Anna also had a new audience to impress. She had moved from outlaw Poplar, and was now living in the Minories, another suburb with a heterogeneous population, exempt from city craft and trade regulations and so attractive to immigrants. Among those arrivals there were strong Calvinist leanings – and many preachers had strong Independent tendencies. The role of leader of reform was ultimately taken up by All Hallows the Great, and Anna was determined to march in the vanguard of the saints. Here is what Anna Trapnel saw as the New Model Army approached:
After this there was a day of thanksgiving that I kept with the church of Allhallows in Lime Street [sic], for the army that was then drawing up towards the city, in which I had a little discovery of the presence of the Lord with them, in which day I had a glorious vision of the New Jerusalem, which melted me into rivers of tears, that I shrunk down in the room, and cried out in my heart, ‘Lord, what is this?’ It was answered me, ‘A discovery of the glorious state of whole Sion, in the reign of the Lord Jesus, in the midst of them, and of it thou shalt have more visions hereafter.’ So then when the day was ended, I retired to my chamber, at that time lying in the Minories in Aldgate parish, where I conversed with God by prayer, and reading of the scriptures, which were excellently opened to me touching the proceedings of the army.
Anna tells us about her church. For her, ‘church’ was not a place but a congregation of people. She also tells us about where she lived; the Minories runs from Aldgate High Street to Tower Hill, and she may mention it because it was itself evidence of the redemption of London; the Minories took its name from the Sorores Minores, or the Poor Clares, an order of nuns established in the thirteenth century by St Clare. Like Trapnel they were devoted to praying, fasting and helping the poor. But all this locality matters less to her than the meaning of the army’s approach; for her it is the first footfalls of the Second Coming. She is excited by being offered the chance to know what is happening through the Holy Spirit, but she also gives us a portrait of a London woman trying to get news:
It was first said to me that they were drawing up toward the city (I not knowing anything of it before) and that there was a great hubbub in the city, the shops commanded to be shut up. Upon this I went down, and enquired of the maid of the house whether there was any stir in the city. She answered me, ‘You confine yourself to your chamber, and take no notice of what is done abroad. We are commanded’, said she, ‘to shut up our shops, and there are great fears among the citizens, what will be the issue, they know not.’
It was unusual for a servant-maid to address a gentlewoman in this way, and it implies that she thought of Anna as either a child or a fellow-servant. No maid would speak that way to a lady. And Anna’s response implies some annoyance at being so addressed:
With that I answered, ‘Blessed be the Lord that hath made it known to so low a servant as I’; then repairing to my chamber again, I looked out at the window, where I saw a flag, at the end of the street. This word I had presently upon it, ‘Thou seest the flag, the flag of defiance is with the army, the king of Salem is on their side, he marcheth before them, he is the captain of their salvation.’
Evidently, too, Anna did not stay indoors, because: ‘I looking saw a hill (it was Blackheath); it was said to me, “Thou seest the hill, not one but many hills rising up against Hermon Hill, they shall fall down and become valleys before it.”’
What Trapnel was seeing was the arrival of the Kentish Royalist troops on Blackheath, and she also ‘saw’ their downfall. For Trapnel, the landscape of London had become the landscape of the Holy Land:
It was then said unto me, ‘Go into the city and see what is done there.’ Where I saw various things from the Lord in order to his appearance with the army. As I was going, hearing of a trumpeter say to a citizen these words: ‘We have many consultations about our coming up, but nothing yet goes on’; presently it was said to me, ‘The counsels of men shall fall, but the counsel of the Lord stands sure, and his works shall prosper.’ So repairing home, I had many visions, that the Lord was doing great things for this nation.
This inspires a ferocious outburst of fasting and prophecy, the first of many until the final one in 1654 brought Anna Trapnel to the attention of Cromwell: ‘And having fasted nine days, nothing coming within my lips, I had upon the ninth day the vision of horns; first I saw in the vision the army coming in Southwark-way, marching through the city with a great deal of silence and quietness, and that there should be little or no blood spilt; this was some weeks before their coming in.’
Such extreme fasting is grounded in a surprisingly Catholic-sounding belief in penance on behalf of others. Rather like the IRA hunger strikers of the 1980s, the Londoners who engaged in these fasts made them into political as well as religious events. Anna’s fasts were extreme even by the standards of her day; she writes that she was seen as ‘under a temptation’ for ‘not eating’. Her local preacher warned her that this might be inspired by vanity, ‘to be singular beyond what was meet’. But Anna Trapnel was not going to be directed now, except by the Bible itself and the Spirit, which informed her that ‘thou shalt in every way be supplied in body and spirit’. Inspired by eating nothing, she had a vision of the horns: its rich symbolism is drawn from the Book of Daniel:
Then broke forth another vision as to the horns: I saw four horns, which were four powers, the first was that of the bishops, that I saw was broken in two and thrown aside; the second horn more white, had joined to it a head, endeavouring to get up a mount, and suddenly it was pushed down, and broken to pieces; the third horn had many splinters joined to it, like to the scales on the back of a fish, and this was presented to be a power or representative consisting of many men, having fair pretences of love to all under all forms; this I saw broken and scattered, that not as much as any bit of it was left.
Plainly, Anna is not just reporting events, but interpreting them in the light of scripture. For many Independent religious thinkers, the ‘little horn’ of Daniel was Charles I. But Trapnel’s vision seems more complex, and there are many horns, not merely one; the third certainly sounds like Parliament. Because the Book of Daniel was about the rule of God becoming incarnate in the world, it was a guide to saints who were hoping to achieve the same thing. By now Anna was moving headily through those revolutionary circles in London that believed they were sent to bring about the end of the world. It was probably a longing to be in the thick of things, and to hear more sermons, meet more saints, that led Trapnel to move from the Minories to the house of a relative in Fenchurch Street, in the City. She was moving to the centre of political ferment, where other women were now taking their political demands to the Parliamentary government, and not always bothering to justify their claims in the name of religion.
In the first days of January 1647, Mary Overton and her brother-in-law Thomas were working, sewing together the leaves of a pamphlet. Mary was running a small printing press, trying to support herself and her three children while her husband Richard was in prison. Since he was one of the leading Levellers in the country, most of what was offered to Mary’s press was extreme in content, potent – and illegal.
What made it illegal was its Leveller content. The term ‘Leveller movement’ used by historians is misleading, suggesting the existence of a single group with an agreed manifesto. There were saints and socialists, radicals who believed in reason and radicals who thought they were bringing about the Second Coming. On any issue there were likely to be more than three opinions. Some saints – Independent church congregations – hated the Levellers for spoiling a moment of godly triumph with their carping. Others saw them as the spearhead of the ever-ongoing process of ecclesiastical reformation. So the Levellers were not a party or a group, and in retrospect the extent to which they even held common views seems doubtful; certainly they did not have any kind of simple programme. But the name was and is still given to those who held a certain set of very radical opinions. At various points, those claiming to be Levellers demanded such previously un
thinkable reforms as manhood suffrage for all freemen, the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, complete religious toleration for Protestants and the equality of all men before the law. Some of their views are still, so to speak, to the left of the British polity.
The Levellers’ cause was hopeless from the start. They never stood the slightest chance of winning over those with the power to grant their demands, or even of winning over a majority of the population for whom they claimed to speak. But somehow they broke through an encrusted order of thought, if not of power, releasing desires and possibilities that would only be translated into action hundreds of years in the future.
‘Leveller’ is a term created by the enemies of those thus named. There is something of destruction in the name: to level is to raze, to erase, to sow every acre with salt, to obliterate civilization as we know it, and this signifies the origins of the movement in an era which was beginning to believe itself on the verge of apocalypse. The end of the world was the only vision of truly radical, permanent change that Christian thought allowed. Political ideas of change were imagined through its rhetoric of the annihilation of difference; if the lion could lie down with the lamb, then the rich and the poor might also one day be reconciled. The Levellers grew out of three things: the experiences of the godly members of the Parliamentarian army, the experience of Independent churchgoing and the unfolding story of the times. All these made change seem thinkable, along certain lines. The Levellers’ leaders could assemble their ideas like patchwork, putting together a fragment of an idea from here, an original thought from there. What they made was a new map of how the world might look. But to most people it just looked like a misdrawn map, or even a big mess without rhyme or reason.
The congregations were also a little world, a gathering-place for innovation, and full of the excitement of newness and the hopes it brought. Among those who must have met in the seething, gasping crowds were the men who became the Leveller leaders: Richard Overton, William Walwyn and John Lilburne, for their pronouncements began to appear coordinated, or at least similar. But the Levellers and the sectarians were also increasingly at odds, because The Case of the Army and later Leveller documents granted equality to all, and the more radical godly congregations were beginning to think that the war had been allowed to bring about the rule of the saints unencumbered by sinners.
What the Levellers wanted was a just state. They wanted to call themselves ‘freeborn Englishmen’ and to extend the reformation of the Church to the reformation of the state, and along similar lines. They wanted a new constitution and a new simplified legal system: no imprisonment for debt, capital punishment only for murder and treason. Legal procedures should be in English, as church services were. Just as the monasteries had been dissolved, so tithes should go. There should be no beggars, free trade would replace closed shops, and there should be freedom of worship. What about an assembly, a single legislature that could consist of representatives elected by every adult male? And local magistrates, also elected?
They said, emphatically, that they didn’t want men’s property, or to make all things common. However, they were a threat to property ownership precisely because they were no longer willing to see it as a distinguishing characteristic in other spheres. For the Levellers, legitimate authority could only come from an agreement of the people. Then where did Cromwell’s authority come from? From what did Henry Ireton’s derive? And how, in any case, could the people decide anything?
In the cold winter of 1647, Mary was stitching a pamphlet so seditious that even now its contents would be shocking, a pamphlet which argued that every king since the Norman conquest was nothing but a usurping tyrant, that the power of Parliament derived from those it governed: Regall Tyrannie Discovered. Mary may have agreed with every word, or she may not have liked the pamphlet, but she was running a business. She and her brother-in-law went on sewing, surrounded by drying sheets of treason. The heavy printing press stood in the corner. The searchers arrived while Mary was still working on the pamphlet. The searchers found loose leaves of it, and other ‘scandalous pamphlets’. Mary, and her brother-in-law Thomas, who was stitching sheets, were arrested. This is Mary’s account of what Parliamentary arrest was like. She already knew, for Richard had been arrested in August:
though your Petitioner’s husband hath constantly adhered to the Parliament, and hath given ample testimony of his sincere and upright affections to the Honourable House, to the just laws and freedoms of England, in general, and to the rights and properties of all and every commoner in particular … upon the 11 of August 1646 had his house surrounded with diverse armed men with swords and muskets, under the conduct of one Robert Eales, and by the said Robert Eales with his Sword drawn in his hand, and by one Mr Eveling (dweller at the Green Dragon in the Strand) with his pistol ready cocked, was suddenly and violently entered, and his person laid hold of.
Now it was her turn to suffer the some injustice. Brought before the Lords on the afternoon of 6 January 1647, and asked by the Speaker who had brought the ‘scandalous pamphlets called Regal tyranny discovered to her Shop, and of whom she had them’, Mary refused to answer. Thomas, too, would say no more than that he had found them there. She was dragged to prison ‘on two cudgels … headlong upon the stones through all the dirt and mire of the streets,’ with her small ‘tender infant’, her six-month-old baby clutched in her arms, and pregnant once more. All the way there, the officers of the law abused her, calling her ‘the scandalous, wicked names of whore, strumpet etc’ Finally she arrived at ‘the most reproachful gaol’ of Bridewell, where Mary miscarried her baby. There she was to remain until July of that year. Neighbours took in her older children, in the informal scramble of kindness which was early modernity’s version of social services, and her house was shut up. Mary was indignant on her own behalf; she felt certain that her treatment had been outrageous: she says her imprisoners are ‘parallel’d by none but by the Spanish or Romish inquisitors’ and she concludes that if they don’t give all of the accused fair and speedy trials, then ‘ … you have absolutely resolved … To inslave the commons [i.e. the common people] of England to a Lordly arbitrary vassalage and bondage, to conquer and destroy their laws, rights, Liberties and Freedoms, and to turn co-Usurpers and joint Tyrants with that Norman brood of insolent dominating tyrants and usurpers, the House of Lords.’
In his account, Richard Overton described the scene in similar pathetic detail: ‘their 3 small children (as helpless Orphans bereft of a father and mother) exposed to the mercy of the wide world’, and he also writes passionately of his wife’s mistreatment: ‘with the poor infant still crying and mourning in her arms, whose life they spared not to hazard by that inhuman barbarous usage … calling her strumpet and wild whore’.
Unlike earlier generations victimized by repressive governments, Overton was able to articulate his horrified sense that this outrage was a violation of privacy and of his wife’s good name, and hence a violation of his masculinity. Therefore he saw it as a sign of tyranny – a tyrant is that which cannot allow privacy and the right to privacy to ordinary men. A wife and children are markers and guarantors of that private male identity. The public shaming of Mary Overton – being dragged through the streets, the shouts of ‘whore’, her literal circulation in the mud and mire – is a violation of Richard’s identity as well as hers.
Mary also complains that the officials have stolen goods ‘which were then her present livelihood for her imprisoned husband, herself, and three small children, her brother and sister; and to bring your petitioner, with Thomas Overton her husband’s brother’. This was cheek, for she meant the printing press, which had been confiscated. But it may have been true all the same. It was an established custom that when men were killed or imprisoned, their wives and daughters were expected to keep their businesses going. Thus women ran alehouses, farms, mills, cobblers – and printshops. Mary was referring to this tradition obliquely in defending herself.
Richard Overton was n
o ignoramus, no ‘mechaniek preacher’. He matriculated as a sizar at Queens’ College, Cambridge, while Milton was still at Christ’s. The record of his matriculation means that he had had to pledge allegiance to the king and to the Church of England to enter the university. And yet Queens’ in Overton’s day was riven by faction; of the thirty-four fellows, twelve were expelled for their Catholic sympathies. There was also the powerful godly preacher Preston. Overton was something of a wit, whose first literary effort was a pamphlet-play which featured Archbishop Laud feasting on the ears of William Prynne. Later, Laud is punished by having his nose pressed to the grindstone. Overton’s carnivalesque humour appeared, too, in Articles of High Treason Exhibited Against Cheap-Side Cross (1642). The cross is tried by the people for treason and found guilty of being a cause of civil war. And yet the predominance of iconoclasm in the war’s opening years suggests he may have had a valid point to make. When the same carnivalesque tactics were used against his family, Overton drew the line.
He could be an astoundingly scandalous critic of government. In The Baiting of the Great Bull of Bashan, for example, he portrays the Levellers as bulldogs attacking the genitals of Oliver Cromwell as a bull. The genitals are pox-ridden, so they come away easily. The Levellers were not always solemn sectarians; they could be bawdy pamphleteers too.
But Mary’s less amusing experience of what it was like to be a Leveller was more typical. The Levellers formulated their ideas under the hammer of surveillance and oppression. Those eager to silence them could hardly have done more to make them want to speak. No one knew this better than Elizabeth Lilburne (or Dewell, as she was at first), who seems to have met her future husband John through his political fame, which was considerable. John Lilburne had been an ardent follower of John Bastwick, and cut his political teeth distributing one of Burton’s satirical pamphlets. This made it natural that he should become a distinguished member of the Parliamentarian forces defending Brentford, and later a radical and religious pamphleteer in his own right. His wife, he said, was ‘an object dear in my affections several years before she knew anything of it’. She seems to have begun in the role of comforter of the afflicted: ‘when [he] was more like Job upon the dunghill by his sufferings than a man at that time fit for her society’, that is, when he was in the Fleet Prison. She may have been the woman who visited him immediately after his whipping. John always spoke very tenderly of his wife, but that was partly to bolster his self-image as an honest father and husband.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 57
