Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution John Rees
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
1 Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English Revolution John Rees Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014. 2 Declaration This thesis is my sole work. There have been no contributions from other researchers, apart for insights from others recognised in the footnotes. This thesis represents new material and has not previously been published, except for quotations from the other works. It has not previously been submitted for a degree at this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. All information derived from this thesis must be acknowledged appropriately. 3 Acknowledgments I am greatly in debt to Ariel Hessayon for his careful supervision and generous assistance in all aspects of the preparation of this work. I am grateful to Justine Taylor, the archivist at the Honourble Artillery Company and to Tim Wells for his for sharing the results of his work in the same archive. Norah Carlin was kind enough to share a very useful unpublished paper with me. Stephen Freeth, the archivist of the Vintners Company, was very helpful in repect of material on the Saracen’s Head and other matters dealt with in the chapter 2. Dr. Alastair Massie at the National Army Museum was of considerable assistance in locating the standards of the London Trained Bands. I am also grateful to the organisers of and participents in the Institute of Historical Research Early Modern Britain seminars for fruitful and stimulating discussions. 4 Abstract Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English Revolution The purpose of this thesis is to establish the extent and effectiveness of Leveller organisation in the English Revolution. The debate among historians of the English Revolution will be examined in order to locate this work in an historical context. The aim of the thesis is to challenge those currents of thought among historians which have sought to argue that the Levellers were of little or no significance in explaining the events of the 1640s. The pre-existing networks of collective organisation will be examined in order to highlight the degree of political co-ordination among individuals who were to become central to the emergence of the Leveller movement. An analysis of the use of public space, print and petitioning will aim to reveal the nature and reach of organised political activity by the Levellers. An investigation of the networks of support in the localities of London, the gathered Churches and the New Model Army will demonstrate the levels of support that the Levellers enjoyed. The way in which the opponents of the Levellers sought to suppress 5 the movement will be discussed with a view to assessing the threat to the dominant political forces of the revolution. But, equally, crucial moments of co-operation between the Levellers and their sometime opponents among the political Independents will be assessed as crucial in shaping the eventual outcome of the revolution in its critical year, 1648. The conclusion of the thesis is that the Levellers developed a unique collective organisation which, while it was only ever a minority current even within the revolutionary camp, was a crucial component of the political bloc which defeated the drive for a Personal Treaty with the King in 1648 and therefore opened the path to the establishment of a Republic. 6 Contents Abbreviations………………………………………………………... 7 Introduction…………………………………………………………. 8 Chapter 1. The Levellers and the historians: a literature review……… 24 Chapter 2. The Levellers and public space………………………….... 56 Chapter 3. The Levellers and print………………………………….. 88 Chapter 4. The Levellers and petitioning…………………………… 118 Chapter 5. Leveller organisation and the death of Rainsborough…… 148 Chapter 6. Leveller martyrs and political persecution……………….. 179 Conclusion…………………………………………………………. 213 Bibliography………………………………………………………… 234 7 Abbreviations For the ease of readers in following footnotes I have preferred fuller citations and have minimised the use of abbreviations. Abbreviations regularly used are as follows: Bod.: Bodleian Library BL: British Library CSPD: Calendar of State Papers Domestic CUP: Cambridge University Press DWL: Dr. Williams Library HLMP: House of Lords Main Papers HMC: Historical Manuscripts Commission LMA: London Metropolitan Archive MECW: Marx Engels Collected Works MUP: Manchester University Press ODNB: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OUP: Oxford University Press PRO: Public Records Office STC: Short Title Catalogue. A Pollard and G Redgrave, A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English books printed abroad 1475-1640. STC (2nd. ed.): A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English books printed abroad 1475-1640. Second edition, revised and enlarged, begun by W Jackson and F Fergusson, completed by K Pantzer TNA: The National Archive Wing: D, Wing, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of the English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700 (1945– 1951) 8 Introduction The purpose of this thesis is to describe some ways in which the Levellers were an historically significant political organisation. This will involve both a description of the extent of Leveller political activity and of the effect of that activity on the course of the English revolution. The proposition that the Levellers were an identifiable and effective political organisation is, of course, not one that is accepted by some modern historians who are unwilling to acknowledge their existence as a political movement or their impact on the events of the 1640s. Critical to the development of this strand of modern scholarship has been Mark Kishlansky’s view that the Levellers were marginal to the events of the revolution. In The Rise of the New Model Army Kishlansky took the authorial decision to ‘give scant attention’ to ‘political radicalism during this period’. He elaborated on this choice by saying: The decision to exclude the Levellers was a more difficult one… The source materials leave little impression of radical infiltration or leadership, but recent historiography has raised the Levellers to fantastic heights. They are nothing less than the deus ex machina in explanations of the Revolution. I have attempted to deal more explicitly with this problem… elsewhere.1 Whatever we may think of this approach, The Rise of the New Model Army did not deal with the events after 1647. Neither did the essays to which Kishlansky refers.2 Kishlansky did have the chance to address the issue of the later role of the Levellers in his A Monarchy Transformed. But here too it is only in his brief mention of the decline of Leveller organisation in 1649 that we 1 M Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, CUP, 1979) p. x. 2 M Kishlansky, ‘The Army and The Levellers: The Roads to Putney’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec., 1979), pp. 795-824 and ‘What Happened at Ware?’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), pp. 827-839. 9 learn that ‘The impressive Leveller organization with its sea-green colours, its party dues and its newspaper, The Moderate, was beginning to dissolve’.3 What this ‘impressive organisation’ was doing in the previous critical year remains untold. Other historians have taken a similar approach. John Walter regrets ‘the attention devoted to the seductive developments’ of the later 1640s ‘with the emergence of radical groups, whose status as “vanguard political parties” has undoubtly been exaggerated…’.4 Jonathan Scott argues that ‘any notion of a “Leveller party” is misleading’ and that the ‘movement never established a large-scale organisation of its own’.5 Diane Purkiss says ‘The term “Leveller movement” used by historians is misleading… the Levellers were not a party or a group... certainly they did not have any kind of simple programme’.6 Michael Braddick is similarly sceptical of the Levellers’ ‘practical significance to the events of the 1640s’.7 This is a long-standing debate. When Cromwell reprieved Leveller Henry Denne from execution after the 1649 Burford mutiny Denne wrote a recantation in which he said that the Levellers were a heterogeneous body with no fixed objectives. The Levellers were defended in the pamphlet Sea-Green and Blue which insisted that it was perfectly possible that ‘these severall parts…should be concentrick, as to a joynt pursuance of publique ends’.8 This battle of interpretation has persisted in modern scholarship. Austin Woolrych’s Soldiers and Statesmen deployed close argument to conclude that Kishlansky’s case was ‘surely implausible’. 3 M Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed Britain 1603-1714, (London, Penguin,1996) p. 194. 4 J Walter, ‘Politicising the popular? The “Tradition of Riot” and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution’, in N Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590-1720, Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester, MUP, 2007) p. 96. 5 J Scott, England’s Troubles, Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, CUP, 2000) p. 270. Scott claims that the Levellers depended for support on groups wider than their own immediate periphery (pp. 270-271). But even many much more strictly defined modern political parties share this characteristic. 6 D Purkiss, The English Civil War, A People’s History (London, Harper Collins, 2006) p. 476. Both Scott and Purkiss, however, go on to treat the Levellers as if they were a coherent group despite the generalizations with which they open their analyses. 7 M Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire A New History of the English Civil War (London, Penguin, 2008) p. 444. 8 H Denne, The Levellers Designe Discovered (London, 1649) E556[11]. Denne does not in fact name the Levellers in his comments which are directed at those involved in ‘this mutiny’. But the Levellers reply, and subsequent historians, have taken the remarks to be applicable to the Levellers in particular.