by Simon Schama
If this was not an atheistic answer, it was a shockingly amoral and impious one. And it was an affront to royalists because, in the aftermath of the death of Charles I, all they had was piety. Hobbes mocked ‘immaterial’ things. But for the devoutly loyal, the immaterial presence of the king was their solace and their hope, and they clung with desperate consolation to any and every purported relic that came their way: to little pieces of brown cloth said to be stained with the blood of the royal martyr; to the ribbon-bound locks of hair sworn to have come from the decapitated head. Above all they hung on the every last word of Charles, collected in the Eikon Basilike, the book of his meditations. Despite the attempts of the Commonwealth to suppress it, ‘The King’s Book’ was an immediate publishing sensation. No fewer than thirty-five editions (plus an extra twenty-five for unvanquished Ireland) appeared in 1649 alone, the first just a week after the beheading. In March 1649 an especially popular expanded edition, complete with the king’s prayers and his speech on the scaffold, was made available. Charles’s posthumous campaign of persuasion was perhaps the most successful he ever waged. Dead, he seemed more ubiquitous and materially present in England, Scotland and Ireland than he had ever been when he was alive. And this was exactly what Charles had intended. For although the editorial genius behind his book was the clergyman Dr John Gauden, Charles had taken enormous pains to present himself (like his grandmother Mary) as a martyr for the Church (in this case the Church of England).
The Eikon Basilike was designed as the king’s spiritual legacy, the gospel according to St Charles, in sure and pious hope of the resurrection of the monarchy. Complicated (but to contemporaries intelligible) Christian symbolism dominated the frontispiece designed by William Marshall, engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar and obviously in tune with the king’s presentation of his posterity. Its themes were consolatory: comfort for the bereft, steadfastness in turmoil, light in the darkness. Palm trees the trees thought never to die and thus the ancient emblems of the resurrection – continue to grow, even under the weight of royal virtue, while the rock of faith (also an emblem of the true Church) remains immovable in the storm-tossed sea. The grace bestowed on the king-martyr was represented as an illumination, the reception of light. Out of the murky skies a shaft of sublime light strikes the head of the kneeling king and imbues him with vision. Blessed with celestial sight he is able, as his parting words promise, to leave his corruptible, earthly crown at his feet and behold his reward, the heavenly crown of glory, radiant with stars.
By the end of the first year of the Commonwealth, ‘The King’s Book’ was everywhere, showing up like an irrepressible phantom, even in miniature editions designed for concealment. Its undeniable popularity disconcerted the stewards of the new state whose own sense of legitimacy depended on their conviction that it was they who represented the ‘honest’ and ‘godly’ kind of people. Apparently there were more of their countrymen enslaved to the old despotism than they had anticipated. Royalist newspapers like John Crouch’s scabrous weekly The Man in the Moon ‘shone its light’ on the devilish Commonwealth, while the Man’s dog, Towzer, shamelessly lifted his leg on proclamations of the Rump Parliament. Something had to be done to counter these scandalous influences. So John Milton, already established as a dedicated propagandist for parliament, was mobilized to enlighten the deluded. Milton was fast losing his own sight. His greatest works – Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes – would be the masterpieces of his long years of blindness and defeat. He had published a volume of poetry in 1645 and thought of prose writing as merely ‘the work of my left hand’. But he also thought of himself in the classical tradition of virtuous republicans such as Cicero who had laid aside ‘idle’ pursuits to place their eloquence at the service of the state. With his own vision dimming, Milton would none the less be the physician of the ‘blind afflictions’ of the common people, the kind of myopia that made them hanker, sentimentally, for the late, unregretted tyrant.
So in February 1649, in the midst of the royalist hagiography, Milton published the essay that brought him to the attention of the beleaguered leaders of the Commonwealth, not least Oliver Cromwell, for whom Milton made no secret of his ardent admiration. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates went unerringly to the vacuum-anxiety, attacking the parliamentarians who had become queasy or even indignant at the king’s trial and punishment, beginning to ‘swerve and almost shiver . . . as if they were newly enter’d into a great sin . . . when the Commonwealth nigh perishes for want of deeds in substance, don with just and faithfull expedition’. Why, if they now flinched from its proper and legal outcome, had they embarked on the resistance against the king in the first place? Could they not see that by resorting to arms, the king had unilaterally torn up the contract with his subjects: the bedrock on which his authority rested. When he had raised his standard at Nottingham he had dethroned himself. God and parliament had merely affirmed that fall from grace by his defeat. For Milton there was no vacuum of authority to lose sleep over. It had always been lodged in the sovereign people whose conditionally appointed executive the king had been. Once stripped of that shared and limited power, Charles Stuart had to be judged for his crimes like any other felon. To accept his assertion that only God could judge him was a dangerous absurdity, since it put in question his earthly accountability for any laws or treaties he signed or promises he forswore (including his coronation oaths).
Historically, this was entirely back to front. The war had begun in 1642 not to remove Charles but to constrain him. The ‘people’ had not existed as a party to the conflict except through their representatives in parliament. But everything had changed in the brutal second civil war, the war of 1648, which had indeed turned into a life-or-death struggle, at least to Cromwell, who treated Milton’s publication like the job application it more or less was. The poet duly became secretary of foreign tongues to the Council, responsible for translating Latin and European documents into English and vice versa. So it was as a dependable attack propagandist that, in October 1649, Milton took his polemical sledgehammer to the Elkon Basilike. His Eikonoklastes, ‘The Image Breaker’ (1649), took the carefully manufactured image of sanctity apart, extracting from the book the passages he thought most fraudulently self-serving. But chopping up ‘The King’s Book’ proved untidier work than chopping up the king, and not much more popular. Milton later confessed that this was a job he had been told to do, which may account for the hectoring manner of its tone and style, alternating between needling, posthumous interrogations (as if Milton regretted not having sat himself on the court which had judged Charles) and bursts of epic denunciation. To Charles’s famous comments in the House of Commons that ‘the birds have flown’, Milton added images which turned the king into a carrion carnivore feeding off the carcasses of the free: ‘If some Vultur in the Mountains could have open’d his beak intelligibly and spoke, what fitter words could he have utter’d at the loss of his prey?’
Milton’s invective may have been more persuasive than his political theory. For his daringly advanced argument, that the authority of governments was based on popular consent and that they were at all times beholden to, and limited by, the will of the sovereign people, left wide open the problem of how the people were supposed to exercise their rediscovered majesty and in whom they could safely put their trust? Parliament, of course, ought to have been the answer. But to many among the traditional governing class – even those who had fought under its flag – the purged, single-chamber assembly of 1649, that came to be known derisively as ‘the Rump’, bore no resemblance at all to the representative institution that had taken to the field in defence of the nation’s liberties in 1642. Those who had been ‘excluded’ in 1648 for their known opposition to the trial of the king never regarded the Rump and its executive Council of State as anything more than an illegitimate usurping power.
Attacks on the presumption of the Rump Parliament and its councillors to fill the void left by the defunct monarchy came from those who thought it was not nearl
y bold enough, as well as from those who questioned its audacity. For the hottest Protestants, free to speak their minds in the void left by bishopless England, the only proper successor to King Charles was King Jesus. Prophecies abounded that a new millennium was at hand, and that the destruction of Antichrist and the coming of the Last Days were imminent. Combing through the books of Daniel and Revelation, the most fervent declared that the Four Monarchies – of Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome – would now be succeeded by a Fifth: the reign of the godly, the visible saints. To those gripped by this ecstatic fervour, the execution of the king had not just been a political act but a sign from God that he had indeed chosen England as his appointed instrument for a universal redemption. And the freshly sanctified country would look like no other realm, for its mighty would be laid low and its humble raised up. Under the rule of the saints ‘no creature comfort, no outward blessing’ would be denied.
For the Fifth Monarchists and a multitude of other equally fervent sects, the emptiness left by the dethroned king was not a void at all but the antechamber to glory. Their preachers and prophets said so in the streets and to rapt congregations of apprentices and artisans. But the message resonated with special force in the army where sabres had been honed by the fire of sermons. The army remained, as it had been since 1647, the dominant institution in the country, for although royalism had been defeated in England, it was very much alive elsewhere in the islands. On learning the news of Charles’s execution, the Presbyterian regime in Scotland had immediately declared his son King Charles II of England and Scotland. In Ireland, not only had the Catholic confederacy not been defeated, it was now reinforced by the explicitly royalist army of the Duke of Ormonde. And since over the past decade the outcome of power struggles in England had been determined by events in Scotland and Ireland, it was impossible for the military to let its guard down and be lulled into a fool’s peace.
So England remained an armed camp, a place of troopers and horses and armourers and arsenals; an occupied country in all but name, where law might as easily be delivered on the point of a sword as in the magistrates’ court. It was an army, moreover, which had changed almost out of all recognition in the course of a decade. The officer corps, especially at the junior level, was younger, less traditionally educated, drawn from lower down the social scale and passionately religious. Since something like 70 per cent of artisans – shoemakers, weavers, coopers, tanners and so on – could read, the rank and file had a political awareness of its destiny and that of the country, and of their own part in shaping it, that was absolutely new in England. In the autumn of 1647, each regiment had elected two Agitators to represent it at the army Council and they had the audacity to debate with Cromwell and Ireton at Putney on the future of the country’s political and social institutions. Their grievances with parliament over arrears of pay and pensions had likely been in part inspired by Leveller writers and orators like John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn into a crusade to transform England into something which, if not quite a representative democracy, was none the less shockingly radical by seventeenth-century standards. Under the Leveller proposals, the franchise would go to all male householders over the age of twenty-one. Parliaments would be annual and members debarred from sitting consecutive terms. Tithes supporting the clergy and excise taxes on food would be abolished, and the law would be simplified and made accessible to the whole people.
As far as Lilburne and his fellow-Levellers were concerned, they were not asking for the moon, just the ‘free-born’ natural rights which Anglo-Saxons had apparently enjoyed before being crushed beneath the Norman yoke, rights which had only been partly restored by Magna Carta. Twenty to thirty per cent of adult males in England in fact already had the vote, and once the categories that the Levellers continued to exclude (servants, apprentices and paupers) were subtracted they could reasonably argue that they were merely extending to the rest of the country what was already de facto household suffrage in towns like Cambridge and Exeter. For the most part, Walwyn, Overton and Lilburne were at pains to distance themselves from any imputation of social egalitarianism. The label of ‘Leveller’ had originally been a hostile accusation. When they called their newspaper The Moderate there was no irony intended. They believed in rank, they insisted. They believed in orderly government.
All the same, they could hardly avoid the impression that they were radicals since it was unquestionably true. If they did not want to see a great social levelling, they did want some sort of attention to the just complaints of the poor. The Levellers were trying to make more fortunate citizens see that these starvelings were not the armies of travelling beggars that haunted the imaginations of constables and magistrates, and which could be whipped out of sight and out of mind. The new poor were often settled folk – agricultural labourers and artisans, or even tenant farmers – who had been distressed or made destitute by the disruptions of the war, their fields burned and their carts and animals requisitioned (in other words stolen) for the troops. The abolition of the tithe was meant to help the tenant farmers, but the Levellers also wanted the Commonwealth government to initiate some sort of sustained programme of relief for the needy rather than abandon them to the Elizabethan poor laws. Even more daringly, they argued that those immediately above pauperdom should be considered active members of political society. At the Putney Debates the naval officer and MP Colonel Thomas Rainborough declared that ‘The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he,’ and insisted that no man should have to live under laws to which he had not personally given his own express consent.
This was an argument of genuinely revolutionary boldness and it appalled the officers whom Lilburne assailed as the ‘grandees’ of the army – Ireton, Fairfax and Cromwell. They came to believe that the Levellers and their allies in the army were hell-bent on subverting both the godly discipline of the troops and, for that matter, the entire social and political order. Against Rainborough’s literal interpretation of the sovereignty of the people, Ireton argued the sovereignty of property: ‘no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom . . . that hath not a permanent fixed interest . . . and those persons together are properly the represented of this kingdom.’ In other words, a man’s estate counted when it came to the vote. A parliament stuffed with lawyers, moreover, was unlikely to feel warmly about the Levellers’ proposals to democratize the law. Oliver Cromwell’s own attitude to the importance of social rank was best summed up in his later dictum: ‘A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman. That is a good interest of the nation and a great one.’
Bitter enemies though they became, Oliver Cromwell and John Lilburne none the less shared a history. Lilburne, who like Cromwell came from a family of county gentry, was always one of those restless souls, easier to recognize in the nineteenth than the seventeenth century, who seem destined to be outsiders. In his twenties he had been arrested for circulating pamphlets attacking Laud and the bishops, and his savage sentence in 1637 had been one of the causes célèbres which helped make the Star Chamber notorious. Lilburne had been flogged through the streets of London from the Fleet to Palace Yard, then set in the pillory (from which he continued to harangue the crowds) and finally incarcerated in the Tower of London for more than two years in conditions of brutal deprivation and restraint. It had been Cromwell, in fact, who had brought Lilburne’s plight to the attention of the Long Parliament and got his release. Commissioned as a captain in the regiment of Lord Brooke, Lilburne was captured by Prince Rupert’s soldiers in the rout at Brentford and was subjected to an exemplary trial for high treason at Oxford. Had not parliament made it clear it would exact retribution on its own royalist prisoners, he would have been executed then and there. For the bravery of his demeanour during the trial the Earl of Essex offered Lilburne £300, a sum his chronically indebted family could hardly afford to turn down. But, of course, Lilburne did just that, announcing he would ‘rather fight for eightpence a day until the
liberties and peace of England was settled’. As an officer in the Eastern Association he would certainly have encountered Cromwell, and he made no secret of sharing Oliver’s dim view of the Earl of Manchester’s capacity for command. Shot through the arm at Wakefield, repeatedly robbed and plundered and seldom paid, Lilburne was in a sorry enough plight in 1645 for Cromwell to write to the Commons recommending he receive the special pension he had been voted on account of his treatment by the Star Chamber, but which had failed to materialize.
This, however, was as far as their comradeship went. Cromwell raised no objection to Lilburne’s imprisonment twice in 1646, first in Newgate, then in the Tower where he was committed by the House of Lords for accusing the peers of, among other things, ‘Tyranny, Usurpation, Perjury, Injustice and Breach of Trust in them reposed’. It didn’t help that when Lilburne appeared before the Lords, he refused to take off his hat, which was taken (as intended) as a refusal to acknowledge their right to try a ‘freeborn Englishman’. In Newgate he barricaded himself in his cell and stuck his fingers in his ears to avoid hearing the charges against him. It was two more years before Lilburne was finally released. But nothing, not even being deprived of writing materials, seemed to be able to gag him as pamphlet after pamphlet somehow issued from the Tower and into the streets, apprentice shops, garrisons and Baptist churches. During 1647 the Levellers began to mobilize mass petitions, often delivered by noisy crowds wearing the Leveller token of a sea-green ribbon in their hats. Cromwell was in no doubt at all that Leveller agitations, with their demands for direct political representation, were undermining military discipline. After the high command had forbidden a ‘general rendezvous’ of the army, two regiments none the less showed up at Corkbush Fields near Ware in Hertfordshire to hear the Leveller Agitators, carrying their literature. The papers and green ribbons were ripped from their hats, the meeting broken up at sword point, and one mutineer shot.