A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  In a book published in 1883, H. M. Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s first fully fledged Marxist party, placed his organisation within a British tradition of class struggle:

  Tyler, Cade, Ball, Kett … read to me like sound English names: not a foreigner in the whole batch. They all held opinions which our capitalist-landlord House of Commons would denounce as direct plagiarism from ‘foreign revolutionists’. We islanders have been revolutionists, however, and will be again, ignorant as our capitalists are of the history of the people.34

  That the names of Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, John Ball, Jack Cade and Robert Kett are so familiar to us is a legacy of the enduring power of hostile contemporary sources. These were the work of medieval and early modern chroniclers intent on producing propagandist narratives warning the monarch’s subjects of the evils of rebellion and the harsh penalties for revolt. Writers such as Jean Froissart, Thomas Walsingham, Nicholas Sotherton and Alexander Neville presented the uprisings as the work of ambitious and unscrupulous upstarts, who manipulated the gullible commonalty into supporting their schemes. These narratives set out a simple morality play in which the vaulting ambition and pride of Tyler, Cade and Kett were followed by their inevitable fall and just and exemplary – meaning brutal – punishment. Their supporters likewise received the providential rewards of rebellion: death by hanging, drawing and quartering. After the aberration of popular revolt, the natural order of society was restored, the lower orders reduced to silent passivity.35

  Unfortunately, these chronicles and histories remain our main sources of information about the revolts. Some historians and writers on the left have at times adopted a rather too literal approach to these texts, accepting uncritically the calls for class war sometimes placed in the mouths of Tyler, Ball and Cade, as if the rebel captains intended a mass slaughter of the aristocracy and gentry and the ‘levelling’ of all social distinctions.36 At the other extreme, some historians have adopted an overly cautious approach to these sources, effectively glossing over any social or political radicalism in medieval and early modern English rebellions. For such academics, these uprisings never challenged the dominant idea of a ‘society of orders’, a supposedly natural hierarchy of aristocracy, gentry and clergy, beneath whom lay the commons, ‘those who did not rule’; medieval rebels, it is argued, sought only to remedy abuses perpetrated by certain individuals within this system, not to overthrow the system itself.37

  It is often claimed, partly as a result of this alleged inherent conservatism, that popular rebellion in this period had little tangible political, social or economic impact.38 But we seriously underestimate the importance of these revolts if we see them as essentially futile. In three keys ways, the Peasants’ Revolt, Cade’s rebellion and the ‘commotion time’ of 1549 were radical events.

  In the first place, the ‘inevitability’ of the defeat of these revolts is deeply questionable. The element of contingency was central to the ultimate suppression of all of them. In the case of the Peasants’ Revolt, the actions of the young Richard II were crucial to averting a potential catastrophe for the English ruling elite. As Alistair Dunn has pointed out, had the monarch not acted so decisively, the implementation of the Kentishmen’s demands for total manumission of England’s serfs would have seen 1381 ranked with other world-historical events, such as the abolition of private serfdom in the Russian Empire in 1861 and the emancipation of the slaves in the United States in 1865, as a vital stage in ending human bondage. On the other hand, if the Peasants’ Revolt did not see the immediate liberation of the serfs, it unquestionably hastened the decline of bound labour. The years that followed 1381, rather than being characterised by brutal repression by the elite, represented a historic high in terms of wages, living conditions and life expectancy for the English peasantry. Subsequent popular rebellions were launched not out of desperation but as a result of the growing confidence of the commons. The assertive yeoman class, in particular, forced a grudging recognition from the elite of the important role of the commonalty in politics.

  Second, popular rebellion had important intellectual as well as social consequences. As most of Wat Tyler’s men were not serfs, their demands for freedom were symbolic as well as practical: manumission represented the lifting of all oppressive burdens. ‘Freedom’ already meant something more than just a legal status.39 This language of English liberty resonated down through the demands of the Norfolk rebels to the Parliamentarian rhetoric of the 1640s. By the time of the civil war, ‘slavery’ was clearly understood not merely as a legal status or an economic system, but as a metaphysical state, meaning any situation where the liberty of the individual was ultimately subject to the caprice of a superior. Such, Parliamentarian propagandists alleged, was the case of the English people under the government of Charles I.

  Far from being creatures of habit, bound by the political and social conventions of their day, ordinary people in late medieval England were capable of making sophisticated and strategic use of political and religious language. It is not just that some rebels may have been influenced by contemporary radical ideas, whether Lollard heresy, evangelical Protestantism or the arguments of mid-Tudor ‘Commonwealthsmen’, though there is certainly some evidence that this was the case. Rather, the political conventions of the day were ambiguous enough to be open to more radical readings. Propagandists may have repeatedly insisted upon the naturalness of the ‘society of orders’, but lordship placed obligations on the lord as well as on the serf. Rebels were often quick to seize upon the implicit social contract inherent within this vision of society. Moreover, many of those who did rebel, such as Robert Kett, were not men excluded from authority but men who governed at a local level. Other terms, too, could be stretched. ‘Commonwealth’ might be interpreted as meaning the whole realm, as when royal ministers formulated schemes for the reform of the ‘Commonweal’, but it could equally be read as meaning the commons, without the gentry or the lords.40 Historians have occasionally presented such interpretations of established ideas as ‘misunderstandings’ or ‘misreadings’, by sub-gentry groups, of concepts articulated by the ruling elite. Rather, they are evidence of the ability of ordinary people to use political ideas in sophisticated, strategic ways.

  These medieval and early modern rebels created a memory of resistance in revolt that was preserved first orally and later through print. That memory also reverberated through the physical landscape. It was no coincidence that Jack Cade’s rebels, like those of 1381, formed their camp outside London on Blackheath, or that the Norfolk rebels of 1549 followed their East Anglian ancestors of 1381 in choosing Mousehold Heath. In spite of the severe repression experienced, and the efforts of the Crown’s propagandists, the memory of these rebellions, for the people at least, remained profoundly empowering. In 1642, as England moved from rebellion to outright revolution, it seemed that the ghosts of Wat Tyler, Jack Cade and Robert Kett were walking abroad once more.

  PART THREE

  ‘THE POOREST HE … THE GREATEST HE’: RADICALISM IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

  The Levellers were defeated. Two hundred years later, however, the working class, the Chartists, put forward similar demands which, as the result of hard prolonged struggle, have been substantially realised.

  Daphne May, ‘The Putney Debates’, Communist Review, January 19481

  The Levellers … anticipated by a century and a half the main ideas of the American and French Revolutions.

  Tony Benn2

  5

  THE ROOTS OF CIVIL WAR RADICALISM: THE REVOLUTION BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

  On the morning of 17 May 1649, Corporals Perkins and Church and Cornet Thompson were executed by firing squad in the churchyard at Burford.* The three condemned men had been identified as the ringleaders of a mutiny of over a thousand troops (a fourth soldier sentenced to death, Cornet Henry Denne, ‘howling and weeping like a crocodile’, repudiated the mutiny and was reprieved through the intervention of General Sir Thomas Fairfax).†1 Wh
ile Thompson expressed contrition for his part in the mutiny and Perkins, petrified by the sight of his dead comrade lying at his feet, could only cry ‘Shoot, shoot’, Church strode to the place of execution and ‘without the least acknowledgment of errour or shew of feare’ pulled off his doublet, looked his executioners in the eye and bade them do their duty.2

  The soldiers had broken with military discipline on 1 May at Salisbury, refusing to be sent to Ireland to fight the Royalist coalition there until their grievances, especially over indemnity for their actions in war and arrears of pay, now amounting to £1.3 million, had been met. Some of the mutineers were influenced by so-called ‘Leveller’ ideas, which, as mentioned earlier, promoted a new constitutional settlement for England based on a wider male electoral franchise, greater political accountability and religious toleration. Thompson’s brother Corporal William Thompson had drafted a printed declaration that combined the soldiers’ demands with the text of the Leveller manifesto, the ‘Agreement of the People’. A number of those involved in the mutinies of 1649, including William Thompson, William Eyre, Robert Everard and Robert Lockyer, had already been implicated in earlier Leveller-inspired mutinies.

  The ‘Burford business’, as it came to be known, might have remained a footnote to accounts of the demise of the Leveller movement of the seventeenth century were it not for the efforts of the Oxford Workers’ Educational Association, and in particular Alan Hicks. In 1975, Hicks organised a meeting to commemorate the deaths of Thompson, Church and Perkins. In its first year ‘Levellers’ Day’, as it came to be known, was a relatively low-key affair. This all changed in 1976 when Hicks decided to invite the then Energy Secretary, Tony Benn, to come and speak. The presence of a government minister (and an increasingly outspoken one, at that) not only attracted greater attention for the event from the left-wing press but also raised Tory hackles both locally and nationally. Burford’s Conservative MP, the future Cabinet minister Douglas Hurd, complained that the WEA was misusing public funds to support what was essentially a party-political event, noting sardonically that he doubted that the minister was coming to the Cotswolds to talk about North Sea oil. Locals took more direct action, daubing the side of the church with the words ‘Bollocks to Benn’, picked out in yellow paint (the graffiti were hastily removed with wire brushes). Although the Vicar of Burford had supported the event, a local nonconformist minister, Raymond Moody, complained that local residents did not want the day to become a regular left-wing jamboree ‘like the Durham miners’ gala’.

  Despite the efforts of the local Conservative Association, who in 1983 tried to scupper Levellers’ Day by booking the church hall for a nonexistent jumble sale, Moody’s nightmare came true. The annual event has been running successfully for over thirty years and has attracted a ‘Who’s Who’ of left-wing speakers and activists: Labour luminaries including Ken Livingstone, Michael Foot and a pre-Blairite-makeover Peter Hain, prominent peace campaigners such as Bruce Kent, environmentalists such as George Monbiot, and the Marxist historians E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill. The day has long featured appropriately right-on entertainment as well as speeches, from artists like the ‘Bard of Barking’, Billy Bragg, and Mark Chadwick from the Levellers folk-rock group. Occasionally, the odd cabaret act has performed too (‘David Blunkett and his dog Nelson’).3

  Why has the suppression of the mutiny at Burford become such a celebrated part of England’s radical history? Undoubtedly, some of this is due to the setting itself. The magnificent Church of St John the Baptist at Burford is a living monument to the divisions rent in English society by the civil war. At one end of the church is the font where Antony Sedley scrawled his name as he and his fellow mutineers waited to learn their fate, while at the other lies the memorial to Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, a leading Royalist born in Burford, killed at the Battle of Newbury in 1643. There is something slightly incongruous about an event that celebrates political radicalism taking place in a chocolate-box tourist town within the Tory Cotswolds. Even so, Burford’s honeyed sandstone buildings provide an undeniably fitting backdrop as the local civil war re-enactment societies march along its streets.

  But this is only part of the reason that Levellers’ Day has been an enduring success. The continued commemoration of the suppression of the mutiny at Burford also tells us much about how and why we remember the Leveller movement as a whole. It is now, perhaps, the most celebrated of all English radical movements – though, as we will see, its elevation to the historical pantheon has been a recent phenomenon. What is commemorated at Burford, however, is the nadir of that movement, not its zenith, and some historians question whether the Burford mutineers should really be regarded as Levellers at all.4 The palpable pathos of Levellers’ Day, with its annual musket salute to the executed soldiers, reveals a preference for memorialising the movement as a heroic failure. Like the eighteenth-century radical republican William Godwin, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, twentieth-century historians and writers have admired the Levellers as a movement that anticipated the modern political ideals of civil rights, mass suffrage and freedom of conscience, but who were too far ‘ahead of their time’ to see their ideas come to fruition.5 Instead, historians such as Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson and politicians including Tony Benn have argued that Leveller ideas were driven back into a radical underground, to re-emerge in the late eighteenth century in the thought of English ‘Jacobins’ and Painites.

  Recently, historians have seriously questioned the prominence given to the group in the history of the English Revolution. They have even queried whether there was a meaningful ‘Leveller’ movement at all, at least before the autumn of 1647, noting that the term was one of abuse, fastened on John Lilburne and his associates by their critics.6 It has been argued that Leveller ideas only appear ‘modern’ when viewed through the distorting lens of a Marxist/socialist historiography that wishes to place them within a ‘tradition’ of British radicalism. In fact, some recent scholars contend that the main Leveller spokesmen, because of their own intensely heterodox religious views, were more preoccupied with liberty of conscience than with the vote. The Levellers, these historians argue, only loom large in contemporary historiography because of the present-centred, ideologically driven concerns of left-wing historians. In their own time, the Levellers had little impact and were deemed unworthy of comment by most historians of the civil war until the late nineteenth century.7

  New research, however, demonstrates that the key Leveller writers, Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and John Wildman, were at the centre of the political turmoil of the civil war and the revolution. Far from being marginal figures, individuals like Wildman were, in fact, well connected to radical MPs within the Commons such as Henry Marten and Thomas Rainborowe.8 By cautioning against seeing their politics as reflecing a simple dichotomy between radicals and conservatives, recent work has also directed our attention to those moments when the army grandees themselves seriously considered radical solutions, such as the Levellers’ various Agreements of the People, for settling the nation. These moments demonstrate that in pragmatic terms, radical thought did exert a significant influence at the time. More than this, they remind us that the failure to achieve more radical political settlements was a result of contingent factors; it was not inevitable.

  Unquestionably, though, hostile pamphleteers were successful in smearing men such as Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton and Wildman with accusations of ‘levelling’ – wishing to do away with private property and ‘level’ the social hierarchy – charges that stuck in part because of the emergence of groups such as the ‘Diggers’, who did advocate communal living and the abolition of the private ownership of land. The success of this propaganda campaign against the Levellers made it politically dangerous to exploit publicly the work of Lilburne et al. Consequently, the acknowledged influence of these writers was minimal until their ‘rediscovery’ in the nineteenth century. That process of historical erasure has obscured the ex
tent to which the political world of the seventeenth century was profoundly shaken, and shaped, by radical thought and action.

  Any attempt to discuss the phenomenon of radicalism in the English Revolution must also tackle the nature of that revolution itself. The leading ‘revisionist’ historian of the civil wars, John Morrill, has stated that the events of the 1640s did not constitute the first modern revolution, but in fact, ‘the last and greatest of the European wars of religion’.9 Other historians have suggested that the English Revolution should be re-termed ‘a Second Reformation’ or its own ‘radical reformation’.10 By the late sixteenth century, Protestantism was entrenched as the official religion of the state and was now the dominant religion among those individuals who normally constituted the core of the ‘political nation’ – the aristocracy and gentry. However, this ascendancy conveyed no sense of security to English Protestants. Many reformers (perhaps with some justification) were convinced that most people were indifferent to the Christian religion and would prefer to spend their Sundays fishing, gaming or drinking. The Reformation’s shallow roots were especially worrying when placed in a European context of rapid Protestant retreat in the face of the forces of an aggressive Catholic counter-Reformation. While the fear of the threat of ‘Popery’, of a Vatican-inspired insurrection and assassination, undoubtedly lurched at times into frenzied paranoia, the threat was nonetheless real, as demonstrated first by the danger of foreign invasion posed by the Spanish Armada in 1588, and second by the possibility of domestic conspiracy posed by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

  Worse still, English Protestants were internally divided, between those contented to conform to the Elizabethan Church settlement and those, known by their critics as ‘puritans’, who believed that the established religion was still only ‘half-reformed’, retaining too much doctrine and discipline that smacked of the old religion. Puritanism, nonetheless, remained a reform movement operating within the Church rather than one seeking to separate itself.