It was, in any case, unlikely that many in 1688–9 would have looked back to the Levellers for models of constitutional reform. The era of the civil war and revolution was viewed, from the perspective of the 1680s, as a national catastrophe that all sides were desperate not to revisit.* Consequently, it was dangerous to make positive reflections on the civil wars. ‘Leveller’ itself remained a term of opprobrium into the eighteenth century and was attached as a smear term to a number of eighteenth-century radical groups, most prominently in its use by ‘loyalists’ in the 1790s in John Reeves’s Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, a national political society aimed at suppressing ‘seditious’ activity.
The propaganda appears to have worked. Though we know that some members of the radical London Corresponding Society owned copies of Leveller pamphlets, they did not advertise the fact, as to do so would have been very politically damaging. When radical writers such as Catharine Macaulay and William Godwin revived interest in the history of England’s seventeenth-century revolution, they preferred to laud the ‘republicans’, men like John Hampden, Henry Vane and Algernon Sidney, rather than the Levellers. Of the major Leveller writers, Lilburne alone received some attention from Godwin, but it was largely negative. Godwin saw the Leveller leader as essentially self-interested and self-obsessed, pursuing his own personal quarrels to the detriment of the wider struggle, contrasting Lilburne, to his disadvantage, with the more ‘public-spirited’ Oliver Cromwell.54 In his novel Sybil, published in 1845, the young Benjamin Disraeli could confidently declare that not ‘one man in a thousand … has ever heard of Major Wildman: yet he was the soul of English politics in the most eventful period in this kingdom … and seemed more than once to hold the balance which was to decide the permanent form of our government’.55
The Levellers, then, remained largely forgotten until the late nineteenth century, when the work of Charles Firth recovered the text of the Putney Debates from the original manuscripts kept in Worcester College, Oxford. But Firth’s transcriptions of the Debates were mainly perceived as interesting only to military historians. It took a non-British scholar, the German democratic socialist Eduard Bernstein, to draw serious attention not just to Putney as a crucial part of the English Revolution, but also to the importance of Winstanley and the Diggers, who had sunk even further from view than Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton and Wildman.
In the English-speaking world it was not until the publication in 1938 of A. S. P. Woodhouse’s provocatively titled Puritanism and Liberty that Putney was established as a milestone in British constitutional history. His edition of the Debates had an explicitly political aim: to provide ideological ammunition for the public in the battle against the forces of fascism and, later, Soviet totalitarianism. It is his reinterpretation of Putney as a crucible of democratic thought that has proved most influential to the present day. In the era of the attempted left and centre-left ‘popular front’ against appeasement, the liberal reading of Putney offered by Woodhouse was adopted by British Marxist historians, most prominently Christopher Hill but also A. L. Morton and Brian Manning and, in a wider context of establishing an English radical tradition, E. P. Thompson. As a soldier, Thompson had carried a copy of A Handbook of Freedom (1939) in his knapsack, an anthology of radical English historical documents by the communist poets and writers Edgell Rickword and Jack Lindsay that included the Putney Debates. The Army Bureau for Current Affairs had encouraged discussion of the Debates among army education units, seeing in this a means of giving soldiers a sense of the historic purpose of the British army in defending liberty.
By the 1940s, the Putney Debates had clearly entered into the consciousness not only of historians, but also of politicians. The campaigning journalist Frank Owen adopted the name ‘Thomas Rainsborough’ in a number of articles on the conduct of the Second World War in Tribune magazine. Putney also served as an inspiration to modern radicals outside of England. The Trinidadian Trotskyite C. L. R. James found inspiration for his anticolonial cause not only in the activities of the Haitian revolutionaries, the subjects of his most famous work, Black Jacobins, but also in debates between seventeenth-century Englishmen.56 Putney had become part of the language of political debate in the postwar era – most notably in Tony Benn’s Arguments for Socialism. The Levellers and Diggers were also entering into popular culture. Winstanley’s life was celebrated in David Caute’s novel Comrade Jacob and in Andrew Molo and Kevin Brownlow’s film Winstanley. The Diggers at Iver in Buckinghamshire were commemorated in Caryl Churchill’s play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (first performed in 1976), and celebrated in song by Leon Rosselson.
The Diggers and Levellers have been celebrated outside England as well. In Alexander Garden, Moscow, a column commemorating revolutionary heroes bears Winstanley’s name at number eight on the list after Marx and Engels. As the Green movement gathered strength in the 1990s, in part through the actions of squatters such as the famous ‘Swampy’, celebrations of the three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Digger settlements were accompanied not only by an academic conference but also by ‘re-enactments’ of the original settlement: anarchist activists briefly reclaimed for the common people the land currently occupied by the millionaire residents of present-day St George’s Hill, including entertainers such as Cliff Richard and Rolf Harris. The popularisation of the radicals of the seventeenth century has most recently been seen in the opening of a new exhibition centre at St Mary’s Church, Putney, to celebrate the three-hundred-and-sixtieth anniversary of the Debates, lauded as a major step forward in disseminating ‘our inspiring radical history’ to a wider public.57
Without the pioneering Marxist, socialist and liberal historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we would not have recovered the history of English radicalism in the seventeenth. The Levellers have now become the most potent symbol of Britain’s ‘democratic tradition’, their work celebrated in print, on stage, in film and in song. While professional historians of the seventeenth century may complain, legitimately, that the history curriculum currently taught to our students remains too chronologically narrow, they can scarcely say that the Levellers are likely to disappear from the public consciousness. Now, in fact, we face the opposite problem: that the image of the Levellers as the ‘first socialists’ or ‘first democrats’ is the dominant one, and one that is now being institutionalised at Putney through permanent exhibitions and plaques. If the Levellers are part of a ‘democratic tradition’, though, it is a tradition that has largely been invented by twentieth-and twenty-first-century historians, journalists and politicians, not one created by radical movements themselves. In 1649, the imprisoned John Lilburne defiantly predicted that ‘posterity … shall reap the benefit of our endeavours whatever shall become of us’.58 But until the late nineteenth century there was very little reference to them and there is scant evidence that their works influenced any subsequent radicals, whether in Britain, America or France.
The commemoration of the execution of the Leveller mutineers at Burford illustrates the problems inherent in the left-wing celebration of the movement. Essentially, ‘Levellers’ Day’ presents it as a heroic failure. However, the Levellers were far more influential and far better connected in terms of the politics of their own time than was previously recognised. That the Agreement of the People did not become the new constitution for the republic was a matter of contingency: indeed, it seems to have been abandoned only once the process of subscribing to the Agreement had already begun. Nonetheless, the idea of reserved rights became incorporated into the constitution of the first protectoral government. The notion of inalienable, natural rights was, for the first time, being publicly recognised. The tactics that the Levellers pioneered – mass petitioning, cheap-print pamphleteering and large-scale public demonstrations – also had an important afterlife, informing feverish party-politicking from the Restoration to the death of Queen Anne.
It may be harder to detect an
immediate legacy bequeathed by Gerrard Winstanley. Certainly, his work had less of an impact on his contemporaries than that of the Levellers. However, his perceptive analysis of the connections between landed wealth and political power, and his radical solution to the inequality this relationship produced – the abolition of the private ownership of land – would resonate with subsequent radical thinkers and movements, from Thomas Spence in the 1790s to the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s.
It is not that the importance of radicalism in the English Revolution has been exaggerated, though it is certainly true that many of the present-day champions of the Levellers and Diggers are guilty of misrepresenting their objectives. Rather, the experience of the 1640s was so traumatic both for the common people, and, most importantly, for the political elite that it had largely to be expunged from public memory – only to be invoked, like the ‘commotion time’ of 1549, in negative terms, as a warning of the evils of rebellion. As Winstanley said, in 1649 it really did appear as if the old world was ‘burning up like parchment in the fire’. The impact of that period in English political life was so profound that merely raising the spectre of the civil wars was enough to induce public anxiety. It was by a constant process of historical revision that the radicals were increasingly marginalised until they were almost obliterated from histories of the period. Individuals themselves were repackaged: the millenarian Edmund Ludlow, for instance, in the hands of his eighteenth-century editor John Toland, was transformed into a secular republican. If the ideas of seventeenth-century radicals lingered on in print, it was only in a half-life; their thoughts, a lasting testament to their radicalism, still too dangerous to deploy in public. Consequently, the radicalism that emerged as a potent force in the late eighteenth century, at least publicly, would owe remarkably little to the political movements of the English Revolution.
PART FOUR
THE AGE OF PAINE: BRITISH RADICALS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
It is an age of revolutions, in which every thing may be looked for.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791)
TOM: … I want freedom and happiness, the same as they have got in France.
JACK: What, Tom, we imitate them? We follow the French! Why they only begun all this mischief at first, in order to be just what we are already. Why I’d sooner go to the Negers to get learning, or go to the Turks to get religion, than to the French for freedom and happiness.
Hannah More, Village Politics (1792)
8
WILKES, PAINE, AND ‘LIBERTY RESTORED’
The passage of the Septennial Act ended the frantic party politics of the reign of Queen Anne, but this did not represent the death of popular political participation. Though the relatively broad electorate of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries gradually shrank as the terms of the franchise failed to keep step with population growth, the public could still exert a powerful political influence. As Hogarth’s ‘election’ series indicated, the main impact of the Septennial Act was not to alter the boisterous, carnivalesque nature of English elections but to increase the power of the aristocracy and gentry as political power brokers, thereby inflating the cost of fighting seats fivefold from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century. This in turn made contested elections less and less likely – in 1761 for example, only 17 per cent of constituencies were presented with a choice of candidates. But even in this stagnant political landscape, as the rising cost of electioneering indicated, ‘treating’ (bribing) the electorate remained very important, especially in the bigger borough and county constituencies. In Hull, the electorate’s customary two-guinea bribe at polling time was seen as a sort of local birthright.
Public opinion continued to be influential in other ways too. In comparison to most Western European countries, Britain had an extraordinarily vibrant national and local press, with a literate population to match. By 1753 there were thirty-two provincial newspapers in the country, with a total circulation of around thirty thousand copies a day. Where it could not be effected through the polls, the press helped oust unpopular political leaders, first Sir Robert Walpole in 1742 and then, later, the Duke of Newcastle. Mass petitioning and addressing also continued unabated in the eighteenth century, providing the British public with a direct means of communicating with and complaining about their largely unelected governors.
Even so, popular pressure tended to be brought to bear most heavily on unpopular individuals, such as Walpole, rather than upon parties or the political system as a whole. The two-party politics of the reign of Queen Anne had been fundamentally altered by the connections between the Tory Party and support for the exiled Catholic Stuart dynasty. As a result of this link, the Tory Party’s share of seats at Westminster dwindled to under one-fifth of the Commons by 1750. The Whig ascendency was justified by the continued threat of Jacobite-sponsored insurrection: this was the party that would defend the legacy of the Glorious Revolution from the return of ‘Catholic tyranny’. But, as the threat of rebellion subsided in the second half of the eighteenth century, the period’s vibrant popular politics became more focused and critical of the political establishment. Electoral reform, an integral part of the Levellers’ programme, once more became a hot topic.1
During the 1760s and 1770s, agitation for political reform in England centred on the figure of John Wilkes. A notorious libertine – he was accused of having a relationship with the Chevalier d’Éon, a reputed French male-impersonator who turned out, confusingly, to be a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man – Wilkes made an unlikely champion for electoral reform, having heavily bribed the Aylesbury electors to win his first parliamentary seat. Wilkes’s feelings about some of his new constituents were less than generous. After his election he wrote, ‘I … have given … orders to keep away from the house and gardens all the rabble at A[ylesbury]. If any of the better sort choose at any time to walk in the gardens, the gardener shall attend them … and then I shall get rid of the numbers of women, children, dogs &c. You wou’d stare at the number of little thefts they make.’2
Despite Wilkes’s obvious failings as a popular champion, in the early 1760s he and his newspaper the North Briton offered virtually the only serious opposition to the government of the Scottish Lord Bute. Wilkes savaged Bute’s ministry for the cheap peace that it had agreed with France to terminate the Seven Years War. These attacks were deeply scurrilous: Wilkes accused Bute of owing his position to a sexual relationship with the Queen Mother. In November 1763, the Commons decided that issue no. 45 of the North Briton constituted seditious libel – a crime, the House deemed, not covered by parliamentary privilege. Wilkes, who had recently been badly injured in a pistol duel with a fellow MP, was now left open to legal proceedings. He fled for France on Christmas Day 1763.
Wilkes recalled his exile fondly: much of his time abroad was devoted to the amorous attentions of his nineteen-year-old Italian mistress, Gertrude Corradini (of whom he said ‘[her] conversation [is] childish and weak but in bed she could not be call’d fatui puella cunni [a girl with a lazy cunt]’).3 By 1767, however, his money was running out. Consequently, he was strongly motivated to stand in the general election of March 1768; having previously used parliamentary privilege to evade paying his debts, he needed to escape his creditors and to annul his convictions for libel of 1764 by means of a royal pardon.4 Nonetheless, Wilkes was an important figure, not only in the movement for electoral reform but also, through his ability to protect London printers, as alderman for Farringdon Without, in the ongoing struggle with the House of Commons to defend the printers’ right to report proceedings in Parliament in their newspapers. (Until this point, debates and votes in the Lords and Commons remained officially secret.*)
Though still an outlaw, Wilkes returned to England in 1768 to stand first, unsuccessfully, as a parliamentary candidate for the City of London and then, to popular acclaim, as MP for Middlesex. His attempt to win the latter seat by popular vote rather than by the usual eighteenth-century routes of
patronage or purchase was self-interested; at the time he had neither the money nor the influence to adopt alternative tactics. But Middlesex’s relatively open franchise would make it a popular battleground for radical candidates into the nineteenth century, and an important showcase for the principle of popular election. Under the eighteenth-century electoral system there was little relationship between population and political representation. Before the 1832 Great Reform Act, Middlesex, with a population of around one million, elected just eight MPs, while Cornwall, with barely a hundred thousand, had forty-two. About half of all MPs in the Commons stood for seats whose electorates were so small that results could easily be secured by bribery.5 The Commons’ repeated rejection of Wilkes’s election (he ‘won’ the seat in three separate by-election contests) on the grounds of his outlawry was an open affront to the electorate and caused a popular outcry.6 In one notorious incident, the ‘massacre’ of St George’s Fields, seven of Wilkes’s supporters were killed by troops sent to suppress the mass meeting.
Wilkes’s imprisonment in June 1768 appeared no impediment to his political career, since in January of the following year he secured election as a city alderman. By June 1771, the Wilkite members of the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights (SSBR) were pushing a far-reaching programme of political reform. The Society appealed to the idea of a British ‘ancient constitution’ and sought to recover the reputedly ‘lost’ rights of English freeholders. It called for parliamentary inquiries into public expenditure, the appointment of judges to redress the grievances of the Middlesex electors, compensation for the wrongful arrest of the Lord Mayor in the printers’ case, close scrutiny of the whole range of maladministration in Ireland, and the virtual withdrawal of all the contentious legislation concerning the American colonies since 1763. Candidates were also to support the return of annual parliaments (claimed as a ‘Saxon’ institution), the establishment of a ‘full and equal representation of the people’ and the exclusion of all ‘placemen’ (government pensionaries), without exception, from the House of Commons. This concern with the corrosive influence of the court was in line with the themes of Wilkes’s earlier journalism in the North Briton. Here, he had accused the court of being captured by a malign pro-French faction, centring on Bute, who, as a Scotsman, inevitably favoured the revival of the Auld Alliance. The fear of foreign influence was likewise evident in the rhetoric of the Bill of Rights Society, created to guard ‘native’ freedoms vigilantly.7
A Radical History Of Britain Page 21
