A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Outside of the established Church and viewed with suspicion and hostility by conformists and puritans alike were a small number of religious sects, such as the Family of Love, followers of the Dutch mystic, Henrik Niklaes, and its Yorkshire offshoot, the Grindletonians. Members of these sects, though almost certainly innocent of most of the charges of moral turpitude that were thrown at them, had reached the theological conclusion that it was possible for believers to achieve spiritual perfection – that is, to be free from sin – in this life. As we shall see, this form of ‘antinomianism’ (belief in the freedom of believers from the moral law) reached its radical conclusion in the writings of the ‘Ranter’ Laurence Clarkson, who claimed that an individual could only become free from the bondage of sin by acting out supposed vices.11

  Always fragile and contested, the Elizabethan religious settlement began to break apart in the last years of the reign of James I. In the eyes of many British Protestants, the Thirty Years War was part of an apocalyptic conflict between the forces of Christ (Protestantism) and Anti-Christ (the papacy and the Catholic Habsburg emperors). Domestic attacks on James’s pacific foreign policy convinced him that Calvinist critics, including his Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, were politically dangerous, and James began to favour a group of churchmen led by William Laud, whose vision of religion was less overtly anti-papal and placed a reassuringly heavy emphasis upon order and obedience. These changes within the Church accelerated after the accession of Charles I in 1625. Charles strongly favoured the style of worship offered by Laud and his associates, which elevated ceremony above the puritan emphasis on preaching. Laud believed in the ‘beauty of holiness’, the importance of celebrating God through the material fabric of churches, stained glass, altar rails and more elaborate clerical dress, and of separating the sacred from the profane.

  He viewed puritanism as essentially schismatic and regarded virtually all aspects of the social networks established by puritans, such as the establishment of lectureships via voluntary subscriptions, as fundamentally seditious. He was made Bishop of London in 1628, then Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, following the death of the long-sidelined George Abbot. The rise of the Laudian faction was viewed with growing horror and dismay by many English Protestants. Coupled, through Charles’s French queen Henrietta Maria, with the increasing Catholic presence at court, Laudian innovations seemed to indicate that, in the words of the Earl of Bedford, Laud was ‘that little thief put into the window of the church to unlock the door to Popery’.

  Laud’s rigorous campaign against nonconformity was most notoriously evidenced by the brutal punishments meted out first to Alexander Leighton in 1630 and then to William Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton in 1637 for distributing anti-episcopal literature. Leighton was placed in the pillory for two hours in the middle of a snowstorm. His ear was nailed to the pillory before being cut off and he was then whipped thirty-seven times before being branded with the letters S.S. (for ‘sower of sedition’). Prynne, Bastwick and Burton received similarly grisly punishments – this was the second time that Prynne had had his ears trimmed: he had been given the same treatment in 1633 for a work that had denounced female actors as ‘notorious whores’, an unfortunate choice of words, given the Queen’s fondness for acting in court entertainments.

  Laud’s determination to root out puritan sedition had the reverse effect: it radicalised Protestants who had previously seen themselves as orthodox members of the Church of England. For example, Stephen Denison, a lecturer at All-Hallow’s, Thames Street, London, had in 1627 vigorously attacked from the pulpit one John Hetherington, a ‘Familist’ box-maker, and presented him to the Ecclesiastical Court of High Commission for his allegedly heretical views. By the 1630s, however, Denison was himself in trouble with the Laudian authorities for preaching against the religious pictures and stained glass that had been installed in the newly restored St Katherine Creechurch, Aldgate. In 1635, Denison was brought up before the Court of High Commission and suspended from his ministry.12 For some, such as John Cotton of Boston, Lincolnshire, the pressure of Laudian persecution was so severe that it could only be relieved by emigration to the New World. Others, including the Cheshire minister Samuel Eaton, fled to the Dutch Republic.

  It was as part of this campaign against Laudian persecution that two of the leading Levellers, John Lilburne and Richard Overton, first came to prominence. Lilburne, born in Sunderland in 1615 to a minor gentry family of modest means, had been exposed to puritan ideas through his apprenticeship with a London clothier, Thomas Hewson. By 1636, Lilburne’s enthusiasm for the puritan cause saw him regularly visiting Dr John Bastwick in prison, and the following year he was a tearful witness to his friend’s brutal punishment. The cruelty of the Laudian regime catalysed Lilburne’s political awakening. He became heavily involved in printing illicit anti-episcopal tracts, travelling to and from England and the Netherlands to oversee their production and distribution. By 1638, these activities had come to the attention of the authorities and in April of that year, by order of the prerogative court of Star Chamber, Lilburne was flogged all the way from Fleet Prison to Westminster and then placed in the pillory before finally being gaoled. Prefiguring his later pamphlets which dwelt on his many subsequent trials and imprisonments, he was quick to publicise his sufferings in print. In November 1640, through the efforts of a new MP, Oliver Cromwell, Lilburne was released from prison. By now, he had become something of a celebrity: an engraving by George Glover from 1641 depicts a raffishly handsome young man with an aquiline nose, well-trimmed moustache and chiselled cheekbones.

  Richard Overton too began his public career as a key part of the campaign against Laudian ‘prelacy’. His early life remains obscure. He may have been university-educated – a Richard Overton matriculated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1631 – but we cannot be certain that this was the future Leveller.13 Unlike the self-publicist Lilburne, Overton, especially in his early career, hid behind the cloak of anonymity. By 1640, however, he was certainly involved in illicitly printing radical religious works. Recent research has demonstrated that Overton was the leading figure behind the secret ‘Cloppenburg Press’, a printing operation that, before the lifting of ecclesiastical censorship, disseminated radical religious literature, including works by the puritan ‘martyr’ William Prynne. These works, though, went much further than attacks on the Laudian regime: they called for the utter destruction of the repressive state Church, anticipating Overton’s later support for very broad religious toleration.14

  Religious controversy in the pre-civil-war era was clearly deeply divisive, and capable of dissolving other bonds – of kinship, of fealty – that held communities together. Conversely, religious belief could also unite individuals who otherwise existed in very different social worlds: the poor London wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington and Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, were both convinced that Parliament was fighting a war for godly reformation. However, we miss something if we view the English civil war as being caused only by ‘religion’ interpreted in a very narrow sense. The religious struggle was also a political and cultural struggle. The fortunes of England’s Reformation had waxed and waned with the royal succession, from the caesaro-papalism of Henry VIII to the evangelical Protestantism of Edward VI, to the counter-Reformation Catholicism of Mary and the less distinctly Calvinist Protestantism of Elizabeth I. Importantly, this top-down dynastic Reformation was confirmed by parliamentary statute. It was a Reformation legitimised not by popular action or mere royal will, but by the law of the land. In 1642, Parliament justified its resistance to the King on legal as well as religious grounds, as Thomas May, the official historian of the Long Parliament that sat from 1640 from 1649, explained:

  That frequent naming of religion, as if it were the only quarrel, hath caused a great mistake of the question in some … to abuse the parliament’s cause … as, instead of disputing whether the parliament of England lawfully assembled … may by arms defend the religion established by the
same power, together with the laws and liberties of the nation: they make it the question, whether subjects, taken in a general notion, may make war against their king for religion’s sake.15

  May’s point can be illustrated further by looking at some of the constitutional flashpoints of Charles I’s reign. The King’s decision to rule without parliaments after 1629 forced him to rely on a number of ‘fiscal expedients’, based on his prerogative powers as monarch, in order to raise enough revenue to make up the shortfall produced by the loss of parliamentary subsidies. The most notorious of these, and the most financially successful in the short term, was ‘ship money’. A traditional emergency levy on maritime counties that required each county to raise the cost of the hire of one ship, ship money was first levied by Charles in 1634. Controversy over it intensified in October 1636, when it became clear that Charles intended to levy the tax on all counties, and on a regular, not emergency, basis. His right to do this was famously challenged by the wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner John Hampden, who made clear that his stance was based on principle, not financial self-interest, by paying all of his ship-money assessment on his property in the county, bar the sum of twenty shillings. The King finally obtained a legal decision in his favour on 12 June 1638, but the judges ruled for the Crown only by the narrowest possible margin, seven to five.

  The dispute over ship money was more than just an argument over the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’. To understand the core of the controversy we need to look at a speech made by Hampden in Parliament in 1628, eight years before he decided to take his stance. Then, according to contemporary accounts, he had stated that if ‘[the King] be no papist, papists are friends and kindred to him’.16 Hampden was clearly convinced that there was a ‘popish plot’ to alter the government of both Church and state, and that the origins of that conspiracy lay very close to the King himself. He was not alone in his view, and had contacts with the godly peer Viscount Saye and Sele, a fellow ship-money refuser, and the Earl of Bedford. In court, Hampden was represented by Oliver St John, later one of the leading ‘political Independents’ in the Long Parliament, an advocate of religious toleration and close associate of Oliver Cromwell.

  So opposition to Ship Money was based not just on financial self-interest nor on the constitutional principle that taxation could only be levied with parliamentary approval, but also on the belief that if Charles could successfully support himself via fiscal expedients of this kind, he would have no need to call Parliament ever again. And, without Parliament to stop him, there would be nothing to prevent him completing the process already begun by his archbishop, William Laud, in reverting England to ‘Popery’.

  Finance, politics and religion were, then, deeply intertwined. ‘Popery’ itself signified not only the reintroduction of Catholic forms of worship but also its political analogues, the increasing power of the clergy – seen in the elevation of Laud and other bishops to the Privy Council – and the weakening of the authority of representative institutions, especially Parliament.17 The anti-episcopal works circulated by Richard Overton suggested that Charles’s government was not just infected with Popery but was an evil tyranny. As early as 1640, the pamphlets coming from his Cloppenburg Press were suggesting that this tyrannical government could only be stopped by force.

  As the key role of the mere apprentice Lilburne suggests, it was not just Protestant gentlemen such as John Hampden who were engaged in this battle against the forces of Popery. Indeed, if our focus is restricted to Westminster alone, it can appear as if events hung solely on the actions of the great Parliamentarian peers Essex, Warwick, Bedford and Saye and Sele, plus their clients in the Lower House, Hampden, John Pym, Oliver St John and Sir John Clotworthy.18 In fact, this was an analysis of the initial cause of the civil war later favoured by the Levellers, as Overton and William Walwyn explained in A remonstrance of many thousand citizens (1646): ‘This nation and that of Scotland are joined together in a most bloody and consuming war by the waste and policy of a sort of lords in each nation that were malcontents and vexed that the king had advanced others, and not themselves, to the managing of state affairs.’19 However, if our perspective is broadened out to include not only England, but Europe as a whole, these peers appear less impressive figures. A sixteenth-century Italian visitor to England, Giovanni Botero, commented:

  In England the nobility possess few castles or strong places environed with walls and ditches, neither have they jurisdiction over the people. The dignities of dukedoms, marquesses and earldoms are no more but mere titles, which the king bestoweth on whom he pleaseth, and peradventure they possess never a penny of revenue in the place from whence they take their titles.20

  As we have already seen, even before the great aristocratic conflagration of the Wars of the Roses, aristocratic and royal armies had struggled to suppress rebel hosts. From the late fifteenth century onwards, every aristocrat-led rebellion had to depend upon a successful appeal to the commons in order to raise sufficient military strength. As Overton and Walwyn noted, the civil war was ‘a mighty work and [the nobles] were nowise able to effect it themselves’.21 Those appeals had to chime with popular concerns. It was patently not enough simply to expect the commonalty to rise in support of a local magnate out of a residual sense of deference. Increasingly, the gentry and the nobility had to frame their demands for support on the grounds not of their status but of their commitment to Protestantism, to their locality and to the nation. Even the King was forced to engage in this sort of bargaining, in August 1642 promising Derbyshire miners extensive financial and legal concessions in return for their allegiance.22 In Yorkshire, the Fairfax family was co-opted into a popular Parliamentarian uprising raised in their name but actually led by local constables and lesser gentry. The irregular forces raised by the Bradford ‘club-men’ defended the town from the assault of the Royalist troops commanded by Sir William Savile and Colonel George Goring with terrifying ferocity: it was reported that the local men had unhorsed one Royalist officer and, when he pleaded for quarter, told him, ‘Aye, they would quarter him’ – and cut him to pieces.23 Thus successful rebellion in seventeenth-century England involved cooperation between nobles, gentry and the commons. When conflict broke out in 1642, war was fought not between the armed retinues of the nobility, but over control of the military resources of the monarchical state – a fact displayed in Sir John Hotham’s famous refusal in April of that year to grant the King access to his royal arsenal at Hull.

  The military weakness of the English nobility also reminds us that revolution in England could not have taken place when it did without foreign intervention. By the late 1630s there was certainly a steady stream of criticism, from behind closed doors, of Charles I’s government. The King’s religious policies had divided and angered many, but for the most part this discontent did not go much beyond talk (and talk in private, at that). The risks involved in raising a domestic insurrection were too high. It was the fact that Charles was King of Scotland and Ireland as well as of England that resulted in the eventual downfall of his regime. The revolt of Scottish Covenanters in 1638, provoked by the imposition of a new, anti-Calvinist prayer book, forced Charles to recall his English Parliament after eleven years of personal rule. The rebellion raised by Irish Catholics in October 1641 prevented him from dissolving that Parliament and sent England into a state of mass hysteria, as the Irish rebels’ (fraudulent) claim to be fighting under the King’s commission seemed to fulfil long-standing beliefs in a ‘popish plot’ to overthrow Church and state. Coordination between the King’s opponents in each of the three kingdoms meant that he was unable to deal with each of his rebellious dominions in turn. By the beginning of 1642, it was less remarkable that a party within Parliament was willing to take up arms against their King, and more surprising that Charles had been able to muster enough support to make a fight of it.

  The radical groups that emerged in the 1640s in England developed from a society that was already religiously divided an
d in which social relations were severely strained. But it was the events of the 1640s themselves that would have the greatest radicalising impact on these movements. Three moments in particular served to inspire radical thought and action. The first was the assault on the apparatus of Charles I’s personal rule, undertaken by the Long Parliament between 1640 and 1642 (‘the revolution’, in the words of the historian David Cressy, ‘before the revolution’).24 The second was the impact of the first civil war itself and the search for means to settle the kingdom following its resolution in 1646. The third was the trial and execution of the King and the establishment of a republic in 1649. Though radical hopes were disappointed, first by political stagnation under the Rump Parliament and the return to old forms of government under the Cromwellian protectorate, there was a revival of radical pamphleteering and political activity after the downfall of the protectorate of Richard Cromwell in 1659. Even under the restored monarchy, radicals continued to speak, write and conspire with a view to the establishment of new forms of government in Church and state.

  The first two years of the Long Parliament saw a sustained and at first virtually unchallenged attack on the King’s capacity to govern by his prerogative. The Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber, which had been responsible for the landmark royal legal victories of the 1630s and for the brutal punishments of Leighton, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne, were abolished. The assault on the machinery of Laudian persecution had the unintended consequence of ushering in de facto freedom of the press. Even before these shackles were removed, a flood of Scottish Covenanter propaganda combined with illicitly published radical works had made direct and forceful criticisms of the King’s regime, even of Charles himself. Many of these came from the secret press operated by Richard Overton. The London bookseller George Thomason, whose collection of pamphlets provides us with much of the evidence for radical activity in the 1640s, bought only 22 titles in 1640, compared with 1966 in 1642. This massive increase was, in part, a product of the massive public hunger for news. For example, titles dealing with the Irish rebellion of October 1641 accounted for 22 per cent of works published between then and April 1642.