In an historian we are not to be critical for every punctilio, not relating to his main design; yet I think ’tis but just to demand that what he doth write be true.
Henry Stubbe, The Lord Bacons Relation of the Sweating-Sickness Examined (1671), p. 2
This book derives from two others which I published in the 1970s. In The World Turned Upside Down (1972) I tried to present the ferment of radical ideas which welled up in England in the revolutionary 1640s and 1650s. I suggested—almost as an afterthought—that Milton in the 1640s shared much of the Wordsworthian excitement of those days when it was bliss to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. This excitement comes across in Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. In Milton and the English Revolution (1977) I tried to work out in more detail Milton’s relationship to the radical ideas of the Revolution, and to suggest that for him the defeat of the Revolution which he had believed to be God’s Cause, and to which he had given up the best years of his life, was a shattering blow. The three great poems of his last years represent, among many other things, his attempt to come to terms with this defeat: to rethink his whole position in order to be able to ‘Assert eternal Providence/And justify the ways of God to men.’ Milton started Paradise Lost in about 1658, and finished it in 1665. In these years he was alone only in his genius. Many others were querying either the goodness or the omnipotence of a God who had apparently so badly let down his servants. The present book attempts to survey the reactions of other radicals to the experience of defeat.
The World Turned Upside Down was criticized for overstating the significance of the radical ideas which I portrayed. In the excitement of discovering far more and far more coherent ideas than I had anticipated, I may indeed have exaggerated the numerical significance of the radicals—though there is much investigation to be done before this can be stated with assurance. I do not think I exaggerated the historical significance of the ideas, both in themselves, and in the reaction which they provoked. They were the ideas of a minority, it is true; but then so were the ideas which dominated English society before 1640 and after 1660, under the protection of the censorship. The extraordinary difference between the novel ideas of the 1640s and 1650s and those which could be printed in the pre- and post-revolutionary periods must lead us to ask where the apparently new ideas came from, and where they went to. Had they been there, below the surface, in some form or other, before 1640? If so, that tells us something important about the society, about the role of the church and the censorship. If not, then we have to explain their sudden appearance and rapid diffusion once the censorship and ecclesiastical controls collapsed. I suggested that upper-class concern about the spread of radical ideas (and especially their apparent revival in 1659–60) made a significant contribution to the swing of opinion which brought the enemies of Charles I to support the restoration of his son in 1660. This suggestion has received some support, but again further investigation is needed.1
Some critics disliked Milton and the English Revolution because in it I seemed to them to degrade Milton by relating him to the political and intellectual problems of the society in which he lived: they prefer to think of the great poet writing in a timeless vacuum. However inadequate the execution may have been, I am unrepentant about my attempt to associate what Milton wrote with the triumphs and defeat of his Cause. Our understanding of history can illuminate the writing of even the greatest of poets, just as no historian can possibly understand any epoch—least of all a revolutionary epoch—without grasping its impact on the great writers who are its most sensitive recorders. Where would our understanding of the Russian Revolution be without Chekhov and Gorky, without Blok’s The Twelve, in which Winstanley’s ‘head Leveller’ Jesus Christ leads the advancing revolutionary soldiers? How should we understand the French Revolution without Rousseau, Choderlos de Laclos, Beaumarchais and Stendhal? The Chinese Revolution of our own century has been illuminated by J. D. Spence’s study of scholars, novelists and poets, with epigraph from Areopagitica.2
Milton, vanguard intellectual as well as sensitive poet, seems to me essential for our understanding of the English Revolution. He was not only an active and deeply committed participant: he narrowly escaped being executed in 1660 for his participation. Properly understood, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes tell us as much about the Revolution as Parliamentary debates and state papers. Since my argument in Milton and the English Revolution did not meet with universal acceptance, I hope to strengthen it by considering the similar experiences which some of Milton’s contemporaries went through. Milton’s presence I hope will be felt throughout this book even when he is not specifically mentioned.
This book deals with ideas. We know something of the practical consequences of defeat. After 1660 nearly one in five of the beneficed ministers lost their livings, without even the meagre compensation which the ejected of the 1640s and 1650s had received. Lay dissenters had to endure nearly thirty years of sporadic but often very damaging persecution.1 My concern is not so much with the fate of radicals after the restoration, but to study how some individuals coped with the experience of living through a revolution which they initially welcomed, and with the defeat of that revolution—a defeat which for some of them occurred before 1660. Those whom I have selected for discussion had to be taken from the few who left evidence of their reactions: many radicals lapsed into silence. I have tried to show what my chosen characters thought the Revolution had been about, where it had gone wrong, and how they adapted to its defeat. I hope that the cumulative effect of their testimony will be to reinforce the argument of The World Turned Upside Down, that there was an intellectually significant and numerically not insignificant congeries of radical ideas; and to demonstrate that Milton was one of many revolutionaries wrestling with common problems.
The experience of defeat meant recognizing the collapse of the system of ideas which had previously sustained action, and attempting to discover new explanations, new perspectives. The first defeat of the more extreme radicals came in and after 1649. Leveller leaders were arrested and imprisoned, Leveller-led mutinies in the Army were suppressed, culminating in the total rout of mutinous regiments at Burford in May 1649. After that the Leveller leaders abandoned hope of winning control of the Army and either subsided into the obscurity from which they had briefly emerged, or took to underground conspiracy, sometimes in conjunction with Royalists. The less numerous Diggers were dispersed in April-May 1650; Ranters were made to recant in 1650–1. Both groupings ceased to exist in any organized form.1
Fifth Monarchists appeared strong in the Army in 1653, when they collaborated in the dismissal of the Rump of the Long Parliament and its replacement by Barebone’s Parliament. But they too had no effective organization, and were divided in their aims. Very few dogs barked at the disappearance of either the Rump or Barebone’s Parliament. Venner’s tiny Fifth Monarchist group staged revolts in London in 1657 and 1661. But apart from their readiness to use violence, their programme differed little from those of other radicals. There had been a strong millenarian element among those who sat in judgement on Charles I in 1649: many regicides executed after the restoration still held tenaciously on to the conviction of divine approval which they believed had justified their action.2 But—significantly—many of those executed by the restored government had been imprisoned under the Protectorate. 1660 was only the confirmation of their defeat. In the 1650s William Erbery, William Sedgwick, Isaac Penington and early Quakers lectured the Army on its duties but had no aspirations to win control over it. Adaptation of their ideas to defeat proceeded throughout the decade: 1660 was a final blow. I suspect the same was true of Milton.3
I look at some Independent revolutionaries—Oliver Cromwell and his chaplains, John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, at the republican James Harrington.4 I have included a group of moderate Puritan ministers, who also found themselves among the defeated after 1660.5 Quakers adopted the peace principle in January 1661 and organized themselves more rigidly as a sect; the Harringtonians adapted their master’s ideas to the constitutional and economic circumstances of the restoration period. Finally I look in more detail at the ideas of other survivors—Samuel Pordage, author of an epic on the Fall of Man well before Milton: he went on to be a Whig exclusionist; Andrew Marvell, who passed from millenarianism to Harringtonianism; Henry Stubbe, who advanced from being a disciple of Henry Vane through Harringtonianism to something like deism.6
I hope I have brought together characters interesting in their own right. I have made no great literary discoveries; but Erbery, Sedgwick and Isaac Penington in his early pamphlets are no mean writers of English prose. Samuel Pordage is far from being a distinguished poet. I sympathize with the lines attributed to Rochester:
Poet, who’er thou art, God damn thee,
Go hang thyself, and burn thy Mariamne.
But the analogies between Pordage’s epic and the writings of Milton and Bunyan help to put the latter two into historical context.1 The total effect should, I hope, be to flesh out our experience of what the restoration meant. For many, perhaps for most, it was a return to normality; for others, not the least sensitive, it was a defeat no less devastating for having been long foreseen.
Other characters tempted me. There are things to say about George Wither and John Bunyan in this context, but I have said most of them already.2 I have also written about William Dell and John Webster, radical reformers who might otherwise have found a place in Chapter Four,3 and briefly about the adaptations made by Milton’s nephews, John and Edward Phillips.4 Broghill was intriguing as an ex-royalist who became Cromwell’s right-hand man in Scotland. He helped to bring Ireland to accept the restoration, and then was an early writer of heroic drama in rhymed couplets, preceding Dryden. But although Broghill did less well financially under Charles II than under Oliver,5 nevertheless such great aristocrats can switch easily from one regime to another without the word ‘defeat’ being applicable. Ashley-Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, is another example; so is the more complex William Howard, later Lord Howard of Escrick, to whom I refer briefly in Chapter Two. Algernon Sidney was an aristocratic republican who (as Milton put it) ‘has ever been loyal to our side’,6 and continued the political struggle until his execution in 1683. His Discourses concerning Government (published posthumously in 1698) handed on many of the political ideas of the English revolutionaries to eighteenth-century Whigs, American and French republicans. He was of greater historical significance than some I have included, but evidence concerning his experience of defeat is meagre. Marchamont Nedham, whose writings also became part of the Whig canon, still remains as difficult to assess as Henry Stubbe was before the work of J. R. Jacob.1 I did not feel capable of tackling that very complicated man.
Robert Everard seemed an intriguing candidate for inclusion. He was a spokesman for the Agitators in the Putney Debates in 1647 who became an Army officer and sectarian preacher and pamphleteer. His critique of the doctrine of original sin was ‘spread far and near, to the deceiving of many poor souls and to the troubling of others’, Nathaniel Stephens lamented in 1658.2 After the restoration Everard was the only former revolutionary who publicly converted to Roman Catholicism. But the pamphlet in which he announced this conversion is most disappointing. It purports to record the conversation of a Catholic layman, and one can well believe that Everard himself did not compose it.3 Apart from a few expressions of regret for his own role in the civil war, the pamphlet could have been written at any time, anywhere: it is not directed to the specific problems of post-revolutionary England. The unknown speaker throughout assumes what was necessary to be proved, that no certainty is to be found outside the Roman church.
Sir Henry Vane might have been added to my republicans, but I shrank from the impenetrable thickets of his prose. I might have looked at more Quakers: George Bishop and Anthony Pearson both diverge from the accepted image. John Sadler and Henry Denne would have been interesting: so would the great naturalist John Ray, who resigned his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1662 to live on the charity of others and who survived to welcome ‘the yoke of slavery … broken’ in 1688.4 I might have made more of those whom defeat drove into emigration—Joseph Salmon, Edward Byllynge, John Perrot. I could have added Edward Taylor, church- and school-outed by the restored prelates, who had to go to New England to get a university education. There he wrote nature poetry in the metaphysical mode. He too lived to welcome 1688, having retained an ‘aversion to the aristocracy of England, alike in church and state’.1 He might have been balanced against Thomas Traherne, whom at one time I thought of including. Radical influences on Traherne are important, but the worst defeat he suffered at the restoration was to have to be re-ordained at the age of 24.
I was disappointed not to be able to find any woman who left adequate evidence of her experience of defeat. Women played an important part in the religious sects, so this is a comment on the survival of evidence about women in the seventeenth century. Lucy Hutchinson should have been a candidate, but in her Memoirs of her husband she is far too concerned to cover up the Colonel’s weaknesses to allow her own views to come through. We get the impression that she was the stronger character of the two, but she would have repudiated such an idea.2 Margaret Fell was another possibility, but her main contribution was in the sphere of Quaker organization rather than of ideas. Mary Cary and Anna Trapnell both fell silent after defeat. Aphra Behn was not visibly a radical before 1660. Who else?
One problem to be faced in dealing with seventeenth-century England, and particularly with radicals, is the censorship. It was there all the time before 1640, its strictness increasing in the 1630s. In the 1640s it was intermittent and rarely effective: it was gradually restored in the 1650s, though there was still greater freedom for radical voices to be heard than after 1660. I discussed some of the effects of the censorship in Milton and the English Revolution:3 we must never forget its existence, and how exceptional men felt its brief absence to be. ‘I must speak plain to you,’ Gerrard Winstanley told Oliver Cromwell in 1651, ‘lest my spirit tell me another day, “if thou hadst spoke plain, things might have been amended.”’4 Under censorship men restrained themselves from telling the whole truth as they saw it, proceeding by analogy, implication and innuendo. Milton quoted Bacon: ‘authorized books are but the language of the times.’1 From Spenser to Bunyan those with something original to say found it safer to make use of allegory or pastoral; others cited the Bible or the classics to convey unorthodox views without actual commitment.2 ‘Of the maintenance of our Saviour and his Apostles,’ wrote Thomas Hobbes, a master of this art, ‘we read only that they had a purse (which was carried by Judas Iscariot)’.3 No one could fault that factual statement; but implications for current disputes about tithes could be drawn from it. Bunyan used the same technique. God’s own people, he wrote, ‘cannot, with Pontius Pilate, speak Hebrew, Greek and Latin’.4
Others equivocated by giving precise but unorthodox sense to biblical terms. Thus when Winstanley declared, ‘I do walk in the daily practice of such ordinances of God as Reason and Scriptures do warrant’,5 we have to remember that he believed Reason and Scriptures did not warrant prayer, preaching, holy communion, baptism or Sabbath observance. Winstanley tells us that ‘all the prophecies, visions and revelations of Scriptures, of prophets and apostles concerning the calling of the Jews, the restoration of Israel and making of that people the inheritors of the whole earth, doth all seat themselves in this work of making the earth a common treasury’ which the Diggers advocated.6 Everybody was against Antichrist; so his name could be extended from Pope to bishops, to the whole hierarchy of the state church, to the King and royalists who defended them; similarly the Norman Yoke could be extended from obsolete laws which Parliament could reform to the whole body of the law itself, and to the Norman gentry and freeholders who opposed the digging on St. George’s Hill.
In this book I have considered poets and prophets, pacifists and politicians. I hope it may contain something for those interested in literature, political ideas and religion; but not all specialists will find all of it equally relevant to their particular interests. Just because of this, the book may perhaps be of some use to those interested in a non-specialist way in the seventeenth century. The study of seventeenth-century England is undergoing one of its regular crises. Those who have come to be called ‘revisionists’ have attempted to deny that there was an English Revolution. The gentry, in and out of Parliament, we are often (and rightly) told, did not want civil war, did not want revolutionary change. There was no parliamentary opposition: incompetent politicians blundered into an unwanted conflict, after which there was a period of chaos until order and normality were restored in 1660.
Now it is quite clear that the characters studied in this book did not see things like that. They may have been untypical when they spoke of the battle of Christ against Antichrist, of the breakdown of the Gothic balance, or of casting ‘the kingdom old/Into another mould’, just as Milton no doubt was when he declared that the Revolution had seen ‘the most heroic and exemplary achievements since the foundation of the world’.1 They all thought something important and something of long-term consequence had happened. Harrington looked back to Henry VII’s reign, others to Wyclif and the Lollards, to the protestant reformation or to the Waldensians: none spoke of accident, and those who denounced incompetence did not regard it as a primary cause of the civil war.
There had been men and women before 1640 who did want change—sufficiently to brave exile in the Netherlands or New England when they saw no immediate hope of getting it at home. As early as 1629–31 John Winthrop and Thomas Hooker believed that God was abandoning England; Mrs Anne Hutchinson had ‘a sure word that England would be destroyed’.2 Hence the excitement in New England when God seemed to be returning in power to England in the 1640s, and their disappointment later.
The leaders of the emigration were gentry and clergy, but the rank and file came from lower social groups. We have no idea whether they were as typical of their social classes as MPs are assumed to have been of theirs. Tom May, official historian of the Long Parliament, frequently emphasizes that the common people were more ready to defend their liberties and their religion than were lords and gentlemen.3 The violent hostility towards religious toleration which most MPs showed in the 1640s, 1650s and 1660s suggests that they thought there was a great deal of potential support for the sectaries. But what we do know is that on specific issues—foreign policy, for example—an exile like Thomas Scott in the 1620s was only expressing in stronger language criticisms of the government with which many MPs agreed. This also came to be true in relation to bishops in the 1630s.
We get some sort of idea of how men felt in the early years of the civil war from Francis Woodcock. Writing in 1643 he spoke of ‘that common question almost in everyone’s mouth, “What will become of us? What do you think of these times?”’1 Woodcock’s explanation was that the Two Witnesses prophesied in Revelation XI had been slain ‘five or six years agone’—i.e. in 1637–8—by the Beast who ascends ‘out of the bottomless pit, the Antichristian kind of government’—i.e. episcopacy. ‘They much mistake themselves that tell us ’tis jure divino.’2 Godly ministers who had testified against Antichrist had been silenced by the Laudians, the pulpit ‘shut against them, yea the press also’. After three and a half years they were restored to liberty at the beginning of the Long Parliament, ‘the multitude of people congratulating with them for their freedom: this is the cloud wherein they ascend to heaven’ (verse 12). Already by 1643 a remarkable change had been wrought. ‘Prelacy and ceremonies gone in Scotland, agoing in this country’: that fulfilled the prophecy about the tenth part of the city in Revelation XI. The slaughter of the 7,000 signified the prelates, deans and chapters, with all their appurtenances. The civil war was the great earthquake continuing (Rev. XI); and we may ‘expect ere long much greater things than I shall dare to speak of’.3
The sense that many radicals had (after the event) that ‘the saints called a Parliament’ in 1640, and that ‘it was God raised up the saints to an Army’,4 their feeling that long-term impersonal forces were at work, may express the social truth that control of political events began to slip from the hands of the natural rulers once the Long Parliament met. It must have felt as if some external power was taking over. Many of the Parliamentarian leaders were less scared of sectaries who might be socially subversive than of the government. So they started on the slippery slope which led from Agitators seizing the King in June 1647 to his execution in January 1649. So far were they in 1640–1 from willing such an outcome that they never even contemplated its possibility. Who else but God could be held responsible?
In the course of the last two generations, the history of theology, law, philosophy, science, literature and art has ceased to be the exclusive preserve of theologians, lawyers, philosophers, scientists, literary and art critics. In consequence our understanding of history has been enriched: it has become the history of society, not of chopped-off segments of society. It still remains to persuade demographers that the statistics on which they rely for the history of population are socially produced and therefore open to criticism from social historians. A last bastion, ironically enough, is administrative history, some of whose practitioners believe that they alone are ‘real’ historians, and that their preserves are sacrosanct. Their shrill cries reveal however that they know theirs is a losing cause. History, we might say, is against them.
‘Revisionists’ have concentrated their attention on the central administration and Parliament, or on the gentry who ran the counties. They have less to say about the great movements of ideas which make the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes and Milton so exciting; or about the shifts in social forces of which Ralegh, Bacon and Harrington were aware. Fortunately the balance has been redressed over the past decade by Brian Manning’s The English People and the English Revolution,1 Derek Hirst’s The Representative of the People?: Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts, Margot Heinemann’s Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts, Keith Wrightson’s English Society, 1580–1680,2 and P. W. Thomas’s ‘Two Cultures? Court and Country under Charles I’ in The Origins of the English Civil War (ed. C. Russell). The best of all the revisionist historians, Conrad Russell and John Morrill, have taken the cue, and a number of younger historians of seventeenth-century English counties have broadened their outlook to study the whole county community, not just ‘the county community’ in the misleading sense in which seventeenth-century gentlemen used it.
The trap some historians have fallen into here illustrates the dangers of the principle put forward recently by John Morrill and taken up by John Bossy, that in discussing seventeenth-century society we must not use terms of analysis which were then unknown.1 Words like ‘class’ and ‘revolution’ were not used then in their modern sense: ergo there cannot have been classes or revolutions. The gentry thought they were the ‘county community’: ergo we must perpetuate the illusion of a ‘one-class society’ in which only the gentry mattered. Contemporaries had no word to ‘conjoin … yeomen and urban master-craftsmen’;2 ergo.… But, as we shall see when we come to look at Harrington, they had such a word—they called them ‘people’, a category from which servants and the poor were excluded.3 We are much more likely to be confused if we use terms like ‘county community’ and ‘people’ in their seventeenth-century sense than if, with proper definition, we use the terms of art devised by later political analysts. The word ‘revolution’ in fact acquired its modern meaning in the later seventeenth-century because of experience of what happened in the mid-century.4 The absence of the word does not prove that the thing could not have existed: the thing had to come first for men to find a word for it. How indeed could it have been otherwise? For this reason, when I use the word ‘people’ in its normal seventeenth-century sense, excluding servants and the poor, I have often put it in inverted commas to remind us that it does not mean what the word means today. On the other hand, when I use ‘saints’ in the technical seventeenth-century sense, I have not put it into inverted commas, since confusion is not likely to arise.
But if we need not be shackled to the words of the men and women of the seventeenth century, we must take their ideas seriously, even when they strike us as silly. Revolutions are not wholly rational events. We do not now look to the book of Revelation for our analysis of political processes; but the concept of the slaughter and resurrection of the Two Witnesses helped Francis Woodcock to explain what was happening, and to forecast what was likely to happen. Similarly we may find it difficult to take seriously the idea that fear of popery was a significant reason for supporting Parliament in 1642; but it was for Richard Baxter, no fool.5 When Lady Eleanor Davies in 1633 foretold a violent death for Charles I, Archbishop Laud dismissed her as ‘never so mad a lady’. But after 1649 it was less easy to laugh her off. Laud had already met his violent death by then.
So this book is a plea for total history, across disciplines. It illustrates not only reactions to the defeat of the English Revolution, but also acceptance of the fact of revolution itself. My emphasis has been on the late 1650s and early 1660s, but I have also tried to show how men looked back to the origins of their Cause in the 1630s and 1640s, if not earlier. ‘The war was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any armies,’ Richard Baxter recalled after the event.1 Those who fought in village streets were not gentry: one of the purposes for which the latter carried swords was to put down lower-class disorder if it should chance to occur. But when government controls broke down between 1640 and 1642, it was ordinary people whose quarrels were most difficult to restrain. This book will follow Manning, Hirst and Wrightson in suggesting some of the ideas behind popular movements which the gentry were unable to control.
This should help to restore a lost dimension. Those great nineteenth-century historians Guizot and Gardiner had no inhibitions about talking of a revolution in mid-seventeenth-century England: the focus of more recent historians has narrowed. Gardiner had no doubts about the ideological nature of what he called ‘the Puritan Revolution’, a phrase which he popularized if he did not invent it. In understandable reaction against treating ‘religion’ as a self-sufficient historical force some Namier-influenced historians have tended to underestimate the importance of ideas in motivating political action. That great historian, R. H. Tawney, had a wider, more all-human perspective: it is a pity that the revisionists in correcting some of his weaknesses have ignored this particular strength. It is high time that we look at what contemporaries thought were the issues at stake, especially contemporaries below the rank of gentry, from whom the civil war began.
I hope, therefore, that this book may play its small part in reestablishing the consensus which the valuable work of the revisionists seemed to have shattered. Their meticulous studies of Parliament, the administration and the gentry in the counties have provided us with a lot of information which Tawney, the last great synthesizer, did not have. Conrad Russell has given us a lead in looking for a new synthesis2 which I hope will embrace the whole nation, not merely the ruling class, and the whole life and thought of the English people, not merely the politics of its upper strata. These, we may agree with Harrington, were largely irrelevant to what was actually happening.
If we are allowed to give the phrase ‘God’s purposes’ only the meaning which it had for seventeenth-century radicals, its use to explain the English Revolution will not advance our understanding. But if we take it as expressing something like ‘the historical process’ it may offer insights which we have overlooked. We do not have to agree that the Parliamentarian Cause was the Cause of God. But knowing that many good and intelligent people believed this may help us to understand the elation of the fight and the desolation of defeat when they realized that the world was not after all to be turned upside down.