The Most Interesting Man In English Civil War London

History has missed the plot with John Fowke

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.

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[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.