The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Commonism and slavery defined the debate at Putney. On the other side was Henry Ireton, the learned and smoothly confident spokesman for the grandees and gentry. He, like Rainborough, was an active soldier, having fought at Naseby, Newbury, Gainsborough, Edgehill, and Bristol. After the capitulation of Oxford he married Cromwell’s daughter. In the debates he admitted frankly, “All the main thing I speak for, is because I would have an eye to property.” He took offense at Rainborough’s words about “the poorest he that is in England,” understanding clearly that they applied to people such as Francis, who were not English. Quoting the Mosaic Law to prop up the laws and authorities Rainborough attacked, he advised the assembled soldiers and indeed the entire nation, “Honour thy father and mother,” a maxim that “doth extend to . . . our governours.” Rainborough immediately perceived Ireton’s words as an argument for upper-class authority, whether kingly or Parliamentary, and answered impatiently, “The great dispute is, who is a right father and a right mother?” Since “the people of England . . . have not voices in the choosing of their fathers and mothers—they are not bound to that commandment.” His view paralleled that of Winstanley, for whom the father was the spirit of the community and the mother was the Earth. Colonel Nathaniel Rich meanwhile expressed the fear that if the propertyless four fifths of the kingdom voted, they might legislate “that there shall be an equality of goods and estates.” Rainborough explained the corollary: if only rich men ruled, then “the one part shall make hewers of wood and drawers of water of the other [four], and so the greatest part of the nation be enslaved.”

  Putney thus became not only a geographic but a historical crossroads, one that has been interpreted in many ways over the last century. Three observations may be made here about the major interpretations. First, following the German socialist Edouard Bernstein, who used Putney to move revolutionary Marxism toward social democracy, one group of interpreters emphasized the origins of a broader franchise and citizenship in the debates of 1647. The project was parliamentary democracy; its subject was the respectable citizen worker.5 Second, in an hour of looming military defeat, on May Day, 1942, Aneurin Bevan, a Labour M. P. and future founder of the national health service, published an article under the name “Thomas Rainborough,” which helped to initiate the wartime political discussion that culminated in the Labour Party’s victory in 1945. The Putney Debates also held great meaning for British soldiers, including Edward Thompson, who carried in his knapsack a copy of the Handbook of Freedom (1939), in which Edgell Rickword and Jack Lindsay wrote, “It will be noticed how the word ‘common’ and its derivatives, now so strangely altered in drawing-room usage, appear and re-appear like a theme throughout the centuries. It was for the once vast common lands that the peasants took up arms; it was as the ‘true commons’ that they spoke of themselves when they assembled, and it was the aspiration of men not corrupted by petty proprietorship ‘that all things should be in common.’”6 Bevan summarized the debates in a single brilliant chiasmus of two breaths: “Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy.” Bevan’s project was the industrial welfare state; its subject was the industrial worker.7 Third, in September 1945 Ras Tefari Makonnen hosted the Pan-African Congress in Manchester. The delegates resolved, “We are unwilling to starve any longer while doing the world’s drudgery.” Among the independence seekers such as Nkrumah and Kenyatta were students of the Putney Debates, notably C. L. R. James, who saw their significance within the history of the struggle against slavery and empire.8 In this case poverty had no democracy to use in attacking property. The project of James and others was national liberation; the subject was the drudge worker.

  Meeting of the General Council of the Army, with agitators at right, 1647. Thomason Tracts E409/25, by permission of the British Library.

  The Putney Debates, ever patient of interpretation, have thus been useful to struggles for the vote, the welfare state, and colonial liberation.9 But there is more. We find two neglected themes: the struggle for the commons and the struggle against slavery. The author of A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire wrote that “man, following his sensuality, became an encloser, so that all the land was enclosed in a few mercenary hands and all the rest made their slaves.” The fork in the road at Putney pointed to either a future with the commons and without slavery, or to one with slavery and without the commons. The commons were a reality, not pie in the sky.

  As soldiers at Putney gathered wood for their campfire, they knew that the debates had relevance to all commoners. Those in Putney, for example, enjoyed common pasture, furze, turf, gravel, underwood, and stones, as well as river resources of smelt, salmon, flounder, shad, roach, dace, barbel, eel, and gudgeon. The debates had special urgency for those affected by the decision of Charles I in 1637 to enclose 236 acres of wastelands between Hampton Court and Richmond for a hunting park. Clarendon, the royalist, noted that the attack on common rights “increased the murmur and noise of the people,” which would eventually grow into a revolutionary clamor and bring down a succession of tyrants: Archbishop Laud, Lord Strafford, and King Charles I. The plunder of the Putney estate of his patron probably confirmed in a young Thomas Hobbes the love of private property and the loathing of the commons that he passed on to his pupil, the future Charles II.10

  Colonel Thomas Rainborough, Putney debater. Thomason Tracts, by permission of the British Library.

  Rainborough spoke with angry eloquence against slavery. For slavery, too, was a reality. As a military man, Rainborough was especially concerned about soldiers and sailors. “I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while?” he asked. “He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.” He added, with bitter sarcasm, “We do find in all presses that go forth none must be pressed that are freehold men. When these gentlemen fall out among themselves they shall press the poor scrubs to come and kill [one another for] them.” Rainborough knew whereof he spoke. He had recruited soldiers among the mobility and ’prentices in St. Giles’s—in-the-Fields, a London parish that also contained a depot for children spirited to the West Indies. As a naval officer he had seen sailors resist impressment, and as a Leveller he knew that their resistance had registered in the Agreement of the People, a leveller’s attempt to provide a written constitution. They had warned that “the matter of impresting and constraining any of us to serve in the wars is against our freedom” and sworn that they would resist “slavish condition.” Impressment was slavery.11

  Another kind of slavery was being practiced a few miles downriver from Putney. Hardly a ship sailed for the West Indies, said a Parliamentary ordinance of 1643, without a cargo of the spirited. A specialist in the Virginia trade wrote, “The Servants are taken up by such men as we here call Spirits, and by them put into Cookes houses about Saint Katherines, where being once entred, are kept Prisoners untill a Mastter fetches them off; and they lye at charges in these places a moneth or more, before they are taken away when the Ship is ready, the Spirits charges and the Cooke for dieting paid, they are Shipped” to America. A precise vocabulary attended the practice: to “nab” was to take a person into custody; to “kidnap” was to seize a child; to “spirit” was to abduct and carry a person overseas; to “barbados” was to abduct someone and ship him or her to Barbados; and to “trepan” was to entrap or ensnare a person for labor. These slang terms came into existence in the 1640s and 1650s, but not without opposition: “Malitious tongues ha’s impaired it much: For it hath beene a constant report amongst the ordinaries sort of people, That those servants who are sent to Virginia, are sold as slaves.”12 As late as 1660 ordinary parents pitifully followed ships carrying their children to the West Indies down river to Gravesend, “cryinge and mourninge for Redemption from their Slavery.”13

  Rainborough also spoke out against African slavery, both the slavery of Europeans imprisoned in North Africa and that of Africans im
prisoned for sale in the Americas. Rainborough’s father, William, had led a naval blockade of eight ships against Sallé in North Africa in 1637; he had rescued 339 prisoners and returned to London in triumph. The Grand Remonstrance presented to the king in 1641 complained of the thousands of sailors lost to slavery. Richard Overton, the Leveller pamphleteer, saw a continuum of miserable slavery extending from the “aged, sick and crippled, begging your halfe-penny Charities,” through those in naval vessels and “the poore; your hunger-starved bretheren” and “those whom your owne unjuste Lawes hold captive in your owne Prisons,” to, finally, the “Gaily-slave in Turkie or Argiere.”14 Rainborough was concerned with the enslavement not only of English people; the signet ring he wore on his finger bore the image of “a Moor’s head proper, wreathed argent, bearded sable.” His official identity and the authority of his written word were thus represented by a symbol of liberation from slavery and an image of an African.

  When Rainborough inveighed against slavery, he included mancipation of several kinds: the practice of impressment, spiriting or kidnapping to the Americas, the capture for forced labor of English people in West and North Africa, and the enslavement of Africans. Agitation against slavery was an essential element in the publications and practices of the Levellers. They fought to abolish slavery. What was at issue, then, was not a rhetorical abstraction of political propaganda, but something real, experienced, suffered, and known. A rough definition of slavery at the time would include these features: it began in an act of expropriation and terror; it affected children and young people particularly; it compelled violent exploitation; and more often than not, it ended in death. The hewers and drawers, or the laboring subjects of the Atlantic economy, met this definition in an era well before race or ethnicity came to define slavery.

  Thomas Rainborough would not survive the English Revolution. He was assassinated by a royalist raiding party in 1648, to the grief of thousands of people who poured into the streets of London for his funeral. Yet what he stood for at Putney would flow down the Thames, where a hundred thousand seamen, watermen, and bargemen linked England to the Atlantic hydrographic system. For Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, rivers provided an image of freedom; for James Joyce, the smithy of the Irish soul, rivers transmitted languages. A recent student of rivers writes, “They are forever picking up solid matter in one place and putting it down in another.”15 Rivers divaricate. From Putney, after 1647, would flow the ideas and practices of both freedom and slavery. A man, woman, or child might there embark upon a boat and, apart from transfers to other types of vessels, not disembark until reaching the harsh estuarial waters of the Shannon or the Liffey (Ireland); Bridgetown or Port Royal (the Caribbean); the Gambia or the Niger (West Africa); the Chesapeake or the Potomac (Virginia).16

  NAPLES, 1647

  On July 7, 1647, a Neopolitan fisherman named Masaniello led a protest by the market women, carters, porters, sailors, fishermen, weavers, silk winders, and all the other poor, or lazzaroni, of the second- or third-largest city in Europe.17 The rebellion began in the marketplace of Naples, where producers rural and urban discovered that the Spanish viceroy had levied a new gabelle, or tax, on the city’s fabled fruit (Goethe believed that the Neapolitans had invented lemonade).18 The rebels turned the world upside down: galley oarsmen became captains, students were given books, prisons were opened, and tax records were burned. Nobles were forbidden to wear expensive garments, while their palaces were marked for destruction and their furnishings burned in the streets. “These Goods are got out of our Heart’s Blood; and as they burn, so ought the Souls and Bodies of those Blood-suckers who own them, to fry in the Fire of Hell,” cried one of the insurgents.19 The rebels decreed that anyone caught looting might be executed, so “that all the World may know, we have not enterpris’d this businesse to enrich ourselves but to vindicate the common liberty.” The price of bread fell to rates consistent with a moral economy. This was the essence of the revolt, which Masaniello expressed in “savage eloquence.” His preferred figure of speech, however, was not to be found in the rhetorical handbooks of the Renaissance; rather, it was the price list: “Look ye here, my Lads, how we are ridden, Gabel upon Gabel, 36 Ounces the Loaf of Bread, 22 the Pound of Cheese,” et cetera, et cetera. “Are these things to be endured? No, my Boys; Get my Words by Heart, and sound them thro’ every Street of the City.”

  Although it lasted only ten days, the revolt of Naples in July 1647 marked the first time that the proletariat of any European city seized power and governed alone. Michelangelo Cerquozzi, the baroque painter, recognized the gravity of the event and painted The Revolt of Masaniello (1648) as a battle scene. Amid the tents and booths of the crowded market, the traffic of commerce, the herded livestock, the great barrel on the water wagon, that the hundreds of people have begun to take action is shown by new gestures of men bending for rocks, of bare arms raised, of pointed fingers. His is a sober assessment of an urban insurrection, equally without condescension or heroism.20 An eighteenth-century historian raised his eyebrows and gasped, “After Ages will hardly believe what Height of Power this ridiculous Sovereign arrived to, who, trampling bare-foot on a throne, and wearing a Mariner’s Cap instead of a Diadem, in the space of four Days, raised an Army of above 150,000 Men, and made himself Master of one of the most populous Cities in the worlde.”21

  Masaniello’s story had special importance for the centers of European seafaring, England and Holland. English merchants had recently eclipsed their Italian counterparts in Levant shipping and now sent as many as 120 ships and three thousand sailors to Naples each year, with attendant desertions and turnovers. Sailors were a major source of information about the revolt. Less immediately effective but more lasting were the medallions struck in Amsterdam, the drama surreptitiously produced in London, and the translations of the first history of the uprising.22 In 1649 T. B. published a play entitled The Rebellion of Naples or the Tragedy of Massenello commonly so called: but rightly Tomaso Aniello di Malfa Generall of the Neapolitans. Written by a Gentleman who was an eye-witness where this was really acted upon the Bloudy Stage, the Streets of Naples. In 1650 James Howell, an entrepreneur, a royalist, and literary man with connections to the Levant Company, translated Alexander Giraffi’s An Exact History of the Late Revolutions in Naples; and of Their Monstrous Successes, and in the same year The Second Part of Masaniello . . . The End of the Commotions.23 These were dedicated to the governor of the Levant Company with the reminder that,

  The people is a beast which heads hath many

  England of late shew’d this more than any.

  Power and solidarity were themes of the play The Rebellion of Naples. On the frontispiece of its published text appeared an illustration of Masaniello himself, bare-legged and bonneted, overlooking a sky with a bare forearm hurling thunderbolts at a squadron of warships; Neptune raises his trident as squares of pikemen fail to prevent a few mariners from hauling the entire city of Naples from the sea to the beach. In his first monologue, Masaniello compares himself to a galley oarsman. The first words from the crowd, meanwhile, are the sailor’s abiding principle of solidarity and the particular cry heard during the mutinies of 1626: “One and all, One and all, One and all.”24 Alluding to the English Levellers and John the Baptist (whose June feast day had been canceled in Naples for fear of tumult), Masaniello’s adviser promises to “level the high walls of government with the earth they stood on: The Axe is already laid to the root.” The Spanish viceroy refers to the furious beast with many heads and shamelessly asks, “How will you make your sauces, if you will not squeeze your Oranges? Or Wine, if you will not presse the Grape?”

  Slavery, Africa, and the women of Naples were major concerns both of the play and of the translated history. One of Masaniello’s advisers had been a slave in Algeria for nineteen years, and another had been a galley slave. The slave of a duke, a Moor, was freed. Masaniello had a daughter who was a blackamoor, who sang a song in praise of blackness. During the summer-festival ritual
that actually provided the flashpoint of the insurrection, Masaniello led a group of teenagers masked in blackface who attacked a mock fort in the middle of the mercato. Giraffi compared the armed women and girls of Naples and their decisive street-fighting skills to so many Amazons. Masaniello’s own wife was imprisoned for failing to pay the gabelle. The women vowed “they would burn the City, and themselves and Children along with it, before they would be Beasts of Burden any longer, and bring up their Children to be Slaves and Pack-Horses to a proud and haughty Nobility.” T. B. compared the women to Ursula, the symbol of disorder in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. An old woman observing the black daughter suggested that she and the white daughter stop scrutinizing one another and instead look elsewhere, to “see what becomes of all the Money, and all the Land.” Cui bono.

  Masaniello and his army of fisherman capturing Naples. T.B., The Rebellion of Naples, or the Tragedy of Massenello . . . (1649). Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.

  The Rebellion of Naples combined persons, events, and ideas from both Naples and London, demonstrating a circulation of the experience of insurrection and suggesting a unity of class conflicts in a diversity of locations. The people had discovered their own strength; this was an autonomous insurrection whose force and power had to be respected—it could not be laughed off the stage. It remained a source of fear to the emerging politics of the bourgeois state; it also remained an example of hope for actual proletarians searching for justice, such as Thomas Spence, as we shall see later. In a notebook, Spinoza portrayed himself in the guise of the fishmonger.25 John Locke sported with Masaniello to ridicule the divine right of kings. His friend James Tyrrell argued that even when the mobile, or urban mob, murmured at grievous taxes, it could not be justified in revolting because that inevitably led to vast spoilage of property, as Masaniello had proved.26 Authorities in Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and London used the name of Masaniello to tar political opponents. Tom Paine feared the name, but the soldiers, sailors, and commoners of the English Revolution did not. In November 1647, only a few days after the debates at Putney, a speaker in London said, “The same business we are upon is perfected in Naples, for if any person stand up for monarchy there, he is immediately hanged at his door.”27