2
The Neglected Soldier as Vagrant, Revenger, Tyrant Slayer in Early Modern England
In 1567, Thomas Harman, an author of “rogue literature,” adopted the posture of a proto-Homeland Security officer, warning the general public about vagrants. His particular orange alert dealt with panhandlers feigning disability. His compilation A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds detailed the alleged “abominable, wicked and detestable behavior of all these rowsy, ragged rabblement of rakehells, that under the pretense of great misery, diseases and other innumerable calamities, which they feign through great hypocrisy, do win and gain great alms in all places where they wily wander.” Harman classified twenty-four specialist categories of vagrant, including the bullying upright-man; the hooker, who hooks clothing and valuables through windows by night; the prigger of prancers, a horse thief; the counterfeit crank, a phony epileptic; the dummerer, a phony dumb man; the whipjack, who pretends to have suffered shipwreck; the demander for glimmer, who pretends her house has burned down; the bawdy-basket, autem-mort, walking mort, kinchin mort, doxy, and dell.1 But the very first one he discussed was the ruffler, a vagrant claiming to be an ex-soldier, usually disabled. Like most vagrants of Harman’s lurid imaginings, the ruffler was blessed with considerable histrionic talent, waxing aggressive or piteous depending on the situation: “With stout audacity he demandeth where he thinketh he may be bold, and circumspect enough, as he seeth cause to ask charity, ruefully and lamentably, that it would make a flinty hart to relent, and pity his miserable estate, how he hath been maimed and bruised in the wars, and peradventure some will shew you some outward wound, which he got at some drunken fray.”2 Harman preferred the aggressive stance to the tear-jerking wound display: highway robbery might be criminal, but at least it was manly.
In fact, Harman believed that a ruffler out begging was not only pretending to have war wounds but also pretending to have been a soldier, for a true soldier would be too proud to beg: “The hardiest soldiers . . . if they escape all hazards and return home again, if they be without relief of their friends, they will surely desperately rob and steal, or [else] shortly be hanged or miserably die in prison, for they be so much ashamed and disdain to beg or ask charity, that rather they will as desperately fight for to live and maintain themselves as manfully and valiantly they ventured themselves in the Prince’s quarrel.”3 It is difficult to agree with this huffing, intolerant anecdotalist that impostors who allegedly feigned dumbness or epilepsy, to bilk ha’pennies out of passers-by, posed much of a threat to the social order. Yet the unemployed, disabled veteran of the period did pose a serious social problem. As A. L. Beier writes, “No occupational groups increased as much as sailors and soldiers among vagrants from 1560 to 1640.”4 Scholars of early modern poverty recognize demobilized, often disabled soldiers as a persistent, significant element of the destitute homeless, and disorder from hungry disbanded soldiers was feared with good reason. In 1589, for example, troops were called out and martial law imposed when hundreds of Sir Francis Drake’s disbanded soldiers threatened the peace in London.5
As historians have shown, many Elizabethan soldiers were demobilized without pensions, compensation for injuries, or even full wages. As Beier observes, unemployed ex-soldiers seemed even more threatening than others classified as vagabonds because they often had weapons and knew how to use them.6 Indeed, for John Awdeley, who wrote about vagrants a few years before Harman, it was the weapon that set rufflers apart from other vagrants: “A ruffler goeth with a weapon to seek service, saying he hath been a servitor in the wars, and beggeth for his relief.”7 Because of the weaponry they still carried, demobilized soldiers were feared through the seventeenth century, but over the course of a century after Harman wrote, this class of Elizabethan vagrant began to move from being part of the problem to being part of the solution.
The Neglected Soldier Onstage
Though rogue literature like Harman’s or Awdeley’s viciously caricatured demobilized soldiers, plays of the public theaters treated them with considerable sympathy. In Edward II (ca. 1592),8 Christopher Marlowe quickly conveys the nastiness of Piers Gaveston by showing him cruelly rebuff a poverty-stricken demobilized soldier who asks him for a job, declaring himself “a soldier, that hath serv’d against the Scot.” Gaveston snarls, “Why, there are hospitals for such as you: / I have no war, and therefore, sir, be gone.” The departing veteran mutters a curse in Gaveston’s general direction: “Farewell, and perish by a soldier’s hand / That would’st reward them with an hospital!”9 Playwrights of the period often depict veterans who are unemployed and in debt. In The Honest Lawyer (ca. 1615), by S. S., a veteran who cannot find work has to set up as a quack physician.10 In Nathan Field and Philip Massinger’s The Fatal Dowry (ca. 1619), a veteran languishing in debtor’s prison commits suicide.11 A character in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen (ca. 1613) laments the plight of the “unconsider’d soldier.”12 In John Webster’s The White Devil (ca. 1612), Flamineo remarks that his chosen career—pandering for his sister—pays better than soldiering.13 In John Fletcher’s The Honest Man’s Fortune (1613), a character vows always to aid “the poor neglected soldier.”14
Plays are sensitive to the condition of soldiers on active duty. In Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), the king wanders incognito among his troops the night before the big battle, eavesdropping on their opinions of the war and himself. If he expected unconditional loyalty, what he gets from common soldiers is a flea in his ear. One soldier who just wants to go home wishes the king were at the battle all by himself; thus would “many poor men’s lives [be] saved.” Taken aback, the disguised king protests, “I dare say you love him not so ill to wish him here alone. . . . I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable.” To which a second soldier answers pointedly, “That’s more than we know,” and continues feelingly: “If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’—some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.”15 Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (ca. 1621) offers a soldier’s-eye view of war. The men complain of their treatment by superiors and hope a besieged town will hold out rather than making terms—their only hope of getting paid lies in taking spoils. And anyway, they like taking revenge on the privileged classes of a sacked city, “choughs that every day may spend / A soldier’s entertainment for a year /. . . . I have seen ’em stop / Their scornful noses first, then seem to swoon / At sight of a buff jerkin.”16 They predict that profit from the war will end up in “the emperor’s coffers,” while “the poor soldier” is “left / To starve, or fill up hospitals.”17 In both these plays, soldiers worry at least as much about their prospects after demobilization as about battle itself. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, one soldier plans to become a beggar faking disability with phony war wounds—in short, a ruffler: “To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal, / And patches will I get unto these cudgelled scars, / And swear I got them in the Gallia wars.”18
Dramatists even evinced concern about the emotional health of veterans, dramatizing soldiers’ difficulties reintegrating into civilian life. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (ca. 1598), the returned soldier Claudio gets engaged, but volunteers to skip his honeymoon to accompany his commanding officer on an out-of-town errand. Ill suited to civilian life among women, Claudio is quick to believe a slander against his fiancée. In the same play, the soldier Benedick returns from war a confirmed woman hater, ranting against women and marriage, and has to be tricked into falling in love. The hero of Shakespeare’s Othello (ca. 1604), a general out of his depth in a civilian context, believes a slander against his wife partly because it comes from a fellow military man. In Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Captain (ca. 1612), an officer just back from war is so uncomfortable with women that he cannot approach one unless he is either drunk or angry enough to rush into battle. When a woman tries to anger him enough to notice her by emptying a pisspot on his head from a balcony, he simply breaks all the windows in the street.19
Some plays show worthy commanders making sure their soldiers get paid: in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1587), a king punctiliously resolves “to see our soldiers paid”: “We will bestow on every soldier / Two ducats, and on every leader ten.”20 The playwright George Peele, whose father was a financial officer and author of the first original English-language manual of double-entry bookkeeping, includes a fiscally oriented scene in his play Edward I (ca. 1591). The king, returning from war, takes up a collection for the maintenance of his maimed soldiers; noblemen vie with each other in giving—three thousand pounds, five thousand pounds. The total pledged amounts to ten thousand pounds. The queen then contributes, modestly setting down only a zero; happily, the zero is in the right-hand column, turning ten thousand pounds into a hundred thousand.21 Such a scene seems designed to inspire magnanimous gestures of gratitude toward the nation’s soldiers. Other plays incite shame in the breasts of ungenerous audiences by staging the more typical scenario of veterans reduced to penury. In Henry Chettle and John Day’s The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (1600), creditors descend on a returning soldier who has been unable to draw his pay and therefore owes for expenses incurred while on active duty: he owes his victualler seven marks, his armorer twelve pounds, his carter twenty nobles. He settles up with them for all he has in ready money.22
Many soldiers whose good military service has been neglected like this turn bitter; and it is from these bitter veterans that Renaissance drama recruits many of its most forceful avengers. A son in Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, or A Revenge for a Father (1602) sets out to avenge his father, a soldier who fought thirty battles for his country and then “for his merits he was named / A prescript outlaw for a little debt” (1.156).23 The veteran Bosola in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (ca. 1614) seeks revenge on the world at large: “There are rewards for hawks, and dogs, . . . when they have done us service; but for a soldier, that hazards his limbs in a battle, nothing but a kind of geometry is his last supportation . . . to hang in a fair pair of slings, upon an honorable pair of crutches, from hospital to hospital.”24
That so many abused soldiers get sympathetic treatment in the public theater, with its heterogeneous mix of social classes,25 suggests public receptivity to the issue across a wide social spectrum. In an era of nascent English nationalism, public theaters staged many patriotic plays, and the soldier risking life and limb for his country was a popular figure. In Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), the newly married shoemaker Ralph Damport is stoic about being conscripted into a foreign war because it is his duty to support “his country’s quarrel” and because he is urged to “fight for the honor of the Gentle Craft.”26 When he eventually comes home disabled and limping, his wife Jane, a regular shopkeeping Penelope, is being courted by a well-born suitor. The scene wherein “five or six shoemakers, all with cudgels, or such weapons,” prepare to liberate Ralph’s wife from the gallant’s clutches on the disabled veteran’s behalf27 must have brought cheers from public theater audiences, of which London apprentices were always a conspicuous component.28 Acting companies quickly found out what themes connected with audiences; that the underappreciated returning veteran appears repeatedly over many years suggests a groundswell of public sentiment on which real soldiers would eventually be able to draw.
Vagrancy, Vengeance, Resistance, Republicanism
If the neglected soldier was a popular stock figure in the drama of this time, the revenger was an even more ubiquitous character type, and the two appear fused into one surprisingly often. Neglected soldiers who turn revenger comprise a hinge between the motifs of vagrancy and vengeance. Although early modern England was not a feud culture, in the sense that Anglo-Saxon England and early modern Friuli in Italy were feud cultures, English Renaissance literature was preoccupied with vengeance. There were dozens of revenge tragedies; in fact most tragedies featured a vengeful figure, as did history plays, novellas, even comedies. Renaissance revenge plays are usually kept in a separate mental compartment from early modern resistance theory by such authors as John Ponet, Christopher Goodman, and George Buchanan, authors who justified the violent overthrow of monarchs who abuse subjects’ rights. However, many literary revengers do act against political tyrants, and many revenge plays are contemporary with periods of resistance to unpopular monarchs. The social protest of Elizabethan drama’s neglected soldiers usually takes the form of private revenge rather than open political resistance. But in real life, the out-of-work veteran victimized by society eventually did turn to political resistance. I want to link the politically activist English soldiers of the seventeenth century to the mistreated veterans of the sixteenth—those that the rogue literature called rufflers. But first a few words about republicanism.
At just the time that Elizabethans were dishing out very shabby treatment to veterans, humanists steeped in the republican ideas of ancient Rome were gingerly exploring the possibility of shifting England’s political system gradually in the direction of a republic or at least a constitutional monarchy. As Markku Peltonen shows, humanist apologists for republicanism stressed civic duty, especially military service, a notion that contributed to the feeling that military service and civilian support for the troops were patriotic duties. Abhorring mercenaries, republicans set great store by a citizen militia. For republicans “the only way to have a good army, which looked to its own glory and to the good of the commonwealth instead of its own private pecuniary gain, [was] to arm the people.”29 At this point, the budding discourse of republicanism collided with contemporary hysteria over vagabonds: what looked to a republican like a responsible subject performing his civic duty in a citizen militia might well look to writers of rogue literature, such as Harman or Awdeley, like a vagrant with a gun.
In the sixteenth century most theory about republican armies, demobilized soldiers, and overhauls of the political system remained just words on paper, penned by armchair republicans like Thomas Starkey. But in the seventeenth century the word became flesh. Mounting opposition to King Charles I found a focal point in Charles’s powerful favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, with whom he hatched plans for unpopular wars that were even harder on soldiers than most early modern conflicts. As James Holstun claims, “Perhaps one third of the 50,000 men whom the king and Buckingham pressed into service between 1624 and 1628 died in battle, of wounds, or of disease.”30 The life story of one of the soldiers in these campaigns, John Felton, reads like a Jacobean revenge tragedy. Fathers were central figures for revengers, and Felton’s father lost his position and died in debtors’ prison, partly owing to the machinations of a close adviser to the king, whom Felton’s brother even suspected of having poisoned their father, a scenario very Italianate and oozing with the ambience of revenge tragedy. His father’s ruin forced Felton into the army, where his difficult and loyal service was eventually slighted by the Duke of Buckingham; he was owed a good deal of back pay. Like stage revengers and the drama’s neglected soldiers, Felton was fired by a sense of personal injury at the hands of an abusive power figure, and like resistance theorists and republicans, he developed an ideologically sophisticated rationale for the violence he planned. He borrowed a copy of George Buchanan’s antityrannical tract Detection of the Doings of Mary Queen of Scots and wrote a self-justifying letter containing republican aphorisms.31 Then he assassinated the Duke of Buckingham. This piece of resistance met with fairly general delight in England, and was particularly popular with Felton’s fellow soldiers, who asked the king to spare Felton’s life.32 Although Felton was executed, his action nudged the nation one step closer to the civil war that would eventually see the execution of the king, the abolition of monarchy, and the founding of a republic—a stunning revolution in which neglected, unrewarded soldiers were to play a central role.
The Civil War Era
During the English Civil War, after parliamentary armies had gained the upper hand over royalist forces and captured the king himself, many in Parliament got cold feet. It was radical elements in the army that pushed Parliament to put the king on trial and eventually execute him. The soldiers, flushed with victory and ready for serious participation in government, also pressed for a political voice.33 In 1647 a manifesto entitled The Case of the Army Truly Stated called for biennial elections and universal manhood suffrage. In 1647–48 An Agreement of the People renewed the call for biennial elections, and the Humble Petition of September 11, 1648, with some forty thousand signatories, demanded religious toleration, no pressing for military service, equality before the law for all social classes, trial by jury, punishment proportionate to crimes, freedom from arbitrary prosecutions, and an end to imprisonment for debt.34 Faced with such radical demands from the army ranks, revolutionary leaders began to show signs of being more interested in protecting property than in extending the franchise or overhauling the legal system. The soldiers, having tasted the heady brew of collective action, looked threatening, and Oliver Cromwell and other revolutionary leaders soon came up with a time-honored solution: divide and conquer—disband the army, turn them out without pensions or back pay, turn them into vagrants. As Beier and others have shown, the sixteenth-century vagrant typically traveled alone or with one or two others; but Harman and other sixteenth-century writers of rogue literature revealed, in their overheated fantasies of fraternities of vagabonds, that vagrants operating on their own were not anywhere near as frightening as the specter of dispossessed people working collectively. To Cromwell and his associates, a newly radicalized army must have seemed as threatening as a fraternity of vagabonds. A plan was immediately formed to demobilize many troops, break remaining troops into small, widely separated units and dispatch a goodly number of troops to a safe distance in Ireland. But this time the soldiers, rebuffed in their political efforts and suffering from arrears in pay, refused to be relegated to ruffler status. They stood their ground.
In A Solemn Engagement of the Army (1647), one of the central documents of this revolutionary era, members of the army refused demobilization, pledging not to allow themselves to be disbanded or divided until their demands were met.35 In summer 1647 common soldiers defied their aristocratic officers; there were army mutinies in 1647 and 1649. One radical pamphlet, The Poor Man’s Advocate, proposed in 1649 to use the proceeds from confiscated royalist estates to pay the army its arrears; like many others, this author advanced from advocacy of restitution to the soldiers to more radical progressive programs: confiscated royalist property could also relieve the poor and fund education.36 Elected representatives of the soldiers (“we . . . who have often seen the devouring sword of a raging enemy drawn forth against us, threatening destruction to us, and now see them vanquished”) published The Apology of the Common Soldiers (1647), which saw the disbanding of the army and dispatch of its remnants to Ireland as “a mere cloak for some who have lately tasted of sovereignty, and being lifted beyond their ordinary sphere of servants, seek to become masters, and degenerate into tyrants.”37 “Many of our fellow soldiers that have been disbanded,” the Apology reported bitterly, have been “imprisoned, indicted, and hanged, although without their efforts in the civil war, civilian legislators “could not have safely sat in the House of Parliament with their heads on.”38 The soldier authors sought redress of immediate (and familiar) grievances, demanding “that the wives and children of those that have been slain in the service, and maimed soldiers, may be provided for.”39 But those who signed themselves “your soldiers” went far beyond this as well: they demanded “an end to all tyranny and oppressions so that justice and equity, according to the law of this land, should . . . [be] done to the people, and that the meanest subject should fully enjoy his right, liberty, and properties in all things.”40 Thomas Rainsborough, the highest-ranking officer in the parliamentary army to support the radical program, demanded to know “what we have fought for,” seeing that the country was still saddled with “the old law of England . . . which enslaves the people of England that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all.” Rainsborough was an early advocate of government by the consent of the governed. He argued, “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and . . . every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and . . . the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”41
Soldiers in this era frequently campaigned for legal equality, striving to redress what was also a primary grievance of revenge-tragedy heroes: the unfairness of the law and its partiality to the propertied and educated classes. The 1649 English Soldiers’ Standard charged, “We live under unknown laws, written in canting French, vexed and molested with a whole drove of corrupt judges, lawyers, jailers, and the like caterpillars of the commonwealth.”42 It is a satisfying irony that soldiers, who as disbanded rufflers were popularly believed to employ thieves’ cant, turned the tables by charging that the law is written in “canting French.”
Those who gave this movement its radical theory were not necessarily rank-and-file soldiers: for example, the theorist John Lilburne, jailed for denouncing members of Parliament who lived in comfort while foot soldiers fought and died for the parliamentary cause, was a lieutenant colonel. And resistance writing of this period had some nonmilitary models, in over a century of hard-hitting resistance literature, by such fiery religious dissidents as Ponet, Goodman, and Knox. But some radical documents were drawn up by the elected representatives of ordinary soldiers; for example, The Apology of the Common Soldiers (1647), which Alan Marshall calls “a key text in the radicalization of the parliamentary army.”43 And the rank and file also crucially contributed democratic practices, with decisions made by elected representatives, and a commitment to collective action and solidarity.
All this radicalism was fueled by a chafing sense of unrewarded service. These soldiers had risked their lives to win the war and overturn the monarchic government, and as a new form of government was coalescing, they were excluded from it. The soldier Edward Sexby demanded,
Do you [not] think it were a sad and miserable condition that we have fought all this time for nothing? All here both great and small do think that we fought for something. . . . If this be the business, that an estate doth make men capable to choose those that shall represent them—it is no matter which way they get it, they are capable—I think there are many that have not estates that in honesty have as much right in the freedom [of] their choice as any that have great estates.44
The neglected soldier, so important a figure in the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was coming into his own politically, and just as neglected soldiers in revenge plays assassinate tyrants, so real-life neglected soldiers were committing determined acts of political resistance.
As the revolutionary party narrowed to one man, Oliver Cromwell, who assumed quasi-monarchic powers as Protector, former soldiers who had once resisted the king began resisting Cromwell. The cashiered soldier Edward Sexby was involved in a plot to assassinate Cromwell, and his famous apology for tyrannicide, Killing No Murder (1657), encourages England’s army to rise up against Cromwell, who had ignored its military sacrifices and betrayed its interests.45
Vagrancy and Soldiering, Urban and Rural
In London, a magnet for the unemployed, vagrants at many times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might easily find occupation as soldiers, and in turn become vagrants when armies were demobilized. Beier writes, “Troops were always likely to become vagrants, because they were chiefly recruited from the poor and criminal classes.” The discontents of urban ex-soldiers acquired a special danger because of the denser concentration of demobilized soldiers in the city, and because in London they were regularly exposed to other rebellious practices—food riots, anti-immigrant libels posted on walls, violent agitations against foreign workers.46
But in the mid-seventeenth-century civil war, soldiers of rural background played a crucial role as well. As David Petegorsky argues, peasants and agricultural laborers were one of the largest components of the parliamentary army,47 and had the army been disbanded and cut adrift to take up the vagrant life of rufflers, they would have joined many other unemployed agricultural workers. If demobilized soldiers formed one perennial component of England’s vagrants, unemployed farm workers comprised another, all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robert Jütte notes that “agricultural workers, casual labourers and textile artisans, and soldiers, sailors and servants and apprentices were predominant among the wayfaring poor of early modern Europe.”48 Farm laborers were vulnerable to being thrown into vagrancy because, as Paul Slack shows, “ten or twenty per cent of the [rural] population . . . hovered around the poverty line and . . . might fall below it when the harvest failed, when sickness hit the chief breadwinner, when employment opportunities for wives and children in rural industries contracted, or simply when there was a particularly bad winter.”49 In urban centers the proportion of the poor in the total population ranged from 5 percent to 25 percent in hard years in the early seventeenth century, but in some places these numbers underestimate the share of the real poor by listing only those deemed worthy of relief.50 Writers of “rogue literature” heaped contempt on the rural unemployed as lazy and shiftless, or simply ignored them, despite their imposing numbers: Harman, for example, presents rural people mainly as dupes of clever rogues—the “conies” who are caught by cony catchers—rather than as themselves members of the vagrant category. Only one brief passage in his memorable anecdote about a shameless “doxy” gives away that she is a displaced agricultural worker.51 But other writers faced the social problem more squarely. In about 1549, Sir Thomas Smith created a dialogue among five speakers—a farmer, a merchant, a knight, a craftsman, and a scholar—to discuss the nation’s economic problems, especially inflation. The farmer complains that everything is so expensive that “by their daily labor [rural workers] are not able to live,” and accuses the knight of raising rents on land; the knight rejoins that farmers have raised the price of commodities the knight buys, such as butter and corn.52 Earlier in the century, Sir Thomas More’s fictive character Raphael Hythlodaye made the following analysis of rural vagrants:
They would be glad to work, but they can find no one who will hire them. There is no need for farm labor, in which they have been trained, when there is no land left to be plowed. . . . This enclosing has had the effect of raising the price of grain in many places. . . . The price of raw wool has risen so much that poor people who used to make cloth are no longer able to buy it, and so great numbers are forced from work to idleness. . . . The wool trade . . . is concentrated in few hands . . . and these so rich, that the owners are never pressed to sell until they have a mind to, and that is only when they can get their price. . . . The high price of grain causes rich men to dismiss as many retainers as they can from their households; and what, I ask, can these men do, but rob or beg? And a man of courage is more likely to steal than to cringe.53
The whole era witnessed recurrent antienclosure riots and revolts. For example, during Ket’s Rebellion in 1549, and during the Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, bands of peasants attacked enclosures. In the 1640s the neglected veteran met the jobless agricultural worker in one memorable moment of cooperative resistance: St. George’s Hill.
Ruffler and Digger
In the famine years between 1648 and 1650 a group of hungry commoners squatted on waste land at St. George’s Hill in Surrey, cultivating crops to share and industriously issuing manifestos. In a letter of 1649, their leader Gerrard Winstanley informed Parliament of an agenda of economic communism: “The land of England is the land of our nativity, . . . and all of us, by the righteous law of our creation, ought to have food and raiment freely by our righteous laboring of the earth, without working for hire, or paying rent to one another”; a third of the kingdom is “waste and barren, and her children starve,” but the earth is meant to be “a common treasury of livelihood to all.”54 Like the army radicals, Winstanley advocated universal manhood suffrage.55 This movement, called the Diggers by posterity, spread to at least seven counties, and Winstanley (along with William Everard and others) spoke inclusively for “the common people of England.”56
Like the land-liberating Ket’s Rebellion a century earlier, the Diggers were crushed, but not without sowing more seeds of radical thought. On the class system, Diggers were eloquent: if aristocrats “can prove that the earth was made by Almighty God peculiarly for them, and not for others equal with them, then we have trespassed in digging upon their rights.”57 “Ye the great ones of the earth, the powers of this world, . . . your first estate was innocency and equality with your fellow creatures.”58 “In the beginning of time . . . not one word was spoken . . . that one branch of mankind should rule over another.”59 As landless vagrants flocked to St. George’s Hill and other Diggers’ sites to cultivate a plot of land, Diggers rewrote the Fall of Man as a plunge into a class system, into a “blindness of mind” that through greed “did set up one man to teach and rule over another”; then “the earth . . . was hedged into enclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made servants and slaves; and the earth that is within this creation made a common storehouse for all is bought and sold and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonored, as if he were a respecter of persons, delighting in the comfortable livelihood of some and rejoicing in the miserable poverty and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.”60 For Diggers, an ideal society would be classless: “Take notice, that England is not a free people until the poor people that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labor the commons, and to live as comfortably as the landlords that live in their enclosures.”61
Some of these radical Diggers were out-of-work farmhands. But one of them was a radical and now discharged soldier, and an aggressive one at that—William Everard was surely one of those whom Thomas Harman would have labeled a ruffler. Hailing from a poor provincial family, he identified himself as an ensign when signing a 1647 petition voicing the grievances of the parliamentary army. At the time of the petition, Everard was in prison awaiting court martial for plotting to kill the king. He was eventually cashiered from the army, and along with Gerrard Winstanley became one of first four unemployed men to take up digging at St. George’s Hill; he and Winstanley remained leaders of the group, and coauthored or at least cosigned its manifestos.62
In the Digger movement of the mid-seventeenth century, then, two elements of mid-sixteenth-century vagrancy came together, rufflers and displaced rural laborers. Although the Digger movement was short-lived, it was, as Petegorsky maintains, “the one genuine proletarian ideology that the Civil War produced,”63 and significantly, one of the midwives of this proletarian ideology, William Everard, was a neglected soldier—a ruffler. Perhaps his experience helped influence his collaborator Winstanley, who in his manifesto The Law of Freedom (1652) deploys a soldierly language to speak of radical change: “A monarchical army lifts up mountains, makes valleys, [that is], advances tyrants, and treads the oppressed in the barren lanes of poverty. But a commonwealth’s army . . . levels the mountains to the valleys, pulls down the tyrant, and lifts up the oppressed.”64
It is no accident that radicals in the parliamentary army agitating for what amounts to rule by the consent of the governed sound like the American founding fathers: one thinker with important influence on Jefferson and other framers of the Declaration of Independence was John Locke, son of an officer in the parliamentary army, who was “imbued with antimonarchy ideology at an early age.”65 The way forward lay through extralegal avenues. American founding fathers set forth their grievances against a tyrant and then engaged in armed revolt, violating British laws they had formerly felt obliged to obey. Soldiers in the parliamentary army set forth their grievances and then engaged in mutinies, refused to be disbanded, defied superiors, and heaped contempt on the legal system of their country. To rebel is one thing; to argue the justness of an extralegal act of rebellion is quite another. This big mental step is the military and political equivalent of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. In England it was those with no rights—exiled people and landless people hovering on the brink of vagrancy—who were able to take that step. I suggest that the disaffected soldiers of the seventeenth century found it possible to think outside the box, to break the frame of conventional political hierarchies and institutions, because for centuries they had regularly been expelled from the bosom of an established society, which used their services and then disowned them without recompense. They saw through the injustice of the law because they had unjustly been made outlaws.
A New World Order Delayed
In the long term, the radical ideas and practice of seventeenth-century soldiers took root and flourished. Many elements of their platform—universal manhood suffrage, an equitable legal system, prison reform, abolition of monopolies, adequate poor relief, a fair tax code—have become part of the agenda of modern progressive democracies. But in the short term, the army radicals lost. On November 15, 1647, army rebels confronted their own leadership head-on, in a mass military rendezvous in which radicals pressed for the adoption of The Agreement of the People. As the leadership held out for more a conservative political agenda a mutinous regiment launched into violence. As Holstun tells it,
At this moment, with a charismatic and beloved rival leader in Thomas Rainsborough, a body of sympathetic troops drawn up, a published manifesto-constitution in The Agreement to provide an ideological rallying point, and the first blow struck, the Agitators [that is, the army’s elected representatives] brought seventeenth-century England closer to a genuinely popular democratic revolution than ever before or after. But it didn’t come close enough. Cromwell charged into the ranks with a drawn sword and demanded the regiment’s submission.66
In this tense face-off, the army blinked. Soldiers from the mutinous regiment were court-martialed and one randomly chosen soldier was shot. The historical moment passed. Thirteen years later, the monarchy was restored. Why the army crumbled in this crisis can be endlessly debated. But a literary perspective can address at least one small corner of the puzzle. One thing weakening this revolutionary movement was that, whatever brilliant use the rebels made of the printing press for petitions, pamphlets, and manifestos, the antimonarchist forces had given up one of the most powerful literary resources potentially available to a rebel cause: they had closed down the theaters.
As we have seen, English Renaissance theater had proved very sympathetic to common soldiers in battle and veterans suffering war wounds (physical and psychological), lack of employment opportunity, and arrears in pay. When the parliamentary revolution, with its strong Puritan component, closed down the theaters on religious and moral grounds in 1642, the theater’s capacity for political commentary passed into the hands of royalist sympathizers—always keen supporters of the theater—whose closet dramas were sometimes printed and occasionally staged for royalists in continental exile. A good number of resistance plays came out of that closet scribbling—resistance to the new parliamentary republic and later to the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. These are often, by the way, cast as revenge plays, supporting the possibility of reading revenge in Renaissance plays as serious political resistance. But resistance on behalf of the status quo ante can hardly be considered revolutionary in political theory.
A case in point is an anonymous closet tragedy entitled The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I, clandestinely printed in 1649, just after the execution of the king. Cromwell figures as a Machiavellian villain and tyrant. Dedicated to King Charles II (the prince in exile), the play is a forthright piece of political resistance. In response to the edict that he never to return to England on pain of death, the play urges young Charles to seek foreign political alliances, to “summon all nations, to thy speedy aid,” from Switzers to Moors.67 As so often in Renaissance plays, a common soldier comes in for attention, but here his energies are harnessed for royalist aims. As a shining example of resistance to anyone inclined to assassinate Cromwell, the playwright stages the murder of Thomas Rainsborough. Although the historical Rainsborough was probably killed by monarchists, the play shows him being assassinated by one of his own common soldiers, in retaliation for the parliamentary army’s perfidious execution of brave royalist military leaders who had surrendered under truce. Those who imagined a new political world, a republic, made a strategic error in leaving the drama to their enemies.
In the early sixteenth century, vagrants, down-and-outs, and threadbare veterans had a few well-educated, literate authors willing to stand up for them: Thomas More, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Shakespeare; and such writers helped to keep issues of poverty, homelessness, injustice, and the shameful neglect of veterans in the public eye. By the mid-seventeenth century, hard-up squatters and cashiered soldiers like Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard were writing and publishing for themselves. But how might history have differed, had the great public theaters—the Globe and the Rose and the Swan—still been open when the army mutinied and the Diggers dug? What if, in that tumultuous time, Winstanley and Everard had written plays, attended by the masses? Now there would have been some ruffling.
Notes
1. John Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Middleton, 1573), sig. Aii. These terms belong to a supposed “thieves’ cant”; whether such jargon existed in Harman’s time or was the invention of literate authors of “rogue literature” is subject to debate.
2. Ibid., sig. Bii.
3. Ibid.
4. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England (London: Methuen, 1985), 93–94.
5. J. Thomas Kelly, Thorns on the Tudor Rose: Monks, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 64.
6. Ibid., 104–5.
7. John Awdeley, The Fraternity of Vagabonds, ca. 1561; repr. in Awdeley’s “Fraternity of Vacabondes, Harman’s Caveat, Haben’s Sermon,” &c., ed. Edward Viles and F. J. Furnivall (London: Early English Text Society, 1869), 3.
8. Dates given for plays are for approximate date of first performance, as listed in Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd ed., rev. Samuel Schoenbaum and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 1989).
9. Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington et al. (New York: Norton, 2002), 1.1.33–38.
10. S. S., The Honest Lawyer (London: George Purslowe, 1616).
11. Nathan Field and Philip Massinger, The Fatal Dowry, ed. T. A. Dunn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
12. William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, Two Noble Kinsmen, in The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Alexander Dyce (New York: Appleton, 1890), 2.1.2.
13. John Webster, The White Devil, ed. Clive Hart (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1970), 3.2.
14. A. Glover and A. R. Waller, eds., The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905–12), 1.1.
15. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds., The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), 4.1.120–40.
16. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, eds., The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), vol. 1, 3.1.22–37.
17. Ibid., 3.1.16–17.
18. Shakespeare, Henry V, 5.1.83–85.
19. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Captain, in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905–12).
20. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 1.2.10–11, 196, 129–30.
21. George Peele, Edward I, ed. Frank S. Hook. In The Life and Works of George Peele, ed. Charles Tyler Prouty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952–70), vol. 2, 1.71–81.
22. Chadwyck-Healey, English Drama Full-Text Database, http://collections.chadwyck.com.
23. Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, or A Revenge for a Father, ibid.
24. John Webster, Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1964), 1.1.59–62.
25. Despite revisionary efforts such as Ann Jennalie Cook’s The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s England, 1576–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), the wide mix of classes in Shakespeare’s audience is still widely accepted; Alfred Harbage’s classic statement that “the theatre was a democratic institution in an intensely undemocratic age” (Shakespeare’s Audience [1941; New York: Columbia University Press, 1961], 11), while oversimplified, was substantially borne out by Andrew Gurr’s more empirical Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gurr’s appendix listing every named person known to have attended a London theater during this period includes, on the one hand, dukes and ambassadors, and on the other, apprentices, students, sailors, butchers, brewers, barbers, a blacksmith, a weaver, a tailor, and servants (226–46).
26. In English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Norton, 2002), 1.186, 1.219.
27. Scene 18, stage direction.
28. Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience, 80.
29. Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 42.
30. James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000), 153–54.
31. Ibid., 166–71.
32. Ibid., 172.
33. Who actually did the writing of the army manifestos is mostly unclear; multiple authorship and multiple signatories is the norm, reflecting the army activists’ principled commitment to collective action, what Holstun calls “a bottom-up model of martial praxis” (196) or an “associative martial praxis” (377). Few of the rank-and-file foot soldiers would have been literate, at least not to the level displayed in the manifestos; but they made good use of literate spokespersons. An Agreement of the People and The English Soldier’s Standard may have been mainly authored by the civilian army-sympathizer William Walwyn, a largely self-educated weaver and medic. John Lilburne, soldier in the parliamentary army and author of radical petitions, hailed from a modestly well-off family and was at one time apprenticed to a clothier and later owned a brewery. Printing of these radical materials was enabled by the abolition of official censorship during the civil war era; even so, printers often took the precaution of not including the name of the print shop on the publications.
34. The Case of the Army Truly Stated, together with the mischiefs and dangers that are imminent, and some suitable remedies, humbly proposed by the agents of five regiments of horse, to their respective regiments, and the whole Army (London: unlisted printer, 1647); An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace, upon grounds of common-right and freedom; as it was proposed by the agents of the five regiments of horse; and since by the general approbation of the Army, offered to the joint concurrence of all the free commons of England (unlisted printer, 1647); To the Right Honorable, the Commons of England in Parliament Assembled: the Humble Petition of diverse well-affected persons inhabiting the City of London, Westminster, the borough of Southwark, hamlets, and places adjacent (London: H. S., 1648).
35. A Solemn Engagement of the Army under the command of his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, with a declaration of their resolutions, as to disbanding, . . . together with the representations of the dissatisfactions of the Army, . . . unanimously agreed upon, and subscribed by the officers and soldiers of the several regiments (London: Richard Lownes, 1647).
36. Peter Chamberlen, The Poor Man’s Advocate, . . . pouring oil and wine into the wounds of the nation, by making present provision for the soldier and the poor, . . . by paying all arrears to the Parliament army (London: Giles Calvert, [1649]).
37. The Apology of the Common Soldiers of His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax’s Army (London: unlisted printer, 1647), 2, 4.
38. Ibid., 6.
39. Ibid., 8.
40. Ibid., 5.
41. In The Clarke Papers: Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, Secretary to the Council of the Army, 1647–1649 . . . , ed. C. H. Firth (London: Camden Society, 1891–1901; repr., London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1992), 1:300, 310–11.
42. The English Soldier’s Standard to repair to, for wisdom and understanding, in these doleful back-sliding times. To be read by every honest officer to his soldiers; and by the soldiers, one to another [sometimes ascribed to William Walwyn] ([London]: unlisted printer, 1649), 4.
43. “Edward Sexby,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
44. In Clarke Papers, 1:329–30.
45. Edward Sexby, Killing No Murder ([Holland]: unlisted printer, 1657).
46. See Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alan Macfarlane and Sarah Harris, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981); David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); R. B. Outh-waite, Dearth, Public Policy and Social Disturbance in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996). Ian Archer argues that in London, “riot was a negotiating strategy” by which apprentices and other interest groups reminded magistrates of their duties toward various sectors of society. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6.
47. David Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: A Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), 58.
48. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 43.
49. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), 66.
50. Ibid., 73–80; cf. A. L. Beier, “Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203–24.
51. Cited in Paul A. Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598–1664,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 27, no. 3 (1974): 378.
52. Sir Thomas Smith [?], A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 17, 39–40. The attribution of this dialogue to Smith is not universally accepted.
53. Sir Thomas More, Utopia, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1992; first published in Latin, 1516), 12–14.
54. Gerrard Winstanley, An Appeal to All Englishmen, to judge between bondage and freedom, sent from those that began to dig upon George Hill in Surrey ([London]: unlisted printer, 1650), 5–8.
55. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform: or, True Magistracy Restored (London: J. M., 1652), 52–53.
56. William Everard and Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced (London: unlisted printer, [1649]), 6.
57. Gerrard Winstanley, An Appeal to the House of Commons, desiring their answer: whether the common people shall have the quiet enjoyment of the commons and waste land; or whether they shall be under the will of lords of manors still ([London: unlisted printer], 1649), 12.
58. Everard and Winstanley, True Levellers, sig. A2v.
59. Ibid., 6.
60. Ibid., 6–7.
61. Ibid., 15.
62. Ariel Hessayon, “William Everard,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; electronic ed., 2006).
63. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy, 73.
64. Gerrard Winstanley, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George Holland Sabine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1941), 575.
65. Garrett Ward Sheldon, “The Political Theory of the Declaration of Independence,” in The Declaration of Independence: Origins and Impact, ed. Scott Douglas Gerber (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002), 16.
66. Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 251.
67. The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I ([London?]: unlisted printer, 1649), dedication, lines 41–47.