The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Nayler was thus silenced, and many others were meant to hear the message of terror. Thousands of Protestant radicals were imprisoned; others were shipped overseas. The Quakers and the Muggletonians rewrote their own histories during the 1660s and 1670s, deradicalizing their movements and suppressing the voices of prophets and antinomians.55 Even Nathaniel Angello, Broadmead’s first minister, found preferment and joined the mocking chorus against Nayler, publishing an allegorical romance called Bentivoglio and Urania.56 Nayler, a false prophet, induced “Enthusiastical Fury” and was associated with arson, superstition, sexuality, and deceit. He remained an object of vicious fun for years. For instance, in Tom Brown’s Letters from the Dead to the Living (1702), Nayler is imagined in hell, where amid “black spiritual janizaries” and “immortal negroes” Lucifer dresses him up “in a rainbow-coloured coat,” the Renaissance symbol of the fool, called the motley. Nayler dines with hungry mechanics on a meal of scorpions, West Indian iguanas, shovel-nosed sharks, and a leviathan. Such savage ridicule, like the theories of monstrosity of Francis Bacon and Thomas Edwards, must be read with a “Satanic light” in order to see the many heads of the hydra—the sailors, clowns, Africans, mechanics, and radical sectaries.

  Meanwhile, like “new age” entrepreneurs, some Baptists and Quakers began to prosper, acquiring wealth overseas, particularly in Ireland and the Caribbean. George Bishop, a Bristol Quaker who implied tyrannicide at the Putney Debates of 1647, was by 1662 offering the consolation of the afterlife for the sufferings of this one.57 William Kiffìn, a former fellow apprentice of Leveller John Lilburne and himself a powerful figure in English Baptist circles, who banished Elizabeth Poole from the congregation for opposing capital punishment for Charles Stuart, offered the restored king a gift of ten thousand pounds. Edward Terrill himself had become involved in many aspects of the sugar industry in Barbados, as a money-scrivener, a broker, a warehouseman, a creditor, a refiner, and a planter. His son, William, managed a family plantation in Barbados, Cabbage Tree Hall, and married Rebecca, heiress to two other plantations. On “A Topographical Description and Admeasurement of the Yland of Barbados in the West Indies with the M[aste]rs Names of the Severall Plantacons,” published in 1657, Terrill’s name appears three times adjacent to little plantation symbols.58 His descendants would comprise one of the leading families in the eighteenth-century planter elite.59

  We now may begin to understand the repressive anxiety within Terrill’s text. At one glorious time his church had been part of a movement opposed to slavery, but the history of that era was written during a different, wicked time, after slavery had become the basis of prosperity for the same church. Could these Bristol Baptists remain at once devout Christians and eager slave traders? What solution would they find to this problem? The answer lies partly in Terrill’s very anxiety, for it was racism that would begin to provide these consciences with a solution.60 We see such race consciousness grow and flourish in the person of another radical Baptist, John Bunyan.

  A tinker’s son born in an open-field village, Bunyan was a revolutionary soldier who in 1644 took part in the siege of Leicester.61 He was a roarer, ranter, swearer, and bell-ringer himself, affected by the ideas of the Ranters, Diggers, and Levellers before being converted by a poor woman, which led him to preaching, the Baptist Church, and jail. After the revolution, Bunyan began to look back on a period that was revolutionary, hopeful, millenarian. In his best-known allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, his pilgrim, named Christian, encounters “a man black of flesh” who is a false apostle, “a man that flattereth his Neighbour [and] spreadeth a Net for his feet.” He shows a false way to the Celestial City. After this encounter Christian converses with Hope, who has found “Rioting, Revelling, Drinking, Swearing, Lying, Uncleanliness, Sabbath-breaking and what not” at Vanity Fair. Bunyan thus associates the African with the activities of the Ranters, or of his own youth. Indeed, Hope says, “All our righteousness are as filthy rags, by the works of the Law no man shall be justified.” This kind of antinomianism survived in English Dissent, but here Bunyan blames the victim: it is true that the riches of the time (Vanity Fair) were accumulated by the labors of slaves who were more and more African, but it is untrue that the slaves themselves were responsible for the vanity that Bunyan so profoundly denounces. This is what Marcus Garvey was able to point out in his commentary on Pilgrim’s Progress.

  Map of Barbados with detail of Terrill plantations. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.

  Christiana, Christian’s wife, meets another black man who symbolizes “the vile Person” who can never be washed clean. One of Bunyan’s children’s poems taught a racialized theology in which Moses, “a fair and comely man,” was contrasted with his wife, “a swarthy Æthiopian.” Bunyan wrote The Holy War (1682) as an allegory, based on his experiences as a soldier during the 1640s. It begins, “Well, upon a time there was one Diabolus, a mighty Gyant, made an assault upon this famous Town of Mansoul, to take it, and make it his own habitation. This Gyant was King of the Blacks or Negroes, and most raving Prince he was.” Here Bunyan inverts the historical truth, pretending that Africans assaulted European Christendom rather than the reverse. Propaganda could not tell a greater lie: white is black, and black is white. It illustrates the value of the warning sounded by the African American theologian James Cone: “Underneath the European language of freedom and equality there is slavery and death.”62

  DEVILS BLACK AND WHITE

  At the time when Francis reminded all to heed the glory of God, it was not at all clear that liberal capitalism would be created; that the sugar plantation and the Atlantic slave trade would become platforms of economic growth; that enclosed private property would become the principle of land tenure; that white supremacy would become the theory of accounting for ethnic differences; or even that the congregation of multitudes with so many different ideas would become a Baptist Church. These developments were not inevitable; they were all contested, and many of the ideas that Francis stood for were defeated. This was revolution and counterrevolution. And yet Francis and her ideas have survived. The revolutionary notion of glory reappeared more than a century and half later, at another moment of counterrevolution, when Shelley wrote his hymn to freedom:

  Men of England, heirs of Glory,

  Heroes of unwritten story,

  Nurslings of one mighty Mother,

  Hopes of her, and one another

  Rise like Lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number,

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you—

  Ye are many—they are few.

  Here glory has gender and national connotations foreign to the fragment left by Francis. Nevertheless, alluding to Shelley and seeking to understand the English radical tradition, Edward Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), “It is above all in Bunyan that we find the slumbering Radicalism which was preserved through the eighteenth century and which breaks out again and again in the nineteenth.” Pilgrim’s Progress contributed “most to the stock of ideas and attitudes which make up the raw material of the movement from 1790 [to] 1850.” Written in prison during the repression of the 1660s, bitter toward the idle rich and comforting in its faith, Pilgrim’s Progress remains an amusing, inspirational testament of survival and defeat. As Bunyan said of himself,

  He fell suddenly into an Allegory

  About their Journey, and the way to Glory.

  In an Atlanta penitentiary, Marcus Garvey wrote Vanity Fair (1926), taking his title from Pilgrim’s Progress, though not his subtitle, The Tragedy of White Man’s Justice. Garvey denounced racism, saying, once again, “God is no respecter of persons.” It took a Jamaican, a pan-Africanist indeed, to rediscover the radical tradition in a way that omitted Bunyan’s racialism yet retained a full measure of his individualism and uplift.63

  “Soon fugitives will come a
nd tell you their news by word of mouth. At once you will recover the power of speech and speak with the fugitives; you will no longer be dumb” (Ezekiel 24:26–27): something like this happened in England between 1645 and 1649. Proletarians of different provenance were cast together and began to realize that together they could do more than they could separately. This is the dynamic that Francis helped to set in motion, and certainly Dinah, too, as she and Sara Wight discovered the story of deliverance from bondage. A Boston antinomian, a Yorkshire plowman, “a Moor born out of England,” and mechanic preachers met and began to talk. Of course such conversations had been going on for years, as when political and common prisoners rioted in Elizabethan prisons, and they would continue after 1649, in the jail cell where Naylor was quartered with pirates, or in Newgate, where the Muggletonians found protection from the condemned highwaymen (“No, said I, it is not for Prisoners to complain of Prisoners”).64 The most remarkable pamphlet of the Diggers was entitled A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. It called for equal rights, free elections, a commonwealth, and a just portion for every person. Its subtitle suggested that Diggers had a local/global consciousness, for the light found in Buckinghamshire led to A Discovery of The Main Grounds and Original Causes of all the Slavery in the World, but chiefly in England (1648).

  “In sanctification [black women] have located a power that has made possible survival and autonomous action when all other means fail,” Nell Painter has observed.65 That Terrill did not omit mention of Francis altogether is evidence that she possessed an undeniable spiritual power. How that power would be remembered was determined first by the emergence of eloquent new voices that were raised against Atlantic slavery between 1645 and 1649, and second by the silencing of those voices at the hands of Cromwell and the Restoration, which assured the triumph of racialized slavery. Yet even the opponents of slavery, such as Sara Wight and John Saltmarsh, expressed their views in racialized imagery. The same was true of the anonymous author of Tyranipocrit Discovered (1649), who denounced the rich, the powerful, and the propertied; inveighed bitterly against capital punishment; advocated communism; and attacked slavery throughout the world.66 He groped toward an understanding of the complexity of class rule, seeking to understand its moments of both force and consent. Like Bunyan, he used allegory. Satan had officiated at a marriage union between Tyranny and Hypocrisy, he wrote; one was figured as a black devil, the others as a white one:

  My black children, which are whores, and knaves, gluttons, drunkards, swearers, Sabbath-breakers, artlesse theeves, and all poor prophane persons, they shall bee all your slaves and wait and attend on Tyranipocrit, and his friends, and you may freely use, and abuse them at your pleasures, for these, although they bee my children, yet they are so unruly, and out of order, that I know not almost how to trust them. . . .

  O thou white devil, I would faine uncase thee, and discover thy vile practises, that all men may see and know that thou art an ugly, odious devil, I mean thou that wilt winne honour by thy impious practises, thou that hast God in thy mouth, but wilt not cast the devil out of thy heart, thou that commandest and teachest others to doe that good which thou praisest in thy mouth, and hatest in thy heart: thou that bindest heavy burdens, and layest them on other mens shoulders, but wilt not touch them thy selfe with one of thy fingers: O it is thou that stealest with a high hand, and yet with an impudent face, thou wilt outface the Law.

  Francis embodied, to use the terms of Francis Bacon, three heads of the hydra: she was an Anabaptist, she was an independent woman, and she was a “West Indian.” To emphasize these aspects of her is not, of course, to qualify her as a swarm or rout deserving of extermination, but on the contrary to help us recognize her as a fellow creature and as an Atlantean proletarian. She was not a monster, even though the attempt to erase the message she carried only ensured its multiplication, like the hydra’s heads. It is impossible to accept her as the “foul little ugly Ethiop” who stained the immaculate New Atlantis, because in the actual Atlantic she brought an exceptional purity of word and intention. Those who held the view that God was no respecter of persons were themselves deeply disrespected during and after the political defeat of the English Revolution, particularly the women, who were thought by capitalist patriarchy to be good for nothing but breeding. Since no mention is made of children at either her deathbed or her funeral, we may assume that Francis was a single woman, whose conception of family did not include the breeding of children, especially not as future slaves or labor power. She became the means of conveying to future generations on both sides of the Atlantic mountains67 the message that God is a respecter of neither persons nor faces. Virginia Woolf asserted “the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.”68 Not to respect persons was to find unacceptable the power relations of hierarchy based on class, gender, or race. Francis utterly confounded all three. The glorifying, disrespecting presence of the multiple figures of the Atlantic proletariat in the English Revolution can no longer be denied.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Divarication of the Putney Debates

  For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under;. . . I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no, that should doubt of such things.

  —Colonel Thomas Rainborough, The Putney Debates (1647)

  AS DOROTHY HAZZARD and her band of Broadmead believers made their way to London during the mid-1640s, they crossed the river Thames at the village of Putney. With an alluvial plain to the north and hills to the south, Putney was a meeting place for travelers, as well as for commoners, household servants, market gardeners, and river workers such as the watermen, ferrymen, and fishermen who lived there. “Putney appears to have been at all times a considerable thoroughfare,” explained Daniel Lysons, the parish incumbent and historian of the 1790s. “It was usual formerly for persons traveling from London to many parts of the West of England, to proceed as far as this place by water.”1

  If Hazzard crossed the Thames at Putney in the autumn of 1647 on her return to Bristol, she would have seen the New Model Army encamped on the heath, ordered there by Oliver Cromwell to occupy strategic ground between the king at Hampton Palace and Parliament in Westminster. The soldiers had won great victories but now were restive, mutinous, and organized to advance their own interests. They wanted their wages, they wanted freedom from impressment, and they wanted provision for the wounded, widows, and orphans. They did not want to go to Ireland. Only a few months before, petitioning troops had wondered, “Have the Souldiers only, who have been Instruments to recover the lost Liberties of the Nation, fought themselves into Slavery?” They considered themselves to be “free commoners of England drawn together and continued in arms in judgment and conscience for defence of their own and the people’s right and liberties.” They had advocated an end to slavery through the biblical jubilee, saying, “Ye may be free if ye will, be free now and ever, now or never, this is the seventh year, the year of jubilee.” They had sidestepped General Thomas Fairfax and elected “agitators” to represent their interests. Fairfax had tried to suppress a soldier’s petitions for wages but ultimately failed: “This was only as cutting off a Hydra’s Head,” he wrote, “for they began again, not so near the Head-Quarters, but in more remote Corners of the Army.” Soon they presented their petition to a highly displeased Parliament.2 Dan Wolfe writes, “The genius of war is audacious action, that of democracy, persuasion, tentative judgment, humility of mind.” These were all in balance at Putney.3

  Crossing at Putney in late October or early November, the Broadmead group may have passed Saint Mary’s church at the time of the crucial
debates between Cromwell, leading the officers of the army, on the one hand, and the agitators, representing the rank and file, on the other. The latter sat around the communion table of Saint Mary’s, defiantly keeping their hats on as they discussed the future of England, indeed the very meaning of “England.” The most powerful advocate for the common soldier at the Putney Debates was Thomas Rainborough, a member of a maritime family and a man of the sea himself. He had served in the navy until 1643, when he took a command in the Parliamentary army and fought bravely at Naseby, Sherburne, Oxford, Worcester, and Bristol, where we earlier saw him. The most radical of the leading officers in the New Model Army, he was affiliated with rank-and-file militancy and with soldiers who had returned to England from America to wage war against the king. He had opened London Bridge to the sectaries in the crisis of August 1647. He was also the virtual leader of the Levellers, perhaps the first political party of any kind and certainly the first democratic one, advocating law in the English language (proceedings had up to then been in Latin), the right to call witnesses, the right to a speedy trial, equality under the law, no impressment, religious toleration, jury trials, no double jeopardy, the right to confront accusers, and the abolition of capital punishment for theft. He emphasized the sovereignty and rights of “the poorest he that is in England,” and was aware of the “many scufflings between the honest men of England and those who have tyrannized over them.” One of these scufflings concerned the denial of access to the commons, which to Rainborough was the “greatest tyranny that was thought of in the world.” The gentry “turned the poor men out of doors”—that is, evicted them. Defending the popular right to the commons and the subsistence they afforded, Rainborough claimed that “God hath set down that thing as to propriety with this law of his, Thou shalt not steal.”4