Left-Wing Democracy in The English Civil War
9. If modern socialism is primary a product of the factory and our industrial civilization,
its ancestry is to be found in the field. For socialism derives, above all else, from the
realization that, if men are to live, they must have free and easy access to the things that
give life; and it is from the increasing denial of that freedom of access that socialism
inevitably emerges. The particular forms socialist thought takes depend almost entirely
on the nature of the things by which men live and the means by which those goods are
produced. In the days when land constituted the basic and almost exclusive means of
subsistence, socialist thought was concerned entirely with the ownership of the soil.
But the highly individualized methods of agricultural production rendered it inevitable
that agrarian socialism could be nothing more than the perception of isolated individuals
rather than the expression of whole groups or classes. In modern society the control of
economic life has become primarily a function of the economic system. As a result, both
the strength and nature of socialism have been imparted to it by the industrial proletariat
who, while collectively operating the machines by which society lives, is denied both a
share in their ownership and an adequate portion of the goods its labour produces. But
the presence throughout all these centuries of the vision of a world in which society itself
would collectively own and control the productive forces by which life is maintained is
continuous and unmistakable."
10. "It found recurrent and articulate expression in that long chain of agrarian revolt that
since 1381 has been an important theme in English history."
11. "The men who made those revolts were seeking the redress of particular grievances
by which they were oppressed: they were little interested in remaking the foundations of
the social order. Generally, those early agrarian rising were movements of al the peasants
and labourers in a district or county against their landlords and employers. The conditions
of economic life precluded the emergence of any sharp class distinctions between
the small peasants and the landless labourers, for their respective lots were scarcely
distinguishable.
I do not intend to trace the process by which the English peasantry was divorced
from the soil. That process, begun even before the Black Death, was lengthy and
complicated. The development of an exchange and money economy, the rise in labour
costs that followed the Black Death, the growth of wool production and the large profits
high prices and cheap labour costs made possible, considerations of agricultural
efficiency, the deterioration of the soil, speculation in land, the growth of the towns and
the increasing demand for food they created, the development of commercial agriculture--
all stimulated the process of enclosure by which the people were evicted from their
holdings."
12. "Wyclif's communism was simply an abstract deduction from certain theological
conceptions and was not intended to have any practical consequences; but it reflected
an unmistakable tendency of the period. The Peasant Revolt of 1381 had a strong
background of primitive communism. The John Ball whom Froissart reports to have
preached communism to the masses may have been a legendary figure; but Owst has
recently shown that the type of preaching Ball is said to have done was widespread
among the friars and churchmen of the day. [1. G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in
Medieval England (1935)] Thomas More and the less famous Starkey may have been
the voices of a dying past rather than the prophets of an emerging future; but they
indicate, at any rate, the conviction of socially conscious individuals in a period of
profound economic maladjustment that an adequate and just social order could be built
only on the basis of some sort of co-operative enterprise. Ket's rebellion must have
had serious communistic tendencies; for, though those tendencies may not have been
given permanent expression, their presence is attested by the fact that both Latimer and
Crowley, those ardent champons of the poor and bitter foes of the enclosers, found it
necessary to repudiate communism.
"I do not agitate the people to make all things common", declared Crowley, "... but
the possessioners must consider themselves stewards rather than lords over their
possessions." [2. Crowley, Select Works, pp. 156 seq. Quoted by M. Beer, History of
British Socialism (1929), Vol. I, p. 45.]
One of the most arresting chapters in that early history of socialism is that written by
Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement during the Civil War in the seventeenth
century. The Civil War was one of the most decisive turning points in English history. It
was a challenge for power between social classes." "It raised in its most acute form the
basic problem of all revolutions, the relationshp of economic to political power."
CHAPTER ONE. THE BACKGROUND OF THE CIVIL WAR
""For wherefore is it that there is such wars and rumours of wars in the Nations of the
Earth? And wherefore are men so mad as to destroy one another? But only to uphold
Civil Propriety of Honor, Dominion and Riches one over another. . . . Propriety and
single interest divides the people of a land and the whole world into parties and is the
cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere." - The True Levellers
Standard Advanced (1649).
Every age tends to write history in its own image; and when Victorian England came to
record its version of the Civil War through the pen of S. R. Gardiner, it could see that
conflict only as a magnificent operation of the special liberalism of its own period. A
united nation suffering cruel tyranny and ruthless oppression had risen in its might and
anger to strike down a despotic king and to preserve inviolate for future generations the
priceless heritage of English liberty. Actually, however, the Civil War was a profound
social struggle whose roots lie deep in the vast economic changes of the preceding
century.
The most important of those changes... was the accession to a position of
increasing prominence and power of a class of men in the cities and towns whose
importance derived not from their ownership of land, but from their possession of capital,
and of those classes in the country who were revolutionizing the traditional scheme of
agriculture and landholding. The effects of the rapid expansion of foreign and domestic
trade, the remarkable development of capitalist industry, the establishment of an
elaborate financial organization and the application of commercial methods to agriculture
had been to achieve a radical alteration of the social structure and to re-define the social
relationships feudalism had established; and from that redefinition there emerged the
challenge that met and eventually broke the old concepts and sanctions that had governed
those relationships.
If capitalism at the beginning of the seventeenth century was yet in its infancy, it
had already dealt a shattering blow to the old order. A society whose class divisions had
been obscured and rationalized by the concept of status was disolving into one that was
undisguisedly based on the phenomenon of class. Wealth was disputing the claims of
birth as the royal highway to social privilege. The impersonal relationships of an
emergent capitalism were superseding the personal contacts that had been of the essence
of feudalism. The supreme and all-embracing power of the Church had shrunk before the
growing authority of the secular State. Expediency was replacing theological sanction as
the bar before which social policy was being tried; and the stentorian tones of religious
prescription were being modified by the pulsating and dynamic beat of the new economic
realities."
The rise of the middle class.
capitalists the most ambitious members.
"In the cities we meet him as the commercial financier eager to exploit the opportunities
of speculation that have appeared on the ever-expanding economic horizon; or as the
industrial capitalist embarking on an uncharted voyage of economic experiment; or as the
sober tradesman industriously increasing his share of the local market. In the country we
find him as the capitalist-farmer who regards his land solely as a business investment and
agriculture purely as a commercial enterprise."
It produced the modern proletariat.
Sixteenth century masses of peasant were displaced by the process of enclosure.
Other factors: conversion of the demesne to pasture,diminution in the demand for labour,
erosion of legal status.
Consequence: took to open-field villages, others drifted to towns. For the first time in
English history: landless labourers.
16. England still most an agricultural economy.
Old nobility forced to break up large estates for more efficiently management and
cultivation of the gentry.
"The untitled gentry, recruited largely from the ranks of those whose fortune in trade had
enabled them to acquire land or from those families who had shared in the spoliation of
the monasteries, were growing in influence and number. The yeoman still tilled his own
holding; and a new class of landless agricultural labourers had emerged."
Commercial interests became dominant figures in cities and towns.
Thought artisan guilds were declining, master craftsmen still played an important role in
economic life.
The rise of financial interest within the City of London
Trades with large amount of apprentices.
Manufacture and mining build a large number of unorganized labourers.
"...the middles classes increasingly perceive that they alone wield the key to its entrance;
for they alone could adequately exploit the opportunities that presented themselves. New
enterprises demanded investment on which no immediate return could be expected and
which none but they was prepared to venture. New machines and technical processes
required large capital outlay which only they could supply. Speculation could be carried
on only with ready money which they alone possessed. Above all, the new age demanded
initiative and imagination which were to be found only in those classes that were not
shackled to the modes and habits of the past."
The middle class "They exhibit all the historical characteristics of a class that is soon
to challenge for supreme authority in the State. They are conscious of their power and
importance. They manifest a growing disregard of tradition and authority. They are
supremely, if quietly, confident of their ultimate victory.
But that victory was neither easily nor quickly achieved. Years of civil war were
to bring to a climax, in blood and slaughter, more than a century of conflict before
England was to be made safe for the new men of property."
"...Tudors, it is true, in hastening the detrioration of the nobility, were destroying the
monarchy's principal ally and thus ultimately enabling the middle class to reduce the
Crown to aposition of spendid impotence. But at a time when the bourgeoisie, though
rising, had not yet risen, and the aristocracy, though weakened, was still a factor of
considerable importance, the monarchy, by holding the balance of power between
both, could play a dominant role; and the Tudors and Stuarts were thus able to breathe
some life into a system already on the verge of collapse. That their efforts should have
been directed towards stabilizing the old order rather than facilitating the transition
to the new was a natural consequence of the threat to their position they sensed in the
rising commercial classes. Through a system of controls, the Tudors attempted to place
themselves directly athwart the driving economic forces of the period. In practice, it
is true, those controls functioned as a series of irritating restrictions; in theory,a t any
rate, they implied an attempt at complete regulation of economic activity. Land laws
and enclosure regulations sought to curb the appetites of the capitalist-farmers and land
merchants."
18. "A mediaeval conception of stewardship as the essence of property attached a dragging
weight to the feet of men engaged in a race in which free disposition of their resources
was the ultimate condition of victory. The doctrine that individual ambition must be
subordinated to social obligation may be an avenue to the Kingdom of Heaven; it
sometimes loses one [of] the goods things of the earth."
19. "If the sixteenth century largely succeeded in destroying ecclesiastical supervision in
the economic realm, it could not prevent the transfer of that control to the powerful state
that breakdown served to create; and under the Tudors economic activity was a rigidly
disciplined--albeit from a different motive--as it had formerly been by the ecclesiastical
system. That it was accepted by the bourgeoisie was no doubt due to the fact that the
monarchy still had its role to play in destroying the surviving vestiges of feudalism and
in further reducing the feudal nobility; in part that acquiescence derived from a sober
realization that to challenge its exercise would be to invite certain defeat. The order State
regulation helped to maintain was, as well, the condition under which the middle class
could strengthen its growing forces. More than a century was to elapse before the trend of
development was securely to establish the claims of laisser-faire. But already the protest
against interventionism was making itself heard. The protest of the House of Commons
against Elizabethan monopolies is one of the earliest and most emphatic examples of that
opposition. [1. Prothero, 'Statues and Constitutional Documents' (1913), p. 111.] "All
free subjects", asserted the House of Commons in 1604, "are born inheritable as to their
land so also to the free exercise of their industry."[2. Commons Journals, May 21, 1604,
Vol. 1, p. 218] In the 1630's and the early years of the Civil War that protest swelled
to new heights. "Tyranny may justly be esteemed the greatest calamity", declares one
anonymous pamphleteer, [3. A Brief Discourse on Tyrants and Tyranny (1642), E. 127
(45)] "because it is in opposition to the chiefest felicity which lies in liberty and the free
disposition of that which God and our own industry hath made ours.""
20. "Capitalism required for its development a supply of free labour to man its growing
enterprises, a labour army to wage its economic battles. That army was already in the
porcess of creation; its recruiting-officers were those who were driving th eEnglish
peasantry off the soil. But if it was to be an effective force in the service of capitalism,
its members had to be at once submissive to authority and unquestioning of the purposes
it would be utilized to achieve. It was therefore necessary to impose on the ever-
increasing numbers of landless labourers both in town and country a discipline that would
reduce them to a homogeneous mass and induce them to ccept without question--or, at
least, without effective portest--their role and status in the new order. They had to be
disciplined to the ends of the new society.
By the early decades of the seventeenth century the bourgeoisie had begun to
sense the tasks that lay before it. It had, first of all, to effect its release from the
oppressive system of control the State attempted to enforce. But because that policy was
rooted in a system of social concepts, the middle class had to complete the destruction of
a body of social doctrine that economic development was already rendering obsolete and
to substitute in its stead a system of thought that would hallow its ends and sanction its
activities. Religion and philosophy had to be re-fashioned to serve new masters and to
fulfil new purposes. In giving freedom to the middle classes the new modes of thought
had to justify its denial to the proletariat. And finally, if the bourgeoisie was to continue
its course without hindrance, the institutions of power--the State--had to be captured from
the aristocracy that controlled them and re-dedicated to the service of the conquerors."
21. The economic impact weakened the Church's authority; transforming itself during the
16th and 17th centuries. Social thought becoming more secular and individualistic.
"...Calvinism, born and nurtured in an environment in which the new forms of economic
life were facts to be accepted rather than innovations to be condemned, constituted an
important and radical departure from the beaten path of religious theory and practice;
and the form it took in English Puritanism completed the process by which theological
percept was to adapt itself to the framework of the new capitalist economy. [1. On
the relationship of religious theory to social change in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and particularly on the rise of Puritanism, see R. H. Tawney, 'Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism', a book indispensable to an understanding of the period. Cf. also H. J.
Laski, 'The Rise of European Liberalism, London (1936), Chaps 1 and 2.]
"There were within Puritanism itself many strains the profound divergence of which the
Civil War was so dramatically to reveal."
22. "...[Puritanism] was adopted by the English middles classes because there was
something in it that corresponded to the ethos of the period and because there was
something in it they were able to use."
"The old Church could no longer provide a system to which even satisfactory lip-service
could be paid because it was remote from the realities of daily life."
The middle classes spread Calvinism to meet the agenda.
"...the central dogma of Calvinism was an all-embracing determinism, a doctrine of
predestination, which asserted that all mankind was divided by God into the chosen few
who were saved and the many who were damned, those who were to enjoy the eternal
bliss of heavenly Paradise and those who were to suffer the tortures of hell. That division
had been determined by an incomprehensible act of the Divine Will, and no human effort
could avail a whit to modify or avert that Divine decree. If no human act could bring
grace, then the business of life was not to achieve salvation, but to glorify the name of
God on earth; and that glorification was to be effected not primarily through prayer or
religious worship, but in the daily routine of practical activity. The responsibility of each
individual to lead a life through which the Creator would be glorified became at least
as fundamental as the duty of the Church to maintain those formal institutions through
which that sanctification could be achieved." This limited the authority of the church,
placing more weight on the scriptures themselves, as interpreted by the individual "...as a
responsibility and privilege."
24. "The poverty of the unfortunate became an indication of their moral failure."
"Poverty and suffering, once an eloquent reproach to the luxury of the wealthy and
a powerful prick to their conscience, became merely confirmation of their own
righteousness and a justification for the denial of their social responsibilities."
""It is gnerally maintained by many worldly wise men that riches, if men doe not set
their hearts on them, cannot hinder godlinesse." [2. Tyranipocrit discovered with all his
wiles wherewith he vanquisheth (1649) p. 17]
25. "The more fortunate were confirmed both in the positions they held and in the
practices by which those positions had been achieved."
27. Sedgwick notes two factions fighting the war. ". . . the Court and Royall and
Episcopall Party" and "the country people and the Puritan party"
"To the King goes men of honour as the nobility and the Gentry, such whose
honour is predominate over their reason and religion . . . men of implicit faith whose
conscience is much regulated by their superiors. . . . To the Parliament, men of a lower
state and expressing their own reasons in religion, zealous and well-affected people, men
of industry and labour that love freedom and to be something themselves; men whose
consciences are their owne and so strict in them; cities, corporations, bodies . . ."
[5. Wm. Sedgwick, 'The Leaves of the Tree of Life for the Healing of the Nations (1648),
E. 460 (10)]
29. "They had to counter the constitutional theory that claimed for the King the rights
they were anxious to abrogate. They had to oppose a legal system that crystallized the
relationships they were in the process of transforming. They had to destroy a church that
was so antithetical to their own temper and which acted vigorously to enforce its dictates.
Above al, they had to capture political power in order to abolish the engines of repression
and to establish in their stead the institutions that would give effect to their own purposes
and ambitions. The middle class was advancing on many fronts; but those fronts were
simply sectors of one large battlefield."
"Under the influence of Bodin, seventeenth-century thinkers were increasingly concerned
witht he problem of sovereignty; but not until its exercise was challenged did Englishmen
move to a consideration of its nature. Until the incisive mind of Hobbes put the
discussion in a more adequate perspective, men were concerned simply with the practical
problem of its location. Did sovereignty rest solely with the King or with the King-in-
Parliament? Was its exercise limited by any fundamental law? Did the King under the
claim of emergency powers have the right to disregard the law? Were the Ministers who
advised the Crown answerable to Parliament for their actions?"
30. "That anti-clericalism and antagonism to the Church reached their height during
Charles' reign, and particularly during Laud's tenure of office as Archbishop of
Canterbury. For to Laud religion was still a totality embracing within its scope every
aspect of corporate, no less than of individual, existence. Society was for him essentially
a hierarchy of functions and duties, an organic unity whose harmony was complete when
every one of its members diligently discharged his function. Unity was the essential
condition of social harmony; and to Laud the price of unity was rigid uniformity."
"[Laud's] attempts to enforce uniformity of worship and ritual evoked profound
opposition. Through the Court of High Commission and the Metropolitical Visitation he
enforced the rules he laid down for the maintenance of order. But the repressive nature of
his rule has been considerably over-exaggerated." "...the repressive nature of his rule has
been considerably over-exaggerated. The punishments inflicted for deviations from his
regulations or for defiance of his authority were, it is true, severe and frequently savage.
The treatment of Bastwick, Pyrnne and Burton can be cited; and the P3000 fine imposed
on Lodovick Bowyer for libelling Laud can be instanced to indicate how jealously Laud
guarded his prestige and authority." [1. Laud, 'Works' (1842), Vol. IV, p. 60.]
32. "[Laud's] suppression of Puritanism, however, was rigorous and did much to
incur the deep enmity of the middle classes among whom Puritanism flourished." "His
hatred of enclosure, for example, was intense; andhis activiy on the Commision for
Depopulation led Clarendon to observe that much of Laud's unpopularity derived from
the fact that "he did a little too much countenance the Commssion for Depopulation".
As one of the most powerful members of a commission to control all English colonies,
he came into conflict with powerful merchant groups by refusing to sanction practices
they wanted to adopt. His membership of the Treasury Commission brought him into
similar conflict with the financial interests. His activity and prominence in the Court
of Star Chamber were fiercely resented; and because of his influence, his power in
affecting decision was formidable. The increase of ecclesiastical representation on
the bench of the Court was widely attacked. The economic effects of Laud's rule were
the subject of many petitions and complaints on the eve of the Civil War. The strict
observance of Saints' Days had, it was claimed, been very costly in economic terms;
and his intolerance and persecution of the Puritans had acted as a serious deterrent to
economic development by driving thousands of enterprising tradesmen from the country.
[2. Gardiner, 'Documents', "Root and Branch Petition", pp. 137-44.]"
33. "It is highly interesting to observe that as long as London maintained its prosperity,
the City remained staunchly Royalist. After the depression of the 1620's, the London
merchants became increasingly hostile to the Crown.
But it is important to note that before the Civil War, at any rate, there does not
emerge from all of those conflicts any well-defined, consistent body of thought. Theories
were simply weapons with which the struggle was waged; and those weapons had to be
adapted to the changing fortunes of battle. As new positions were captured, new
theoretical defences were erected; and retreats were generally covered with thick smoke-
screens of legal and constitutional verbiage."
"There were limitations on trading and restrictions on the freedom of markets imposed
by the Crown. There were the sporadic efforts of the Stuarts to protects the peasantry by
enforcing the statues against enclosure, athoguh after the depression of 1622 the gentry
were given the opportunity to recoup their fortunes by the suspension of the laws."
34. "Parliament, we must remember, was endeavouring to bind the King to its will;
the success of the monarchy in maintaining the old order was to depend largly on its
ability to render itself independent of Parliament. State finance still operated on the
principle that the King, defraying peace-time expenses from his own revenues, could
seek assistance from Parliament only for purposes of war. Despite the efforts of Elizabeth
and the Stuarts to avoid the complications of foreign adventure, they were continually
becoming involved in Continental wars; and the Tudors and the Stuarts were constantly
forced to seek Parliamentary grants. The spoliation of the Church lands considerably
enhanced monarchical revenues; but costly wars, particularly the invasion of Ireland,
and the depreciation of the value of money added heavy burdens to the Exchequer, and
recourse was had to every device."
35. "Elizabeth began the practice and it was continued by James and Charles -- of selling
rather than leasing Crown lands, in an effort to realize ready money." "The costly and
ill-advised foreign ventures of the Stuarts and an extravagance in their domestic affairs
aggravated a financial plight already acute; and because of their heavy sale of Crown
lands, their income remained stationary at a time when their needs and commitments
had sharply increased. In every instance the attempts of both James and Charles to rule
without Parliament founded on the rock of financial necessity. Parliament's grip on the
pursestring was its chief defence against the perpetuation of personalrule; to loosen those
strings would have mento to release the only bond that held the Crown to Parliament."
"The struggle reached its climax during the period of Charles' personal rule from 1629 to
1640. For during those years the old order displayed a toughness that few had imagined
it to possess. Investigation has forced historians to abandon the old conception of those
years as a period of tyranny and oppression. Actually, the period was one of growing
prosperity and considerable administraive efficiency. Whatever Charles' faults may have
been--and no doubt they were many--he had a deep sense of justice. Financial necessity
forced him to adopt many of the expedients to which he resorted; but his policy was at
least equally actuated by a sincere concern for the welfare of the poorer of his subjects.
At the same time that he was ordering the imposition of ship-money we find him insisting
in his orders to the collectors
"that no persons be assessed unto the same unless they be known to have Estates in Mony
or Goods or other means to live by over and above their daily Labour; and where you
find such persons to be taxed you are to take off what shall be set upon them and lay it
upon those that are better able to bear it."[1. Rushworth, op. cit., Part 2, Vol. 1, p. 261]
36. "Charles himself may have lacked the ability to give practical expression to his social
ideals; but he had the able assistance of Laud and Strafford, whose subsequent fate at
the hands of the Long Parliament is the most eloquent tribute to their success during the
years of personal government."
"We have already discussed Laud's role during that period; the needs of Charles' purse
fortunately harmonized with the dictates of Laud's conscience. If Strafford lacked the
intesity of Laud's religious convictions, he share dhis passion for order and authority.
An administrator rather than a thinker, practical rather than theoretic, Strafford was
primarily concerned with the effective maintenance o f strong government. For years
a staunch opponent of the royal party, he had become convinced that no popular body
could adequately control public affairs. Only a powerful central government deriving its
authority from the King and administered by men zealous for the common welfare could
achieve the efficiency he set as his ideal. Indifferent alike to the protests of friends and
abuse of enemies, he consistently gave effect, first as Lord President of the Council of
the North and later as Lord Deputy of Ireland, to the policy he later summarized on the
scaffold: "I had not any intention in my heart but what did aim at the joint and individual
prosperity of the King and his people." [2. Rushworth, 'The Tryal of the Earl of Strafford'
(1700), p. 763]
37. "Together, Charles, Laud and Strafford gave England for a decade a Government
which attempted to subdue personal ambition to the demands of the corporate well-
being. There was no sphere of economic activity into which the Government hesitated to
venture. Financial necessity drove it to the adoption of many unpopular measures; and
sordid and pecuniary motives often lurk behind a policy that at first sight impresses us
by its social idealism. But the concern of the regim for the welfare of the poor and the
protection of the less fortunate was nevertheless genuine and real. We need but turn the
pages of the 'Calendar of State Papers' for the period how intense was the preoccupation
of the Government with the regulation of economic affairs and how continuous was its
intervention on behalf of the oppressed and the poverty-stricken:
"The most characteristic feature of the economic policy of the Stuarts and of the Tudors",
one recent writer has declared, "was the continual endeavour to aid the new classes of
society who suffered from the new capitalist development, aboe all the weavers and the
artisans generally against the entrepreneurs and managers of industry and commerce,
and also the agricultural population oppressed by the enclosures and sheep-rearing." [1.
Heckscher, 'Mercantilism' (1935), Vol. 1, p. 257]
"In 1630, for example, the justices of five Midland counties were instructed to remove
all enclosures of the previous two years because they had resulted in depopulation.
[3. Leyonard, "The Inclosure of the Common Fields in the Seventeenth Century",
Transactions Royal Historical Society, New Series, Vol. XIX, p. 128.] Commissions of
investigation were appointed in 1632, 1635 and 1636, and special instructions issued
to the Justices of Assize to enforce the Statutes against enclosure. Heavy fines were
levied against offenders; one Roper, for example, was fined over P4000 and confined
to the Fleet for enclosing his land, converting it to pasture and evicting his tenants. [1.
Rushworth, Historical Collections, Part 2, Vol 1, p. 268]
38. Rushworth records that the comissions sent to Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick and
Nottingham alone brought into the Exchequer over P30,000 in fines. [2. Ibid., p. 333]
The dearth of corn and the consequent rise in prices in 1629-31 produced a very
considerable burst of governmental activity; the State Papers for the years following the
shortage are particularly full of the reports of the Justices of the Peace on their measures
to ease the hardships the dearth created. Engrossers were heavily fined, seven Norfolk
hoarders, for example, being assessed P100 each for the practice.[3. Reports of Cases in
the Courts of Star Chamber, ect, p. 88.] The capitalist-farmers, eager to seize the profits a
shortage of commodities would normally have made possible, were particularly angered
by the strenuous efforts of the Government to reduce and to stabilize the prices of
foodstuffs and to provide the poor with food.
The regulation of wages, similarly, occupied much of the Government's
attention; and the Privy Council was frequently intervening to protect employees from
wage reductions. [4. e.g. C.S.P. Dom., 1631-33, p. 22; E Lipson, 'Economic History of
England, Vol. III, p. 255; Rushworth, op. cit., p. 333.] And no phase of governmental
activity of the period is more noteworthy than the efficiency that was achieved in the
administration of the Poor Law. [5. From 1631 to 1640, declares Miss Leonard, "we have
had more poor relief in England than we have ever had before or since."
Leonard, 'English Poor Relief' (1900), p. 256; cf. Leonard, 'passim' for the administration
of poor relief during this period.]
38-39. "Charles' desperate efforts to augment his revenue form a much less creditable
phase of its activities. His determination to achieve that end without recourse to
Parliament forced him to tap every possible source of income; forced loans, ship-money,
monopoly patents--among other measures--were the direct results of that effort."
Ulterior motive. "Monopoly grants, [1. On monoplies under the Stuarts, cf. G. Unwin,
Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1907), and Gilds
and Companies of London (1938, Chap. XVII; and W. H. Price, 'The English Patents
of Monopoly (1906), Chaps. 3 and 11. ] one of the most important sources of royal
revenue, to cite another instance, were ostensibly intended to encourage native industry
by protecting it from foreign competition, to protect the small master and artisan from
the domination of the capitalist and to assure the consumer an adequate supply of
commodities at fair prices. In many instances monopoly undoubtedly worked to those
ends; the commercial monopolies, particularly, were valuable factors in developing new
area. For the greater part, however, the industrial monopolies were little more than a
device for raising money without the consent of Parliament. The income from this source
was considerable. It has been claimed that towards the end of the decade the wine and
soap monopolies were each yielding an annual income of P30,000 and tobacco the sum
of P13,000 yearly. [2. Price, op. cit., p. 42.] A number of industries were actually in
the hands of the Crown; gold and silver wire-drawing, pin making, the manufacture of
playing-cards and alum were all at one time or another royal monopolies. Charles made
strenuous efforts to exact money from the coal trade from the North of England, and,
failing that, vainly endeavoured to convert it into a royal monopoly. [3. J. U. Nef, 'The
Rise of the British Coal Industry (1932), Vol. I, pp. 267]"
40. "Whatever forms the legal or constitutional issues may have taken--and generally
Charles was within his rights--the opposition of the middle classes to subsidies, to
tonnage and poundage, to ship-money, derived from their realizaiton that to grant the
King power to levy direct taxation without the consent of Parliament would have been to
abdicate whatever political power they possessed. Hampden's case was fundamental in
much more than the constitutional sense that has generally been stressed. Had the King
been able effectively to establish the right conferred on him by the decision of the judges
to levy taxation when he deemed an emergency existed, the annual income of P200,000
it was hoped the levy would assure would have rendered him permanently indepedent of
Parliament."
41. "The landlord anxious to enclose found himself baulked by the Commission for
Depopulation. The manufacturer seeking to maximize profits by reducing wages was
thwarted by an Order-in-Council. Merchant and industrialist alike found the highways
of economic expansion blocked by the monopolies the Crown had created. At a time
when men were endeavoring to establish as absolute the right of an individual in his own
property, the State was insisting that that right was limited by social obligation and the
fiscal needs of the Crown."
"But the protest that emerges before the Civil War is not primarily directed against the
idea of State control as such; it is a dissatisfaction with the particular kind of control the
State is enforcing.
"While everyone feels himself injured by the present form of contributions", the Earl of
Danby told Charles in a letter of protest against ship-money, "no one will object to the
contributions in themselves if they are levied in the proper manner." [1. CSP Venetian,
1636-39, p. 110]
42. Not much active protest of the Charles government in the decade before the war. "The
revival of trade in the 'thirties which followed on the slump of the preceding years
ushered in a period of general prosperity which was maintained until 1638 or 1639.
Governmental activity evidently checked for a time the progress of the enclosure
movement, and the period is remarkably free of agrarian unrest. Little indication can
be found in the literature of the decade of any considerable dissatisfaction with the
Government on the part of either the peasants or the town labourers and craftsmen; on
the contrary, there is ample evidene that the Government's policy evoked the approval of
these groups. The middle classes, to be sure, were chafing under the yoke which they felt
bore so heavily on them."
43. "It is at this point that the religious issue plays a role of such importance in the
immediate political developments, for the close union of Church and State enabled the
bourgeoisie to turn opposition to the former into revolt against the latter. Occasionally
sincerely urged, as often as not skilfully and deliberately manipulated, the appeal to
men's religious convictions obscured and distorted--for some years, at any rate--the
fundamental issues in conflict. Large sections of the population whose material interests
should have allied them with the Crown were to rally to Parliament because they thought
it was struggling to exorcise the devils the former had introduced into England."
43-44. "Flushed with his successes in England, Laud attempted in 1637 to impose the
service of the Angelican Church in Presbyterian Scotland. The spirited resistance of the
Scots--encouraged, no doubt, by Charles' opponents in England, confronted Charles with
the alternatives of admitting failure or subduing Scotland by force of arms; and because
both Laud and Charles were incapable of graceful retreat, they decided on military
measures. It was an impossible affair for Charles to raise an army in his straitened
financial circumstances, and he was forced to recall Strafford from Ireland to organize his
campaign. The latter advised the summoning of Parliament in the spring of 1640 in the
hope that the King's plea that he was assembling an army for the defence of the kingdom
would evoke a favourable response. But Strafford misjudged the temper of Parliament.
By 1640 the division into the groups who were to fight the Civil War had not yet
emerged, and the King did not have the active support of any section in Parliament. By
1640 the division into the groups who were to fight the Civil War had not yet emerged,
and the King did not have the active support of any section in Parliament. With the
exception of the spiritual peers, all classes represented in Parliament were united in their
resistance to the arbitrary exercise of the royal prerogative, for it had borne as heavily on
the nobility and the great landlords as on the capitalist-gentry and the merchants.
Accordingly, when the Short Parliament began its session there was immediate
unanimity in brushing aside the plea of national emergency and in an insistence that
popular grievances receive prior consideration. Grimstone's opening speech clearly
reflected the mood of Parliament.
"I am very much mistaken if there be not a case here at home", he declared, "of as great a
danger as that which is already put." [1. Rushworth, op. cit., Part 2, Vol. 2, p. 1128]
Property had waited eleven years to assert its claims; it was in no mood to countenance
a postponement of their discussion. By refusing to vote money until the question of
arbitrary taxation had been discussed, Parliament placed the issue squarely before
Charles. Intelligent compromise might have temporarily solved the impasse. The Lords
had already expressed their readiness to give Charles' demands precedence over other
business; and the vote in the Commons for a second conference with the Lords indicated
that he had substantial support in the Lower House as well. But his unwillingness to make
adequate concessions and his fear that Parliament was about to come to terms with the
Scots impelled him to dissolve the session.
His appeal to the people was equally fruitless. The City refused to advance him
any money. The Scots took advanage of his weakened position to invade England once
again; and at Ripon, Charles was forced to surrender. The treaty, involving the immediate
payment of considerable sums to the Scots, left him with no alternative but to summon
Parliament again."
45. Meanwhile opponents prepared to use religious dissatisfaction against the Crown.
Several currents:
General Puritan against the High-Church spirit.
Anti-clericalism intensified after 1629. (Based on resentment from the middle class
toward Church control of property)
"Their opposition was stimulated as well, we can be certain, by their desire to bring
on the market and to make available for development the rich lands still held by the
Church."
"...anti-Catholicism rose to a dominant pitch in the years directly prior to the Civil War."
47. What really enabled the religious issue to be used so effectively in arousing active
opposition to the monarchy was the fact that in 1640, the year both the Short and Long
Parliaments met, England entered a period of acute economic depression. In part, that
depression was the natural result of a financial system, based, as was that of Charles, on
indirect taxation of commodities. [1. W. R. Scott, 'Joint Stock Companies to 1720', Vol.
1, pp. 216-17.] Political unrest aggravated the situation, and Charles' seizure of the
bullion created a serious financial dislocation whose repercussions on industry and
commerce were profound. The depression of 1640 a large number of petitions
complaining of the acute economic crisis poured in on Parliament. Tradesmen,
manufacturers, labourers, seamen, apprentices, people from every branch of the
economic life of the country bitterly protested against the economic breakdown.
Although the peasantry, with its traditional inarticulateness, contributed few of these
petitions, widespread agrarian riots testify to a considerable revival of enclosure. We
shall have occasion to consider in subsequent chapters how the people, looking to
Parliament for amelioration of their economic distress, regarded the struggle being waged
against the King as an effort to free themselves from the tyranny of poverty; from their
disillusionment with Parliament was born the movement of protest and revolt that found
expression first in the army and later in the agitation of Leellers, the Diggers and kindred
groups. What we are concerned with at the moment is the manner in which the economic
plight of the people was fused with their religious grievances--real and fancied--in a
general avalanche of protest against the monarchy.
During 1640 and 1641 anti-clericalism is the most prominent feature of the
petitions, and all the ills of the country are laid at the door of the bishops. In 1642 anti-
Catholicism has become the driving force of the protests, and Papists are seen lurking
everywhere in the Kingdom to destroy religion and liberty."
49. "When the Long Parliament assembled in Novembe it was clear that its members
had conceived no constructive programme. They were simply interested in rectifying the
grievances they had protested. To free those who had suffered from the arbitrary decrees
of the Courts, to punish those whose advice had been responsible for the measures they
opposed, to render it impossible for the King to rule without their consent by erecting
safeguards against the absolute exercise of the royal prerogative, above all, to remove all
challenges to the security of private property were the immediate objectives with which
they were concerned. Leighton, Burton, Bastwick and Lilburne were soon released and
compensated. Strafford was impeached and confined to the Tower within eight days of
the meeting of Parliament; and Laud followed him five weeks later. In a series of statutes
Parliament struck at the bastions of the Stuart regime. The Triennial Act provided that
not more than three years could elapse without summoning Parliament. By the Act of
May 10, 1641, Parliament declared that it could be dissolved only by its own consent.
The Tonnage and Poundage Act prohibited any further impositions without the consent of
Parliament; and together with the nullification of the ship-money decision, it guaranteed
the King's future financial dependence on Parliament and removed the fear of arbitrary
taxation. The Courts of Star Chamber, of High Commission, of the North and of Wales
were swept away. The limits and boundaries of the Royal Forests were restored and the
exaction of knighthood fines prohibited. [1. For the text of all these statues see Gardiner,
Documents, pp. 144 ff.] Parliament thus ensured that the King could not act without its
consent; it had not yet asserted its claim to act independently of the sovereign."
50. 1640 doubtful many in Parliament knew how revolutionary the change in law.
From 1640 to greater part of 1641 Parliament was content with countering the King's
claim to absolutism.
"By the summer of 1641 distrust of the King and suspicion of his intrigues led the
majority in the Commons to the realization that, as long as Charles retained control
of the Executive, the value of the safeguards by which they tried to limit his power
would remain extremely dubious. Accordingly, they endeavoured to secure a measure
of control over the executive by demanding in June that the King remove those advisers
to whom Parliament objected and replace them by those who had its approval. [2.
Gardiner, 'Documents', "The Ten Propositions," p. 163] That the divisions between the
contending factions in the war had not yet crystallized can be seen in the fact that the Ten
Propositions elaborating that demand were unanimously passed by the Commons and
without serious opposition by the Lords."
51. "The aristocracy began to perceive the threat to its privileges that the ascendancy of
the middle classes implied. Already, for a century, the pressure of the new middle classes
had seriously weakened the strength and prestige of the landed nobility."
"As the aims of the Commons became clearer and more explicit, party divisions quickly
widened. By the time the Grand Remonstrance was voted, the nobility had largly taken
up its position behind the King."
"The earlier division over the Root and Branch Bill was, as Professor Allen has pointed
out, [1. Allen, op. cit., p. 346, f. 373] more superficial than real. The Bill was introduced,
no doubt, for many reasons: the confiscation of the property attached to the bishoprics
and the cathedral chapters would help pay the debts Parliament had incurred; denial
to the King of the right to appoint bishops would deprive him of a powerful medium
of propaganda by removing the pulpit from his control; excluding the bishops from
Parliament would eliminate a large group of his most consistent supporters. But all
parties in the Commons were agreed that Parliament must establish control over
the Church. The division was simply on the question whether to abolish episcopacy
altogether or to retain it as an instrument of the secular authorities. The Lords refused
to consent to the exclusion of the bishops from the Upper House because they resented
having the constitution of their body changed by the Commons. In part, their refusal
derived from a reluctance to weaken the position of the King too greatly by removing his
staunchest supporters. But these differences in themselves would never have led to civil
war. What produced the sharp and final cleavage in Parliament was the realization of the
nobility that to grant the full demands of the Commons would be seriously to weaken
their own position. In self-defence they rallied to the support of the Crown."
52. Reasons for supporting Monarchy. "...sincerely feared that the attacks on the Church
would destroy all true religion. Others shrank from the anarchy they were certain the
sovereign rule of a popular assembly would create. Others, like the Catholics, saw in
the monarchy their sole protection from the persecution they feared would be unleashed
against them in the event of its defeat." The major reason, however, is that previleges
were believed to be taken if not in support of the Crown.
53. "In the Nineteen Propositions submitted to the King on June 1, 1642, Parliament
formally demanded supreme political power by asking for control of the Executive
and the militia and the right to determine the forms of the ecclesiastical settlement. [1.
Gardiner, Documents, p. 249] By the Declaration of June 6 in defence of the Militia
Ordinance, Parliament announced that it was assuming supreme sovereignty in the state.
[2. Ibid., p. 254]
In 1640 Parliament had asserted the existence of fundamental law that the King could not
contravene. In 1642 it declared that, in the event of conflict as to the interpretation of the
law, it alone was the final judge. Between both parties there could be no arbitrament but
that of force. For, as Warr correctly saw
"the great men of the world being invested with the power thereof cannot be imagined
to eclipse themselves or their own pomp unless by the violent interposition of the
people's spirits who are most sensible of their own burdens and most forward in seeking
reliefe" [3. John Warr, 'The Corruption and Deficiency of the LAwes of England Soberly
Discovered (1649), E. 559 (10).]
On August 22 Charles raised his standard at Nottingham."
CHAPTER TWO. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADICAL POLITICAL THOUGHT
DURING THE CIVIL WAR
54. ""This is the fruit of War from the beginning, for it removes Propriety out of a weaker
into a stronger hand but still upholds the curse of bondage." --Winstanley, 'A New Yeers
Gift for the Parliament and Army (1650)""
55. "From the very beginning of the war much effective authority was passing from the
capitalist-gentry who had led the opposition to Charles in Parliament in the financial
interests of the City of London; for, as the Venetian envoy astutely observed:
". . . since the city pays the money for the war, they also claim the right to direct it." [1.
CSP, Venetian, 1643-47, Aug. 28, 1643, p. 11]"
"On the one hand, they sought to destroy the power of the aristocracy; on the other, they
attempted to suppress the threat of the common people."
57. "When, by 1645, the opposition to Presbyterianism had become more coherent and
unified, Parliament hastened to approve by ordinance the Assembly's directory for the
establishment of Presbyterian forms of worship throughout the country. [2. Firth and
Rait, Vol. I, Jan, 4, 1645, p. 582. English Presbyterianism was always strongly Erastian,
for it was intended that a Parliament dominated by the propertied groups should control
the ecclesiastical organization, and not that the Church should dominate the State.]
But in the army, at any rate, the Presbyterians were being ousted from
leadership. Angered by the failure of the General to press home advantages gained in the
campaign of the autumn of 1644, Cromwell succeeded in forcing through Parliament
early in 1645 the ordinance for the organization of the New Model Army under the
command of Fairfax and the Self-Denying Ordinance whose intention and effect were to
force the resignation of the Presbyterian generals from their military commands. The Self-
Denying Ordinance which took the control of the Army out of the hands of the Lords was
opposed, significantly enough, by the Upper House."
58. "With the organization of the New Model and the accession of Cromwell to military
leadship, the King was soon reduced to military impotence; and after the Battle of
Naseby the Royalists presented no effective threat o Parliamentary supremacy. From
that point the history of the Civil War is no longer the record of the struggle between
the Royalists and Parliament, but of the conflicts between the various classes that has
composed the Parliamentary front. Until each class or group achieved power, it played a
progressive role in the struggle for the enfranchisement of the emerging capitalism; then,
like the Presbyterians in 1647 and the Independents in 1649, it became a reactionary and
counter-revolutionary force.
But it must be emphasized that the Civil War was from its very outset never
more than a war of minorities."
"The squirearchy and the commercial groups who had formed the core of the
Parliamentary resistance to Charles and the landed aristocracy who had rallied to his
support readily responded to the call to battle. But the apprentices and artisans of London,
and the peasants and the agricultural labourers of the Midlands who formed the bulk
of the Parliamentary army, and the peasantry of the North who largely comprised the
Royalist forces fought only when conscripted. At the very beginning of the war there
was, it is true, no lack of volunteers on either side. But by 1643 voluntary service proved
inadequate to meet the stern demands of warfare and both sides were forced to resort
to impressment. Parliament, particularly, was seriously confronted with the problem
of man-power. Initial disillusionment with Parliament was spreading; the flood of
volunteers dwindled to a mere trickle and then dried up completely; desertion during
1643 and 1644 depleted the ranks considerably; very large numbers of men refused to
serve beyond the borders of their respective counties."
61-62. From 1640 to 1642 Parliament's manipulation of the religious issue had aroused
considerable opposition to the Royalists. Parliament was able to unite diverse classes in
its support by the original enunciation of the ideals for which it was fighting because the
vagueness in which those ideals were stated enabled each class to lend to them its own
interpretation--an interpreation, we should emphasize, that was fashioned by the needs
and ambitions of its members. But as the war dragged on indecisively, as the ultimate
intentions of Parliament were revealed by the legislation it enacted, increasing numbers
throughout the country became aware of the fact that the ends they were being utilized to
achieve were not those for which they had imagined themselves to be fighting."
62. Common people saw no gains from the war, and the economy continued to
deteriorate.
Economic depression in 1939 and 1640.
Political instability 1641 and 1642.
"The troops of both armies freely plundered the country."
63. ""It is now impossible", observed the Venetian Ambassador as early as January
1643, "for the poor to live in this Kingdom." [1 CSP, Venetian, 1643-47, Jan. 16, 1643, p.
230]
The beakdown of communications, both internal and external, seriously hampered
trade and commerce; and large amounts of capital were withdrawn from the country,
particularly by foreign merchants. Landowners took advantage of the prevailing chaos
and the breakdown of effective and interested authority to indulge in their favourite
pastime of enclosure. During 1642 a large number of petitions poured in on Parliament
complaining of acute distress; and if their frequency and vehemence decreased somewhat
in 1643, it was not because the situation had become less serious, but because the people
were becoming habituated to the misery they were enduring.
The early years of the war were, thus, for the common people of England a
period of bewildering confusion and deepening misery, of eager hopes and, then, of
gradual and crushing disillusionment. An England in which, as far as they were
aware, "every man", in the words of Warwick, "sat quiet under his own vine tree and the
fountain of justice ran clear and current" had suddenly been plunged into fratricidal strife.
Parliament, by its promises, roused their hopes, and then, by its behaviour, shattered the
dreams it had inspired. There were years of restlessness and stirring, of questioning and
seeking. Unable as yet to give expression to their aspirations in secular or political terms
or to voice their moods and attitudes in the language of daily affairs, profoundly
conscious of their overwhelming need to escape from the misery that encompassed them,
but uncetain of the ways in which that escape was to be achieved, disappointed in the
Parliament in which they had centred their hopes, yet not quite prepared to repudiate it
finally, they expressed themselves in the only terms in which they had been trained and
habituated to think--in the language and forms of religion and spirituality. Prevailing
Puritan concepts proved empty and devoid of meaning for them largely because those
concepts had been fashioned to fulfil the purposes of a rising middle class and not the
needs of the oppressed. The latter found their expression in religious mysticism. The
widespread growth of sectarian activity and mystical enthusiasm after 1640 is the
unmistakable beginnings of a class consciousness that later took more definite form in
revolutionary political action. When their needs had crystalized in their own minds into
practical demands for social reform, when their disillusionment with Parliament had
become final and when their experience in the army had imparted to them a sense of their
corporate unity, the people passed to more practical action than the spinning of visions;
then they sought to drag down the millennium they had been anticipating from the
ethereal realms of heaven to the reality of daily life."
64. Mysticism in England. Lollard Movement. Sixteenth century strains encouraged
by Anabaptism and its short-lived triumph at Munster; by writers Denk and Franck, of
Schwenckfeld and Boehme. Germany refugees spreading Continental mysticism.
"But the soil in which it thrived, like that in which it first took root, was that which had
been turned by the furrow of social unrest and watered by the tears of poverty and the
hope of amelioration."
"...an attempt to escape an unpleasant and ever-present reality by identification with
something that transcended their daily lives and the insistence on the imminence of a
millennium or salvation. The profound dissatisfation of the oppressed with their condition
impelled them to an effort to transcend their immediate selves and environment through a
mystical union with God, to seek compensation for their suffering in a sense of nearness
to their Maker." 1640-2 onward believed that the millennium and deliverance from
suffering was at hand. Earlier works in this regard, Archer and Hanserd Knollys. [1.
John Archer, 'The Personall Raigne of Christ Upon Earth (1641) E. 180 (13) ; Hanserd
Knollys, 'A Glimpse of Sion's Glory (1641), E., 175 (5). On Knollys' authorship of this
tract see Haller, 'The Rise of Puritanism', Chap. VII, note 32.]
65. "Puritanism, by identifying worldly success with election, told the poor that they were
damned of God because they were not of the Elect. The answer of those who were told
that they were condemned to abject poverty in this world and to eternal damnation in
the next was to assert the essential equality of all human beings before God by denying
the doctrine of predestination and affirming, in its stead, that the key to salvation was
revelation. Puritanism had insisted that knowledge of God could come only through study
and understanding of the Bible. By substituting the written word of the Scriptures for the
hierarchy as the final authority in religious life, it took the effective direction of religious
affairs from the hands of the prelates only to make it the monopoly of a literate, educated
class. The reply of the poor--and hence, the illiterate and uneducated--was that not formal
learning but an inner spiritual experience and inspiration were the true source of religious
knowledge, that contact with God was not the exclusive privilege of a superior class, but
could be attained by any man however humble his station. On the contrary, that inner
spiritual experience by which alone men could be saved was far more likely to occur in
those whom suffering had rendered meek and humble than in those whose wealth had
made them haughty and proud. Salvation, they therefore affirmed in proclaiming the
spiritual equality of mankind, was not a monopoly of a Chosen Elect, but possible for
everyone; for every human being had within him a spark of divinity, an Inner Light that
might at any moment be kindled."
1640 an outburst of mystical religion.
68. "The Anabaptists, the most fered of all sects, teach
"that a Christian may not with a safe conscience possesse anything proper to himselfe but
whatsoever he hath he must make common". [2. Heresiography, pp. 12-13]
69. Another, recalling that Muenzer [in regard to Anabaptists]
"preached that all goods must be common and all men free and of equall dignity", warns
that Anabaptism, "the gospel of licentiousness and rebellion. . ."
"They preach", declares Richard Carter, "that all Christian liberty is lost if we obey
anything that is imposed on us by man." [2. Richard Carter, 'The Schismatick Stigmatized
(1641), E. 179 (14).]
70. In January 1642 Pym warned the House of Lords against the dangers of "tumults and
insurrections of the meaner sort of people", adding "that what they cannot buy . . . they
will take". [2. Lords' Journals, Vol IV, p. 541]
In the country there were widespread riots against enclosure. Peasants, everywhere,
evidently inspired by the sentiment expressed by those who attacked the estates of the
Earl of Suffolk in 1643 that
"if they took not Advantage of the Time, they shall never have the Opportunity again" [3.
Ibid. Vol VI, p. 21]
pulled down fences and levelled enclosures, dug up ditches that had been filled in and
filled in ditched that had been dug up. Royal grounds in Cornwall, in the Forest of Dean,
in West Durham, Roxham and Huntingdon and on Hounslow Heath were attacked and
entered by irate peasants. So serious did the attacks on enclosures become that the Lords,
moved by concern for their own estates, ordered in July 1641 that no enclosures that had
been made up to the first day of the meeting of the Long Parliament could be interfered
with, and where such enclosures were menaced the owners could enlist the assistance
of the Justices of Peace in suppressing any disorder. But the attacks continued with
little interruption during 1642-3. From many towns in Huntingdonshire, Somersetshire,
Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Dorsetshire and Wiltshire came frequent complaints of
enclosure riots. [4. James, op. cit., pp. 90-4] The Lords in 1643, for example, were forced
to pass an ordinance
"to suppress all Riotous and orderly persons in and about Meere, Shatesberry and Brome
Selwood in the County of Sommerset, Dorset and Wilts" who "break open enclosures,
throw down houses". [5. Firth and Rait, Vol. 1, May 3, 1643, p. 139.]
71. "In the riots and unrest in town and country, in the feverish surge of sectarian activity
and in the tremendous volume of public discussion among the hitherto-inarticulate poorer
classes, we can discern the first expression of the revolutionary spirit that was to be
crystallized by subsequent evens into the radical moements of 1647-9. It is too early to
see in them as yet the emergence of a proletarian, or even a democratic, ideology. But
intellectual influences were already at work which, merged with the developments of
the following years, helped to rescue the movement of discontent from the chiliastic
mysticism and ineffectual sectarianism into which it threatened to dissipate and to
convert it to secular and rational purposes and, for a time, to revolutionary activity." In
the writings of Parker, Rutherford, Herle, and Burroughs "in their emphasis on natural
law, on the people as the only source of all political power and consent as the only valid
basis for the exercise of political authority."
Royalists, primarily defensive, pointed to history and scripture.
""Power is originally inherent in the people," declares Parker, "and it is nothing else but
that might and vigour which such a society of men contains in itself. . . . The people is the
true efficient cause of power." [1. Parker, 'Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late
Answers and Expresses' (1642), E. 153 (62), 1. 2. Reprinted in Haller, 'Tracts on Liberty
in the Puritan Revolution' (1934), Vol. 2, p 165]
It is unimportant that Parker equates Parliament with the People and thus gives to it that
absolute power he took from the King. "Parliament is indeed the State itself." [Ibid., p.
34] What is significant in Parker and other Parliamentary writers is the insistence on the
conditional nature of political power, on the origin of government in some sort of social
contract and on its limitation by some fundamental law of nature or reason that each
individual can discover. There is a growing tendency to assert that the individual citizen's
conscience must be the final determinant or judge of the validity of law. [3. e.g., John
Goodwin, 'Anti-Cavalierisme' (1642), E. 123 (35). Reprinted in Haller, Vol. 2, p. 215]"
"There is the argument for toleration that emerged out of the work of the Independents
in the Westminster Assembly and in the writings of Brooke and Walwyn and Roger
Williams, and which, if originally dictated by strategic and political considerations,
rapidly developed a much broader significance and based itself on a more purely
rationalistic premises."
71. "In the riots and unrest in town and country, in the feverish surge of sectarian activity
and in the tremendous volume of public discussion among the hitherto-inarticulate poorer
classes, we can discernt he first expression of the revolutionary spirit that was to be
crystallized by subsequent events into the radical movements of 1647-9."
"...Parliamentary theoriss like Parker and Rutherford, Herle and Burroughs... natural
law, on the people as the only source of all political power and consent as the only valid
basis for the exercise of political authority." Royalists mostly a defensive struggle, citing
history or Scripture.
"Driven to justify their rebellion against established authority, they had to ascribe the
origin of political power to the people, to assert the conditional nature of its exercise and
the right of the people, either directly or through their representatives, to remove those to
whom it has been entrusted when they have exceeded their trust or no longer command
popular consent."
72. Parker ""Parliament is indeed the State itself." [2. Parker. 'Observations' (1642)]
"There is a growing tendency to asser tthat the indivudal citizen's conscience must be the
final determinant or judge of the validity of law. [3. John Goodwin, 'Anti-Cavalierisme'
(1642), E. 123 (35). Reprinted in Haller, Vol. 2, p. 215]"
"There is the deepening recognition of the relative rather than the absolute nature of
knowledge and truth. [5. Henry Robinson, 'Liberty of Conscience' (1644)] There is
a growing faith in the efficacy of education and rational persuasion that is reflected
during 1640-4 in the writings and activity of Hartlib and Comenius, of Milton and
Harmar. [6. Hartlib, 'A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641), E. 173
(28); 'Considerations tending to the happy accomplishment of England's Reformation
(1647), E. 389 (4); Comenius, 'A Reformation of Schooles (1642); Milton, 'Of Education'
(1644); Harmar, 'Vox Populi: or Gloucestershes Desire with the way to make a
Kingdome happy by seting up of School-Masters in every parish' (1642), E. 146 (2).]
73. Overton's 'Man's Mortalitie' shows beginnings of a scientific materialism.
By 1645 complaints of common people where voiced less confused and in more
categorical terms.
"...there was already a growing recognition of the fact that the bourgeoisie dominating
Parliament had been waging war for ends exclusively its own. Parliament is criticized
not merely because it has proved itself ineffectual in relieving distress; it is condemned
because it has deliberately deceived and wilfully lied to those it claimed to represent. It
declared for liberty; it has imposed greater tyranny."
74. "Walwyn, Overton, Lilburne--among others--were rapidly moving to an enuciation
of the theoretical argument on which the progressive forces both in London and the army
were soon to take their stand."
75. "Overton was asserting the supremacy of reason in all human affairs and the fact that
no compulsion can be valid against its dictates. Lilburne had become acutely aware of the
social problems of the common people and the conditions by which they were oppressed.
He still retained his faith in Parliament and in its ability to redress their grievances; but he
was emphasizing that the law it promulgates must be governed by equity and that those
who legislate must themselves be bound by the law they decree. He had already left the
army and had begun to dramatize in his own stormy and tempestuous experiences the
larger issues around which the events of the next few years were to revolve. In 'England's
Birth-Right Justified' he provided the petty tradesman, the artisan, the small merchant
with a coherent statement of their grievances and the basis of a practical programme
that could satisfy their needs. There are the attack on the commercial monopolies, the
most formidable enemy of the small business man, and the protest against the collapse of
trade and the inadequacy of the measures that have been taken to revive business." "He
expresses popular resentment against the difficult the people encounter in bringing their
complaints to the attention of Parliament or the Council of London.And fundamental to
his entire argument is the insistence that positive law must be limited in its operation by
the inalienable rights and liberties that every Englishman possess and of which Magna
Charta is the basis and guarantee."
76. 1645, "first important organized movement against the war--the armed rising of the
Club Men in Dorsetshire and Wiltshire. Determined to end the misery wrought by the
war, fearful that their liberties would disappear completely and alarmed by the threat
to their lives and property, thousands of the inhabitants of those counties petitioned the
King and Parliament to conclude an immediate peace and armed themselves, in their own
words, ". . . to joyne with and assist one another in the mutuall defence of our Libeties
and Properties against all Plunderers and all unlaefull violence whatsoever". ['The
Desires and Resolutions of the Club-Men of the Counties of Dorset and Wilts. (July 12,
1645), E. 292 (24)]"
77. "Meanwhile, similar radical tendencies were manifesting themselves among the
rank and file of the New Model. When the Independents succeeded in removing
the Presbyterian Generals from leadership, they lost little time in impressing their
doctrines on the army; and some of the most progressive preachers of the time, like Dell,
Saltmarsh, Hugh Peters and William Sedgwick, were chaplains to the New Model during
1645-6.In the soldiery they found an audience eagerly receptive to their message; for to
the common soldiers the domination of the Presbyterians implied the impressment that
had forced them into the army, irregular and insufficient pay and the hardships the ravges
of war had inflicted on their families. The debates in the Assembly were followed with
keen interest by the army."
"The pious Baxter, annoyed by his cold reception from Cromwell when he visted the
army after the Battle of Naseby, can hardly be considered an objective and unprejudiced
observer of its opinions; but his testimony nevertheless affords us an interesting picture
of the ferment of ideas that was proceeding in the army at the time:
"But when Icame to the army among Cromwell's soldiers", he reports, "I found a new
face of things I had never dreamt of; I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that
which intimated their intention to subvert both Church and State. Independency and
Anabaptistry were most prevalent. Antinomianism and Arminianism were equally
distributed. . . . Abundance of the common troopers and many of the Officers I found
to be honest, sober, Orthodox men and others tractable ready to hear the truth and of
upright intentions. But a few proud, self conceited, hot-headed sectaries had got into the
highest places and were Cromwell's chief favourties, and by their very heat and activity
bore down the rest or carried them along with them. . . . The greatest part of the common
soldiers especially of the Foot were ignorant men of little religion." [1. Baxter, 'Reliquiae
Baxterianae' (16960, pp. 50, 53.]
78. "By the end of 1645... all the elements out of which a democratic and progressive
movement could be formed were already present."
"...a coherent political philosophy was forced on the radical wing of the Independents
by the events of 1646. The arrest of Lilburne, his clash with the Lords, Overton's
imprisonment and the mass protests those incidents inspired brought forth a series of
pamphlets and petitions in which the scattered elements of democratic thought were
fused into a consistent doctrine that became the basis of the revolutionary movement of
the following year. The fact, too, that the Civil War had been temporarily brought to an
end made it necessary for progressive thinkers to ormulate their demands in concrete and
specific terms; and many pamphlets began to expand the suggestions that Lilburne and
others had advanced into a comprehensive political programme that was rooted in the
needs of he common people.
The political philosophy that emerges from the radical writings of 1646,
however, had not yet become the intellectual equipment of a political party; for not until
the latter part of 1647 did the Leveller Movement assume organized form."
80. "There are occasional passages in Lilburne which indicate the contract, in his view,
to have been one negotiated between the individuals who compose society themselves
for their mutual benefit; other suggest the agreement to have been one between the
community and the rulers it creates. But the limits it sets to government are unmistakble.
"The people's native right on which the social contract rests is to name and instruct rulers
to do that which if it had been convenient the people might have done themselves." [1.
Overton, 'Remonstrance', op. cit.]
"When in 1647 and 1648 it became clear that the House of Commons would not adopt
the programme the Levellers urged on it, Lilburne and his followers denied its authority
by claiming that since it had failed to give effect to the wishes of the people, the power
with which it had been entrusted had been revoked and annulled. To recognize its legality
would have been to sanction arbitrary and tyrannical rule. One meets with increasing
frequency in the Leveller discussion of the origins of government during this period the
reference to the Norman Conquest that was so popular with all writers during the Civil
War. But with the Levellers the Conquest was adduced not as an appeal to pre-Normal
precedent, but to enable them to answer in historicl terms how a free people, living under
a government it had established by common consent, came to find itself under arbitrary
domination. To the Levellers, the introduction of that arbitrary rule in England dates from
the Norman Conquest."
"There is some confusion in Leveller writings of 1646, and in their subsequent utterances
as well, as to the origin or nature of those [natural] rights. Occasionally they are derived,
as with Overton, from the fact that since all men are equally born the children of God,
they should therefore enjoy equal rights.
"For by natural birth all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and
freedome."
81. "...on the whole, here is a consistent identification of natural law with reason and an
insistence that those laws and rights are natural which reason enables us to discover.
"Nothing which is against Reason is lawfull, it is a sure maxim, for Reason is the Life of
the Law."[2. Overton, 'A Defiance against all Arbitrary Usurpations or Encroachments
(Sept. 1646), E. 353 (17)]
"...as Ireton later protested, to sanction every demand [based on natural law] the
progressives found it necessary or expedient to make. Already, indeed, it is being
employed to give authority to the appeals of many classes and interests."
In the pro-free enterprise pamplet by Thomas Johnson, 'A Plea for Free-Mens
Liberties', ". . . it is irrationall, reason being the foundation of all honest laws gives to
every man propriety of interest, freedom of enjoyment and improvement to his own
advantage"
"Another pleads for the freedom of trade:
". . . it being the birthright of every man to be alike free to transport that or any
commodity into what parts beyond the seas seemeth most advantageous to him". [4. The
Golden-Fleece Defended, or Reasons against the Company of Merchant Adventurers
(March 1647), E. 381 (10).]
82. "A paticularly significant feature of the democratic argument of 1646 is the
degree to which political theory has been divorced from theological sanction." For
progressives "...the burden of their emphasis was in an increasing measure a wholly
secular one."
"Essentially, they were attempting to bind Parliament with principles Parliamentary
writers had already used to bind the King. That all political power originates in the
people, that government is a trust based on a social contract that is revocable at will and
that there exists a fundamental law that guarantees the rights of all Englishmen were
arguments Parliamentary theorists had been making from the very beginning of the
war and with the first two of which, at any rate, English thinkers had been familiarized
through the "Vindiciae".
83. "The apologists of Parliament had utilized the concepts of contract and funamental
law simply to justify their rebellion against the King, to provide the financial groups
and the gentry with a rationale for their seizure of power. And they had been careful to
circumscribe the areas in which those concepts operated in order to justify the exercie
of absolute power by a Parliament dominated by the upper bourgeoisie. Government,
they may claim, is above all else, a trust; but only Parliament, representing the dominant
economic interests of the country, is to define the breach of that trust. Law, it may
be admitted, must conform to reason; but the reason it embodies must be that of the
bourgeoisie. And when, with the attainment of power by the bourgeoisie, those concepts
had served their purpose, they could be discarded or repudiated--as with Ireton in the
Army Debates--when they were being effectively employed to challenge the autocratic
power the dominant classes were endeavouring to exercise.
In the hands of the progressive groups, however, those principles became the
basis of a political programme that sought to vest power with the people. Governments
function solely as representatives of the people; the latter must therefore at all times
remain superior to their agents, and it is they who must ultimately determine when those
they have chosen no longer merit their trust. Fundamental law, the radicals insisted, must
represent not a body of rivileges of an economically ascendant minority, but the interest
of all the individuals in the nation. The Levellers, it is true, in interpeting those interests
equated them with the needs of the tradesmen and artisans and peasants they represented.
But their major importance for political theory lies in their attempts to set up
constitutional machinery that would render the sovereignty of the people effective by
limiting the practical operation of government. It is from those efforts that there emerged
in 1647 the idea of a written constitution whose acceptance by the entire people would
make the processes of consent an actual fact rather than an historical fiction and whose
provisions would guarantee each individual his inalienable and natural rights by defining
the boundaries of governmental activity."
84. "As early as 1645 and 1646 the radicals saw clearly that no social organization could
be justified which perpetuated social inequality and which operated simply to make the
rich richer and to keep the poor destitute; and their demands for social and economic
reform constitute a programme that was far in advance of the age. But they never lost
the conviction that informs their early writings that the reforms they demanded could be
effected merely by devising the appropriate constitutional mechanisms. There was no
serious effort to analyse in realistic terms the roots of the power of those against whose
tyranny they protested or the historical development of their supremacy. Overton, alone,
in 1646 seems to have had some conception of the significance of class division and
of the problems emerging from that division that the radical movement would have to
confront.
"Such hath been the misterious subtilty from generation to generation of those
cunning usurpers whereby they have driven on their wicked designs of tyranny and
arbitrary domination under the fair, specious, deceitfull pretences of Liberty and
Freedomthat the poore deceived people are even (in a manner) bestiallized in their
understandings, become so stupid and grossly ignorant of themselves and of their own
naturall immunities and strength wherewith God by nature hath enirched them that they
are even degenerated from being men . . ." [1. Overton. A Defiance again all Arbitrary
Usurpations or Encroachments (1646), E. 353 (17).
87. February 4, 1647. Ordinance against heresy by Parliament.
"The army, never regularly or adequately paid, demanded the payment of its arrears,
adequae security for future payments, effective guarantees of indemnity and the
prohibiton of impressment for military service. [1. By Marchy 1647 the foot soldiers
were eighteen weeks and the horse dragoons forty-three weeks in arrears. Total
arrears amounted to P331,000 (C.J.,V, 126] The tradesmen and apprentices had been
impoverished by the complete collapse of trade, by unemployment and, in the cloth and
woolen industries particularly, by the crushing pressure of the Merchant Adventurers.
The peasants were oppressed by the insecurity of their tenures, by excessive fines and
rents, by unrestrained enclosure and by the loss of their markets in the cities. Successive
years of bad harvests had further aggravated their desperate situation. Everywhere,
rising prices, taxes, levies, assessents, tithes, impsitions, free-quarter, added unbearable
burdens to an already distressed populace. The breakdown of local administration and
of the judicial system rendered an appeal to the law in case of even the most flagrant
abuses well-night impossible. [2. From the autumn of 1642 to the autumn of 1648 no
judges went the circuits. F. A.Inderwick, 'The Interregnum, p 173.] Largely as a result
of Leveller activity, those streams of discontent soon burrowed deeper and broader
channels; and before long they had been converted into a vigorous movement for
fundamental social change that threatened to push the revolution to a point far beyond
that at which its original makers were endeavouring to arrest its progress.
For Parliament during 1647 was still dominated by the financial and commercial
groups of the City and the landed gentry. Its temper was considerably more conservative
than it had been during the previous year.The removal of the threat of the Scotch army
had restored to the Presbyterians the support of many whom that fear had previously
alienated; and growing alarm at the swelling tide of discontent fostered a general
insistence that effective measures be taken for the restoration of order. For by the
beginning of 1647 the classes now in power had achieved practically everything for
which they had plunged the country into war. The institutions that had thwarted and
hampered economic progress had been swept away. Trade and commerce had been
liberated from the arbitrary interference of the monarchy. Land and capital had been
released for development and exploitation through the expropriation of estates, the
abolition of feudal survivals and the removal of restraint on enclosure. The royal
bureaucracy had been shattered. The Church was being stripped of the independent
financial and judicial powers it had hitherto exercised; and the confiscation of its lands
had destroyed the economic basis of its strength. The monarchy had been defeated in the
field; and whatever power it might wield in the future it would exercise solely at the
pleasure of its conquerors. State power was now in the hands of the 'bourgeoisie'; and the
latter, having attained its ends, now sought to consolidate the positions it had won."
88. "At this point, however, it found itself confronted with the dilemma that has
generally faced the victors of all bourgeois revolutions in modern history. It was faced
with the army it had created to effect its victory--an army of peasants and labourers,
of artisans and apprentices, with deep-seated grievances whose satisfaction it was
urgently demanding and with a profound sense of its corporate unity. The bourgeoisie
was confronted, as well, with those classes in town and country who had suffered such
acute distress during the war, whose free-quarter and taxes and excise had financed the
victory and in whom Parliament's promises had aroused profound expectations of social
improvement. The army and the common people now demanded their share of the fruits
of the victory their sacrifice had rendered possible. Parliament refused to satisfy those
demands because their effect would have been to limit and, ultimately, to abrogate the
exclusive privileges of the now-dominant bourgeoisie. Instead, it attempted to remove the
most serious threat to its position by disbanding the army and sending several regiments
for service to Ireland. That effort gave unity and coherence to the radical movements
in the army and throughout the entire country because it made clear to the people more
effectively than anything else that the victory that had been achieved was not their
victory."
90. "There is a special protest against the Merchant Adventurers Company and a demand
for its immediate liquidation because it operates
"to the extream prejudice of all such industrious people as to depend on clothing and
woolen manufacture . . . and to the great discouragement and disadvantage of all sorts of
Tradesmen, sea-faring men and hindrance of shipping and navigation" [1. Sept. 1648, E.
464 (19): On the identity of this pamplet with "the Large Petition" see T. C. Pease, 'The
Leveller Movement', p. 158, n. I.]
91. "Parliament's attitude to the claims of the common people is strikingly revealed in the
draft of the answer rejecting the petition that was prepared by the Commons:
"We wish you would keep within the bounds of obedience", it declares, "and not presume
to anticipate our counsels and prevent our proceedings by telling us what you expect our
resolutions to be. We are contented to receive your grievances but not be schooled by
you." [1. C.S.P., 'Dom.', 1645-47, pp. 558-9]
Parliament's action in rejecting the petitions convinced the Levellers that they could not
hope to effect their ends through its medium. Asserting that the House of Commons
by failing to act in accordance with the wishes of the people had broken its trust and
forfeited its authority, they declared the kingdom to have reverted to a state of nature in
which no constituted authority existed and turned to the army."
"With remarkable speed the rank and file proceeded to create its own democratic organs
of expression and representation by the election of Agitators representing every troop
and company, who evidently functioned jointly as company and regimental committees
and from which the representatives who comprised the Council of Agitators were drawn.
From protest against disbandment in terms of their particular grievances they rapidly
moved to a general attack on Parliament on broader and more fundamental issues. As
early as May they appealed to Fairfax and their officers that the attempt to send them to
Ireland was
"but a meere cloake for some who have lately tasted of soveraignty; and being lifted
beyond their ordinary spheare of servants seek to become masters and degenerate into
tyrants"[2. 'The Apology of the Common Soldiers of his Excellency Thos. Fairfaxes
Army (May 3, 1647), E. 385 (18).]
92. "They had hoped by their victory, they declare, to establish a system of justice which
". . . the meanest subject should freely enjoy his right, liberty and properties in all
things. . . . Upon this ground of hope we have gone through all difficulties and dangers
that wee might purchase to the people of this land and ourselves a plentifull crop and
harvest of Libertie and Peace but instead of it, to the great griefe and sadning of our
hearts wee see that oppression is as great as ever if not greater. . . ." [1. 'The Apology of
the Common Soldiers of his Excellency Thos. Fairfaxes Army. (May 3, 1647), E. 385
(18).]
92. "
"It was very requisite and wisely done that they should vote this army", wrote
one pamphleteer immediately after the vote for disbandment had been passed, "because it
is the onely block and stumbling-stone to their designe of Presbytery and Lordly
predominancy and that it may not be a refuge pillar for the oppressed and distressed
commons of England where on to leane in claiming of justice and their just rights and
liberties."
"It is apparent", declares another, "that the disbanding or otherwise dissolving of
this army is the only plenary expedient to render us Vassals and slaves to the will of our
enemies and to bring upon us the worst of miseries." [3. 'A New Found Stratagem' (April
1647), E. 384. (11).]
93. "The officers, generally recruited from the gentry and the commercial classes, allied
themselves on the whole with the Independent faction in Parliament. Some were prepared
to accept Parliament's terms and to agree to immediate disbandment. [1. C.S.P., Dom.,
1645-47 (March 22, 1647), p. 541: "Engagement signed by the officers who drew off
from the army at the conclusion of the war", in which the twenty-nine signatories express
their readiness to disband or to go to Ireland, confident that Parliament will give them
satisfaction rearears and indemnity, ect."] Others, like Cromwell, sought to compromise
with the Presbyterian majority. When they discovered the intransigeance of the latter,
they threw in their lot with the army--not because of sympathy with its revoluntionary
aspirations, but because they hoped to use it in coercing Parliament into compromise.
We must not make too much of that breach between the Independents in
Parliament and in the army now led by Cromwell and the wealthy Presbyterians,
important though their difference may have proved to be in subsequent political
development. The former are as solicitous as anyone in the country for the interests of
property. They are no less profoundly disturbed than the Presbyterians by the threat to
those interests that is shaping itself throughout the land. They are prepared--and for a
time, anxious--to restore the King. They are even willing, in return for a limited
toleration for themselves, to acquiesce in the establishment of Presbyterianism:
". . . though the leaders of each party seem to maintain a hot opposition", wrote one
author in a penetrating recognition of the fundamental identity of interest of both
groups, "yet when any profit or preferment is to be reached at it is to be observed that
a powerful Independent especially moves for a Presbyterian; or a leading Presbyterian
for an Independent: and seldome doth one oppose or speake against another (in such
cases) unless something of particular spleene or competition come between which cause
them to breake the common rule. . . . By this artifice the Grandees of each side share
the Commonwealth between them."[2. The Mystery of the Two Juntos, Presbyterian
and Independent or the Serpent in the Bosom Unfolded (June 1647), E. 393 (28). Pease
ascribes the pamplet to Clement Walker.]"
94. "The hostility between both groups was due less to any fundamental irreconcilability
of end and purpose than to the fact that the mutual suspicion aroused by the intrigues of
the one with the King and the manipulation of the army by the other led the Independents
to fear a complete negation of the revolution and the Presbyterians its extension. Those
fears drove a considerable number of the Presbyterians into alliance with the Royalists
in the second Civil War and pushed the Independents into closer collaboration with the
radicals until the execution of the King."
"They sought to climb to power on its shoulders; but at no point did they share its [the
radicals] aspirations. If the rank and file organized its Councils of Agitators, Cromwell
and Ireton were quick to minimize its influence by absorbing it into a General Council
of the Army that they "packed" with officers. In the struggle between the Army and
Parliament in the summer of 1647 for control of the City, the proposals of the Agitators
for decisive action by the army were vetoed by the officers; and the demands and
suggested programmes of the rank and file were being continually tempered and modified
by the conservatism of those officers. When, largely as a result of Leveller influence, the
Army Council in November favoured the Agreement of the People and the scheduled
general rendezvous at Ware seemed destined to witness its acceptance by the entire
army, Cromwell, by a supreme effort, thwarted its ratification. He quickly suppressed
the mutiny that aros among some of the more radical regiments; and those soldiers who
had been most active in promoting the Agreement, among them one Will Everard, were
arrested and later cashiered from the army."
95. "Ireton is prepared to concede to the common people the right
"to air and place and ground and the freedom of the highways and other things, to live
amongst us", [2. Putney Debates, Edited with an important introduction by Professor
Woodhouse; 'Puritanism and Liberty', p. 57. The earlier edition in the Camden Society
Publications, 'Clarke Papers', ed. Firth, New Series, Vols. XLIX, LIV, contains a valuable
introduction by Professor Firth.]
but the shaping of public policy must remain the exclusive privilege of
"the persons in whom all land lies and those in corporations in whom all trading lies". [2.
Woodhouse, op. cit., p. 54.]
For, he frankly confesses his fear, if
"you may have such men chosen or at least the major part of them (as have no local or
permanent interest) why may not these men vote against all property?" [3. Ibid., p. 63]
If government is to be administered by a propertied minority solely in the interests of
wealth, its decrees must not be challenged by the common people. Law must be obeyed
and agreements honoured whatever their content; for law, Ireton argues, derives its claim
to obedience simply because it emanates from a source formally competent to enact
authority.
96.
To the Levellers and the Agitators, on the other hand, the only valid end of state
activity is the general welfare of the common people and the protection of their rights;
and to the achievement of those ends all claims of property and privilege must be
subordinated, for everyone has an equal claim to share in the common good:
"... the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he" [1. Woodhouse,
op. cit. p. 53]
"We have engaged in this Kingdom and ventured our lives", Sexby declares bluntly, "to
recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen. . . . There are many thousands of us
soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little propriety in the kingdom as to our
estates, yet we have had a birthright." [2. Ibid., p. 69]
"Effective sovereignty must therefore be vested not in a minority of property owners,
but in the entire people; and that sovereignty is to be rendered an operative reality by a
system of universal suffrage.
". . . every man born in England, cannot, ought not, either by the Law of God nor the Law
of Nature to be exempted from the choice of those whoa re to make laws for him to live
under and for him, for aught I know, to lose his life under". [3. Ibid., p. 56]
"Ireton was quick to protest that such an argument involved a state of contingent anarchy:
". . . for a man to infer that upon any particular issue you may dispute that authority by
what is commanded whether it is just or unjust, this would be the end of all government".
[4. Ibid., p. 29]
97. But the Levellers saw no less clearly that the acceptance of Ireton's view-point would
mean the enslavement of the majority who were denied the opportunity to share in the
making of policy to the tyranny of wealth and privilege.
There is a marked tendency in the early stages of the debate for the Levellers and
the Agitators to shrink from pushing their arguments to their logical conclusions. Ireton
recognizes more clearly than they the implications of their position. The argument from
natural law, he urges, can lead to a denial of the right of property:
"By that same right of nature (whatever it be) that you pretend by which you can say, one
man hath an equall right with another to the choosing of him that shall govern him--by
the same right of nature, he hath the same equall right in any goods he sees--meat, drink,
clothes--to take and use them for his sustenance." [1. Woodhouse, op. cit., p. 58.]
Rainborough hastens to assure him that his party has no intentions of challenging the
institution of porperty.
"To say because a man pleads that every man hath a voice (by right of nature) that
therefore it destroys by the same argument all property--this is to forget the Law of God.
That there's a property, the Law of God says it; else why hath God made the law 'Thou
shalt not steal?'"
But, as the Levellers begin to appreciate the fundamental significance of Ireton's
argument and his uncompromising class position, they are driven progressively leftward:
"Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away",
Rainborough firmly tells Ireton. ". . . But I would fain know what the soldier hath fought
for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men
of estates, to make him a perpetual slave." [3. Woodhouse. p. 71]
98. Sexby, with his characteristic bluntness, expresses the disillusionment of the entire
army:
"I confess", he declares, "many of us fought for those ends which,w e since saw, were not
those which caused us to go through difficulties and straits and to venture all in the ship
with you. It had been good in you to have advertised us of it and I beliee you would have
had fewer under your command to command." [1. Woodhouse, op. cit., p. 74]
The irreconcilable class divisions the debates have evealed are finely crystallized by
Rainborough:
"There is a great deal of difference between us two," he declares, turning to Ireton. "If a
man hath all he doth desire, he may wish to sit still; but if I thnk I have nothing at all of
what I fought for, I do not think the argument holds that I must desist as well as he." [2.
Ibid., p. 78]
Through him, the common people are announcing to the bourgeoisie their determination
to fight for the rights and liberties the latter are attempting to deny them.
The revolutionary movement gathered momentum rapidly during 1647. It
developed, as we have already indicated, in the army, in London and throughout the
country. The Army Agitators developed an elaborate organizational structure; the New
Model agitators were particularly active. They maintained contact with the civilian
populace, with the armies in other parts of the country and with the navy; they organized
meetings and demonstrations; they conducted an extensive correspondence; they
evidently operated a printing press of their own. [3. See, e.g., Edvertisements for
Managing the Counsels of the Army (May 4, 1647), 'Letters to the Agitators'. Reprinted
in part in Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 398-400.]
They were in constant contact with Lilburne, to whom they turned for advice and
guidance. There is ample evidence of considerable Leveller activity in the army in the
early months of the year. [4. Gardiner, 'Civil War', Vol. III, pp. 237, 245, ect.]
99. "
"Suffer not one sort of men too long to remain adjutators", he cautioned the soldiers, "lest
they be corrupted by bribes of office or places of preferment; for standing waters though
never so pure at first, in time putrifies."[1.Lilburne, "Advice to the Private Soldiers"
(Aug. 21, 1647). Appended to 'The Juglers Discovered', op. cit.]
He impressed on them the importance of basing their agitation on the mass support of the
people. To that end, he urged them
"to presse for moneys to pay your quarters, the want of which will speddily (by free
quarter) destroy the army in the poore country people's affections, whose burthens are
intolerable in paying excise for that very meat the Soldiers eate from them gratis and yet
paying heavy taxation besides. . ." [1.]
""Your safety shall be equally before us with our own", write the Agitators in thanking
the apprentices for their petitions in behalf of the army. [2. 'The Petition of the Wel-
Affected Young Men and Apprentices of London to Sir Thomas Fairfax, together with
a Congratulatory Letter from the Agitators in the Army to the Apprentices (July 1647),
E. 399 (2). See also, e.g., 'The Humble Acknowledgment and Congratulations of Many
Thousands Young Men and Apprentices . . . to His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax' (Aug.
1647), E. 403 (1).]"
During the Army Debates the City Levellers came forth to join the Agitators in
arguing the radical cause. We can see the results of their collaboration in the increasing
effectiveness with which the revolutionary needs of the people are now stated in
documents like the 'Case of the Army' and the 'Agreement of the People'. But we must
never overlook the fact that, whatever direction the Leveller leaders may have given
to the army, the revolutionary development of the latter was a spontaneous and mass
phenomenon."
100. "We can see the results of their efforts in the fact that the people n giving expression
to the class consciousness that was being so rapidly intensified among them spoe the
language of the Leveller leaders. One could point to many magnificent examples of
the depth of that feeling in 1647. There is, for example, that eloquent and powerful
pamphlet, 'The Antipodes'. When the Long Parliament first assembled, writes the
author, England groaned under many evils--monopolies, favouritism before the law,
imprisonment without just cause, burdensome taxation. Parliament promised to remedy
those conditions, to restore the rule of law and the freedom of the individual. But
Parliament has betrayed its trust:
"Heare oh Heavens and tremble oh Earth", he passionately appeals. "Oh England, stand
amazed. Many of your trustees have conceived wickedness. They promoised liberty but
behold slavery, they pretended justice but behold oppression; they pretended reformation
but behold deformation; they pleased law but have lost conscience; they pretended purity
but behold hypocrisy. . . . Our condition is much worse than at the beginning, for then
we knew our sicknesse and remedye but now such are our distempers that wee may
more easily know them than cure them. 'Tis their privilege is our bondage, their power
our prestilence, their rights our poverty, their wils our law, their smiles our safty, their
frownes our ruine. . . ."
"And you poore Commons of England," he concludes in a stirring call to the
people, "unlesse you seriously and suddainly lay your condition to heart and as one man
rise up for the vindicating of yourselves against those which have abused and daily
endeavoured to inslave you and if you doe not now take this opportunity in joyning with
and assisting of this army . . . know assuredly that you doe hammer out a yoake for your
own necks which will pierce the lives, liberties and estates of yourselves and posterities
and when your suffering bring you sorrow you may not happily find deliverers." [1. 'The
Antipodes or Reformation with the Heeles Upward'. I. H. (July 1647)]
101. In another pamplet, "a fundamental understanding of the nature and significance of
class division that is found, among the Leveller leaders, only in Overton:
"Consider how impossible it is for those that oppresse you to ease and free you from
oppressions;" he reasons. "For who are the oppressors but the Nobility and Gentry; and
who are oppressed, is it not the Yeoman, the Farmer, the Tradesman and the Labourer?
then consider have you not chosen oppressor to relieve you from oppressions? . . . It is
naturally inbred in the major part of the nobility and gentry to oppresse the persons of
such that are not as rich and honourable as themselves, to judge the poore but fooles and
them wise. . . . It is they that oppresse you, insomuch that your slavery is their liberty,
your poverty is their prosperity." [2. 'A General Charge of Impeachment of High Treason
in the Name of Justice-Equity against the Communalty' (Oct. 1647), E. 410 (9).]
102. "By the middle of the year some of the Leveller leaders had become aware, in
limited fashion, of the agrarian problem. Overton, appealing over the heads of Parliament
to the people in July, includes in his programme for what seems to be the first time, the
demand
". . . that all grounds which anciently lay in common for the poore and are now
impropriate, inclosed and fenced in may forthwith (in whose hands soever they are) be
cast out and laid open againe to the free and common use and benefit of the poore". [2.
Overton, 'An Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body the Commons of England
Assembled at Westminster to the Body Represented, the Free People in General' (July
1647), E. 398 (28)]"
"Not until the end of 1648 did the impact of Leveller propaganda on the landless
labourers translate itself into a plea for common ownership.
The political developments of 1647-9 can be summarized but briefly at this
point. Their central theme is the sturggle for power between the Independents and the
army led by Cromwell and the Presbyterians. The latter tried to secure their position
through accommodation with the Royalists; Cromwell bade for power through the
pressure of the army. Cromwell may not have been a dissembling hypocrite; but he was
certainly the supreme political opportunist of the period. To attain his end, there was no
medium he was not prepared to utilize. He could intrigue with Charles and negotiate with
the Levellers. He could, when necessary, purge Parliament and finally execute the King.
But throughout he remained consistent in one thing--in his determination to suppress the
threat of the common people by retaining absolute control of the army and by crushing
whatever popular movements ventured to challenge his authority. It was essential to the
purpose of the Idependents that they retain the allegiance of all sections of the army; but
they were careful, in so doing, to deny the radical elements any share in its control.
During 1648, the alliance of considerable sections of the Presbyterians with the Royalists
plunged the country into the counter-revolutionary second Civil War and placed the
government in jeopardy. Confronted by a common danger, Parliament and the army
temporarily shelved their struggle. But when the war had been brought to an end and the
Parliamentary majority, but particularly the Lords, persisted in their negotiations with the
King, the Independents were driven to the realization that they could guarantee the order
they desired to establish only by the direct seizure of power by the army and the
execution of the King. To maintain the unity that was vital to their purpose, they were
forced to move closer to the policy of the Left. There was a series of negotiations and
compromises that revealed that the conflict between the revolutionary aims of the
Levellers and the essential convatism of the army leaders was as fundamental as ever.
[1. "He (Cromwell) and the Levellers can as soon combine as fire and water", wrote a
Royalist newspaper at the time, ". . . the Levellers aim being at pure democracy . . . and
the design of Oliver and his grandees for an Oligarchy in the hands of himselfe."
Mercurius Pragmaticus (Dec. 19-26, 1648)] If anything, the army leaders, conscious that
supreme power was within their grasp, already betrayed, as with Ireton in the Whitehall
Debates, their reactionary intentions. But they remained sufficiently united in purpose to
effect the unity they required. Ireton by accepting the Leveller demand that the kingdom
be settled through the medium of an Agreement of the People secured their reluctant
acquiescence in the immediate programme he suggested. Pride's Purge and the execution
of the King installed the army in the seat of power."
104. "With their accession to power, Cromwell and the Independents cast off the specious
liberalism in which they had paraded. The vote of Jan. 4, 1649, which declared that "the
people under God are the original of all power" and which established the House of
Commons as the supreme authority in the land may superficially seem to have been a
formal triumph for the Levellers. Actually, it was a hollow mockery. For, when that
declaration was issued, supreme power in the State was already in the hands of a small
minority whose authority rested solely on the army it commanded and who was to rule
England ruthlessly by the naked power of the sword.
The suppression of the mutiny at Ware in November, 1647, and the subsequent
purge of the army restored discipline in the ranks and seriously arrested revolutionary
activity. Parliament's vote to make no further addresses to the King did much to heal the
breach between the officers and the common soldiery; and when the Army Council
adjourned for the last time in January, after expressing its satisfaction with Parliament's
decision, the army leaders had largely regained the confidence of the soldiers. As the
revolutionary fervour of the army temporarily cooled, the Levellers became a more
purely civilian movement. The discovery of their plans by the Government early in 1648,
the arrest of Lilburne and Wildman and the second Civil War checked organized Leveller
activity until the autumn of the year. But as the movement tended to base itself more and
more exclusively on the civilian populace and as its propaganda spread to towns and
country, its economic and social aspects became considerably more pominent than they
had hitherto been. Where radical petitions of earlier years had generally revealed the
hand of Leveller organizers, those of 1648 unmistakably reflect a genuine spontaneity.
They are much more profoundly concerned with the acute economic distress of the
signatories than with immediate political developments; and the demands for social
reform are put forward with a much greater urgency than are those for constitutional
change. They are suffused by a sense of desperation; and there runs through them the
continual threat of violence to which the desperation of the people is driving them."
106. "They conclude with a frantic appeal to Parliament and so the army:
"Oh, Parliament men and soldiers! Necessity dissolves all law and government and
hunger will break throough stone walls. Tender mothers will sooner devour you than the
fruit of their own womb and hunger regards no swords and cannons. . . . Oh hearke at our
doors how our children cry 'bread, bread, bread', and we how with bleeding hearts cry
once more to you, pity an enslaved, oppressed people; carry our cries in the large petition
to the Parliament and tell them if they still be deafe, the tears of the oppressed will wash
away the foundations of their houses." [1. 'The Mournfull Cryes of Many Thousand Poor
Tradesmen who are ready to famish through decay of trade or The Warning Teares of
the Oppressed (Jan. 1648) 669, f. 11 (116). The Large Petition referred to is probably
the Smithfield Petition drawn up in Jan. 1648. It is printed in Lilburne's 'Impeachment of
High Treason', E. 508 (20).]
There is, too, that equally eloquent protest of the "Plaine Men of England against the
Rich and Miightie" for the intrigues of the Lords with the King, and their efforts to
weaken the authority of the House of Commons by allying themselves with the rich men
of the City and for encouraging division among the poor to prevent their unity:
"all proceedings ever since evidently demonstrating a confederacy amongst the rich and
mighty to impovish and so to enslave all the plaine and mean people throughout the
land". [2. 'England's Troublers Troubled or the Just Resolutions of the Plaine Men of
England against the Rich and Mightie by whose pride, treachery and wilfulness they are
brought into extream necessity and misery (Aug. 1648), E. 459 (11).]
"Ye have by corruption in Government, by unjust and unequall lawes, by fraud,
cousenage, tyranny and oppression gotten most of the land of this distressed and enslaved
nation into your ravenous clawes, ye have by monopolies, usuries and combinations
engrossed all the wealth, monies and houses into your possession! yea and enclosed our
commons in most Counties. . . . How excessively and uncounscionably have ye advanced
your land rents in the Country and house and shop rents in the City within these fourty
years? How many families have ye eaten out at doores and made beggars, some with
racke rents and others with engrossing of leases and monopolizing of trades? . . . When
with extreme care, rackt credit and hard labour, ourselves and servants have produced our
manufactures, with what cruelty have ye wrought and still worke upon our necessities
and enrich yourselves upon our extremities, offering yea frequently buying our work for
lesse than (you know) the stuff whereof it was made cost us; by which and the like
unconscionable meanes in griding the faces of the poore and advancing yourselves on our
ruins, most of you rich citizens come to your wealth without any kind of remorse or
Christian compassion for your so undoing of poor families and pitifully eating the bread
out of the young crying infants mouths." [1. 'England's Troubles Troubled' (Aug. 1648),
E., 459 (11)]
107. "They warn the Lords that unless the latter cease to corrupt the House of Commons
and to provoke the army and, instead, actively promote the restoration of trade, they will
resort to economic action by refusing to pay rents or debts or taxes.
"Ye must hold us excused", they declared, "for paying any of you either rents,
debts or interest and all enclosures of fens and commons ye must expect to be layed
open."[1. 'England's Troublers Troubled' (Aug. 1648), E., 459 (11).]
"We should observe, too, that they strike a note that, surprisingly enough, is seldom
sounded in Leveller literature--a recognition of the potentialities of the expanding
economy and the protest that the denial to anyone of his just share of those benefits is
nothing less than an act of robbery:
"But these and many other enormities are parcells of the fruits of evile, corrupt and
tyrannicale Government and of covetous, wicked and ambitious Governers, perverting
most undutifully and unconscionably the end of God's creation who in all nations hath
most wisely and liberally provided a sufficiency of necessaries for the Inhabitants and
unto every particular or individuale person whereof a competency is due and which
if witheld is in his sight no less than robbery and injustice. And therefore by all just
governments ought to be carefully lookt unto and prevented, it being most unreasonable
where God hath given enough that any should perish through want and penury. These
things we have begun now more seriously to consider than at any time heretofore" is
their concluding warning, "ye giving us more and more cause to do so." [1. 'England's
Troublers Troubled' (Aug. 1648), E. 459 (11).]
108. "But as the social and economic aspects of the movement emerged in greater detail
and with increasing emphasis, their limited character became more obvious. We hear
in the protests and demands the voice of those classes of the 'petit bourgeoisie' whom
the new capitalist development in trade and industry and agriculture had most seriously
affected. The petty tradesmen and manufacturers in the towns and the peasants in the
country demand the abolition of the special privileges the law extended to the monopolist
and the enclosing landlord. They seek equality of opportunity with the wealthier business
enterprises and the larger unit of production that were becoming more important in the
economic life of the country. They insist that all restrictions on trade and industry that
operate to the prejudice of the small business men be removed and that protection and
encouragement be extended them in the exercise of their trades and businesses. Taxes and
excise should either be completely abolished or more equitably distributed in accordance
with capacity to pay.
In 1648 the peasantry and smaller freeholders have become equally articulate.
Like the tradesmen, they rotest against the legally-supported privileges of the gentry and
nobility. For the Ordinance of 1646, [2. First and Rait, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 833.] while
removing the feudal survivals that hampered the tenants-in-chief, did nothing to ease the
burden of the smaller tenants. There is the continual demand from the latter in Leveller
petitions for the abolition of copyhold tenures and their conversion to freehold:
"The Ancient and almost antiquated badge of slavery, viz. all bbare Tenures by Copies,
Oaths of Fealty, Homage, Fines at Will of Lord, ect (being the Conquerors' marks on
the people) may be taken away." [1. A New Engagement or Manifesto (1648), 669, f. 12
(97).]
109. "...if the peasants and tradesmen had become fully aware of the nature of their
struggle with the Right, they had become almost equally sensitive to the danger they
conceived to be threatening them from the Left. There is no evidence during 1648 of any
independent movement of the workers in the towns or o fthe landless labourers in the
country. But there are indications, which we shall discuss in a later chapter, that these
propertyless classes found the Leveller programme inadequate and, to a considerable
measure, irrelevant to their situation; for restrictions on monopoly or the conversion
of tenures bore little significance for those who had neither trades nor land. There is in
all Leveller literature, it is true, a sincere and very generous solicitude for the welfare
of the poor and the dispossessed. The various Leveller petitions and manifestos insist
that poor relief be much more efficiently organized and administered, and that adequate
measures be taken to prevent begging and destitution. All enclosed fens and commons,
they repeatedly urged, should be opened for the benefit of the poor; and income from
enclosures should be dedicated to their relief. But those suggestions were inspired by
sympathy and charitable motives rather than by any deep concern with the problems of
the propertyless classes. Wage-earners, in fact the Levellers argreed, were to be excluded
from the scheme of universal suffrage they were advocating; and beyond adequate relief
from destitution, they had little claim on the State."
110. "In March, Lilburne repudiated the designation of his party as "The Levellers",
declaring of his followers that
". . . they have been the truest and constantest asserters of liberty and propriety (which
are quite opposite to communitie and levelling) that have been in the whole land". [1.
Lilburne, 'A Whip for the Present House of Lords or the Levellers Levelled' (March
1648), E. 431 (1).]
He challenges anyone to adduce anything in their writings or declarations
"that doth in the least tend to the destruction liberty and proprietie or to the setting up of
Levelling by universal communitie or anything really and truly like it". [1]
All leveller petitions now listed, among the things they had been expecting of Parliament,
". . . that you would have bound yourselves and all future Parliaments from abolishing
propriety, levelling men's estates or making all things common". [2. 'To the Right
Honorable the Commons of England. . . . The Humble Petition of Thousands Well-
Affected Persons (Sept. 11, 1648), E. 464 (5).]
The Second Agreement of the People of 1648 already included in the limitations on the
power of governments
". . . that no representative shall in any wise render up, or give, or take away any
foundations of common right, liberty or safty contained in this Agreement, nor shall level
men's estates, destroy propriety, or make all things common". [3. 'The Second Agreement
of the People', printed in Lilburn's 'Foundations of Freedom', E. 476 (26).]
Walwyn, t is true, was reported to have declared on one occasion
". . . that it was a sad and miserable thing that it should so continue and that it would
never be well until all things were common". [4. 'Walwyn's Wiles or the Manifestators
Manifestated' (1649), E. 554 (24).]
111. "But Walwyn was probably the most advanced of all the Levellers; and the
particular statement, at any rate, was denied both by Walwyn [1. Walwyn, 'The Fountain
of Slander Discovered' (May 1649), E. 557 (4).] and his intimate acquaintances. [2. The
Charity of Church-Men or a Vindication of Mr. William Walwyn, Merchant.' By H. E.
(May 1649), E. 556 (20).]
"What probably contributed to evoking their [the Levellers] denial of communistic
intentions in greater measure than anything else, was the fact that even before
Wiinstanley had begun to issue his tracts or the Diggers had made their appearance on
St. George's Hill to begin their experiment in practical communism there was already
a significant, though as yet inarticulate, current of opinion among the propertyless
classes that the problems of economic oppression and class division the Levellers were
attempting to confront could not be adequately solved until private property had been
abolished and a system of common ownership established in its stead.
"I would not be mistaken as if I were an enemy to great estates," Cooke hastens to
explain as early as January 1648 in setting forth his scheme for the alleviation of poverty,
betraying an anxiety to dissociate himself from that current of opinion. "I am not of
their opinion that drive at a parity, to have all men alike, tis but a Utopian fiction, the
Scripture holds forth no such thing; the poore ye shall alwayes have with you. . . ." [1.
John Cooke, 'Unum Necessarium or the Poor Man's Case' (Jan. 1648), E. 425 (1).]
112. "There was a renewed outburst of radical agitation in the autumn of 1648, when,
with the end of the second Civil War, considerable sections of Parliament persisted in
their negotiations with the King. Those efforts drew angry and threatening protests from
the army, the country and the City radicals. Lilburne, alarmed that the Independents
preparing to challenge for power would establish a regime as autocratic as that of the
Presbyterians or of Charles, renewed his agitation for the acceptance of the Agreement
as the only method that would guarantee freedom and security to the people. The
negotiations and compromises between the Independents, the Army and the Levellers in
the months that preceded the execution of Charles lessened overt revolutionary activity;
but when, with the accession of Cromwell to power, the reactionary nature of the regime
he proposed to establish was revealed there was an intense resurgence of revolutionary
agitation, which we shall examine in a later chapter, that was brought to a climax by the
revolts at Burford and Oxford. But, in Leveller theory at any rate, there were no further
developments of fundamental importance; f or the arguments they had advanced against
the arbitrary rule of the Presbyterian Parliament were equally valid when directed against
the Commonwealth."
"The circulation and presentation of petitions, one of the most effective methods of
crystallizing discontent and organizing mass demonstrations, were continually being
rendered more difficult. When Parliament, for example, after considerable pressure
from the apprentices, was forced to grant them a daily holiday every month, [2. Supra,
p. 123. First and Rait, June 8, 1647, Vol. 1, p. 954-] its alarm at their growing class
consciousness and its fear that they would take advantage of their free day to engage in
political discussion and activity impelled it to issue an ordinance three weeks later giving
the justices the right to imprison any apprentices
". . . who cause any riotous or tumultuous assembly to the disturbane of the peace on such
a day of recreation"[1. Firth and Rait, June 28, 1647, Vol 1, p. 985]
113. ""Poore Wise-Man" accurately forewarned the "plaine people" of the tactics that
would be employed by those in power to discredit all progressive movements:
"The bait they will use", he wrote, "will be the suppression of Hereticks and Schismaticks
which henceforth ye shall finde to be but nicknames for any that oppose tyrants and
oppressors by which they have endeavoured to make those odious to the rude multitude
whose honestie and conscience could not otherwise be blemished." [3. 'The Poore Wise-
Man's Admonition Unto all the Plaine People of London (June 1647), E. 392 (4).]
Libel and defamation, it is true, were the normal and accepted political weapons of the
day; but they were excessively employed to bring the Levellers and other radical writers
into disrepute. They were denounced as godless and blasphemous. They were atheists and
libertines. The notorious blasphemy ordinance of May 1648, ostensibly directed against
the heretical activities of the sects, was in reality a deadly political weapon by which
the Government could strike down any activity they chose to consider subversive; f or
it covered such a multitude of sins that none but the most rigidly dogmatic Prebyterian
could feel himself secure from its threat."
114. "Both Parliament and the army leaders were continually attempting to break the
radical movement by the arrests of its most active leaders. We have already referred to
the arrests and purge in the army after the mutiny at Ware. Five leading City Levellers
were imprisoned in the autumn of 1647; and Lilburne and Wildman suffered a similar
fate early in the New Year. In March 1649 Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Prince were
confined to the Tower. The campaign of repression, we shall later see, was greatly
intensified after the establishment of the Commonwealth. Lilburne describes the tactics
used by Parliament to suppress Leveller activity in a passage that reveals their striking
similarity to the technique of our own day:
". . . their only fears remain upon our Discoveries", he wrote of the Parliamentary
and army leaders, "to prevent which they use means that either we might not have the
opportunity to lay open their treacheries and Hypocrisies or not to be believed if we
did it. In order to the first. They strictly stop the Presse. In order to the second: They
blast us with all the scandals and false reports their wit or malice could invent against
us: and so monstrously have prized into all our actions and made use of all our friendly
intimacies. . . . By these arts are they now fastened in their powers." [1. Lilburne, 'The
Second Part of England's New Chains Discovered or A Sad Representation of the
Uncertaine and Dangerous Condition of the Commonwealth' (March 1649), E. 548 (16).]
115. "There is thus an important revival from 1648 onwards of mystical religion and
sectarian enthusiasm; [2. 'Infra', Conclusion] it is to this period that the origins of such
groups as the Quakers and the Fifth Monarchy Men are to be traced. But it should be
noted that the sectarian activity after 1648 is profoundly different in its character from
that of the earlier period. The latter had been the expression of an immature political
consciousness, of confused hopes and aspiration, of an inchoate protest, that was
gradually translated by impact of events into secular and political terms. The movements
of 1648, on the contrary, are the product of an acute class consciousness, of a deep
understanding of the social needs of the oppressed and of a firm belief in the inalienable
rights of every individual; and this political maturity is unmistakably reflected for several
years after 1648 in the writings of the religious radicals."
116. "The angels may enter where men may not venture to tread; and what political
activity had failed to achieve, Divine intervention would surely effect. The rights of the
individual which society should guarantee became the privileges of the Saints which
God would assure; and a social order in which legislation was to abolish inequality and
injustice became instead a world in which,a s a result of the inner spiritual regeneration
of mankind, men would cease to oppress their fellows. It may be noted that Winstanley's
mystical and theological writings, which we shall later examine, are all a product of this
period.
If the immediate practical achievements of Levellers were insignificant, their
importance in the history of political thought is considerable; for they anticipated, in very
remarkable fashion, the development of radical liberalism. In them the individualism that
had been inherent in the Reformation and in Puritanism is given its fullest expression. To
the rising middle classes that individualism was primarily a function of privilege; and the
rights that could be claimed in its name were those that furthered, or at least were
compatible with, the interests of wealth. To the Levellers it was essentially an assertion
that the State is built, above all else, of the individuals who compose it. Its activity must
therefore be directed towards satisfying the needs of all rather than serving the interests
of a few; for every individual by virtue of his existence has inalienably an equal claim
with his fellows to share in the common good. That meant, as the Levellers clearly saw,
that equality must replace privilege as the dominant theme of social relationships; for a
State that is divided into rich and poor, or a system that excludes certain classes from
privileges it confers on others, violates that equality to which every individual has a
natural claim.
It meant, furthermore, that no individual or class could impose a system of law
or government on their fellows against or without their consent. Every person in the State
must therefore be able to share equally with his fellow-ciitzens, through universal
suffrage in the election of their representatives, in the determination of public policy; and
no government can claim validity which has not been sanctioned by the free consent of
those who are to live under its rule. That consent, the Levellers urged, should take the
form of the popular ratification of a written constitution that would clearly and
unmistakably set forth the powers of government and that would define the boundaries of
public authority by prohibiting interference with those individual rights that were
considered fundamental--religious freedom, the right to private property, equality before
the law, security of person against impressment and imprisonment without cause. To
prevent the abuse of authority by those in power, the Levellers further insisted on the
erection of such constitutional safeguards as periodical elections and the separation of
powers."
118. "The political and social programme of the Levellers was far in advance of their
time. In their demands for universal suffrage, for reapportionment, for legal amendment,
for prison reform, for the abolition of monopolies, feudal tenures, tithes, etc., for poor
relief, for an adequate system of taxation, they sketched a programme whose translation
into legislation was to prove the work of centuries. For the classes in whose name
they sought to secure those social improvements did not have, in the seventeenth
century, the economic strength or the political organization to enable them to wring
from the triumphant capitalist the concessions the latter were forced to extend to later
generations."
119. "The law, Lilburne affirmed was
". . . the surest sanctuary that a man can take and the strongest fortresse to protect the
weakest of all".[1. Lilburne, 'The Laws Funerall' (May 1648), E. 442 (13).]
But the Levellers failed to relate the developments with which they were concerned
to the foundations of the economic system in which those phenomena had their roots.
There is in their writings no consistent or serious attempt to analyse the social basis of
the power of the ruling classes they oppsed or to understand the historical evolution of
their supremacy. Law, they fail to recognize, is but the reflection and crystallization of
the social relationships it is intended to regulate, a result rather than a cause. The forms of
political organization, they fully realized, were much less important than their operative
content. But they were unable to perceive that no political system can transcend, in any
ultimate sense, the economic relationships on whose foundation it is reared."
"For such an analysis would have meant to challenge the State on fundamentals; and
that challenge could not be made by the small property-owners--the peasants, the petty
tradesmen and merchants, the artisans--whose party the Levellers essentially were. It
could come only from those whom the development of capitalism was transforming into
the beginnings of the modern proletariat, from the landless labourers who had to live not
by their holding or trades or businesses, but by their labour-power alone. The Diggers
played a negligible role in the political drama of the period, and their fleeting appearance
on the stage at Cobham was quickly forgotten. But, through Gerrard Winstanley, they
questioned more profoundly than anyone else in the seventeenth century the foundations
on which the new society was being built, and produced the one genuine proletarian
ideology that emerged from the revolutionary ferment of the Civil War."
CHAPTER THREE: GERRARD WINSTANLEY - A FORGOTTEN RADICAL
"
"Was the Earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them
to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a
fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?" -Winstanley, 'The New Law of
Righteousness' (1649)
121. "Not until his resurrection by Bernstein [1. E. Bernstein, 'Sozialismus and
Demokratie in der grossen Englischen Revolution' (1895). Translated by H. J. Stenning
as 'Cromwell and Communism' (1930)] was attention first directed to the fact that the
most advanced thinker of the English Revolution had been completely neglected by its
historians. And, if his political ideas have since been rescued from oblivion, the details of
his personal activity still remain shrouded in mystery.
Winstanley was born in Wigan in Lancashire in 1609; the parish register of
Wigan records his baptism on October 10 of that year. [2. 'The Registers of the Parish
Church of Wigan in the County of Lancaster, 1580-1625', ed. J. Arrowsmith, Wigan,
1899, p. 74.] The Winstanleys are a family of great antiquity in Lancashire and figure
prominently in its local history. The name appears for what seems to be the last time
among the county squires in 1575, when a Humfrey Winstanley was summoned to
provide arms for the Queen's service. [3. 'Memorials of the Families of Cropper, Cubham
and Wolsey of Bickerstaffe and of Winstanley of Winstanley.' N. Waterhouse, Liverpool,
1864.] Gerard's father, Edward, of Wigan, who is described in the recorders as
a "mercer", was probably a trader in cloths and wool. He is recorded as a burgess in the
earliest surviving list, that of 1627, [4. Sinclair, 'History of Wigan', Vol. 1, p. 198] and
subsequently in the lists for 1635 and 1638. The notice of his burial at the parish church
on December 27, 1639, describing him as "Mr." would seem to indicate that he had been
a person of considerable standing in the community."
122. "Winstanley was, of course, intimately acquainted with the Scriptures; but that
was a trait common to all literate Englishmen of the century. Apart from the Bible, he
makes no mention of or reference to any books he had read or studied. His writing are
completely free of those classical quotations with which other contemporary authors
delighted to exhibit their erudition; and his reerences to law or to statute, to history or to
ancient or contemporary thinkers are extremely few. His pamphlets can leave little doubt
that he was acquainted, at any rate, with More's 'Utopia' and with the works of Bacon;
but nowhere does he acknowledge their influence. His contempt for the book-learning
of the orthodox ministers derived, no doubt, from the fact that he found the traditional
concepts they preached meaningless and inadequate; it may also betray an envy and
disappointment at having failed to receive some of the advantges of a formal education.
It is uncertain when Winstanley left Wigan; but at the age of twenty he was
already in London. Apprenticed to Sarah Gater of Cornhill, the widow of William Gater
of the Merchant Taylors Company, on April 10, 1630, he became a freeman on February
21, 1637. [1. Manuscript records of the Merchant Taylors Company, London.] It might
be interesting to speculate as to the persons with whom he came into contact or the
preachers to whose sermons he listened during those years of his apprenticeship in
London; but Winstanley has left us nothing on which to build. Whether or not he
returned to Lancashire after he came to London, he certainly must haave maintained
fairly intimate contact with his birthplace; for his first written work, published at least
eighteen years after his arrival in London, is dedicated to his "beloved countrymen of the
Countie of Lancaster", asking them not to despise him for having the temerity to venture
into print. [1. 'The Mysterie of God Concerning the whole Creation, Mankinde' (1648),
B. M. 4377, a. 51 (1).]
123. "In 1640 he applied for a licence to marry Susan Kiing at St. Martin's Outwhich. The
entry describes him as a "Merchant Taylor of the Parish of St. olaves in the Old Jewry", a
bachelor about thirty. [2. Registry of the Bishop of London, Allegation Book 22, Jan. 1-
Dec. 12, 1640] The recorde of the church at which the marriage was to have taken place
were destroyed in the Great Fire. Nowhere in his writings does Winstanley make mention
of wife or family.
For several years he was a cloth merchant in London, and continued in business
until 1643, when he fell victim to the economic depression of the period. A bill of
complaint that was presented by Winstanley in 1660, when he was being sued by the
executors of the estate of one Richard Aldworth for the recovery of a debt of P114 he
was said to have contracted during his brief period in business, reveals his commercial
activities to have been rather modest. Over a period of thirty months he claims his
transaction with Aldworth, who evidently supplied him with cloth, to have amounted to
P331 1s:
". . . about the beginning of April 1641," he states, "your oratour being then a citizen of
London had some trading with one Richard Aldworth late citizen and . . . of London,
deceased, for fustian, dimities and lynnin cloth and such like commodities which trading
continued for the part of two or three years." [3. Chancery Records, Public Records
Office. Reynardson's Division, c. 9/412/269.]
Aldworth, he writes, was an important trader, for he employed several servants to keep
his books. Winstanley, with his more modest enterprise, did his own accounting."
124. "After his failure in business, Winstanley was forced to accept the hospitality of
friends and to move to the country, probably to the vicinity of Cobham in Surrey. [1.
Berens. 'The Digger Movement' (1906), p. 79)] There is no further record of his activities
until the publication of his first tract early in 1648.]
"His first two pamphlets of the early summer of 1648 are typical of the chiliastic
mysticism so popular during the period. In the autumn he has shed that mysticism; and
though he is still concerned exclusively with spiritual problems, his argument is that of
a progressive rationalist. A few months later he emerges as the most advanced radical of
the century, convinced that social and economic reorganization is society's most vital and
immediate need.
Winstanley's writings fall into five definite groupings. There are his two mystical
works of the summer of 1648, two subsequent theological pamphlets of the autumn of
that year, the 'New LAw of Righteousness' of January 1649, that marks the transition in
his development, the tracts and manifestos issued during and in connection with the
Digger experiment in Surrey and 'The Law of Freedom', in which he develops in detail
his plan for the organization of English society on the basis of a system of common
ownership."
125. "Winstanley's first two theological tracts were published early in 1648. The
first, 'The Mysterie of God Concerning the Whole Creation, Mankinde', evidently
written in the spring of the year, bears the name of no printer; the second, 'The Breaking
of the Day of God', whose preface is dated on May 20, was printed by Giles Calvert,
who published Winstanley's subsequent writings. These tracts are typical products of
the mystical theology of the period; and there is little in them to indicate the trend of
Winstanley's later development. To search for the sources of his theological conceptions
would be as futile as to attempt to identify the streams that have contributed to the bucket
of water one has drawn from the sea. The air of the Civil War period, we have already
indicated, was charged with the currents of mystical, pantheistic and humanistic thought;
and Winstanley, like countless others, had breathed deeply of its draughts. There are
in his writings the certainty in the imminence of redemption, the profound faith in the
potentialities of human nature, the insistence that salvation can be achieved not through
the medium of the visible Church or its formal rites, but only through an inner spiritual
experience of God, the affirmation of the presence of Christ in every human soul, the
conviction that suffering and persecution are but a prelude to the redemption--that are
common not only to the sects of the Interregnum, but to so many the mediaeval popular
movements in the stage of their political immaturity. We have already indicated the
social roots of those ideas. They had been widely current, for example, in Central Europe
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, int he Peasant Revolt and the Anabaptist
agitation in Germany. [3. See K. Kautsky, 'Communism in Central Europe at the time
of the Reformation' (1897); B. Bax, 'The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists' (1903); F.
Engels, 'The Peasant War in Germany' (1927)]"
126. "They had found formal expression in the writings of men like Denck and Franck
and Schwenckfeld; and authors like John Everard had popularized those concepts in
England both through their translations of the Continental mystics and their own original
works. It may be possible to detect in Winstanley the particular influence of Jacob
Boehme and of the Familists and Seekers among the sects. But it is to the environment
of the age rather than to any individual thinker or sect that Winstanley owes his religious
doctrines. He himself constantly emphasized that the truths he set forth had not been
culled from books or commentaries or formal study, but had come to him entirely as
the result of a profound personal experience of God. [1. Thus, for example, George
Fox records that he was having very similar experiences at the time. "The Lord opened
to me"; "The Lord shewed me, so that I did see clearly, that He did not dwell in these
temples which men had commanded and set up but in people's hearts", "My desires after
the Lord grew stronger, and zeal in the pure knowledge of God and Christ alone, without
the help of any man, book or writing. For though I read the Scriptures that spake of Christ
and of God, yet I knew Him not, butby revelation." ect. - Journal of George Fox.]
We need be little concerned with the theological and mystical expositions which
occupy the major portions of those early tract. But there runs through them what one may
term a spiritual interpretation of history which provided the theological foundation of his
social philosophy."
"But the strength of the Serpent is formidable, and man, under its influence, constantly
refuses to recognize the presence of Christ within himself. He delights in the things of
the flesh; he is blind to his own sin and degeneracy; he is constantly thwarting his own
redemption. But Christ has already begun to redeem mankind by revealing Himself to
some individuals and freeing them from the tyranny of the Beast:
"I lay under the bondage of the Serpent", Winstanley relates, citing his own experience as
an example, "and I saw not any bondage: but since God was pleased to manifest his love
to me, he hath caused me to see that I lay dead in sin weltering in blood and death, was a
prisoner to my lusts." [1. 'The Mysterie of God', op. cit., p. 10]
Since that revelation
"I see and feele that God hath set me free from the dominion and over-ruling power of
that body of sin. . . . God hath freed me therefrom and taken me up into his own Being."
[2. Ibid., p. 18]
That freedom is primarily a release from the overwhelming desire for material pleasures
for
". . . when man is made spirituall and swallowed up in life or taken into the Being of God
there will then be no more use or need of these outward creatures as cattell, corn, meat,
drink and the like". [3. Ibid., p. 12]
When man first becomes aware of the presence of Christ within his heart, he finds
himself in the throes of an excruciating struggle; but it is a struggle that must inevitably
end in the death of the Serpent. As the latter feels his end approaching, he intensifies the
violence of his efforts. If anyone is therefore conscious of acute suffering and misery, he
can derive consolation from the assurance that his salvation is imminent. But man himself
can do nothing to hasten his own redemption.
"If thou lie under sorrowes for sins, now known that it is God's dispensation to thee. Wait
patiently upon him. If thou lie under the temptations of men, of losses, of povertie, of
reproaches, it is God's dispensation to thee, waite with an humble quiet spirit upon him
until he give deliverance." [4. Ibid, p. 59]
128. "That revelation, Winstanley constantly affirms, will at the beginning not come
primarily to scholars and divines, to those who have "all advantages and meanes
outward" or to men "of study, learning and actings", but rather to the "despised, the
unlearned, the poor, the nothing of this world", "to such as the world counts fools".
Since recognition of God is born only of an inner spiritual experience, those who
seek to testify to His power must themselves have felt and known that experience; and he
who
"preaches from his book and not from the anointing and so speaking in experience what
he hath seen and heard from God is no minister sent of God but a hireling that runs before
he be sent, only to get a temporall living". [2. Ibid., p. 33]
"God hath need of faithful witnesses to bear testimony thereof to the world", Winstanley
declares, but only of "such witnesses as can and will prove their testimony, not from the
writings and words of others; but from their own experienced knowledge of what they
have seen and heard and been made acquainted with from God." [3. 'The Breaking of the
Day of God', p. 14]
What is happening in the world at large is simply a reflection in macrocosm of what
transpires in each human heart:
"If you desire to know the Beast, that treads you and the holy City underfoot; looke
first into your owne hearts; for there she sits; and after that ye have beheld her confused
working there against Christ, then looke into the world; and you shall see the same
confusion of ignorance, pride, self-love, oppression and vain conversation acted against
Christ in States, in assemblies and in some churches in the world." [4. Ibid., p. 52]
129. "Just as the Sepent within man seeks to prevent the triumph of the spirit of Christ,
those who are under its influence attempt to suppress true religion in the world. There
is no method or means they are not prepared to employ. They secure from the civil
magistrate, who is commissioned by God to preserve peace, a false ecclesiastical power
that has no Divine sanction; they use that power to devise false forms of worship; they
attempt by coercion and compulsory conformity to introduce an artificial and rigid
uniformity of religion. They mercilessly persecute the Saints to whom Christ has been
revealed and prevent them from spreading their message and testimony to the world:
". . . sharp punishing laws were made to forbid fishermen, shepherds, husbandmen, and
tradesmen for ever preaching of God any more but schollars bred up in humane letters
only should doe that worke". [1. 'The Breaking', p. 115]
And all their wit and subtlety and learning are directed towards effecting those ends. That
usurpation of ecclesiastical authority has wrought chaos in the civil sphere as well.
"Ecclesiastical power hath been a great troubler of magistracy ever since the deceived
magistracy set it up." [2. Ibid., p. 133]
If the visible Church were abolished and the authority of Christ substituted for human
direction in religious affairs "the pure reformation of Civil Magistracy would soon
appear"..
The struggle within man is an indication that Christ is about to reveal Himself;
and the violence of the Serpent increases with the realization of his impending doom. The
persecution of the Saints throughout the land is similarly proof of the fact that God is
redeeming mankind. The desperate efforts that are made to enforce conformity of
religious worship, the fury that is directed against those who seek to spread true religion
by relating their personal experiences of God, the calumny and dicule and persecution to
which they are subjected are but the frantic efforts of the fomentors of evil to avert their
imminent destruction. Therefore:
"Rejoyce in the midst of this cloud of nationall troubles", Winstanley declares to the
Saints, "for your redemption drawes near. God is working out an inward and outward
peace and liberty for you all." [1. 'The Beaking', A. 5.]
131. "...fundamental to his entire argument, there is throughout the insistence that men
must accept nothing on the authority of others, but only that which they can verify in
their own personal experience, that they should regarrd as truth not that which they have
gathered from books or study, but only that which they have felt and known themselves.
That theme dominates his next two pamphlets. Within a period of a few months
he moves from the mysticism of his earlier writings to give expression to a progressive
rationalism. Where his earlier tracts are rendered almost unreadable by his lengthy
mystical expositions, his writings of the latter half of 1648 are informed by a remarkable
spirit of scientific rationalism. He is still exclusively concerned with man's spiritual
adventures; but his argument is n longer the mystical one of his first tracts, but one that is
in a large measure based on rational and prudential consideration. Scriptural history has
become in them primarily an allegory for the illustration of his theme."
Winstanley "recalls that he was prey to the same ignorance and blindness.
"I worshipped a God but I neither knew who he was nor where he was . . . walking by
imagination, I worshipped the Devill and called him God." [2. 'The Saint's Paradise or
the Fathers Teaching the only Satisfaction to waiting souls wherein many experiences are
recorded for the comfort of such as are under spiritual burning' (1648), Preface, A. 2.]
But he now realizes that God is not a Supreme Being, majestically enthroned in the
Heavens, above and beyond man, but a spirit that dwells in all mankind; and His presence
in every living creature establishes a fundamental interrelationship between all things in
the universe:
132.
"So that you do not look for a God now as formerly you did be a place of glory beyond
the Sun, Moon and Stars nor imagine a divine beeing you know not where but see him
ruling within you; and not only in you but you see and know him to be the spirit that
dwells in every creature according to his orbe within the globe of the creation. . . . He that
looks for a God without himself and worships God at a distance he worships he knows
not what but is led away and deceived by the imaginations of his own heart . . . but he
that looke for a God within himselfe and submits himselfe to the spirit of righteousnesse
that shines within, this man knows whom he worships for he is made subject to and hath
community with that spirit that made all flesh in every creature within the globe." [1. 'The
Saint's Paradise'. ppp. 55-56,58.]
133. "Towards the end of the pamphlet Winstanley introduces a new and radical note that
thereafter becomes fundamental to his thouoght--the idientification of God and the Spirit
with Reason.
". . . the spirit that will purge mankind", he asserts "is pure reason. . . . Though men
esteeme this word Reason to be too meane a name to set forth the Father by, yet it is the
highest name that can be given him." [1. 'The Saint's Paradise', p. 78]
There is no consistent definition of God in the texts.
""For it is reason that made all things and it is Reason that governs the whole Creation."
[2. Ibid., p. 78]""
"At other times it is held to be an absolute moral principle implanted in the hearts of men
which impels them to walk in the path of justice and righteousness and enables men to
distinguish right from wrong and good from evil.
". . . the spirit . . . is pure reason which governs the whole globe in righteousness and
shows thee thy wickednesse and the light thereof discovers thy darkness and fills thee
with shame and torment. . . ." [3. Ibid., p. 61.]
More frequently, however, it is regarded as the basis of a system of prudential rather than
absolute ethics, of a practical morality. It is the rational element iwthin man that, in the
interests of his own self-preservation, dictates that he deal justly with his fellow-man.
That rational faculty, on the basis of which a moral structure is reared and which every
human being possesses, distinguishes man from the beast; for it renders social life and a
realization of the natural unity of mankind a possible adventure.
134.
"When the curse in flesh moves a man to oppresse or deceive his neighbours or to take
away his rights and liberties, to beat or abuse him in any, kind reason moderates this
wicked flesh and speak within, wouldest thou be dealt with so by thyself? Wouldest
thou have another to come and take away the Goods, thy Liberties, thy life? No saint
the Flesh, that I would not. Then, saith Reason, Do as you wouldest be done unto; and
thereby the envious and covetous and proud flesh is killed and the man is made very
moderate. . . . For let reason rule the man and he dares not trespasse against his fellow
creatures but will do as he would be done unto. For Reason tells him is thy neighbour
hungry and naked today, do thou feed him and cloathe him, it may be thy case tomorrow
and then he will be ready to help thee." [1. 'The Saint's Paradise', p. 79]
Winstanley gives no clue whatever to this remarkable development within a few months
from a mystical to a rational theology; and there are no indications of the influences
that might have operated on him to produce that development. There was, of course,
the rationalism of men like Overton, which was being given increasing expression in
their writings; but, if Winstanley was consciously influenced by their ideas, he does not
seem to have had any direct contact with Overton or members of his circle. It is possible,
however, that William Everard, with whom Winstanley came into contact about this time,
may have exerted a very important influence in shaping his ideas.
Everard, who at the beginning of the Digger experiement at St. George's Hill in
April 1649 shared its leadership with Winstanley, had been one of the soldiers arrested in
the autumn of 1647 for promoting the First Agreement of the People in the ranks of the
New Model. [2. 'England's Freedom, Souldiers Rights . . . Delivered tohis Excellency Sir
Thomas Fairfax' (Dec. 14, 1647), E. 419 (23), by W. Thompson. Attached is a petition of
his fellow-prisoners in which "Will Everard" appears among the nine signatories. I have
been unable to establish any relationship between William Everard and John Everard, the
mystic.] Released from imprisonment in December of that year, he had been cashieired
from the army."
135. Regarding Everard, "The short accounts of him in the newspapers that commented
on the Digger venture indicate him to hae been an aggressive, impetuous, defiant,
fanatical personality; he is variously described as a "mad prophet", as "seduced", as
a "lunatic". By the autumn of 1648 he had already met Winstanley; for the latter in
his next tract declares that it was written to defend both Everard and himself against
accusations of blasphemy and the denial of "God, Christ and the Scriptures". Those
accusations had probably been directed against Winstanley as a result of the publication
of 'The Saint's Paradise'. Everard, who had evidently urged similar views with more
vigour and less discretion, had been arrested at Kingston in Surrey and imprisoned for a
week.
"Now, I was moved to write what here follows", declares Winstanley in the preface
to 'Truth Lifting Up its Head Above Scandals' after referring to Everard's arrest, "as
a vindication of the man and my selfe being slandered as well as he (by some of the
ministers) having been in his company that all the world may udge of his and my
innocency in these particular scandals." [1. 'Truth Lifting Up its Head Above Scandals'
(Oct. 1648), B.M. 4372, a. a. 17. "To the Gentle Reader."]
By October, then, their friendship had become intimate enough for Winstanley to take
up the pen in Everard's defence. There is no positive evidence to indicate that Everard
had beenone of the Agitators; but it is likely that as an active radical in the army he
was intimately acquainted with the writings of Overton and Walwyn. His influence on
Winstanley through his knowledge of Leveller concepts and his familiarity with the
rationalism of some of the Leveller theorists may have been decisive in the development
Winstanley had already reflected in 'The Saint's Paradise'.
In 'Truth Lifting, ect.', Winstanley elaborates the interpretation of God and the
Scriptures he had advanced in his previous pamphlet and defends his use of the
term "reasons" previous pamphlet and defends his use of the term "reason" instead of
God. He still employs the concept both as an absolute moral imperative which "guides all
men's reasonings in right order and to a right end" and as the principle of common and
mutual preservation that is the foundation of a prudential social ethics. To live by reason,
he explains, is essentially to live moderately in all things.
136.
". . . not to be excessive in drunkenness and gluttony . . . to act righteously to all fellow
creatures, till the ground according to reason, use the labour of your cattle according to
reason; follow your curse of trading in Righteousness as Reason requires; do to men and
women as you would have them do to you". [1. 'Truth Lifting, ect', pp. 49-50]
He has become much more profoundly impressed by the interdependence of all human
beings and by the fact that reason operates in society as a principle of order for their
common preservation.
"The Spirit of the Father is Pure Reason; which as he made so he knits the whole creation
together into a onenesse of life and moderation; every creature sweetly in love lendering
their hands to preserve each other and so uphold the whole fabrique." [2. Ibid., pp. 3-4]
"The spirit Reason doth not preserve the creature and destroy another, as many times
mens reasonings doth being blind by the imaginations of the flesh; but it hath a regard
to the whole creation; andknits every creature together into a onenesse; makin every
creature to be upholder of his felow; and so every one is an assistant to preserve the
whole." [3. Ibid. "To the Gentle Reader."]
Winstanley now sees a similar interdependence and order operating not only in human
affairs, but in the processes of nature as well.
"The cloudes send down r aine, and there is great undeniable reason in it, for otherwise
the earth could not bring froth grasse and fruit. The earth sends forth grasse, or else
cattle could not be preserved. The sunne gives his light and hehate or else the Creation
could not subsist. So that the mighty power Reason hath made these to give life and
preservation one to another." [4. Ibid., pp. 4-5]
This profound sense of the unity of society and nature, it should be notes, sharply
distinguishes Winstanley's cosmology from the atomism that formed the philosophic
foundation of the Levellers' individualism.
The universe, then, is not an irrational, purposeless phenomenon directed in
some mysterious fashion by the arbitrary will of a Divine Being. Rather, it is a rational,
intelligible order that operates in accordance with certain natural laws whose purpose is
the well-being and preservation of mankind. A knowledge and understanding of these
laws, furthermore, can be achieved through experience by every human being."
"He devotes considerable space to his allegorical interpeationsof the two Adams, the first
of whom, by succumbing to the temptation of the flesh, filled the earth with corruption
and the second whose revolutionary appearance
"will change times and customs and fill the earth with a new law, wherein dwels
righteousness and peace and justice and judgement shall be the upholders of his
Kingdom". [1. 'Truth Lifting, ect.', p. 24]
"He still feels that man, by his own efforts, can do little to improve the state of affairs
until spiritual perfection is achieved; and every individual must still "wait with a quiet
and humble spirit until the Father be pleased to teach" him. But he advises people to
begin in the meantime to "do as you would be done unto", to read the Scriptures and to
speak with those who have known the testimony of the Spirit within themselves."
138. "His postscript is a eulogy, in verse, of reason.
"If Reason, King do rule in thee
There's truth and peace and clemencie.
When Reason rules in whole man-kind
Nothing but peace will all men find;
Their hearts he makes both meek and kind
And troublesome thoughts he throws behind,
For he is truth and love and peace
Makes wars and lewdnesse for to cease.
And why do men so clamour then
Against this powerfull King in men?"
It was to that final question that Winstanley now addressed himself; the answer he
formulated constituted the most progressive social doctrine the Civil War produced.
What seems to have been an influence of decisive importance in Winstanley's
rapid development from his rational theology of autumn of 1648 to his practical
communism of the spring of 1649 was the activity of a group of advanced country
Levellers in Buckinghamshire. Winstanley, living near the borders of that county, may
have come into personal contact with some members of that group, but at any rate the
influence of their first short tract, 'Light Shining in Buckinghamshire' of December 1648,
is unmistakably reflected in his remarkable work, 'The New Law of Righteousness', of
the following month. For the first time he has become directly concerned with the social
problems of the period; and in his recognition of the institution of private property as the
source of all social conflict and his argument for a system of common ownership he has
already passed far beyond all other thinkers of the period. It is an argument that is still
fundamentally religious in its inspiration and emphasis; but the foundations for its
transfer to the secular and political plane have already been securely laid."
139. "'Light Shining in Buckinghamshire', which its authors announce in the sub-title ot
be "A Discovery of the main ground; original cause of all the slavery in the world but
chiefly in England", can scarcely be considered a Digger tract. It would seem, instead, to
represent the impact of Leveller propaganda on a number of peasants whose position had
been seriously affected by enclosure. Its language and argument are generally derived
from Leveller literature. Its political and constitutional discussion is primarily Leveller.
IT is essentially a plea for equal rather than for common ownership. But in its advanced
application of Leveller theory, in its historical interpretation and in its analysis of the
technique of class domination, it gave remarkable expression in political and social terms
to forces whose operation Winstanley had been describing in terms of the spiritual life-
history of mankind."
"...like most Leveller tracts, it leans but little on theological support for its validity.
Its point of departure is the assertion, common to most Leveller writings, that God, in
creating man, gave him permission to dominate "inferior creatures", but not to exercise
arbitrary authority over his fellow-man."
140. "...the authors of 'Light Shining, ect.,' stress that it confers on all men a right to equal
property.
". . . all men being alike privileged by birth so all men were to enjoy the creatures
alike without propertie one more than the other . . . that is to say no man was to lord
or command over his own kind; neither to enclose the creatures to his own use to the
impoverishing of his neighbours". [1. 'Light Shining, ect', pp. 1-2]
"But man following his sensualities", they continue, "became a devourer of the
creatures and an encloser, not content that another should enjoy the same privilege as
himself, but encloseth all from his brothers" [2. Ibid., p. 2]
Through murder and violence, some men proceeded to rob their fellows of their share of
the land, to enclose those areas into estates and to set themselves up as Lords of Manors.
Thus, the natural order that had known no distinction between men was corrupted by
the violent introduction of social division based on the unequal ownership of land. The
original community of equals was thus dissolved, and in its place there emerged the
society of propertied and propertyless we know to-day. The majjority of the people,
deprived of their means of subsistence, were forced, in order to maintain themselves, to
become the slaves of those who had stolen their land; and the latter have since lived, not,
as God had commanded, by the products of their ownlabour but on the exploitation and
oppression of those they had plundered.
To secure themselves in their enjoyment of their spoils they introduced
that "heathenish innovation", the monarchy. They gave their privileges the forms of
legality through a complicated system of charters, monopolies, patents, tenures and
enclosures that were issued in the name of the King and that derive their validity from his
authority. In England that process began when William set up his rule by conquest. The
monarchy is thus the keystone in the arch of tyranny that has been erected in the
country. ". . . all tyranny shelters itself under the King's wings". There arose, as a
consequence, a class of lawyers who intesify the exploitation of the people by
complicating the legal system and adding to its expense."
141. "A clergy was established and subsidized to preach the duty of subservience to
the people. Those who were responsible for the introduction of division in society have
thereby created a complex system centred in the monarchy that is designed to preserve
their privileges; and the clergy, the lawyers, the judges, have all a vested interest in its
maintenance, for to question the validity of the monarchy would be to undermine the
source of their own power and functions.
Popular agitation occasionally forced the King to grant certain concessions to the
people; but, impressive though they might have been in form, they were meaningless in
fact. Parliament, for example, was rendered impotent as a popular body from the moment
of its creation by limiting the choice of the majority of the members of the House of
Commons to freeholders, by having the Lords appointed only by the King and by
reserving for the monarch the power to veto acts of both Houses.
The Leveller programme, they urge, can strike down this "kingly Power". The
principles of freedom, they insist, must include "a just portion for each man to live so that
none need to beg or steal for want but every man may live comfortably", "a just rule for
each man to go by, which rule is to be the Scriptures", the application of the Golden Rule
in social relationships and the administration of government and law, without charge and
complication, by popularly elected elders. They further demand that a public stock be
created for the maintenance of the poor and that all bishops, forest and Crown lands be
taken over for that purpose. They warn their oppressors, the landlords, that
"the people will no longer be enslaved by you for knowledge of the Lord shall enlighten
them" that "it is not lawful nor fit for some to work and others to play; for it is God's
command that all work, let all eat and if all work alike, is it not fit for all to eat alike and
enjoy alike privileges and freedome?" [1. Light Shining, etc.]
142. According to Winstanley "Human laws and institutions, he had seen, were the
agencies by which the domination of the flesh was secured. The eventual triumph of
Christ, foreshadowed by the suffering of His Saints, would restore to the world the
original unity that the spirit of selfishness had destroyed. But, whereas he had hitherto
described that struggle on the external and social plane in vague generalities, 'Light
Shining, ect', gave him a much more adequate understanding of its nature. The
internal sturggle in each individual is still fundamental for him; but he now realizes
the independent and vital importance of its objectivication in the social conflict. That
conflict, he now appreciates, has a law of development of its own that he proceeds to
examine. It is a measure of the remarkable quality of his mind that he was able, within a
very brief period, to expand the suggestions of 'Light Shining, ect.', into a comprehensive
social philosophy that so completely transferred his interests from man's spiritual
difficulties to his social and economic problems.
'The New Law of Righteousness' [1.'The New Law of Righteousness Budding
forth, in restoring the whole Creation from the bondage of the Curse Or A Glimpse of the
new Heaven, and a New Earth wherein dwels Righteousness Giving an Alarm to silence
all that preach or speak from hear-say or imagination (Jan. 1648)] marks the transition in
Winstanley's development. It is a fascinating blend of the mystical iwth the practical, of
his theological coneptions with th enew social understanding he has achieved. He is still
profoundly concerned with the struggle of the spiritual forces within man; and more than
half the pages of his book are dedicated to an allegorical interpreation of Scriptural
history in those terms. But he is now equally interested in the external manifestations of
that struggle; and for the first time he ventures a detailed description of those phenomena.
He is impelled, at least consciously, not so much by sympathy with the suffering of the
people or an abstract economic argument, as by the conviction that the prevailing social
system has destroyed the natural perfection of the universal scheme. For, man at the time
of his creation was a perfect being; and that perfection was paralleled in the social sphere
by the unity that obtained when everything was owned in common and mankind knew no
division or strife. But that harmonious integration of man was destroyed when selfishness
arose within him. It shattered social unity, for it translated itself into a selfish desire for
the exclusive possession and enjoyment of material things; and from that desire private
property was born.
". . . and this is the beginnign of particular interest, buying and selling the earth from one
particular hand to another saying this is mine, upholding this particular propriety by a law
of government of his own making thereby restraining other fellow creatures from seeking
nourishment from their mother earth." [1. 'The New Law of Righteousness', p. 6]
" "everyone that gets an authority into his hands tyrannizes over others" [2. Ibid., p. 5]
Throughout the book Winstanley discusses in detail the technique by which the
owners of property have maintained their domination. Having taken possession of the
land by force and violence, they erected a system of law and government that secures and
protects their privileges. To aid them in enslaving the people they established a visible
Church that had no divine sanction; and they subjected man to the rule of the priest from
the cradle through the altar to the grave. More outspokenly than anyone else in the
century, Winstanley denounced the leaders of organized religion for the support they had
given to th eoppressors. They told the common man tales of an"
144. " "outward heavenw hich is a fancy your false teachers put into your heads to please
you with while they pick your purses". [1. 'The New Law of Righteousness, p. 97]
As a reuslt of the private ownership of the soil there arose the buying and selling of
land and commodities; and, by making trading the art of thievery, the rich have further
extended their oppression of the poor. If the latter seek redress through law, the Justices
of the Peace apply different standards to the rich and poor. By corrupting the universities,
the ruling classes have made certain that truth will not issue from the houses of learning.
Winstanley is fully aware of all the implications and subtle results of class
division. Private property, he claims, has been the cause of all the misery and strife the
world has ever known:
"self-proprity . . . is the curse and burden the creation groans under". [2. Ibid. p. 61]
By impoverishing people, it inevitably drives them to crime; and hanging for theft has
made death the price of poverty:
". . . this particular propriety of mine and thine hath brought in all miserye upon people.
For, for it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. Secondly, it hath made laws
to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil action and then kils them for
doing of it." [3. Ibid, p. 62]
Their enjoyment of power has bred in the rich the conviction that their domination is part
of the natural order of things.
"The man of the flesh judges it a righteous thing that some men that are clothed with the
objects of the earth and so called rich men whether it be got by right or wrong should be
magistrates to rule over the poor; and that the poor should be servants, nay rather slaves
to the rich." [4. Ibid., p. 34]
There is, Winstanley insists, but one solution to all this--the abolition of the system of
private ownership. He has no allusions that oppression can be ended so long as men own
unequally and some not at all."
145. " ". . . so long as such are rulers as cals the Land theirs, upholding this particular
propriety of mine and thine, the common people shall never have their liberty nor the
land ever freed from troubles, oppressions and complainings". [1. 'The New LAw of
Righteousness', pp. 6-7]
Only if the earth is made a "common treasury" again, he declares, introducing the phrase
that was to re-echo throughout all of his subsequent writings, can the original harmony of
the social order be restored and the misery of mankind be ended. For, if a man
"have meat and drinke and clothes by his labor in freedome and what can he desire more
in earth. Pride and envy likewise is killed thereby for everyone shall look upon each other
as an equal in creation". [2. Ibid. p. 7]
If everyone will be able to satisfy his needs by honest labour, there will be no incentive
to crime; and the necessity for laws, prisons and punishment will utlimately disappear. If
men will share in common the results of their labours, there will be no need for extensive
trading, and "buying and selling" will be eliminated. Ending the system of "mine and
thine" will be eliminated. Ending the system of "mine and thine" will uproot the source
of social strife; for where private ownership divides men, common ownership will unite
them.
He recognizes, however, that the abolition of the existing system will not be a
simple adventure; but he is convinced that there is a law of development in social
institutions that renders its disappearance a certainty:
". . . as everything hath his growth, his raign and end so must this slavery have an end".
[3. Ibid., p. 102]
The instruments through which the system will be abolished are the poorest and most
oppressed strata of society:
"The Father now is rising up a people to himself out of the dust, that is out of the lowest
and most despised sort of people, that are counted the dust of the earth, mankind, that
are trod under-foot. In these and from these shall the Law of Righteousnesse break forth
first." [4. Ibid., p. 42]"
146. "But social change will be strenuously opposed by
". . . covetous, proud, lazy, pamper'd flesh that would have the poor still to work for that
devil (particular interest) to maintaine his greatnesse that he may live at ease". [1. 'The
New Law of Rightourness', p. 56]
But Winstanley insists that the poor must not make violence their avenue to a better
social order:
"Weapons and swords shall destroy and cut the powers of the earth asunder but they shall
never build up" [2. Ibid. p. 37]
Writing immediately before the execution of Charles and at the time of the seizure of
power by the army, he makes no direct reference to the political developments of the day.
But he would seem to be addressing the Army and the Independents when he declares
that
". . . this is not to be done by the hands of a few or by unrighteous men that would pull
the tyrannical government out of other men's hands and keep it in their own heart, as we
feel this to be a burden of our age". [3. Ibid. p. 35]
He sets himself firmly against violence as a method of social reform and death as a form
of punishment:
"I do not speak", he emphasizes, "that any particular man shall go and take their
neighbours goods by violence or robbery . . . but everyone is to wait till the Lord Christ
spread himself in multiplicities of bodies making them all of one heart and minde acting
in righteousnesse one to another." [Ibid, p. 38]
He constantly returns to the theme that had been the burdenof his earlier writings, that
men can do nothing but wait with a meek and quiet spirit for the coming of Christ; but
he has moved to a realization of the necessity of anticipating that revelation with positive
action:
"You dust of the earth that are trod underfoot," he earnestly appeals to the
oppressed, "you poor people that makes both schollars and rich men your oppressours by
your labours, take notice of your priviledge." [5. Ibid. 53]"
147. "The rich, of course, will refuse to surrender their property. But the propertyless can
begin to effect their own freedom by refusing to work for their masters. It is no less a
crime to maintain the domination of man by man by working for another than by directly
exploiting one's fellows; and in a land, Winstanley argues, where less than one-third of
the total area is under cultiv ation there is no need for anyone to starve or to work for his
oppressors. IF the rich insist on saying "this land is mine", they must work it with their
own hands. No man, he asserts in anticipation of Locke, can claim more land than he
can labour with his own hands "neither giving nor taking hire".The propertyless must
therefore begin to free the world by working and producing together on the common
lands and sharing the results. The rich may claim as their own possessions the estates
on which they dwell. But the common lands and the heaths ar eundeniably the common
property of the poor. The latter should begin to make the earth a common treasury and to
teach mankind by example by establishing that community on their own lands.
All this, Winstanley affirms, has come to him through a Divine Revelation.
While he was in a trance, texts darted at him from the sky:
"Likewise I heard these words 'Worke together, Eat bread together, declare all this
abroad'. Likewise I heard these words. '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 the labourer. I the Lord have spoke it and I will do it. Declare this all
abroad:' "[1. 'The New Law of Righteousness', p. 48]
We have already indicated the possible role that 'Light Shining in Buckinghamshire' may
have played in inducing the trance which gave Winstanley his inspiration. He is prepared,
he announces, to move from theory to practice, to become priest instead of prophet as
soon as God will give him his instructions:
"I have now obeyed the command of the Spirit that bid me declare all this abroad, I have
delivered it and I will deliver it by word of mouth, I have now declared it by my pen.
And when the Lord doth shew uton me the place and manner how he will have us that are
called common people to manure and work upon the Common lands, I will then go forth
and declare it in my actions." [1. The New Law of Righteousness, pp. 54-54]
148. "Fortunately, the Lord, in a very convenient revelation was soon to indicate St.
George's Hill, a few miles from Winstanley's home, as the site for beginning of the
Digger experiment.
Thus, within a period of six or seven months Winstanley had traversed a path
that led from a chiliastic mysticism through a progressive rationalism to a practical
communism. Only on one subsequent occasion did he again cast his ideas wholly in a
theological moud; and that tract seems to have been writen during a period of profound
disappointment at the failure of his practical venture. [2. 'Fire in the Bush, The Spirit
Burning, not consuming but purging mankinde' (1650)]
We have indicated in an earlier chapter that Winstanley began to write at a time
when, as a result of the failure of political effort, there was an increasing tendency to turn
from politics to a mystical theology, to reverse the process of the early years of the war
by translating political aspirations into theological and spiritual terms and to invoke the
assistance of the Almighty to achieve those social reforms that political agitation had
failed to secure. Winstanley's earlier tracts were a manifestation of that tendency. He had
already recognized the Civil War as a struggle for supremacy between opposing forces.
He saw from the fact that there was a continual and determined effort to suppress and
exploit the poor that the conflict was definitely one between social groups. Ecclesiastical
authority, political institutions, the judiciary, law, were the weapons of the wealthy in the
war they were waging. In the poor who were demanding no more than the right to live
like human being and to worship God freely, he recognized the only people who were
animated not by a selfish desire for power and privilege, but by a spirit of justice and
righteousness. The fury of persecution, as a result, was being directed against them and
those who sought to act as their spokesmen."
149. "We should note at this point, however, that there had been throughout the entire
decade a continuous demand for "common property". It is, to be sure, a demand of
whose existence we know largely through the fulminations of its oppenents rather than
through any explicit formulation by its advocates. But the volume of opposition that
was expressed to any scheme of common ownership leaves no room for doubt that the
suggestion achieved considerable popularity. The demand for some sort of community
of goods is conspicuous in all the popular movements of the mediaeval periods.[1. See
Kautsky, op. cit; Box, op. cit; Engels, op. cit.]"
150. "We have already noted that during the early years of the Civil War the sects were
feared and denounced because "they would have all things in common", [1. 'Supra',
Chapter 2, pp. 91-3] Edwards, writing in 1646, catalogues as one of the errors of the sects
their assertion
"that all the Earth is the Saints and there ought to be a community of goods and the
Saints should share in the Lands and Estates of the Gentlemen and Rich Men". [2.
Edwards, 'Gangraena' (1646), Part 1. p. 34]
The movement for some form of communism seems to have grown rapidly after 1646.
The Congregational Societies of London, for example, were forced to deny in a lengthy
and reasoned statement that they
"intended to throwe down those hedges that are set about men's estates and to lay both
one and the other common". [3. 'A Declaration of the congregationall Societies in and
about the City of London as well as of those commonly called Anabaptists as others.
In way vindication of themselves Touching: 1. Liberty. 2. MAgistracy. 3. Propriety. 4.
Polygamie (Nov. 1647), E. 416 (20)]
The Levellers' persistent affirmation of their loyalty to the principle of private property
was required as an answer both to those who repeatedly accused them of seeking to "level
all estates" and to those in their own ranks who were applying the principles of natural
equality to the economic as well as the political sphere. [4. 'Supra', Chap. 2, pp. 150-3]
The denial of men like John Cooke and Henry Parker that they favour the principle of
common ownership betrays an anxiety to dissociate themselves from a current of opinion
that must have become increasingly prominent. [5. John Cooke, 'Unum Necessarium or
the Poor Man's Case (Jan. 1648), E. 425 (1); Henry Parker, 'Of a Free Trade' (1648) E.
425 (18).] There were, too, from the very beginning of the war, serious and constant riots
in all parts of the country against enclosures and the frequent destruction of fences and
hedges.
But in none of these manifestations did communism achieve the status of a social
doctrine. With the rioting peasants, it is the spontaneous expression of their anger with
thosewho had enclosed their lands and an attempt to regain what had been taken from
them. The communism of the mediaeval movements and of most of the sects of the
Interregnum is generally a vague and mystical affair, and, at best, a general demand for a
common and equal division of the social product rather than for a system of common
production. In no instance does it derive from a reasoned examination of social and
historical forces."
151. "With Winstanley, however, the demand for common ownership was rooted as early
as January 1649 in a comprehensive social philosophy that became th ebasis of a political
programme. It emerged as the result of a reasoned analysis of the role of private property
in history and of the results of social division. Unlike the mediaval varieties, it proposed
communism not only in distribution, but in production as well.
Several aspects of Winstanley's position of January 1649 must be noted. He still
retains his conviction that only God can achieve the final redemption of mankind; but,
unlike his earlier insistence, he urges that man himself must begin that process through
direct action by the propertyless classes. Where in the summer of 1648 he had conceived
human freedom as a form of asceticism, as essentially an escape from the necessity for
material things, he now regards it, on the contrary, as a function of the guarantee to every
individual of an adequate minimum of material comfort. He is not concerned with the
forms of political organization; for he realizes that institutions and laws are simply the
expression of the economic relationships they reflect and by which they are limited.
Nowhere in the writings we have thus far examined is there any extended discussion of
political forms or constitutional mechanisms. In fact, his social analysis has not been at
all applied to the development of English history; and the argument or illustration from
the Norman Conqust has yet to appear in his pages.
But we must at the same time recognize the limitations of the position he has
achieved in 'The New Law of Righteousness'. The ultimate causes of social change, he
still maintains, are to be found in the minds and hearts of men, though he has vaguely
sensed that human nature may, after all, not be an eternal and fundamental phenomenon,
but simply the way human behaviour expresses itself under particular social conditions.
His communism is conceived not as the product of an inevitable historical development,
but as the recognition of a basic principle of justice and morality. Common ownership is
for him, as yet, not dictated by any political or economic argument; and there is no
attempt to discuss the economic advantages such a system might confer. It is to him,
above all else, a method of restoring the original and natural perfectibility of Creation
that had been destroyed by the introduction of private property.
We shall examine in subsequent chapters the degree to which his position of
January 1649 was modified and his outlook broadened by his practical experiences of the
ensuing year."
CHAPTER FOUR: THE DIGGER MOVEMENT
"My mind was not at rest because nothing was acted, and thoughts ran in me that words
and writings were all nothing and must die, For action is the life of all and if thou dost not
act, dou dost nothing." - Winstanley, 'A Watchword to the City of London and the Armie'
(1649).
153. "With Pride's Purge, England entered on ap eriod of military dictatorship. John
Goodwin's defence of the army's action was eloquent and persuasive; but it could not
mask the fac tthat the Government rested on the power of the sword rather than on the
will of the people. [1. The average attendance at Parliamentary divisions, for example,
during the first three months after the establishment of the Commonwealth was fifty-six
(Gardiner, 'Commonwealth', Vol. I, p. 9)] His argument that
". . . the cals of the miseries and extremities of men for reliefe are more authorizing, more
urging, pressing and binding upon the consciences of men who have wherewithall to
afford reliefe unto them, then the formall requests or elections of men to places of trust or
interest when the electors have no such present or pressing necessity upon them for the
interposall of the elected on their behalfe. The necessities of men call more effectually
than men themselves". [2. John Goodwin, 'Right and Might Well Met' (Jan. 2, 1649) E.
536 (28)]
could be urged with equal validity against the Commonwealth as against the Presbyterian
Parliament the army had purged.
During the entire year the country seethed with discontent. Economic conditions
were growing steadily worse. The disastrous harvest of 1648 caused an acute scarcity of
commodities, and prices rose to famine levels.[3. Thorold Rogers, 'History of Agriculture
and Prices' (1887), V. 825]
"Never was there in England so many in want of relief as now". [4. 'The Humble
Petition of Divers Inhabitants of the City of London and Places Adjacent in the behalfe of
the Poore of this Nation' (March 10, 1649), E. 546 (15).] the inhabitants of London
complained in March on behalf of the poor of the country."
154. "Civilian disturance was continuous during the year, particularly in the North, the
Midlands and the West. The Royalists, attempting to rally their forces, were intriguing,
organizing, arming in many parts of the country. At home they were exploring the
possibility of an alliance with the Levellers; abroad they were feverishly negotiating
for foreign assistance and intervention. The City, alarmed by the revolutionary purge
of Parliament, maintained an attitutde of active opposition, at best, of cold indifference,
to the Commonwealth during the first few months of its existence. The Levellers,
seriously weakened by the months of political truce and by the firm control Cromwell
had established over the army, returned to the fray with a series of vigorous and powerful
pamphlets denouncing the Commonwealth as a military dictatorship no less arbitrary than
the regime of the King or the Presbyterians had been. Tyranny had altered its vestments;
its body remained substaintially the same. Monarchy, it was claimed a few weeks after
the execution of the King,
"had lost its name but not its nature, its form but not its power, they making themselves
as absolute as ever the King in his reign, dignity and supremacy." [1. 'A Rout, A Rout or
some part of the Armies Quarters Beaten Up By the Day of the Lord stealing upon Them'
(Feb. 10, 1649), E. 542 (5)]
About the middle of February the Levellers began urging the soldiers to demand the
reappointment of the Agitators and the re-establishment of the General Council of the
Army. The reply of the Council of State was effectively to abrogate the soldiers' freedom
of petitioning by decreeing that all petitions from the ranks had to be submitted through
the officers and to prohibit any private meetings of officers or soldiers. Several soldiers
who protested against the Council's behaviour were cashiered from the army; in their
subsequent attack on Cromwell and Ireton they produced one of the most remarkable
tracts of the entire period. [2. 'The Hunting of the Foxes from New-Market and Triploe-
Heaths to Whitehall by Five Samll Beagles'. By Robt. Ward, Thos. Watson, Simon
Graunt, George Jellis, William Sawyer (March 1649), E. 548 (7).]
"We were before ruled by King, Lords, and Commons, now by a General, a Court Martial
and House of Commons; we pray you what is the difference? . . . The old King's person
and the old Lords are now removed and a new King and new Lords with the commons
are in one House; and so under a more absolute Arbitrary Monarchy than before. We
have notthe change of a Kingdome to a Commonwealth; we are onely under the old
cheat, the transmutation of names but with the addition of New tyranies to the old . . .
and the last state of this Commonwealth is worse than the first." [1. 'The Hunting of the
Foxes', p. 14]"
155. "Similar charges were elaborated by Lilburne in a number of tracts. In 'England's
New Chaines Discovered' [2. Feb. 26, 1649, E. 545 (27).] and in 'The Second Part of
England's New Chaines Discovered, [3. March 24, 1649, E. 548 (16).] he does not
challenge the legality of the Rump; but he insists that it is being coerced by the officers
and appeals to it to free itself from that coercion. For publishing the latter tract, Lilburne,
Overton, Walwyn and Prince were arrested on March 26 and confined to the Tower.
Their imprisonment again aroused a tremendous agitation for their release; the petition of
April 2, alone, is said to have borne over 80,000 signatures.
Among the many pamphlets that appeared during those months we should not
the second publication of the authors of 'Light Shining in Buckinhamshire', who
influence on Winstanley we have already discussed. The argument of 'More Light
Shining in Buckinhamshire'[4. March 1649, E. 548 (33)] is substantially that of the
earlier tract; but it repeats with greater emphasis the insistence that no one can claim
anything but that which he has produced by his own labour.
"None is our bread but what we work for . . . therefore those that work not have no right
to eat." [4. March 1649, E. 548 (33).]
It again demands freedom of speech, equality of rights and privileges, the abolition of
patents, corporations and monopoly grants, the adjudication of controversies and the
administration of law by popularly elected elders, the removal of enclosures and the
prohibition of "buying and selling". "Above all", it pleads, "look to the poor". It rejects
the Agreement of the People that had been suggested by Ireton and the Officers because
it is"
156. " ". . . too low and too shallow to free us for it doth not throw down all these
arbitrary courts, Patents and powers as aforesaid; and what stock or way is provided
for the poor, fatherless, widows, and impoverished people? And what advancement
or encouragement for the laboring and industrious as to take off burthens is there?"
[1. 'More Light, ect., op. cit.]
Dissatisfaction and unrest were again spreading rapidly in the army. During February
and March the Council of State revived the plan of an invasion of Ireland that had always
obsessed so many of its members. The invasion attracted the Council not merely because
it would prevent the use of Ireland by th eRoyalists as a base of operations against
England, but because of the prospect of plunder the Commonwealth so desperately
required and for the diversion it was hoped foreign adventure would provide. Cromwell,
after waiting for several weeks for his instructions from the Lord--weeks during which,
no doubt, he was able to evaluate the domestic situation more accurately--accepted the
leadership of the Irish campaign. But the troops chosen for the venture failed to share
the enthusiasm of their leaders. None of the outstanding demands of the soldiers had as
yet been met; payment was still considerably in arrears. Those soldiers who indicated
their refusal to serve in Ireland were dismissed from the army in April without payment.
Open mutiny broke out in Colonel Whalley's regiment, as a result of which six men were
sentenced to death. The lot for execution fell on Lockyer, a young, popular and able
veteran of the war. His execution on April 27 aroused tremendous indignation throughout
the army; and his funeral on the 29th witnessed a vast popular demonstration of sympathy
with the Levellers and the soldiers.
With the execution of Lockyer, revolutionary ferment developed rapidly.
Opposition to the Irish venture and grievances over pay were more outspokenly and
vehemently expressed. The practice of court-martialling protesting soldiers, of dismissing
them without sufficient remuneration and the denial to the soldiers of the elementary
rights and liberties for which they had fought intensified their conviction that unless the
military dictatorship were overthrown England would be permanently enslaved to the
arbitrary will of the officers."
157. " "Our undoubted Liberties never more encroached upon by the Military power
and Law-Martial", protested several soldiers in petitioning for a reprieve of Lockyer's
sentence, "Soldiers and others of late being frequently seized, restrained and adjudged to
death, and reproachful punishments wihtout any regard to the LAw of the Land or tryall
by twelve sworn men of the Neighborhood; as is manifest in your present procoeedings
against those soldiers and others now under restraint and censure of the Council of
War."[1. 'The Army's Martyr' (April 1649)]
In their petition they were clearly reflecting the mood of no inconsiderable section of the
army.
From the Tower, Lilburne and his associates continued their agitation. In a letter
to Fairfax they condemned Lockyer's execution as an act of murder; for
". . . it is by law fully proved that it is both treason and murder for any general of the
Council of War to execute any soldier in time of peace by martial law". [2. The Copie of
a LEtter Written to the General by Lt-Col. J. Lilburne and Mr. Richard Overton' (April
27, 1649), 669, f. 14 (23).]
On May 1 they issued a new version of 'The Agreement of the People', a version, let it be
noted, in which future Parliaments were again forbidden "to level men's estates, destroy
propriety or make all things common".
When Cromwell reviewed the troops in Hyde Park on May 9 most of the soldiers
were sporting the sea-green emblem of the Levellers. In a conciliatory speech he
promised to put the Agreement of the People into effect and to settle all grievances
arising out of arrears of pay. Meanwhile serious mutiny had developed in the army.
William Thompson was leadin several hundreds of Colonel Whalley's regiment in mutiny
at Banbury. in their manifesto, 'England's Standard Advanced', [3. May 6, 1649]
Thompson demanded the implementation of the Agreement, satisfaction for the murder
of Lockyer and the release of the Leveller leaders. They were joined by most of
Scroope's and Ireton's regiments, who were in revolt at Salisbury; and Harrison's and
Skippon's regiments mutinied in Buckinghamshire. Scroope's and Ireton's men asserted
in their Declaration that they were driven to revolt against the officers and Council of
War because of"
158. "the sad and wofull experience of the present proceedings of the Officers and divers
Regiments of the Army against the Souldiery, in depriving us of our Native Liberties,
casting lots upon our persons and thereby designing us for the Irish Services without our
consent or knowledge, which we beleeve no Age can parallel and after the designation
to force us (contrary to English Right) by unequall terms for the said Service, so as if
we should deny, to be presently cashiered from the Army, with little or no pay at all in
hand, whereby we must either be forced to beg, steal or starve. . . . Wherefore we are
now resolved no longer to dally with our God but with our endeavours to pursue what
we have before promised in order to the settling of this poor Nation, and the restitution
of our shaking Freedom, and redeeming ourselves out of the hands of Tyrants; for
which cause (the safty of the Nation and the restitution of our shaking Freedom, and
redeeming ourselves out of the hands of tyrants; for which cause (the safty of the Nation
involved together with our own) hath forced us to deny obedience to such Tyrannical
Officers whose unsufferable proceedings tend manifestly to the obstructing of our Peace,
thehindrances of the Relief of Ireland, the re-inslaving of the consuming Nation. . . ."
[1. 'The Unanimous Declaration of Colonel Scroop's and Commissary Gen. Ireton's
Regiments at a Rendezvous at Old Sarum' (May 11, 1649), E. 555 (4).]
Writing in defence of their action some months later, a number of the soldiers who had
revolted declared that they had no alternative to mutiny when they saw
". . . the whole fabrick of the Common wealth faln into the grossest and vilest tyranny
that ever English men groaned under; all their Laws, Rights, Liberties and Properties
wholly subdued (under the viziard and form of that Engagement) to the boundless wills
of some deceitfull persons, having devolved the whole Magistracy of England into their
MartialDomination, ruling the people with a Rod of Iron as most mens wofull experience
can clearly witness". [2. 'The Levellers (falsely so called) Vindicated' (Aug. 21), E. 571
(11).]
Cromwell and Fairfax, aware that, in the state of distress the country was experiencing
and that because of the general dissatisfaction and unrest in the army, the revolt might
easily assume nation-wide proportions, marched at once to Oxford with picked men
to prevent the garrison at Banbury from effecting contact with the Buckinghamshire
regiments. On the 12th the Agents for Ireton and Scroope's regiments sent a letter to
Fairfax declaring"
159. "All we require is the performance of our Engagement made at Triplo Heath, and
we shall prmise never to depart from you Excellencies Command in any thing which
shall not be contrary to the said Engagement."[1. 'A Full Narrative of All the Proceeding
betweene His Excellency the Lord Fairfax and the Mutineers' (May 1649), E. 555 (27).
In the ensuring interchange of letters the troops in revolt urged Fairfax to restore a
measure of democratic discipline in the army by the re-establishment of the General
Council of the Army.
"This we beg earnestly of your Excellency to grant in respect of your duty to God, this
Nation and the Army," they wrote, "that we may thereby recover our Peace and procure
the happinesse of this Nation. This is the desire of our soules, i fyou deny this we must
lay at your doore all the misery, bloodshed, and ruine which will follow." [1.]
Their appeal was unanswered. On May 14 the Army Levellers, betrayed, as they later
claimed, by some of their own comrades, were suprised at Burford and, after a spirited
fight, they were overwhelmed and defeated. With the defeat at Burford, the army revolt
collapsed.
On the day the Levellers were being crushed at Burford, the Council of State was
issuing an act declaring it a treasonable offence for anyone to asser tthat the Government
were
". . . tyrannical, usurped or unlawfull; or that the Commons in Parliament assembled are
not the Supreme Authority of this Nation; or shall plot, contrive or endeavour to stir up
or raise force against the present government or for the subversion or alteration of the
same . . . or shall attempt to stir up mutiny in the army." [2. Firth and Rait, Vol. II, p. 120
(May 14, 1649)]
160. "The rule of force was being sanctioned by the formality of law.
On their return from Burford, Cromwell and Fairfax were honoured with degrees
at Oxford for the distinguished service they were deemed to have rendered the State by
their suppression of the Leveller revolt. A few weeks later the City merchants and
financiers, recognizing that Cromwell was not the dangerous revoluntionary they had
feared, but, like themselves, a solid and conservative man of property who would brook
no threat to its security, made their peace with the new regime. The deat of the mutiny
and the new accord between the City and the Government were celebrated by a banquet
in the City on June 7. [1. It is extremely interesting to note that in the Prayer specially
composed for the occasion was included the Biblical injunction, "Cursed be he that
removeth the mark of his neighbour's land." 'A Form of Prayer to be used for both the
days of Public Thanksgiving fo the Seasonable and happy reducing of the Levellers'
(June 6, 1649), E. 558 (22).] The following day the City, in toke of its gratitude,
presented Fairfax with a basin and ewer of gold and Cromwell with plate valued at P300
and 200 pieces of gold. By crushing the Leveller revolt, Cromwell had removed the most
serious threat to his dictatorship; by offering such unanswerable proof of his
conservatism, he regained the support of the City merchants.
If the army mutiny had failed, civilian a gitation continued unabated. It had been
reported at the time of the Burfod encounter that 1500 Somersetshire Clubmen were
marching to the support of the Levellers.[2. 'Mercurius Philo-Monarchieus' (May 14-21,
1649), E. 555 (34)] There were riots in many parts of the country. In the summer there
was a particularly serious rising of the Derbyshire miners, dissatisfied with their
conditions of labour. In September the Levellers began to urge direct economic measures
against the Government. In the same month the garrison at Oxford rose in mutiny.
Throughout, the Royalists continued to intrigue for an alliance with the Levellers; the
latter, defeated on all fronts, began to give the suggestion serious consideration.
It is against this background of military dictatorship, of econmic distress, of
Royalist intrigue, of civilian revolt, of Leveller agitation and of army mutiny that we
must set the beginnings of the Digger experiment in practical communism in April 1649.
After the publication of 'The New Law of Righteousness', Winstanley awaited a
revelation from the Lord as to the point from which to begin to make the earth "a
common treasury". Two months later he had evidently been vouchsafed that divine
guidance; for on April 1, Everard, Winstanley and several of their companions appeared
at St. George's Hill, in the Parish of Walton-onThames in Surrey, began to dig the waste-
land and to plant some vegetables. The following day their number had been augmented;
and for a few weeks they continued their work of digging and planting. Although they do
not seem to have numbered more than thirty or forty persons during those weeks, they
confidently asserted that they would shortly be joined by 5000 of their fellows. They
extended a general invitation to the people of the district to join with them, promising
that everyone would share equally in their venture. From the very outset, however, they
encountered the violent opposition of the local populace. Writing some eight months
afterwards, Winstanley relates that during the first weeks of the St. George's Hill colony,
the Diggers were attacked by a mob of over 100 people, who burned a house they had
erected, carried off and destroyed their tools and forcibly dragged several of the Diggers
to Walton Church, where they were struc and molested before being released by a
Kingston justice.
News of the little communist group must have spread rapidly; for on April 14 the
Leveller leaders, in a manifesto issued to counter accusations that had been made against
them, were primarily concerned to deny that "we would level all men's estates". They
make no mention of the Diggers; but the length at which they elaborated their opposition
to common ownership leaves little doubt that they were already being publicly associated
with the little band of Diggers in Surrey. They insist that they would never agree to any
form of communism unless it had been unanimously sanctioned by the people, and that it
was beyond the competence of any representative body to abolish private property.
Primitive Christian communism, they assert, was purely voluntary; at best, it was a very
limited and temporary affair."
162. "
"We profess, therefore," they declare, "that we never had it in our thoughts to level men's
esates, it being the utmost of our aim that the Commonwealth be reduced to such a pass
that every man with as much security as may be enjoy his propriety." [1. 'A Manifestation
from Lilburne, Prince, Overton and Walwyn' (April 14, 1649) E. 550 (25). In June,
however, Lilburne specifically repudiaed "the erronious tenets of the poor Diggers
at George Hill in Surrey and laid down in their late two avowed books called 'The
True Levellers Stand and The New Law of Righteousnesse'"-'The Legal Fundamental
Liberties, E. 560 (14).]
Despite the hostility of the local populace, the Diggers continued with their sowing
and planting. On April 16 their persistence brought them to the attention of the Council
of State. On that date the Council was informed of their activities by Henry Sanders
of Walton. [2. Clarke Papers, Vol. 2, p. 210] The Council promptly forwarded the
information to Fairfax, suggesting that he take immediate action for
". . . although the pretence of their being there by them avowed may seeme very
ridiculous yett that conflux of people may bee a beginning whence things of a greater and
more dangerous consequence may grow to a disturbance of the peace and quiett of the
Commonwealth." [2.]
The Justices of the Peace for Surrey were similarly instructed
". . . to send for the contrivers or promoters of those riotous meetings and to proceed
against them" [3. CSP, Dom. 1649-50, April 16, 1649, p. 95]
Two troops of horse were despatched to Kingston to investigate what was occurring.
Captain Gladman, reporting the results of his investigation to Fairfax three day later,
wrote that Winstanley and Everard had agreed to come to London to explain their action
in person to the General. Gladman himself planned to visit them at St. George's Hill "to
persuade those people to leave off th semployment".
"Indeed," his report concluded, "the business is not worth the writing nor yet taking notiss
of; I wonder the Council of State should be so abused with informations." [4. Clarke
Papers, Vol. 2, p. 212]"
163. "
On Friday, April 20, Everard and Winstanley appeared before Fairfax in London.
Insisting that they could recognize no distinctions of rank, they refused to remove their
hats in the presence of the General. [1. In 1647 Saltmarsh had similarly retained his hat
in the presence of Fairfax--'Dictionary of National Biography. Article on "Saltmarsh",
by Rev. Alexander Gordon] Everard, in a speech to Fairfax, declared that, since the
Conquest, England had lived under tyranny more ruthless than the Israelites had
experienced under Pharaoh. But God had revealed to the poor that their deliverance was
at hand and that He would soon restore to them their freedom to enjoy the fruits of the
earth. In a vision, Everard had been commanded to "arise and dig and plant the earth and
receive the fruits thereof". He assured Fairfax that he and his fellows did not intend either
to interfere with private property or to destroy enclosures, but that they were merely
claiming the commons which were the rightful possession of the poor. They intended to
cultivate the waste-lands in common and to provide sustenance for the distressed. They
hoped that the poor throughout the country would follow their example; they, themselves,
intended to extend their activities to Newmarket, Hounslow and Hampstead Heath. They
were certain that ere long all men would voluntarily cede their property and join with
them in "community". In no circumstances, not even in self-defence, Everard declared,
would the Diggers resort to the use of force. [2. 'The Declaration and Standard of the
Dwellers of England', E. 551 (11). See also 'A Modest Narrative of Intelligence' (April
14-21), E. 551 (11).] At the same time they issued a manifesto to the country setting forth
a reasoned statement and elaboration of their social programme. [3. 'The True Levellers
Standard Advanced or the State of Community opened and presented to the Sons of Men',
E. 552 (5)]. Everard's name heads the ist of signatories. The preface is dated April 20.
Thomason reived his copy on April 26. In the Thomason Catalogue the date is incorrectly
given as 1650.]
With their notice by the Council of State and the appearance of their leaders
before Fairfax, the Diggers enjoyed the spotlight of national attention for a brief period.
Most of the news-sheets of the last weeks of April note their activities; and it is
interesting to observe the reception they were accorded by the various journals. Some,
like 'A Perfect Diurnall', contented themselves with brief and factual accounts of the
information that had reached the Council and the interview with Fairfax. [4. 'A Perfect
Diurnall' (April 16-23), E. 529 (18), notices on April 18 and 20.] Others, reporting the
affair, dismissed it as the work of a few madmen; Everard, particularly, is described by
most papers as "a mad prophet"."
164. "They are a distracted crack-brained people that were the chief." [1. 'A Perfect
Summary of an Exact Diary of some Passages of Parliament' (April 16-23), E. 529 (19).]
'The Kingdome's Faithfull and Impartiall Scout' printed a cynical account:
"The new-fangled people that begin to dig on St. George's Hill in Surrey say they
are like Adam, they expect a generall restauration of the Earth to its first condition,
that themselves were called to seek and begin this great work which will shortly go
on throughout the whole Earth; (one of them getting up a great burden of thorns and
briars thrust them into the pulpit of the Church at Walton to stop out the Parson). They
professe a great deal of mildness and would have the world believe they have dreamed
dreams, seen visions, heard strange voices and have dictates beyond man's teaching.
They professe they will not fight knowing that not be good for them." [2. April 20-
27, E. 529 (22). In its report of an incident at St. George's on April 23, the paper refers
to the "party of Diggers". This seems to be the first occasion on which the group was
designated by that name. During the first few weeks they generally referred to themselves
as "True Levellers", though Winstanley subsequently adopted the term "Diggers". The
name appears during the enclosure riots of 1607 in a manifesto issued by "The Diggers
of Warwickshire to all other Diggers", protesting the tyranny of the landlords. The
manifesto is printed in full in 'The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom', edited for the New
Shakespeare Society by James Halliwell (1846), p. 140, sect. 15. My attention was first
drawn to this fact by R. H. Tawney, 'The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century'
(1912)]
'Mercurius Pragmaticus' was sarcastic and abusive in its report:
"Our sugamores this evening consulted how they might take our great prophet Everet
sometime a champion unto their holy cause who for his perserverance in iniquity
pretends to be rewarded with the gift of lunacy instead of Revelation. He and some 30
of his disciples intended to have converted Catland Park into a wilderness and preach
liberty to the oppressed deer; they have gun to plan their colony with hermits' fare,
parsnips, beans, and such other castigatue nourishment; but nevertheless they intend in
pure zeal to increase and multiply, if any of the sisterhood but once resolve to reliquish
the pomps and vanities of this wicked world and kennel with themin their caves which
(in the imitation of the seven sleepers) they have dug good store of and like meek saints
intend to inherit under the earth all the privileges of darkness, that their revelations may
be freelier inspired in dreams from below; they are insolent in their frenzy and theaten
the countrymen'scattle,they intend to plough and have pulled down the barricdes of
tyrannous prerogative, the Park-pale". [1. April 17-24, E. 551 (12)]"
165. "But the writer adds a note of warning.
"What this fanaticall insurrection may grow into cannot be conceived for Mahomet
had as smell and despicable a beginning whose damnable infections have spread
themselves many hundres years since over the face of half the Universe." [2. 'Mercurius
Pragmaticus', op. cit.]
'The Moderate Intelligencer', in similar vein, lightly regards the incident as the result of
the hallucinations of a few individuals
". . . wanting reason and parts to beare them up and keep them". [3. April 19-26, E. 552
(4).]
Generally, writers confused the Diggers with the Levellers and regarded them merely
as offshoots of the latter group. [4. e.g. 'A Modest Narrative of Intelligence' (April 21-
28), E. 552 (7); (April 28-May 5) E. 553 (1). "You see how contradictions are necessary
to State Disturbers. Lately the four Fathers of the People told us they were not against
propriety, ect. But their children now tell us in their Declaration ect. that particular
propriety is cursed Devil" (June 2-9), E. 559 (5).] The identification of the Diggers with
the Levellers displeased the Royalists; for th elatter, regarding the Levellers as potential
and valuable allies in the struggle against Cromwell, were anxious that the popular
appeal of the Levellers should not be impaired by the taint of communism. Thus, the
Royalist journal 'Mercurius Pragmaticus' (for Charles II) protested the attempt to bring
the Levellers into disrepute. After referring to the petiton to free Lilburne, it writes:"
166. " ". . . and men truly understood what they are which we call Levellers; not that they
aim at the Levelling of men's estates but at the new state tyranny; and therefore it is that
the merciful Hoghen Mogens of Derby House having nigh starved the Kingdom and a
few poor people making bold with a little waste ground in Surrey to sow a few turnips
and carrots to sustain their families, they wrest this act to the disrepute of the Levellers as
if they meant to make all common; and to make a large business of it, their pamphleteers
proclaim it about the Kingdom and divers troops of Janisaries were sent prancing into
Surrey to make a conquest over those feeble souls and empty bellies. But that you may
not be scared with the Levellers hereafter I tell you they are such as stand for an equal
interest in freedom against the present tyranny and are so much the more tolerable in
that a little experience will teach them that a just monarch is the best guardian of public
liberty; besides the passage is very quick and easy from a popular government to well-
regulated monarchy." [1. April 17-24, E. 551 (15)]
The article drew a sharp retort from 'Mercurius Britannicus', who took 'Pragmaticu' to
task for tis tolerant references to the Levellers. In turn, 'Britanicus' accused the Royalists
of having instigated the Digger venture in order to increase the general confusion and
unrest so that the Royalists might have the opportunity of seizingpower. [2. April 24-May
5, E. 552 (27)]
Several days after the interview with Fairfax, the Diggers were driven off St. George's
Hill by the local populace. [3. 'A Perfect Summary of an Exact Diarie of Some Passages
of Parliament' (April 23-30), E. 529 (34). April 26: "The new plantation at St. George's
Hill in Surrey is quite relevelled and their new creation utterly destroyed and by the
country people thereabouts they are driven away--and as seekers, gone a-seeking."
Similar accounts appear in 'A Perfect Diurnal' (April 23-30), E. 559 (26); 'The Impartiall
Intelligencer' (April 25-May 2), E. 529 (28); 'Continued Heads of Perfect Passages in
Parliament' (April 27-May 4), E. 529 (30).] A few days later, however, they returned to
the Hill, determined to resume their work.
During May, Everard seems to have severed his connection with the little band
of Diggers."
167. "At the outset, he had generally been regarded as the practical leader of the group.
Impetuous and aggressive, he had attracted public attention much more readily than
the mild Winstanley; in the interview with Fairfax he had spoken in the name of the
Diggers; his name had headed the list of signatories to the first Digger manifesto, 'The
True Levellers Standard Advanced'. [1. The pamphlet, however, is unmistakably from
the pen of Winstanley.] After its publication, however, he no longer figures in any
Digger activities; his name is missing from the second manifesto issued in May. Some
newspapers reported that he had joined the Levellers in their revolt at Burford.
"One of the chiefest ring leaders deputed by John Lilburne", wrote 'Mercurius
Brittanicus', "is Evers (i.e., Everard) who was not long since sowing carrots and turnips in
the waste grounds in Surrey." [2. May 8-15, E. 555 (15)]
"Mr. Everard, the quandum digger with his company", reported another
journal, "being molested in their new plantation have thrown aside the spade and taken
up the sword and tis said he commands 4 or 5 hundred horse." [3. 'The Kingdomes
Faithfull and Impartiall Scout' (May 4-11), E. 530 (2).]
The report of his presence at Burford, however, was probably due to his confusion with
Captain Robert Everard, a leading Leveller, and the "Buff-Coat" of the Putney Debates,
who actively participated in the mutiny. [4. !!!]"
168. "The notoriety Everard the Digger was enjoying at the moment was probably
responsible for his confusion with the Leveller captain.
Despite the optimistic predictions of the Diggers that they would shortly be
joined by several thousand of their fellow poor, there is little evidence that the example
of the St. George's Hill pioneers was emulated elsewhere during the early months of the
attempt; and the immediate impact of the Diggers seems to have been negligible in its
effects. During the summer and autumn of 1649, the Levellers held the centre of popular
attention; and radical minds were almost exclusively concerned with the fate of the
imprisoned leaders and the progress of the army mutiny. From their Levellers friends in
Buckinghamshire, however, the Diggers received a message of encouragement and
sympathy. In a declaration emobdying many Digger and Leveller arguments, the "middle
sort of men" of Buckinghamshire asserted that they had been waiting for eight years for
relief from arbitrary oppression.
"We shall help to aid and assist the poor", they declare, "to the regaining all their
rights, dues, ect. that do belong unto them and are detained from them by any tyranny
whatsoever. . . . And likewise will further and help said poor to manure, dig, ect. the
said commons and to sell those woods growing theron to help them to a stock ect. All
wel-affected persons that join in community in God's way as those Acts 2 and desire to
manure, dig and plant in the waste grounds and commons shall not be trouled or molested
by any of us but rather furthered therein." [1. 'A Declaration of the Wel-Affected in the
County of Buckinhamshire. . .' (May 10), E. 555 (1).]
The central authorities, worried by the army revolt and Leveller and Royalist agitation,
seem to have taken no further notice of the Diggers for a time; for Fairfax had evidently
satisfied himself that they were a group of harmless pacificsts."
169. "He me them again on May 29, when he passed by St. George's Hill on his way
to London. Finding a dozen people at work on the common, he stopped "to give them
a short speech by way of admonition". Winstanley in his reply to the General again
asserted the claim of the poor to the common land and reassured Fairfax that the Diggers
intended no resort to force. The incident was briefly reported by some newspapers,
who dismissed it as "a businesse not worth the mentioning". Some, however, were
rather favourably impressed by the "sober answers" of Winstanley, The Diggers,
commented one journal, "seemed rather to minde their work than fear an army". [1. 'The
Speeches of the Lord-General Fairfac and the officers of the armie to the Diggers at
St. George's Hill in Surry and the Diggers severall answers and replies thereunto (May
31, 1649); 'England's Moderate Messenger' (May 28-June 4), E. 530 (27); 'A Modest
NArrative of Intelligence' (May 26-June 2), E. 557 (13); 'A Perfect Diurnall of Some
Passages in Parliament' (May 28-June 4). E. 530 (28)]
But, if the Council of State was concerned with graver problems than what it
conceived to be the efforts of a handful of men to cultivate a bit of baren ground, the
inhabitants of Walton and Cobham recognized in the Diggers a direct challenge to their
rights of private property. They met that challenge with force and ruthless violence. The
grain and vegetables the Diggers attempted to plant were time and again uprooted; their
tools were smashed; houses they erected were torn down. Undaunted, however, by the
opposition they were encountering, the Diggers issued a second manifesto in May
announcing their intention of cutting and selling the wood on the common in order to
maintain themselves while they were waiting for their crops. The wood of the common,
they claimed, belongs to the poor no less than the land. They warned the lords to cease
carrying off the wood, and appealed to the merchants and the populace to boycott those
who after stealing the wood from the common might attempt to sell it.
"but if you will slight us in this thing, blame us not if we make stop of the carts you send
and convert the woods to our own use as need requires, it being our own equal with him
that calls himself the Lord of the Manor and not his peculiar right shutting us out but he
shall share with us as a fellow-creature." "
170. "We intend", they furthermore declare, "that not one, two or a few men of us shall
sell or exchange the said woods but it shall be known publicly in print or wwriting to all
how much every such and such parcel of wood is sold for and how it is laid out either
in victualls, corn, ploughs or other materialls necessary." [1. 'A Declaration from the
Poor Oppressed People of England. . .' (June 1), E. 557 (9) (Thomason). Barens gives its
date as March-April and assumes that it was published before the beginning of the St.
George's Hill colony. Here again I have failed to ascertain his evidence. It is evident from
the pamphlet that the Diggers had already begun to plant the land: ". . . while we labor
the earth to cast in seed and to wait till the first crop comes up". Everard's name no longer
appears in the list of forty-five signatories headed by Winstanley. Thomason received
his copy on June 1. There is an unmistakable reference to the manifesto in 'A Modest
Narrative of Intelligence' of June 9-16, E. 560 (12). The tract would therefore seem to
have been written during the last weeks of May.]
Winstanley, convinced that the unanswerable justice of his position would
immediately be recognized by the entire nation, certainly exaggerated the interest the
Diggers were arousing when he told Fairfax in a letter on June 9 that "we understand our
digging on that common is the talk of the whol land". But there were many pamphleteers,
at any rate, who were quick to employ the communist venture of the Diggers to the
disadvantage of the Levellers. 'The Discoverer', in a lengthy attack on the Levellers
published early in June, makes no distinction between Winstanley and the Levellers. To
support its accusation that the Levellers favour the abolition of private property, it quotes
extensively from 'The New Law of Righteousness, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire,
The True Levellers Standard Advanced and The Declaration of the Poor Oppressed
People of England. [2] The 'Discoverer dew an immediate reply from the Levellers,in
which the latter accused the author of employing unfair tactics in his attack."
171. " ". . . to impose upon them the deviations of other men not of their party, and yet to
make the world believe they are. . . . Alas how you deceive the world! They are citations
out of a book none of us own, called The New Law of Righteousness. What an inference
is here! A certain man to whom we have no realtion has written a book wherein are many
particulars, from whence you infer the deniall of a deity (and that falsely too as he will
tell you) . . . the expressions cited and the books out of which they cite them are no more
ours or owned by us then by them that cited them; and what dealing I pray is this to lay
other men's infirmities upon our shoulders." [1. 'The Crafts-mens Craft or the Wiles of
the Discoverer' (June 25), E. 561 (11).]
While the Levellers were thus repudiating any association with the Diggers, the
latter were continuing to suffer the fate of all social pioneers. Early in June, several
infantry-men under a Captain Stravie came to St. George's Hill, attacked a man and a boy
at work, seriously wounding the latter, and burned a house. Winstanley, in a letter he
delivered by hand to Fairfax, protested the soldiers' action. [2. 'A Letter to Lord Fairfax
and his Councell of War with Divers Questions to the Lawyers and Ministers proving it
an undeniable equity that the Common People ought to dig and plow and dwell upon the
Commons without hiring them or paying rent to any' (June 9), E. 560 (1). 'The Leveller's
New Remonstrance or Declaration sent to his Excellencie The Lord General Fairfax'
(June 15).] Two days later, several men attacked four Diggers on the common. The
Diggers, who refused to resist, were brutally beaten; one was not expected to live. A cart
in which the Diggers were carrying wood with which to rebuild their house was smashed
and their horse seriously wounded. [3. 'A Declaration of the bloudie and unchristian
acting of William Star and John Taylor of Walton with divers men in women's apparell in
opposition to those that dig upon St. George's Hill in Surrey' (June 1649), E. 561 (6)]
Early in July, Winstanley was arrested, together with some of his fellow-Diggers, on a
charge of trespassing on St. George's Hill, the property of a Mr. Drake, the Lord of the
Manor and a member of Parliament, and brought to Kingston Court. [4. The original bill
of presentment is preserved in the Public Records Office, Assizes Records, South-Eastern
Circuit. Surrey, 1649, 35/90/.] "
172. "The Court refused to tell them the charge on which they had been arrested until
they had engaged a lawyer. Refusing to accept legal assistance, the Diggers were denied
the right to plead their own case. The Court similarly declined to read the written
declaration Winstanley submitted in lieu of a plea; and having heard only the plaintiff,
the jury imposed a fine of ten pounds per person for trespassing and twenty-nine shillings
and a penny each for costs. Two days after the sentence had been passed, Bickerstaffe,
one of the men arrested with Winstanley, was imprisoned for three days. In execution
of the sentence, bailiffs came to Winstanley's dwelling and drove away four cows,
which strangers subsequently rescued. Winstanley penned an eloquent appeal to the
House of Commons protesting the action of the Court. [1. Gerrard Winstanley, Henry
Barton, Thomas Star, John Cobham, William Everard, John Palmer, Jacob Hall, William
Combes, Adam Knight, Thomas Edeer, Richard Goodgreene, Henry Bickerstaffe,
Richard Mudley, William Boggeral and Edward Longhurst, all described as labourers of
Walton-on-Thames, are accused of having
"on April 1, 1649 by force of arms at Cobham ritously and illicitly assembled themselves
and came together to the disturbance of the public peace and that the aforesaid did dig up
land to the loss of the Parish of Walton and their inhabitants."
'An Appeal to the House of Commons desiring their answer whether the Common People
shall have the quiet enjoyment of the Commons and Waste Land; or whether they shall
be under the will of Lords of Manors still' (July 11), E. 564 (5) (Thomason)
There is an interesting item in 'The Perfect Weekly Account' of July 18-25, E.
565 (28), that refers either to the presentation to the House of Winstanley's appeal or a
similar petition on behalf of the Diggers:
"A petition was this day (Tues. July 24th) presented to the House by one Pelsham and
divers other persons called Diggers on behalf of themselves and the rest of their friends
which began the new Plantation on St. George's Hill in Surrey wherin they would be
thought (though at present a despised people) instrumentall in a restoration from Adam
and Noah. In prosecution whereof they have oftentimes bin molested, their corn and
roots (planted with the labour of their hands and the sweat of their brows) maliciously
troden down and trampled under foot; and last of all, three of their friends arrested at
the suit of the Lord of the Soyl and bound to answer the Law, ect. The House were upon
other weighty matters when this petition was presented and therefore the Petitioners must
expect to stay some time longer for an answer.
The men seemed to bee of sober life and conversation and say their rule is to do
unto others as they would be done unto. But the grand question is whether they do not
take the consequent for the matter or substance, for as man fell before the curse came so
must it follow that (before the earth) man should be restored to the first estate in Adam,
and propriety is butt the consequent effect of the first offence."
None of the othe rpapers seems to have noted the incident.]
But, like the plea of Fairfax, the appeal to the House met with no response."
173. "The local people continued to destroy the Diggers' crops and to tear down their
houses. In August, Winstanley was arrested a second time and fined four pounds for
trespassing.
"One of the officers of that court told a friend of miine", he declared, "that if the Diggers
cause was good he would pick out such a jurie as should overthow him."[1. 'A New
Yeer's Gift for the Parliament and Armie' (Jan. 1, 1650), E. 587 (6).]
The bailiffs again unsuccessfully attempted to drive away some cattle that a neighbour
was pasturing on Winstanley's land. Five Diggers were attacked by the townspeople in
the presence of the Sheriff and later carried off to prison for five weeks. Under orders
from the Manor Lords, several soldiers and countrymen, on November 27 and 28,
destroyed the houses the Diggers had again erected and carried off their belongings.
Some of the soldiers and countrymen, Winstanley records with appreciation, performed
their task with considerable reluctance; one very sympathetic solider, in fact, left the
Diggers a small sum of money. But the Diggers persisted in their efforts. Returning to St.
George's Hill, they planted several acres with wheat and rye, built "little hutches like calf
cribs" and declared that only starvation could deter them from their mission of making
the earth "a common treasury".
The Surrey ministers, meanwhile, were urging the people to refuse the Diggers
lodging or food. The Diggers were denounced to the Council of State as Royalists, as
atheists, as libertines, as polygamists. In February, Winstanley issued a brief statement
denying accusations that sought to identify the Diggers with the Ranters. [2. 'A
Vindication of those whose endeavors is only to make the Earth a Common Treasury,
Called Diggers' (Feb. 20, 1650), E. 1365 (1). The pamphlet is incorrectly dated in the
Thomason Catalogue as 1649.] In a postscript to the statement penned on March 4,
Winstanley drew attention to the fact that several men were travelling through the
country soliciting funds for the Diggers by producing a letter purporting to have been
signed by himself, but which was a forged document. A Digger delegation, however,
visited several counties in the spring urging the poor to emulate the example of St.
George's Hill and seeking financial assistance for the little group. Their travels took them
through more than thirty towns and villages in Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Hertfordshire,
Middlesex, Berkshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire."
174. "Two of the original Diggers carried a letter from Winstanley and signed by twenty-
five of the Diggers declaring that, despite all opposition, they would persist in their
determination to cast off the yokke of oppression by freeing the land. But it warned that,
the summer's crop havaing been destroyed, poverty and dire necessity might force the
Diggers to cease their work; and it earnestly appealed for assistance and relief.[1. 'A
Perfect Diurnal of Some Passages and Proceedings' (April 1-8, 1650), E. 534 (25), which
prints a copy of the letter and an account of the arrest in Wellingborough.]
The Digger emissaries were arrested at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire;
but in the latter town, at any rate, their efforts met with success. In March the "poor
inhabitants" of the town announced that they had begun to dig upon the "common and
waste-ground called Bareshank", that several free-holders had agreed to surrener their
claim to the commons and that some farmers had already offered them seed. But the
Wellingborough Diggers met with no better fate than their Surrey comrades; for the
Council of State wrote Mr. Pentlow, the Justice of Peace for Northampton, some weeks
later commending him on the prompt measures he had taken against the "Levellers in
those parts", and advising him to put into immediate execution the laws "against those
that intrude upon other men's properties". [2. CSP, Dom, 1650, April 15, 1650, p. 106.
For the Declaration of the Wellingborough Diggers see: 'A Declaration of the Grounds
and Reasons why we the poor inhabitants of the town of Wellingborrow in the County of
Northampton have begun and give consent to dig up, meanure and sow corn upon the
Common and Waste ground called Bareshanke belonging to the inhabitants of
Wellinborrow by those that have subscribed and hundreds more that give consent'
(March 12, 1650), 669, f. 15 (21).] Another group began similar activity at Coxhall in
Kent. In June there were serious riots in Slimbridge and Frampton in Gloucestershire,
where "rude multitudes" were "levelling enclosures". [3. CSP, Dom, 1650, June 27, p.
218]
The parent colony at Cobham, however, was struggling desperately for its
existence. On February 23, the Council of State wrote Fairfax of complaints that had
been received from Surrey, evidently from Cobham, that the woods were being despoiled
and ordered him to apprehend the offenders; for such action"
175. " ". . . besides the loss, encourages the looser and disordered sort of people to the
greater boldness in other designs by their impunity in this in which they have so far
proceeded that they cannot be brought to justice by the ordinary course". [1. CSP, Dom,
1649-50, Feb. 9, p. 510; CSP Dom, 1650, Feb 23, p. 10]
By the end of March the Diggers had been driven off St. George's Hill, but continued
their work on a little heath near by. In a manifesto they issued, they congratulated their
comrades at Wellingborough and Coxhall:
"Likewise", they declared, "we write it as a letter of ccongratulation and encouragement
to our dear fellow Englishmen that have begun to dig upon the commons therby taking
posession of their freedom in Wellinborrow in Northamptonshire and at Coxhall in
Kent." [2. 'An Appeale to all Englishmen to judge between Bondage and Freedom sent
from those that began to digge upon George Hill in Surrey; bu tnow are carrying on that
publick work upon the little Heath in the Parish of Cobham' (March 26, 1650), 669, f. 15
(23).]
Shortly afterwards, however, the little communsit venture came to an end. A week
before Easter, Parson Platt, one of the Diggers' most persistent persecutors, together
with a Mr. Sutton, pulled down a house and struck a man and a woman working on
the heath. Despite Platt's promise that if the Diggers cut no wood from the heath he
would no longer melest them, he returned a week later with several men, set fire to the
Diggers' houses, burned their funiture and scattered their belongings. The Diggers were
threatened with death if they attempted to resume their activities. To prevent their return,
Platt and Sutton hired several men to maintain a twenty-four hour vigil on the heath.
With that, Winstanley's practical attempt to introduce communism into England seems
to have come to an end. In April he addressed "An Humble Request to the Ministers of
both Universities and to all Lawyers in every Inns-a-Court" detailing Platt's behaviour
and publishing the written statement he had submitted to him. [3. April 1650. Forster
Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London.] But no further
effort seems to have been made to resume the work of planting the commons.
With the collapse of his effort to introduce communism by practical example,
Winstanley seems to have dedicated himself exclusively to the task of peaceful and
reasoned persuasion; for there is no further record of his activities until the publication
of 'The Law of Freedom' early in 1652. [1. I am inclined to believe that 'Fire in the Bush',
whose date has already been discussed (Chap. III, p. 148, n. 2), belongs to the months
immediately after the end of the St. George's Hill venture. There is no reference whatever
in the pamphlet to the Digger experiment; but the tract would seem to be the expression
of a profoundly reigious man who, disappointed in the failure of practical effort, has
found consolation in the realization that his experience is but the reflection of the eternal
conflict between God and the Serpent, the struggle between good and evil, in which good
will inevitably conquer.]"
CHAPTER FIVE: THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE DIGGER
MOVEMENT
"
"True Freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation and that is in
the use of the earth." - Winstanley, 'The Law of Freedom' (1652).
"True Religion and undefiled is this, To make restitution of the Earth which hath been
taken and held from the common people by the power of Conquests formerly and so set
the oppressed free." - Winstanley, 'A New Yeers Gift for the Parliament and the Armie'
(1650)
If the Diggers were a factor of negligible importance in the political developments
of their period, they bequeathed a legacy of enduring value to political thought. For
Winstanley was writing at a time when the edifice of English life was being re-shaped
in a form it has largly maintained to our day. If a few contemporary thinkers quarrelled
with some details of its structure, none questioned as profoundly as Winstanley the
foundations on which it was being erected. The challenge he issued has lost none of its
pertinence for our time; if anything, as the problems with which Winstanley, in a period
of social transition, was concerned have once again become the paramount issues of the
day, its significance has greatly increased during the intervening centuries.
The political philosophy of the Digger Movement found its expression in the
several manifestos and declarations and the few lengthier tracts--mainly the work of
Winstanley--that were issued during the course of the St. George's Hill venture and in
Winstanley's last work, 'The Law of Freedom'. From those writings there emerges a body
of doctrine that served as a guide to action and that was in its turn modified and expanded
by the practical experience its exponents encountered. It was essentially, it must be
emphasized, less an integrated, doctrinal system than a serious of brilliant perceptions
and profound insights. But it was none the less a comprehensive social philosophy
embodying an interpretation of history and social development, a theory of government
and law, an analysis of economic processes and a programme of social reconstruction
based on that analysis."
178. "Winstanley retained to the end his profound spirituality; and he was constantly
tending to express in spiritual terms the social and material forces he was seeking to
describe. The mystic and the political theorist remain, if not in actual conflict, at least
in uneasy partnership with each other. The ideas of the one are constantly being clothed
in the language of the other; and the profundity of his social insights is frequently
obscured by the theological symbols that he employed in their description. But it must
be emphasized that there was no fundamental dichotomy in Winstanley between his
religious convictions and his social concepts; for both were simply different aspects of
his reaction to the events and problems of his time. It is of vital importance, however, to
stress that in Winstanley both the tendency of the mystic to await the intervention of the
Lord and the natural detachment of the philosopher were conquered by the realism of the
practical reformer.
"My mind was not at rest", he wrote, recalling the weeks that followed the
publication of 'The New Law of Righteousness, "because nothing was acted, and
thoughts ran in me that words and writings were all nothing and must die, For action is
the Life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing." [1. 'A Watchword to the City
of London and the Armie' (Sept. 1649), E. 573 (1).]
Winstanley's attempt to translate his ideals into reality is fundamental to an understanding
of his thought.
But the theological framework within which his social ideas had originally been
contained gradually lost its significance and function. Ultimately, the validity of his
argument rested on a foundation that was wholly secular in its nature, if primarily
spiritual in its original inspiration. In his last work, his position was an almost purely
materialistic one. Nature emerges as the final and ultimate reality; and social and
environmental influences were seen as the paramount factors conditioning human
behaviour. Both natural and social phenomena are to be explained not by external forces,
but in terms of their interrelationships and by laws inherent in those processes
themselves. Religion finally became for Winstanley a concep tto which supernatural
considerations were wholly alien; it was essentially a broad radical humanitarianism
concerned exclusively with human relationships rather than with any mystical
communion with the supernatural."
179. "In fact, it may be said that Winstanley tended to use religion as a concept
synonymous with the class consciousness of the oppressed, with their recognition of their
social rights:
"True religion and undefiled is this, To make restituion of the Earth which hath been
taken and held from the common people by the power of Conquests formerly and so set
the oppressed free." [1. 'A New Yeers Gift for the Parliament and the Armie' (Jan. 1,
1650), E. 587 (6), p. 24]
God, as he had already affirmed in his earlier writings, was not a personal deity over
and beyond man or a principle independent of nature and matter. The conception of a
personal God or devil, of an actual heaven and hell were the psychological result of the
inability to understand the nature of the physical world, the refuge of those who felt
impelled to substitute fancy and imagination for the knowledge they were unable to
achieve:
". . . it is a docrine of a sickly and weak spirit who hath lost his understanding in the
knowledge of the Creation and of the temper of his own Heart and Nature and so runs
into fancies". [2. 'The Law of Freedom in a Platform or True Magistracy Restored'
(1652), E. 655 (8), p. 60]
The idea of God to Winstanley was the expression of certain laws operating in the natural
order and in human society--the principle of motion and interdependence in nature and
of love, reason and justice in human affairs. Essentially, it was a description of those
principles through which natural phenomena could be explained and made meaningful
and on which alone an adequate social order could be erected:
"To know the secrets of nature, is to know the works of God; And to know the works of
God within the creation, is to know God himself, for God dwells in every visible work
or body. And indeed if you would know spiritual things, it is to know how the Spirit or
Power of Wisdom and Life, causing motion or growth, dwels within and governs both the
several bodies of the stars and planets in the heavens above and the several bodies of the
earth below as grass, plants, fishes, beasts, birds and mankinde." [1. Law of Freedom', p.
58]"