B. You have read, that when Hercules fighting with the Hydra, had cut off any one of his many heads, there still arose two other heads in its place; and yet at last he cut them off all.
A. The story is told false. For Hercules at first did not cut off those heads, but bought them off; and afterwards, when he saw it did him no good, then he cut them off, and got the victory.
The rising of Prentises and Sea-men, Mayday, 1640. Thomason Tracts E116/49. By permission of the British Library.
The king would not in the end “get the victory” because, as some said, he did not deploy sufficient violence and terror against the hydra. Strafford advised hanging some aldermen who refused to loan Charles money; instead, two young rioters were hanged, one after being tortured on the rack, the last time the device was used in England.58 After Charles I was beheaded at Whitehall on January 30, 1649, Anthony Ascham wrote Of the Confusions and Revolutions in Government (1649), reminding all of the need for a new Hercules “to tame Monsters.” Thus was the role of Oliver Cromwell and the revolutionary bourgeoisie defined. Their task was to turn the many-headed hydra back into hewers of wood and drawers of water.
CHAPTER THREE
“A Blackymore Maide Named Francis”
Soon fugitives will come and tell you their news by word
of mouth. At once you will recover the power of speech
and speak with the fugitives; you will no longer be dumb.
—Ezekiel 24:26–27
I will pour out my spirit in those days even upon slaves and slave-girls.
—Joel 2:29
. . . If de fust woman God ever made was strong enough to
turn de world upside down all her one lone, all dese togeder
ought to be able to turn it back and git it right side up again.
—Sojourner Truth (1851)
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION broke out in 1640. At first the conflict appeared to be among the kingdoms of Scotland, Ireland, and England, a contest for regional dominance and religious conformity. It was not long, however, before Parliament asserted its rights and powers against the personal and absolute rule of Charles I, introducing the slogan “No taxation without representation” and expanding the writ of habeas corpus as an instrument of individual freedom against arbitrary imprisonment. Civil war pitted king (Cavaliers) against Parliament (Roundheads). The creation of the New Model Army in 1645 resulted in a series of military victories for the parliamentary side. The increasingly successful revolutionaries did away with censorship of the press, abolished repressive courts such as the Star Chamber (where Bacon had once ruled), and executed King Charles I by decapitation in January 1649. They then dissolved the monarchy and the House of Lords and declared a republic.
Oliver Cromwell and the militant Puritans led the revolutionary forces. The Atlantic merchants, lesser gentry, and nascent industrialists who tended to back Cromwell all gained much from the economic changes encouraged by the state. The Navigation Acts protected British trade and shipping; agricultural enclosures privatized property; industrial legislation removed production from paternal restrictions on profiteering; and financial alterations in the stock market and funded debt promoted speculative capitalism. English merchants moved decisively toward the African slave trade as sugar plantations, imported from Brazil, expanded throughout the West Indies. In making their revolution, Cromwell and his propertied allies had to rely upon the radical voices of the many-headed hydra—the Levellers and the Diggers, the soldiers and sailors, the urban rioters and rural commoners—which proved to have an agenda of their own. Christopher Hill summarized the revolutionary era as a “great overturning, questioning, revaluing of everything in England”; H. N. Brailsford stated simply, “What was at stake was the ownership of England.”1 The ideas of the radicals were eventually suppressed by Cromwell and his ilk, but they were nonetheless formative, in their own day and later.2
Some of the more revolutionary notions of the day may be best illustrated by an extraordinary text about a woman named Francis, a “blackymore maide” who, as a member of a radical religious congregation in Bristol during the 1640s, provided leadership especially to the women of that congregation. The text was written by a church elder, Edward Terrill, which means that ours cannot be a simple story about Francis; it must also necessarily be a tale about the teller of it. She was black; he was white. She was a woman; he was a man. She was a sister in the congregation; he was an elder of the church. She was a servant; he was a master. Underlying these familiar oppositions was a basic antinomy: she lived and died during the revolution of the 1640s, while he came of age in the 1640s but thrived during the counterrevolution after the 1660s. The story of Francis and Terrill helps to illuminate the dynamics of race, class, and gender in the English Revolution and to show how the radical voices were ultimately silenced.3 The outcome of the English Revolution might have been dramatically altered: the commons might have been preserved; values other than those of market society and commodity production might have triumphed; work might not have been seen as the condition of human salvation; patriarchy in the family might not have been saved, nor the labor of women devalued; torture and terror might not have survived in the law and its practice; popular assemblies might have proliferated and become open; mutual subsistence rather than individual accumulation might have become the basis of economic activity; and divisions between master and slave might have been abolished.
Edward Terrill was just a boy when the revolutionary wars erupted. Born in Almondsbury in 1634, he moved to Bristol in 1640 and was apprenticed to a scrivener in 1645. He was “convinced” by a religious experience in 1654 and baptized by immersion in 1658. In partnership with Thomas Ellis, a sugar trader who provided Broadmead Church with financial support, Terrill prospered, and he soon became an elder of the church. Meanwhile, the king, now Charles II, was restored to the throne in 1660, and a period of repression ensued. Terrill and the Broadmead Baptist Church (as it was called after the Restoration) suffered under the Corporation Act (1661), the Act of Uniformity (1662), and the Test Act (1673), which required all urban officials, all religious ministers, and all government officers to be communicants of the Church of England; they suffered further under the Conventicle Act (1664), prohibiting nonconformist worship even in private houses, and the Five Mile Act (1665), banning nonconformist ministers from living within five miles of a town.4
During this time of trial and persecution, Terrill wisely began to keep what came to be known as the “waste book,” subsequently published as The Records of a Church of Christ in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–1687, a collection compiled between 1672 and 1678.5 The narrative is a composite document that includes oral history that Terrill recorded in conversation with Dorothy Hazzard, the founder of the congregation to which both Francis and Terrill belonged; selections from another manuscript notebook that is now lost to us; and finally, the author’s own rewriting of history, prompted by Restoration repression.6 Here is what Terrill had to say about Francis:
By the goodness of God they had one Memmorable member aded unto them namely a Blackymore maide named Francis (a servant to one that lived upon ye Back of Bristoll) which thing is somewhat rare in our dayes and Nation, to have an Ethyopian or Blackmore to be truly Convinced of Sin; and of their lost State without ye Redeemer and to be truly Converted to ye Lord Jesus Christ, as she was: which by her profession or declaration at ye time of her reception: together with her Sincere Conversation; she gave greate ground for Charity to believe she was truly brought over to Christ, for this poor Æthiopian’s soule savoured much of God, and she walked very humble and blamelesse in her Conversation, to her end; and when she was upon her death bed: She sent a Remarkable Exhortation, unto ye whole Church with whom she walked, as her last request unto them: which argued her holy, childlike fear of ye Lord; and how precious the Lord was to her Soule; as was observed by the manner of her Expressing it. Which was this, one of the Sisters of ye Congregation coming to visit her, in her Sicknesse, She solemnly took her leav
e of her, as to this world: and pray’d ye Sister, to remember her to ye whole Congregation, and tell them, that she did Begg every soule, To take heed that they did lett The glory of God to be dear unto them a word meet for ye Church ever to remember; and for every particular member to observe, that they doe not loose ye glory of God in their families, neighbourhoods or places where God casts them: it being ye dyeing words of a Blackmoore, fit for a White heart to store. After which this Æthiopian yielded up ye Spirit to Jesus that redeemed her and was Honourably Interred being carryed by ye Elders, & ye chiefest of note of ye Brethren in ye Congregation (Devout men bearing her) to ye grave, where she must rest untill our Lord doth come who will bring his Saints with him. By this in our days, we may see, Experimentally, that Scripture made good, , that is God is no respecter of faces: But among all nations, &c. Acts 10: 34:35.
This is all Terrill wrote about Francis—a fragment, it might be thought. The absence of more information means that we cannot treat her in a conventionally biographical way. Alternately, we may consider her in the context of an ensemble of social relations, four of which stand out as formative. She was a “servant” at a time when that term suggested a hewer of wood and drawer of water, both in the specific tasks of her job description and in the lowly, defenseless status accorded her. She was a “blackymore” with that word’s social and religious connotations of colonialism. She was a sister in a gathered congregation recently organized by and for women. She was a Baptist given to liberty and like notions at a moment in history preceding the formation of discrete denominations.
Edward Terrill’s account of “a Blackymore maide named Francis.” “The Records of a Church of Christ in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–1687.” Broadmead Church, Bristol.
SERVANT, BLACKYMORE, SISTER, AND BAPTIST
As a servant, Francis was part of what was probably the biggest occupational category of her era. Agricultural workers were servants, as were domestic producers in the manifold handicrafts and plantation workers in the colonies. Francis, however, was a particular type of servant: a maid. The labors of a maid might include cooking, washing, doing laundry, gathering fuel, bearing water, nursing the sick, or comforting the afflicted, depending on whether she was a chambermaid, kitchen maid, housemaid, maid-of-all-work, or scullery maid.7 The patriarchal family, itself the model of guild and kingly power, depended on such labors. Yet in the seventeenth century the occupation underwent changes with the rise of capitalism. Servants were deliberately excluded from some of the proposals for the democratic franchise, and in the cities their status declined as service became increasingly polarized and feminized.8 “Service is a state of subjection, grounded partly in the curse of God for sin; partly in Civill constitution; it is a miserable condition,” wrote a Cambridge scholar named Paul Bayne in 1643, in a thousand-page treatise on the religious justification for such service. Its basis was obedience: “I say to one, goe, he goeth, come, and he cometh, doe this, hee doth it.”9 The scholar noted that perpetual obedience could not be expected, for once unemployed, servants would try to beard their masters and would cut their throats, too, if they could. We might say Francis was a proletarian: she did not possess any means of production, and the payment for her labor was ambiguous. She was paid by the year and otherwise lived on tips and vails, or customary rights to household items, a practice Bayne denounced as “rolling another mans pigeons to their owne lockers.” Against the ruling-class view of the lowliness of service, a buoyant spiritual tradition arose among servants—a glint of light captured by Professor Nell Painter in her description of the “unseen holy women . . . who performed household labor.”10
Francis, like other servants, was thus poor, and the Bristol congregation understood that. Indeed, Terrill’s text indirectly reflects discussions within the congregation about her poverty. The economic insecurity of the 1640s made the promise of material aid from the independent churches attractive to the poor, but the suppression of conventicles (on the grounds that Protestant gatherings were heretical and illegal) during the Restoration, when Terrill was writing, rendered such obligations difficult to meet. This would explain Terrill’s emphasis on the religious sincerity or authenticity of Francis, his insistence that she had truly been brought over to Christ and was truly convinced of sin.
Terrill tells us that Francis was servant to one who lived upon the Back of Bristol. The Back was a specific location next to the river Avon, along the largest apron space by the wharves where the deep-water vessels—slave ships included—moored. A comparison of maps of the town between 1568 and 1673 shows intensive development. The Back of Bristol put Francis at the interface of the triangular trade and amid the human news of the continents. Exchanges of the North Atlantic—Gaelic, African, American, West Indian, and Dutch voices—would have been in her ear. Her eye would have spied the labor markets of men, women, and children; her soul, their spirits. Bristol was then England’s third-largest town (with twelve thousand residents) and second-largest port. There was a wealthy mercantile elite at the top and a class of former foresters and downsized weavers living in extreme poverty at the bottom. In 1640 the established traders of the Society of Merchant Venturers were challenged by a group of younger, aggressive dealers who were deeply involved in free trade across the Atlantic. Labor-market entrepreneurs had transformed the man-trade into a highly profitable business, since 1623 using the Bristol bridewell as a transshipment center of forced labor to the Caribbean. Peter Fryer writes that the “small speculators had their snouts in the trough alongside the big merchants.” Having established a trade in labor as a transatlantic commodity, merchants now began to move into the African slave trade. This would prove to be an important source of wealth by the end of the seventeenth century, but that was by no means clear in the 1640s. Although the Dutch governor at Fort Elmina reported nineteen English ships hovering off the slave coast between 1645 and 1647, English dominance was not yet certain.
The immediate problem of Terrill’s passage about Francis is that while he calls her a memorable member of the congregation, he gives us little to remember her by. He buries her voice in the middle of the paragraph, quoting directly fewer than ten words. As a scrivener, Terrill was a master of the pen, his means of expression; he knew when to use capital letters, how to spell, when to increase the size of letters for emphasis. In general such skills could lead to the profession of chronicler, or to banking, and something of those professions may be found in Terrill. Penmanship led to chronicling the church as well as to profiting from West Indian trade. In this text we note how Terrill emphasizes the ethnicity of Francis, mentioning it explicitly six times and implicitly twice more. He labels the paragraph, in the margin, “Francis, a Black Woman.” He spells blackamoor and Ethiopian inconsistently, suggesting to us that something about the subject made the master scrivener nervous. The passage thus contains a mystery: why the anxiety?
Other black people had lived in Bristol before Francis. The first recorded was Cattelena, who died in 1625. But the city’s numbers were growing as Bristol’s slave traders carried ever larger number of Africans to Barbados, and some back to their own home port. “Blackness” in Francis’s day had contradictory associations. The Geneva Bible (1560) asked, “Can the blacke More change his skin?” (Jeremiah 13:23) and commented that the cloak of hypocrisy should be pulled off, thereby associating blackness with divine truthfulness. The Leveller Sexby, who had the Agreement of the People translated into French, argued at the Putney Debates (where as we will see in the next chapter the common soldiers in 1647 debated the future of England), “We have gone about to wash a blackmoor, to wash him white, which he will not. . . . I think we are going about to set up the power of kings, some part of it, which God will destroy.”11 He thus associated blackness with republicanism. Differences in skin color signified something other than either sincerity or republicanism by the time Terrill wrote, but if we are to understand why the subject provoked anxiety at that later time, there is much else we need to know.
Fr
ancis was a sister and an “Anabaptist” in a group that took shape in the 1630s around Dorothy Hazzard, a seamstress, who gathered a writing-school master, a glover, a house carpenter, a countryman, a butcher, a farrier, and a young minister to worship together.12 They assembled to “cry day and night to the Lord to pluck down the lordly prelates of the time, and the superstitions thereof.” They did not permit bowing at the name of Jesus; they refused to kneel at the Sacrament; and they opposed idolatrous pictures and images.13 Nor did they observe feast days: Hazzard kept her shop open on Christmas Day and sat there sewing in the broad daylight.14 Terrill compared Hazzard to biblical figures such as Priscilla (a Roman who risked her neck for Saint Paul), Ruth (a gleaner who, in return for her loyalty, asked, “May I ask you as a favour not to treat me only as one of your slave-girls?”), and Deborah (who authorized resistance among the drawers of water: “Hark, the sound of the players striking up in the places where the women draw water!” [Judges 5:11]). Hazzard gathered around her pregnant women in need of assistance, traders, and workers, some on their way to New England in search of the simplicity and equality of the primitive first Christians. They formed a new covenant in 1640, “that they would, in ye Strength and assistance of ye Lord, come forth of ye world, and worship ye Lord more purely.” In calling Dorothy Hazzard “a he-goat before the flock” (Jeremiah 50:8), Terrill acknowledged female leadership.15
When war broke out, Dorothy Hazzard was prominent among the two hundred women and girls who defended Bristol’s Frome Gate against the assault of the king’s nephew Prince Rupert, who nonetheless eventually captured the strategic port town and its heavily fortified royal arsenal. Hazzard and her fellow spiritual travelers then took to the roads. At first they sought succor from a Welsh church led by Walter Craddock; then they walked to London, “into a wildernesse state, passing through a Red Sea of Blood by ye wars.” The assembly (as they called themselves) was separate, it was gathered, it was pure, it was militant, but it was not (yet) Baptist. This was the assembly, or gathering, that Francis joined.
The Many-Headed Hydra Page 9