Conclusion: Following the Levellers
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CONCLUSION: FOLLOWING THE LEVELLERS ‘I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride on him.’ Richard Rumbold’s intransigent July 1685 scaffold assertion of the essential equality of all men provides evidence of the persistence of Leveller ideas into the 1680s.1 By his own acknowl- edgement, Rumbold had served as a horse guard at the Whitehall execu- tion of Charles I in 1649. He had then supported the Levellers’ agenda before fnally accepting the new republic that the Leveller authors chal- lenged.2 Rumbold’s name has repeatedly surfaced in the analysis of Restoration Leveller successors in the preceding chapters. He fed to Amsterdam after the exposure of the plot to attack Charles I’s sons at his Hertfordshire malting house. Joining in Monmouth’s ill-fated efforts against James II, Rumbold acted as a colonel in the Scottish rebel force headed by Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll. He was wounded, captured, and quickly tried before the Scottish Privy Council for treason, to which he freely confessed. Rumbold was executed at the Edinburgh Mercat Cross where Scottish kings were proclaimed and where numer- ous Scottish Restoration rebels had been executed before him. His death, like his life, graphically brought Leveller perspectives and experi- ences into the era of James II. However, Rumbold actually had more to say on the scaffold after he had ‘saluted the people on all sides.’ In its necessary brevity, this Baptist conspirator’s fnal speech nevertheless reveals a heady mix of old Leveller and agitator notions blended with other opposition and commonwealth © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 323 G. S. De Krey, Following the Levellers, Volume Two, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95330-1 324 CONCLUSION: FOLLOWING THE LEVELLERS positions. Indeed, Rumbold’s speech wove together the fragments and echoes of Leveller ideas that were apparent in the interrogations of other late Restoration plotters, disclosing the radical political mindset of many committed sectarians from the external London wards and parishes that Rumbold knew so well. Like the Leveller authors of 1647–1649, Rumbold claimed to be no ‘leveller’ in the common sense of the word, for he remarked that ‘God hath wisely ordered different stations for men,’ despite their equality in other respects. He preferred ‘kingly gov- ernment,’ he said, provided that it included a ‘legal free-chosen parlia- ment.’ Rumbold understood government to rest on a ‘contract’ between the king and the people, but he maintained that if the government broke the ‘conditions’ of the agreement, the people were ‘no longer obliged to perform their part,’ according to ‘the law of God, the law of nations, and the law of reason.’ The people also needed enough secure property ‘to make them happy,’ and government needed to respect the ‘ancient laws’ and ‘just rights and liberties’ for which he died, words that were apparently drowned out by an interrupting drumroll. As for his faith, Rumbold died an adherent to the ‘true Protestant religion,’ which prompted him to reject the aid and the ‘erroneous opinions’ of the church divines appointed to attend him on the scaffold and to ‘seek God in his own way.’ He hoped both for greater unity among Christian persuasions and that God himself would ‘arise for the deliverance of his church and people,’ which he and others had failed to accomplish. Rumbold’s fnal words were no sectarian claim for an exclusive route to heaven, however, but rather ‘wishes for the salvation of all men, who were created for that end.’3 Walwyn’s irenic spirit and General Baptist universalism broke through at the very end of Rumbold’s life. As the case of Richard Rumbold suggests, the most signifcant con- clusion to be drawn from this survey of the history of the Levellers and their successors is that the Levellers were not a one-shot phenomenon. They were not a premature voice in a wilderness of hierarchy and privi- lege. They did not speak in advance of their times, nor did they actually anticipate the secular democratic theory of the nineteenth century. The Levellers must be better integrated into the history of the seventeenth century rather than extracted from it. The voices of the Leveller authors were widely heard in the outlying and socially inferior neighbourhoods of London, and although those voices were unique and rooted in the circumstances of 1647–1653, Leveller ideas had a continuing impact in those same London localities. In socially heterogeneous Westminster, CONCLUSION: FOLLOWING THE LEVELLERS 325 in Cripplegate and Bishopsgate, in Wapping and Whitechapel, and in Southwark—all areas with weak parochial structures and notable sectar- ian populations—the Levellers gained their urban audience. There, they helped shape the increasing political assertiveness of marginal tradesmen and artisans who were also actively involved in the non-parochial worship and church life that they favoured over both episcopal and Presbyterian alternatives. Leveller views similarly took root in nearby towns and coun- ties with sizable communities of sectarians. In London, the uppity ‘mechanics’ and tradesmen who followed the Levellers in 1647–1649 and again in 1653 sought both freedom of religious expression and a larger role in the politics of the city and the nation. They did not cease to have such desires thereafter, although they did not again acquire spokesmen of the calibre of the Leveller authors. In every major political crisis through 1688, such ordinary people and their leaders took advantage of unsettled times to press for the replace- ment of coercive political and religious practices with more tolerant and participatory modes of settlement. Tightly devised historical con- structions of the Levellers as an organized party, faction, or movement that ‘rose’ only to be ‘crushed’ in 1649 overlook important continui- ties between the Levellers and their successors. Few of their successors employed exactly the same language as the Levellers. Instead, like their predecessors, Leveller successors responded to their particular times: they adapted ideas that had previously been part of the Leveller ethos, com- bining them with motifs from a broader opposition heritage to suit their own purposes. The social history of Leveller thought after 1653 is inher- ently complex because of the porous intellectual boundaries between Leveller perspectives and those of the republican and sectarian opponents of Oliver Cromwell and Charles II‚ as well as the perspectives of those who embraced James II’s toleration. Nevertheless, the reverberation of elements of the Leveller agenda over the next forty years is clear, as is the continuing circulation of those ideas in the original Leveller milieu. Christopher Hill once sought to separate ‘constitutional Levellers’ from more socially revolutionary groups of the 1640s and 1650s that ‘called in question the institutions and ideology’ of their era. For Hill, the Levellers were something of a sideshow to the truly radical groups of the era—the Diggers, the Ranters, and the Quakers, and for him, they were the ‘frst losers’ in the defeat of revolutionary impulses and ideas by the men of property.4 However, the present analysis of the Levellers and their successors suggests that they were not only central to the 326 CONCLUSION: FOLLOWING THE LEVELLERS climacteric of 1647–1649 but that their ideas re-emerged in the repeated crises of settlement during the next forty years. The Levellers were the most creative political expression of the breaking open of old Protestant forms by a new sectarian spirit that arose, dramatically, in the 1640s and that continued to fourish thereafter. Analytical efforts to distinguish between the Levellers and separatism work only in the immediate political context of the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649, and such efforts are not very successful even then. Leading London Baptist pastoral spokesmen sought, at that junc- ture, to separate their religious followers from association with insur- rectionary Leveller discourse, and Independent notables chose the new Commonwealth over the Levellers’ Agreement of the People. Nevertheless, the Levellers did not lose their sectarian audience in London and other localities in 1649, and Leveller followers continued to press for frequent parliamentary elections and for the acknowledgement of fundamental rights like liberty of conscience. As sectarian communities maintained themselves after 1649, political arguments like those of the Levellers and their army and republican allies repeatedly surfaced in times that tested coercive political and religious structures. Gathered churches that demanded liberty of conscience continued to draw on the Leveller ethos and to challenge rationales for the persecutory Anglican royalist state of the Restoration. Given the visibility of these sectarians in every climac- teric from 1647 through 1688, Hill’s distinction between the Levellers and other truly revolutionary groups dismisses the beginning of the most remarkable and continuous radical stream of the seventeenth century. Sectarian religious and political language also converged after 1675 with that of the parliamentary and Whig opposition, but looking at the politics of sectarianism only through the Whig label does not reveal the entire story. The Whigs were no more a monolithic political movement than was the parliamentary cause of 1642–1647, and Restoration dissent was no more uniform than the ‘puritanism’ of the 1640s. Understanding the assertive demands for popular rights and religious freedom that resur- faced in London after 1676 as involving not only ‘dissenters’ but also sectarians, and as involving not only ‘radical Whigs’ but also ‘Leveller successors’ emphasizes the multiple political strands that shaped the ‘frst Whigs.’ Restoration historians need to differentiate more carefully between sectarians and ‘main-stream’ dissenters who relied more heav- ily on the Reformed or Calvinist theological and ecclesiological heritage.