The Road Not Taken
Page 26
If Winstanley’s religious thinking is sometimes a muddle, his socio-economic thought is reasonably clear-cut. He started from the unexceptionable proposition that vague talk of equality is meaningless without social equality. He grasped that ‘equality of opportunity’ must be a meaningless slogan if the parties concerned start from vastly different economic, social and financial bases. As for ‘equality before the law’, as Anatole France famously remarked this means that rich and poor are forbidden to sleep under the bridges of the Seine.25 Winstanley thought that the first step towards social equality was the foundation of self-help and self-sustaining agricultural communities, communistic in nature, and that this would be the germ from which the eventual sharing of all property in common would grow.26 His ‘take notice’ declaration became as famous in its own way as Rainsborough’s ‘the poorest he’ (see above): ‘Take notice that England is not a free people, till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons, and so live as comfortably as landlords that live in their Inclosures.’27 Winstanley’s oeuvre evinces in socio-economic affairs the same hatred for landlords and their ‘jackals’, the lawyers, that is expressed for priestcraft in the religious writings. He particularly detested the landlords’ practice of selling timber from common land at a profit to provide dowries and portions for their children. Taking up John Ball’s old mantra about the absence of a leisured non-productive class in the Garden of Eden, he stressed both the justice, desirability and redemptive power of the ‘gentleman’ undergoing manual labour and picking up a spade.28 Of course this aspect of communist thought became especially notorious in the 1960s and 1970s when both Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia tried to break down the division of labour by forcing intellectuals, bureaucrats and other ‘parasites’ to labour in the rice fields; naturally, when pushed too far, what sounds like a reasonable prescription becomes an example of what the poet Wallace Stevens called ‘logical lunacy’.29 Winstanley’s view of the world was Manichean, a permanent struggle between the forces of light and darkness. He saw ‘Christ’ as the great leveller, emphasised the Sermon on the Mount – the meek shall inherit the earth, etc – and regarded private property as a form of blasphemy against Christ. Anticipating Rousseau and Wordsworth, he excoriated the notion of original sin as the explanation for evil in society and underlined the primal innocence of the child: ‘Look upon a child that is new born, or till he grows up some years: he is innocent, harmless, humble, patient, gentle, easy to be entreated, not envious. And this is Adam, or mankind in his innocence; and this continues till outward objects entice him to pleasure, or seek content without him. And when he consents, or suffers the imaginary Covetousness within to close with the objects, then he falls, and is taken captive, and falls lower and lower.’30 In short, Winstanley discounted the notion of an incorrigible human nature and thought that environment and society were the corrupters – from which it followed of course that schemes of social amelioration were feasible and that the ‘New Man’ could be created, in Winstanley’s view by manual labour in the first instance.
It is important to be clear that Winstanley’s ideas, in some ways highly original, did not appear in a vacuum, nor were they the product of, as it were, an intellectual devising a bright idea in his study of an afternoon. The years 1620–50 are generally considered the worst that the poor and dispossessed of England ever suffered. Indeed the entire century roughly from the Pilgrimage of Grace to the outbreak of the English Civil War (1540–1640) was miserable except for the privileged classes, with wages halved, unemployment high, taxation heavy, harvests bad and the impact of war especially horrendous, not just in terms of the free billeting and quartering of troops and military looting, but also the famine and disease that always followed sustained warfare. One scholar indeed has characterised the years 1647–50, when Winstanley’s radical ideas were coming to light, as ‘the seventeenth, eighth and sixth most serious depressions of the entire early modern period’.31 The irony for Winstanley and those who thought like him was that the century of immiseration coincided with a vast influx of wealth to central government from the confiscated ‘abbey lands’ and other property forfeited for treason, real or simply alleged; Digger propaganda often contrasted this paradoxically with food shortages and high prices.32 The other main ‘deep structure’ element of the Digger movement was that it was the culmination of a century of unauthorised encroachment on forests and wastes by squatters and local commoners, impelled both by the above immiserating factors and by land shortage and population pressure.33 It is often said that Winstanley’s thought was idiosyncratic, creative and up to the moment with a savage irony that anticipated Swift and Orwell.34 Nowhere is his capacity for melding ideas from different sources to form a kind of ‘syncretism’ more evident than in his ‘light on the road to Damascus’ essay written in January 1649, at the very moment Charles I was on trial. While all the above elements were clearly influences, Winstanley managed to weave in the fate of the king as a salient feature.35 The execution of the monarch would be a turning point and not just in a millenarian sense, as the Fifth Monarchists understood it. For Winstanley, the Digger programme of communism was a logical consequence of Charles’s death. The abolition of monarchy and the introduction of a ‘free Commonwealth’ would, in his view, invalidate all laws introduced since the Norman Conquest and restore to the common people their ancient legal rights to the commons and wastes of England. Moreover, Parliament was obligated to the common people, as without their help the royalists could not have been defeated. The Diggers were the backbone of the new covenant. Parliament would be in breach of this covenant if, having secured the support of the dispossessed to defeat Charles and his Cavaliers, it then shut them out from the fruits of victory and kept these solely for the gentry and aristocracy. It is at this point that we see most clearly the convergence of Digger ideology and the thought of radical Levellers like Sexby. The other interesting aspect of Winstanley’s ideas was the continuing interpenetration of religious and socio-economic motifs, for talk of a ‘Covenant’ irresistibly recalled the very different meaning put on the word by the Scots and the Presbyterians.36
Despite its power and originality, Winstanley’s thought is vulnerable to some criticisms that have always been thought definitive by those who disparage him. Feminists claim that his work is ‘chauvinistic’ in that, despite his radicalism, he still advocates patriarchy and female chastity; this is true enough, though parts of his work can be read as feministic.37 Such is his hatred of private property that he proposes the death penalty or slavery for those who would refuse to participate in his utopia, who profiteer or show interest in money, dividends and any form of private profit. Once again the charge can be sustained, but it should be remembered that Winstanley’s ideal penal code had far fewer offences for which the penalty was capital than the law of England in the seventeenth century and – even more so – the Bloody Code of the eighteenth century. More seriously, Winstanley often claimed that his theory of communism was a direct revelation from God, or that God was ‘our common Father’ and the earth our common mother, but if the Supreme Being did not exist except as ‘the God within’, it is difficult to see what meaning the statement could have. For that matter, what did his statement mean that it was offensive to God for destitution to exist in a land as rich as England? If the God was within, this could mean only that it was offensive to Winstanley. In fairness to Winstanley it should be conceded that all who posit a quasi-Buddhist introjected deity labour under acute difficulties with language when they speak of ‘God’; the classic case is that of the psychologist C. G. Jung.38 At a deeper level there is tension and ambiguity in Winstanley’s thought as between his belief in a wholesale root-and-branch transformation of the entire society and the creation of a system of landless and propertyless communities in the here and now, existing alongside but independent of the official legal and property system. Doubtless Winstanley saw the second option as an interim solution – it would be his equivalent of t
he ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ – but there are difficulties about how the passage from one to the other is effected which Winstanley never clears up; the most there is is the admission in his later writings that the transition would be a much longer haul than he originally thought.39 Whatever defence can be entered on Winstanley’s behalf in these matters, there can be no disputing that his discussion of the origin of ‘covetousness’ and private property is a tissue of confusion. He said that the obstacle to achievement of the Digger programme was man’s sinfulness, but as the origin of sin itself was supposed to be private property, the argument was circular: it amounted to saying that one could not abolish private property because it existed. Besides, if man originally lived in a Rousseauesque ‘state of nature’ and human nature was innocent and childlike, how could private property, allegedly the cause of sin, have arisen in the first place? Additionally, Winstanley oscillated in his explanation of the origin of inequality. Sometimes he located it in the mists of time, as Rousseau later would, and ascribed it vaguely to ‘covetousness’ (a key Winstanley concept but one that was never properly unpacked). For him the Digger movement was essentially a spiritual struggle, exhibiting the Manichean conflict between the power of love and the power of covetousness.40 At others, he insisted that Anglo-Saxon England had been a Golden Age and that it was only after 1066, with the coming of the ‘Norman yoke’, that social inequality really took a hold. The ‘Norman yoke’ became something of a rallying cry for the Diggers; for them it was the essence of Cromwell’s sinfulness that he arrested the otherwise inevitable fresh start and return to the Golden Age that England would enjoy.41 On the other hand, he always pointed up the moral that the removal of the Norman yoke was merely a necessary condition for utopia; the sufficient condition remained the achievement of the state of perfection of the early Christians in the Acts of the Apostles.
Yet Winstanley was no mere armchair theorist, anticipating Proudhon in his declaration that property was theft or adumbrating ideas that would be more comprehensively developed a century later by Rousseau. In line with his conviction that the division of labour between workers by hand and workers by brain was a symptom of human sinfulness, in April 1649 he began his great social experiment in Surrey. With a dozen comrades he began sowing carrots, parsnips and on St George’s Hill, Crown land and therefore, in the post-execution context of early 1649, of uncertain status. Those who worked on St George’s Hill included a shoemaker, a cloth-maker, a householder, a blacksmith, a maltster, a baker and a baker’s apprentice. Because of the apparent connection with the brewing trade, hostile propagandists spread the canard that the Diggers were a band of drunkards.42 The social composition of the Diggers closely resembled that of the early Quakers, in that the middling sectors were attracted as well as the poor. At first they were not molested in their agriculture, as it was thought they had the protection of the army. When it became clear that they did not, they became the target for violent attacks, accused of being godless and of sharing women in common. Forced off the hill by a violent mob, the Diggers were first imprisoned in a church and then haled before magistrates; meanwhile their houses were destroyed. When the justices could no longer find any excuse to hold them, the Diggers tried to return to the hill with horses to carry away wood, but they were savagely beaten up by an angry mob who also killed their horses and maliciously destroyed their crops.43
Winstanley made a number of appeals to different quarters, protesting about this savagery and particularly upset about the presence of ‘ignorant bawling women’ in the aggressive mobs. His pamphlets went out to the House of Commons, the City of London, the Army Council and to Fairfax himself. He used the selfsame arguments throughout: the Diggers were respectable men trying to grow crops on unpromising soil, in other words they were socially useful, peaceful citizens who made no attempt to invade or expropriate private land.44 It is noteworthy that in his attempt to get Fairfax on his side – which would certainly have scared off the local roughnecks – Winstanley linked the idea of private property with the ‘Norman yoke’, which he claimed had now ended with the death of Charles I. So far from advocating revolution, he claimed to be in daily expectation that Cromwell himself would usher in the new age, and that he had merely anticipated it; it is an open question whether Winstanley really believed this. Fairfax agreed to receive Winstanley and his de facto Number Two, William Everard; the two waited on Fairfax on 20 April but offended him by refusing to remove their hats in his presence, to signify their commitment to absolute equality.45 The general’s bemused and noncommittal stance encouraged the naive Diggers to conclude that he was on their side. In July 1649 Winstanley learned the truth when Fairfax sent troops to clear the Diggers off St George’s Hill. Winstanley decided to try again in another location. Whereas from April to July, for all the persecution, he had been among friends and kinfolk, in August he made the tactical error of switching his operations from St George’s Hill to Cobham, hoping to avoid club-wielding mobs. The move simply exposed the reality of post-execution army rule. Persecution continued: when the Diggers tried to prosecute their assailants, their bills were thrown out by the Grand Jury. Winstanley realised that Fairfax was a false friend and that he had moved from a mere bush fire to an inferno.46 This time the main persecuting impetus came from the army itself, on the grounds that the Diggers were a crypto-royalist faction secretly working to restore Prince Charles (the later Charles II). A veritable reign of terror began. Cobham tenants were ordered by the Army Council to evict all Diggers and their sympathisers and to deny them food and lodging. By the spring of 1650 the Diggers were decisively beaten. Although the movement limped on outside Surrey – for Everard especially had managed to proselytise in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire and Iver, Buckinghamshire and to a lesser extent in Barnet, Enfield, Dunstable and Bosworth in Nottinghamshire – the game was up and Winstanley knew it.47
An obvious question is: How did the Diggers relate to the Levellers? Whereas the Diggers were a tightly knit, homogeneous movement, the Levellers ran the gamut from republican reformism to communism – roughly the difference between Lilburne and Walwyn, the most left-wing of the Levellers – and at the leftward end there was virtually no difference between a radical Leveller and a Digger. The Diggers liked to pre-empt this debate by calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’.48 The essential difference between a mainstream Leveller and a Digger was that the former believed in political equality only, not social and economic equality, though most Levellers would have had little difficulty with Winstanley’s characterisation of clergy, lawyers and king as three heads of the same monster.49 It would be incorrect to take an intellectual short cut and say that the Levellers were an urban phenomenon and the Diggers a rural one, for most Levellers had some interest in the countryside and were in favour of opening enclosed commons and fens and abolishing tithes and base tenures, as their manifestos indicate. It is, however, true that rural Levellers tended to be more sympathetic to the Diggers than their urban brethren. The basic Leveller thrust was towards helping agricultural labourers without communalism, while still preserving private property and social hierarchy.50 The Levellers were naturally angry and contemptuous about Fairfax’s use of troops on St George’s Hill, which they considered heavy-handed despotism or the sending of ‘divers troops of Janissaries … prancing into Surrey’.51 However, among Leveller leadership there was irritation that the ‘extremism’ of the Diggers was allowing the Grandees to portray the entire Leveller movement as a band of foaming-mouthed communists and revolutionaries. It is undoubtedly true that in 1649 the army’s attitude to both Levellers and Diggers evinced the same kind of purblind paranoia exhibited by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his acolytes towards a handful of American communists who supposedly constituted a ‘red menace’. The most popular Grandee slur was that the Diggers were simply the acceptable face of Ranterism and that they shared women in common. Winstanley was particularly incensed by this, as he despised the Ranters for their cavalier attitude to female chasti
ty and for promoting idleness; he therefore directed particular vituperation and scorn against them.52 It was almost predictable that the Leveller who most distanced himself from the Diggers was John Lilburne, for Lilburne’s personality dictated that he must always be in the van of any opposition to Cromwell. In his contrarian desire always to be ‘agin’ orthodoxy, he even perceived the Diggers as the enemy on this score and poured scorn on Winstanley and his social experiment:
In my opinion and judgement this conceit of levelling property and magistracy is so ridiculous and foolish an opinion as no man of brains, reason or ingenuity can be imagined such as to maintain such a principle, because it would, if practised, destroy not only the individual in the world, but raze against the very foundation of generation and of subsistence … As for independence and valour, by which the societies of mankind are maintained and preserved, who will take pains for that which when he hath gotten it is not his own but must equally be shared by every lazy, simple, dronish sot.53
While Fairfax dealt decisively with the Diggers, Cromwell completed the political extinction of the Levellers. 1649 was undoubtedly his annus mirabilis, for in that one year he executed a king, laid Ireland waste in a campaign that would live in infamy and make his name resonate with purulent hatred to this very day, and finally put paid to all hopes of political improvement and liberty.54 Levellers’ expectation rose momentarily in February, when the House of Commons abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords and appointed a Council of State of forty-one members (all Grandees) as executive authority, but populist aspirations were immediately dashed when the Grandees countered increasing Leveller activity in the army by banning all petitions to Parliament from serving troops. Lilburne, by now disillusioned with politics and genuinely wishing to spend more time with his wife and family, told Hugh Peters bitterly that he would rather live seven years under Charles I than a single one under the new regime and was even thinking of switching his support to ‘Prince Charles’ (the future Charles II).55 The miserable plight and discontent of the soldiers he had fought with encouraged him to make one last effort on their behalf. In England’s New Chains Discovered, of March 1649, usually considered his polemical masterpiece, he went for the Grandees’ jugular. His theme was the one he had already expressed to Peters: that the king had gone but the nation had merely exchanged one species of tyranny for another. The new Council of State was clearly a souped-up version of the old Star Chamber, the Rump Parliament was not going to submit itself to elections, and Cromwell and his gang were using censorship and the law of libel to gag all opposition. Denouncing Cromwell and Ireton as ‘the grand continuers’, who were cynically manipulating a docile Commons for their own ends, he appealed to the army to rise up against Cromwell’s imminent dictatorship. The rhetoric was compelling: ‘We were before ruled by King, Lords and Commons, now by a Council, Court-Martial and House of Commons: and we pray you, what is the difference?’56 Another pamphlet, The Hunting of the Foxes, possibly written by Overton (or maybe Lilburne or perhaps both) was a withering indictment of the hypocrisy of Cromwell and Ireton and no longer pretended there was room for dialogue between Grandees and Levellers; political life in England was now a naked struggle for power.57 Cromwell was seriously alarmed by this powerful rhetoric. He knew that the rank and file of the army were severely disillusioned on a number of counts, principally the failure of the new regime to introduce even the mild reforms promised in Ireton’s Remonstrance, and the rumour that they would be required to serve in Ireland, which they had not signed up for. He called for stern measures and told the Council of State: ‘I tell you, sirs, there is no other way to deal with these men (the Levellers) but to break them in pieces.’58 In March the radicals saw the first signs of iron in the new order. Eight Leveller troopers went to see Fairfax to ask for restoration of the right to petition the Commons; he dismissed them brusquely and cashiered five of them on the spot. Shortly afterwards (when England’s New Chains appeared), Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton and the Leveller treasurer, Thomas Prince, were arrested for treason by order of the Council of State.59 This event precipitated the first clear appearance of women as a force to be reckoned with in the Leveller movement. Several hundred marched to Westminster to petition Parliament for the release of their leaders. Members of parliament predictably taunted them as being ‘mere females’ meddling in affairs they did not understand. Nothing daunted, Katherine Chidley, a woman in her thirties who was the Boadicea of the movement, collected 10,000 signatures from the radical sisterhood and petitioned Parliament again; Chidley wrote a pamphlet for the occasion.60