The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  5. For the Elizabethan Poor Laws see A. L. Meier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (1985); N. Fellows, Disorder and Rebellion in Tudor England (2001); John F. Proud, Poverty and Vagrancy in Early Modern England (1971); Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor England (1988).

  6. For this point see Karl Marx, Capital, i, p. 773.

  7. M. Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton, 1975), p. 340.

  8. John Spurr, English Puritanism, 1603–1689 (1998). See also John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008).

  9. Disraeli, Sybil, Book 4, Ch. 6.

  10. For Laud see Antony Milton, ‘Laud, William’, ODNB (2004), 32, pp. 655–70; H. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645 (1940).

  11. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (1995).

  12. Michael Mendle, ‘The Ship Money Case: The Case of Ship Money and the Development of Henry Parker’s Parliamentary Absolutism’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 513–36. There is a good popular account in David Gross, ed., We Won’t Pay! A Tax Resistance Reader (2008), pp. 9–16. See also Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War (2003).

  13. Pauline Gregg, Freeborn John: A Biography of John Lilburne (2001), pp. 56–63.

  14. A. Sharp, ed., The English Levellers (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 38–9.

  15. Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (2002), p. 134. For divine-right theory see Glenn Burgess, ‘The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered’, EHR, 107 (1992), pp. 837–61. For Sir Edmund Coke see Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne (1958).

  16. Trevor Royle, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (2005), pp. 89–94.

  17. For Pym see J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (1941). For the 16 April 1640 speech see J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary (1986), pp. 183–9.

  18. D. Cressy, England on the Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), p. 426.

  19. For Strafford in Ireland see Hugh F. Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633–1641: A Study in Absolutism (1989).

  20. Ronald G. Asch, ‘Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford’, ODNB (2004), 58, pp. 142–57.

  21. There is no better account of all this than C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (2000). For Charles’s assent to the attainder see Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 178.

  22. C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace (1955) provides full details.

  23. R. Fletcher, ed., Prose Works of Milton (Harvard, 1835), pp. 11–13.

  24. Cressy, England on the Edge, p. 247.

  25. J. Morrill, B. Manning and D. Underdown, ‘What Was the English Revolution?’, History Today, 34 (1984); Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, English Radicalism (Cambridge, 2011), p. 69.

  26. For the Grand Remonstrance see S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (1906), pp. 202–32.

  27. Cressy, England on the Edge, p. 218.

  28. J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England (1978), p. 136; David L. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689 (1999), p. 129.

  29. David Starkey, Monarchy (2006), pp. 113–14.

  30. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 291.

  31. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (1973), pp. 120–9.

  32. The details can be followed in John Morill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990).

  33. John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds, The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 2000), p. 141.

  34. Charles Carlton, The Experience of the English Civil War (1992), pp. 211–14.

  35. Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms (2007), pp. 433–9.

  36. Carlton, Experience.

  37. George Nelson Godwin, The Civil War in Hampshire (1642–45) (1904), pp. 314–17.

  38. Spurr, Puritanism; Coffey and Lim, eds, Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. The works of Weber and Tawney referred to are Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926).

  39. There is a very good discussion of all these points in Laurence Stone, The Origins of the English Revolution (1972).

  40. Friedrich Engels, Neue Zeit (1892–3), i, pp. 43–4.

  41. See George Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962).

  42. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, Ch. 136, ‘Suite de la religion de l’Angleterre’ (1756).

  43. William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (1912).

  44. Everyone knows that biblical exegesis is a minefield. For what it is worth, Antinomians often cited the following passages in St Paul: 2 Peter 3: 16; Galatians 2: 4; 3: 23–5, 4: 21–3; Colossians 1: 13–14; 1 Corinthians 3: 16–17; Romans 6: 14–15; 7: 1–7; Ephesians 2: 15 as well as the Acts of the Apostles 13: 39; 18: 12–16.

  45. And so gave a literally true meaning to the experience of modern airline travellers of the ‘six miles high’ variety.

  46. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p. 52.

  47. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), pp. 70–6; John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 961–85.

  48. There has been a scholarly debate about the Ranters. The extreme view is that they never existed but were simply bogeymen conjured up by the Presbyterians – see J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (1986). The more cogent view is that they did exist but, like the communists conjured up by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the USA in the 1950s, were too insignificant to be taken seriously – see the review of Davis’s book by Richard L. Greave in Church History, 57 (1988), pp. 376–8 and by G. Aylmer in PP 117 (1987), pp. 208–19.

  49. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion and the English Revolution (1984).

  50. See Leo Miller, John Milton Among the Polygamophiles (NY, 1974); Annabel Patterson, ‘Milton, Marriage and Divorce’, in Thomas Corn, ed., A Companion to Milton (Oxford, 2003), pp. 279–93.

  51. B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Millenarianism (1972).

  52. Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (NY, 1965), p. 195. See also Craig Cabell, Witchfinder-General: The Biography of Matthew Hopkins (2006); Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century Tragedy (2005); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971).

  53. This is apparently not a genuine Chestertonism, but a distillation of his thought by Emile Cammaerts in his biography The Laughing Prophet (1937).

  54. There is much detail on all this in D. L. Smith, Oliver Cromwell, Politics and Religion in the English Revolution (1991).

  55. John Milton, ‘On the New Forces of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’ (1646) – the last line of the poem.

  56. J. C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Democracy’, PP 40 (1968), pp. 174–80.

  57. John Milton, Areopagitica (1646).

  58. T. Carlyle, ed., Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845), i, p. 205.

  59. ‘According to some conservative contemporary observers, the mental atmosphere in the Army resembled (in modern terms) something like a mixture of a revivalist religious congress and an extreme left-wing debating society.’ G. E. Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution (Cornell, 1975), p. 11.

  60. Blair Worden, ‘The Levellers in History and Memory c.1660–1960’, in Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 256–82 (esp. pp. 280–2).

  61. See the discussion in Colin Davis, ‘Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 35 (1972), pp. 507–31; J. C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Christianity’, in B. Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973), pp. 225–50.

>   62. H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Constitution (1961), pp. 9, 30–4.

  63. From a mountain of material on the Levellers, their beliefs and ideology see: G. E. Aylmer, ‘Gentlemen Levellers’, PP 49 (1970), pp. 120–5; D. E. Brewster and R. Howell, ‘Reconsidering the Levellers: The Evidence of the “Moderate”’, PP 46 (1970), pp. 68–86; K. Thomas, ‘Another Digger Broadside’, PP 42 (1969), pp. 57–61.

  64. The work of J. C. Davis is particularly stimulating. See ‘Levellers and Democracy’ ‘General Winstanley and the Restoration of True Magistracy’, PP 70 (1976), pp. 76–93; ‘Fear, Myth and Furore’, PP 129 (1990), pp. 79–103.

  65. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 309.

  66. Gregg, Freeborn John, pp. 102–3.

  67. D. M. Masson, ed., The Quarrel between the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell: Documents Collected by J. Bruce, with a Historical Preface, Camden Society, NS, 12 (1875).

  68. For Blanqui see L. Kolakowski, The Mainstream of Marxism (2005), pp. 176–7.

  69. Gregg, Freeborn John, pp. 111, 120, 135.

  70. Ibid., pp. 170–4.

  71. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 74.

  72. Ibid., pp. 237–8.

  73. Ibid., p. 77.

  74. Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 56–62.

  75. A. L. Morton, Freedom in Arms (1975), pp. 87–99.

  76. J. T. Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 625–45.

  77. Rachel Foxley, ‘John Lilburne and the Citizenship of “Freeborn Englishmen”’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 849–74; cf. also Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 122–5.

  78. See William Godwin, History of the Commonwealth (1824).

  79. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972), pp. 91–9. The preference for Walwyn over Lilburne is evident in Brailsford, Levellers, esp. pp. 59–71.

  80. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft, eds, The Writings of William Walwyn (Athens, Georgia, 1989), pp. 143–53. For the ‘mess of pottage’ see Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 63–7.

  81. Barbara Taft, ‘William Walwyn’, ODNB (2004), 57, pp. 225–31.

  82. McMichael and Taft, eds, Writings of William Walwyn, pp. 236–44.

  83. William Haller and Godfrey Davies, eds, The Leveller Tracts, 1647–1653 (Gloucester, Mass., 1964), pp. 350–98; McMichael and Taft, eds, Writings of William Walwyn, pp. 383–432.

  84. McMichael and Taft, eds, Writings of William Walwyn, pp. 433–45, 446–52.

  85. B. J. Gibbons, ‘Richard Overton’, ODNB (2004), 42, pp. 166–71.

  86. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 91–9. His brilliant pupil, David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (Stroud, 1999), likewise characterises Overton.

  87. D. Como, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, PP 196 (2007), pp. 37–82 (at p. 69).

  88. Don M. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestos of the Puritan Revolution (1967), pp. 154–95.

  89. Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 49–57, 233.

  90. Sharp, English Levellers, pp. 20–3.

  91. Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 82–7.

  92. M. A. Gibb, John Lilburne the Leveller: A Christian Democrat (1947), pp. 215–16.

  93. S. Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000), p. 30.

  94. Gregg, Freeborn John, pp. 167, 191, 193–5, 199.

  95. M. A. Kishlansky, ‘The Army and the Levellers: The Roads to Putney’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), pp. 795–824.

  96. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 181.

  97. Gregg, Freeborn John, pp. 170–1.

  98. Barry Coward, The Stuart Age, 1603–1714 (2003), pp. 188–95.

  99. Ian Gentles, ‘Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron’, ODNB (2004), 18, pp. 933–41.

  100. There has been an impassioned debate on the authorship of this manifesto. See John Adamson, ‘The English Nobility and the Projected Settlement of 1647’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), pp. 567–702; Mark Kishlansky, ‘Saye What?’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 919–37.

  101. For details see Geoffrey Robertson, ed., The Putney Debates: The Levellers (2007), pp. 25–30.

  102. A. S. P. Woodhouse, Introduction to Puritanism and Liberty: The Army Debates 1647–49 (1992), p. 24; Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 241–4, 252.

  103. D. Farr, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 86–9.

  104. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 247.

  105. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestos, pp. 196–222; Haller and Davies, eds, Leveller Tracts, pp. 64–87.

  106. Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 142, 183–4. For Sexby’s authorship of The Case of the Army Truly Stated, see Mendle, ed., Putney Debates, pp. 103–24.

  107. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestos, pp. 223–34; Morton, Freedom in Arms, pp. 134–49.

  108. In yet another example of Protestant schism, the Arminians were a seventeenth-century break-away movement from Calvinism. Although every aspect of their doctrine is hotly disputed, they had a distaste for the hard-line version of original sin and were to the Calvinists roughly what Pelagius had been to St Augustine. They were a major influence on John Wesley and Methodism. See Roger Olson, Arminian Theology: Myth and Realities (2006).

  109. Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 203, 216.

  110. M. Ashley, John Wildman: Plotter and Postmaster; A Study of the English Republican Movement in the Seventeenth Century (1947).

  111. Disraeli, Sybil, ed. T. Braun (1980), p. 40.

  112. Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 270–1.

  113. See W. R. D. Jones, Thomas Rainborowe (c.1610–1648): Civil War Seaman, Siegemaster and Radical (Woodbridge, 2005).

  114. Brailsford describes Ireton as ‘by far the ablest debater at Putney’ (Levellers, p. 269) and, contrasting him with Rainsborough, adds: ‘Henry Ireton was, at all events on the theoretical plane, by far the abler and honester man of the two, but he had none of the tact and none of the intuitive understanding of other men’s feelings which a good leader must possess.’ Ibid., p. 229. Such a view can hardly be sustained by a close reading of the Putney Debates, which show Cromwell and Ireton curtailing the meeting after they had been worsted in argument. But there seems a general inclination to underrate Rainsborough. Another scholar opines that in the Putney Debates Wildman was intellectually more formidable than Rainsborough or Sexby but a less powerful speaker. Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 100–1.

  115. Sharp, English Levellers, p. 120.

  116. Robertson, Putney Debates, pp. 61–8.

  117. Ian Gentles, ‘Henry Ireton’, ODNB (2004), 29, pp. 344–52. See also Alex Craven, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (2000).

  118. Much of the debate at Putney was a rehash of arguments already made in The Agreement (Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 88–96).

  119. ‘For God’s sake! Why do you have to bring God into everything!’ (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Book 1, Ch. 5).

  120. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 217.

  121. Ibid., p. 202.

  122. For Robert (or William?) Everard see Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994), p. 336. As to the identity of Everard and the conflation of the Leveller figure of that name and a later Digger see Hill, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 284–6; Hill, Experience of Defeat, pp. 18, 207; Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, p. 305.

  123. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 267.

  124. Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 112, 115.

  125. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, iii, II, 303–4.

  126. Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 286–7, 365; R. C. Richardson and G. M. Ridden, eds, Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays in History and Literature (1986), pp. 25–44 (including, on p. 26, a direct accusation of hypocrisy).

  127. Philip Baker, ‘A Despicable Contemptible Generation of Men: Cromwell and the Levellers’, in Patrick
Little, ed., Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (2009), pp. 90–115 (at p. 110).

  128. Robertson, Putney Debates, p. 69.

  129. For a full discussion of this eighteenth-century refinement see H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property (1977).

  130. Robertson, Putney Debates, p. 70.

  131. C. B. MacPherson, The Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), pp. 107–59.

  132. Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, p. 102.

  133. This is the first full-blooded appearance in Leveller thought of the ‘Norman yoke’ thesis that would figure so largely in Digger ideology. Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 129–30.

  134. Many have considered that ‘Why should I obey the government?’ is the key issue in all pre-twentieth-century political theory and that all the ‘great books’ of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, et al., are simply different answers to the same question. A. J. Ayer, Metaphysics and Commonsense (1969), pp. 240–60.

  135. This is a reference to the rumoured conscription for a campaign in Ireland.

  136. The entire Rainsborough–Ireton clash can be followed in detail in Sharp, English Levellers, pp. 103–16.

  137. Ibid.

  138. Robertson, Putney Debates, p. 75.

  139. Ibid., p. 76.

  140. Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 278–9.

  141. J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1958), I, iii, p. 35, cf. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 217.

  142. Robertson, Putney Debates, p. 93.

  143. Woodhouse, Puritanism, p. 452.

  144. Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and Its Debates (Oxford, 1987), p. 250.

  145. A. J. Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007).

  146. David Farr, Henry Ireton (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 114.

  147. Woolrych, Soldiers, p. 255.

  148. Brailsford, Levellers, p. 290.

  149. Mendle, ed., Putney Debates, pp. 73–5, 138–9.

  150. John Ashburnham, A Narrative of John Ashburnham on His Attendance on King Charles I from Oxford to the Scottish Army and from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, 2 vols (1830), ii, pp. 117–36; Anton Bantock, Ashton Court (2004).