A History of Britain, Volume 2 (26 page)

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.

The Levellers were not yet finished as a threat to the ‘grandees'. Through the second civil war
The Moderate
continued to voice the programme set out the year before in their ‘Agreement of the People', as well as to point fingers at backsliders and adventurers in parliament. (Astonishingly, some of the Leveller chiefs even began to make contact
with the king in hopes of persuading him to become a patron of their household democracy.) After Charles's defeat Ireton grafted some of their principal demands – the abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy, and annual parliaments – on to his own official proposals for republican government. But by the beginning of 1649 Overton, Lilburne and Walwyn were convinced that the Commonwealth had been delivered into the hands of an oligarchy every bit as rapacious, self-serving and heedless of the needs of the masses as the one it had replaced. Lilburne's snarling rebuke to the House of Lords in 1646 held just as well for the Rump Commons three years later: ‘All you intended when you set us a-fighting was merely to unhorse and dismount our old riders and tyrants, that so you might get up and ride in their stead.'

Lilburne detested everything about the new regime. He had been against the execution of the king and had refused to support his trial on the grounds that it violated all the principles of equity encoded in the common law. Even Charles Stuart he believed was entitled to the same benefits of Magna Carta as Freeborn John, including the right to trial by jury. When three of the captured royalist commanders – the Scots Duke of Hamilton, Lord Holland and Lord Arthur Capel – were awaiting trial in the Tower (they would be beheaded shortly after the king in front of the parliament house), Lilburne sent them law books for their own defence. The response of the Leveller leaders to a formal ban on political discussions in the army was a two-part pamphlet called
England's New Chains
, which at the very least put in question any kind of obedience to a regime they condemned as illegitimate. On 28 March 1649 Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn, together with a fourth colleague Thomas Prince, were arrested and dragged before the Council of State. There (according to Lilburne), both they and the councillors were treated to a fist-pounding eruption of rage by Oliver Cromwell:

Not surprisingly, then, the Levellers who refused to acknowledge the authority of the Council were packed off to the Tower. But then
something quite astonishing – and to the hardened grandees of the army incomprehensible – happened. A petitioning campaign for their release immediately broke out in London, mobilized by Leveller women. In 1646 Lilburne had already gone against the grain of virtually every household manual (a Puritan speciality) by insisting, and in print, that women ‘were by nature all equall and alike in power, dignity, authority and majesty [to men]'. Leveller women had always been directly involved in the movement's campaigns. Elizabeth Lilburne had been politicized through her early efforts to spring her reckless spouse from one prison or another, moving from the expected tear-stained pleas to unexpected assertions of the rights of man and woman. Mary Overton seems to have been, from the beginning, a radical at heart. For printing and distributing her husband's tracts, she had been brutally punished, dragged through the London streets by a cart, as she was holding her six-month-old infant, while being pelted and abused like a common whore. But the most articulate and impassioned of the sisters was the charismatic preacher-turned-Leveller Katherine Chidley, who tried to make the Commonwealth understand the particular sufferings of their sex and to institute poor relief for their assistance:

The outrageous temerity of women giving voice to these grievances was profoundly shocking to mainstream Puritan culture, devoted as it was to an especially draconian hierarchy of the sexes in which the woman's role was that of obedient, quietly devoted helpmate. When Elizabeth Lilburne and Katherine Chidley, at the head of a mass demonstration of women, presumed to petition parliament for the release of the Leveller leaders, they met with a predictably dusty response: ‘The matter you petition about is of a higher concernment than you understand, the House have an answer to your Husbands and therefore you are desired to go home and looke after your own businesse, and meddle with your huswifery.'

But the Leveller women did not go home. Instead they made sure that the
Manifestation,
published from the Tower under the names of all the
imprisoned Levellers, was widely distributed in London. Its quasi-theological touches – comparisons between the sufferings endured by the Levellers and those inflicted on Christ and his disciples – suggest the authorship of William Walwyn, the grandson of a bishop. But the
Manifestation
was less of a treatise and more an explanation to the obtuse of why, after so much persecution, deprivation and frustration, they had no choice but to persevere, whatever further ordeals might come their way. In its determination and bleak pathos, the
Manifestation
is a vocational manifesto of an unmistakably modern profession: the revolutionary calling.

All the same, the four denied that they were ‘impatient and over-violent in our motions for the Publick Good', hoping to achieve their ends through another ‘Agreement of the Free People', which they proceeded to publish from their ‘causelesse captivity' on 1 May 1649. The document was serious and not impractical: a legislature of 400 chosen ‘according to naturall right' by all males over twenty-one years old, other than paupers, royalists and servants. Neither military forces nor taxes could be raised without its consent, but the limits of that parliament's power were spelled out as forcefully as its jurisdiction. It was not to infringe freedom of conscience; it was not to coerce anyone into the military, nor to create any kind of legal procedures not provided for in the common law. It was neither to limit trade, nor to impose capital punishments or mutilations for anything other than murder and certainly not for ‘trivial offences'. No
one, except Catholics who insisted on papal supremacy, was to be disqualified from office on account of their religion. Judged by what was thought politically acceptable, in the Commonwealth, this ‘(
third and final
)
Agreement of the
[
Free
]
People
' was a non-starter. But this did not mean that the kind of assumptions and arguments made by the Levellers should be thought of as utopian (hence their desperation to mark out clear differences from Gerrard Winstanley's ‘Diggers', who preached community of land and goods). Leveller principles would have a future, in fact, and not just in America.