God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [243]
There were winners clearly, but overall the benefits accrued to individuals rather than social classes – there is no evidence of significant structural social change. While some prospered, others were ruined. Ironically, sequestration caused acute difficulties even for Sir Cheney Culpeper, who was unhesitatingly parliamentarian. Taken ill in the early 1640s he had made over his lands to his father in anticipation of his death. He survived but before he could recover the lands war broke out and his royalist father was subject to sequestration, imposed on what were really Sir Cheney’s lands.58 Others paid a high price for royalism, either directly, or in spending their fortune in the service of the King. On the other hand, seized goods and lands enriched others: Oliver Cromwell for example. He had been born into the junior branch of a gentry family, and his personal fortunes had reached a nadir during the 1630s, when he may have been worth only £90 per annum. Rescued by his family, and then by an inheritance, he recovered a secure gentry status with an income of around £300 p.a. At the end of the war, in October 1646, he was granted a pension of £2,500 p.a. from estates confiscated from the Marquess of Winchester.59
These contrasting fortunes really represented a redistribution of wealth within the existing social structure, rather than a social revolution, however. Sequestration did not lead to redistribution between social classes, even where it was harshly enforced. In Cornwall, for example, royalist control during the war gave way to parliamentary rule thereafter, and sequestration was severely imposed, but it did not ruin the pre-war gentry class. Across the country as a whole many were allowed to compound at a relatively mild rate – compared to what might have been possible under the legislation – or to repurchase. Even where this did not happen the estates were not taken up by mechanic preachers or shoeless infantrymen.60 The verdict on the effects of the sale of crown lands is broadly similar.61
The same is true of officeholding – purges or exclusions were a disaster for some, an opportunity for others – and there are signs of a slight downward shift in the status of JPs during the 1640s. The King relinquished control of appointments reluctantly as his military position deteriorated. From 1644 onwards Parliament took control of the commissions in the south and east. In Sussex this led to the displacement of twenty-seven men and the induction of twenty-four. There and in Hertfordshire a core of parliamentary activists provided continuity, recruiting friends and relatives as the need arose. But in other counties the changes were more dramatic. In Devon and Warwickshire there were more thorough clear-outs – in Warwickshire fifty-seven men were drafted in following the defeat of the royalist armies. There was a similarly wholesale change of personnel in Wales following the royalist defeat. This did result in a shift towards men of lower gentry status, and dissolved the cousinages that had dominated commissions before the war, but even in the 1650s, when changes were more dramatic, JPs remained gentry figures almost everywhere.62 In Warwickshire and Cheshire the absence of the greater gentry from wartime administration gave authority to lesser men, who demonstrated that the leading gentry figures were not essential to the maintenance of local government.63 Elsewhere, however, it was the political complexion rather than the social composition of the local officeholding population that changed – in Somerset,