LONDON, 1649
If the Masaniello revolt and the Putney Debates of 1647 represented a high point of revolutionary possibility, the downfall began in 1649 with two exemplary executions. One seemed to kill the old regime of monarchy and hierarchy, the other the hope of a new regime based on neither of those. The first was the beheading of King Charles on January 30. A poor woman named Elizabeth Poole, of Abington, had twice advised the General Council of the army that though God “hath a controversie with the great and mighty of the earth,” they should have no “respect of persons” and therefore should not execute the king.28 Many other radicals, Levellers included, also hesitated over the death of the king, but to no avail. An executioner disguised as a sailor decapitated him, and the Cromwellian republic was born in the bloodletting. The execution by firing squad of Robert Lockyer, a soldier, on April 27, originated in the grumblings of unpaid soldiers against what they called the “cutthroat expedition” to Ireland, which escalated into mutiny at Bishopsgate in April. Cromwell, fearing a general rising of “discontented persons, servants, reformadoes [and] beggars,” rode to Bishopsgate with Fairfax to lead the suppression of the mutiny, arresting a number of men, finding five guilty, and condemning Lockyer, a leader among the soldiers, to be shot at Saint Paul’s. When the moment of execution came, Lockyer disdained a blindfold and appealed to his executioners, brother soldiers, to put down their guns. They refused, fired, and killed him. Thousands, wearing green (the color of the Levellers and of Thomas Rainborough), thronged the streets of London at his funeral.
The executions of the king and the soldier came at a time when a portion of the revolutionary movement had begun to challenge capital punishment. The subject had attracted study by Thomas Browne, who in 1646 had published his thoughts concerning the biomechanics of decapitation, suffocation, crucifixion, and illagneation, and the various theatrical effects produced by each.29 The critique offered by soldiers and religious radicals made the same connection that had been drawn in the Putney Debates, between expropriation and slavery. Samuel Chidley, a Leveller and a minister, once commented that if felons transported to America were “sold as slaves,” then “it is a worse slavery, yea, a great tyranny indeed, to take away their lives” by hanging.30
Within a month of the execution of the king, the Council of State received information from Walton-on-Thames concerning Robert Everard, who had come to George’s Hill in Surrey “and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans,” the signature action of the Diggers. The gesture was humble, but the Diggers’ hopes were not, for they saw their commune as a solution to the problems of expropriation, imprisonment, hanging, and slavery, not to mention hunger:
This freedom in planting the common Land, will prevent robbing, stealling, and murdering, and Prisons will not so mightily be filled with Prisoners; and thereby we shall prevent that hart breaking spectacle of seeing so many hanged every Sessions as they are. And surely this imprisoning and hanging of men is the Norman power still, and cannot stand with the freedom. . . . This freedom in the common earth is the poors right by the Law of Creation and equity of the Scriptures, for the earth was not made for a few, but for whole Mankind, for God is no respector of Persons.
Later the Diggers asked,
What need have we of imprisoning, whipping, or hanging Laws, to bring one another into bondage? and we know that none of those that are subject to this righteous law dares arrest or inslave his brother for, or about the objects of the earth, because the earth is made by our Creator to be a common Treasury of livelihood to one equall with another, without respect of person.
By taking direct action to repossess the land and by building about a dozen communes, the Diggers delivered themselves from slavery.31
To the Council of State, Everard’s planting seemed “ridiculous, yet that conflux of people may be a beginning whence things of a greater and more dangerous consequence may grow.” Worried, Lord Fairfax interviewed Everard and Winstanley at Whitehall in April. They refused to remove their hats. Everard echoed the prophecy of Sarah and Dinah when he “said he was of the race of the Jews . . . but now the time of deliverance was at hand, and God would bring his people out of this slavery, and restore them to their freedom in enjoying the fruits and benefits of the Earth.” Winstanley defended himself in court in language that echoed Rainborough’s words at Putney: “I shew by the law of righteousness that the poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man.” Fairfax concluded that the alternative example of the Diggers was too dangerous to escape destruction. He personally led a troop of horse to the most important of the communes, George’s Hill, and drove the commoners off the land, breaking their spades, trampling the crops, and destroying their houses. Among the first acts of the leaders of the young English republic was thus direct military intervention on behalf of private property. They feared that rural commoners and the city proletariat might join forces in the conflux as they had done in Naples.
Winstanley and the Diggers more broadly believed that the death penalty was logically related to the enclosure movement. Kingly power “hedges the weake out of the Earth, and either starves them, or else forces them through poverty to take from others, and then hangs them for so doing.”32 Given that the poor were forced to work beneath subsistence, “this Law that frights people and forces people to obey it by Prisons, Whips, and Gallows, is the very kingdom of the Devil, and Darknesse, which the Creation groans under at this day.” Robert Coster queried “whether the Lords of the mannors, do not hold their Right and Title to the Commons, meerly from the Kings Will . . . and whether the strongest point in their Law for the keeping up their Title, be not, Take him Jaylor?” The author of Tyranipocrit Discovered advanced similar arguments in 1649, and with Atlantic scope. This abolitionist tract denounced the slavery being developed in America, of both poor people and Indians. The idle rich commanded others to labor, the thieving rich commanded others not to steal, and together they made thieves by Act of Parliament and hanged them. Yet God was no respecter of persons.33
Samuel Chidley considered the death penalty an abomination that defiled the land with blood. He petitioned the Lord Mayor in June 1649, announcing that since the penalty is “inhuman, bloody, barbarous, and tyrannical,” capital laws “are no rules for me to walk by.” He also petitioned the Council of State, warning that “the foundations of the earth are out of course.” He visited the Old Bailey, where he “observed that the [inmates] . . . are poor labourers, and such creatures, who stole things of a small value, peradventure, for mere necessity.” The magistrates threw him out. He advised Parliament to lay the ax to the root: “Certainly the law cannot be good, that forceth all men to prefer the meanest thing before the greatest, that is, a little wicked mammon with an idolatrous badge upon it, before a man’s precious life.” In 1652, as lay minister at Christ Church, Newgate, he published A Cry Against a Crying Sin, which was printed in red ink. He tried to nail the book to the Tyburn gallows, but the crowd was too dense, so he was “forced to nail it to the tree, which is upon the bank by the gallows,” where it was read by many. An anonymous writer joined Chidley in pointing the finger of shame: “For man to inclose all Lands and Creatures from his kind, is utterly unnatural, wicked, and treacherous. . . . Mark this you great Cormudgings, you hang a man for stealing for his wants, when you your selves have stole from your fellow Brethren all Lands, Creatures, &c.”34
Following the regicide, the Levellers sought to ally with, in turn, the rural poor, the urban proletariat, and finally the soldiers in the army, but the execution of Robert Lockyer indicated the beginning of their end. Cromwell thumped the table and explained to Fairfax, “I tell you sir, you have no other way to deal with these men [the Levellers] but to break them in pieces,” for “if you do not break them they will break you.” Two weeks later the military power of the Levellers was tested at Burford. Levellers were rounded up and imprisoned, assassinated, executed, and exiled, but their ideas could not be contained. Despite nea
r famine conditions, the London bourgeoisie gloated with a day of feasting. Abiezer Coppe objected in the most powerful single rant of class-war jubilee of the time, called A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to All the Great Ones. Levellers “were the cause of many turbulent commotions, which like Hydra’s heads, one being lopped, others instantly sprouted up,” as was observed as late as 1656.35 So the killing of Lockyer, while not a martyrdom on the royal scale, helped to assure the survival of the ideas of the Levellers:
Their self-will is their law, stand up now, stand up now,
Their self will is their law, stand up now.
Since tyranny came in they count it now no sin
To make a gaol a gin, to starve poor men therein.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The gentry are all round, standup now, standup now,
The gentry are all round, stand up now,
The gentry are all round, on each side they are found,
This wisdom’s so profound, to cheat us of our ground.
Stand up now, stand up now.
“The Digger’s Song” ended on a Francis note: “Glory here, Diggers all.” Once the antinomian challenge had been defeated, the way was open to conquer Ireland, to wage war against the Dutch and the Spanish, to stabilize Barbados, to seize Jamaica, and to establish slavery more broadly than ever by linking West Africa with the Caribbean.
IRELAND, 1649–1651
On March 29, 1649, the day after the Leveller leadership had been crushed by the arrest of John Lilburne, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton, Cromwell agreed to take charge of the expedition to conquer Ireland. Thus commenced “the Via Dolorosa of the Irish,” as James Connolly wrote, and, its historical corollary, the beginnings of the “green Atlantic.”36 Once Cromwell’s Irish expedition had been announced, opposition to it grew quickly throughout the army in April and May. The author of The English Soldiers’ Standard warned that the officers intended to enslave the soldiers and advised the election of new agitators. The newsbook Mercurius Militaris, published by John Harriss, explained that “this Irish Design” was meant “to keep this nation in slavery.” The Levellers, for their part, circulated the mildly titled Certain Queries Propounded to the Consideration of such as were Intended of the Service of Ireland, which posed questions far from mild: “Whether Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, William Duke of Normandie, or anie other the great Conquerors of the world, were anie other then so manie great and lawless thievs?” The Levellers knew the Irish expedition was a diversion: “If they could but get us once over into Ireland (they thinke) they have us sure enough: either we shall have our throats cut, or be famished, for they are sure we can never get back againe over the Great Pond.” A Leveller leaflet questioned the right of Englishmen “to deprive a people of the land God and nature has given them and impose laws without their consent.” The author wondered whether the Irish were not justified “in all that they have done . . . to preserve and deliver themselves from the usurpations of the English,” and declared that it was the duty of every honest man to oppose Cromwell’s campaign. While open resistance was quelled, thousands deserted.37
Cromwell departed Bristol in July for Dublin. His destination was Drogheda, where massacre was dealt out. Cromwell described his approach: “Every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped off for the Barbadoes.”38 Cromwell estimated that 2,100 were killed; Hugh Peter placed the number at 3,552. Two years later Ireton, the defender of property in the Putney Debates, laid siege to Limerick on the Shannon. “Ireton was content to rest his hopes mainly on famine and on the plague which raged within the walls,” writes one historian, but we must add that he had the heavy guns and the gallows with which to enforce the famine. “One old man desired to be hanged instead of his daughter, ‘but that,’ says Ludlow, ‘was refused, and he with the rest driven back to town.’ A gibbet was then raised in sight of the walls, upon which condemned criminals were hanged, and this stopped the exodus.” Thousands perished during the siege, including Ireton himself, who caught cold and died.39 According to Gardiner, a new capital-punishment statute for Ireland put eighty thousand at risk of execution. Sir John Davis had argued a generation earlier that Ireland was barbarous precisely because, unlike other, well-governed kingdoms and commonweals, it did not have a death penalty.40
Cromwell next turned his attention to seizing land, in order to pay the soldiers and the investors in Adventures for Lands in Ireland (including, at two hundred pounds apiece, Thomas and William Rainborough).41 The Army Council debated whether “to eradicate the Natives” or merely “to divest them of their Estates.”42 A few years later, in 1652, the preamble of the Act for the Settlement of Ireland decided the issue: the landlord system was installed. It was “not the intention of parliament to extirpate that whole nation,” for the land could not be cultivated “without the help of the natives.” Fixed enclosures replaced open fields, single dispersed farms replaced nucleated settlements or the clachan, commercial tillage and an increase in agricultural labor replaced subsistence strips and environmental egalitarianism. This ruthless transfer of the land of Ireland to an immigrant landlord class was accompanied by a major cadastral mapping enterprise, Sir William Petty’s Down survey of the 1650s, which put Ireland “down” on paper.43 And it brought a wave of “rude persons in the country, [by] whom [the landlords] might expect often to be crossed and opposed,” also known as tories, a name that was first officially applied in 1647 to masterless men living a life of brigandage.
A “poore Souldier” in the New Model Army in Ireland. The humble Petition of us the Parliaments poore Souldiers in the Army of Ireland (1647).
The labor of the dispossessed Irish would now be deployed on the estates of English masters, not only in Ireland but across the Atlantic. Cromwell sent thousands of Irish to Jamaica.44 This was not a wholly new experience, as indicated by Hugh O’Neill on the eve of the defeat at Kinsale in 1601: “We Irishmen are exiled and made bond-slaves and servitors to a strange and foreign prince.” A thousand Irish slaves had been sold to Sweden in 1610.45 Sir William Petty estimated that one sixth of the adult males, some thirty-four thousand men, were shipped out of Ireland and sold abroad in the aftermath of the 1649 conquest. By 1660 there were at least twelve thousand Irish workers in the West Indies, and nine years later, eight thousand in Barbados alone. “Though we must use force in taking them up, . . . it is not in the least doubted that you may have such numbers of them as you see fit,” wrote Henry Cromwell in response to a request from Jamaica for a thousand Irish girls and a thousand boys. The poet lamented,46
Tribeless, landless, nameless,
Wealthless, hostless, fameless
Wander now thine aimless
Children to and fro.
In addition to the boys and girls and land, knowledge was taken, too. Robert Boyle received huge masses of Irish lands, the profits from which helped to maintain the Royal Society, which also benefited from the trade secrets that Boyle appropriated from the art and mystery of the Irish craftsman. He was impressed, for example, by “a smith, who with a hammer . . . can out of masses of iron, forge great bars or wedges, and make those strong heavy chains, that were employed to load malefactors, and even to secure streets and gates” in order to protect property in Ireland and to produce more of it overseas.47
BARBADOS, 1649
Irishmen were among the conspirators who plotted in 1649 to make themselves freemen and masters of Barbados. The successful cultivation of sugar, brought by the Dutch from Pernambuco, Brazil, to the island in 1640, had intensified the exploitation of plantation workers. Richard Ligon, an eyewitness, believed the conspiracy involved a majority of the servant class, which at the time numbered near ten thousand. He saw the event as a direct response to the cruelty of the masters, which caused the servants to seek freedom or die in the act. They never reached the moment of action, however, as an informer alerted the authorities to their plan. Hundreds were arrested, many tortured, eighteen executed. The leaders were “
so haughty in their resolutions, and so incorrigible, as they were like enough to become actors in a second plot.” Despite the executions, resistance to slavery continued, including a new plot organized by Africans.48
By the late 1640s the masters of Barbados had much wealth to protect from those who had produced it. After visiting the island in August 1645, George Downing wrote, “If you go to Barbados, you shall see a flourishing island, many able men. I believe they have brought this year no less than a thousand Negroes, and the more they buy, the better able they are to buy, for in a year and half, they will earn (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost.” When Richard Ligon first arrived in Bridgetown, in 1647, he counted twenty-two ships in the harbor, “quick stirring and numerous.” The 1651 charter of Barbados noted that the principal source of “wealth of the inhabitants of the island consisteth chiefly in the labour of their servants.” Barbados became England’s wealthiest colony, and “one of the richest Spots of earth under the Sun.”49
Barbados was described as “the dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish. Rogues and whores and such people are those which are generally brought here.” True enough: the first cargo of convicts reached Barbados in 1642. An act of 1652 permitted English magistrates summarily to seize vagrants or beggars and ship them to the plantations. A shipload of prostitutes from the jails of London was transported to Barbados as breeders. Besides these, the island was inhabited by all sorts: English, French, Dutch, Scots, Irish, Spanish Jews, Indians, and Africans. Heinrich von Uchteritz, a German mercenary who fought for Charles Stuart, was sold to a plantation that had “one hundred Christians, one hundred Negroes, and one hundred Indians as slaves.” The Native Americans were mostly Guianese Arawaks, who came to the island early on as free people but were enslaved by 1636. English servants and African slaves arrived in the first English ships in 1627, and the Irish in the 1630s; two thousand per year came from England in the 1640s, and three thousand in the 1650s. They were sometimes sold according to their weight. Many were veterans of the English Revolution—soldiers, “familists”—who became poor planters, propertyless freemen, and indentured servants. Some of them, in antinomian fashion, denied all ordinances. George Fox visited Barbados in 1671 and preached similar notions to “the Blacks, the Taunies, and the Whites.”50 The planters moved against religious radicals suspected of involvement in the conspiracy of 1649 by banishing 122 men.
The Many-Headed Hydra Page 14