God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Nonetheless, during 1645 there is plenty of evidence that the experience and perception of disruption, and the publicity given to advocates of other forms of social compact, called forth an active attempt to refurbish older forms of community for the new world created by the war. The material costs were difficult to bear, and the new forms of authority and political mobilization presented a challenge to the ideals and institutions of local government. In a sense this was a crisis in community – the formal and informal sources of authority through which local conflicts had been reconciled, order established and protection provided. Established patterns of authority and ritual were also challenged by the threat to the territorial basis of religious community. Was communion for those of a like mind, or all those living together? And what forms of ritual life could bring people together in a shared community?

  Drawing on traditions of self-government in these challenging times, there were active and creative responses to these problems during the latter stages of the war. For, just as with the financial balance sheet, there were opportunities as well as burdens. By 1646 the war had provided opportunities to work off grudges, to redress local wrongs, to further a particular view of reformation, to promote pet projects, to make money, to assume local office. The war created the problems addressed by clubmen, excise rioters and witch-hunters, but also created the opportunities for obscure people to promote their own solutions. It had unleashed energies and arguments that went beyond the issues at the heart of peace negotiations. That affected formal negotiation – inducing both caution and urgency – but also provided the basis for activists to pursue purposes quite different from the formal war aims of the military parties. Anxiety, opportunism and creative adaptation were symbiotically linked; and they resonated deeply in English society.

  Revolution, 1646–1649

  16

  Post-War Politics

  Print, Polemic and Mobilization

  Certainties were easier to find on the battlefield than at the negotiating table: there was a limited number of outcomes, quickly apparent, which had a more or less obvious significance. The experience of battle was in that sense appealing to those looking for God’s hand in this world. At Langport, Major Thomas Harrison, watching the Cavalier army crumble before the heroic attack of the New Model across a river and up a narrow lane lined with musketeers, ‘with a loud voice [broke] forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions as if he had been in a rapture’. Oliver Cromwell seems to have been particularly persuaded by such signs. At Marston Moor, he exulted that God had made the enemy ‘as stubble to our swords’, and of the great victory at Naseby he wrote: ‘this is none other than the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory’. Like Harrison he was equally certain about Langport: ‘Thus you see what the Lord hath wrought for us… Thus you have [Langport] mercy added to Naseby mercy. And to see this, is it not to see the face of God?’1

  By the time final victory came, however, it was not at all clear what it meant, either in the limited sense of what the parliamentary coalition had ended up fighting for or in the deeper sense of what cause God had smiled upon. As a practical problem this was more difficult for the victors – it was clear that the royalists would now be negotiating a rearguard action. But in three stages Parliament had taken measures which put its cause in a different light: the administrative and financial escalations of 1643; the military alliance with the Covenanters; and the formation of the New Model, with all that was taken to imply. What was the peace that all this was intended to achieve? Following victory there were plenty of ideas about that question, and attempts to make victory a vehicle for them, but that made the peace no easier to win than the war had been. In the world of print, where these conflicting visions were promoted among overlapping publics, there had been another, less easily quantified, set of costs and benefits. Lost coherence in contemporary debate, a crisis of common sense, created the opportunity to fly kites and make creative arguments; as those opportunities were taken up, so the world of public debate seemed more and more anarchic.

  On 19 July 1645, just over a month after Naseby, William Walwyn and a deputation of religious and political radicals were at Westminster, accusing the Speaker of sustaining correspondence with the royalists and with the King. Walwyn was by that time in his mid-forties, the second son of a landed gentleman, a member of the Merchant Adventurers and a medical practitioner of some substance. A conversion experience moved Walwyn from a relatively orthodox predestinarian Calvinism to belief in free grace, accepting love and inner peace. This led him to advocate freedom of conscience, arguing that as long as knowledge was imperfect, men would differ. As a result such differences should be tolerated. Since the world was not divided between the elect and the reprobate, and redemption was available to all, everyone should be free to follow God’s promptings: there should be no human constraint on the conscience. He advocated this position in seven pamphlets published anonymously between 1641 and January 1646. Here was a man for whom the parliamentary cause was the pursuit of full reformation, and for whom, presumably, compromise with the King, which jeopardized freedom of conscience, was an ungodly act.2

  While at Westminster on that day in July 1645, Walwyn met John Lilburne, who was there to answer charges about the publication of illicit political tracts. Lilburne had reached his twenties during the Laudian domination of the church, and that had radicalized him. An associate of Henry Burton, he was already a significant figure in radical Puritan circles by 1640 – released from the Fleet prison at the petition of Oliver Cromwell in November and the subject of an upmarket engraving by George Glover in 1641. He was part of the coalition of disaffected Protestants that dominated London’s street politics in the first two years of the Long Parliament. He signed up for the parliamentary army in 1642 and by 1644 had a distinguished military record. By 1645, however, his militancy was leading him away from the military struggle and back to the world of print and polemic. He was worried by Presbyterian plans for the national church and the political influence Presbyterian leaders were apparently able to muster, and irritated both by military differences with his (Presbyterian) commanders and by what he perceived as inadequate recognition by them of his achievements. As a result he began a pamphlet assault on Presbyterian leaders, and the institutions which allowed them influence, which led to the expression of radical political principles.3

  Pamphlets by, or attributed to, Richard Overton follow a similar trajectory, which began to intersect with Lilburne’s in 1645. We know much less about Overton: he may have been born around 1600 or around 1615, he may or may not have matriculated at Queens” College, Cambridge (suggesting a relatively high-status background, perhaps), he may or may not have been married to Mary between 1642 and 1644. Unlike Lilburne there is no evidence to connect him with active politics: we do not know if he was in the crowds which shaped political events between 1640 and 1642, and there is nothing to suggest that he undertook any military service. Perhaps this is a difference in generation, or of education. His pamphlets support the view that he had received a relatively advanced education. Although his background and circumstances are obscure, the intellectual journey reflected in the 150 pamphlets and writings attributed to him is relatively clear. Between 1640 and 1642 he contributed to the vast output of anti-Laudian and anti-popish pamphlets. Taking up his pen again in 1644, however, he had moved in a more radical direction, arguing for the mortality of the soul, a publication which got him into trouble alongside Milton. Orthodox soteriology (theological argument about salvation) depended on the continued existence of the soul after physical death – it was the basis of beliefs about heaven and hell (and, for Catholics, purgatory). Overton’s prominence in the world of illegal printing had probably brought him into contact with Lilburne the previous winter, if not before.4

  Prior to the chance meeting on 19 July Walwyn and Lilburne had become fellow travellers in the fight against what they saw as Presbyterian intolerance. Lilburne had once been imprisoned for publicizing
Henry Burton’s views and, along with Burton, Bastwick and Prynne, had suffered at the hands of the Laudian regime. By January 1645, however, he and Prynne were separated on the issue of Church government. On 2 January, Prynne’s Truth Triumphing over Falsehood had championed, intemperately, the Presbyterian cause. Both Lilburne and Walwyn were prompted to reply, as were Burton and Thomas Goodwin, a leading Independent minister and one of the authors of the Apologeticall Narration. Lilburne’s reply appeared within five days, testimony to the immediacy of the print polemic by this stage in the conflict. It was followed less than a month later by Walwyn’s A Helpe to the right understanding, which argued for freedom of conscience. Richard Overton added his own counterblasts from April onwards, his the more withering and satirical contributions. In April The Araignement of Mr Persecution put Prynne on trial before the Grand Jury of virtuous principles, and this was followed by three pamphlets copying a notorious Elizabethan pamphleteering campaign by Martin Marprelate. In both cases the associations are interesting – laying claim to religious freedom in a traditional institution of English liberties and laying claim to a longer tradition of reformation polemic. A fourth pamphlet, The Nativity of Sir John Presbyter, assumed the form of a horoscope cast by ‘Christopher Scale-Sky, Mathematition in chief to the Assembly of Divines’.5

  The trajectories of these three – Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne – were crossing in the summer of 1645 in response to the Presbyterian campaign to take charge of the parliamentary cause. What cemented this incipient alliance was the political martyrdom of John Lilburne. Although Prynne had ignored Lilburne in the spring, he was prompted into action by a meeting at the Windmill Tavern in the summer. On one account this was convened to discuss the implications of Parliament’s defeat at Leicester, immediately prior to Naseby. At the time of the loss of Leicester, however, the New Model had not been able to engage the royal army, another spring was slipping away and now the royalists had scored a significant military blow. According to Overton’s Martin’s Eccho this was one of the signs of God’s wrath against the persecuting spirit in the parliamentary cause. The meeting recommended adjourning Parliament for a month, to allow members to reacquaint themselves with the temper of those they represented. The Westminster Assembly was to take a similar break. To Prynne this seemed to be an Independent attack on the assembly and the Presbyterian interest in Parliament. This provocation, and the pamphlet attacks on him, provoked A Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious New Wandring-Blasing Stars.6

  A new bout of pamphlet jousting between Prynne and his opponents coincided with a print campaign in defence of Lilburne. He had been denounced by Bastwick (another man whom Lilburne had supported in the resistance to Laudianism) on the basis of a conversation overheard on 19 July. Bastwick claimed that in the course of that conversation Lilburne had said that Lenthall had sent £60,000 to the enemy at Oxford. Lilburne was brought before the Committee of Examinations the following week, where, rather than dispute the charge, he questioned the authority of the tribunal and asserted his rights as a free-born Englishman. And, of course, he launched into print, with England’s Birth-Right Justified (10 October 1645). In this he was supported directly by Walwyn, whose pamphlet England’s Lamentable Slaverie appeared the following day, and engaged in a public dialogue with Lilburne.7

  One of Lilburne’s gifts was for seeing in his own troubles principles of general significance, and it was this that facilitated the translation of religious freedom into the civic sphere: his serial oppressions at the hands of various civil bodies became the basis for arguments about the illegitimacy of their authority. Walwyn’s view of free grace was the basis of a radical view of the constitution. Secular power ought to be so arranged as to guarantee freedom of conscience, since there could be no free moral agent without civil liberty. These were very clearly practical questions, in the light of Lilburne’s experience. It was an anti-Calvinist position, and one based not on the ancient constitution but on ancient rights. In Lilburne’s hands these ancient rights became the basis for political settlement, a uniform set of rights due to all Englishmen by birth.8

  Measured against the flood of pamphlets in these months, this was a fairly insignificant set of exchanges. It is not clear that the arguments for religious toleration made by Walwyn were of more importance to contemporaries than those made by Burton and Williams the previous year, but an earlier generation of historians saw here the germ of a modern, and admirable, politics for in this convergence among London radicals lie the origins of the Levellers. ‘To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers’, wrote H. N. Brailsford in 1958. For Brailsford it was the Levellers who came to champion popular sovereignty expressed in a democratically accountable House of Commons. In The Araignement, for example, Walwyn had appealed to human reason as a source of authority, combining it with the maxim that salus populi suprema lex (the good or safety of the people is the supreme law).9 As we have seen, Overton had Presbyterian persecution arraigned before a Grand Jury, the voice of the local community. From these ideas, discernible in 1645, sprang a campaign that the army championed, carrying through a political revolution which was of significance to the history of the west as a whole – a people’s army championing ideals resembling the secular democratic values of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West. The practical significance of their ideas, according to this view, derived from their influence over the army: it was from the Levellers, and not from their commanders, that the New Model Army derived its political ideas and ‘democratic drive’.10 Here, too, the exchanges of 1645 offer some support – as well as arguing for the abolition of tithes and for religious toleration, Overton’s Martin’s Eccho argued for the payment of the soldiers” arrears. This was the basis of a political alliance, since refusal to pay up was another sign, so Overton thought, of the sin of Presbyterian half-heartedness in prosecution of the war effort.11

  Both claims – about the relationship between Leveller ideas and democracy, and about the influence of the Levellers over the New Model Army – are now contested.12 The rediscovery of the Levellers may have resulted in an exaggeration of their modernity and practical significance to the events of the 1640s. Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn’s convergence in 1645 probably reveals more about the networks and mechanics of 1640s polemics than it does about the motive force of practical politics during these crucial years. Nonetheless, by the summer of 1645 the Stationers” Company was trying to shut Overton down.13

  Polemicists in this highly competitive environment were forced to assert the authority of their views. Lilburne’s first defence of himself employed a full ‘apparatus of erudition’: margins stuffed with textual references, a text interspersed with Latin phrases and constant scriptural allusions. His textual authorities included well-established touchstones of constitutional thinking – Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and Coke’s Institutes – but also Husbands” Exact Collection. The latter was itself a confection from the plethora of publications in the first years of the Long Parliament and Lilburne’s deployment of it reflects the ways in which this print culture fed off itself.14 Indeed, the Levellers were themselves a print phenomenon long before they were a ‘movement’ – comrades in arms in the paper war before they had actually met, and sympathetic pamphleteers long before they could have been claimed to have been a party.15

  It is now difficult to know what to make of this coalescence therefore: whether it was just paper talk or the expression of the views of a larger constituency. It is possible to see in 1645 traces of radical religious networks with roots in sectarian congregations, mobilizing to secure a complete military victory in order to safeguard the gains made for reformation since the collapse of Laudianism. The convergence of these three polemicists bears testimony to the ways that print had become a source of authority and community in itself. Even if it was just paper talk, in other words, it is still significant. For the generation of the 1950s and 1960s democracy mattered; for that of the early twenty-first century so does paper tal
k, even if it’s not true.

  As the war drew to a close, and victory approached, Thomas Edwards became the leading figure in Presbyterian polemics against these views. A relatively hot Calvinist; he had run into trouble during the 1630s, partly because of his beliefs and partly because of his combative personal style. Naturally sympathetic to the anti-Laudian politics of the period 1640–42 he had, nonetheless, been quick to identify the dangers of Independency – the attack on Laud, and then on episcopacy, was welcome, but beyond that had to lie a comprehensive and reformed national church. In 1641 he had published an attack on Independency which had elicited only one response – from Katherine Chidley. A principal reason for this relative silence was the agreement reached in November 1641 among leading Puritans not to engage in public controversy on the issue of church government. During 1644, however, as the Westminster Assembly leaned increasingly towards a strict Presbyterian settlement, that agreement broke down. The Apologeticall Narration, despite its moderate tone, had set off a heated argument.16