Aside from its alleged repressiveness, The Law of Freedom has also been attacked for its moral conservatism. Winstanley continued to see the traditional patriarchal household as the basis of his new Utopian Commonwealth. The Digger leader, like the Leveller spokesmen, has been criticised for the lack of attention given to women in his work. In answering Lady Eleanor Davies, Winstanley had resorted to deploying the orthodox separation between masculine authority and female submission. However, there were some good political reasons for his apparent moral conservatism. Apart from being smeared as violent anarchists, the Diggers were also accused by their opponents of holding women in ‘common’ and living in ‘bestialness’.32 In his last mystical work, Fire in the Bush, Winstanley condemned ‘Lust of the flesh’ as part of covetousness.33 His concern here was with the association of his Digger movement with the activities of so-called ‘Ranters’, religious radicals who were said to advocate, among other things, free love, drinking, smoking and swearing.
As we have already seen, the association of religious radicalism with libertinism was neither unusual nor unique to the years 1649–50. However, these accusations were especially problematic for Winstanley for two reasons. First, patriarchal theory and English law held that wives were essentially the property of their husbands. If, the Diggers critics argued, they wished to abolish private property, surely this included men’s property in their wives? If the land became common, then it must follow that women became common too. Second, at the time the Digger colonies were being established, England was in the grip of a moral panic, spread by contemporary news-sheets and pamphlets, concerning the activities of the supposed ‘Ranters’, whose activities the equivalent of an early modern tabloid press spent much time and energy in detailing. The pamphlet The Ranters Religion, published on 11 October 1650, claimed they held that:
All Women ought to be in common, and when they are assembled together (this is a known truth) they first entertaine one another, the men those of their own sex, and the Women their fellow females: with horrid Oathes and execrations, then they fall to bowzing, and drinke deep healths (Oh cursed Caitiffes!) to their Brother God, and their Brother Devill; then being well heated with Liquor, each Brother takes his she Otter upon his knee, and the word (spoken in derision of the sacred Writ) being given, viz. Increase and Multiply, they fall to their lascivious embraces, with a joynt motion &c.34
Other pamphlets alleged that Ranter meetings consisted of ‘mixt dances of men and women stark naked’.35 The leading reputed Ranter Abezier Coppe was accused of lying in bed ‘with two women at a time’.36 Yet other publications accused Ranters of making a mockery of the Eucharist:
one of them took [a piece of beef] in his hand, tearing it asunder said to the other, This is the flesh of Christ, take and eat. The other took a cup of Ale and threw it in the chimney corner, saying There is the bloud of Christ. And having some discourse of God it was proved that every one of these said, That he could go into the house of Office, and make a God every morning, by easing his body.37
It was said that one woman Ranter, the almost certainly fictitious ‘Mary Adams’, proclaimed that she was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary and was pregnant with Jesus Christ. Pamphlets reported that for these blasphemies she was kept under close confinement until she gave birth. When the baby was born it proved not to be the Messiah but a hideous misshapen monster, with no hands or feet but claws like a toad. Adams herself became covered in boils, blotches and putrefying scabs; shortly afterwards, she compounded her sins by committing suicide.38
The Rump Parliament took the ‘Ranter scare’ very seriously, passing a new law against blasphemy in 1650 that was designed to counter the threat to public morals posed by this sect (a law which Milton, that famous advocate of liberty of conscience, praised as ‘that prudent and well deliberated act’).39 However, some historians have questioned whether the Ranters existed at all or were in fact mere phantoms created by the popular press both to satiate puerile public interest and to act as a check on real radical movements such as the Diggers. In time, accusations of descending into ‘Ranterism’ became a means by which the sects themselves could exercise internal discipline over their members.
It is certainly true that the popular press recycled images and stories that had already appeared in print to spotlight the activities of religious radicals. Images of supposed naked ‘Adamite’ meetings published in 1641 were reprinted in 1650 with a new text claiming that they were depictions of ‘Ranter’ gatherings. The press also co-opted cases involving generally irreligious behaviour, such as the mock communion in the alehouse described above, into accounts of the particular sect, the ‘Ranters’. There was no real theological coherence to this picture. At one and the same time, ‘Ranters’ were depicted as libertines, pseudo-Christs and anti-formalists. The ‘Ranter scare’, it has been suggested, reminds us that the real influence of ‘radicalism’ in the English Revolution was essentially negative, in that it acted as an ideological bogeyman that conservatives could use to rally support.40
However, if we dismiss the Ranters as simply the creation of the popular press, we ignore an important facet of the radicalism of the English Revolution. The alehouse radicalism that pamphlets like Strange Newes from Newgate detailed, for instance, was not a fabrication, something we can see from the autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton, the co-founder, with his cousin John Reeve, of a sect bearing his name that would survive in an underground existence until the late 1970s. Muggleton recounted frequent arguments in London pubs in the Minories between himself, Reeve and various Ranters over the spiritual authority of the Muggletonian prophets.*41 Moreover, while there was no identifiable organised sect of Ranters – and given the anti-formalism ascribed to them, why should we expect to find one? – there were certainly individuals who advocated the kind of rejection of orthodox morality depicted in the popular prints. Foremost of these was Laurence Clarkson, who had already attracted attention as a target of Thomas Edwards’s ire in his Gangraena. Clarkson’s work, A Single Eye, published June 1650, may have been responsible for fuelling the whole Ranter scare. In this work, Clarkson infamously stated: ‘Therefore till acted that so called Sin, thou art not delivered from the power of sin, but ready upon all the Alarms to tremble and fear the reproach of thy body.’42 Clarkson’s call to enact sinful behaviour in order to free oneself from sin was the radical extension of the antinomian belief that the moral law was no longer binding upon God’s ‘saints’. Clarkson was not alone in advocating such behaviour. The anonymous author of the pamphlet A Justification of the Mad Crew stated that among their community ‘to every woman is their wife, not one woman apart from another, but all in one, and one in all’.43
Winstanley feared the Ranters not simply because accusations of ‘Ranterism’ were used to tar all religious and political radicals, but also because elements of supposed Ranter writing sounded similar to the programme of the Diggers.44 The vision of the author of A Justification of the Mad Crew was communitarian as well as libertine: ‘Come give me your mony, your land, your wives and children, let it be their land, mony, wives and children as well as yours, and yours as well as theirs; call it our mony, our wives, our children, our Table, our meat, our drink.’45 The same radical interpretation of Christian charity was evident in the work of Abezier Coppe, who believed that the world was entering its last days and those who did not cast their gold and silver into the common treasury would be condemned at the Last Judgement. Only those who accounted ‘All things common’ partook in ‘true communion’.46 Conservatives saw in the Ranters not just a convenient rhetorical stick with which to beat their political and religious opponents, but also the most extreme manifestation of a society in which traditional values had been seriously undermined, the greatest expression of a world turned upside down.
The years after the death of Charles I have been seen to witness a steady process of conservative retrenchment. By 1649, some of the most outspoken radicals were already dead. Apart from the army mutineers,
the Leveller cause had also lost one of its most eloquent spokesmen in Thomas Rainborowe, killed by Royalists in 1648 in a botched hostage-taking at Doncaster (the Cavaliers had planned to exchange Rainborowe for Sir Marmaduke Langdale, then a prisoner of the Parliamentarians). The Leveller newspaper The Moderate reported Rainborowe’s heroic death. He had desired his would-be captors to
give him a sword, that he might die like a man, but one ran him again through the belly, he boldly with both hands pulled the sword out of his body, bending the point back almost to the hilt, endeavouring to have forst it from him, with which they cried, pistol the rogue, but that failing to go off, one threw his pistol violently at him, bruised his forehead very much and made him stagger … being again ran through the body, [Rainborowe] fell, having before flung one of them upon the ground, they rid away from him, he got up and followed him some 12 yards, which they seeing swore the dog was following them, and returned again upon him, but with faintnesse he was faln before they came back yet then they ran him some 8 times thorow the body; the last words the maid of the house heard him say before appearing in the street, either for his rescue, or to revenge him on them, not so much as a musket shot off, or an alarm by drum, though his struggling with them was above a quarter of an hour.47
Other Levellers, including John Lilburne, languished in prison; or, in exile, men such as Edward Sexby and John Wildman resorted to pursuing conspiracies against Cromwell’s protectorate. Gerrard Winstanley returned to a life of relative obscurity – though in 1654 a Winstanley was reported to be in contact with the Quakers, telling one of their leaders, Edward Burrough, that they were carrying on the work of the Diggers. The civil war, which had started with declamations by its pamphleteers of the ‘slavery’ endured by the people under Charles I’s personal rule, had now produced a regime that regularly transported large numbers of its subjects to become bound labourers on the plantations of the West Indies.48 The limits of religious tolerance during the protectorate were clearly displayed by the trial of the Quaker James Nayler for blasphemy in 1656, a trial that concluded with penalties – physical mutilation, branding, imprisonment – that were remarkably similar to those handed out to Burton, Bastwick and Prynne in 1637. The new republic could clearly be as tyrannical and cruel as the old monarchy. A year after Nayler’s trial, Lilburne was dead, having earlier rejected his former life of political activism by laying down ‘the temporall sword’ to become a Quaker.49
There was a brief revival of radical fortunes with the downfall of Richard Cromwell’s protectorate in 1659 (he had succeeded to the title following his father’s death in 1658) and the recall of the Rump. Levellers and classical republicans returned to the political fray, including John Milton in The Ready and Easie Way to establish a free commonwealth – a pamphlet produced when it was already clear that the newly restored Commonwealth was failing – and there was an increase in Quaker political pamphleteering, partly as a result of the illness of the group’s more conservative founder, George Fox. This radical activity, however, also acted to galvanise moderates within Parliament to move for the restoration of the monarchy. The republic did not simply collapse: it was forced out by organised conservative opposition and, most importantly, by the intervention of General George Monck and his troops.50
The restoration of Charles II saw Richard Cromwell and the regicide Edmund Ludlow fly into exile, while radicals such as Henry Marten and John Lambert were imprisoned. The restored monarchy displayed a vindictive thirst for vengeance. Even the carpenter who had erected Charles I’s gallows was executed. Those regicides who had fled the country, such as John Okey, were hunted down – Okey was dragged from his pregnant wife in Delft. Not even death could obstruct the restored monarch’s desire for retributive justice. The bodies of Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell were exhumed and hanged, drawn and quartered. The retribution ended simply because there were no more regicides left to kill and because the executions themselves were becoming politically counterproductive. The dying speeches in which these traitors were expected to display their contrition for their horrible crimes instead became platforms for declaring their unyielding support for the ‘Good Old Cause’. In his scaffold speech, John Cook, the prosecuting counsel at Charles I’s trial, declared, ‘We are not traitors, nor murderers, nor fanatics, but true Christians and good Commonwealth men, fixed and constant to principles of sanctity, truth, justice and mercy.’51
The commitment of those who escaped Royalist clutches also remained undimmed. The republican Algernon Sidney left his response to the execution of his friend Sir Henry Vane – not a regicide, but viewed as too politically dangerous by the restored monarchy to be allowed to live – in the visitors’ book at the Calvinist Academy in Geneva in 1663: ‘Sit Sanguinis Ultor Justorum [Let there be revenge for the blood of the just].’52 Radicals both aristocratic and plebeian continued to plot and fight against the restored monarchy, as evidenced by Venner’s rising in 1661 and the Northern Rising of 1663, both insurrections involving large numbers of ex-New Model Army soldiers. The ideals of the ‘Good Old Cause’ were voiced even in a rebellion ostensibly in support of a royal pretender, the Duke of Monmouth against the reigning King, the Catholic James II. The one-eyed former New Model Army soldier Richard ‘Hannibal’ Rumbold was captured after the failure of the Scottish rebellion, led by the Earl of Argyll, in 1685, the counterpart to Monmouth’s rising in Dorset and Somerset. His last words on the scaffold were a rousing affirmation of political equality (later to be immortalised by Thomas Jefferson): ‘I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle upon his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.’53
In November 1688 another Protestant challenger to James II landed in the West Country. However, unlike the Duke of Monmouth’s rag-tag army, the Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange was accompanied by an invasion force four times the size of the Spanish Armada of a century earlier. And in contrast to Monmouth’s rebellion, which drew its support largely from impoverished cloth-workers and farmhands, the Prince of Orange could rely on the backing of most of the English political elite, including members of the royal family such as James’s Protestant daughter, Anne, alienated by the King’s pro-Catholic policies and authoritarian rule.
These high-profile defections weakened the King’s resolve and, instead of meeting William’s army in battle, he turned back towards his capital. London, however, was no longer a safe haven for James. The atmosphere in the City, which had largely stayed loyal during the Monmouth rebellion, was deeply hostile to the King and his ministers: mobs attacked Catholic chapels and homes, and the hated Lord Chancellor, George Jeffries, was incarcerated in the Tower for his own safety. Terrified that he too might fall victim to crowd violence, James fled London on 11 December but was captured by Kent fishermen near Sheerness as his boat took on ballast. The King’s capture was an inconvenience for William, now looked upon as the only individual capable of restoring order to the nation through his disciplined army, and on 23 December, with the Prince’s connivance, James left the country. With the King gone, and after considerable pressure from the Prince of Orange himself, the hastily summoned Convention Parliament – so named because it was called by an ad hoc council of peers rather than by the King – agreed that William would rule as joint monarch with his wife Mary, the eldest daughter of James II, rather than act merely as her consort. On 13 February 1689, William and Mary formally accepted the throne.
As the Restoration regime finally met its end in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, a number of the surviving radicals returned to England, including, as an active member of William’s invasion party, John Wildman. He was appointed Postmaster General and though soon dismissed from this post – under something of a cloud, he was accused both of consorting with James II and with blackening the names of Tories with fraudulent letters – he was still enough in royal favour to be knighted the year before his death, in February 1691. Wildman had remained a staunch advocate of popular sovere
ignty and limited monarchy, but his politics were more overtly Whig than republican or Leveller. Radical hopes were largely disappointed by the outcome of the Glorious Revolution. Revealingly, others whose politics had mellowed less, such as Edmund Ludlow, were no more welcome in post-revolutionary England than they had been after the Restoration. Ludlow was once again declared a traitor and orders were sent for his arrest.
In some respects, the world of 1688 can look like the realisation of the world of the Levellers, with religious toleration enacted through legislation, regular elections secured via the Triennial Act, greater accountability of the executive, and a declaration of the subjects’ rights (including, significantly for later radical movements, the right to petition Parliament) on the statute books. Certainly, for most eighteenth-century radicals, 1688 was a crucial moment in the defining of British liberty. However, what looks similar is not necessarily the same, as the case of Edmund Ludlow reminds us. The Levellers had wisely acknowledged the need to limit the power of representative institutions, ring-fencing key rights against abridgement by the legislature. The Bill of Rights of 1689 featured no ‘reserved’ powers equivalent to those contained in the Agreement of the People, and though it did clip the wings of the monarchy, it placed no similar limitations on the sovereignty of Parliament. The absence of such controls would subsequently allow the Whig Party under Robert Walpole to undermine important elements of the revolution settlement, such as the 1694 Triennial Act. The extension of the life of parliaments after 1716 from three to seven years allowed Walpole to subdue the vibrant electoral politics of the age of Queen Anne and ushered in the long rule of a political oligarchy.
A Radical History Of Britain Page 20
