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State Democracy and Church Democracy the Levellers and the Bible in the English Revolution

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State Democracy and Church Democracy the Levellers and the Bible in the English Revolution Autumn 2017 State democracy and church democracy The Levellers and the Bible in the English Revolution Modern political values have religious sources, but its judicial laws, its political narrative, and its these are easily overlooked. Contemporary political prophetic calls for social justice, loomed at least as theory is a secularised discipline, making little or large as the New Testament in Christian political no reference to theology or sacred texts. This was reflection. Indeed, treatises on ‘the Hebrew not the case in early modernity. In the sixteenth republic’ formed one of the most important and seventeenth centuries, as in the Middle Ages, genres of political theory in seventeenth-century political thinkers were preoccupied by questions Europe.2 Hardly surprising then, that when early of ecclesiastical as well as civil power; discussions moderns argued over democracy, they did it with about the church often spilled over into debates Aristotle in one hand and the Bible in the other. John Coffey about the state. Medieval conciliarists maintained Democracy in the modern sense – one person, that the Catholic Church should be governed by John Coffey is one vote – was not inconceivable in early modern councils not merely by popes, and their arguments Professor of Early Europe, but it was viewed as a dangerous idea. were deployed by defenders of parliaments against Modern History, Aristotle had provided the standard taxonomy University of monarchs. Accounts of church polity were expected of political systems, and the forms into which Leicester. to align with civil polity. English Presbyterians, who they often degenerated: monarchy into tyranny, asserted that ecclesiastical power lay with local aristocracy into oligarchy, democracy into anarchy. presbyters rather than with an episcopal hierarchy, Anarchy was deeply feared, and the carnage of were accused of undermining monarchy. As King the German Peasants War of 1525, unleashed by James VI and I put it: ‘No bishop, no king.’ When the apocalyptic hopes inspired by Luther’s Reformation, Puritan divine Richard Baxter visited the New Model was a warning against empowering the people. Army in 1645, he was disturbed to hear the troops English Puritans (who sought to reform the engaging in heated intellectual debates, arguing Elizabethan settlement) were often accused of ‘sometimes for State Democracy, and sometimes for fostering ‘popularity’, and ‘democracy’ was a smear Church Democracy’. 1 word more than a noble ideal. Yet there was wide In these controversies about church and state, support for a ‘mixed polity’, combining elements of the Bible was frequently cited as a source of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. In church unimpeachable authority, albeit one whose government, Presbyterians claimed to be balancing political message was hotly disputed. To win a the claims of Christ as king, an aristocratic eldership, political argument, one needed to have Scripture and the popular consent of local congregations. on one’s side. Two of the classic works of English Congregationalists and Baptists went further, political thought – Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) establishing new congregations by a ‘church and Locke’s Two Treatises (1689) – devote half of covenant’ between members, and holding meetings their text to scriptural and theological reasoning. in which members (even women) voted. Sectarian The Old Testament, with its primordial history, 18 Autumn 2017 congregations often fostered lay preaching, even merely the first modern democrats, but the first to allowing artisans and tradesmen to proclaim the seek to construct a liberal state. 5 NOTES word, on the grounds that ‘the Spirit’s teaching’ In emphasising the modernity of Leveller values, 1. Richard was of greater value than a university education. Baxter, Reliquiae historians run the risk of downplaying their As the sociologist Max Weber recognised, Baxterianae (1696), pre-modern roots. The Levellers drew on various English Puritanism ‘created a popular religious I, p. 53. sources: Greek and Roman political thought, the intellectualism never found since’, prompting 2. See Eric Nelson, classical republican tradition, natural law theory, ordinary men and women to master the biblical The Hebrew Republic: English common law, the idea of ‘the Norman Yoke’, text, and to grapple with abstruse doctrinal Jewish Sources and as well as recent declarations of Parliament and the Transformation disputes.3 In the City of London during the 1640s, the New Model Army. Their experience of London of European Political the cobbler Samuel How memorised Scripture politics was formative, for City politics permitted Thought (Cambridge, while mending shoes, and went head to head with MA: Harvard a remarkably wide participation in parochial learned Puritan clergy in a debate in the Nag’s Head University Press, affairs and Common Council elections. Yet the Tavern. The soapboiler Thomas Lambe established 2010). Levellers were also a religiously motivated reform a Baptist congregation in Swan Alley on Coleman 3. Max Weber, movement, emerging from radical Protestant Street that became notorious for free-ranging Economy and Society, sects and steeped in the language and narrative of discussions, in which anyone present could voice ed. Guenter Roth and the Bible. Biblical texts adorned the title pages of Claus Wittich, 2 vols their opinion. There were even women preachers, some of their most important tracts, and biblical (Berkeley: University like the formidable separatist Katherine Chidley. allusions peppered their arguments.6 of California Press, 1968), I: 514. This was the populist religious milieu which This was no mere rhetoric. The Levellers read the produced ‘the Levellers’ – a nickname they 4. See John Rees, The Bible politically, as a book with a coherent message rejected, though one that stuck, because like Leveller Revolution about power and its abuse. They found in biblical (London: Verso, ‘Baptist’ and ‘Quaker’ it captured a central feature narrative a series of confrontations between 2016), chs. 2–4. of their movement. Keen supporters of the vulnerable saints and powerful oppressors: Abel Parliamentary cause, the Levellers coalesced 5. David Wootton, slaughtered by his brother Cain; the Children ‘The Levellers’, in around a triumvirate of activist pamphleteers of Israel enslaved by Pharaoh’s taskmasters; the John Dunn, ed., who organised mass petitions: John Lilburne, Israelites trembling like grasshoppers before the Democracy: The Richard Overton and William Walwyn. Lilburne Unfinished Journey giants of Canaan; Old Testament heroes stoned and had acquired fame as a ‘martyr’ after suffering (Oxford: Oxford sawn asunder; David taunted by the giant Goliath; persecution under bishops. He and Overton were University Press, Elijah facing the prophets of Baal; the psalmist 1992), p. 71. Baptists, and although Walwyn never separated surrounded by ‘bulls of Bashan’; the exiles in from the parish churches, he frequently attended 6. See Christopher Babylon ruled by Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar; Hill, The English ‘gathered churches’. All three championed ‘liberty Christ persecuted by Scribes, Pharisees and the Bible and the of conscience’ and denied that the magistrate temple authorities; the apostles assailed by mobs Seventeenth-Century had any coercive power in matters of religion. The Revolution (London: and priests; the witnesses of the book of Revelation separatist congregations led by Lambe and Chidley Penguin, 1993), ch. martyred by the Beast. The Bible was history from were a key part of the Levellers’ core support base.4 8; Andrew Bradstock, below, viewed from the vantage point of the weak. ‘Digging, Levelling As the 1640s progressed, Lilburne and Overton As Walwyn explained, God did not choose the and Ranting: The came to believe that English liberties were threat- learned to be his ‘Prophets and publishers of the Bible and the Civil ened as much by the Parliamentarians in the Gospel; but Herds-men, Fisher-men, Tent-makers, War Sects’, in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, Lords and Commons as by the King. In a series Toll-gatherers, etc’. Christ himself, ‘who thought it Rachel Willie, eds, of manifestoes, they insisted that the power of no robbery to be equal with God … yet despised The Oxford Handbook government comes from the people, and must not to be esteemed the Son of a Carpenter’.7 of the Bible in Early be subject In An Arrow against all Tyrants to strict Modern England, c. The fact that the Bible was written by the limitations in recognition of the natural rights of 1530–1700 (Oxford: marginalised, and that the incarnate Son of God had Oxford University citizens. By 1647 they were demanding a written been a manual labourer, testified to the character Press, 2015), ch. 25. constitution. As the historian David Wootton of the God. For the Levellers, the God of the Bible 7. The Writings of explains: sided with the poor and the downtrodden. In one William Walwyn, ed. The Levellers are the first modern political movement of Lilburne’s final tracts, his Just Defence (1653), he Barbara Taft and J.R. organized around the idea of popular sovereignty. stated: ‘I have been hunted like a Partridge upon McMichael (Athens, GA: University of They are the first democrats who think in terms, the mountains … but yet I know I have to deal with Georgia Press, 1989), not of participatory self-government within a city- a gracious God.’ 8 416, 418. state, but of representative government within a Christians, like the God they worshipped, were 8. The title page nation-state.
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