‘certain sort of public-spirited men,’ who, when the presbyterian and independent factions were at their hottest, ‘declared against the ambition of the grandees of both and against the prevailing partiality, by which great men were privileged to do those things for which meaner men were punished. Many then got shelter in the house and army against their debts, by which others were undone. The lords, as if it were the chief privilege of nobility to be licensed in vice, claimed many prerogatives, which set them out of the reach of common justice, which these good people would have had equally belong to the poorest as well as to the mighty.’ ‘But,’ continues Mrs. Hutchinson, taking a turn at philosophy, ‘as all virtues are mediums and have their extremes, there rose up after under the same name a people who endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities, which these sober levellers were never guilty of desiring.’ [1]
[1] [Life of colonel Hutchinson, ii. 125; ed, 1885.]
This account corresponds with the tenor of the petitions which we read of as presented to the republican parliament by ‘levellers.’ They are simply a continuation of the agreements and remonstrances issued by the council of the army during the agitation of 1648, which in the main no doubt expressed the mind of Cromwell and Ireton. Their demand is for reforms, which for the most part stood over for nearly another two hundred years, till they began to be carried out by the ‘purged parliament’ of 1832. With minor variations according to circumstances, they pray, firstly, for a cheap and expeditious process of law, to be the same for all, with no exemptions in virtue of tenure or privilege; the laws to be written and in English; secondly, the abolition of all feudal courts, payments, and privileges; thirdly, the maintenance of the clergy by some other method than tithes, which, let us remember, were not then commuted, but were a perpetual source of carnal dispute between the clergy and the farmers; fourthly, the removal of monopolies, custom-duties, and excise, and the imposition of equal taxation; fifthly, the abolition of imprisonment for debt; all {339} estates to be liable for debt, and the rich not to turn prisons into places of protection; sixthly, the establishment of perfect freedom of conscience; and seventhly and lastly comes the demand, which presented the real difficulty, the dissolution of the sitting parliament, with provision for calling a new one at regular intervals.
This, we shall agree, is a sufficiently large and reasonable programme of reform. Sometimes farther details appear, of a kind which show a curious forecast of modern legislation, such as the establishment of registers of mortgage and the sale of lands. The rational desire for reform, however, which these petitions indicate, was always liable in the army to pass into a spirit of mutiny and disaffection, or into an ecstatic revolt, such as constantly appeared in those times against the clothing, literal and metaphorical, with which custom has covered the nakedness of human life. The grand mover of the mutinous spirit was John Lilburne, the object of Marten’s well-known joke, that if he were the only man left in the world, John would quarrel with Lilburne and Lilburne with John. His obligations to Cromwell were of long standing. In a tract published in 1647 he says to Cromwell, ‘You took compassion on me when I was at death’s door, and in 1640 set me free from the long tyranny of the bishops and the Star chamber.’ (In 1640 no one will suppose that Cromwell’s sympathy was other than disinterested.) ‘I have looked on you,’ he proceeds, ‘as the most absolute, single-hearted great man in England, untainted and unbiassed with ends of your own.’ He did not long continue, however, to use this language. He had made himself useful to Cromwell in the matter of the self-denying ordinance by showing up certain scandals in connection with the earl of Manchester and other officers of the original army. This made him many enemies, one of the obscurer of whom prosecuted him for damaging his character. The case was decided against Lilburne, who was called on for heavy damages. He appealed to the parliament, and its disregard of his appeal was the beginning of a long series of grievances, accumulating in intensity as grievances do, and gradually drawing within the circle of his animosity every one who declined to make his vindication the sole object of political action. Cromwell and Marten seem really to have done what they could to help him, but he would not wait to be helped. From time to {340} time a parliamentary committee was appointed to consider his case, but before anything could be done, there would appear some violent pamphlet of his against parliament and its grandees in general, for which he would be lodged in the tower. ‘Jonah’s cry,’ ‘The oppressed man’s oppression,’ ‘The just man’s justification,’ ‘Jugglers discovered,’ are among the titles of his tracts, all most trenchantly written, that appeared during the military agitation which culminated in the rendezvous at Ware. Because Cromwell would not break on his account with ‘the grandees of the parliament’ and the more worldly-wise of the officers, he became one in Lilburne’s eyes who had bartered his high calling for the glory of the world. His supposed machinations were exhibited in a pamphlet published during the first months of the commonwealth, under the title ‘The hunting of the foxes from Triploe Heath to Whitehall by five small beagles’; the foremost ‘beagle’ being Lilburne. [1] It strongly illustrates the freedom of discussion allowed in the army, which indeed was the condition of its peculiar enthusiasm, that this and other seditious manifestoes from the same hand, such as ‘England’s new chains discovered,’ had apparently unchecked circulation in it, and that at a time when a strong leaven of mutiny was at work. At three different places in the spring of 1649, in London, at Banbury, and at Salisbury, while the ‘five beagles’ were happily under lock and key in the tower, the troops broke into open revolt. Through want of leaders, and the swift energy of Cromwell, the revolt was suppressed without bloodshed, and of the captured mutineers, altogether some two thousand in number, only five were shot. It is a fact probably unique in military history, that the one who was shot in London was carried to the grave with military honours, followed by the whole body of troops quartered about the city with the ‘levelling’ badges in their hats. The fact is unique because the army also was unique, being not a mercenary machine, or even an embodiment of patriotic impulse, but an armed organisation of opinion.
[1] [“Lilburn” amended to “Lilburne”, twice. Tr.]
Contemporaneously with this outburst of mutiny, the levelling spirit had taken another direction, sufficiently peaceable, but equally tending to sap the foundation of a government resting on opinion.
‘In April of the year 1649,’ says Whitelock, [1] ‘the council of state had intelligence of new {341} levellers at St. Margaret’s Hill, near Cobham in Surrey, and at St. George’s Hill, and that they digged the ground and sowed it with roots and beans; one Everard, once of the army, is the chief of them.’ A few days after Everard was brought before the general. He said that he ‘was of the race of the Jews; that all the liberties of the people were lost by the coming in of William the Conqueror, and that ever since the people of God had lived under tyranny and oppression worse than that of our forefathers under the Egyptians. But now the time of deliverance was at hand…. And that there had lately appeared to him a vision, which bade him arise, and dig and plough the earth, and receive the fruits thereof; that their intent is to restore the creation to its former condition…. That they intend not to meddle with any man’s property … but only with what is common and untilled; … that the time will suddenly be that all men shall willingly come in, and give up their lands and estates, and submit to this community …, For money, there was not any need of it, nor of clothes more than to cover nakedness…. As their forefathers lived in tents, so now it would be suitable to live in the same,’ with more to the like effect. ‘I have set down this the more largely,’ adds Whitelock, ‘because it was the beginning of the appearance of this opinion, and that we might the better understand and avoid these weak persuasions.’
[1] [iii. p. 17.]
This ‘persuasion,’ ‘weak’ though it might be, was simply an expression of that individual consciousness of spiritual capacity and right, which had been strong enough to pull down an ancient church and monarchy, and was now tearing off the encumbrances by which, as it seemed, ages of selfish activity had clogged its motion. It was the sectarian enthusiasm, seeking wildly to withdraw itself from secular, as it had already done from religious ordinance. Ultimately clothed and in its right mind under the form of quakerism, it was to serve as a permanent protest against the plausibilities of the world, and to supply a constant spring of unconventional beneficence to English life. Even in this rude agricultural form, which it took among the diggers on Cobham Heath, it was perfectly peaceable. ‘They would not defend themselves with arms, but would submit unto authority, and wait till the promised opportunity be offered, which they conceived to be at hand.’ Their existence, however, showed that the enthusiasm which {342} had created the commonwealth was taking the inevitable course which made it useless as a support for any civil government whatever.
A kindred impulse to theirs, moreover, was at work in high places of the army, where it did not forswear the use of a carnal sword. Major-general Harrison was now directing his course by a verse in the prophet Daniel, which promises the kingdom of the world to the saints of the Most High, and was looking to the Rump parliament to introduce this kingdom with all speed. If their factions and worldly interests prevented them from doing so, Cromwell, he held, by some method above that of civil government, could and would. It was not for a constitutional theory or a pagan republicanism that he had been fighting, but for a dominion of grace, and he would not long be still while grandees of parliament, whom God had never owned in war, wrangled over the legal adjustment of his mercies. Overton, the governor of Hull, was the most eminent of those who shared his view, which, however, was but the legitimate doctrine of the military saint.