The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  The first target of the holy war was Caliban. Bacon called him the West Indian, an appellation that would have applied to any Native American, whether in the Caribbean or in North, South, or Central America, and especially to any group that dared, like the Caribs, to resist European encroachment. The native peoples of the Americas stood outside the law of God and nature, according to Bacon, because of their nakedness, their illiteracy and ignorance of horse riding (“thinking that horses did eat their bits and letters speak”), and their “eating of men.” Imperialists had long used charges of cannibalism to justify expropriation (though of course they themselves were the cannibals: many upper-class people took medicinal “mummy,” concocted from human cadavers and believed to be particularly potent when made from the hanged or from Libyans).42 Bacon explained that “wild and savage people are like beasts and birds, which are feræ naturæ, the property of which passeth with the possession, and goeth to the occupant.” He wrote this just after the Powhatan attack on the Virginia colony in 1622, in which 347 European settlers (nearly one quarter of the population) had been killed. In An Advertisement Touching an Holy War, Bacon gave the Virginia Company and other colonizers something more lasting than revenge: a theory of genocide.

  A second category of person who might be exterminated was the Canaanite, he or she who had lost land to the Israelites—in short, a dispossessed commoner. This would have included the many thousands of dispossessed in England, the wild Irish beyond the pale, and Africans. Bacon wanted workers for the colonies—“work-folks of all sorts [who] will be the more continuously on work without loss of time”—and expected them to be made available by enclosure, by the wars of attrition in Ireland (where the plan was “to burn all the corn and kill all the cattle, and to bring famine,” as Spenser wanted), and by the slave trade.43 Later William Petty would estimate that some 504,000 Irish perished between 1641 and 1652, “wasted by the sword, Plague, Famine, Hardship and Banishment.” Thomas Morton saw a New English Canaan, or New Canaan, in Massachusetts, to quote the title of his 1637 book, but he advocated acquiring the land through cooperative trade with the Native Americans. He praised their midwives, medicine men, and uses of the land. His followers, servants and fugitives of several languages and colors, hoisted the maypole and joined the round dance, earning the wrath of the Puritans, whose attitude toward the sensuality of popular culture was similar to Bacon’s. The architect of empire wanted Canaanites—borderless hewers and drawers—for the plantations; indeed, Africans were already at work in Virginia. But such people had no place in his ideal society, as he explained in New Atlantis (1627). Here Bacon imagined a future chaste nation, the “virgin of the world,” and contrasted this patriarchal dream with the “Spirit of Fornication” represented by a “little foul ugly Æthiop.”44

  A third “multitude” or “swarm” of people deserving extinction was pirates, “the common enemy of human society.” In selecting this enemy Bacon was acknowledging the corsairs of North Africa, who during the reign of James I and after attacked not only English shipping (taking almost five hundred ships between 1609 and 1616 alone) but the coasts of England and Ireland in slaving raids. The men they captured from ships, a figure put at twenty thousand during the 1620s, helped to quarry the rocks for the Barbary harbors. Some northern European seamen, English and Irish included, were not captured by but rather deserted to the Algerian pirates—or “turned Turk,” as they called it—bringing skill, technology (the “round ship,” for example), and experience to the polyglot community of Mediterranean pirates. These renegades included Henry Chandler (later Ramadan Raïs), a former Somerset farm laborer; Peter Easton, who commanded forty vessels in 1611; and John Ward, born “a poore fisher’s brat” in Faversham, Kent, who led a mutiny in 1603, stole a ship, renamed it Little John, and commenced pirating. The pirate port of Sallé, wrote Father Dan, the first European historian of the corsairs, was thus “made . . . into a republic,” a compound culture of heretics and religious radicals (Ranters and Sufis). Bacon wished to eradicate the “receptacle and mansion” of pirates in Algiers.45

  The fourth class Bacon marked for destruction consisted of land rovers, from highway robbers to petty thieves, the same people Hercules had slain in delivering his own land from oppression. Their existence is recorded in the coney-catching pamphlets of Thomas Dekker and Robert Greene. Dekker warned, “The abram cove is a lusty strong rogue . . . a face staring like a Saracen. . . . These walking up and down the country, are more terrible to women and children, than the name of Raw-head and Bloody-bones, Robin Goodfellow, or any other hobgoblin.” This is an early description of what has since been called the lumpenproletariat, lazzaroni, or underclass. In the glossaries of cant or thieves’ talk we are given a veritable dramatis personae of the land rovers, all those who rejected wage labor: the Abraham-men, palliards, clapperdudgeons, whip-jacks, dummerers, files, dunakers, cursitors, Roberds-men, swadlers, prigs, anglers, fraters, rufflers, bawdy-baskets, autem-morts, walking morts, doxies, and dells. At the head of them all was the uprightman, of whose kind Thomas Harman, the Kentish squire, wrote, “Of these ranging rabblement of rascals, some be serving-men, artificers, and labouring men traded up in husbandry. These, not minding to get their living with the sweat of their face, but casting off all pain, will wander, after their wicked manner, through most shires of this realm.”46

  The fifth group was assassins. Stuart kings lived in deathly fear of assassination. As attorney general, Francis Bacon interrogated Edmund Peacham, an old clergyman, because a sermon had been found in his house foretelling a rebellion by the people and the death of the king. No plot was discovered, though he was “examined before torture, in torture, between tortures, and after torture.”47 John Webster wrote a play about a Roman general who did not pay his troops, an obvious reference to the King’s favorite, Buckingham, who was killed by an angry, unpaid sailor in 1625.48 One day the general, Appius, is held in awe by the people; the next he is in prison and fettered:

  The world is chang’d now. All damnations

  Seize on the Hydra-headed multitude,

  That only gape for innovation!

  O who would trust a people?

  The tyrannicides of the early Stuarts (Buckingham in 1625 and Charles Stuart in 1649) point to the insurrectionary danger caused by courtiers’ and republicans’ contending for state power—a sordid situation that Bacon himself knew well.49

  The sixth group suggested for extirpation was another collective enemy of Hercules, the Amazons, whose “whole government public and private, yea the militia itself, was in the hands of women.” Armed women frequently led popular disturbances in Bacon’s era. The Irish pirate queen Grace O’Malley, the “nurse to all rebellions for forty years,” commanded heterogeneous followers of different clans and terrorized merchants far and wide until her death, in 1603. In 1607 “Captain Dorothy” led thirty-seven women wielding knives and throwing stones against the enclosures of Kirkby Malzeard in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Bacon knew of this struggle, for as Lord Chancellor ten years later he would observe that “Clubb Lawe” had prevailed. Armed women also spearheaded food riots, in 1595 seizeing food corn at Wye, in 1605 marching on the Medway ports to prevent the export of grain, and in 1608 going so far as to board grain ships in Southampton to keep their cargo from being shipped away. During the Western Rising (1629–31), women again led food riots, thus time in Berkshire and Essex. In 1626 the Star Chamber proceeded against women who had threatened to destroy Gillingham (Wiltshire) forest enclosures. “A certain number of ignorant women” pulled down enclosures in 1628. In Braydon Forest, meanwhile, “Lady Skimington” was the alias of male rioters who disguised themselves as women.50

  The final and perhaps most dangerous group against which holy war might be waged was the Anabaptists, who in sixteenth-century Münster had held “all things to be lawful, not according to any certain laws or rules, but according to the secret and variable motions and instincts of the spirit; this is indeed no nation, no people, no si
gnory, that God doth know.”51 Here was the specter of communism! And Bacon wanted to “cut them off from the face of the earth.” As attorney general in 1615, Bacon had sentenced to death John Owen, whose writings he deemed Anabaptist, inclined to “the pulling down of magistrates” and the binding of “Kings in chains and their nobles in fetters of iron.” One of Bacon’s enemies was Robert Browne, the advocate of congregational churches governed from below, by mutual consent, rather than from above, by elder, king, or nation, and organized on principles of lawful debate, dispute, protest, and questioning. Browne had directly influenced Stephan Hopkins, who had led the resistance on Bermuda in 1609. Browne’s theory of self-organization had revolutionary implications, calling as it did for democratic covenants. Earlier, Thomas Nashe had written of the repression of the Anabaptists in the German peasant revolt: “What is there more as touching this tragedie that you would be resolved of? say quickly. . . . How John Leyden dyed, is that it? He dyed like a dogge, he was hanged & the halter paid for. For his companions, doe they trouble you? They troubled some men before, for they were all kild, & none escapt, no not so much as one to tell the tale of the rainbow.”52 In his work as a torturer (in 1619 he stretched a schoolmaster, Samuel Peacock, on the rack until he fainted), Bacon perhaps indulged a similar vanity, believing that “the tale of the rainbow” itself could be extirpated. He thus used Hercules and the hydra to suggest an expansion and intensification of state terror.

  Bacon’s theory of monstrosity and terror was carried into the middle of the seventeenth century by Thomas Edwards, who studied the heresies of revolutionary England and published Gangraena: Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, in three volumes in 1646. Edwards cataloged 176 different heresies in volume 1, twenty-three in volume 2, and fifty-three in volume 3, for a total of 252. In his dedication he described his combat against the “three bodied Monster Geryon, and the three headed Cerberus,” and “that Hydra also, ready to rise up in their place.” At the beginning of volume 2 he noted that “whilest I was writing this Reply, had even finished it, striking off this three headed Cerberus, new heads of that monstrous Hydra of Sectarism sprung up.” The heads of Bacon’s hydra lunge out of Edwards’s work, in the shape of religious radicals, indigenous Americans, Africans, commoners, sailors, and women.

  The “Anabaptists” denounced by Bacon had multiplied during the subsequent generation, posing a revolutionary challenge during the 1640s and 1650s and setting men such as Edwards to work. Some of these heretics, Edwards explained, favored communism, claiming “that all men are Commoners by right” and that “all the earth is the Saints, and there ought to be a community of goods, and the Saints should share in the Lands and Estates of Gentlemen, and rich men.” An associated belief was the millenarian notion that Christ would visibly reign for a thousand years, putting down all oppressors, while Christians lived in worldly delight (though no one seemed to know when to begin the calculation of the millennium!). Many of the Anabaptists were also antinomians, believing that the “moral law [was] of no use at all to believers,” that the Old Testament was not binding on God’s chosen, and that faith and conscience took priority over good works and lawfully constituted authority. Indeed, some held that it was “unlawful for a Christian to be a magistrate,” while others felt that secular government itself was an oppression. Skepticism toward rules, ordinances, and rituals abounded, as did revelations and visions. Some religious radicals asserted that the “body of the common people is the Earthly Sovereign.”

  Like Bacon, Edwards adopted an international perspective on his subject, remarking that many of the heresies had been promoted by persons “cast out of other Countries.” He condemned the numerous spiritual extremists of New England:

  How many cast out of New England for their Antinomianisme, Anabaptisme, &c. have come over, and here printed Books for their Errors, and preach up and down freely; so that poor England must lick up such persons, who like vomit have been cast out of the mouth of other Churches, and is become the common shore and sinke to receive in the filth of Heresies, and Errors from all places; what was said of Hannibals Army, it was colluvies omnium gentium, the same may be said of us for all kinde of sects and sectaries, Anglia colluvies omnium errorum §arum.

  The core of Hannibal’s army was African, and indeed the continent to which English slave traders were flocking in the 1640s was never far from Edwards’s mind. Many of the heresies of seventeenth-century England seemed to Edwards to be variations of the North African heresies of early Christianity, such as those of the Donatists.53 He wrote, “Error, if way be given to it, knowes no bounds, it is bottomlesse, no man could say how farre England would goe, but like Africa it would be bringing forth Monsters every day.”

  Title page of Heresiography, by Ephraim Pagitt, 1654. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  When Edwards singled out for particular scorn those monsters he described as “hairy, rough, wilde red men,” Caliban reappeared in revolutionary England, as did native America more generally. In much the same vein, the editor of an English newsbook reported in April 1649 the sayings of two “savage Indians” at the French court:

  [One Indian] observed two things which he stood amazed at. First, that so many gallant men which seemed to have stout and generous Spirits, should all stand bare, and be subject to the will and pleasure of a Child [Louis XIV]. Secondly, that some in the City were clad in very rich and costly Apparel, and others so extream poor, that they were ready to famish for hunger; that he conceived them to be all equaliz’d in the ballance of Nature, and not one to be exalted above another.

  The editor denounced the natives as “two Heathen Levellers.”54 In the Americas, fear of Indian attacks and slave revolt went hand in hand with fear of “familisme [the doctrine of the sixteenth-century sect called the Family of Love], Anabaptisme, or Antinomianisme,” and the many-headed hydra summarized the threat in a powerful rhetorical figure.55 Edwards wrote that John Calvin, who attacked popish heresy as well as the heresies of libertines and Anabaptists, was a “Christian Hercules, overcoming so many monsters.”

  Bacon’s Amazons were also animated in Edwards’s account, in the heresy “that ’tis lawful for women to preach, and why should they not, having gifts as well as men?” Equally threatening were women who held it unlawful “to hear any man preach, either publickly or privately.” Dispossessed commoners and land rovers were likely the ones expressing the “jubilee” heresy that Christ came into the world to preach deliverance to the captives (in prison), or the critique of capital punishment, “God doth not hang first, and judge after.” Other heretics opposed Bacon’s whole strategy of warfare, holy or unholy, insisting “that ’tis unlawful to give thanks for victories for one man’s killing another”—that in short, “’tis unlawful to take up arms, or to kill any man.” More specifically, a “godly Citizen” had told Edwards of hearing a “great Sectary that belonged to the Army say, speaking of Ireland, he doubted, and so did many more in the Army, whether it were lawfull to go fight against the Irish; and that that Country was theirs, as well as England was ours.”

  Bacon, in sum, approached the hydra from above, identifying subjects to be acted upon: the swarms, shoals, and routs, as he called the multitude. A generation later, Edwards approached the monster from below, reactively, where it formed covenanted churches, politicized army regiments, rural communes, and urban mobs. The commoners, the vagabonds, the soldiers and sailors, the servants and the slaves, the masterless men and women, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water—all those many new slaves—came from far and wide and traveled further, preaching, interrupting, spouting, ranting, and organizing. As Edwards wondered, “How do persons cast out of other Countries for their Errours, not only live here, but gather Churches, preach publikely their Opinions! what swarms are there of all sorts of illiterate mechanick Preachers, yea of Women and Boy Preachers! What a number of meetings of Sectaries
in this City, eleven at least in one Parish!” Across the ocean, on Bermuda, in 1640, an eight-year-old mulatto girl named Sarah Layfield was brought to court on charges of uttering “foolish and dangerous words touching the person of the King’s majesty.”56

  During the December Days of 1641, the London crowd, or mob, assembled tumultuously at Whitehall and Westminster, lending support to the radicals in the House of Commons whose views of liberty and restrictions on kingly power were listed in the Grand Remonstrance, which was printed in the same month. The king denounced them as a “multitude of Brownists, Anabaptists and other sectaries.” Two Common Councilmen for London were accused of contriving the tumult: they were said to have gone “from house to house and brought this Hydras Head to Westminster, and put in their mouths to cry out, ‘No Bishops, No Popish Lords.’” The hydra, composed of sailors, mechanics, watermen, apprentices, the lowly and the base—or, put another way, the revolutionary urban proletariat—was now taking independent action.57 Francis Bacon’s sometime secretary Thomas Hobbes took notice of such new forms of organized power when, for example, mariners and ’prentices used the instruments of street warfare (a cudgel, a musket, an oar, a farmer’s trine, a bill hook) to break open the prisons on Mayday 1640—and noted, as well, the king’s inability to control them through the usual means, money. Hence Hobbes’s interpretation of the hydra: