A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  28 Lindley, Civil War and Revolution, p. 167.

  29 Cromwell to Robert Jenner and John Ashe, MPs, 20 November 1648, in Thomas Carlyle, The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. S. C. Lomas (3 vols, London, 1904), i, 387.

  30 Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 424.

  31 Quoted in A. Sharp, ‘John Lilburne’, ODNB.

  32 The Humble Representation of the Committee, Gentry, Ministry, And other well-affected Persons in the County of Leicester (London, 17 March 1648[9]), p. 11. An MS version of the Officers’ Agreement in the British Library, Egerton MS 1048 ff. 91–2, carries the small marginal note ‘The forme of ye subscription for the Officers of ye Army’, indicating that copies were being prepared of this version for signing before it was abruptly abandoned.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 For Winstanley’s biography see J. Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), ch. 3.

  2 See A. Hessayon, ‘William Everard’, ODNB.

  3 Truth Lifting up Its Head above Scandals (1648), in G. Winstanley, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. G. H. Sabine (New York, 1945), p. 104.

  4 Ibid., p. 113; see also p. 107.

  5 This already takes on a political hue: ‘Lands and Kingdoms are most commonly governed more by the wisdome of the flesh, than of the spirit’. Ibid., p. 129; see also p. 137.

  6 Ibid., p. 124.

  7 Ibid., p. 124.

  8 C. Hill, ed., Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 18.

  9 Agricultural improvement allied to millenarian expectation was not unique to Winstanley: see T. Leng, Benjamin Worsley (1618–1677): Trade, Interest and the Spirit in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 25–6, 62 and chs 5–6 passim; see also Gurney, Brave Community, pp. 137–8.

  10 Winstanley, Works, p. 190.

  11 Ibid., pp. 182–3.

  12 Winstanley, Works, p. 255. On the use of the Covenant by radicals see my Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (Woodbridge, 2005), ch. 7.

  13 Winstanley, Works, p. 259.

  14 Ibid., p. 260.

  15 Ibid., p. 262.

  16 Ibid., p. 266.

  17 Light Shining in Buckingham-shire (1648), p. 3.

  18 More Light Shining in Buckingham-shire (1649), p. 4.

  19 For the status of the Diggers see Gurney, Brave Community, pp. 128–37. For the mistaken presentation of the Diggers as landless ‘peasants’ see D. Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London, 2006), p. 524.

  20 For this aspect of enclosure riots and other forms of popular protest see K. Wrightson, English Society 1850–1680 (2nd edn, London, 2003), pp. 181–90.

  21 Some of the hostility may have originated less from disputes over land use than from long-standing conflicts, as between the family of one of the Diggers, Henry Bickerstaffe, and his neighbour William Starr, which had spilled over into violent confrontation. See Gurney, Brave Community, pp. 155–7.

  22 Ibid., p. 124.

  23 Quoted in Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, p. 159.

  24 Winstanley, Works, p. 353.

  25 Ibid., p. 373.

  26 Quoted in Gurney, Brave Community, p. 211.

  27 See A. Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: Theaurau John Tany and the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 197–8.

  28 See. J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 7.

  29 Winstanley, Works, p. 523, the ‘hell of prisons, whips and gallows’. For the laws (which included whipping as a punishment) see ibid., pp. 591–600. This did go back on Winstanley’s prohibition of capital punishment in The New Law of Righteousness (1649), in Winstanley, Works, p. 192.

  30 K. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 28–9. Kesselring also notes some similarities between the system of punishment employed by Winstanley and the short-lived 1547 vagrancy laws which sentenced offenders to branding and two years as private slaves. Ibid., p. 39.

  31 Winstanley, Works, p. 534.

  32 Gurney, Brave Community, p. 183. For Winstanley’s answers to charges of ‘Ranterism’ see A Vindication of those whose Endeavors is only to make the Earth a Common Treasury, Called Diggers (1650), in Winstanley, Works, pp. 397–403.

  33 Ibid., p. 459.

  34 Quoted in J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986), p. 159.

  35 Ibid., p. 163.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Ibid., p. 186.

  38 See A. Hessayon, ‘Mary Adams’, ODNB.

  39 Milton, quoted in J. Coffey, ‘A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall, eds, Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 5.

  40 This is the main thrust of Davis, Fear, Myth and History; a similar conclusion is drawn about the impact of the Quakers by Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London, 1985).

  41 T. L. Underwood, ed., The Acts of the Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early Muggletonian Writings (Oxford, 1999), pp. 58, 60–1. Reeve was the effective leader of the sect and the group only became known as the ‘Muggletonians’ after his death in 1658.

  42 Quoted in Davis, Fear, Myth and History, p. 63.

  43 Ibid., p. 147.

  44 These similarities are picked up on by Gurney, Brave Community, pp. 180–3.

  45 Davis, Fear, Myth and History, p. 149.

  46 Ibid., p. 54.

  47 W. R. D. Jones, Thomas Rainborowe (c. 1610–1648): Civil War Seaman, Siegemaster and Radical (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 123.

  48 See P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000), pp. 132–4, the cases of Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, sold into slavery for their part in gun-running for the Royalists. On the rhetoric of slavery in the civil war see Q. Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, in M. Van Gelderen and Q. Skinner, eds, Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2, The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 1.

  49 Gregg, Free-born John, pp. 343–4.

  50 Ruth E. Mayers, 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth (Woodbridge, 2004).

  51 See L. Knoppers, ‘“This so horrid spectacle”: “Samson Agonistes” and the execution of the Regicides’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 487–504, at 487.

  52 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, p. 321.

  53 Rumbold’s quarters were not displayed in Scotland but transported to England and hung outside his residence at Rye House, where the plot to assassinate Charles II had allegedly been hatched in 1683. For Jefferson’s use of Rumbold see Douglass Adair, ‘Rumbold’s dying speech, 1685, and Jefferson’s last words on democracy, 1826’, William and Mary Quarterly, 9 (1952), 521–31.

  54 Godwin, History of the Commonwealth, p. xxix. The radical printer, publisher and antiquarian William Hone was an exception to this general tendency by Georgian radicals to neglect the Levellers: see M. Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture: 1790–1822 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 121–31, and this volume, pp. 315–17, 351.

  55 B. Disraeli, Sybil, ed. T. Braun (London, 1980), p. 40.

  56 C. L. R. James, ‘Cromwell and the Levellers’, Fourth International, 10, no. 5 (1949), pp. 143–8, reproduced at http://www.marxists.org/archive/jamesclr/works/1949/05/english-revolution.htm, accessed on 22 January 2008.

  57 An exhaustive discussion of the referencing of civil-war radicals, from the late seventeenth century onwards, is given in A. Hessayon, ‘Fabricating radical traditions’, http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/hessayon2_radical.html.

  58 Sharp, English Levellers, p. 152.

  PART FOUR: THE AGE OF PAINE

  1 P. S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (2 vols, New York, 1969), i, 341–2, 344. Henceforth, Foner, ed., CWTP.

 
2 Quoted in C. Emsley, Britain and the French Revolution (Harlow, 2000), p. 85.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 D. Hay and N. Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford, 1997), pp. 56–63.

  2 Quoted in J. Sainsbury, John Wilkes: The Lives of a Libertine (Bodmin, 2006), p. 57; see also, for Chevalier D’Éon, pp. 113–14. A. Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, 2004), ch. 2, esp. pp. 44–5 where Clark suggests that rumours of an affair between Wilkes and d’Éon were intended to throw back in his face Wilkes’s own accusations of sodomy made against the Georgian court. Wilkes also initiated the novel device of sending every one of his voters a thank-you card in a bid to retain their loyalty in future elections; see A. H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (Yale, 2006), p. 58.

  3 Sainsbury, Wilkes, p. 121.

  4 For Wilkes’s exploitation of his privileges as an MP see ibid., p. 215.

  5 P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1998), pp. 712, 716.

  6 G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study (2nd edn, London, 1983), ch. 5, for the voting figures. Wilkes succeeded in repeatedly securing an overwhelming majority of the vote, even though his supporters faced a massive government campaign of propaganda and intimidation.

  7 On this aspect of radical language in the mid-eighteenth century see G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (New York, 1987).

  8 E. Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (2nd edn, Oxford, 2005), p. 3.

  9 C. Brent, ‘Thirty-something: Thomas Paine at Bull House in Lewes – six formative years’ (forthcoming Sussex Archaeological Society article); G. Hindmarsh, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and His Officers of Excise (privately printed, 1998). My thanks to Paul Myles for sending me a copy of Colin Brent’s important article.

  10 See East Sussex Record Office, NU1/3/4–5. There is also a letter from Ollive witnessed by Paine in NU1 3/3, and a report of the lawyer Thomas Erskine’s attack on Paine’s Age of Reason in SAS/A740. Erskine, as we shall see, successfully defended a number of radicals in the 1790s, but he was also a devout Christian who found Paine’s work repugnant.

  11 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 235, 496.

  12 Although he did argue for the improvement of excise officers’ pay in The Rights of Man Part the Second (1792), Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 411.

  13 Ibid., ii, 8–9.

  14 Ibid., ii, 11. Though he disowned this pamphlet, Paine returned to the issue of the pay of excise officers in his most famous work, Rights of Man. Ibid., i, 441.

  15 On this see C. Wagner, ‘Loyalist propaganda and the scandalous life of Tom Paine: “Hypocritical Monster!”’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (2005), 97–115.

  16 Foner, ed., CWTP, ii, 1130.

  17 See ibid., i, 258.

  18 Ibid., i, 57–8.

  19 Quoted in J. Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London, 2003), p. 100.

  20 Foner, ed., CWTP, ii, 18.

  21 Ibid., ii, 19.

  22 Ibid., i, 25.

  23 Ibid., ii, 1160–5; Foner, Paine, p. 78.

  24 See T. Loughran, ‘Disseminating Common Sense: Thomas Paine and the problem of the early national bestseller’, American Literature, 78 (2006), 1–28.

  25 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 13. See here Keane’s masterful discussion, Paine, 116–17.

  26 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 28.

  27 Ibid., i, 3.

  28 Ibid., i, 3–4.

  29 Ibid., i, 7–8.

  30 Ibid., i, 27.

  31 Ibid., i, 19.

  32 Ibid., i, 37.

  33 Quoted in H. T. Dickinson, ‘Charles Wyvill’, ODNB.

  34 For their influence and for an accessible, cheap edition of the letters, see D. L. Jacobson, ed., The English Libertarian Heritage (repr. San Francisco, 1994), esp. pp. xlviii–lx. See also A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979), pp. 33–8.

  35 On this see the introduction to my The Glorious Revolution: 1688 and Britain’s Fight for Liberty (London, 2006).

  36 Quoted in Keane, Paine, p. 141.

  37 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 50. In another letter Paine suggested that the allegiances of Americans should be tested by an oath renouncing all allegiance to the George III. Ibid., i, 99–100.

  38 Ibid., i, 191.

  39 Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, pp. 86–7. For Price, see P. Buck, ‘People who counted: political arithmetic in the eighteenth century’, Isis, 73 (1982), 28–45; D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, 1977).

  40 Quoted in C. Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 85–6.

  41 Ibid., p. 87. For a good discussion of Price’s sermon see T. W. Davis, ‘The influence of Richard Price on the Burke–Paine debate’, Proceedings of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850 (1990), 800–6.

  42 Quoted in Franklin, Wollstonecraft, p. 88.

  43 Ibid., p. 89.

  44 Quoted in P. Langford, ‘Edmund Burke’, ODNB.

  45 Quoted in Vallance, Glorious Revolution, p. 10.

  46 On this see Colley, Britons, pp. 232–3.

  47 For an excellent summary of Burke’s position see Emsley’s Britain and the French Revolution, p. 11.

  48 See F. O’Gorman, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher (London, 1986).

  49 C. Bewley and D. Bewley, Gentleman Radical: A Life of John Horne Tooke, 1736–1812 (London, 1998), p. 96.

  50 Ibid., pp. 53, 120.

  51 Franklin, Wollstonecraft, p. 96.

  52 Ibid., p. 97.

  53 J. Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London, 2000), p. 168.

  54 Franklin, Wollstonecraft, p. 98.

  CHAPTER 9

  1 Franklin, Wollstonecraft, p. 100.

  2 Foner, ed., CWTP, ii, 481.

  3 For the grotto, see Marsden Rock: or, the story of Peter Allan and Marsden Marine Grotto (Sunderland, 1848); J. P. Robson, Summer Excursions in the North of England; including A Trip to Warkworth; A Ramble to Marsden Rocks; Picnicings at Finchale Priory; A Week at Gilsland (Newcastle, 1851). The legal case over the rent appears to have brought Allan to an early death in 1849: see Newcastle Courant, 14 September 1849.

  4 Quoted in Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, p. 95.

  5 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 250.

  6 Ibid., i, 252.

  7 Ibid., i, 260; see also i, 419n.

  8 Ibid., i, 382–3.

  9 Ibid., i, 279.

  10 Ibid., i, 280, 382.

  11 Ibid., i, 260.

  12 Ibid., i, 256.

  13 Ibid., i, 266.

  14 Ibid., i, 291.

  15 Note also that the earlier English meaning of tolerance was the enduring of evil or suffering.

  16 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 281.

  17 Ibid., i, 289.

  18 Ibid., i, 326.

  19 Ibid., i, 280–1.

  20 Emsley, Britain and the French Revolution, pp. 12, 29.

  21 D. Vincent, ed., Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians 1790–1885 (London, 1977), p. 45.

  22 Quoted in M. T. Davis, ‘London Corresponding Society’, ODNB.

  23 Quoted in Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, p. 168.

  24 Thale, ed., Selections, pp. 18, 76.

  25 Ibid., p. 106.

  26 See Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, p. 175.

  27 Ibid., pp. 164–7.

  28 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 355.

  29 Ibid., i, 365.

  30 Ibid., i, 366.

  31 Ibid., i, 374.

  32 Ibid., i, 359.

  33 Ibid., i, 358–61.

  34 Thale, ed., Selections, p. 256.

  35 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 404.

  36 Ibid., i, 410–11. The interrelationship between success in the brewing industry and landed wealth is demonstrated by the rise of the Whitbread dynasty in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: see D. Rapp, ‘Social
mobility in the eighteenth century: the Whitbreads of Bedfordshire, 1720–1815’, Economic History Review, 27 (1974), 380–94.

  37 Foner, ed., CWTP, i, 434.

  38 Ibid., i, 428–9. Paine was referring here to the frequent disputes between parishes over paying the costs of paupers’ burials. See for legal discussions of the issue of removal orders, pauper deaths and the costs incurred M. Nolan, A Treatise of the Laws for Relief and Settlement of the Poor (4th edn, 3 vols, London, 1852), ii, 488.

  39 Foner, ed., CWTP, i. 431.

  40 Ibid., i, 430.

  41 Thale, ed., Selections, p. 253.

  42 See M. McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 132–3, for the irony that Wollstonecraft’s ideal female citizen was defined by the virtues of ‘manly independence’.

  43 M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. C. Ward (Dover Thrift edn, New York, 1996), p. 15.

  44 Ibid., p. 151.

  45 Ibid., pp. 7, 78. One of those on Wollstonecraft’s shortlist of admirable women was not even female. ‘Madame d’Éon’ was the same Chevalier d’Éon rumoured to have had a sexual relationship with John Wilkes. To be fair to Wollstonecraft, though, d’Éon’s sex was only discovered following an autopsy in 1810.

  46 Ibid., p. 9. A similar concern for fashion and beauty deterred women (again, wealthy women) from breast-feeding their children – once more, Wollstonecraft felt, to the detriment of proper child-rearing: p. 147.

  47 Ibid., pp. 60–1.

  48 Ibid., p. 178.

  49 Ibid., pp. 177–8.

  50 Quoted in Taylor, ‘Wollstonecraft’, ODNB.

  51 Todd, Wollstonecraft, p. 185. Although More almost certainly did read the work and respond critically to it when she came to produce her own highly successful works on women’s education.

  52 W. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. M. Philp and A. Gee (London, 1993), p. 357. Henceforth, Godwin, Enquiry, ed. Philp and Gee.

  53 Quoted in P. Marshall, William Godwin (London, 1984), p. 1.

  54 Emsley, Britain and the French Revolution, p. 17.

  55 Godwin, Enquiry, ed. Philp and Gee, p. 7.

  56 W. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (Woodstock reprint, Oxford, 1992), p. viii. Henceforth Godwin, Political Justice.

  57 Godwin, Enquiry, ed. Philp and Gee, p. 212.