Part 17

Given the sense of security of social order and of the administration of justice, the nation, generally, no more heeds the passing of the supremacy from the House of Commons, than it heeded the winning of that supremacy.

The Laudian doctrine in the Church of England, revived at the Restoration, disappeared with the passing of the non-jurors at the close of the seventeenth century. But its Anglo-Catholic teaching was renewed by the Oxford Movement, early in Queen Victoria’s reign, and has largely changed the whole appearance of the Church of England. The modern high Anglican, claiming, as Laud claimed, the right to interpret the Book of Common Prayer as a Catholic document, but no longer the advocate of any theory of divine right of kings, or the champion of any particular political creed, has travelled indeed far beyond Laud’s very limited success in winning support for Catholic doctrine and ritual in the Church of England. Laud was beaten by the opposition of parliament; his present day successors in the Church of England have prospered in spite of that opposition, and have triumphed over acts of parliaments, adverse judicial sentences, privations and imprisonments. But with Laud the movement was directed by bishops and approved by the king, the modern Laudian movement was banned by bishops and disfavoured by all in high authority.

To-day nearly every Catholic doctrine, save papal supremacy, has its expounders and defenders in the Church of England, and Catholic rites and ceremonies are freely practised.

Laud, dying on the scaffold in 1645 at the hands of parliament, is amply avenged in the twentieth century by the victorious high-churchman. The Laudian clergy of the Established Church can now maintain their Anglo-Catholic faith and practice, without any fear of parliamentary interference. For generally they enjoy a popularity and respect that the House of Commons does not willingly venture to assail.

John Lilburne and the Levellers

1647–1653

AUTHORITIES: Lilburne’s Pamphlets; _Calendar of State Papers_; _Charles I. and the Commonwealth_; _State Trials_; _House of Commons’ Journals_; Whitelocke--_Memorials of English Affairs_; Clarendon--_History of the Rebellion_; W. Godwin--_History of the Commonwealth_; S. R. Gardiner--_History of the Great Civil War_; _History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate_; G. P. Gooch--_History of Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_.

JOHN LILBURNE AND THE LEVELLERS

1647–1653.

From his coming of age in 1637 till the near approach of death, when he turned, a dying man, to the peaceful tenets of the Quakers, the life of John Lilburne is a record of twenty years of strife and battle with the rulers of the land.

He came of pugnacious stock, for John Lilburne’s father, a well-to-do Durham squire, was the last man to demand the settlement of a lawsuit by the ordeal of battle, and came into court armed accordingly--only to be disappointed by an order from the crown, forbidding the proposed return to such ancient and obsolete methods of deciding the differences of neighbours.

Apprenticed to a wholesale cloth-merchant in London, John Lilburne soon became acquainted with Bastwick and Prynne, then busy over anti-episcopal pamphlets, and, keeping such company, naturally fell into the clutches of the Star Chamber. The charge against him was that he had helped to print and circulate unlicensed books, in particular, Prynne’s _News from Ipswich_; and though Lilburne declared the charge to be false, on his refusal to take the usual oath to answer truly all questions put to him, the Star Chamber adjudged him guilty, and passed sentence--Lilburne was to be whipped from the Fleet to Westminster, to stand in the pillory, and to be kept in prison.

The sentence was carried out on February 13th, 1638, but Lilburne was not cowed, for he scattered some of Bastwick’s offending pamphlets on the road, and was gagged in the pillory to reduce him to silence. In prison things went hardly with Lilburne, for the authorities had him placed in irons and kept in solitary confinement, and only the compassion of fellow prisoners saved him from actual starvation in the two years and nine months of his imprisonment.

It was a rough beginning, and John Lilburne was henceforth an agitator and a rebel.

At the end of 1640 one of the first things done by the Long Parliament was to order Lilburne’s release, and in the following May the sentence was pronounced “illegal and against the liberties of the subject.” But illegal or not, the punishment had been inflicted, and with unbroken spirit, passionately resenting the tyranny that could so wrong men, Lilburne flew quickly to the attack on the authors of the injustice.

At Edgehill Lilburne held a captain’s commission, and at Brentford he was taken prisoner by the royalists. Only the threat of swift reprisals by the parliamentary army saved him from being shot as “a traitor,” and the following year he was again at liberty on an exchange of prisoners. Again, after fighting at Marston Moor, he fell into the hands of the royalists, and, shot through the arm, was kept in prison at Oxford for six months.

Brave soldier as Lilburne was, he left the army in 1645 (with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and with £880 arrears of pay owing to him) rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of Cromwell’s “new model.”

And now monarchy having fallen from its high estate, Lilburne at once saw elements of tyranny in the Parliamentary government, and did not hesitate to say so. Courageous and intrepid, with considerable legal knowledge, a passion for liberty, and clear views on democracy, John Lilburne might have given invaluable service to the commonwealth. He had shown skill and daring in the war, his character for fearless endurance had been proved, his ability as a pamphleteer was considerable, and his capacity for work enormous; the government had either to treat Lilburne as a friend or foe--he was not to be ignored. The government, unwisely, decided Lilburne was an enemy, and for the next ten years he fought the rule of parliament and the army, his popularity increasing with every new pamphlet he produced. The price the commonwealth government paid for its opposition to Lilburne was to be seen on the death of Cromwell.[114]

From 1645 to 1649 Lilburne’s vigorous criticisms of the men in power provoked retaliation, and brought him to Newgate. But in prison or out of prison Lilburne went on hammering away to establish a democratic constitution. The time was to come when Cromwell would find the Long Parliament had outlived its usefulness and would end it by main force. Lilburne was anxious in 1647 for a radical reform of parliament and a general manhood suffrage. His proposals were popular in the army, and had Cromwell supported him the whole future of English politics would have been changed.

When the Presbyterian majority in parliament proposed the disbandment of the army in 1647, the regiments chose their agitators, and, refusing to disband, drew up the “Agreement of the People” and the “Case for the Army.” These documents give the political standpoint of the Levellers and the particular grievances to be remedied.

The distribution of parliamentary seats according to the number of inhabitants was the chief proposal in the “Agreement of the People,” and the principles maintained are that “no man is bound to a government under which he has not put himself,” and that “all inhabitants who have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections.”

The particular demands in the “Case for the Army” were the abolition of monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed common lands, and abolition of sinecures.

While Cromwell and Ireton were both bitterly against manhood suffrage, the council of officers to whom the Levellers appealed agreed to support it, without approving the rest of the programme.

Cromwell, relying on the army to prevent a royalist reaction--for Charles was plotting from Carisbrooke for aid from Scotland, and the royalists in the House of Commons were anxious to effect a reconciliation--would give neither time nor patience to the demands of Lilburne and the Levellers.

In vain the Levellers exclaimed, in 1648, “We were ruled before by King, Lords, and Commons, now by a General, Court Martial, and Commons: and, we pray you, what is the difference?” Cromwell, at all costs, was determined to preserve the discipline of the army, and to suppress mutiny with an iron hand. For him the army which had beaten the cavaliers was the one safeguard against the return of the old order in Church and State. Lilburne and the Levellers, with the “Fifth Monarchy” men, had been the strength, the very life of the army that had conquered at Marston Moor and Naseby. The petition of the Fifth Monarchy men for the reign of Christ and His saints (which, according to prophecy, was to supersede the four monarchies of the ancient world) had no terrors for Cromwell; in other words, they demanded government exclusively by the godly, Independents and Presbyterians combining to elect all representatives, “and to determine all things by the Word.” “Such a proposal might attract fanatics; it could not attract the multitude. The Levellers who stood up for an exaggeration of the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy were likely to be far more numerous.”[115] To Cromwell the immediate thing was the royalist danger; it was no season for embarking on democratic experiments with which he had no sympathy. The breach between Cromwell and the Levellers widened, and as Cromwell became more and more impatient of their agitation, distrust and suspicion of Cromwell and of the newly-appointed Council of State ripened, in 1649, into revolt.[116] It is the perennial misunderstanding between the statesman and the agitator. The one weighted by responsibility can rarely travel at the pace of the other, untrammelled by office, and as the distance between the two lengthens, it seems they are not even pursuing the same course--as, indeed, very often they are not.

Lilburne had none of Cromwell’s anxieties as to a possible royalist reaction; for him the danger could not come from the dethroned king and his defeated cavaliers, but from a parliamentary oligarchy or a military dictatorship. But he overestimated the strength of the Leveller movement in the army. With the presentation of the “Agreement of the People” the bulk of the discontent in the army diminished, and while the Levellers who remained became in several regiments openly mutinous, the movement generally died down, so that when the revolt came, it was suppressed without difficulty.[117]

Lilburne was out of prison at the beginning of 1649. He took no part in the trial of Charles I., and let it be known that he doubted the wisdom of abolishing monarchy before a new constitution had been drawn up.

As neither the remnant of the Long Parliament nor Cromwell and Fairfax were doing anything to set up this new constitution, Lilburne proceeded to lay a remonstrance before parliament, and to follow this up by his two pamphlets on “England’s New Chains.” He now urged that “committees of short continuance” should supersede the Council of State, that the Self-denying Ordinance should be put in force, “seeing how dangerous it was for one and the same persons to be continued long in the highest commands of a military power,”[118] that a new parliament should be elected, and the “Agreement of the People” proceeded with heartily. At the same time he called for army reform by a reconstruction of the General Council and the election of agitators.

The expulsion of five troopers from the army for directly petitioning parliament provoked another pamphlet--“The Hunting of the Foxes from Newmarket to Whitehall by five small beagles late of the army.” The argument here was that Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison ruled the council of officers, and that the council of officers ruled parliament and the nation. “The old king’s person and the old lords are but removed, and a new king and new lords with the commons are in one House, and so we are under a more absolute arbitrary monarchy than before.”

There was only one answer to be made to Lilburne’s pen, and that was to arrest the man who held it, for the commonwealth had no one on its side who could reply to him. At the end of March Lilburne and three of his supporters, Walwyn, Prince, and Richard Overton were arrested as traitors, “England’s New Chains” having been voted by parliament seditious and destructive of the government, and were committed to the Tower to await trial.

At once a petition was got up and signed by 80,000 persons for Lilburne’s release, and a fortnight later--April 18th--another petition was taken to the bar of the House of Commons to the same effect. Parliament promised that the prisoners should have a legal trial, but declared the course of justice must not be interfered with. A large deputation of women also appeared at Westminster on April 23rd with a similar petition; but these were forbidden to enter the House, and, admonished by members to “go home and wash their dishes,” answered they would soon have no dishes to wash.[119]

Lilburne was not brought to trial till October, and in the six months’ interval, though the output of democratic pamphlets continued from the Tower, the Leveller movement in the army ended in open mutiny and defeat.

Carlyle tells the story accurately enough of the mutiny in Whalley’s regiment in Bishopsgate, London, on April 25th:

They want this and that; they seize their colours from the cornet, who is lodged at the “Bull” there; the general (Fairfax) and lieutenant-general (Cromwell) have to hasten thither, quell them, pack them forth on their march, seizing fifteen of them first to be tried by court-martial. Tried by instant court-martial, five of them are found guilty, doomed to die, but pardoned; and one of them, Trooper Lockyer, is doomed and not pardoned.[120] Trooper Lockyer is shot in Paul’s Churchyard on the morrow. A very brave young man, they say; though but three-and-twenty. “He has served seven years in these wars,” ever since the wars began. “Religious,” too, “of excellent parts and much beloved”; but with hot notions as to human freedom, and the rate at which the milleniums are attainable. Poor Lockyer! He falls shot in Paul’s Churchyard on Friday, amid the tears of men and women. Lockyer’s corpse is watched and wept over, not without prayer, in the eastern regions of the city, till a new week come; and on Monday, this is what we see advancing westward by way of funeral to him:

About one thousand went before the corpse, five or six in a file; the corpse was then brought, with six trumpets sounding a soldier’s knell, then the trooper’s horse came, clothed all over in mourning, and led by a footman. The corpse was adorned with bundles of rosemary, one half stained in blood, and the sword of the deceased along with them. Some thousands followed in ranks and files, all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on their hats and to their breasts, and the women brought up the rear.

At the new churchyard at Westminster some thousands more of the better sort met them, who thought not fit to march through the city. Many looked upon this funeral as an affront to parliament and the army; others called these people “Levellers”; but they took no notice of any of them.[121]

In May one Corporal William Thompson rallied a body of Levellers at Banbury, published a manifesto called “England’s Standard Advanced,” and inveighed against the tyranny of courts-martial. Overwhelmed by force of numbers, Thompson escaped, and later died fighting alone near Wellingborough. Some twenty of his followers joined the mutineers of Scrope’s regiment at Salisbury. Numbering some 1,200, these Levellers made their way by Marlborough and Wantage to Burford. Here Cromwell came up with the mutineers, and surprised them at midnight. Resistance was hopeless, and the majority at once surrendered. All were pardoned except Cornet Thompson (brother to William), and two corporals--Church and Perkins--who showed neither fear nor admitted any wrong on their part. These three men were shot in Burford churchyard on May 15th,[122] and with their deaths the Leveller movement was at an end.

But Lilburne was unsubdued. His new “Agreement of the Free People,” published on May 1st, called for annual parliaments elected by manhood suffrage--pensioners, militant royalists, and lawyers excluded--and for the free election of unendowed church ministers in each parish. At the same time he disclaimed all connection with Winstanley’s “Diggers”--political reform was Lilburne’s demand.[123]

Released on bail in July, Lilburne issued in August an “Impeachment for High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law, James Ireton.” In this his hatred of government by the army compels the admission that monarchy is preferable to a military despotism: “If we must have a king, I for my part would rather have the prince than any man in the world.... For the present army to set up the pretended Saint Oliver or any other as their elected king, there will be nothing thereby from the beginning of the chapter to the end thereof but wars and the cutting of throats year after year; yea, and the absolute keeping up of a perpetual army under which the people are absolute and perfect slaves.”

Thereupon, instead of bringing him to trial, the government merely issued a warrant for Lilburne’s arrest. The agitator met this by a stronger manifesto, “An Outcry of the Young Men and Apprentices of London,” calling on the army to rise in support of a democratic parliament and to vindicate the men executed at Burford. Some response came from the garrison at Oxford, who summoned their officers to join in the demand for a free parliament, but no success attended this step.

At last in October Lilburne was brought to trial at the Guildhall, not on the charge for which he had been first committed to the Tower in March, but for the “treason” of his later pamphlets. The trial is memorable for Lilburne’s demand that counsel should be assigned to him in the event of legal technicalities arising, and for his bidding the jury remember they were judges of law as well as of fact. His real defence lay in the question he had put so often: Was England to be governed by the sword and a mock parliament, or by duly elected representatives of the People? The jury understood that Lilburne was on trial for putting that question, and, agreeing with him, they acquitted him. The verdict was received with tremendous applause, and “a loud and unanimous shout” of triumph went up from the citizens of London in the Guildhall.[124]

In December Lilburne was elected to the common council of the city, but parliament promptly declared the election void. “Fiercely as Lilburne attacked Cromwell, there was at times considerable liking between the two men, and they met on friendly terms before Cromwell went to Scotland in 1650. Cromwell assured Lilburne of his desire to make England enjoy the real fruit of all the army’s promises and declarations,” and friendly relations lasted till Cromwell’s return. But, in Cromwell’s absence, Lilburne charged Hazlerigg with corruption in the administration of justice concerning a disputed colliery lease in Durham, and parliament took up the matter. In January, 1652, it declared Lilburne’s petition for redress a libel, and imposed a fine of £7,000 with a sentence of banishment for life.

This proceeding by parliament revived the methods of the Star Chamber in imposing a conviction and a sentence without trial, but the House of Commons was determined to stop Lilburne’s activities at all cost.

Cromwell made no effort to hinder the conviction, and Lilburne insisted that Cromwell’s professions of friendship were hypocritical, and that the general himself was responsible for the sentence.

For the time Lilburne retired to Holland, where he discussed favourably the chances of a royalist restoration. But on the expulsion of the Rump of the Long Parliament the agitator at once wrote off to Cromwell for permission to return to England, and getting no answer crossed to London in June, 1653, and settled in lodgings in Moorfields. He petitioned Cromwell and the Council of State for leave to remain unmolested, promising to live peacefully, but Cromwell, with the whole government on his shoulders, had no willingness to incur the risk Lilburne and his doctrine of popular rights involved to the safety of the State.

Lilburne was promptly arrested by Cromwell’s order and brought to trial at the Old Bailey on July 13th. The government case was that he had returned to England knowing that a sentence of death was decreed by parliament if he broke his exile.

Lilburne’s defence, in the main, was that the parliament which had passed sentence was dead, and that if Cromwell had acted justly in dissolving it, then its unjust actions ought not to be maintained; if Cromwell had acted unjustly, why was he not punished?

Again the jury acquitted him, and again the people of London expressed their satisfaction at the verdict, “the very soldiers sent to guard the court joining in the shouts, and beating their drums and sounding their trumpets as they passed along the streets to their quarters.”

But “for the peace of the nation” Cromwell would not let Lilburne be at large. Back in the Tower, then at Guernsey, and then in Dover Castle for more than two years Lilburne was a prisoner.

His health was broken in 1656, and consumption had set in. Death was near, and for John Lilburne the days of “carnal sword-fighting and fleshly hustlings and contests” were over. He wrote to Cromwell from Dover Castle telling the Lord Protector of his conversion to Quakerism, and Cromwell, assured that there was to be no more agitation from “Free-Born John,” granted his release, and a pension of 40s. a week.

The battle was over for John Lilburne, liberty could not stay the hand of death. The many imprisonments and close confinements had done their work, and rapid consumption marked down the man who had stood up against the whole might of Cromwell’s government.

John Lilburne died at Eltham in August, 1657, at the age of forty. A year later, and his old antagonist, and older comrade-in-arms, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, was dead, and the Commonwealth government which had contemned the agitation for democracy was doomed.

Winstanley the Digger

1649–1650

AUTHORITIES: Winstanley’s Pamphlets; Whitelocke--_Memorial of English Affairs_; Clarke Papers; L. H. Berens--_Digger Movement in the days of the Commonwealth_.

WINSTANLEY THE DIGGER

1649–1650.

In the spring of 1649, the “Digger” movement revealed a strange and unexpected manifestation of the democratic spirit in England. Free communism had been the creed of more than one Protestant sect on the continent in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists had been conspicuously identified with the proposal. But in England John Lilburne and the Levellers were attacking the parliamentary government in the name of political democracy, and social agitation had been unknown since the Norfolk Rising of 1549, save for a riot against land enclosures at the beginning of James I.’s reign.

Gerrard Winstanley was the leader at the sudden outbreak of social discontent, and his “Digger” movement was to end this discontent and all other miseries of the time by getting rid of enclosures of common lands, and allowing people to plough these common lands and waste spaces, “that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed.”