A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Faced with a supremely victorious army sweeping all before it, Parliament reacted to the news of the ‘Engagers” routing by reopening negotiations with the King, though Charles was no more sincere about his intentions to honour the new peace proposals, the Treaty of Newport, than he had been about any of the many previous attempts at settlement. As he explained to a confidant, his only desire was to buy time so that he might escape. For Ireton, the King’s readiness to wage war once more against his own people made him a criminal who had to be brought to justice. The rest of the officers were almost certainly won over to this position once it became clear that Parliament was ready to reach a settlement with the King that was indistinguishable from the one for which the Royalist participants in the second civil war had been fighting.

  It was at this point, in the winter of 1648, that the Levellers came closest to achieving their political goals, as the army leadership now strove for a settlement that did not require the consent of Charles Stuart. Leading Levellers, including Lilburne, Wildman and City Independents, met at the Nag’s Head tavern and secured amendments to a draft Remonstrance put together by Ireton. The final version was laid before the Commons on 18 November. It made clear that ‘exemplary justice … in capital punishment’ should be meted out to the ‘principal author’ (the King) of the ‘late wars’.30 The document’s hostility towards the reigning monarch was clear for all to see, but this was not yet a republican manifesto. Instead, it projected a political settlement in which a new monarch would be elected by the representative body and not admitted to the throne until he had subscribed to a new version of the Agreement of the People. This version, far more detailed than the original, looked more like a pragmatic programme for political settlement than an abstract statement of principle. It nonetheless retained the core idea of the ‘reserves’, though these were more limited in scope than in the first Agreement.

  The officers’ engagement with the idea of an Agreement is often presented as if it were a sham, designed to divert radical energies while the army leadership got on with the main business of bringing the King to justice. Lilburne accused the officers of talking with the Levellers ‘meerly to quiet and please us (like children with rattles) till they had done their main work’.31 Some of the leading Levellers even turned on each other, Richard Overton accusing Wildman of ‘selling out’ his principles for the promise of preferment under the new regime. Yet, in viewing events in late 1648 and early 1649 in this way, historians have been guilty again of privileging the Putney Debates above all other attempts to arrive at a solution. The discussions that took place at Whitehall in December 1648 were arguably much more significant. At Putney, as Ireton had reminded the participants, the army was merely discussing its own plans for the settlement of the kingdom. At Whitehall, with the New Model Army now firmly in control of the capital and with Parliament purged, by Colonel Thomas Pride and his men, of those MPs who wished to continue negotiating with the King, there was a real possibility that the debates would determine the shape that any new government would take.

  The officers presented their amended version of the Agreement to the Commons on 20 January, the day that the King’s trial opened at Westminster Hall. Aside from their rejection of the religious reserve, one stumbling-block remained for the Levellers, and for Lilburne in particular: they continued to insist that any Agreement had to be tendered to the people for approval before a new government could be established. The timing of the submission of the ‘Officers’ Agreement’, as it came to be known, has led to suggestions that, like modern-day politicians choosing to bury unpopular announcements on ‘bad-news days’, Ireton and Cromwell saw an opportunity to let the Agreement die a quiet death while the nation’s attention was fixed upon the fate of their monarch. Certainly, Parliament did not seem to take up the Agreement with any great alacrity, merely thanking Ireton and Cromwell for their efforts while simultaneously counselling them on the need for the army to stay out of politics. By March 1649 Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Thomas Prince (the Levellers’ treasurer, formerly a cheese-maker) were in prison, arrested for their attack on the new military regime contained in The Second Part of England’s New Chaines Discovered, a follow-up to Lilburne’s pamphlet of 26 February.

  However, evidence suggests that there was more genuine commitment to, and public enthusiasm for, the notion of a new government established on the basis of the Agreement than previously assumed. Manuscript copies of the ‘Officers’ Agreement’ exist that were clearly being circulated for subscription in local communities, presumably in preparation for the creation of a new administration.32 Indeed, before Pride’s purge Ireton had attempted to get well-disposed MPs to agree to dissolve Parliament rather than continue to sit as an attenuated version of the Long Parliament that had been in session since November 1640. The failure to establish a new government on the basis of the Agreement almost certainly has more to do with the extreme political volatility of the years 1649–51, as the fate of the fledgling republic hung in the balance, threatened by both Irish and Scottish Royalist risings, than with any Machiavellian plot by Ireton to pull the wool over the eyes of Wildman, Lilburne and their associates.* The vehemence of Lilburne’s attacks on the officers, and the tendency of historians to view the politics of the 1640s in terms of a simple dichotomy between Leveller ‘radicals’ and ‘conservative’ Grandees, has obscured the fact that in 1649 the Levellers had come within a whisker of seeing their projected settlement for the government of England reach fruition.

  7

  THE EARTH A COMMON TREASURY

  On 30 January 1649, Charles I was executed on a platform erected outside his Banqueting House in Whitehall, the ‘royal actor’, as the poet Andrew Marvell described him, performing one last role, this time tragic, upon the world’s stage. Eyewitnesses spoke of a great groan emanating from the crowd as the executioner’s axe fell upon him. Charles’s dignified conduct in his final hours, and his careful repackaging by Royalist writers as a martyr for the Anglican Church, meant that the regicide paradoxically became a great propaganda coup for the Stuart cause. Rid of a king who in life was a constant political liability, Charles’s old supporters were now left with a monarch who in death had been transformed into a Christ-like figure, having given his life in a bid to save his people.

  If the execution provoked deep shock among the population at large, there is also considerable evidence that execution may not have been the outcome that was desired of the King’s show trial at Westminster Hall. There was never any chance that Charles would be acquitted, but it is possible that the purpose of the trial was to get him to accept publicly his responsibility for the wars of the 1640s and to step down in favour of one of his sons, probably the youngest (and presumably the most malleable), Henry, Duke of Gloucester. These schemes might have been merely diversionary tactics to draw attention from the true objective of the trial, but in any case, they were rendered useless by the King’s resolute refusal to recognise the authority of the court and therefore to answer the charges that were laid against him. Whether it had been their original intention or not, the members of the High Court of Justice were pushed into recording a capital judgement against Charles.

  England’s new rulers were as hesitant to declare themselves a republic as they appear to have been to kill their king. It took two months for the ‘Rump’, as the remainder of the Long Parliament came to be known, to declare that the office of king and the House of Lords had been abolished, and it was not until May 1649 that the Rump declared that England was now a ‘Commonwealth and Free State … governed by the representatives of the people in parliament … without any king or House of Lords’.

  The regicide was deeply unpopular, and the socially and politically conservative majority in the Rump could barely bring themselves to describe the new regime as a ‘commonwealth’. It was government without a king, not a republic. But in spite of this reluctance and the gradual regression to constitutional conservatism at the centre, the King’s death and the acts est
ablishing a commonwealth served to inspire many to call for more radical political and religious settlements. To a significant proportion of the population, Charles’s death was a prophetic moment, signalling the coming of the new millennium and the reign of Christ and his saints on earth. Prominent among these were the individuals who later became known as the Fifth Monarchists, as a result of their close reading of the prophecies of the Book of Daniel, in which the fall of the four earthly empires (Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Roman) would be followed by the rule of ‘King Jesus’ and his saints. In Fifth Monarchist readings of the regicide, Charles I was identified as the ‘little horn’ of the fourth beast – the fourth empire – discussed in Daniel’s prophecy (Daniel 7:8): ‘And behold in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.’

  The most remarkable of the many prophecies to be inspired by the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth came from an obscure petty gentleman, Gerrard Winstanley, who, with William Everard and several others, began to dig the common land on St George’s Hill, Walton, Surrey, on 1 April 1649, in preparation for sowing it with peas, beans and carrots.

  Until 1648, when he began publishing his mystical works, Winstanley had done little to attract public attention. He was relatively well connected in London society. His kinsmen in London included the lawyer James Winstanley (whose daughter, after the Restoration, would be made a Lady of the Privy Chamber in Ordinary to the Queen), and a prosperous merchant taylor, also James Winstanley, connected to the London Whig and City Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Player. Gerrard Winstanley also married well. His first wife, Susan, was the child of a leading London surgeon, William King, who became master of the Barber-Surgeons Company in 1650. However, Winstanley’s textile business in London, like many others, suffered during the war, and in late 1643 he was forced to declare himself bankrupt. The experience was a bitter one: in his later works, he declared his hatred of ‘the theeving art of buying and selling’ which generally involved ‘oppressing fellow-creatures’. By the end of the year, he had moved to Surrey, possibly because his father-in-law owned property there, at Ham; by 1646 he was working as a grazier in the nearby community of Cobham. Though he was not one of Cobham’s wealthiest inhabitants, neither was he living in abject poverty. On manorial court rolls from this time he was listed as a ‘gentleman’. On 10 April 1646, in an early presage of his later activities, Winstanley and five others were up before the manorial court for digging on the commons and taking peat and turf in what was probably a protest over restrictive tenancy agreements.1

  Winstanley’s later works indicate that he sided with Parliament during the first civil war, though his activism does not appear to have gone beyond taking the Parliamentary loyalty oath, the Solemn League and Covenant, in London in 1643. Towards the end of 1648, though, he became publicly involved in defending William Everard, a former New Model Army soldier and now prophet, against charges of blasphemy. Everard was a shadowy and volatile character, a one-time Parliamentarian spy who had been first imprisoned, then cashiered, for his part in an earlier plot to kill Charles I.2 Winstanley answered the blasphemy charges in print in Truth Lifting up Its Head above Scandals (October 1648). Depending on how you looked at it, the pamphlet was either a very brave or a very naive attempt at refuting the charges, for the beliefs that Winstanley admitted he himself held could scarcely be called anything other than deeply heterodox. Truth Lifting up Its Head was the culmination of the three other spiritual works that he had published that year, The Mysterie of God, The Breaking of the Day of God and The Saints’ Paradise. In these works he had equated God with the spirit of ‘pure Reason’, which, he said, was ‘that living power of light that is in all things: it is the salt that savours all things: it is the fire that burns up dross and so restores what is corrupted’.3

  Like some other radicals, Winstanley believed the regicide heralded the ushering-in of the new millennium. However, whereas the Fifth Monarchists saw the Second Coming as being the literal rule of Christ with His saints – a fundamentally undemocratic vision, as the unregenerate could not be permitted a role in the government of ‘King Jesus’ – Winstanley interpreted the millennium as the rising of Christ’s spirit in all. The promise of salvation was universal and all would be saved, though for the sinful, the process by which the ‘dross’ would be burnt up would necessarily be painful.

  Winstanley directly attacked traditional religion. Heaven and hell were not real, physical places: those who worshipped a God in some celestial heaven kept Him ‘at a distance’. This Christ at a distance would save no one: only ‘Christ within is thy saviour’.4 Heaven was living under ‘true magistracy’, the spirit of love and charity; hell was living under the ‘kingly’ power of covetousness, the spirit of oppression.5 As the true essence of God was the spirit, the university-educated clergy, to whom Winstanley directed Truth Lifting up Its Head, had no better claim to it than anyone else. To worship other men’s interpretations of the Bible, rather than follow the spirit, was to worship the Devil. Winstanley’s emphasis on the spirit diminished the importance of the historic Christ. He denied the traditional Christian account of the resurrection, asserting that Christ had not physically risen after crucifixion.

  This denial was important to his belief system and to explain the actions that he later took in Surrey. For Winstanley, the Fall of Man had had serious material, as well as spiritual, consequences. It was the Fall, itself precipitated by an act of covetousness, the taking of an apple, that had rendered the earth barren and unfruitful in places. Christ’s essence, however, would cleanse and purge the ‘poysoned’ earth. His spirit would rise ‘like a corne of wheat’ from under ‘the clods of earth’.6 Pastoral metaphors can be found throughout Winstanley’s early writings. In Truth Lifting up Its Head he described the spreading of the spirit of righteousness in these terms: ‘The Thorne bush is burning; but the Vine is flourishing. The Ashes of the Thorne bush is laid at the root and feet of the Vine, and it growes abundantly.’7

  There were clear similarities between Winstanley’s religious thought and that of other religious radicals. The emphasis on practical Christianity, charity and the ‘golden rule’ linked his work with the writings of Overton and Walwyn. The emphasis on the spirit connected him with earlier antinomian writers and prefigured the centrality of the spirit to the Quaker movement, a sect that Winstanley would gravitate towards in later life. The attack upon formal religion and the spiritual monopoly of the clergy was common to the works of many radicals. However, Winstanley always denied being influenced by other religious writers (the only reference to a religious work in his writings other than the Bible is to John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), claiming that what he wrote came from ‘a free discovery within’. There is also no clear evidence that he had contact with other radical figures until he came to the defence of Everard in the autumn of 1648, though there is a suggestion in some of his works that he may have briefly been involved with Baptists and ‘dipped’ (undergone adult re-baptism).8

  Historians who have discussed Winstanley’s thought have often struggled to reconcile his ‘mystical’ works published in 1648 with the ‘political’ works that began to appear in 1649. This has led some to offer various arguments about his character as a thinker: that he was either essentially a mystical writer and that the later Digger experiments were symbolic; that he was really a political writer, and that he dressed up his writings in the language of visions, trances and prophecy, as did some female ‘prophets’, as a means of attracting an audience for his work; or that he was intellectually schizoid with his life falling into two distinct periods, mystical and then political.

  None of these arguments is correct. Winstanley was at one and the same time a mystic and a communist. His theology was deeply political: he always associated sin with covetousness – meaning, for him, private ownership of the land and economic domination. Likewise, his communism drew strength from his theology. The experiment of digging on the common land would work, he
believed, because the spirit of righteousness rising in men and women would make wastelands fertile. But Winstanley was no crackpot: he also advocated in his works, and practised on Digger settlements, sound techniques for agricultural improvement such as manuring the land, planting beans and pulses so as to fix nitrogen in the soil, or the practice known as ‘Devonshiring’, in which undergrowth was burnt and the ashes spread to fertilise poor soil.9

  The first of Winstanley’s works to fuse the religious and the political into radical praxis, The New Law of Righteousness, emerged at the height of revolutionary fervour in England. Completed just four days before the execution of the King, it was in this pamphlet that he first declared the message given to him while in a trance:

  Worke together. Eat bread together … Whosoever it is that labours in the earth, for any person or persons, that lifts up themselves as Lords and Rulers over others, and that doth not look upon themselves equal to others in the Creation, the hand of the Lord shall be upon that labourer: I the Lord have spoke it and I will do it; Declare this all abroad.10