The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  Ireton opposed the clause on religion, arguing strongly for judgement in moral as well as civil matters, and he succeeded in ensuring that toleration did not extend to Catholics or prelacy. He also fought hard against the clause on punishment, and yet the result was a compromise in which no one really believed.

  Now the Levellers adopted a new and startling strategy. Rainborough and Lilburne finally met on 31 October 1647, when Rainborough went to visit Lilburne in the Tower. It seems Rainborough was hoping to get Lilburne’s agreement to treating with the king; if so he was knocking at an open door, because Lilburne had no republican ideas, and may already have been in touch with Charles through his fellow-prisoner Lewis Dyve; Lilburne may have promised the king the Army’s devotion. At first it may seem odd that the Levellers, keen to abolish monarchy, were willing to develop a working alliance with Charles. It was in part a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, and it also made a kind of metaphorical sense in the light of early Leveller tracts, which almost identified with the king on the grounds that he too had been scorned and dishonoured by Parliament, who ‘make the king their scorn and us their slaves’. ‘Remember the end of your taking up arms was to defend the king’s majesty and to bring offenders to trial, let them be of what side they will’, said another, and a third proposed that reform must begin with ‘his Majesty invested in his just power’.

  But if Lilburne made the offer he was promising something he couldn’t deliver, because the Army was turning against the king. People like Goffe had begun to wonder if God had withdrawn himself from the Army because they had been treating with his enemy. We are all distracted in council, the Army said, because we have been complicit in preserving the man of blood. By now it was depressingly clear even to the most eager spirits that the debates were opening up fresh divisions rather than healing them. By 8 November, Fairfax and Cromwell could see that it was all going nowhere. They also knew the king was about to bolt. They wound things up.

  Because they had failed at Putney, leading Levellers argued for a rendezvous of the whole Army where they hoped to present An Agreement of the People to the soldiers. Fairfax and Cromwell ordered three separate assemblies rather than one, so the Levellers tried to persuade everyone to attend the first meeting, held on 15 November 1647, at Corkbush Field, Ware.

  The atmosphere was tense. No one knew where the king was. He had escaped from Hampton Court only four days earlier. There was a rumour that he would join the Army on Monday. Would he appear at Ware? The officers knew by Sunday night that Charles had reached the Isle of Wight, but the soldiers had heard many rumours and no facts: would the war begin all over again?

  The soldiers drew up. Fairfax arrived, and was met by Rainborough, who handed him a copy of the Agreement as an official petition from the Army. Fairfax reviewed each regiment and asked each to subscribe to the Agreement. Seven regiments had been ordered to the field, and two more came with them, parading with copies of the Agreement in their hats, a kind of ‘field sign’. In black letters, the papers were superscribed, ENGLANDS FREEDOMS, SOLDIERS RIGHTS. One was Thomas Harrison’s regiment, which had managed to discard its officers; the other was Robert Lilburne’s men. This was not only a mutinous act, but a flagrant and disruptive attempt to turn the tables on Fairfax and Cromwell on a day which was supposed to demonstrate the unity of the Army in the face of its foes.

  There was a moment when history trembled on the verge of radical alteration.

  Then Cromwell acted: he plunged into the ranks of the two regiments, drawn sword in hand, and managed to cow them. The papers were torn from their caps, and a number of the Leveller leaders were rounded up. They were ordered to draw lots for their lives. The three losers then diced, and the loser this time, Private Richard Arnold, was shot in front of his regiment by his two reprieved companions. The field was littered with discarded, trampled copies of the Agreement. Clarke, shorthand notebook ever at the ready, noted that John Lilburne was there, incognito: ‘things not succeeding at the rendezvous according to expectation, came not further’. The officers, the Levellers felt sure, were the problem; they had betrayed their trusts.

  But in reality the problem they faced lay deeper. Most people went on believing in inequality; they saw it all around them, and they found it hard to make the imaginative leap the Levellers had made; it was hard to understand how things could be as different as the Levellers wanted.

  Even while the debates were going on, the seeds of disaster were being sown. Mutiny broke out in the Army, independently of the Levellers. The Second Civil War saw the Army gather itself together, but by spring and summer 1649 the officers had rid themselves of their enemies in the Commons, and abolished both kingship and the House of Lords. Their only remaining enemies were the leaders of Army mutinies. In March 1649, Cromwell was heard to strike the Council table and cry out, ‘I tell you, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces.’

  There had been a mutiny – yet another – in April. A group of people were sent to one place and stayed put; these had the sense to barricade themselves into an inn, the Bull. They hung on to their colours, too. They were complaining that they had no money to pay for their quarters; their critics said if they’d managed their money better they’d have plenty left. Their commander, Whalley – again – promised them money, but they wanted their arrears guaranteed, and Whalley couldn’t promise that, so when a soldier called Lockyer disobeyed a direct order he arrested him instead. In the end only Lockyer was executed, because Fairfax decided that he was the ringleader. Some Leveller women told the authorities that they were about to murder a saint, but they pressed ahead. He was executed in Paul’s Yard. He was smiling.

  Thousands attended his funeral; a newsbook reported, ‘every one having a Black ribbon and a small one fastened to it of a sea green colour … It is said so called not of the sea but of the republic, for the People in many places of scripture are compared to the great waters, the sea or ocean, which was signified by sea green.’ The coffin was decorated with rosemary, dipped in blood, for remembrance. Lockyer was buried in Moorfields.

  There were two kinds of honour in early modern England, and historians have labelled them vertical honour and horizontal honour. Vertical honour involved showing special respect to superiors: cap-doffing, fore-lock-tugging, saluting, loyal toasts. The Levellers often flouted vertical honour, in part because it was supposed to be a reciprocal system and they felt that it had broken down. Broadly, the implicit contract was that social superiority had to flow from hospitality, generosity, and courtesy to inferiors. The Levellers thought that these things had broken down during the war. Moreover, social hierarchies had been called into question by the emergence of an alternative system, election, being part of God’s elite. But they all still believed in horizontal honour, the respect for equals, and inasmuch as they came to think that even officers were equal in some respects, though not in all, they came to feel slighted. A courtesy manual said that to be interrupted, contradicted, pre-empted, or simply ignored, was to be dishonoured. The Army rank-and-file felt all these things about its officers. They understood their plight in terms of the past. Like the Saxon peasants, they felt, they were now living under rulers who were exploiting them rather than providing for them in fatherly fashion. The only choice in such circumstances was to turn outlaw.

  So in May 1649, in Oxfordshire, a group of men, armed and mounted, were assembling. They were led by William Thompson: hot-tempered, brave, and eagerly concerned for the poor groaning under the Norman Yoke, following the Robin Hood code of honour that animated so many. Thompson wasn’t entitled to any Army rank. He was a corporal who had been cashiered from Whalley’s regiment because he had been on a drinking and gambling binge so excessive that it went beyond the usual soldierly excesses. He had been at Ware; had been, in fact, one of the ringleaders. He called himself ‘Captain’, perhaps less as a usurpation of an army rank to which he was not entitled than because it was what food-riot leaders often called the
mselves.

  The men with Thompson were mutineers. They were also Levellers. They wanted to stop the payment of all taxes. Thompson wrote and published a manifesto: ‘Through an unavoidable necessity, no other means left under heaven, we are enforced to betake ourselves to the law of nature, to defend and preserve ourselves and native rights … Gathered and associated together on the bare account of Englishmen, to redeem ourselves and the land of our nativity, from slavery and oppression, to avenge the blood of war shed in time of peace, to have justice for the blood of Mr Arnold shot to death at Ware, and for the blood of Mr Robert Lockyer, and divers others who of late by martial law were murdered at London.’ The language of honour is clear and strong.

  But this feisty band proved reluctant to fight against their old comrades-in-arms. After a parley, some even enlisted with their pursuers, while Thompson and a small party shot and cut their way free. While they gathered, army mutineers had been rioting for pay in Salisbury and Thompson thought that if he could join up with them they would be unstoppable. While this was happening, Fairfax and Cromwell were assembling a force in Hyde Park to quell the mutinies. Many of those summoned came to the rendezvous with green ribbons on their hats symbolizing their support for the Levellers. Cromwell wasn’t having that: angrily, he pulled out the sea-green men. But he had plenty of sense, as ever; he had secured ten thousand pounds to cover their back pay, subtracting it from the navy.

  Meanwhile the Wiltshire mutineers were marching north, from Salisbury to Marlborough, to Wantage and godly Abingdon, where they joined up with Thompson’s men. Cromwell and Fairfax were hoping to overtake them before they could all unite. The combined Levellers and mutineers left Abingdon and turned west, then ran into Reynolds’s horse, which held the Thames at Newbridge Crossing against them. This time no one felt any scruples about attacking ‘a mercenary damn crew’, made up mainly of Royalist prisoners from Colchester: ‘a company of blood-thirsty rogues, murderers, thieves, highwaymen, and some that were taken in Colchester’. But the Levellers were persuaded to avoid bloodshed and to use a nearby ford instead; ‘having marched through the ford into the marsh on the other side, we called our council together’. On the evening of 14 May 1649 they came to Burford, a town so traditional in outlook that it still paraded its giant and dragon through the streets once a year, at midsummer. That mythical battle would be displaced by a real one.

  During the day Cromwell and his troops had covered forty-five miles. At midnight his tired but numerically far superior forces arrived in Burford. Despite the pacific efforts of Major White, one man on each side was killed. At the Crowne Inn, where Sheep Street joins the High Street, a man called Eyres, a friend of Henry Marten, fought on bravely against hopeless odds. These were, after all, men of the New Model Army. Both sides were used to winning, but Cromwell had far more soldiers. Three hundred and forty prisoners were taken from among the mutineers, and placed under guard in the church. The rest escaped, but without their horses, which fell as booty to the loyalists.

  Next day the prisoners were relieved of the threat of decimation – the Roman practice of taking out one in ten mutineers and killing them – that hung over them, but had to listen to reproachful sermons. Most of them decided to show due penitence – perhaps they remembered the fate of the rebels at Ware. Nonetheless, there was a court martial and four victims were chosen. Cornet Denne, the chaplain; Cornet Thompson, the younger brother of the hot-tempered Captain; and Corporals Church and Perkins. Denne had brought a winding-sheet and sat wrapped in it, like John Donne. He rejoiced, he said, to suffer under so righteous a sentence. All this did the trick; he was pardoned and sent off to preach to his fellow-prisoners.

  The other three were shot outside the church. Cornet Thompson was terrified – ironic, since he was being punished for his brother’s derring-do. An eager contemporary reported:

  This day Cornet Thompson was brought into the churchyard (the place of execution). Death was a great terror to him, as unto most. Some say he had hopes of a pardon, and therefore delivered something reflecting upon the legality of his engagement, and the just hand of God; but if so, they failed him. Corporal Perkins was the next; the place of death, and the sight of his executioners, was so far from altering his countenance, or daunting his spirit, that he seemed to smile upon both, and account it a great mercy that he was to die for this quarrel, and casting his eyes up to his Father and afterwards to his fellow prisoners, who stood upon church leads to see the execution, set his back against the wall, and bid the executioners shoot: and so died as gallantly as he lived religiously. After him Master John Church was brought to the stake, he was as much supported by God in this great agony as the latter; for after he pulled off his doublet, he stretched out his arms, and bid the soldiers do their duties, looking them in the face, till they gave fire upon him, without the least kind of fear or terror.

  Church’s demeanour was a deliberate imitation of Christ’s death on the cross: meek, resigned, self-sacrificing. This wasn’t weakness, but a kind of passive protest, like lying down in front of a tank. The phrase of which the modern political left is fond, the ‘massacre at Burford church’, makes it sound as if it was a kind of early modern Peterloo. It was far from that; just the routine punishment of a few mutineers to discourage the others, sad, unjust, but not worth the pilgrimages it has inspired – unless, perhaps, it is when authority is understood by almost everyone to be in the right that it is most tyrannical. A disappointment about the ‘English revolution’ is its lack of real martyrs, their hearts’ blood dyed in every fold of a Red Flag. (Indeed, martyrdom was to be the Royalists’ trump card.) The Levellers’ courage means that they deserve respect for what they were, not for what we would like them to have been.

  Meanwhile, Captain Thompson and a small band had escaped in the night to look for more trouble. They managed to storm a gaol in Northampton and release its Leveller prisoners – Robin Hood again – and scattered money from the excisemen’s tills among the poor. At Wellingborough on 17 May, a troop of Oxfordshire horse overtook them. Characteristically, Thompson retreated to a wood, scorned quarter, and chose to fight. He charged three times though wounded, killing one of his pursuers and injuring another, before falling himself. When she heard of his death, his wife, who was pregnant, miscarried and died.

  Thompson’s Robin Hood mien and defiant last stand were inspiring, and it may be no coincidence that Wellingborough became the site of a new Digger community. A Royalist newspaper, only half-joking, called him ‘that Alexander of the Levellers’. Its half-hearted support was due to the fact that Cromwell was hoping to use the crushing of the mutiny as proof that he was on the side of law and order, as a way of wooing moderate and conservative opinion. He did a lot of table-thumping, announcing (honour again) that either he or Lilburne must die for it. Then he went off to spend the night in comfort at Burford Priory, before moving on to Oxford. With its usual agility, the university was keen to confer honorary degrees on the Army leaders. Anthony à Wood said the speeches were ‘bad, but good enough for soldiers’. Cromwell confounded this snobbish response by making a very good speech himself, in which he declared that no commonwealth could ever flourish without learning. Then he went off for dinner at Magdalen and bowling on the green after dinner, Charles’s own favourite game in captivity, pursuits which marked his new status as a ruler, if not (yet?) a monarch.

  The Levellers lost their sectarian followers to the new policy of tolerance, but more importantly, the Army came to see itself more and more as soldiers, distinct from the London citizens. The Levellers didn’t disappear, but they were reduced to pamphleteering and complaining, attacked by other pamphleteers. In the end they were creatures of paper. Despite this, history has loved them because they are thought to have led to us, to liberal democracy. The Levellers’ independency, their longing for the rights of men who scrabbled in dirty jobs to be noticed, are like the yearning of blue-collar voters everywhere to be truly enfranchised; to this day, they know that governments are not ru
n by people like them, and can therefore not be run for people like them. Representation, they know, is about seeing yourself mirrored in government. That vision is still not reality.

  When the Levellers talked about representation and suffrage, they meant for the English. But some among them had genuine sympathy for the people of all the kingdoms, even for the feared Irish. William Walwyn, one of the Levellers’ most active pamphleteers, is supposed to have said that ‘the Irish did no more but what we would have done our selves, if it had been our case … That they were a better-natured people than we … why should they not enjoy the liberty of their consciences?’ Common sense is always something that has to be worked for strenuously when the subject is Ireland. The book that reported Walwyn’s words thought it likely to damn him in everyone’s eyes. How could anyone say such things? It was an outrage. But did Walwyn really say them? A Leveller leaflet, now lost, entitled Certain queries propounded to the consideration of those who are intended for the service of Ireland asked some very pertinent questions:

  Whether Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, William Duke of Normandy [the usual radical villain] or any other the great conquerers of the world, were any other than so many great and lawless thieves; and whether it be not as unjust to take our Neighbouring Nations Lands, and liberties from them, as our neighbour’s goods of our own nation?

  Whether the condition of the conquered be not Ireland, and the condition of the conquerers be not England, and Ireland unjustly termed rebels, and their cause just, and England a thieving usurping tyranny, and their cause altogether unjust, being against God and nature?