by Frank McLynn
Yet another wacky sect was the the Adamite persuasion. The Adamites believed in nudity, the rejection of private property, communal living, no marriage but the sharing of women in common.49 Also at a non-Christian, secular level were the pressure groups such as the Divorcers, influenced by John Milton who, having been refused a divorce after a deeply unsatisfactory marriage, campaigned for its legality.50 Most of these cults vaguely and ultimately derived from the antinomian or Anabaptist tradition of the Radical Reformation. Yet there were other highly eccentric (to put it no stronger) groups who took their inspiration from mainstream religion and belief. Devotion to eschatology, chiliasm and millenarianism was rife in the 1640s. The Fifth Monarchy Men, for instance, believed that the execution of the king would trigger the end of times and the Second Coming.51 More sinisterly, and in keeping with the tenets of the Puritans and the Presbyterians, there was a ‘witch craze’ or revival of the belief in black magic. This was particularly associated with the areas that had been Roundhead strongholds in the Civil War: Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. Cynical individuals promoted the idea that women were witches and men warlocks or maguses in order to collect bounties (equally cynically offered by the parliamentary authorities) or to settle private scores or vendettas. The most sinister individual connected with the ‘witch craze’ was the self-styled Witchfinder-General, Matthew Hopkins (c. 1620–47), who claimed judicial powers never actually granted by Parliament but nonetheless connived at. Combing through Essex and East Anglia in the two years from March 1645 Hopkins and his associates hanged more than 200 people for ‘witchcraft’.52 All of these effusions of craziness and lunacy were aspects of the ‘world turned upside down’. Cromwell and his Parliamentarians had, so to speak, gone through the mental sound barrier and were now in uncharted territory. They had done what no previous revolutionaries had ventured to do: opposed a king in battle and overthrown him. With all the old certainties gone, it was possible to believe in grand projects and to dream impossible dreams. In the famous words attributed to G. K. Chesterton, when men have ceased to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything.53 With no boundaries or limits anywhere in sight, a truly revolutionary vacuum had opened up.
By 1645, too, there was palpable tension even among the victors, between army and Parliament. The New Model Army prided itself on being a force whose officers were meritocrats, recruited from the same social level as its troopers, from peasants, labourers, journeymen, yeomen and artisans, with the last two especially prominent in the cavalry, where one had to pay for one’s horses. Politically the New Model Army was represented by the Independents. Parliament, by contrast, was the stronghold of the big landowners and the bourgeoisie. Thus far at least the army–Parliament split could be regarded as a form of class conflict. In religious terms the division was between Congregationalists (Puritans) in the army and Presbyterians in Parliament, with the Presbyterians determined to deliver on Pym’s promise to the Scots (before his death in 1643) that he would unite Scotland and England in a Kirk-based Presbyterian worship.54 Milton was particularly incensed by this ambition and declared that the attempt to replace the Church of England with a new breed of religious authoritarianism would in effect take England back to the days before the Reformation: ‘New Presbyter is but old priest writ large,’ was his quip.55 The Presbyterian Parliament made no secret of its desire to disband the New Model Army after Naseby, without, however, giving its troops blanket amnesty for any war crimes committed or guaranteeing back pay. Parliament was reluctant to make up the army’s huge pay arrears and, backed by important figures like the Earl of Manchester (who had not wanted to fight on after Marston Moor), was suspected of wanting a ‘cheap peace’ – basically accepting Charles I back on a revised basis and letting bygones be bygones. The tension between Parliament (relying on the heavily Presbyterian capital city of London) and the Independents (Congregationalists) had been evident since late 1643 when a bitter pamphlet war was waged between the two sides, with Presbyterians making the allegation, which would become a standard canard, that the religious freedom wanted by Independents would lead to anarchy and the euthanasia of private property.56 The Presbyterian programme was the execution of Archbishop Laud (achieved in 1645), the marginalisation of the Independents and strict press censorship – the issue against which Milton inveighed in Areopagitica.57 Cromwell himself made press censorship a difficult ambition by telling Parliament in clear terms after Naseby: ‘He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience and you for the liberty he fights for.’58 When the New Model Army arose to thwart their plans, the Presbyterians hatched a new project: causing disaffection and mutiny by haggling over arrears of pay, dismissing the malcontents and then sending the lumpen remainder to the wars in Ireland. There was particular hatred of the egalitarianism and meritocracy in the reformed army, which the Presbyterians tried to express with withering contempt.59
As a counter to this hard-line Presbyterianism, a ‘leftist’ faction of the Independents manifested itself, which a little later would acquire the label ‘the Levellers’. This was a term with a curious ancestry. ‘Leveller’ was first used in seventeenth-century England as a term of abuse for rural workers: in the Midland Revolt of 1607 the name had been used to refer to those who ‘levelled’ hedges in the fight against enclosure.60 Almost everything about the Levellers is disputed by historians. Some doubt that they were ever very important or influential, others question whether they were in any real sense radicals, and others again see their real significance as being in theology rather than politics (that is, if one can in fact make such a neat division about affairs in the 1640s).61 Yet some generalisations are possible. The Levellers formed something like a third stratum, being drawn largely from the lower-middle classes: skilled craftsmen, cobblers, printers, small farmers, small traders, shopkeepers, weavers from Spitalfields, lead miners from Derbyshire.62 The Levellers stressed the sovereignty of the House of Commons and the possible abolition of the House of Lords. They wanted elections for a new parliament on an extended franchise, drastic reform of the legal system with particular emphasis on strong protection for the individual against the State, legal protection for all dissenting Puritan sects, and a number of key economic reforms: reform of taxation towards a progressive system; the abolition of excise tax and compulsory tithes; and the extirpation of all monopolies, including corporate ones like those of the Merchant Venturers and Stationers Companies. In Leveller ideology there was a particular hatred of lawyers, viewed as ‘caterpillars of society’. Influenced by the Anabaptists, though often deists, the Levellers advocated communal living and equality of the sexes (though not full economic equality) and particularly detested wars and capital punishment.63 The main influences on them were, in very broad and general terms, the Calvinism of the Reformation, the rationalism of the Renaissance and an indigenous English tradition connoted partly by attachment to Magna Carta and partly by the myth of the Norman yoke. The most abiding strand in the movement was the emphasis on the supremacy of local autonomy and conscience over any putative loyalties to economic overlordship, monarchy or the State.64 Naturally the appearance of such a grouping on the Independent side was manna to the Presbyterians, who falsely claimed that their opponents were all communists. As one of them put it, their enemies went ‘by the name of Levellers, a most apt title for such a despicable and desperate knot to be known by, that endeavour to cast down and level the enclosures of the nobility, gentry and propriety, to make us even, so that every Jack shall vie with a gentleman and every gentleman be made a Jack’.65
The three most important figures in the emerging Leveller movement were John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton. Lilburne, who had made his name after his ordeal at the hands of the Star Chamber, is the best known and the most feted, perhaps because he was in liberal terms a moderate, the kind of turbulent individual who is a rebel, rabble-rouser and generally ‘agin’ things without in any sense being a
revolutionary. A colonel in the Roundhead army, he was at one stage captured by the royalists and threatened with execution for high treason until Parliament threatened retaliation in kind against Cavalier prisoners.66 From 1640 until 1646 he was close to Cromwell and supported him in his struggle against Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester – a struggle which ended with Cromwell triumphant. The future Lord Protector’s critics claimed that he was an ingrate for having betrayed the man who was his commanding officer – for Manchester, having begun the Civil War as a protégé of Essex, in August 1643 received an independent command as leader of all parliamentary forces in the eastern counties of England, with Cromwell as his second-in-command. Lilburne was a vociferous supporter of Cromwell in his campaign against Manchester via the Self-Denying Ordinance, which ended with Manchester’s resignation.67 Lilburne acquitted himself well at the Battle of Marston Moor but resigned his commission as lieutenant-colonel before Naseby, in April 1645, on grounds of conscience: he was angry about Parliament’s attempt to make its supporters sign the Solemn League and Covenant, committing them to Presbyterianism. Still in his early thirties, in July he received the first of the prison sentences that would lead later students of revolution to compare him to the nineteenth-century thinker Auguste Blanqui, who spent most of his life in prison.68 In Presbyterian eyes he had committed two grave offences: he denounced MPs who lived in comfort while soldiers continued to die, and he slandered the Speaker of the House of Commons by alleging that he was in correspondence with the royalists.69 In October he was released after a petition by over 2,000 leading citizens in London, only to be jailed once more in July 1646 when he denounced Manchester as a traitor and royalist sympathiser. The latter part of the charge was true: Manchester was a peace-loving individual who had taken up arms only reluctantly for Parliament, took no part in the trial of Charles I in 1648–9, retired into private life in the 1650s and was rewarded with high honours by Charles II after the Restoration.70
1646 also saw Lilburne’s breach with Cromwell. There were both rational and irrational elements in this rupture. Cromwell was always a natural conservative while Lilburne was a born rebel; Cromwell was a natural politician, used to compromise, cabals and committees, whereas Lilburne was a sea-green incorruptible, impatient with the short change of politics; one critic indeed has justifiably complained that he was lacking in common sense.71 Moreover, there are some grounds for thinking that Lilburne suffered a ‘father complex’ and that this may have played a part in his hostility to the ‘father figure’ Cromwell, fifteen years his senior.72 Whatever the reason, the sudden and pronounced hostility to Cromwell that appeared at the end of 1646 and intensified with every year that passed was dangerous: as has been well said of Cromwell: ‘When Cromwell feared a man, he struck him down, were he monarch or Leveller,’ and it seems Cromwell genuinely did fear the power of Lilburne’s oratory and skill as a propagandist.73 At the beginning of Lilburne’s pamphlet campaign his targets were also Cromwell’s targets. England’s Birthright Justified of October 1645 called for Parliament’s powers to be limited by law and attacked monopolies, not just in economic life but in the Church and the law. Even here one could discern the glimmer of a criticism of Cromwell in the remark that the Self-Denying Ordinance should be strictly enforced – everyone was aware that the great leader had evaded its provisions.74 In March 1647 Lilburne produced his masterpiece of pamphleteering The Large Petition, which called for religious freedom, the abolition of tithes, the dissolution of the Merchant Adventurers’ monopoly, demanded that all laws be in English, that self-incrimination in courts be abolished, and that criminals should receive humane treatment.75 This document contains many of Lilburne’s most common predilections and preoccupations. He despised the Long Parliament for its Presbyterian dominance and especially its habit of voting public moneys for the enrichment of its members.76 He hated the monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers and those of other large corporations such as the East India Company. In economics he was for free trade but wanted some import quotas. And he was adamant that the use of Latin and Norman French in law courts was simply another attempt at obfuscation by venal lawyers; his suspicion of the legal profession was justified, for lawyers managed to defeat every attempt in the years 1645–59 at an organic reform of the common law; there would be no great codes like those of Napoleon or Lenin. The clauses relating to humane treatment of prisoners probably indicated that uppermost in Lilburne’s mind was his abiding hatred of imprisonment for debt – a bugbear common to the Levellers, but once again indicating the class element in their programme, as draconian penalties for debt were in the interests of big capitalism but against those of craftsmen and small traders.77
Lilburne has always had his fervent admirers among later libertarians and socialists, perhaps most notably William Godwin.78 Others, perhaps put off by Lilburne’s relentless pose as man of action, have preferred the quieter William Walwyn or the genuinely radical Richard Overton. The great scholar Christopher Hill once confidently declared that among the Levellers only Walwyn and Overton truly deserved the title of revolutionaries, with Lilburne as an obvious reformist.79 Walwyn, perhaps in his mid-forties by the time of the decisive Battle of Naseby, was a meritocrat and ex-master weaver who genuinely admired Lilburne, but was not overawed by him and quite prepared to convict him of political naivety. In the October 1645 pamphlet England’s Lamentable Slavery, for instance, Walwyn eulogised Lilburne but pointed out that he seriously overrated Magna Carta, which he called ‘a mess of pottage’.80 Nevertheless, Walwyn rallied Leveller sympathisers in London to protest against Lilburne’s first arrest and produced a small masterpiece (possibly in co-authorship with Overton) in the pamphlet Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, which is often claimed as the founding document of the Leveller movement. Emphasising again and again that the people command Parliament and not vice versa, Walwyn demanded complete press and religious freedom; he used the case of Lilburne’s imprisonment to reiterate the Leveller opposition to being jailed for debts.81 In October 1646 he followed this up with another pamphlet extolling freedom of speech and religion – A Demur to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresy – another clampdown the Presbyterians were able to push through a tame Parliament.82 The power of Walwyn’s pen irritated the opposition, and they made him the target for the most sustained character assassination in a scurrilous pamphlet entitled Walwyn’s Wiles, accusing him of being ‘a Jesuit, a bigamist and a man who drove women to suicide, a hatred of all lawyers and all governments’. Walwyn swatted this away easily in his Just Defense,83 but perhaps he was already becoming alarmed at his exposed position and the possible repercussions. Although he co-wrote the later key Leveller document An Agreement of the People, he perhaps significantly took no part in the famous Putney Debates of November 1647, and was severely shaken when arrested in 1648 with the rest of the Leveller leaders. On his release he moved in the opposite direction from Lilburne, declared his loyalty to Cromwell, retired from public life, retrained as a physician and kept his head down during the Commonwealth. He had two parting shots as a pamphleteer: Juries Justified, a defence of trial by jury (1651), and the following year For a Free Trade, an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Cromwell’s Council of State to abolish the Levant Company’s monopoly of trade with the Middle East, some of the arguments in which anticipate Adam Smith.84
In some ways the most impressive of the Leveller leaders was Richard Overton, in 1645 yet another man in his mid-forties (i.e. roughly the same age as Cromwell). Little is known of his early life, though some say that he was an ex-actor and playwright.85 A devotee of popular sovereignty, social equality and the abolition of monarchy, he had little time for the troika of king, House of Lords and nobility, and some have identified him as the most revolutionary of all the Levellers.86 Though ostensibly a man of God (probably a deist), the main thrust of Overton’s thought was materialist. In the dark years before the outbreak of war in 1642, Overton was the leading figure in the underground Cloppenbu
rg Press, which violently attacked Laud’s religious programme and called for the dismantling of State religion and the Church of England.87 A further venture into publishing in 1646 saw him arrested on the nugatory grounds of printing without a licence; he was imprisoned in August and not released until September 1647. Jail did not soften him. He was the author of the hard-hitting pamphlet, An Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body to the Free People of England, published in July 1647, which violently attacked a ‘tyrannical’ Parliament.88 Doubtless concluding that there was little point in holding him in prison unless they could silence his thought, Parliament released him in September 1647. Without question Overton was the most interesting of the three Leveller leaders. He lacked Lilburne’s talent for high drama and self-advertisement or Walwyn’s cool analytical style, but managed to combine the dauntlessness of the one with the cerebration of the other. Influenced by Thomas More’s Utopia, he argued for a ‘welfare state’ on a county, not national, basis.89 More original than his comrades, Overton made an outstanding case for religious tolerance while lambasting the Presbyterians. Religious tolerance was what made for stable and prosperous societies, he averred, instancing the Dutch Republic. More to the point, he argued convincingly that religious tolerance could lead to a genuine Catholic–Protestant rapprochement, which would make horrors like the Thirty Years War outmoded.90 In the Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body Overton began to investigate the social and economic roots of society, but his edging towards social equality was meat too strong even for most Levellers, who managed to sidetrack him onto the ‘softer’ issues of suffrage and Church–State relations.91
