Читать книгу Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World - Alec Ryrie - Страница 14
ОглавлениеEvery valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. . . . And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.
– ISAIAH 40:4–5
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the themes of Protestantism’s early history came together in a bloody, chaotic, and exhilarating symphony. They did so in an unlikely place: the island of Great Britain, which until then had played a supporting role in Protestantism’s drama. The island’s two kingdoms, England and Scotland, had both embraced the Reformation, allowing them to overcome their perennial mutual hostility. Since 1603, both realms had been subject to the same king. During the religious wars, both countries sent volunteers, money, munitions, and – occasionally – formal armies to the Continent, and England also completed a savage conquest of Catholic Ireland. But they managed to keep their wars at arm’s length. Spain’s attempts to bring the war to Elizabeth I’s England failed, most famously in the disastrous Armada expedition of 1588. From 1560, Britain enjoyed an unprecedented era of internal peace and of religious stability. After 1560, both kingdoms were more or less Calvinist, although the English church had retained some Catholic structures and a ceremonial streak in its worship. Religious debates in both countries could be lively, but they took place within a widely shared consensus, which included an almost universal commitment to the ideal of a comprehensive, national church.
And yet, between 1637 and 1642, first Scotland, then Ireland, and finally England rebelled against their king, setting off two decades of war, political turmoil, regicide, and wave after wave of religious revolution. When the smoke finally cleared and the blood soaked away, the monarchy and the old churches were restored in the 1660s almost as if nothing had happened. In fact, the new beliefs that took shape in this crucible would make themselves felt around the world for centuries to come.
The collapse during 1637–42 had many causes, most of them beyond our concern. The immediate disputes over a dysfunctional system of taxation were symptoms of a deeper philosophical conflict. A century earlier, England’s political classes had been utterly cowed by Henry VIII, but by the early seventeenth century they had turned mulish. Perhaps the turmoil of the Reformation and a series of nail-biting succession crises had convinced them that politics was too important to be left to kings. Perhaps Protestantism had simply corroded the ideal of obedience. For whatever reason, a broad class of gentlemen, merchants, and lawyers were newly willing to stand on their rights and answer back to their kings. James I, England’s king from 1603 to 1625, had been raised in Scotland’s bare-knuckle politics and had learned to use his royal dignity to face down his opponents, but he understood that asserting his divine right to rule was a political ploy. His son Charles I utterly believed it and had little interest in political realism. For all the deep forces at work, the most obvious cause of the disaster was his profound inadequacy as a ruler.
Still, penny-pinching, idealistic legalism versus overweening, extravagant royal incompetence is the ordinary stuff of politics. What made this nasty brew toxic was religion. In both England and Scotland, royal power had long been associated with religious conservatism. King James had had his fill of assertive Calvinists as king of Scots, and when he became king of England after Elizabeth I’s death, he eagerly embraced the English church’s ceremonialist strand, especially its government by well-behaved bishops. Yet he still allowed room for “Puritans”, who thought the English Reformation was unfinished and who dreamed of completing it.
King Charles shared his father’s opinions but not his caution. He exclusively promoted ceremonialist priests and bishops, many of whom denied the core Calvinist doctrine of predestination and froze out anyone who disagreed. Leading the king’s campaign was William Laud, bishop of London from 1628 and archbishop of Canterbury from 1633. Under Laud’s eye, a counter-revolution was imposed on English parishes: Communion tables dressed and railed like Catholic altars, choral music instead of simple metrical hymns, sermons downgraded in favour of liturgy, and set forms of prayer favoured over spontaneous outpourings.
For a great many English people, all of these things smelled of “popery”: creeping re-Catholicization. Charles’s queen, a French Catholic princess, maintained her own Catholic chapel in the heart of London, and Puritans suspected her husband was likewise smuggling “popery” into the English church. Of course Charles denied it, but he would, wouldn’t he? Laud’s campaign awakened English Protestantism’s martyr complex. Puritans were being driven from office. In one notorious case in 1637, three outspoken preachers were imprisoned and had their ears cut off for defying the king. Meanwhile, Charles steadfastly refused to intervene in the Thirty Years War to save his suffering Protestant brethren in Europe. Was he, in fact, now the puppet of Catholic plotters?
By the late 1620s, political trust had almost completely collapsed. A series of Parliaments clashed head-on with the king, until finally in 1629 Charles dismissed Parliament and set about governing without it. Which he could, but only as long as England remained at peace and could manage without the taxes that only Parliament could levy. Laud’s agenda marched forwards, and Puritans were left voiceless. It seemed like a victory.
Characteristically, Charles overplayed his hand. Despite ample warnings, he decided to extend Laud’s counter-revolution to Scotland, whose church was much more straightforwardly Calvinist than England’s and whose political culture was much less polite. The imposition of a version of the English Book of Common Prayer on Scotland in 1637 provoked first riots, then full-scale rebellion. In February 1638, a Scottish National Covenant was ostentatiously signed in Edinburgh and rapidly distributed across the country. The Covenanters affirmed their loyalty to the king while furiously denouncing popery. Declaring that King Charles’s changes “tend to the re-establishing of the popish religion and tyranny”, they swore to give the “utmost of our power, with our means and lives”, to defend “the true religion and his majesty’s authority”. If that meant defending the king’s authority from the king himself, so be it.1
Charles’s instinct was to respond with force. Through 1639–40, he tried to cobble together an army. He could raise men from his third kingdom, Ireland, but paying them was another matter. In April 1640, he risked summoning an English Parliament, to ask for taxes. But England’s political classes were not going to support a crypto-Catholic king in leading an army of Irish Catholics against Scottish Protestants. For all they knew, once the Scots were subdued, the Irish muskets would be turned on them, and a Catholic tyranny would be imposed openly. The “Short Parliament” was dismissed after three weeks of impasse.
Charles, typically, tried to attack anyway, but the Scottish Covenanters had assembled a formidable army, led by returned volunteers from the European war. There was only one serious skirmish, outside the English military town of Newcastle on 28 August 1640, at which the seasoned Scottish forces scattered the king’s raw recruits. The Scots occupied much of the north of England, forcing the king to pay their expenses. Militarily defeated, financially exhausted, and almost completely politically isolated, Charles was compelled to summon another English Parliament. This one would endure in various forms for nearly twenty years.
This new Parliament shamelessly used its financial muscle to roll back Charles’s counter-revolution. As well as extracting a series of constitutional concessions, it attacked the “popish” clique bewitching the king. Archbishop Laud was imprisoned. The earl of Strafford, the king’s Irish deputy, whose army had been so much feared, was executed. Charles consented to Strafford’s death only under excruciating pressure. His remorse at having done so would fortify him against sensible compromises for years to come.
For some in Parliament, that was enough: the point had been made, the clock turned back, and normal life could resume. Others, however, reckoned that the entire pre-Laudian settlement had been exposed as a sham. The bishops whom Puritans had once pragmatically accepted were now revealed as tyrannical miniature popes. Those who had spent a decade defying those bishops at considerable personal cost were not about to compromise. They had tasted freedom, and they wanted more.
It was not only the merchants, lawyers, and gentlemen in Parliament who wanted change. London was the world’s largest Protestant city, a Babylon filled with Puritan agitators, unemployed soldiers, and volunteers returning from the war in Germany. With the hobbling of Charles’s government and the release of Puritan prisoners, a carnivalesque anarchy had taken hold. A radical fringe was coming into the open as official censorship faltered. A storm of provocative, scabrous, and opportunistic pamphlets flew from London’s presses and whipped up the urban fire over which Parliament was simmering.
In France in the early 1560s, and the Netherlands in 1566, the sudden withdrawal of government control produced an explosion of interest in and conversion to new religious choices. So it was in England in 1640–42. A petition calling for bishops and other ceremonial vestiges to be abolished gathered fifteen thousand signatures. An unknown young polemicist named John Milton published a foam-flecked diatribe against the “canary-sucking”, “swan-eating” bishops. An emerging constituency was arguing that the old establishment was enslaved to Antichrist and so needed utter abolition, not mere reform. An uncontainable suspicion and fury was building.2
Still, the pull of consensus might have prevailed had it not been for Ireland. In October 1641, Irish Catholic landowners, emboldened by the political power vacuum and alarmed by the new mood in England, launched a coup. A surgical strike against leaders turned into a general rising almost by accident. Like the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre seventy years earlier, the widespread belief that King Charles had backed the plotters gave the violence legitimacy. Around four thousand Irish Protestants were killed, and twice as many died of exposure during the winter, having been expelled from their homes. Ireland seemed to have successfully shrugged off British rule.
This rising raised the temperature of English politics beyond boiling point. Irish atrocity stories, each more exaggerated than the last, fanned England’s already-blazing anti-Catholic paranoia into a wildfire. Those who had been warning of a Catholic conspiracy to drown Protestants in their own blood felt vindicated. There were vigilante attacks on English Catholics. A “Grand Remonstrance”, presented to the king by Parliament in December 1641, blamed England’s woes on “a corrupt and ill-affected party” and “their mischievous devices for the alteration of religion and government” and insisted that bishops be abolished forthwith.3
The problem was, how was the Irish rebellion to be crushed? Could the king be trusted with an army? What would stop him from allying with the Irish papists and bringing them to England to slaughter Protestants in their beds? But if he could not stand to England’s defence, then he had in effect abandoned his duties as king. In which case, his subjects’ first duty was to bring him to his senses, by any means necessary.
For English moderates, this kind of talk was open rebellion. To accuse the king of treachery was to make a nonsense of all laws. Henry Burton, a radical minister whose missing ears were a token of his anti-Catholic bona fides, retorted that “if any human Laws be found to be contrary to Gods Word, they are invalid and void ipso facto”.4 To some, this was common sense. To others, it was treason. In January 1642, Charles attempted a coup of his own and tried to arrest the parliamentary ringleaders. Westminster closed ranks to protect them, and the king fled London. It was no longer his city.
Even now, no one expected a full-scale war. As so often happens, both parties believed they would quickly defeat their opponents. Both seemed to themselves to be obviously right and moderate, and their opponents a fringe of extremists. Yet we cannot quite write this off as the naivety of a people who had lived in peace for so long that they had forgotten what war means. For over two decades, the English had been transfixed by the ghastly spectacle that we call the Thirty Years War, in which tens of thousands of English and Scottish volunteers and mercenaries had fought. As the political temperature at home rose, these men came pouring back, bringing with them up-to-the-minute military expertise and battle-hardened sensibilities. It was these veterans who made the Scottish mobilization and victory in 1639–40 possible. England, too, had all too many ex-soldiers: men with no skills other than killing, ready to be filled with martial zeal for whichever cause came calling. Continental butchery had inured a generation to war and had made it seem a natural state of affairs.
Now it was coming to England. As a 1641 pamphlet put it, “The same wheel of mischief that hath wrought the worst in Germany since the year 1618 hath for some years last past been set also at work in England, Scotland and Ireland.” The Laudian counter-revolution, the Irish rebellion – it was all part of the same vast plot. Those who counselled peace were at best naive, at worst active agents of Antichrist.5
And so, in 1642, Europe’s religious wars finally spilled across the English Channel. Both sides in the English Civil War drew on Continental veterans and imported Continental weapons. There was also a real threat of direct Continental intervention in England’s wars, forestalled by Parliament’s seizure of the Royal Navy. Parliamentarians, in particular, understood their war as part of a European struggle. The nickname Cavalier, applied to the royalist army, was a piece of Continental name-calling. (“Roundhead”, a derogatory reference to typically Puritan hairstyles, was a homegrown English insult apparently first coined in 1641.) A woodcut dating from the 1650s gives this view of the wars in full. The two-headed eagle, symbol of the Catholic Habsburg emperors who had driven the Thirty Years War, is seen straddling the North Sea, with one wing in the Netherlands and the other in Yorkshire. For those who feared a vast popish conspiracy, it was all one war: a war of desperate self-defence and also of liberation.
During 1642, each party found to its surprise that its rival did not crumble. Instead, both entrenched themselves in their regional strongholds. The supposedly swift war lasted three and a half years, during which more than eighty thousand people were killed and large parts of England, especially the heavily contested Midlands and West Country, were laid waste.
The king’s aim was simply to put down a vast rebellion. Parliament’s aims were more complex. At first, Parliamentarians believed they were fighting to defend themselves against the Catholic plotters who had deceived their king, a king to whom they still swore fealty. But as they began to realize what victory could mean, visions of a new England began to take shape, some more radical than others.
The most obvious route was the one endorsed in the summer of 1643 by a military alliance between the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters. The alliance, the Solemn League and Covenant, was sealed by a joint religious programme which came close to making this a war for Presbyterianism: to import Scotland’s national church into England. Several high-powered Scots now joined the Westminster Assembly, a gathering of theologians set up by the English Parliament in order to work out a post-war religious settlement. This was what English Puritans had long hoped for. England’s unfinished Reformation would be purged of its popish dregs and brought into line with international Calvinism.
The Westminster Assembly set itself earnestly to work. In 1644, it produced a newly austere order of service for the English church in place of the uncomfortably traditionalist Book of Common Prayer. In 1646, the assembly produced a new confession of faith, which is still a touchstone for Presbyterians around the world. Parliament supported the assembly’s work by banning the old Prayer Book, abolishing the office of bishop, and – to underline the point – executing Archbishop Laud. In place of the bishops, a Presbyterian structure of elected elders and regional assemblies was haltingly erected. However, to Presbyterian dismay, Parliament insisted on retaining oversight of those assemblies. The Scottish church’s robust independence would not be imported. Presbyterian purists, whose temperament was not suited to seeing a glass as nine-tenths full, scented betrayal.
The moment when England might have turned Presbyterian came after a crushing defeat of the royalists by a Scots–Parliamentarian army at the battle of Marston Moor on 2 July 1644. There was talk of a negotiated peace in which a chastened king would have accepted a house-trained Presbyterian church. But if Charles had been the kind of man to accept such terms, the war would never have begun. By the winter, it was clear that Parliament would have to fight to the end, although no one yet knew what that end might be. And that meant defeating the king in his western heartlands, which required a new strategy. So, fatefully, in January 1645 Parliament voted to consolidate its various regional forces into a “new-modelled” army, a professional, national force that could fight the war to the finish.
In military terms, this was bruisingly effective. On 14 June 1645, the New Model Army crushed a veteran royalist force at the battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire. In September, it took the ruined remains of Bristol, a royalist stronghold and once England’s third-largest city. By early 1646, royalist resistance was virtually over. The army’s career, however, was only beginning. In a series of further campaigns in England, Scotland, and Ireland over the following decade and a half, it was to prove itself an exceptionally formidable fighting force: man for man, a match for any army in the world. It also quickly became, and remained until 1660, the primary source of political power in the British Isles. The king was defeated not by Parliament but by the army. That fact determined everything that followed.
When armies intervene in politics in the modern world, we generally see them as authoritarian and conservative. But this army was created to be God’s and the people’s army, a meritocracy of true believers. It imagined itself to be a truer custodian of the godly cause than the House of Commons, whose ageing electoral mandate dated from another world. In 1647, one zealous London artisan called it “our Army . . . the Army that we had poured out to God so many prayers and tears for, and we had largely contributed unto. They were as our right hand.”6 The soldiers had earned their authority with their own blood, and God had plainly endorsed it by giving them an unbroken run of victories.
The army’s godliness, however, was of a particular kind. The breakdown of religious authority since 1640 had given a vocal minority of English Protestants a taste for religious experiment. Even if they still believed in a unified national church, it took heroic patience to wait to reach it in lockstep. A vanguard of advanced reformers wanted to enjoy true Christian purity here and now. Already in 1641, some high-profile Puritans were advocating a network of “independent Churches”, governed neither by bishops nor by presbyteries but by the law of Christ and by mutual consultation and advice.7
There were not all that many Independent congregations, but they were zealous and high-profile, and they bridled at all attempts to make them march to a slow, orderly national tune. John Milton, one of the Independents’ publicists, bracketed bishops and presbyteries together as disciplinarian “forcers of conscience”. Independents began to talk of toleration and religious freedom. In 1644, with Parliament trying to reimpose order on London’s unruly printers, Milton famously defended a free press as a matter of principle. Castellio, a century earlier, had argued that “to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man”. Milton now argued that “as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God”. Making the classic Protestant appeal to conscience, he claimed the freedom “to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”.8
The Presbyterians’ retort was that liberty of this kind led directly to heresy and blasphemy. Thomas Edwards, Presbyterianism’s painstaking and horrified chronicler of errors, warned that Independents were not merely orthodox Calvinists who had rejected external oversight, but concealed views that were “higher flown, more seraphical”. That was untrue. Plenty of Independents were essentially orthodox in their theology, including the most famous of them all, Oliver Cromwell, an MP who became the army’s most brilliant general. But for some, Independency was a gateway drug. Even as Presbyterianism’s victory over royalist crypto-Catholicism was in its grasp, it was unravelling on its other flank, and Parliament could muster neither the votes nor the will for a serious crackdown.
In the long term, the most important of the new groups now emerging were the Baptists, who went from being a marginal sectarian movement in pre-war England to a church tens of thousands strong by 1660. Their existence proves that the old barrier between “magisterial” and “radical” Protestants had collapsed. For over a century, “magisterial” Protestants had insisted on infant baptism as a necessary feature of a universal, all-embracing church. Now, in revolutionary England, it was becoming plain that such a church no longer existed. So why not stop pretending that infant baptism was biblical and embrace being a sect? Crucially, doing this did not make you a wild radical. Many Baptists were, theologically, pretty conventional Calvinists. But they had mixed “magisterial” doctrines with a “radical” structure: allowing congregations to organize themselves, and sharply separating their community of baptized believers from the mass of corrupt humanity. It was a potent mix. From this starting point, the Baptists would spread across the Atlantic and then across the planet, to become one of the world’s leading Protestant denominational families.
The primary vector for this and other, even more radical infections was the New Model Army. It is not simply that the army’s zealous recruits were disproportionately Independent or Baptist. Independency’s essence was its denial of the network of parish churches; the army, forever on the move, was by definition outside that network. Its chaplains were under its own discipline, and its soldiers, risking their lives in God’s service, had their own voices. We have testimony to this from Richard Baxter, one of the most humane pastoral theologians of his age. Baxter had believed that Parliament’s war was being fought in defence of “our old principles . . . only to save the Parliament and Kingdom from papists and delinquents, and to remove the dividers, that the King might again return to his Parliament”. But shortly after the battle of Naseby, he visited the army’s encampment:
Among Cromwell’s soldiers, I found a new face of things which I never dreamed of: I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their intention to subvert both Church and State. Independency and Anabaptistry were most prevalent; Antinomianism and Arminianism were equally distributed.9
Something shockingly new was brewing in the army’s ranks. The “old principles” were no longer to be had.
So when the king finally surrendered in 1646, he faced a divided gaggle of victors: a staunchly Presbyterian and increasingly powerless Westminster Assembly; an army seething with radicalism, keen to fulfil its providential destiny, and unwilling to demobilize until its soldiers’ substantial arrears were paid; and Parliament, trying to balance the books and hold the ring. The king, trying to divide his enemies, spun out round after round of talks. As he did so, the mirage of a settled Presbyterian church vanished over the horizon. Many parishes and some regions did set up Presbyterian institutions, yet participation in this supposedly national church was essentially voluntary. Every parish church had become de facto Independent, whether it used that freedom to submit to Presbyterian discipline, to stick to something very like the supposedly banned Prayer Book, or to explore wilder shores.
Meanwhile, the army’s frustration was growing. The symbolic point at which the political initiative passed from Parliament to army was 4 June 1647, when the army seized the king to forestall any attempt to impose a deal against their wishes. Those wishes were at this point still a work in progress. The leading officers were willing to contemplate a political settlement that permitted a fair degree of religious toleration but otherwise looked just about recognizably like pre-crisis England. For many of the men, however, the time for that had passed.
Enter the group known to history as the Levellers, justly famous as the world’s first advocates of representative democracy. Their ambitions were first articulated in a series of pamphlets published in 1645 and 1646, but in 1647 the movement was taken up in earnest by the army’s rank and file and reinforced by London-based petitions that gathered tens of thousands of signatures. The Levellers demanded that Parliaments be elected every two years, by something not too far from universal male suffrage, along with freedom of religion and equality under the law. As to the king, some openly called for a republic. They certainly refused to cede any real power to the man who had “intended our bondage, and brought a cruell War upon us”.10
After that war, merely restoring the status quo felt inadequate. The Levellers in the army declared that their wartime service made plain “at how high a rate we value our just freedom”. In any case, the past was irrecoverable. A new world needs new rules. Even some royalists were tempted by Leveller ideas; if you feared parliamentary tyranny, regular elections with a reformed franchise had an appeal.11
Underpinning all of this was an explicitly Protestant conviction that this was an apocalyptic crisis. The living God who acts providentially in history had renewed his Gospel through Martin Luther. Antichrist had mustered all his forces in response. Now this had come to a head in a catastrophic war that had convulsed all Europe and had at last come to the Gospel’s last outpost, Britain, at earth’s westernmost end. Finally, at terrible cost, victory had been won, and power providentially given to God’s own army. It was a hinge in the world’s history. God was about to do something new.
So the Levellers rejected Presbyterianism as “a compulsive mastership, or aristocratical government, over the people”. They envisaged a government with no authority over religion at all, insisting that it was a sin to accept any externally imposed orthodoxy instead of “what our Consciences dictate to be the mind of God”. Respectable Calvinists generally held that orthodoxy was policed by the scholarship of university-trained ministers. But what if the universities had become self-serving guilds that excluded inconvenient truths? What use is book learning when the Spirit of God is at work? The Presbyterians’ rule, claimed the radical army chaplain John Saltmarsh, was that “God must not speak till man give him leave.” Saltmarsh instead appealed to “the infinitely abounding spirit of God, which blows when and where it listeth”. The Levellers felt that breath on their necks.12
They could never have succeeded. Even if, impossibly, they had secured truly free elections, they would have been routed. Their awkward argument that Catholics and royalists should be disenfranchised shows that they knew it. But in any case, the discussions were cut short. It does not do to leave a live king out of your calculations. In December 1647, Charles escaped and gathered fresh supporters. Old royalists were joined by some Presbyterians, who had concluded that the army’s radical ways were a more serious threat than the king. A second civil war ensued, which lasted for much of 1648, although Charles himself was swiftly recaptured. The new royalist coalition was potentially formidable but was disparate and disorganized, and the New Model Army did what it did best. Local revolts were put down one by one. A Scottish royalist army was taken unawares by a slightly smaller English force at Preston in Lancashire and beaten into a bloody surrender.
Now the army, officers and men alike, were unforgiving. King Charles was a war criminal, a “man of blood” who bore responsibility for his subjects’ deaths. By restarting a war he had already lost, he had openly defied God. There was talk of forcing him to abdicate in favour of one of his sons, but even now such a compromise was not Charles’s style. He tried to strike a deal with the parliamentary leadership over the army’s heads. A parliamentary vote on 5 December that suggested it might happen triggered an open coup. The army moved into Westminster. Forty-five MPs were briefly imprisoned, and nearly 300 more were excluded, leaving a hard core of about 70 sympathetic to the army’s views. Eventually, another 130 or so would be allowed to trickle back into the body known, cruelly but fairly, as the Rump Parliament. By then, it had already carried out the task for which it was created. It put its sovereign lord, King Charles I, on trial for treason, and on 30 January 1649, cut off his head.
The king’s death opened up three possible ways forward. One was to conclude that with this exceptionally awful king gone, normality of some kind could resume. This was the path chosen by the Scots, who proclaimed the dead king’s eighteen-year-old son King Charles II as soon as the news from London reached them. The new “king”, in Continental exile, was reluctant to accept the filleted crown that Presbyterian Scotland was offering him, but even royal beggars cannot be choosers, and in 1650 he landed in Scotland to claim it. Relations with his Scottish subjects were not warm. Nor was England’s response. The army, under Cromwell’s leadership, invaded, defeating the Scots royalists in a series of brutally effective battles. In 1651, Charles himself narrowly escaped to peripatetic exile once again. So the first option, a restored monarchy, failed, but not utterly. It slept until the second had run its course.
The second possible response, taken by the new regime in London, was to reform the state’s abuses while still maintaining a degree of continuity. Following the king’s execution, a republic was declared, but the purged House of Commons insisted in February 1649 that it was “fully resolved to maintain the fundamental laws of this nation”.13 It was in that spirit that the republican leadership experimented with a series of governing structures over the following decade. The Rump Parliament, ineffective and increasingly friendless, was forcibly dissolved by the army in 1653 when it tried to make its own rule perpetual. The army then made a brief and quixotic attempt to replace it with a nominated assembly, known derisively as Barebones’s Parliament, many of whose members were drawn from the Independent churches. However, when its radical wing threatened to take control, this too was closed down. Oliver Cromwell, who as the army’s most effective general had for some time been the de facto ruler of England, was now formally acknowledged as its Lord Protector.
The following five years brought a degree of stability. Cromwell proved himself to be a shrewd, effective, and even principled ruler, imposing a semblance of order on his war-torn country and normalizing relations with England’s neighbours. He held parliaments at which dissident voices were muffled but not entirely silenced. He did make some attempt to police the population’s moral behavior, although this was much exaggerated by subsequent legends, and he worked hard to root out vestigial royalists. Yet, to howls of betrayal from the Presbyterians, he refused to impose a national church of any kind. Cromwell became the first Protestant ruler anywhere to support religious toleration as a matter of principle, and as a result presided over a sectarian flowering unmatched since Luther had first denounced the “fanatics” in Germany in the 1520s. This toleration was not limitless. It did not extend to Catholics, whom the regime saw as a political threat, and in principle anti-Trinitarians were excluded too. Yet the regime had no stomach for actually persecuting anyone except Catholics. Cromwell claimed his toleration could extend even to Muslims (of whom there were none in England). He also ended England’s centuries-old exclusion of Jews, in the hope of a boost to commerce (which happened) and of mass Jewish conversions to Christianity (which did not).
And yet the republican regimes did not abolish the underpinning structure of a national church. No one was now compelled to attend a parish church, but most continued to do so. Presbyterian structures were allowed to operate. The government vetted ministerial appointments. Most controversially of all, tithes continued to be legally required. Tithes were the makeshift local taxes that supported parish churches and from which, very often, landowners took a considerable cut. Radicals of all kinds railed against this, but tithes, as a symbol of social order, became totemic for the establishment. The suppression of Barebones’s Parliament in 1653 was triggered by an attempt to abolish tithes: for Cromwell, a step too far.
As lord protector, Cromwell became king in all but name. One of his parliaments pressed him to accept the crown openly. He and the army leadership refused, but when he died in 1658, he was succeeded as lord protector by his son Richard Cromwell; it seemed pretty monarchical. However, during the next eighteen months the republican regime unravelled amid rising panic about sectarianism. The army, which did not trust Richard, deposed him in May 1659. A bewildering succession of attempted governing structures came and went over the following months, until eventually one of the most powerful of the generals accepted the growing clamour for what seemed like the only viable option: restoring the monarchy. Charles II returned to England in 1660, pledging forgiveness and moderation, promises that he did not violate as thoroughly as some had feared. And so in the end the second option failed utterly: it produced a republic that was simply old England in new dress and all too soon clothed itself in its old rags once again.
The third option, the impossible option, was the republic not of King Oliver but of King Jesus. This England would have been the Levellers’ vision taken up and transfigured, the firstfruits of a world remade under Christ. This was the explicit aim of the so-called Fifth Monarchists, a group who deduced from the Bible that history would comprise four great human empires followed at the last by a fifth, Christ’s kingdom on earth. In the turmoil of the 1640s, it was not foolish to think that the time had finally come. Immediately after the king’s execution, a petition called on the army to encourage the godly to form themselves “into families, churches and corporations, till they thus multiply exceedingly”. As this self-governing godly republic wriggled free from its cocoon, the husk of worldly government and law would simply wither away. In the meantime, those in power should prepare the way by abolishing tithes, imposing ferocious legislation against immorality of all kinds, redistributing land to the poor, radically simplifying the law, and purging the universities. Levellers wanted the rule of the people, but Fifth Monarchists wanted the rule of the godly.14 The godly who were actually in power regarded these idealists with a certain patronizing tolerance. In return, especially after the failure of Barebones’s Parliament, the Fifth Monarchists reviled their republican rulers as illegitimate. There was even fruitless talk of armed insurrection.
One of Cromwell’s policies was a particular betrayal: he made peace with the Dutch in 1654 after a two-year naval war over commercial rivalries. This dashed the hopes that radicals had cherished as a result of Cromwell’s genocidal reconquest of Ireland in 1649–50. Perhaps the Dutch, whose tolerance of Arminians showed them to be apostates, would be next. And then? “How durst our Army to be still, now the work is to do abroad?” one Fifth Monarchist wrote in 1653. “Are there no Protestants in France and Germany (even) now under persecution?” Why could God’s own army not ride all the way to Rome?15 It is easy to laugh at the notion of Cromwell as a new Alexander the Great, setting out to conquer the world. But 150 years later, Napoleon proved that an army hardened by battle and fired by revolutionary zeal can do remarkable things. Cromwell’s army, formidable as it was, would have had what neither Alexander’s nor Napoleon’s did: the certain knowledge that God was for them. Mercifully, it was not to be. The English republic turned into simply another human power, and the revolutionaries’ restless hopes turned elsewhere.
In 1647, the army chaplain John Saltmarsh argued, borrowing medieval apocalyptic terms, that the age of the Gospel was coming to an end and that a new age, of the Spirit, was dawning. Christians should no more stay in the old church, stuck as it was in the old ways, than Christ’s original disciples should have stayed in his tomb after he had risen from the dead. On that much, a great many people whom the 1640s had stirred into disquiet could agree. But where should they go?
The Levellers’ ambitions turned out to be a dead end. After the second Civil War, the Army high command suppressed the Leveller agitators, and a failed Leveller mutiny in May 1649 ended the movement as a political force. But their ideas did not die. A Leveller pamphlet a month earlier had asserted that because women had “an interest in Christ equal unto men”, they too should have equal rights. This was, for the moment, a very marginal idea, but the prominence of women among the sectarians was inescapable. Another advocate of women’s political equality, Anna Trapnel, became one of the best-known Fifth Monarchist prophets. In a religious free market, talent can sometimes rise to the top regardless of gender.
Later in 1649, another pamphleteer, Gerrard Winstanley, laid claim to the “true Leveller’s standard”. Winstanley’s group, the so-called Diggers, had occupied a plot of land that had been shown to him in a dream and proposed to work it together, holding all property and produce in common. This now looks like Communism, but for Winstanley it was a prophetic act, prefiguring “a new heaven, and a new earth” in which
none shall lay claim to any creature, and say, This is mine, and that is yours, This is my work, that is yours. . . . There shall be no buying nor selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man, for the earth is the Lord’s. . . . Every one shall work in love: one with, and for another.
The commune’s purpose was to show the world the true meaning of the freedom for which the war had been fought, for “freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down”.16
The Diggers’ experiment was soon forcibly broken up, and Winstanley eventually returned to a life of genteel respectability, but other subversives were pushing in different directions. In the summer of 1649, Abiezer Coppe, a preacher of questionable mental stability, produced a book claiming that “Sword levelling, or digging-levelling” were
but shadowes of most terrible, yet great and glorious good things to come. Behold, behold, behold, I the eternal God, the Lord of Hosts, who am that mighty Leveller, am coming . . . to Level the Hills with the Valleys, and to lay the Mountains low.
Coppe had his sights on the “plaguy holinesse” of Presbyterians and Independents alike, people whose religion was no more than “horrid hypocrisie, envy, malice, evill surmising”: an engine for moral self-satisfaction, as well-heeled believers used their self-awarded godliness to despise the poor whom they ought to love. He urged Christians to love not only the poor but thieves, whoremongers, and other notorious sinners. He deliberately, even prophetically, abandoned both his own dignity and his pretensions to morality. He ran through London’s streets, charging at the coaches of the wealthy, “gnashing with my teeth . . . with a huge loud voice proclaiming the day of the Lord”. He prostrated himself before “rogues, beggars, cripples”, kissing their feet. He “sat downe, and ate and drank around on the ground with Gypsies, and clip’t, hug’d and kiss’d them, putting my hand in their bosomes, loving the she-Gypsies dearly”. Such comments, especially his claim to “love my neighbour’s wife as myself”, made him notorious. But his claimed sexual libertinism is a side issue. Coppe’s point was that a true Christian “must lose all his righteousnesse, every bit of his holinesse, and every crum of his Religion”. Only then could he reach the point where he “knows no evil”.17
Coppe was associated with a group of so-called Ranters, around whom a sudden moral panic ballooned in 1650. This panic was mostly about sex, and former Ranters did claim to have taught that “till you can lie with all women as one woman, and not judge it sin, you can do nothing but sin”.18 But this misses the point. The Ranters’ assault on traditional moral norms was driven by their understanding of God. “They call him the Being, the Fulness, the Great motion, Reason, the Immensity.” Ranters taught a kind of pantheism, holding that all things are a part of God, including themselves. Hence the libertinism: if they were God and fully aware that they were God, how could they do wrong? But hence too the radical egalitarianism: every human being is a part of God, so how could social barriers have any meaning? Like Saltmarsh before them, they believed that in this new age of the Spirit, most of received Christianity was simply out of date. They disliked talk of resurrection and judgment, instead thinking of the dead returning to “that infinite Bulk and Bigness, so called God, as a drop into the Ocean”. Some even spoke of reincarnation.19
This tiny, quixotic movement, which had flared and disappeared by the mid-1650s, matters less in its own right than as a clue to the movement that contemporaries called Seekers. Seekers were in no sense a sect, but a mood: a restless conviction that the established forms of Christianity were simply inadequate and should be abandoned. Some Seekers waited for the new age of the Spirit to reveal itself. Others set out to create it.
