The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  7

  England’s Revolution Manqué?

  MEANWHILE CHARLES’S MACHINATIONS had so far prevailed that a serious royalist uprising broke out, triggering what would be known as the Second Civil War. Although the sheer numbers of rebels declaring for Charles should on paper have given him his best chance since 1642, the Cavaliers this time were hopelessly divided and uncoordinated. The outbreaks in support of the king in England and Wales broke out long before the Scots were ready to cross the border, giving Cromwell and his lieutenants the opportunity to defeat them piecemeal. Beginning at the end of February 1648, South Wales, Cornwall, Kent and Essex provided the focus of the royalist attempt, with minor skirmishes in Surrey, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. Evident in the hostilities and campaigns in 1648 was a hardening of attitudes on the parliamentary side and hence a greater incidence of atrocities and war crimes even as compared with 1642–5, which had hardly been a civilised tea-party affair; this time around many captured royalist commanders were simply executed without trial.1 The great Scottish invasion, when it finally came very late in the day, was an acute disappointment: whereas Cromwell and his brilliant new 29-year-old general, John Lambert, seemed to have an intuitive mutual understanding and instinctive rapport, the Scottish commanders quarrelled with each other and with the putative royalist commander-in-chief in the south-west of England. Cromwell once again proved himself an energetic and inspired general and on 17–19 August routed the Scots at Preston. Though he had only about 8,600 troops against 20,000 of the enemy, Cromwell caught them when they were strung out and thus achieved local superiority of force. For just 100 admitted casualties, he killed 2,000 Scots and took another 9,000 prisoner.2 This was almost the final nail in the coffin for the Levellers’ fantasy of exciting the army against the Grandees. 1648 saw the Levellers in generally subdued mood, aware that they could be dubbed unpatriotic and treacherous for rocking the boat while Cromwell was engaged against the royalists. They concentrated on building up their organisation in London, and in July brought out the first edition of their newspaper, The Moderate.3 In January a very conciliatory petition to the Army Council accepted the Grandees’ compromise on the suffrage that beggars and servants should not have the vote. The Levellers were shaken, not just by Cromwell’s defeat of them in the army but by their failure to make headway on the issue of equality, with both the Baptist and Independent churches disappointingly distancing themselves from the movement on this issue.4 The exception to the generally sober tone of the chastened Levellers was, not surprisingly, Freeborn John. Lilburne had been released from jail in November 1647, in effect granted bail without asking for it, as one student of the movement has put it.5 Made not a whit more compromising by his spell in prison, Lilburne at once began to campaign for an armed rising against Cromwell and the Grandees, arguing that an army coup was imminent, and that radicals in the ranks should beat Cromwell to the punch. It was generally remarked that early in 1648 Leveller fears about Cromwell’s repressive intentions became more paranoid than ever and consequently the idea of armed insurrection seemed positively to haunt their movement.6 Finally Lilburne went too far and in a House of Commons debate expressly accused Cromwell of high treason. He was then himself immediately arrested for treason and once again incarcerated. Following his amazing zigzag, in–out pattern of freedom and imprisonment, Lilburne was again released in August 1648 after a massive petition to the House of Commons, including tens of thousands of signatures from London, evincing the growing power of the Levellers in the capital.7

  The defeat of the royalists in the Second Civil War and the revelation of Charles I’s duplicity, double-cross and treachery finally disgusted Ireton and Cromwell, who concluded that a deal with the king was no longer possible. Amazingly, even though Parliament had voted in January 1648 to cease all negotiations with the monarch, by September, with Charles no longer a military danger, that resolution was fading, and the Presbyterians in Parliament, still hankering for the imposition of their creed as a State religion, were disposed to begin talks yet again with the wayward Stuart king. This stupefied the Levellers and roused them to a new initiative. A petition from them in September called for three main things: an end to all talks with Charles or even the disconcerting talks about talks; enclosure to be abolished or admitted in individual cases only if it could be demonstrated to redound to the benefit of the poor; and a declaration that Parliament would never abolish private property or seek to level and equalise by force. This last was a rebuttal of the Levellers’ critics, and Cromwell himself, who were apt to refer to them as communists or ‘Switzering anarchists’.8 Wildman and the Independents also pressed hard for an amendment to a draft Remonstrance drawn up by Ireton which both called for the execution of Charles and insisted that any new monarch should only be allowed to come to the throne once he had signed up to the Agreement; nearly a year on from the Putney Debates the Levellers had still not entirely given up on their favourite project. The interesting thing about the amendment was that it was not a republican document but, by attaching conditions to the coronation of a king to succeed Charles I, hoped to secure radical change. Ireton and Cromwell agreed between themselves that Noll would have to conduct mopping-up operations in Scotland after the victory at Preston and that, in view of this and their resolve to execute Charles I, to say nothing about dealing with a still recalcitrant Parliament, it would be best to settle accounts with the Levellers at a later date; Wildman’s amendment was then allowed through. Ireton told Cromwell he was hopeful that the man in the street would forget all about the Agreement in the excitement over Charles I’s execution.9 Only Lilburne was shrewd enough to see how his enemies’ minds were working and began to campaign against bringing the king to trial on a charge of war crimes. Whether Lilburne secretly intrigued with Charles I in 1648 is still debated; it is not impossible, given that he now regarded Cromwell as a more egregious tyrant than Charles ever was. It is probable that at bottom he was indifferent to the king’s fate. But the sticking point for him was popular sovereignty. Lilburne’s analysis and advocacy were threefold. He considered it essential that the Agreement should be ratified by Parliament before the king was brought to trial. He thought that to execute Charles was a tactical mistake; what the anti-Cromwell faction should do was to keep the monarch in play as a pawn and counterweight to Cromwell. Most of all, he insisted on the point of principle that Cromwell and the Grandees had no right to try Charles, as there was as yet no settled legal authority or constitution in England. To execute the king before parliamentary elections had been held under universal suffrage (excluding servants and beggars) and the future shape of politics determined by a genuinely popular vote would not just be jumping the gun; it would be judicial murder plain and simple.10

  While Lilburne campaigned thus, two dramatic events entirely changed the picture. First, the gallant Colonel Rainsborough was killed in almost the last fighting of the Second Civil War. Fairfax had sent Rainsborough north, far from London, so that his eloquence and advocacy would not be available to the Levellers. Appointed parliamentary commander-in-chief in Yorkshire, Rainsborough arrived at Pontefract (where the royalist-held castle was under siege) and found to his amazement that the Puritan commander on the spot, Sir Henry Cholmly, violently objected to the appointment, refused to accept his authority and declined to follow his orders. Since Cholmly’s troops remained loyal to him, and Rainsborough had brought only a personal bodyguard, the only way to resolve the conflict was to write to Fairfax in London. While this wrangling continued, Rainsborough took up his quarters in Doncaster. On the night of 30 October four officers sallied from Pontefract in an attempt to kidnap Rainsborough; there was a scrimmage in the colonel’s lodgings and Rainsborough was run through with a sword and sustained a mortal wound.11 The death of the great radical hero was the occasion for loud lamentations by his followers, who, at his funeral in London (attended by more than 3,000 troops), wore sea-green ribbons in their hats. The death was, from the Grandees’ point of view, mo
re than a little convenient. Suspicions were immediately voiced and Cholmly implicated. It was queried how he, supposedly besieging Pontefract Castle, had allowed four royalist assassins to slip through his lines and then enter Doncaster without let or hindrance; the tale of abduction was widely scouted, and radicals whispered that it had been a murder raid in which Cholmly had colluded. The wider suspicions were that Cromwell himself and Fairfax were implicated.12 Even as the Levellers reeled under the impact of Rainsborough’s loss, Cromwell effectively took out all his enemies with one blow. Ireton’s Grand Remonstrance, incorporating the Walwyn amendment, was rejected in the House of Commons on 20 November by 125 votes to 58. Even worse from the army’s point of view, the parliamentary commissioners who were treating with Charles I brought back a highly unsatisfactory answer from the king to the points put to him, yet Parliament accepted their report on 5 December by 129 to 83.13 The army’s response was immediate. On 6 December army detachments under Colonel Pride barred the entrance to the Commons and arrested all Presbyterian members in what has sometimes been described as England’s only military coup. The Presbyterian MPs were arrested, held for a few days and later released, but the result was that Parliament was now truncated, with just 200 members left, all loyal to Cromwell and the army. This was the beginning of the so-called Rump Parliament, which would endure until 1653.14 Once again Cromwell, though clearly the brains behind the operation, ensured that there was no paper trail that would lead directly to his door. Located in Pontefract on 6 December, but undoubtedly privy to all that was going on, Cromwell immediately raced down to London to take charge.

  Having solved the problem of parliamentary opposition, Cromwell now pressed hard for the trial and execution of the king. Perhaps oddly, he simultaneously sought to deal with the Levellers in another series of debates, the so-called Whitehall Debates of 14 December–13 January, narrower in focus than the famous ones at Putney a year before and concentrating mainly on the issue of religious toleration. The Levellers presented the Second Agreement of the People, which contained detailed proposals for a new parliament with universal male suffrage (conceding the Grandees’ point about the non-eligibility of servants and beggars), requiring the new body to abolish base tenures and making the accommodating gesture that eight issues could be reserved from the decision-making of MPs. In a supplementary pamphlet No Papist nor Presbyterian, they argued controversially that Catholics should have religious freedom.15 Cromwell’s policy was to string the Levellers along until he had finally closed accounts with the king. Cromwell’s animus against Charles was now white-hot. He considered his actions in the Second Civil War, and especially the secret treaty with the Scots, to be ‘prodigious treason’ and he moved swiftly to take the king out of the political equation. One of the first acts of the Rump Parliament was to pass an act creating a new High Court of Justice. Even though the Lords refused their assent, Cromwell invoked popular sovereignty and declared that the will of the Commons was law. The High Court in turn established 135 commissioners, of whom 68 would sit in judgement on Charles I. The Stuart monarch meanwhile was moved from the Isle of Wight to Hurst Castle near Portsmouth, thence to Windsor Castle and finally brought to trial in Whitehall on 20 January 1649. The High Court had its first sitting under Chief Justice John Bradshaw, while Solicitor-General John Cooke conducted the prosecution. Charles was accused of treason, specifically of using his power for personal interests rather than for the good of England and thus causing the deaths of at least 5 per cent of the population. The indictment charged the king with being ‘guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said war, or occasioned thereby’.16 The trial began on 20 January, but Charles refused to plead, on the ground that the High Court was not a legally constituted body and that the king could do no wrong. The commissioners heard evidence of all the depredations carried out during the war and constantly asked Charles to speak. All he would say was that he demanded to know on what authority he was brought there. Illogically, after refusing to speak, the king then demanded the right of reply when he was found guilty on 27 January, but this was not conceded. Fifty-nine commissioners, including Cromwell, signed the death warrant, but not Fairfax; his refusal to do so undoubtedly saved his life at the Restoration in 1660 when Charles II systematically and vengefully consigned all surviving regicides to traitors’ deaths.17

  Charles’s execution on 30 January seemed to open up an entirely new chapter in history. Kings had been deposed before (Henry VI) and even assassinated (Richard II), but this was the first time one had been killed after judicial process. The Fifth Monarchists thought Charles’s death presaged a new millennium, and in radical circles the idea of a fresh dawn manifested itself most dramatically in the appearance of the Diggers. The Digger movement was almost entirely the brainchild of one man: Gerrard Winstanley, a forty-year-old ex-cloth merchant, a gentleman born in Wigan who had been bankrupted in 1643, the victim of fraud. Winstanley moved to Cobham, Surrey in 1643 and became a farmer, and it was there that he became a radical thinker.18 Historians have not usually been kind to Winstanley, and judgements vary between those who perceive him as a hopeless dreamer and those who see him as having been (in the years 1649–50) in the grip of temporary psychosis. Here is one patronising judgement: ‘Gerrard Winstanley, a small businessman who began his career wholesailing cloth, ended it wholesailing grain, and in between sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions.’19 In 1648 he started his short-lived term as a writer, pamphleteer and agitator with some mystical musings on religion and Christianity clearly influenced by the Anabaptists, the Quakers and the importance of the ‘inner light’. Some have seen Winstanley as a kind of locus classicus of the chaos world opened up by Puritan victory in the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. All the following heterodox or heretic views can be discerned in his work: radical Arminianism, anti-Trinitarianism, repudiation of the doctrine of original sin, scepticism about Heaven and Hell, moralism, soul-sleeping, antinomianism, the creation of the world by God, allied to millenarianism and a belief in the imminent arrival of the kingdom on earth, not to mention virulent anticlericalism.20 His views on God and religion can be simply stated. Like so many mystics, he believed in the ‘God within’ and denied the existence of a transcendental and interventionist deity. For Winstanley, Christ was not a real person and the biblical stories he cited so often were allegories not statements of fact or history. The Second Coming for him was not the glorious return of a Trinitarian God in a cloud of angels but what he called ‘the rising up of Christ’ or the spirit of Reason becoming triumphant.21 The hopes of immortality which official religions peddled – and especially the story of the Resurrection – were delusional; to this extent Winstanley would have agreed with Marx’s famous later judgement that religion was the opium of the people.22 However, unlike Wildman, he liked to quote massively from the Bible, always interpreting the stories, whether the Genesis tale of the Garden of Eden, Exodus, Jacob and Esau, Daniel or Revelations, in a figurative or allegorical way. He also liked to cherrypick passages from the Bible to prove a point – the scepticism about rulers in the Book of Samuel, for example, or the famous saying of St Paul that under the new covenant there were neither masters nor slaves, Jew or Gentile, male or female.23 Some critics have found it hard to reconcile this visionary and mystical Winstanley of 1648 with the radical egalitarian of 1649. Yet the alleged conundrum does not seem insoluble. There are a number of possibilities. Perhaps he was at root a mystic and his socio-economic analysis should be interpreted symbolically. On the other hand, maybe the political writing is primary and the numinous items secondary or allegorical. Or it could be that, like so many thinkers and artists – Cobbett, Henry James, C. G. Jung, A. N. Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein etc, etc – he had distinctive early and late periods in his work. The most likely explanation is that the mysticism and the social and economic radicalism were unintegrated aspects of his thought, or linked
by the simple proposition that a true understanding of Christianity would lead one to socialism. Significantly Winstanley was fond of the famous passage in the Acts of the Apostles where the early members of the Church are seen sharing everything in common.24