Chapter VIII: Part 8

Pym had entered the House of Commons with Eliot in 1614, and had been imprisoned in that year for his boldness. In 1620 he had been one of the “twelve ambassadors” to James I., for whom that king had ordered chairs to be set in Whitehall. With Eliot and Hampden he had pressed for Buckingham’s impeachment and for the Petition of Right. Now in 1640, John Pym, in his fifty-sixth year, was about to become the accredited leader of the parliamentary party, to be called “King Pym” by his enemies at the court, and to pass away when the long constitutional struggle was being settled on the field of civil war. Unimaginative, and averse from new ideas, Pym had a quite clear perception of the business of the House of Commons, and of the fitting relations of king and parliament. The crown, the lords, the commons were all recognized and necessary elements in the constitution, but their importance was not equal. The collective assembly of parliament had prevailed over the crown more than once; to Pym, the Laudian “divine right” was a novelty, and nonsense at that. Parliament could do much of its work with or without royal approval, and of the two Houses, if the Lords were unwilling to work with the lower House, the Commons could “save the kingdom alone.”

In the autumn Charles was driven again to appeal to parliament, and in November, 1640, the “Long Parliament” met, only to be dissolved thirteen years later by the arms of Cromwell. To the eleven years of “personal government” by Charles succeed thirteen years of parliamentary government, and then the House of Commons, now too enfeebled to endure, itself goes down before a military dictatorship.

Pym anticipated the coming struggle by riding over England on the eve of the elections to the Long Parliament and urging the electors to return men to the House of Commons resolute and alive to the crisis. The response was unmistakable. Parliament assembled to find some remedy for the distresses of the country before voting any money for the purposes of the crown. Enormous numbers of petitions were presented, and the House of Commons appointed its committees to attend to and report on the complaints.[111]

Before the year closed the House of Commons had struck at the power of Laud and Wentworth (now the Earl of Strafford), and the two ministers lay in prison impeached for high treason. Windebank, Charles’s secretary of state, and Finch, the chancellor, were already fled over seas.

It was Pym who went to the bar of the House of Lords to summon Strafford to surrender, and it was Pym who opened the charge of impeachment the following March. As in Eliot’s time, Hampden is content to be overshadowed by his friend, though his was the greater influence in the House.

Clarendon has given us his view of Hampden at the opening of the Long Parliament:

When this parliament began the eyes of all men were fixed upon
him, as their _patriae pater_, and the pilot that must steer
the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it.
I am persuaded his power and interest at that time were greater
to do good or hurt than any man’s in the kingdom, or than any
man of his rank hath had in any time; for his reputation of
honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly
guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them.

Baxter, it may be recalled, had written in the _Saints’ Rest_ that one of the pleasures which he hoped to enjoy in heaven was the society of John Hampden. The name of Hampden was blotted out in the copies published after the Restoration. “But,” wrote Baxter, “I must tell the reader that I did blot it out, not as changing my opinion of the person.”

The work of Pym and Hampden is conspicuous at the beginning of the Long Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts are abolished. Ship-money and all enforced taxation unauthorised by parliament are declared illegal. Oliver Cromwell’s motion for annual parliaments is amended into an act for triennial parliaments to be called with or without royal summons. Strafford--the only strong minister Charles had--perished on Tower Hill in May, both Pym and Hampden supporting impeachment instead of attainder, and voting for the fallen minister to be allowed the use of counsel at his trial. That Strafford was a criminal and a traitor ready to use his Irish army for the suppression of the English parliament Pym had no doubt.

Still Charles would not admit the position lost, and still struggled to govern, not through parliament, but by personal rule. The death of Strafford, though approved by all supporters of the House of Commons, rallied the king’s friends. The House of Lords was no longer quite at one with the Commons in the contest. In the House of Commons a royalist party emerges to oppose Pym, and the beginning of party government is seen. Overtures are made by Pym to the queen--to be disregarded, of course; though the tide is setting towards revolution, yet Pym and Hampden are far from revolutionaries. They are willing to end the political power of the bishops by turning them out of the House of Lords, but have only moderate sympathy with the root-and-branch Puritans who would abolish episcopacy.

In the Grand Remonstrance which Pym laid before the House of Commons in November, 1641, the case for the Parliament was stated with frankness, but the demands were not revolutionary. The main points were securities for the administration of justice, and insistence on the responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament. The royalists fought the Remonstrance vigorously, and in the end it was only carried by a majority of eleven, 159 to 148. At the end of the debate the excitement was intense: “some waved their hats over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground.” Violence seemed inevitable, “had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it.”

On the 1st of December the Remonstrance, with a petition for the removal of grievances, especially in matters of religion, was presented to the king at Hampton Court. “Charles had now a last chance of regaining the affection of his people. If he could have resolved to give his confidence to the leaders of the moderate party in the House of Commons, and to regulate his proceedings by their advice, he might have been, not, indeed, as he had been, a despot, but the powerful and respected king of a free people. The nation might have enjoyed liberty and repose under a government with Falkland at its head, checked by a constitutional opposition under the conduct of Hampden. It was not necessary that, in order to accomplish this happy end, the king should sacrifice any part of his lawful prerogative, or submit to any conditions inconsistent with his dignity.” So Macaulay wrote. But the days of “governments” and “constitutional oppositions” were far off in 1641, and only the germ of party government is seen in the division of the House of Commons. To “submit to any conditions” from parliament was inconsistent with the king’s notions of royal dignity, fostered by Laud to reject all criticisms as denials of the absolutism of the crown.

Charles promised an answer to the deputation which waited on him, and the answer was seen on January 3, 1642, when the king’s attorney appeared at the bar of the Lords, impeached Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode, and Hazlerig of high treason, in having corresponded with the Scots for the invasion of England, and demanded the surrender of the five members. “All constitutional law was set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the king, which deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a tribunal which had no pretence to a jurisdiction over them.”

The House of Commons simply declined to surrender their members, but promised to take the matter into consideration.

Then Charles, with some three hundred cavaliers, went to Westminster, and entered the House of Commons to demand the accused. But the five members, warned of his coming, were out of the way and safe within the city of London. “It was believed that if the king had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business.” As it was, the king could only retire discomfited, with some words about respecting the laws of the realm and the privileges of parliament, and “in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in.”

The invasion of the Commons was the worst move Charles could have made, for parliament was in no temper favourable to royal encroachments, and it had a large population at hand ready to give substantial support. The city of London at once declared for the House of Commons, ignored the king’s writs for the arrest of the five members, and answered the royal proclamation declaring them “traitors” by calling out the trained bands for the escort of the members back to Westminster, and for the protection of the House of Commons.

Falkland and the royalist members turned for the moment from Charles at his unexpected attack on the House, the cavaliers of Whitehall, menaced by the trained bands from Southwark and the city, fled, and Charles, standing alone, left London.

War was now imminent. Pym and Hampden at once prepared for the struggle.

Pym secured the arsenals of Portsmouth and Hull for the parliament, but his efforts to obtain the control of the militia in the counties were frustrated for a time by the king’s natural refusal to consent to the Militia Bill, which would have placed troops under the orders of country gentlemen of the parliamentary party.

Both king and parliament had to break through all constitutional precedent. The king levied troops by a royal commission, and Pym got an ordinance of both Houses of Parliament passed appointing the lords-lieutenant to command the militia, and thereby published the supremacy of parliament over the crown. In April the king appeared at Hull to obtain arms, and was refused admission to the town by Sir John Hotham, the governor. Parliament expressed its approval of Hotham’s act, the royalists gathered round Charles at York, and the final proposals of parliament for ending absolute monarchy were rejected by the king in June with the words, “If I granted your demands I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king.”[112]

With this refusal all negotiations were broken off. Essex was appointed commander of the parliamentary army, and in August Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.

Hampden threw himself vigorously into the campaign. From his native county of Buckingham, the county which made him its representative in parliament in 1640, he raised a regiment of infantry. “His neighbours eagerly enlisted under his command. His men were known by their green uniform, and by their standard, which bore on one side the watchword of the parliament, ‘God with us,’ and on the other the device of Hampden, ‘_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_.’” In the first stages of the war, before any decisive blow had been struck, Hampden was busy passing and repassing between the army and the parliament. Clarendon praises his courage and ability on the field.

A skirmish at Chalgrove, on June 18th, 1643, between bodies of horse commanded by Rupert and by Hampden, ended in victory for the royalists. Hampden was seen riding off the field, “before the action was done, which he never used to do, and with his head hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of his horse.” He was mortally wounded, for two carbine balls were lodged in his shoulder, and reached Thame only to die six days later.

The death of Hampden--at the age of 49--came at a dark hour in the early fortunes of the parliamentary army, and deepened the gloom. “The loss of Colonel Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that loves the good of his king and country, and makes some conceive little content to be at the army now that he is gone.” But Pym remained, and Cromwell and Vane, and many another resolute House of Commons man.

Pym’s health was already broken when Hampden fell, but he lived to accomplish the alliance of the English Puritans and the Scotch army, and, as the price of this alliance, the abolition of episcopacy and the adoption of Presbyterianism in the Church of England. The Solemn League and Covenant was accepted by parliament, and imposed on the nation in September. Henceforth the parliamentary army was pledged to extirpate “Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism and profaneness”; to bring “the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion”; to “preserve the rights and privileges of the parliament and the liberties of the kingdom; and to unite the two kingdoms in a firm peace and union to all posterity.”

The taking of the covenant--a political necessity--was John Pym’s last work. He was ten years older than Hampden, and his character was ruggeder and sterner and without the charm of the younger man. But Pym’s was the greater genius in politics, and his scheme of constitutional government was to be fulfilled in England at a later season.

John Pym died on December 8th, 1643, and his body was buried in Westminster Abbey--only to be turned out at the Restoration and removed to St. Margaret’s churchyard.

With Pym and Hampden gone, henceforth the conduct of parliament was in other hands, and the day of moderate statesmanship had passed.

The war undertaken to preserve the liberties and establish the supremacy of the House of Commons was to bring in its train not only the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, but the suppression of the House of Commons itself.

Important to the nation as the issues at stake were, most people in England took hardly any more part or interest in the great civil war than they had done in the Wars of the Roses. “A very large number of persons regarded the struggle with indifference.... In one case, the inhabitants of an entire county pledged themselves to remain neutral. Many quietly changed with the times (as people changed with the varying fortunes of York and Lancaster). That this sentiment of neutrality was common to the greater mass of the working classes is obvious from the simultaneous appearance of the club men in different parts of the country, with their motto, ‘If you take our cattle, we will give you battle.’”[113]

How could it be otherwise? Supremacy of King, or supremacy of Commons,--seed time and harvest remain, and the labourer and the artizan must needs do their day’s work.

Not till the deposing of the Stuarts--forty-five years after John Hampden’s death--is the supremacy of parliament over the crown arrived at by general consent, to become a recognized and settled thing in British politics. By the middle of the nineteenth century the House of Commons is unmistakably the ruling power in the constitution, and the labours of Eliot, Hampden and Pym are vindicated.

In our own day changes in the balance of constitutional power may be noted. The supremacy of the House of Commons is quietly disappearing before the growing popularity of the crown, the reawakened activity of the House of Lords, and the steady gathering of the reins of power into the hands of the Cabinet and Executive. As the crown in the last twenty years has increased in popular esteem, so the influence and importance of the Commons has waned in the country; and this waning influence of the Lower House has been further diminished by the frequent rejection and revision of its measures by the House of Lords.

The power of the Executive has also been obtained at the expense of the power of the Commons. The Cabinet, rather than the House of Commons, holds the supremacy to-day, and the direction of foreign policy, and the making of international treaties are no more within the authority of the House of Commons than are the administration of Egypt and India. Pym and Hampden fought and gave their lives for the right of the House of Commons to control the ministers of the crown and to order the policy of these ministers. By its own consent, and not from pressure from without, the House of Commons has silently surrendered this right, and has agreed that the policy of its Foreign Minister for the time being--whether he be Liberal or Conservative--must not be subject to reproof, still less to correction. In home affairs administrative order steadily supersedes statute law.

In theory ministers are still subject to the House of Commons. In actual practice they can rely on not being interfered with as long as their party has a majority in the House. When the price of effective interference with the conduct of affairs is a defeat of the Cabinet and a consequent dissolution, the payment is more than members of parliament are prepared to make.

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.”

Little is known of Winstanley, and the movement is shortlived. The “Diggers” never threatened the safety of the Commonwealth government as Lilburne and the Levellers did, for Winstanley’s social doctrine included the non-resistance principles that later found exponents in the Society of Friends, and the agrarian revolution he preached could hardly be accomplished without force of arms. What is notable about Winstanley is his witness to the fact that a social question existed--that he saw beyond the Civil War, and the strife for political liberties, a great mass of poverty unheeded; and seeing the miseries of his fellows resolutely thought out some cure for their distress, and did his best, as it seemed to him, to get this cure adopted.

Neither the Council of State nor the republican army had time or patience for Winstanley’s schemes, and the “Diggers” were dispersed with little trouble; but Winstanley’s religious teaching was to exercise considerable influence in the world when George Fox became its preacher, and his social teaching on the land question has thousands of disciples in Great Britain to-day.

Gerrard Winstanley was born in Lancashire in 1609.[125] He seems to have settled in London as a small trader and to have lost what money he had in business--cheated he says, “in the thieving art of buying and selling, and by the burdens of and for the soldiery in the beginning of the war”--so that he was obliged “to accept of the good-will of friends to live a country life.” In the country Winstanley ponders the source of the ills around him, and, having some considerable gift of expression, gives utterance, in a number of pamphlets, to a cry for reform, and gathers followers.

In December, 1648, Winstanley (or one of his friends) issued the earliest of the Digger publications under the title of “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire--A Discovery of the Main Ground, Original Cause of all the Slavery of the World, but chiefly in England. Presented by way of a Declaration of many of the Well-affected in that County, to all their poor oppressed Countrymen in England. And also to the consideration of the present army under the conduct of the Lord Fairfax.”

A month later and Winstanley publishes his “New Law of Righteousness: Budding forth to restore the whole Creation from the Bondage of the Curse. Or a glimpse of the new Heaven and the new Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness.” Here, with a good deal of mystical religious phrasing (the author explains that when he was in a trance the message came to him), Winstanley proclaims his calling and unfolds his agrarian proposals:

And when the Lord doth show unto me the place and manner, how
He will have us that are called common people manure and work
upon the common lands, I will then go forth and declare it by
my action, to eat my bread by the sweat of my brow, without
either giving or taking hire, looking upon the land as freely
mine as another’s.

There is to be no forcible expropriation of landlords:

If the rich still hold fast to this propriety of Mine and
Thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands.
And let the common people, that say the earth is _ours_, not
_mine_, let them labor together, and eat bread together upon
the commons, mountains, and hills.

For as the enclosures are called such a man’s land, and
such a man’s land, so the Commons and Heath are called the
common people’s. And let the world see who labor the earth in
righteousness, and those to whom the Lord gives the blessing,
let them be the people that shall inherit the earth.

None can say that their right is taken from them. For let the
rich work alone by themselves; and let the poor work together
by themselves. The rich in their enclosures, saying, _This is
mine_; and the poor upon the commons, saying, _This is ours,
the earth and its fruits are common_. And who can be offended
at the poor for doing this? None but covetous, proud, idle,
pampered flesh, that would have the poor work still for this
devil (particular interest) to maintain his greatness that he
may live at ease.

Was the earth made for to preserve a few covetous, proud men
to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures
of the earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a
fruitful land: or was it made to preserve all her children? Let
Reason and the Prophets’ and Apostles’ writings be judge....
For the earth is the Lord’s; that is the spreading Power of
Righteousness, not the inheritance of covetous proud flesh that
dies. If any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may
say, _That is mine_. But if the Lord made these for the use of
His creation, surely then the earth was made by the Lord to be
a Common Treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some.

Leave off dominion and lordship one over another; for the
whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth. Leave off
imprisoning, whipping, and killing, which are but the actings
of the curse. Let those that have hitherto had no land, and
have been forced to rob and steal through poverty; henceforth
let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone may
enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread
with the sweat of his own brows. For surely this particular
propriety of mine and thine hath brought in all misery upon
people. First it hath occasioned people to steal from one
another. Secondly it hath made laws to hang those that did
steal. It tempts people to do an evil action, and then kills
them for doing of it. Let all judge whether this be not a great
evil.

In April, 1649, the time was ripe--so Winstanley and his friends judged--for making a start to get rid of this evil.

The Council of State, but a few months old, and much occupied with dangers in Scotland and Ireland, and with mutinous Levellers in the army, was suddenly informed of the strange activities of “a disorderly and tumultuous sort of people” by one Henry Sanders, of Walton-upon-Thames.

Sanders’ testimony affirmed that “there was one Everard, once of the army but was cashiered, who termeth himself a prophet, one Stewer and Colten, and two more, all living at Cobham, came to St. George’s Hill in Surrey, and began to dig on that side the hill next to Camp Close, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans. On Monday following they were there again, being increased in their number, and on the next day they fired the heath, and burned at least forty rood of heath, which is a very great prejudice to the town. On Friday last they came again, between twenty and thirty, and wrought all day at digging. They did then intend to have two or three ploughs at work, but they had not furnished themselves with seed-corn, which they did on Saturday at Kingston. They invite all to come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes. They do threaten to pull down and level all park pales, and lay open, and intend to plant there very shortly. They give out they will be four or five thousand within ten days, and threaten the neighbouring people there, that they will make them all come up to the hills and work: and forewarn them suffering their cattle to come near the plantation; if they do, they will cut their legs off. It is feared they have some design in hand.”[126]

The date of this information was April 16th, and Bradshaw, the President of the Council, at once asked General Fairfax “to disperse the people so met, and to prevent the like for the future, that a malignant and disaffected party may not under colour of such ridiculous people have any opportunity to rendezvous themselves in order to do a greater mischief.”

Fairfax sent Captain John Gladman to attend to the matter, and Gladman reports three days later that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard are the chief men responsible, that he “cannot hear that there have been above twenty of them together since they first undertook the business,” and that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard will wait upon Lord Fairfax. He adds; “I believe you will be glad to be rid of them again, especially Everard, who is no other than a mad man. I intend to go with two or three men to St. George’s Hill this day and persuade these people to leave this employment if I can, and if then I see no more danger than now I do I shall march back again to London to-morrow.” Gladman’s opinion is that “the business is not worth the writing nor yet taking notice of.”

The interview between Fairfax and Winstanley and Everard took place on April 20, and Everard explained that the Diggers “did not intend to meddle with any man’s property nor to break down any pales or enclosures, but only to meddle with what was common and untilled, and to make it fruitful for the use of man: that they will not defend themselves by arms, but will submit unto authority; that as their forefathers lived in tents, so it would be suitable to their condition now to live in the same.”

Fairfax evidently decided that the movement was not so alarming as the Council of State had represented, for Winstanley and his Diggers resumed their work, and at the end of May, Fairfax, with the officers of the army, paid a visit to St. George’s Hill. Winstanley returned “sober answers” to the inquiries of Fairfax, “though they gave little satisfaction (if any at all) in regard of the strangeness of their action.” Winstanley’s argument, often enlarged in his pamphlets, was that the people were dispossessed of their lands by the crown at the Norman Conquest, and that “the king who possessed them by the Norman Conquest being dead, they were returned again, being Crown Lands, to the Common People of England.”

This was not conclusive to their visitors, and “some officers wished they had no further plot in what they did, and that no more was intended than what they did pretend.” To the objection that the ground was too poor to repay cultivation, “the Diggers answered they would use their endeavours and leave the success to God, who had promised to make the barren ground fruitful.” Public opinion gave out that the Diggers were “sober, honest men,” and that “the ground will probably in a short time yield them some fruit of their labour, how contemptible soever they do yet appear to be.”

Encouraged by Fairfax’s “kindness and moderation,” Winstanley appeals to him in June against the interference of the local landowners, and getting no response (for Fairfax had said that the Diggers were to be left to “the Gentlemen of the County and the Law of the Land”), publishes an appeal to the House of Commons against his arrest for trespass by the Lords of Manors in Surrey. The House of Commons, occupied with State matters, turned an indifferent ear to Winstanley’s complaint, and the leader of the Diggers sent a “Watchword to the City of London and the Army,” telling the wrongs the Diggers suffered at the hands of the law for “digging upon the barren common”--how they were mulcted in damages at £10 a man, with costs at twenty-nine shillings and a penny, and taken in execution, and how their cows were seized by the bailiffs. At the end of November the very huts they had built were pulled down, and it was a hard winter for the little colony still left on St. George’s Hill.

Winstanley does not merely relate his injuries in these publications, he is all the time urging that his plan for setting people upon the common lands is the needful thing in England, that a common ownership of land is God’s will, and that the crown lands taken by the Normans must revert to the people on the execution of the king.

In the spring of 1650 an attempt was made to extend the digging propaganda--for the planting of St. George’s Hill was doomed--and some of Winstanley’s disciples made a tour through the counties of Middlesex, Bedford, Hertford, Huntingdon, and Northampton, settling down at last on some waste ground near Wellingborough. Here they were very soon arrested by a local justice of the peace, the Council of State ordered their prosecution, and the movement was suppressed.

To the Council of State these Diggers were “Levellers,”[127] “intruders upon other men’s properties,” “seditious and tumultuous,” against whom the public peace must be preserved.