The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  Walwyn, Overton, Lilburne and Prince spent most of 1649 in the Tower. They (perhaps especially Walwyn and Overton) were in chastened mood once they saw the vehemence with which Cromwell intended to suppress them. Scribbling away furiously in their cells, they produced a series of pamphlets that were notable for their moderation and conciliatory tone. Walwyn’s A Manifestation seemed more a dig at the Diggers than an attack on the Grandees. It rebutted absurd charges that the Levellers were pro-popery, crypto-royalists, atheists, anarchists and anti-scripturists and emphasised that equality of wealth and common ownership could only ever be justified if the people freely chose it; it could never be achieved by duress or forced on an unwilling population.61 Walwyn was much preoccupied by a Grandee pamphlet entitled Walwyn’s Wiles, which had accused him not just of political Machiavellianism and extremism – allegedly he wanted to destroy all government and execute all lawyers – but also of being a crypto-Jesuit, a bigamist and a man known to have driven several women to suicide. In Walwyn’s Just Defence, written in June, he had no difficulty showing all this up for the scurrilous nonsense it was.62 Meanwhile Overton and Lilburne were collaborating on the Third Agreement of the Free People of England, which was essentially a peace offering to Cromwell and the Grandees, eschewing most controversial issues and concentrating on the franchise and electoral reform. It asked for suffrage for all males over the age of twenty-one with no exceptions; an annual parliament with 400 paid members; rotation of political offices as in ancient Athens; abolition of tithes and religious toleration for all denominations except Roman Catholics; no more parliamentary interference with the law courts and no more legal exemptions and privileges; trial by jury with jurors openly chosen; the army to be commanded by officers appointed by Parliament; the ending of all trade monopolies, and indirect taxation replaced by direct; freedom of the press; a maximum rate of interest of 6 per cent and legislation to change base tenures into freehold. As a clear sop to the Grandees, there was to be a total ban on communism in any form. Most of the radicalism in the document came in the proposals for legal reform: no court proceedings to last longer than six months, defendants’ right to silence, capital punishment to be retained only for murder and treason, and debt to be unpunishable by imprisonment.63 Not only did this manifesto give no comfort to the Diggers or the Levellers’ left wing, it sought to calm the panic induced in London merchants, traders, businessmen and financiers by all the talk of socio-economic equality. As has been well said: ‘The fear of communism that haunted the wealthier Puritans was doubtless an expression of the unconscious guilt they felt when they contrasted their own prosperity with the hunger of the poor around them. What if there were, after all, a God who would avenge the widows and the fatherless?’64 The Grandees showed their contempt for this overture by passing a Treason Act making it an express act of treason to say that the existing government was unlawful.

  While the Leveller leaders languished in jail, their followers experienced the sharp end of the Grandees’ backlash. By now Cromwell, Ireton and Fairfax were in agreement that sterner measures were needed to arrest the levelling ‘cancer’ in the army. In April there occurred the ‘Bishopsgate mutiny’. Three hundred troopers of Colonel Edward Halley’s regiment stationed in Bishopsgate demanded the immediate implementation of the full Leveller programme as the price of their agreeing to serve in Ireland. After Fairfax appealed to them, the mutineers laid down their arms. All 300 were cashiered with loss of pay including arrears, 15 of the ‘ringleaders’ were arrested and court-martialled, and 6 were sentenced to death; 5 of these were pardoned but 23-year-old Robert Lockyer was hanged. The death and funeral of Lockyer on 27 April was the occasion for a massive Leveller demonstration, and a fortnight later there was a tense confrontation in Hyde Park when Cromwell faced down hundreds of defiant Leveller soldiers with sea-green ribbons and bunches of rosemary in their hats.65 From the Tower Lilburne and Overton wrote to Fairfax that the sentence of execution on Lockyer was not just murder but treason as well. Tempers were running very high. If the Grandees thought that a show of toughness would intimidate the army, they were soon disabused. On 1 May troopers of Scroop’s horse at Salisbury categorically refused to serve in Ireland, adducing as grievances also the imprisonment of the Leveller leaders and the execution of Lockyer. Faced with mutiny, the officers at Salisbury simply decamped, and for twelve days there was anarchy and chaos. An even more serious manifestation followed at Oxford. Captain William Thompson and a large band of cavalry effectively declared themselves rebels by going far beyond the negative mutiny of their Salisbury confrères: they actually called for armed insurrection to overthrow Cromwell.66

  Fairfax and Cromwell did not underrate all these warning signs and realised they would have to act fast to stop the contagion from spreading; if Thompson could unite all mutineers between Salisbury and Oxford he would have a formidable fighting force of 3,000 men at his disposal. Cromwell sent ahead, by flying columns and post horses, a handful of officers, in essence political commissars, whose task it was to talk the mutineers into laying down their arms or least stalling them and slowing them up by pointless talk. One of these agents was a Major White, who seems to have been particularly successful.67 A campaign of disinformation managed to detach a number of the mutineers on 11 May, but Thompson himself escaped from the attempt to encircle him, taking nearly 1,000 armed rebels with him. Tired, wet and hungry, Thompson’s men billeted themselves overnight in the grey-stone cottages of Burford and environs. Decisive action in times of military crisis was always Cromwell’s strong suit. Relying on speed and forced marches to confound enemy expectations, Cromwell and Fairfax put together an elite squad of 2,000 men to ride fifty miles a day and strike back fast. At midnight on 14–15 May he came upon the sleeping rebels at Burford and smote them with biblical fury, scattering the confused and panic-stricken foe in short order.68 A few shots were fired, but resistance seemed useless. Five hundred fled into the night (Thompson among them), but 340 were taken prisoner. Fairfax’s court martial selected four victims for the death sentence. Cornet Dene won a reprieve after the most abject display of grovelling recantation and a promise to preach his ‘reformation’ throughout the army, but the other three were executed: Cornet James Thompson (the rebel leader’s brother) and Corporals Church and Perkins. Thompson himself was killed a little later in a shootout at Northampton.69 In contrast to the cowardice of ‘Judas’ Dene, most of those captured were defiant. Among them was William Eyre, a veteran of Edgehill and Cromwell’s 1643 campaign in Lincolnshire, who told Fairfax at the court martial: ‘If but ten men appeared for the cause, I would make eleven.’ Eyre and certain others got off lightly, possibly because they were lower-middle-class officers of the kind Cromwell favoured, the famous ‘plain, russet-coated captains’.70 The proletarian rebels were more roughly handled, including a number who were locked up for a week in Burford church on bread and water.

  Although there was another small mutiny in Oxford in September, resulting in another two executions, the Levellers had shot their bolt. Cromwell departed for his slaughterous campaign in Ireland, confident that he had defeated his most persistent critics. A significant pointer was that The Moderate ceased publication in September. The defeated and disillusioned Levellers and Diggers largely drifted away into Quakerism and other forms of quietism; a few opted for millenarianism.71 Cromwell judged the time was right to put Lilburne on trial for his life but, as with all his most despotic decisions, he liked to delegate the details to underlings while he was absent. The charge was treason. Since under the Treason Act it was treason to question the legitimacy of the Council of State, it followed that Lilburne must clearly be guilty, for he had described the ‘Army junto’ as one run by ‘tyrants and weasels and polecats’. In a two-day trial in October, conducting what they thought would be an open-and-shut case, the judges directed the jury to convict but instead, after an hour’s deliberation, they acquitted him of all charges. In Ireland Cromwell heard to his fury that Lilburne had been carri
ed back, shoulder-high, to the Tower by a jubilant crowd. It was two weeks before the Council of State thought it safe to release him, but they finally did so in November, freeing Overton, Walwyn and Prince also. So popular was Lilburne that Cromwell and the Council did not dare to proceed against him again until 1651. This time they found a way to avoid the ‘inconvenience’ of jury trial and held him in contempt for having libelled a member of parliament; this allowed them to exile him. Lilburne departed for a two-year sojourn in Holland.72

  The delay in having, so to speak, a second shot at Lilburne was partly occasioned by the eventful nature of the years 1650–1. After spending nine months in Ireland, Cromwell was forced to return to Great Britain in May 1650 to oppose a new royalist rising engendered by Charles II’s landing in Scotland and his acclamation by the Covenanters there. Cromwell always had as soft a spot for the Scots as he had a pathological loathing for the Irish, and at first he tried to talk them round. His appeal to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, rebuking them for the royal alliance, has become famous: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’73 Rebuffed, he prepared for war. He won a great victory at Dunbar in September 1650, but it was another year, until September 1651, before he extinguished the threat from Charles with a smashing victory at Worcester, which many military historians think was his finest martial hour.74 This triumph was overshadowed a little later by the death of Ireton, whom Cromwell always loved like a son. Ireton, left in command of the New Model Army in Ireland when Cromwell was forced to return, died of fever just after successfully completing the siege of Limerick; Cromwell was devastated. Returning to London, he struggled through more than a year’s unsatisfactory dealings with the Rump Parliament before dissolving it in April 1653; the immediate trigger was the Rump’s threat to disband Cromwell’s 50,000-strong army as ‘too expensive’. Cromwell’s harangue on that occasion produced another of his famous sayings: ‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately … Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’75 It was a choice irony that Cromwell, who had regarded Charles I’s irruption into the Commons in January 1642 as the ultimate blasphemy, should easily have outdone the king in despotism by dissolving two parliaments, the Long in 1648 and the Rump in 1653. The phantom-like Barebones Parliament, a hand-picked assembly, lasted a mere six months in 1653, after which Cromwell had himself declared Lord Protector for life.76

  Cromwell’s total and unalloyed triumph was the end of the road for most of the Levellers and Diggers. Walwyn, Overton and Winstanley most obviously came to heel. Walwyn’s later pamphlets were reformist and tame. In December 1651 he wrote a defence of trial by jury, but as this was the sole Leveller achievement left standing, his advocacy seemed supererogatory. In May 1652 he made an unsuccessful attempt in For a Free Trade to persuade the Council of State to abolish the Levant Company’s monopoly of trade with the Middle East, using some arguments which anticipated Adam Smith.77 Although he was rearrested as a precaution when Lilburne returned from exile in 1653, he soon proved his loyalty to the new regime and retired into private life, where he ‘retreaded’ and worked as a physician until his death at eighty in 1681. Richard Overton at first proved defiant, moved to Holland and began plotting with John Wildman and Edward Sexby to overthrow the Protectorate. He soon saw that the various conspiracies were wildly impractical, cut his losses and returned to private life in obscurity in England; he died in 1664 in his early sixties.78 Winstanley maintained his socialistic stance until 1652, then gave up and joined the Quakers. He inherited an estate, became a man of property, a churchwarden and later chief constable of Elmbridge. Like Walwyn and Overton, he survived well into the reign of Charles II and died aged sixty-seven in 1676.79 Another long-lived Leveller was John Wildman, the inveterate plotter and intriguer, who conspired against Cromwell and the restored Stuart monarchs and ended up knighted by King William III after the Glorious Revolution. His parting shot, while safely out of Cromwell’s reach on the continent, was a splenetic attack focusing on the Lord Protector’s distasteful personality.80 The two most courageous Levellers were destined, perhaps as a consequence, to die young like Rainsborough. Edward Sexby, unlike Overton and Wildman his two early collaborators in plotting, did not get out when the going became dangerous but seemed almost to redouble his efforts. He recruited as his chief accomplice an intemperate young man named Miles Sindercombe, and the two became enmeshed in a complex plot to assassinate Cromwell. Charles II had put a bounty on the head of the Lord Protector, offering an annuity of £500, the rank of colonel and other honours to ‘whosoever will, by the sword, pistol or poison, kill the base mechanic fellow, by name Oliver Cromwell’. While secretly loathing the royalists, Sexby conspired with them on the continent and hatched what he thought a credible plot to liquidate Cromwell. Returning to England with Sindercombe early in 1657 to implement the conspiracy, the plotters were betrayed to Cromwell’s chief of police. Sentenced to a traitor’s death, Sindercombe committed suicide in the Tower in February to avoid being hanged, drawn and quartered. Sexby remained at large until July, but was then kept in the Tower and interrogated personally by Cromwell. He allegedly caught a fever and then went insane, but the probability is that he was so badly tortured that his health simply gave way. He died in the Tower in January 1658, still in his early forties.81 Lilburne also died young. After a restless exile in Bruges and the Netherlands, he suddenly reappeared in England on 14 June 1653, claiming that since the Rump Parliament no longer existed, in logic he could hardly still be punished for having impugned its integrity; after all, Cromwell himself had done that. The Lord Protector was having none of it; ‘Freeborn John’ was arrested and lodged in Newgate jail. For the second time he had Lilburne put on trial for his life. The trial began on 13 July in an atmosphere of great tension, with soldiers barring the entrance to the Old Bailey against a huge hostile crowd. A popular ditty ran round London:

  And what, shall then honest John Lilburne die?

  Three score thousand will know the reason why.82

  This time the proceedings were protracted, but the result was the same as before. Lilburne cleverly appealed to the jury on the general morality of his banishment, not the technicality of whether he had breached its terms. On 20 August Lilburne was acquitted, with the jury recording this verdict: ‘John Lilburne is not guilty of any crime worthy of death.’83 In fury Cromwell insisted that the jurors be interrogated by his secret police and the Council of State to discover why they had delivered such an unsound judgement. Thus were all the accusations adequately fulfilled, that England under Cromwell had not advanced beyond the Court of Star Chamber. The move was, however, in vain. The jurors all met at the Windmill Tavern before their interrogation and concerted the answer which all then gave: ‘I gave the verdict with a clear conscience and I refuse to answer any questions about it.’ Cromwell refused to allow Lilburne to go free. He was taken from Newgate to the Tower and then to Mount Orgeuil Castle in Jersey, where the governor found him ‘more troublesome than ten cavaliers’. He was brought back to England in 1655 and placed under house arrest in Dover Castle. He then converted to Quakerism, allowing his friends finally to persuade Cromwell to give him his liberty. After a very short spell of freedom he died aged forty-three at Eltham in Kent.84