The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  The times were incendiary. Craddock exclaimed, “The Gospel is run over the Mountains between Brecknockshire and Monmouthshire, as the fire in the thatch.”16 In 1644 John Milton wrote in Areopagitica,

  Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection. The shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defense of beleaguered Truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching reformation; others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.

  The words expressed the revolutionary hopes, the eager spirit of inquiry, and the militant search for truth that awaited Francis and her fellowship.

  Meanwhile, combat continued in Bristol. Parliamentary forces, fresh from victory at Naseby and commanded by Colonel Thomas Rainborough, launched a counterattack against Prince Rupert’s army in 1645, with soldiers’ scaling the walls of Prior’s Hill Fort amid a rain of round and case shot. When the scaling ladders proved too short, the infantry crept in at the portholes, prevailing in a two-hour battle against the push of pike. Colonel Rainborough’s victory helped to preserve the city as a stronghold of religious radicals who usurped the pulpits, preached in the streets, and engaged in ruthless iconoclastic behavior, producing a revolutionary energy in militant Calvinism or libertarian antinomianism.17 The former was the doctrine of puritanical work-discipline; the latter offered a gracious view of freedom.

  Between 1644 and 1649, the peak of antinomianism, those who would later become Baptists “proved the most successful disseminators of radical religious ideas until the rise of the Quakers in the 1650s.”18 They were directly associated with the revolutionary victories of the New Model Army and with the organization and birth of the Levellers. During its sojourn to London, the small Bristol band led by Hazzard was inflamed by the reason and truth of the “approaching reformation.” Once back in Bristol, Terrill reported, “the heads and minds of many of the members were filled with controversies, insomuch that every meeting almost was filled with disputes and debates: [so] that they were in great confusion, and but little order. Some of them [were] against ordinances, as having got above them, or pleading that while the church of Christ was in her wilderness state they should not use them, and so took liberty to forbear them.” They formed another covenant, “leaveing those that sucked in Libertisme Notions to forbear.”19

  At their meetings, “there was liberty for any brother, and for any sister by a brother, to propose his doubt of, or their desire of understanding, any portion of scripture.” The rest of the congregation would speak “one by one and then be silent, and another speak, and so a third.” It was a creative moment in world history, when democracy was practiced directly; these were some of its first rules. Laurence Clarkson wrote at about this time, 1647, “Who are the oppressors but the Nobility and Gentry; and who are oppressed, if not the Yeoman, the Farmer, the Tradesman and the Labourer? then consider, have you not chosen oppressors to redeeme you from oppression?. . . your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity; yea, in brief, your honoring of them, dishonoreth the communality. . . . Unlord those that are lorded by you.”20 The Broadmead assembly hired Nathaniel Angello to minister to its members but soon removed him for his too-great fondness for music and clothes. Walter Craddock, the itinerant antinomian, came next: he preached upon the text “All things are lawful for me” (1 Corinthians 10:23), asserting that “now the day was breaking out after a long night, and light was coming every day more than other; and there were many Gospel priviledges, and of the new Jerusalem that we should then enjoy.” Craddock welcomed drunkards and adulterers into his gatherings; he encouraged preaching by “fishermen, poor men, and women sometimes.”21 In 1648, preaching on “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), he said, “We are not sent to get Galley-slaves to the Oares.” He believed that the simplest people commonly understood the Gospel the best. He wrote:

  I have seen poore women in the mountaines of Wales . . . they have been so poor that when they have come to a house to beg a little whey or butter-milke, they have been faine to beg the loane of a pot, or a dish to put it in. So . . . we cannot carry one graine of grace home, unlesse God give us spirituall buckets. As that woman said, John 4, Here is water, but where is the bucket to draw? So God may say, thou wantest grace, but where is thy bucket? saith the humble soul, Lord I have none, thou must both give the water and lend the bucket to carry it home.22

  This is the exegesis of the poor by the poor for the poor. In 1648, some eight hundred itinerant Welsh ministers were preaching; the Vagrancy Act was passed specifically against them.23

  In Terrill’s account, Francis comprehends the powerlessness that might allow the spirited, kidnapped souls of Bristol to be cast nearly anywhere. She asks a sister in the congregation to carry her message to the whole assembly, not to “loose ye glory of God in their families, neighbourhoods or places where God casts them.” She recognizes that a neighborhood may be international, a notion of shipmates, a family of oceanic passages. Francis understands community without propinquity. For her, neighborhood is the congregation whose existence she has nurtured in deep and unforgettable ways. She would have known about slavery and the struggle against slavery. On May Day 1638, for instance, the first African slave rebellion in English history took place on Providence Island. From the wharves, Francis would have brought Atlantic news to her congregation, recounting stories of the terrors: the man-trade at Elmina Castle, the servants’ revolt in Barbados, the grinding sugar mills of Suriname, or the repression of the Boston antinomians. We do not know where Francis lived before Bristol. Was she, like Tituba of Salem in the 1690s, from Barbados? Was she from Suriname, where Aphra Behn, the novelist and playwright, passed her childhood at this time? Had she been in Boston at the time of the first legal challenge to the African slave trade? The glory of God was merely the last of her exhortations; it would be interesting to know the others.24

  GLORY AND NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS

  Terrill’s paragraph concludes with a quotation in Greek. The title page of the Records is likewise in Greek, while the page headers alternate between Greek and Hebrew. Terrill’s use of Greek calls attention to an important debate. Philology of this kind was characteristic of Protestantism. Does the quoting of Greek mask a murky purpose? Francis, Terrill asserts, is an example (he calls her an experiment) who proves Scripture, rather than the opposite, a recipient of the Bible’s spiritual aid. If she emphasizes the Spirit, he emphasizes the Letter. Terrill thus subverts, or even contradicts, Francis’s message. What is that message? and why does Terrill subvert it? Francis is associated in the text with two biblical ideas, one her own (“the glory of God”) and the other, apparently, Terrill’s (“God is no respecter of faces”). What did these signify in the midst of revolutionary civil war in England? Why should they be remembered?

  Three primary meanings of glory may be distinguished in the Scriptures. First, found in Ezekiel and Isaiah, is an external meaning, an atmospheric sense, with secondary figures such as seraphim and cherubim surrounding the numinous Jahweh. We detect this meaning in the architecture and music of the mercantilist or Baroque state, from the Palladian Whitehall to Wren’s “glorious” Saint Paul’s—resplendence, beauty, and majesty expressed in Portland stone. This was the glory of Archbishop Laud, a looking-up, glory from the top down. It was not for Francis, but two other meanings of glory were. One of these emerged in three key episodes in the Gospels describing the life of Jesus, in which glory descended to Earth: when the shepherds kept watch at the birth of Jesus; at the Transfiguration (the “Son of man shall come in glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works” [Matthew 16:27]); and during the last days in Jerusalem, when J
esus describes the end of the world. Glory was part of eschatology, the last things; it was also a time of justice. Another meaning of glory originated in the book of John and was developed in Paul’s letters. Here glory and glorification were related to the promise of an end to bondage (Romans 8:15–17) and to an interior glory that came down to Earth and entered the spirit of the children of God. It was within: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Glory was democratized; it became available to all.

  Francis would have agreed with the Digger Gerrard Winstanley when he wrote, “The glory of Israel’s Commonwealth is this, They had no Beggar among them.” He explained: “What glory soever you shall be capable of to see with your own eyes or hear with your ears, it is but the breakings forth of that glorious power that is seated within for the glory of the Father is not without him.”25 Lodovick Muggleton urged in 1658, “You must not imagine the kingdom of glory to be in a global condition, as this world is. . . . The world to come is a boundless kingdom, that lieth all open.”26 In the 1640s glory was associated with the destruction of Babylon and the building of Zion, or the New Jerusalem. The historical actors, the destroyers and the builders, were often considered to be “the poorest and the meanest,” the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Glory signified the transcendental present—not a passive waiting for a future in Heaven but actions, to be taken by the dispossessed, to create Heaven here on Earth. Glory appeared through devout expression that mediated between holy text and subjective experience. It might sound like groaning, howling, screeching, or screams of pain, but it had the power to transform persons.27 Hence it was alarming to authority, as explained by Thomas Hobbes: “Glory, or internal gloriation or triumph of the mind, is the passion which proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our own power above the power of him that contendeth with us.” Ostentation in words and insolence in action were its signs. The discourse of glory among the humble assemblies of the 1640s was synonymous with audacity and originality.28 Glorying symbolized historical agency.

  These ideas appeared in an important sermon delivered and published by Hanserd Knollys, “A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory” (1641), on the Revelation text “And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying: Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.” Babylon falls and glory rises. There “shall be abundance of glorious prophecies fulfilled, and glorious promises accomplished.” The “poorest and meanest of all” were called to glorious revolutionary action: “Blessed is he that dasheth the brats of Babylon against the stones.” Similar ideas were expressed after the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, which ended the first civil war, giving victory to the New Model Army of the Puritans and Parliament. Thomas Collier, a Baptist, preached a sermon at army headquarters at Putney, on September 29, 1647, on Isaiah’s text “Behold I create new heavens, and a new earth.” God’s glory, explained Collier, appeared on Earth as the saints built a New Jerusalem, where the lion and the lamb would lie down together. “The glory of this new creation . . . consists in the execution of righteousness, justice and mercy, without respect of persons. It is to undo every yoke.”29 Glory lay, he preached, in the struggle against slavery.

  Collier was not alone in connecting glory with the second idea associated with Francis, that God is no respecter of persons, or, in Terrill’s translation, “no respecter of faces.” The phrase was an old one (Nashe had used it in 1594 in noting that the rebels of the German peasant revolt were as poor and base in trades as the twelve apostles), but it did not become part of the English Bible until it was incorporated in the authorized version of 1611 How, we must ask, may persons be respected? By ethnicity, by nation, by race, by gender, and by class. Charles I avowed, “For the hazards of war are equal, nor doth the cannon know any respect for persons.”30 In the Americas, Captain Underhill justified the slaughter of six to seven hundred Pequot men, women, and children at Fort Mystic, Connecticut, in 1637 by invoking his God: “He hath no respect of persons.”31 The phrase thus had martial as well as egalitarian connotations, which lent it to wide use in the revolution. It is a phrase of levelling. In the quotes above, the levelling is of the dead; in contrast, it is its association with economic and social justice, or the levelling of the living, that is significant for us.

  The Diggers and the Ranters associated glory with the levelling of the living. To quote from the Digger manifesto, The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced (1649), the desired end was

  that we may work in righteousness, and lay the foundation of making the earth a common treasure for all, both rich and poor. That every one that is born in the land may be fed by the earth, his mother that brought him forth, according to the reason that rules in the creation, not enclosing any part into any particular land, but all as one man working together, and feeding together as sons of one father, members of one family; not one lording over another, but all looking upon each other as equals in creation. So that our Maker may be glorified in the work of his own hands, and that every one may see he is no respecter of persons, but equally loves his whole creation, and hates nothing but the serpent. Which is covetousness. [emphasis added]

  It was a fundamental concept for Winstanley; indeed, it was the “spirit of the whole creation.”32 The Ranters, for their part, published a pamphlet entitled A Justification of the Mad Crew (1650), “a true Testimony of that sweet and unspeakable Joy and everlasting glory that dwels in and breaks out.” He who would know God must let his own glory break out, the pamphlet held. Glory kept low company, “among the rogues, theeves, whoremasters, and base persons of the world.” As no respecter of persons, God “pulleth down the mighty from their Throne, and sets up men of low degree.” God’s refusal to respect persons thus constituted a kind of internationale of glory: “He is in England, France, and Turkey,” and therefore “the people in England, France, and Turkey [must become] one people and one body, for where the one lives there liveth the other also.” In the geographic terminology of the seventeenth century, “Turkey” signified both the religion Islam and the continent Africa. A person such as Francis was specifically included. “Here glory lyeth, and is concealed to the most of men, it is coming forth to some, peeping through the lattis, and looking behind the wall; it is above board to others, well, what is it?” It was no respecter of persons; rather,

  he beholds all things and persons, with the same and in the same purity, with and in the same glory, all perfect in him, compleat in him, righteous in him, children of pleasure in him: He sees dancing, lying with one another, kissing pure and perfect in him; He loves all with an everlasting love, the thief that goes to the Gallows as well as the Judge that condemns him, and the Judge with a love of and from eternity as well as the thief.

  It is significant that Terrill forsook the familiar egalitarianism of the authorized version of the Bible by altering “persons” to “faces.” His translation distances him and his church from some revolutionary meanings of the phrase. “Face,” in this context, suggests something superficial, a mask; and in this case, the mask is that of a “blackamore.” The translation calls attention to skin color. These “dyeing words of a Blackmoore” were “fit for a White heart to store,” sighed Terrill, and he quotes the Greek words of Acts 10:34. His readers would have known the biblical context. The story was important to the growth of Christianity since it told of the first baptism of a non-Jew. Cornelius, a God-fearing man but a Roman or Gentile, was sent in a vision to visit Peter, before whom he prostrated himself. Peter welcomed him, saying, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.” Francis thus stood for Cornelius, and Terrill for Peter. The analogy points to the universalism of early Christianity and the English Revolution and to their contribution to the doctrine of human solidarity. James Nayler asked of this decisive biblical incident: “Had Cornelius sufficient light within him before Peter preach
ed unto him? Answer: Jesus came to open blind eyes, not to give them eyes.” Terrill’s choice of words attenuates this meaning; in a moment we shall see why.33

  The last part of Terrill’s passage concerning Francis consists not so much of her own testimony as of the evidence of others, and in this case that evidence is the prominence and the devotion of the elder brethren of the church who carried her to the grave. The revolutionary implications of the idea associated with Francis help us to understand why Terrill felt the need to sandwich her words between the repetitive bona fides of her sincerity on one side of her prophetic exhortation and the elders, the brethren, the devout, as her pallbearers on the other. He precedes his discussion of Francis with a digression of seven or eight pages on John Canne, which is an astonishing interpolation because the latter came to Bristol in 1648, not in 1640–41, as Terrill implies. Why did Terrill make this interpolation? Canne was the scion of the ruling Bristol oligarchy, who had great influence within the Puritan movement (a relative held the contract for the transportation of Scottish and Irish prisoners to slavery in the plantations).34 He had been the leader of an independent church in Amsterdam from 1630 to 1647, he was a major publisher of English puritanism (his fully cross-referenced Bible of 1647 was authoritative), and after his return to England in 1649 he attacked the Levellers and wielded influence with the Council of State. Terrill could not have chosen a more learned, more respected Puritan to indicate the respectability of Baptist separation. Terrill presents Canne as a confident teacher whose Twelve Steps enabled the congregation to separate under an iron rod of rule. Terrill himself preached a deep baptism by immersion, not dipping or sprinkling; the trick, however, was to avoid any suspicion of the anabaptism of a century earlier, during the German peasant revolt, when both private property and the patriarchal family had been overthrown. Not only could Canne show how the German Anabaptists had taken “some very irregular actions,” he was an opponent of the Levellers. Thus, when Terrill misdates the leadership of Canne, so that Broadmead will appear to have been a Particular Baptist congregation from the beginning, the purpose of the misdating is not merely to antedate the denominational origin but also to conceal the antinomianism, or “libertism,” of the period 1641–49. The interpolation seems to prove the disciplined respectability of Baptist separation, thus protecting the church in the 1670s and 1680s. It is part of the revision of history that mutes Francis.