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Acknowledgments
Along the winding path that led to the publication of this book, I have benefited from the help and wisdom of many scholars and friends. I have learned from countless discussions, conferences, and exchanges in recent years, and while it is impossible to acknowledge all who have contributed to this study, I would like to thank the following colleagues and interlocutors: Carolyn Arena, Phil Baker, Alex Barber, Alastair Bellany, Lloyd Bowen, Mike Braddick, Andrew Cambers, John Coffey, Jeff Collins, Brian Cowan, Alan Cromartie, Richard Cust, Ken Fincham, Thomas Fulton, Tobias Gregory, Karl Gunther, Evan Haefeli, Susan Hardman Moore, Tim Harris, Simon Healy, Derek Hirst, Clive Holmes, Brendan Kane, Sean Kelsey, Chris Kyle, David Loewenstein, Diarmaid MacCulloch, David Magliocco, Michael Mendle, John Morrill, Sarah Mortimer, Molly Murray, David Norbrook, Michael Questier, Matt Reynolds, Stephen Roberts, David Scott, Ethan Shagan, Bill Sheils, Nigel Smith, Johann Sommerville, Isaac Stephens, Keith Thomas, Nicholas Tyacke, Elliot Vernon, Tim Wales, Rachel Weil, Michael Winship, and Lehua Yim. Considerable thanks are due to Sharon Achinstein, David Adams, Mario Caricchio, Ian Gentles, Polly Ha, Joel Halcomb, Ariel Hessayon, and Andy Hopper, who not only provided helpful advice, but also kindly shared portions of their own work prior to publication. Anthony Milton and Julia Merritt bailed me out of a self-induced archival emergency in Cambridge, then showed great hospitality when thanks should have been flowing the other way. I have also reaped the benefits of the endlessly supportive Pacific coast community of early modernists, centered on the PCCBS and the Huntington, including Susan Amussen, Tom Cogswell, David Cressy, Barbara Donagan, Lori Anne Ferrell, Susan Green, Cynthia Herrup, Steve Hindle, Rebecca Lemon, Sears McGee, Roy Ritchie, Mary Robertson, David Sacks, and Stefania Tutino, who offered guidance and friendship, even as they were subjected to early and undigested iterations of the arguments below.
A handful of scholars were particularly influential in helping me through the thicket of civil-war historical material and debate. Ann Hughes has been a constant source of advice and assistance, and stands, to my knowledge, as the only person who has reached the summit of SP 28, the Everest of civil-war historians. Blair Worden has provided continual encouragement, and the work has benefited significantly from his knowledge and judgment. Steve Pincus has been instrumental to the project, offering support and inspiration from the initial stages of research. Perhaps the most important influence has been Jason Peacey, whose friendship, research, and unparalleled expertise on England’s revolutionary decades has shaped this book from its inception. Many of the arguments below were hammered out with Jason and others in the Skinners Arms, a successor of sorts to Mrs. Wilson’s Nag’s Head.
Often present at the Skinners Arms was Peter Lake, whose advice has improved this book in innumerable ways. He read portions of the manuscript in its earliest
Acknowledgments
stages and his insights and suggestions helped me to frame many of the book’s themes and arguments. It would be impossible to express my thanks in words, so for now he’ll have to settle for another pint and a trip to Drummond Street. Sandy Solomon also offered great support and kindness. Paul Seaver read early chapters in draft and he and Kirsten Seaver have been anchors of friendship and encouragement throughout the arduous process of research and writing. I owe them both an unpayable debt.
Others at Stanford have also played important roles in making this book possible. Richard Saller and Debra Satz were very supportive as deans. In my department, a number of colleagues in allied fields, including Caroline Winterer, Keith Baker, Paula Findlen, and Priya Satia, created a vital intellectual environment. Allyson Hobbs, Zephyr Frank, and Yumi Moon cheerfully listened to me drone on about my work and many other things besides. Sean Hanretta was an exemplary colleague, and has continued to be a true friend after decamping to Evanston. Monica Wheeler has been heroic throughout. Particular thanks are due to J. P. Daughton, Karyn Panitch, Bob Crews, and Margaret Sena, who have been rocks of sanity amidst chaos, providing boundless support, friendship, and good cheer. In addition, I have been blessed by a succession of outstanding students—Jonathan Gray, Noah Millstone, Catherine Chou, and Richard Bell—who finished PhDs under my supervision (and who have taught me much in the process).
I have been assisted by two major external grants, one from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the other a Frederick Burckhardt Fellowship from the ACLS (taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I enjoyed a fruitful year in residence). Short-term fellowships from the Huntington Library and the Bibliographic Society of America aided the early stages of the research and writing. My editors at Oxford University Press, Christopher Wheeler, Cathryn Steele, and Neil Morris, have been extraordinarily patient and supportive. Archivists and librarians at many institutions have furthered this project. Martha Whittaker, formerly of the Sutro Library, Kathy Lafferty of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, and Dennis Sears of the University of Illinois provided much-needed help at key points. Ben Stone, a good friend and living treasure in the Stanford Library system, has been ceaselessly supportive, fielding a barrage of outrageous requests over the years. Katie George, archivist of the Salters’ Company, helped me navigate the records of the Salters, and offered generous assistance in understanding the functions of London’s livery companies.
I also wish to thank friends from Bernal Heights, who’ve provided camaraderie, even as they’ve taught me much about political life in a different context—Linda Weiner, Geoffrey Bauman, Huli Milanese, Bob Weisblatt, Steve Shapiro, Laurel Muniz, David Looman (who will be pleased to be associated with a rabble of English puritans), and Tom Gallagher (who will be appalled to be associated with a rabble of English puritans). In New York, Amy Lehrner and Andrew Sartori have been great friends, and Andrew offered very helpful discussions of the work. Bryce Giddens has been a pillar of friendship and support—he’ll be happy (or perhaps unsettled) to know that some of the key insights in these pages were sharpened in freezing dive conditions under the waves at Lobos and Monastery.
Acknowledgments
Above all, I would like to thank my family. My parents, Joseph and Jean Como, have been tireless in their support, and no moment in the genesis of this book was as important to me as the day my father appeared at a paper I was giving in New Brunswick. This book would not have been completed without them. My extended family—Brett, Langton, Drozdoff, and Como—provided much-needed encouragement. David and Jean Britland have been unstintingly kind and generous towards me, for which I am deeply thankful.
Many years ago, Karen Britland joked that I was rewriting the history of the English civil wars in real time, on an hour-by-hour basis. That proved to be a wildly overoptimistic diagnosis. For more than a decade, she has endured the highs and lows of someone else’s obsessive project, including a succession of “holidays” to Wigston Magna, Matlock, Chippenham, and many other exotic destinations of touristic (that is to say, archival) delight. Despite it all, she has provided unwavering support, helping to make this book what it is in countless ways (not least in sifting through too many pages of undercooked prose). Although she may not thank me for it, this book is dedicated to her, with profound love and gratitude.
I. FROM PERSONAL RULE TO POLITICAL CRISIS, 1635–1642
1. Freeborn Subjects: Puritanism, Politics, and Print in the Personal Rule
2. Secret Printing and the Crisis of 1640: The Margery Mar-Prelate Press and Print in the Time of Parliament
3. The Rubble of Episcopacy: Parliament, Religious Mobilization, and the “Generall Liberty” of the Press, 1641
4. “Extremities, Not Fit to be Named”: Crowds, Print, and Constitutional Improvisation
II. CIVIL WAR,
1642–1643
5. “Lawless Tyranny” and “Destructive Accommodation”: War and the Transformation of Politics, 1642–1643
6. Defining the Cause: The London Remonstrance, the General Rising, and Military Crisis
7. “So Full of Novelties”: The Sectarian Slurry, Redistributionism, and the Licensing Ordinance
III. WAR AND RELIGION,
1643–1644
8. The Rise of Religious Conflict in the Parliamentarian Coalition
9. Print House, Petitions, and Provinces: Religious Politics, Toleration, and the Making of an “Independent” Coalition
10. The House of Stuart, the House of Lords, and the Politics of “Independency”: Ideological Escalation in 1644
IV. FRAGMENTATION AND VICTORY,
1644–1645
11. Rumor Wars: Underground Print and the Coming of the New Model Army
12. Supremacy in the Commons: Partisan Politics, Political Innovation, and the Rise of Lilburne
13. White King, Black Cassock: Monarchy, Presbytery, and the Radical Propaganda Collective 333
V. PATHS TO REVOLUTION
14. Internal Revolutions: Private Meditations and Radical Parliamentarianism, 1642–1646 367
15. The Seeking Way: “Forms of Religion” and the Coming of the English Revolution
16. The Last
List of Figures
2.1. Ornaments used on Margery Mar-Prelate Press books
2.2. Ornaments of Stam, Margery Mar-Prelate Press, Peter Cole, and Richard Overton
2.3. The Lawfulnesse of our Expedition into England Manifested (1640), t.p.
4.1. A Question Answered: How Laws are to be understood, and obedience yeelded?
7.1. The Sufficiencie of the Spirits Teaching; A Sermon Preached at Westminster; Mans Mortallitie
10.1. The Great Eclipse of the Sun
11.1. Alas pore Parliament, how art thou betrai’d?
12.1. To the Right Honourable, the LORD MAJOR, and the Right Worshipfull, the ALDERMEN, and Common Councell of the City of LONDON
13.1. The Conclusion of Lieuten: Generall Cromwells Letter
13.2. The Conclusion of Lieuten: Generall Cromwells Letter; letter “P”
13.3. The Ordinance for Tythes Dismounted
15.1. Vox Borealis; A Sermon Preached at Westminster; Divine Light
16.1. The Last Warning To all the Inhabitants Of London
List of Abbreviations
Adams, “Secret Printing”
Adamson, NR
Alum. Cant.
Alum. Ox.
AMAE, Paris
Baillie
Baxter, Reliquiae
BL
BL, Hl. 164
BL, Hl. 165
BL, Hl. 166
BL, Whit.
BL, Yonge 1
BL, Yonge 2
BL, Yonge 3
BL, Yonge 4
Bod. L.
D. R. Adams, “The Secret Printing and Publishing Career of Richard Overton the Leveller, 1644–46,” The Library, 7th ser., 11 (2010), 3–88
J. Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007)
J. Venn and J. A. Venn, eds., Alumni Cantabrigienses. A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part I. From the Earliest Times to 1751, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1922)
J. Foster, ed., Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500–1714: their Parentage, Birthplace, and Year of Birth, with a Record of their Degrees, 4 vols. (Oxford and London, 1891)
Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, La Courneuve, Paris: Fonds de la correpondence politique—Angleterre (origines–1871)
Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, A.M., ed. David Laing, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841–2)
R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae: Or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of The most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times, ed. M. Sylvester, 3 parts (1696)
The British Library, London
British Library, Harleian MS. 164 (diary of Sir Simonds D’ewes)
British Library, Harleian MS. 165 (diary of Sir Simonds D’ewes)
British Library, Harleian MS. 166 (diary of Sir Simonds D’ewes)
British Library, Additional MS 31116 (diary of Laurence Whitaker)
British Library, Additional MS. 18777 (diary of Walter Yonge)
British Library, Additional MS. 18778 (diary of Walter Yonge)
British Library, Additional MS. 18779 (diary of Walter Yonge)
British Library, Additional MS. 18780 (diary of Walter Yonge)
The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Brenner, M&R
R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, 1993)
List of Abbreviations
Bruce and Masson, eds., Quarrel J. Bruce and D. Masson, eds., The Quarrel between the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell, Camden Society, N.S., 12 (1875)
Burrage C. Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641), 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1912)
CJ
Clarendon
Como, Blown by the Spirit
CSPV
CUL
Culpeper
EHR
Gangraena, 1
Journal of the House of Commons
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1888)
D. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, 2004)
Calendar of State Papers Venetian
Cambridge University Library
M. J. Braddick and M. Greengrass, eds., “The Letters of Sir Cheney Culpeper, 1641–1657,” Camden Miscellany XXXIII, Camden Society, 5th ser., 7 (1996)
The English Historical Review
T. Edwards, Gangraena: Or A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries, 1st ed. (1646); citations refer to the second pagination, unless noted Gangraena, 2
T. Edwards, The Second Part of Gangraena: Or A fresh and further Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and dangerous Proceedings of the Sectaries (1646)
Gangraena, 3
Gardiner, GCW
HJ
HL
T. Edwards, The third Part of Gangraena. Or, A new and higher Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and insolent Proceedings of the Sectaries (1646)
S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1893)
The Historical Journal
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
Holmes, Eastern Association
JBS
Juxon
Lightfoot
Lindley, PPR
LJ
LMA
McKenzie and Bell, LBT
McKenzie, SCA
C. Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974)
Journal of British Studies
K. Lindley and D. Scott, eds., The Journal of Thomas Juxon, Camden Society, 5th ser., 13 (1999)
J. Lightfoot, The Whole Works of the Rev. John Lightfoot, D.D., ed. J.R. Pitman, 13 vols. (London, 1822–5)
K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War
London (Aldershot, 1997)
Journal of the House of Lords
London Metropolitan Archives
D. F. McKenzie and M. Bell, A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade, 1641–1700, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2005)
D. F. McKenzie, Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1605–1640 (Charlottesville, VA, 1961)
List of Abbreviations
MP Main Papers of the House of Lords
MPWA
ODNB
C. van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, 5 vols. (Oxford, 2012)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: from the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004)
PA Parliamentary Archives, Westminster Peacey, Public Politics
PJLP
POSLP
Russell, FBM
SP
SR
Stat. Co.
TNA
UIUC
J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013)
W. H. Coates, A. Steele Young, and V. F. Snow, eds., The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1982–92)
M. Jansson, ed., Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament. House of Commons, 7 vols. (Rochester, NY, 2000–7)
C. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies (Oxford, 1991)
The National Archives of the UK, State Papers
G .E. B. Eyre and C. R. Rivington, eds., A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1640–1708, 3 vols. (London, 1913–14)
Stationers’ Hall, London, archives of the Stationers’ Company, as microfilmed in R. Myers, ed., Records of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1554–1920, 115 reels (Cambridge, 1985)
The National Archives of the UK
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Whitelocke, Memorials Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1682)
Note on Sources, Citations,
and Dates
Pre-1900 works were published in London, unless otherwise noted. Original spelling from seventeenth-century sources has been retained (with the exception of i, j, u, and v, which have generally been converted to their appropriate modern forms). Standard early modern abbreviations and contractions have been expanded, except in rare instances where, for purposes of clarity or due to uncertainty, they have been left in original form. I have also expanded the shorthand used in Walter Yonge’s parliamentary diaries, in accordance with Yonge’s own shorthand key. Italics in original quotations have been retained (except where compositors have deployed italic type for body text and used roman letters to indicate emphasis, in which cases I have rendered emphasized text in italics). Civil-war newspapers are cited by date of publication, followed by British Library, Thomason Tracts shelf mark, where available. The start of the New Year is reckoned as January 1, and Lady Day dating has been converted accordingly, except when quoting directly from seventeenth-century sources.
Introduction
The English Civil Wars have never truly ended. Even before the last shots were fired, historians on both sides of the conflict began to retell the story of the descent into bloodshed. The narratives they wove were from the beginning contested, colored by abiding partisan animosities. And the passionate heat of civil-war battlefields has persisted. There are many reasons for this, but they begin with the improbable outcome of the conflict, the regicidal moment in which a king— indeed kingship itself—was put in the dock, tried, and beheaded. From the start, then, the paper wars of controversialists and historians have, as it were, been fought over holy ground, anointed with the blood of a reigning monarch. That the royal blood trickled into a swelling torrent extracted from Charles I’s English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish subjects only amplified the emotional resonance of the conflict’s legacy. The dead stalked the generations that followed, haunting and shaping British political life, and subsequent scholarship has never fully exorcized their spirits.
Yet the peculiar urgency of historical debate over the civil wars also flowed from a sense, evident among commentators from an early stage, that this was no ordinary conflict. The regicide may have been a wrenching spectacle, but it also served to expose profound differences of political and religious principle, differences that had been expressed in a multitude of voices and venues in the years of violent struggle that preceded it. Conflicts over the nature of monarchy, the powers of parliaments, the liberties and obligations of subjects, and other fundamental theoretical problems were on display from the beginning of the crisis. So, too, pressing questions about religious truth and the relationship of the Christian church to secular government were debated with minute attention. And these underlying disputes were waged not just with powder and sword, but with words, an unprecedented outpouring of tracts and declarations, which from the outset seemed to mark this civil war apart from anything that had previously happened in English history, if not the history of the world.
As time passed, these issues of principle seemed to interpreters more salient, and in the wake of the French Revolution, scholars began to portray England’s mid-century conflicts as the first in a succession of great European revolutions. S. R. Gardiner, the Victorian progenitor of the study of Stuart England, thus dubbed the conflicts “the Puritan Revolution.” At stake, in his view, was nothing less than the rise of parliamentary government, a development accompanied by the victory of religious toleration over spiritual tyranny. For Gardiner, however, these were more than matters of local significance, since, he professed, England’s parliament
Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War was “the noblest monument ever reared by mortal man.”1 His account of the period thus extended a venerable, Whig line of interpretation. But now energized by the spreading wings of imperial liberalism, his version of the seventeenth century gave England’s revolution a starring role in the drama of human history.
Twentieth-century scholarship built on this vision, stripping it of its naked triumphalism, while adding layers of interpretation that rendered the significance of England’s civil wars if anything more universal. Borrowing Gardiner’s Whiggish narrative, but drawing on new subdisciplines of economic and social history, scholars such as Tawney and Stone unearthed what they took to be the deep structural changes underlying the conflict. The struggles of the period were recast as a story of economic modernization, in which acquisitive landlords and merchants sought through parliament to impose themselves on a political order that remained feudal in form. At its most robust, as articulated by Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and A. L. Morton, this vision posited England’s civil war as the first great bourgeois revolution, in which a rising capitalist class of landowners and urban leaders seized power.2 The English Revolution, as it was now frequently known, was here inscribed as an event of world-historical significance, in which nascent capitalism began to be felt on an epochal scale.
Interpretations informed by socioeconomic analysis were accompanied by increasing attention towards what was often called the “radicalism” of the English Revolution. This term was used to describe all manner of sectarian puritans and millenarians, as well as trenchant visionaries who appeared during the wars and Interregnum. The existence of such groups and ideas had been little studied by earlier historians; Gardiner, for instance, devoted scant attention to sectaries, and when he did so, he echoed unflattering contemporary portrayals, complaining of the “noisy ranting tub preacher,” prone to “Wild incoherency” who possessed (even worse, for a Victorian liberal) “no sense of decorum.”3 If these groups were for Gardiner a distraction from the heroic drama on the main stage, Whig and Marxist historians of the twentieth century saw them as more central to the period’s upheavals. Sectaries, such as baptists and Fifth Monarchists, who played such a visible role in these years, were reclaimed from denominational historians and folded into a broader category sometimes called “radical puritanism.”4
The most obvious beneficiaries of this scholarly turn were the so-called Levellers, whose meteoric rise in the late 1640s, championing an expanded franchise, religious toleration, and a raft of other reforms, now earned them a central place in the literature. Here was a group that seemed to presage many democratic and egalitarian
1 S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 10 vols. (1883–4), 1:2; for the revolutionary paradigm, see N. Tyacke, “Introduction: Locating the English Revolution,” in N. Tyacke, ed., The English Revolution, c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester, 2007), 1–26.
2 R. H. Tawney, “The Rise of the Gentry, 1558–1640,” Economic History Review, 11 (1941), 1–38; L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965); C. Hill, ed., The English Revolution, 1640: Three Essays (London, 1940); for precursors, see Tyacke, “Introduction,” 2–7.
3 Gardiner, GCW, 3:9.
4 For discussion and bibliography, see D. Como, “Radical Puritanism, c. 1558–1660,” in J. Coffey and P. Lim, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), 242–58.
principles taken to characterize twentieth-century modernity, and sustained attention came from scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, who saw the Levellers as forerunners of liberal democracy and reformist movements, perhaps even the world’s first organized political party.5 Marxist historians, such as Hill and Morton, while sharing this interest in “radicalism,” looked less to the Levellers (viewed as mired in petit-bourgeois half measures) and more to other eddies of religious and political extremism—to antinomians and Ranters, with their purported subversion of the moral order, and to Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers, with their explicit challenge to the existing property regime.6 These groups were rechristened as ancestors in a tradition of British radicalism, and their stories reconstructed as offering a useable past for current generations. Moreover, these movements were slotted into a broader Marxian metanarrative: radical sectaries allegedly articulated the interests of an emerging proletariat, alienated by infant capitalist brutality, and resistant to the work-discipline and order imposed by mainstream puritanism. They were portrayed as farsighted, if doomed, harbingers of the future, who to a considerable extent stood outside and against the dominant currents of their age. This vision reached its apogee with the 1972 publication of Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, which combined Hill’s interest in the radicalism of the period with the now well-established paradigm of an English Revolution. His book represented a high-water mark of both these trends, and earned an enduring audience far beyond the walls of the academy.
By the time Hill published, however, a backlash was brewing against the reigning narratives of civil-war history. In the 1970s, a sustained “revisionist” challenge arose to question the dominant modernization paradigm. Much revisionist effort was devoted to dismantling the Whiggish political narrative on which prevailing views of the English Revolution depended. In place of escalating long-term conflict between liberty and absolutism, revisionists emphasized consensus and ideological harmony; puritanism, for Gardiner a driving engine behind the crisis, was reconfigured as a conservative force, a response to Arminian and Laudian innovations. Considerable attention was also devoted to court faction, localist obstructionism, the frailties of the fiscal system, and the challenges of governing the tripartite “British” monarchies, all of which were deemed more important to the outbreak of civil war than any grand story of rising social or ideological conflict. The view which ultimately emerged was one in which the events of the 1640s and 1650s
5 For the Levellers’ rediscovery and other dimensions of civil-war historiography, see B. Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2001), esp. 316–38; T. Pease, The Leveller Movement (Washington, DC, 1916); D. B. Robertson, The Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy (New York, 1951); J. Frank, The Levellers. A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats (Cambridge, MA, 1955); H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, 1961); P. Gregg, Free-born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London, 1961).
6 A. L. Morton, “The Place of Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn in the Tradition of English Prose,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 6 (1958), 5; A. L. Morton, The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (London, 1970); C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972).
Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War appeared as something of an aberration, a grand mistake, which was for the most part wiped away with the Restoration.7
Revisionist accounts were not wholly consistent with one another. But they tended to downplay the transformations of the civil war and Interregnum, and shared a central conviction that England, in 1640, was a distinctly unrevolutionary polity. It was claimed that a teleological search for long-term conflict and constitutional milestones had skewed understanding of the era, a problem that could only be remedied by detailed reconstruction of political narrative, chiefly through manuscript sources, which were taken to allow for more privileged access to underlying reality. One casualty in this recalibration was the whole notion of “radicalism,” which had become central to accounts of the English Revolution. The sectarian eruptions and political movements that captivated postwar historians were downgraded in importance, and portrayed as at best epiphenomenal, at worst mere chimeras, invented by over-credulous scholars, who through anachronistic assumptions and reliance on dubious printed sources had swallowed seventeenthcentury scaremongering as transparent reality.8 In some cases, the very concept of “radicalism,” as applied to the seventeenth century, was dismissed as ahistorical, conveying a misleading similarity to modern sociopolitical movements.9 This argument represented part of a broader shift, whereby the idea of an “English Revolution” was shorn of status and stature, a move accompanied by a change in nomenclature, as historians retreated from the language of “revolution,” typically in favor of the more neutral “civil war.”
Famously, however, this left practitioners hard-pressed to explain the extraordinary upheavals of the period, not least the regicide, the abolition of monarchy, and the collapse of a monopolistic national church. How had these events taken place in a society steeped in political consensus? One explanatory strategy focused on detailed narrative: if England was decidedly unrevolutionary in 1640, the key to the political breakdown and apparent extremism that followed must necessarily be located in the crisis of the early 1640s and the war itself, and efforts were made to reconstruct the ebb and flow of politics, the chains of contingent political maneuver that gave rise to a situation which, in effect, no one wanted or anticipated.10 In other cases, heavy emphasis was placed on religious motivations: what looked to earlier generations a political revolution of world-historical significance was now portrayed as a kind of great spiritual earthquake, a perspective encapsulated by John Morrill’s observation that the “English civil war was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion.” This suggested that the seemingly
7 For the historiography through the 1990s, see R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution, 3rd ed. (Manchester, 1998).
8 J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986); M. Kishlansky, “The Army and the Levellers: The Roads to Putney,” HJ, 22 (1979), 797 n.4.
9 C. Condren, “Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates in Early Modern Political Thought: A Case of Sandwich Island Syndrome?” History of Political Thought, 10 (1989), 525–42; L. Mulligan and J. Richards, “A ‘Radical’ Problem: The Poor and the English Reformers in the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” JBS, 29 (1990), 118–46.
10 The approach is exemplified in Russell, FBM; M. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979).
dramatic rupture of the regicide and the creation of the republic was the result of a fierce outpouring of religious zealotry and providential thinking, a view that downplayed principled conflicts over political ideology and deflated earlier certainty that England’s troubles should be construed as the world’s first modern revolution.11
The present study draws upon central insights of revisionists, including their focus on detailed narrative reconstruction and their insistence on the importance of religion. But it is more directly indebted to canons of scholarship that have emerged in the wake of revisionism. From the outset, many historians resisted or sought to transcend the revisionist approach, generating multiple streams of illuminating research, several of which are incorporated in this book. Despite this subsequent work, however, it remains the case that revisionists left the great eruptions of the 1640s and 1650s to some extent more mysterious than they found them. Even those who have sought most creatively to move beyond the paradigm have often remained trapped by its interpretative confines.12 The present book is, in large measure, an attempt to redress this problem, to explain how and under what circumstances the political crisis of the 1640s mutated into a revolution. It seeks to chronicle and analyze a process whereby a society, seemingly steeped in custom, monarchical institutions, the ancient constitution of king, lords, and commons, and orthodox Christianity pulled itself apart, spiraling into constitutional and religious innovation, and, ultimately, regicide and republicanism.
RADICAL PARLIAMENTARIANS
This study addresses these questions by reconstructing the history of the most radical wing of the parliamentarian coalition during the political crisis and First Civil War, from 1640 to 1646. Under the rubric of “radical parliamentarians,” this book encompasses a wide range of people, ideas, and activities. At the core of the category are those supporters of parliament who championed the most exalted notions of parliamentary authority; the most adventurous commitments to far-reaching change in the nature of the polity; the most aggressive and uncompromising policies with respect to monarchy, the king, and his backers; and the most unconventional and extreme attempts to remake the existing structure of the church or the orthodox doctrine promulgated by that church. Although the subject matter of this book thus frequently overlaps with the world sketched by historians such as
11 J. Morrill, “The Religious Context of the English Civil War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., 34 (1984), 178; cf. the claims of Ronald Hutton, following Blair Worden, that “the regicide was a feast of constitutional destruction, not creation, and its mental inspiration derived not from republican theory but from Puritan providentialism.” R. Hutton, The British Republic, 1649–1660, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, 2000), xx.
12 A point illustrated in Sean Kelsey’s influential work, which reconstructs in detail the weeks before the regicide to explain a contingent outcome unintended even by those most central to the political process: S. Kelsey, “The Trial of Charles I,” EHR, 118 (2003), 583–616; S. Kelsey, “The Death of Charles I,” HJ, 45 (2002), 727–54; for two ambitious syntheses, see D. Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (Basingstoke, 2003); J. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000).
Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War Hill and Morton—and many of the starring figures in their accounts reappear below—there are crucial differences of approach. This book does not seek to identify a hypostasized “radicalism,” abstracted from other political and intellectual currents of the time. Rather, it portrays the developments under consideration precisely as part of those currents, as inseparably connected to, and indeed generated by, their relationship to the war effort, the parliamentarian coalition, and the political process broadly construed.13 The streams of thought and practice discussed here were partly forced into being by challenges that emerged during the war, and as such they must be understood as part of a diachronic narrative. These people and ideas were also, crucially, part of a continuum, standing at one end of a spectrum of parliamentarian thought and practice; they cannot be understood outside their relationship to the other elements of that spectrum.
The focus on radical parliamentarians is justified by the fact that it was, in the end, precisely the most militant wing of parliament’s coalition that dictated the outcome of the war and political settlement. This study traces the story through to the conclusion of the First English Civil War and the king’s surrender to the Scots in April 1646. While there remained a long road to be traveled between 1646 and the execution of Charles I in 1649, it is demonstrated below, against the grain of recent scholarship, that most of the basic theoretical and practical positions that led to the regicide, the establishment of England as a republic, and the abolition of the upper house of parliament were in place by the end of the First Civil War.14 So, too, most of the remarkable religious divisions and ideas that propelled the army and its allies to power in the later 1640s had already emerged. Although the final triumph of parliament’s most extreme partisans was by no means a foregone conclusion in 1646, their ideas and energy considerably strengthened the war effort, ensuring the king’s defeat. Moreover, militant parliamentarians, through zealous service (and a dose of political cunning), captured key military and bureaucratic
13 Accordingly, this book generally avoids the word “radicalism,” construed as a distinct, unified complex of ideas or programs, of a progressive (even proto-leftist) nature. The word “radical” is used throughout, but mainly as a modifier, to distinguish the most extreme section of a broader group or party, or to describe individuals or ideas that most comprehensively sought to disrupt or replace traditional, existing, or orthodox forms of political and religious life. For attempts to grapple with “radicals” and “radicalism” in the wake of revisionism, see N. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989); D. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge, 2001); N. McDowell, The English Radical Imagination (Oxford, 2003); A. Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, 2007); G. Burgess, “Radicalism and the English Revolution,” in G. Burgess and M. Festenstein, eds., English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2007), 62–86; P. Baker, “Rhetoric, Reality and Varieties of Civil-War Radicalism,” in J. Adamson, ed., The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts (Basingstoke, 2009), 202–24; A. Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England (London, 2011); D. Finnegan and A. Hessayon, eds., Varieties of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Radicalism in Context (Farnham, 2011).
14 I intend to analyze the period between 1646 and 1649 in a separate study. For an overview of the politics behind the regicide, see C. Holmes, Why was Charles I Executed? (London, 2006); for a work that argues in a different way for revolutionary change in the early 1640s, see D. Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006).
footholds, meaning that when it came to determine the peace, they were able to overpower their opponents.
Part of the utility of the focus on radical parliamentarians—viewed along a spectrum, and in constant relation to a shifting, broader coalition—is the very flexibility of the category. This is true in two ways. First, the rapid upheavals of political crisis and civil war ensured that ideas and programs were constantly being revised, so that the personnel and ideological structures at the militant edge of the coalition shifted over time. Ideas and opinions that were marginal in 1640 quickly migrated to the center of the coalition, while new ideological revisions entered public discussion, winning followers even as they repulsed others, thus polarizing opinion. This dynamic of radicalization and polarization recurs throughout this study, and must be seen as one engine driving the civil war towards its improbable outcome. Yet it is a dynamic that can only be understood by tracking the shifting state of opinion at the leading edge of parliament’s coalition over time, and by observing the process through which the marginal became mainstream.
This also points towards the second advantage of the plasticity of the category of radical parliamentarians—its diversity. This study explores a wide range of opinions, not all consonant with one another. One effect of the civil war was to throw up a dizzying array of competing ideas and discourses. This study seeks to encompass this broad range, and to make sense of both the commonalities and differences that emerged at the militant edge of parliament’s coalition. Thus, many figures frequently associated with the “radicalism” of the revolution appear in this study. The three men typically seen as ideological leaders of the Levellers—John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn—bob frequently to the surface in these pages, and, indeed, their early careers serve as a loose thread running through this book. The Leveller movement, per se, is a subject that properly belongs to the later 1640s, beyond this study’s purview, but one goal here is to offer an account of the genesis of that celebrated political agitation.15 This book is also, however, deeply concerned with many figures not typically associated with the Levellers, and who in some cases later appeared as their primary antagonists, not least Oliver Cromwell, whose rise to prominence represents an important sub-theme below.16 But the net is cast wider still, and this study at points deals with groups and individuals not traditionally perceived as “radical” at all, including presbyterians, often seen as the archconservatives within parliament’s camp. This may have been true in 1649, but it had not always been the case, and part of the burden of this book, with its focus on shifting ideological debate within parliament’s coalition, is to explain this outcome.
This study traces a number of key questions or problems, which were disputed over the course of the period. In the realm of politics and political thought, the
15 For two far-reaching recent re-evaluations of the Levellers, see R. Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2013); J. Rees, The Leveller Revolution (London and New York, 2016).
16 However, for commonalities between Levellers and army leaders in 1648 and beyond, see Burgess, “Radicalism,” 69–73; P. Baker, “‘A Despicable Contemptible Generation of Men’? Cromwell and the Levellers,” in P. Little, ed., Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), 90–115.
