hath,” “says” for “sayeth,” etc.) as well as the modern spelling of “saltpetre/saltpeter.” Modern punctuation has been added for legibility in the thesis but remains absent in the appended transcripts. Surname spellings are also problematic. “Fowke” is spelled throughout the Bill of Complaint as “Fowlke,” which the Further Joint and Several Answers, described last in this chapter, points out as a defect in the Bill of Complaint.
And the defendant Fowke for his part further says that a writing in parchment. with a great seal in yellow wax affixed unto it. was showed unto this defendant, but he did not read the said writing, and at the same time there was delivered unto this defendant a writing in paper purporting a decree against one John Fowlke and Danniell Bonnell, merchant; how far the same concerns this defendant, who writes his name as it is, John Fowke and not John Fowlke, he humbly submits to the judgment of this honorable court. And this defendant says he has not been served with the decree in the bill mentioned, nor with any other decree otherwise than this defendant has hereinbefore truly set forth and declared.[46]
In the parlance of modern jurisprudence, Joseph Caron, acting as Fowke’s attorney, claimed here that his client was never properly served by the court. Rarely successful in any era, the gambit failed them in 1631. Fowke’s overall record of success and failure is hardly impeccable. He made very big bets, or ‘adventures,’ and not all of them panned out. However, the successful war against Charles made it possible to reverse this Chancery verdict against Fowke. The reader may judge to what extent the English Civil War should be seen as Fowke’s biggest adventure of all, a gamble meant to reverse his most humiliating defeat.
This thesis proposes that East India Company v John Fowke in 1630 deserves closer study as a personal and political ignition point to the English Civil War. The split between Fowke’s business clique and the larger London community was already visible. With enemies at the Company court as well as the royal court, Fowke was the underdog. War was his opportunity to rise.
[1] Henning, B. D., editor. The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1660-1690. Boydell & Brewer, 1983.
[2] Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders. 1550-1653. Verso Books, 2004. 372
[3] MacCormack, John R. Revolutionary Politics in the Long Parliament. Harvard University Press, 1973. 75
[4] Roper, L.H. Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688. 136-137
[5] 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
[6] Brenner 103
[7] 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
[8] ibid
[9] Downs, Jordan S. Civil War London: Mobilizing for Parliament, 1641-5. Manchester University Press, 2021. 110-111
[10] Sainsbury, Ethel Bruce, editor. Calendar of Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1634-1639. Clarendon Press, 1907-1938. 69
[11] Brenner 274
[12] Brenner 174
[13] Brenner 173
[14] Roper 100
[15] Ibid
[16] Brenner 538
[17] Brenner 415; MacCormack 41
[18] Green, Mary Anne Everett, editor. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the Reign of Charles II, 1660-1661. Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, 1860. 19 March, note 105
[19] Downs 48-49
[20] Downs 61
[21] Brenner 517
[22] The term “radical” is overbroad and contested. Like the term “Old Guard” it is used throughout this thesis as a useful shorthand for a complex topic that is beyond the scope of this thesis
[23] Stephen, Leslie, editor. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 1921-22. 521
[24] Pearl, Valerie. London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625-43. Oxford University Press, 1961. 130-131
[25] Pells Ismini. Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: The “Christian Centurion.” Routledge, 2020. 84
[26] Anonymous. Boyd’s Inhabitants of London 1638 6725
[27] Ibid
[28] Mahaffey, Robert Pentland, editor. Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1647-60. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908. 581
[29] Boyd’s Inhabitants 1638 6725
[30] O’Sullivan, Harold. “The Plantation of the Cromwellian Soldiers in the Barony of Ardee, 1652-1656.” Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society Vol. 21, No. 4 (1988), pp. 415-452. 415
[31] Pells 84
[32] A Letter From Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus, 1643
[33] Hill, Christopher. “Recent Interpretations of the Civil War.” History, New Series, Vol. 41 No. 141/143, Feb-Oct 1956, pp, 67-87. 84
[34] Pearl, Valerie. London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625-43. Oxford University Press, 1961. 120
[35] Ashton, Robert. The City and the Court 1603-1643. Cambridge University Press, 2008. 46
[36] Downs 61. Downs has confirmed this impression to the writer in conversation.
[37] Downs 41-42
[38] Downs 41-42
[39] Ibid
[40] Black, Jeremy. European Warfare, 1494-1660. Routledge, 2002.
[41] Wanklyn, Malcolm. Warrior Generals: Winning the English Civil Wars. Yale University Press, 2010; Wanklyn, Malcolm. A Military History of the English Civil War. Routledge, 2014; Reid, Stuart. All the King’s Armies: a Military History of the English Civil War. TJ International, 1998.
[42] Osborne, Matthew. “The Gunpowder Reason, A Plot?: Reassessing the English Civil Wars as Materialschlacht.” Term paper for Wallace Cross, Fall 2021.
[43] Clarke, Alex. The Drydock - Episode 279 (Part 1). YouTube, uploaded by Drachinifel, 31 Dec 2023 (Link)
[44] Clarke, ibid
[45] Clarke, ibid
[46] Joint and Several Answers of John Fowke and Joseph Carron, C 8/39/63
