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

by Diane Purkiss

  It went on to propose an Irish Free State, though not toleration for English Catholics. What gave all this urgency was that the Army mutineers were refusing, specifically, to go to Ireland. The Ulster Presbyterians declared for Charles II and moved towards open rebellion, while the Irish Catholics tried for a separate peace. But The English Souldiers Standard, often attributed to Walwyn, advised the Army not to go and settle matters. What’s wrong with negotiation? it asked. John Harris, another Leveller, wrote that Cromwell and Ireton must be possessed; ‘the good soul of Philip the Second is got into them’. The Souldiers Demand, too, was sceptical about the grandees’ motivation:

  What have we to do with Ireland, to fight, and murder a people and nation (for indeed they are set upon cruelty, and murdering poor people, which they glory in) which have done us no harm, only deeper to put our hands in blood with their own? We have waded too far in that crimson stream already of innocent and Christian blood … And if they could but get us once over into Ireland (they think) they have us sure enough: either we shall have our throats cut, or be famished, for they are sure we cannot get back again over the Great Pond.

  Scepticism about the horror stories used to whip up anti-Irish feeling had at last set in. How just was this war? The Souldiers Demand is not a Leveller pamphlet; it expresses doubt about executing Charles: ‘poor simple men’ who had believed they were fighting for liberty are simply deluded. Other publications tried to restore the panicky heat of 1641 by reminding the soldiers of the outrages of a barbarous and bloody people, the murder of women and children. But the attempt to play an anti-popery card was vain; eager arguments for religious toleration had finally begun to impact on anti-Catholic feeling. Overton remarked imaginatively that a Protestant sermon would strike a papist as heretical, while a popish Mass would seem so to a Protestant. One of the most vehement Leveller pamphlets denounced anti-popery: ‘When I think how worse then barbarians the French men dealt with the Waldences, and so did the Spainiards with the Moorians, and how the English hunted the poor Irish: and how Duke d’Alba persecuted the Belgians … When I consider these, and many more cruel changes, and no bettering, but all to establish tyranny in other forms and fashions, then I think O white Devil, O Tyranipocrit, how impious art thou.’

  Henry Parker had tried to get around this kind of argument by claiming that Catholicism was not a religion at all, but an international political conspiracy to conquer Europe. A subtler move was to argue that Irish barbarity required the civilizing influence of the English, so that their conversion to Protestantism could be achieved. Cromwell, too, thought of the Irish as barbarous: ‘they will make this the most miserable people in the earth, for all the world knows their barbarism – not of any religion, almost nay of them, but in a manner as bad as papists’. It would have been well for the three kingdoms if the voices of toleration had been heard. But for others, toleration was far less important than retaliation. Cromwell went to Ireland with their voices ringing in his ears.

  The Levellers had their limits. One of them was the question of women’s political rights. The activities of Elizabeth Lilburne and Mary Overton must be understood in the context of women’s role in politics. It is true that women could be citizens in the sense of inhabitants of the land, but they could not defend the state in arms, so they were excluded from one of the most powerful – and most levelling – definitions of citizenship. Women could, however, be subjects of the Crown, and could petition the monarch, or Parliament, and they could and did participate in informal, unlicensed protest.

  It was possible for a woman to live through the war years without ever smelling powder. However, in other locations – sometimes just up the road – there could be long-felt repercussions. Women did do war work on occasion: in Coventry they filled in quarries ‘that they might not shelter the enemy’. And we’ve seen how women were crucial at Turnham Green. Others nursed the wounded, or were camp-followers, cooking and washing for their men. Even more dramatically, as we have seen, women like Brilliana Harley commanded siege defences. Still others acted as spies, intelligence-gatherers; a woman known only as ‘Mary the scout’ was rewarded by Fairfax himself after the fall of Taunton, and we have met Parliament Joan. Other women were involved in political intrigue: Ann Fanshawe, Anne Halkett, Henrietta Maria and Lucy Hay amongst them. Some women, too, had the experience of seeing their houses despoiled, their husbands and sons killed, their bedlinen burned, their children hungry. Some were stripped, others raped during sacks of towns. The women cooking dinner for their husbands at Naseby probably had no idea why they were being slaughtered. Women had to fight for pensions, for subsistence. They had to take on men’s work in farms and businesses. Women got involved in the print trade, as we have seen. Perhaps all these experiences made them feel they had a stake in the commonwealth just as the experience of the New Model Army and its victories gave confidence to its Leveller minority. For in traditional ways, but in larger numbers than ever before, women were active in wartime politics. They began as peace petitioners, and went on to become participants in the excitement and danger of radical politics.

  On 11 September 1648, a group of women staked a claim to the political process not very different from the one articulated by the Leveller men. They had begun to imagine equality through their experiences in Independent churches. Now they translated that vision of entitlement into the political sphere. They told the Commons that:

  since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ, equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the Freedoms of this commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes, as to be thought unworthy to petition or represent our grievances to this honourable house. Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities, contained in the Petition of right, and other the good Laws of the Land?

  But the House of Commons wasn’t ready for women in politics, just as it had not been ready for lower-class men. The Leveller women petitioners were active in April 1649, on behalf of the imprisoned Leveller leaders: ‘We are so over-pressed, so overwhelmed in afflictions, that we are not able to keep in our compass, to be bounded in the custom of our sex, for indeed we confess it is not our custom to address our selves to this house in the public behalf.’ But on 25 April Parliament refused the women’s petition. MPs reacted intolerantly, telling the women that ‘it was not for women to petition; they might stay at home and wash their dishes’. The Journal of the House reported that they had not been answered directly, but had been told through the Serjeant that ‘the matter you petition about, is of a higher concernment than you understand, that the House gave an answer to your Husbands, and therefore that you are desired to go home, and look after your own business, and meddle with your housewifery’. The women went home only when dispersed by troops. Perhaps they did housewifery for ten days or so, but they also found time to meet and write. Then they returned on 5 May with a more strongly worded petition. This used the figure of hungry children already exploited by the Overtons: ‘we are not able to see our children hang upon us, and cry out for bread, and not have the wherewithal to feed them, we had rather die than see that day’. They also used historical women as examples: ‘By the British women this land was delivered from the tyranny of the Danes … And the overthrow of episcopal tyranny in Scotland was first begun by the women of that Nation.’

  They described their contributions to the war effort, too: ‘our money, plate, jewels, rings, bodkins &c. have been offered at your feet’. Their petitions were surprisingly like another kind of women’s petition produced in large numbers by the war, the pleas of the wives of prisoners for their release, and of war widows for financial help. One Cheshire widow, for example, sounded very like the Levellers when she wrote:

  Though I have been in hopes every day to be dispatched, yet such is the hardness of the hearts of men that nothing is brought to perfection as yet, but as soon as it shall please God to put an
end to this miserable bondage and that I may have the money which I have so dearly bought I intend … to return again. Wherefore genteel men I entreat you that you will consider my distressed condition and the great loss I had with you and the great charge [of children] upon my hand and nothing to support them but what was bought with the blood of my dear husband.

  Left alone after the imprisonment of their men, the Leveller women were claiming that it was impossible for them to manage, and thus asking for their men’s return.

  The Royalists thought it was all terribly funny. ‘Hannah Jenks, Ruth Turn-Up, Doll Burn-It and Sister Wagrayle have petitioned the supreme authority for their man John, and Mr Overton … Holofernes Fairfax look to thy head, for Judith is a coming, the women are up in arms, and vow they will tickle your members.’

  No woman’s voice was heard in the Putney debates of October and November 1647. Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he’, but no one had a word to say for ‘the poorest she’. This was in part because freemen – as opposed to slaves or bondmen – were the only ones discussed. As Ireton had said, the dependent couldn’t be relied upon to vote with independence. Though everyone agreed that Englishwomen were born free, they lost their liberty upon marriage.

  The Levellers, men and women, were eventually to be overtaken by events. Said Ireton, ‘If the generality of the people could see the end of the Parliament, [they] would … look for a succession of new Parliaments in the old way and old form of a King again.’ Perhaps it was Ireton’s good luck that he never knew how right he was. The restored government he predicted was to dig up his decomposing corpse and hang it from Tyburn Tree. Thus the man who had fought to preserve what he thought of as tradition became a symbol of its destruction. He died of fever, tired out, in 1651.

  It seemed that ‘primitive’ and Edenic native societies understood what the leading Levellers wanted better than their own countrymen. A Leveller newsbook in The Kingdomes Faithfull and Impartiall Scout described two American Indians displayed in France by merchants as objects of curiosity. But the Indians are not only observed; they also do their own observing, and they are ‘stood amazed’;

  That so many gallant men which seemed to have stout and generous spirits should all stand bare, and be subject to the will and pleasure of a Child [Louis XIV]. Secondly, that some in the city were clad in very rich and costly apparel, and others so extreme poor, that they were ready to famish for hunger; that he conceived them to be all equalised in the balance of nature, and not one to be exalted above another.

  So said A worthy expression of two heathen levellers. Perhaps the New World would be more hospitable to their ideas than the old world had been.

  XXIX Stand Up Now, Stand Up Now: Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers

  If the Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley is remembered at all, it is as a voice crying for liberation in an age that did not understand. The Diggers were not like the Levellers except in their concern for the ordinary men of the British kingdoms. Winstanley was a critic of the economic as well as the political division of the kingdoms: his reading of the Bible, like Trapnel’s, led him to censure the injustice of the rich to the poor. Influenced by the general godly spirit of a return to essentials, he took the Garden of Eden as a model for the way God wanted human affairs to work. He wrote that ‘in the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another.’ He particularly disliked enclosures, the process in which common lands given over to the use of the poor because they were not easy to cultivate – fens, marshes, moors and other uninhabited places – were reclaimed and converted to new private plots. Winstanley wrote: ‘The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.’ But in fact his views were not unique. Long before the war, they had been expressed helplessly by people who had no hope of being heard. In 1629, the cloth industry in Essex was hit hard by a slump in European trade and clothworkers lost their jobs. In the meantime, the price of grain rose, and more and more of it was shipped from the Eastern ports to the Low Countries while people in the streets of Maldon went hungry. The women of the town boarded Flemish ships and took the grain themselves, just enough for their own families. The unrest had been going on since just after Christmas. Bands of men and women armed with staves and pitchforks seized grain that would otherwise be exported. They intended to meet their own needs, then sell the surplus – but at their own price, not the inflated amounts being charged by merchants, and they threatened to kill the factors who might arrange more grain shipments.

  The rioters mostly came from Maldon’s poorest parish, St Mary’s, ‘much overcharged with poor’ most of them were married to men who had to juggle three or four jobs in a vain effort to make ends meet. They were also already known to the law for a number of petty offences: drunkenness and absence from church, trying to keep animals in the streets, assault and violence in the case of Ann Spearman’s husband. Dorothy Berry had been placed in the stocks for six hours at Easter for being drunk. When hauled before the magistrates for the same crime only a few months later, Dorothy was unable to provide surety, but sarcastically offered ‘her dog for one of her sureties and her cat for the other’. Anne Carter was equally willing to use the language of insult against the magistrates, calling one of them ‘a bloodsucker’, and telling another who complained about her absence from church that she would go if he would send round someone to do her work for her. She added that she served God just as well as he did. When a third tried to arrest her husband, John Carter, Anne attacked him with a cudgel and rescued her husband. All this suggests simmering anger that could find expression in the usual early modern language of insult and accusation. Such outbursts became political when they found a suitable cause or grievance, like grain exports and magistrates who favoured foreign merchants.

  The town magistrates decided not to prosecute this time. But things went on getting worse. The cloth trade fell into more severe decline, and the workers, dependent on wages that were repeatedly cut from small beginnings, began to starve: ‘many hundreds of them have no beds to lie, nor food, but from hand to mouth to maintain themselves their wives and children’, recorded a contemporary pamphlet. Even the Venetian ambassador was moved to remark on the probability that many would starve. The workers begged the local authorities for relief, and then addressed the king, telling him that they were forced to sell their beds to buy bread, and to lie in straw. They warned him that ‘many wretched people’ would mutiny if he did nothing. The king made a few sporadic efforts to organize local relief; when nothing came of them in a system never designed to relieve want on this kind of scale, there was a second riot at Burrow Hills. Anne Carter led the mob; illiterate, she hired a local baker, John Gardner, to act as her secretary and had written letters, signing herself Captain and drumming up support. ‘Come, my brave lads of Maldon,’ she cried, Robin Hood-like, ‘I will be your leader, for we will not starve.’

  Once authority had been petitioned and had failed, what was the point of it? Ominously, some of the rioters had attacked the local magnates; Francis Cousen found himself in gaol in Colchester; he too had gathered grain from ships, but had also urged the crowd of poor people to go to the Earl Rivers’s house, ‘saying there was gold and silver enough’. Crowds have memories; did someone recall this eleven years later, when equally angry crowds, differently composed, attacked Lady Rivers?

  Riots – including t
he ones that began the Civil War – were not expressions of panic or loss of control so much as carefully staged and disciplined demonstrations of dissatisfaction. Part of a culture of punishment, shaming, bullying and communal rudeness, they could be violent: some anti-drainage rioters actually stoned the workers, beat them, and even erected mock-gallows on which to hang them. If the king was there, some said, they would kill him too. Rioters often tried threats, blackmail, communal disapproval and bullying before resorting to mass demonstrations. Rhymes and songs, libellous, scabrous, anticipated those that circulated in the Civil War: if they urged people on to protest, they also expressed a rage that could detonate in violence. ‘The corn is so dear’, went a rhyme circulating in Kent in the 1630s, ‘I fear many will starve this year,/ If you see not to this/ Some of you will speed amiss/ Our souls they are dear/ For our bodies have some care/ Before we arise/ Less will suffice.’

  Riots were usually about a small local matter, viewed as a departure from normality, rather than about sweeping changes in Church and state. Food rioters were affirming the right to eat, to buy corn at a price they could afford and not be cheated by middlemen and merchants. These rights were seen not as novel, but as traditional, stemming from the good world, under the old religion, when prices were low, not like now. Protests were often very organized, with demonstrators marching in companies like small armies. In the same way, men and women would riot to defend a right to use common land. In many places freeholders had fewer than five acres of land, while some had only a cottage and garden, so without common rights such smallholders could not survive. There was often a theatrical element – rioters could be led by Captain Alice, a man dressed as a woman, or the Midland Revolt’s Captain Pouch, who claimed to carry in his pouch authority from the king himself to destroy enclosures (actually it contained nothing but a piece of green cheese). Part of this ritual context was a language of insult which included a kind of eat-the-rich rhetoric, ‘for reformation of those late enclosures which made them of the poorest sort ready to pine for want’, and ‘rich men had all in their hands and would starve the poor’. Such statements made each riot into a drama of poor but plucky leaders versus rich evildoers, a drama like The Seven Champions of Christendom or Bevis of Hampden.