Many leading radicals experienced this bitter conflict at first hand. John Lilburne enlisted as a member of Lord Brooke’s troop and fought at Edgehill and Marston Moor; the future ‘Ranters’ Laurence Clarkson and Abezier Coppe both served as army preachers; while the early Quaker leader James Nayler served as a soldier for some nine years, winning praise for his service from the Parliamentarian general John Lambert. In broader terms the war politicised the army, and not simply in the sense that the army leadership came, through force of arms, to have a greater role in securing a constitutional settlement once the fighting was over. While bread-and-butter issues of indemnity and pay were core concerns of the rank and file, they were not divorced from apparently more abstract demands for freedom of conscience, as the Levellers recognised: indeed, Leveller pamphlets linked freedom from conscription with freedom of conscience. As Thomas Rainborowe would point out during the Putney Debates of 1647, impressment was also linked to wealth and power: ‘We do find in all presses that go forth none must be pressed that are freehold men. When these gentlemen fall out among themselves they shall press the poor scrubs to come and kill one another for them.’2
The Parliamentarian New Model Army, formed in 1645, the first army in the civil war not to be tied to a particular region or garrison, had a reputation – stoked by its critics – of being a nursery for radical political and religious ideas. Though the puritanical zeal of its soldiers may have been exaggerated, as the presence of Baptist ministers such as Coppe and Clarkson indicates, the rank and file was certainly exposed to the thought of radical preachers. Of the seventeen chaplains appointed to the army between 1645 and 1647, fifteen were Independents – favouring independent congregations organised and directed by the communities concerned – and two were Baptists. More conservative Presbyterian ministers such as Richard Baxter were gradually being pushed out. To the disgust of Baxter and his fellow ministers Thomas Edwards and Edmund Calamy, some of the soldiers themselves, such as Captain Paul Hobson, became lay preachers.3 The presence of lay preachers divided the army command as well. The staunch Presbyterian commander Sir Samuel Luke had Hobson arrested for breaching orders against unlicensed preaching, only to find himself thwarted by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Hobson’s immediate commander, Charles Fleetwood. Many officers were also MPs, including Fleetwood, Henry Ireton, Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, Rainborowe, Thomas Harrison and Philip Skippon.* The army itself, especially after 1646, seems to have developed a sense of corporate political identity. This can be seen most powerfully in the famous remark of Cornet Joyce: when required to justify his seizure of the King from his parliamentary captors on 3 June 1647, Joyce defended his actions to the Parliament by saying ‘all commanded and yet were under command’.4
The notion that authority in the army was ultimately the result of the popular sovereignty of its rank and file was enshrined in the ‘Solemn Engagement’, an agreement signed by the officers and the troops’ agents at the general rendezvous at Newmarket on 5 June. The ‘Engagement’, almost a covenant between the officers and the agents, stated that the army would not be disbanded, nor the officers separated from their men, until the army’s conditions had been satisfied. The document was produced in reaction to the attempts of the Presbyterian-dominated Parliament to disband the army without fully recompensing arrears of pay or offering guarantees concerning the soldiers’ immunity from prosecution for their actions during wartime. Soldiers were also concerned that the Parliament seemed intent on agreeing to a ‘cheap peace’ with Charles that would make all the New Model Army’s hard-fought victories seemingly worthless. In the words of Edward Sexby, an agent for the rank and file at Putney, the soldiers had ‘ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen … I wonder we were so much deceived. If we had not right in this kingdom we were mere mercenary soldiers.’5
One of the soldiers’ core demands, a product of the de facto toleration within the army itself, was for freedom of conscience. But the puritan alliance that had brought down the Laudian Church was now utterly destroyed. The outbreak of the Irish rebellion had seen the establishment of a fragile religious truce between the Presbyterians (those who favoured a restrictive national Church settlement) and Independents (Congregationalists). However, as the war progressed, that peace came under great strain, and by late 1643 a pamphlet war had broken out between Presbyterians and defenders of the congregational way. One of the leading Presbyterian polemicists, Thomas Edwards, had already entered into the fray against the Independents in 1641, before the peace accord of November that year, with his Reasons against the Independent Government of Particular Congregations. That pamphlet had elicited a doughty riposte from Katherine Chidley, one of the most strident writers of the civil wars and later a leading figure in the Leveller movement. Chidley, aside from raising seven children, was also a member of a Shrewsbury ‘conventicle’, and had been actively involved in the campaign against Laudian innovations in the Church, mixing with figures such as John Lilburne and the radical separatist minister John Duppa. For Edwards, the horror of Independency was that it would lead to religious tolerance, and thence to religious and political anarchy and social disorder. Chidley’s response, however, was not to dispute the social challenge inherent in separatist religion. The unbelieving husband, she asserted, though he might command her body, could have no authority over the believing wife’s conscience.
Despite the humiliation Edwards had suffered in being so effectively dressed down by a woman, he had kept to the truce agreed in November 1641. However, the publication of the Apologeticall Narration in late 1643, a pamphlet authored by leading Independents Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye and Sidrach Simpson calling for Parliament to accept the congregational way, signalled the effective end of the peace between Presbyterians and Independents. Conservative writers such as Edwards entered the fray once more to decry the evils of religious toleration and the perverted practices of the separatist churches. It was in response to these Presbyterian attacks on the sects that leading Levellers Richard Overton and William Walwyn came to public prominence – Overton had until now successfully kept his role in illicit printing secret. Both emerged as staunch defenders of religious toleration, though self-interest undoubtedly played a part in their stance.
Overton’s earliest attributed works fitted with Puritan attacks on the Laudian Church, although displaying an unusual satirical edge. However, in Mans Mortalitie, published anonymously in January 1644 and officially condemned by Parliament on 26 August that year, he revealed for the first time his radical theology. In this pamphlet, Overton laid out his belief in the doctrine of thnetopsychism, the ‘mortalist’ heresy that the soul died with the body and would only be miraculously restored at the Last Judgement. The heresy had political implications too, as advocates often suggested that the kingdom of God would be established on Earth, not in heaven. This was a gross affront to orthodox Christian understanding, in which the soul was judged immediately after death. So-called Presbyterian ‘heresiographers’, including Thomas Edwards, latched on to the idea of the ‘soul sleeping’ as evidence of the grotesque opinions that de facto toleration was allowing to flourish.*
In contrast to Overton’s flagrantly heretical opinions, Walwyn’s personal religious views were more obscure. The eldest of the leading Levellers and the son of a well-respected and well-to-do Worcestershire gentleman, Walwyn had until the early 1640s lived the life of a seemingly contented London merchant and family man (he claimed to have twenty children). An engraving from the late seventeenth century shows an avuncular, ruddy-cheeked character, with something of the well-fed country squire about him. He supported Parliament at the outbreak of the war, gathering money from his parish to support the Parliamentarian troops. But it was his break with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and his acceptance of the idea of Christ’s free grace, that brought him into public controversy with the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards. Walwyn emerged with Overton as one of the most far-reaching advoca
tes of religious liberty in Britain, arguing for the toleration of groups such as Jews, Catholics and atheists who would still face discrimination in the Victorian era.
Overton’s and Walwyn’s arguments went far beyond the pragmatic defence of a limited toleration supported by most Independents, which offered the only protection against the Presbyterians’ tendency to persecute. They went further, even, than more famous advocates of toleration, such as the New England separatist Roger Williams in his The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644) and the poet and pamphleteer John Milton in his Areopagitica (1644). For Williams and Milton, the danger of intolerance was not so much that it oppressed human consciences but that, because of degenerate human reason, magistrates were as likely to suppress divine truth – in Williams’s words ‘Christ Jesus in his servants’ – as to correct error.
Overton and Walwyn, though, like Williams and Milton, men with deeply held religious beliefs, presented their arguments for toleration differently. For the former, it was a civil as well as a spiritual good: tolerant societies, they argued, with an eye to the example of the Dutch Republic, were more prosperous, more unified, more stable, and thus more successful in war than nations that persecuted some of their subjects.6 Overton’s first and most famous tract, issued under his ‘Martin Mar-Priest’ pseudonym, The Arraignement of Mr Persecution (1645), placed England’s current struggles within the European context of a continent ravaged by confessional warfare. Holy wars, even against ‘infidels’, slaughtered only the innocent: ‘To kill the unbeleever, as Turke, Pagan, Jew &c. is to slay such as Christ would have to live to repent.’
In the midst of a war that was seen by many as a struggle between the forces of Popery and those of the godly, Overton made a remarkable plea for Catholic–Protestant reconciliation: ‘If the Papist knew the Protestant, the Protestant the Papist, to love one another: and would not molest, or at least injure one another for their Conscience, but live peaceably and quietly one by another, bearing one with another … What man would lift up his hand against his Neighbour?’7 Likewise, Walwyn denied the efficacy of persecution, even in the case of one ‘whose mind is so misinformed as to deny a Deity’.8 Neither the Fleet Prison nor the Bedlam Hospital had the power to change a man’s mind, he said. In a clear jibe at Edwards and his fellow Presbyterian polemicists, he noted that it was often the ‘most weak and passionate men, the most unable to defend truth or their own opinions’, who were ‘the most violent for persecution’.9 Again, toleration’s role as a panacea for civil strife was commended: ‘the way to foster love and amity in a family as in a state being an equal respect from those in authority’.10 For Walwyn, God was love; what was not borne of love, like persecution, could not be good.
Thomas Edwards, however, was scarcely overflowing with the milk of human kindness. Undeterred by a second, published, debate with Katherine Chidley in which she taunted him that his argument was so weak that it was ‘a task most befitting a woman … to answer it’, Edwards had spent much time amassing information from a variety of godly informants on his sectarian and Independent opponents. The result of all this research was Gangraena, published in 1646 in three parts. The metaphor of bodily corruption deployed by Milton in Of Reformation was now redirected from the bishops to the sects. As Edwards saw it, in the wake of the King’s defeat in the first civil war, the Presbyterian cause, set upon by an unholy alliance of the army, the Independents and the heretical sects, was faltering both in Parliament and in the country as a whole. The sects, nourished by de facto toleration, were growing like a canker upon the body politic. If the gangrenous limb were not cauterised and toleration ended, the result would be not only the death of a national Church, but also the end of civil society.
Gangraena, despite its length (over eight hundred pages), lack of structure and hectoring style, became a publishing sensation, going through three printings in three months. The book focused not on what Presbyterians would have regarded as intellectual heresy – there was very little discussion here of antinomianism or free grace – but upon the evil moral and social consequences of toleration. If one believed Edwards, there was scarcely a Baptist minister who had not fondled one of his young female believers during the course of an adult immersion. When they were not baptising comely young maidens, religious radicals were baptising horses in derision of the ordained clergy. The ministers of the sects themselves, according to Edwards, were uniformly uneducated, being shoemakers, milliners and soap-boilers who had had the presumption to think that they could preach with the same authority as the university-educated ministry. (In fact, many of Edwards’s targets had been to university, or at the very least, had considerable schooling.11)
Edwards was not a mere fantasist or an outright liar. He was, however, highly selective when quoting from his targets’ works, ‘source-mining’ their pamphlets for the most controversial passages, and often severely distorting their meaning by wresting them free from their context. The vision of England’s religious landscape that he produced proved deeply influential. Gangraena both presented and helped create two distinct and opposing groups: the godly, Presbyterian opponents of heresy and schism on the one hand, and the unholy alliance of Independents, sectaries and army men on the other. This radical conspiracy had its headquarters in London. As the centre of radical activity, the capital predominated over all other areas in Edwards’s discussion – a diseased metropolitan heart that pumped error and sin into the provinces.
This image of two diametrically opposed camps was reinforced by the tendency of some of Edwards’s victims, such as John Goodwin, an independent minister whose church had connections with the Levellers, especially William Walwyn, to come to the defence of other targets of the heresiographer’s ire. The identities constructed glossed over the differences between individuals and lumped them in the same camp. For example, there was much disagreement among Presbyterians over the precise form of Church government. Equally, Edwards greatly diminished the theological, social and political gulf between ‘respectable’ Independents such as Jeremiah Burroughes and ‘mechanick’ or ‘tub’ preachers such as the hatmaker Thomas Webbe.12
Along with other heresiographical works, Edwards’s contributed to the sectarianisation of radical religion in the 1640s. While, in reality, the religious identity of individuals could be extremely fluid – Laurence Clarkson, for example, moved from being an Independent to a Baptist, to a ‘Ranter’ and finally to a Muggletonian – Edwards and his fellow conservative polemicists presented taxonomies of heresy in their works, giving loose-knit groups of individuals clear corporate identities, such as ‘Dippers’ (Baptists), ‘Seekers’, ‘Adamites’ (an alleged sect of naked radicals) and ‘Divorcers’ (another fabricated sect, in this case designed to lampoon Milton’s divorce tracts). In fact, most of the names of radical groups with which we are now familiar, such as Quaker and Ranter, came to us from these hostile commentators, rather than from the groups themselves. The term ‘Leveller’ itself, first used with reference to the participants in the Midland rising of 1607, was, according to John Lilburne, imposed upon the group by Henry Ireton at the Putney Debates. The Levellers themselves repeatedly disowned the term, knowing that it was intended to link their arguments with a sweeping ‘levelling’ of the social hierarchy and with an attack on private property. In one of their last collaborative works, A Manifestation (1649), Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn complained that they ‘never had it in our thoughts to level men’s estates, it being the utmost of our aim … that every man may with as much security as may be enjoy his propriety [proper state and condition, including property]’.13
Edwards’s picture of radical activity in the 1640s has strongly influenced historians as well as contemporaries. As a result, the connections between the army, the sects and the Levellers have, to a degree, been exaggerated. The Levellers constituted a looser, broader and more influential coalition than the sectarianised picture of radical activity allows. Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn had all come to prominence before they were ever label
led ‘Levellers’. The Levellers were individuals with connections in Westminster as well as among the army and the sects. The youngest of their four leading writers, the lawyer John Wildman, even had links with leading Royalists, having twice married into the Berkshire aristocracy. (Both matches seemed unusual choices for a political radical – Wildman’s first wife was the daughter of a Catholic nobleman, his second the daughter of the Royalist Lord Lovelace.) Edwards presented religious and political divisions in the late 1640s as a simple dichotomy between radical (the Independents, the army, the sects) and conservative (Presbyterian MPs and clergymen). However, as we shall see, the political centre, itself fast-shifting over the course of the decade, at times adopted the agenda of the radicals, while radicals themselves sometimes consorted with Royalists.
Thomas Edwards wished more than simply to smear his rivals with accusations of sexual impropriety or religious ignorance. Gangraena was in part a piece of propaganda designed to help mobilise a counter-revolutionary movement that would deal with the threat posed by the New Model Army and Independent MPs within Parliament. After the end of the first civil war in 1646, English politics had become like the endgame of a chess match, with all political activity focused on the King. By the summer of 1647, tensions between the army and Parliament came to a head, as Parliament attempted to disband the army without full pay. The army, increasingly concerned at the overtures that Presbyterians within Parliament such as Denzil Holles were making to the King, chose to seize the political initiative, first in the daring capture of Charles by Cornet Joyce (with the probable knowledge of Cromwell) and then by accusing eleven Presbyterian MPs of treason.
A Radical History Of Britain Page 16