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3

‘The Head and Fountain of Rebellion’

The only and sole legislative law making power is originally inherent in the people.

John Lilburne

LONDON’S REVOLUTIONARY REPUTATION

If ‘posterity shall ask’, said one Royalist, ‘who would have pulled the crown from the king’s head, taken the government off the hinges, dissolved Monarchy, enslaved the laws, and ruined the country; say, “twas the proud, unthankful, schismatical, rebellious, bloody City of London”.’1 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon and Charles I’s advisor, was inclined to the same view. He saw London as ‘the fomenter, supporter and indeed the life of the war’.2 For the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was obvious that ‘but for the city the Parliament never could have made the war, nor the Rump ever have murdered the King’.3 Sir Edward Walker described London as ‘the head and fountain of this detested rebellion’.4

It is certainly true that King Charles I was driven from London at the start of the Civil War, eventually establishing his headquarters at Oxford. And it is also true that at the end of the civil wars London was the scene of his execution and the establishment of a Republic. But the radicalism of London was not inevitable nor was it uncontested. London was the site of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution. At the outset of the conflict the City had to break its ties to the Crown, which were considerable. Later on, there were pro-peace demonstrations at various times during the war. In 1647 those moderates who wished to conclude a treaty which would ‘re-inthrone’ Charles organized an effective counterrevolutionary petitioning campaign.5 And if it is true that, in general, the forces of revolution were victorious, it is also true that they did not win alone. On two occasions, in 1647 and again in 1648, the New Model Army had to enter the capital in force to restore the fortunes of the revolution.

The London of the revolutionary 1640s was a fast-expanding city, but it was still composed of three distinct areas separated by open country. The old walled City remained the core of the metropolis, but it was spilling eastwards beyond its stone boundary in the Tower Hamlets and along the river, through the seafarers’ town of Wapping, to Limehouse. Ribbon development was spreading towards the new buildings of the Strand, that were themselves the outgrowth of the second governmental centre of the city at Westminster. But this development was limited, with Covent Garden, where Leveller John Wildman’s Nonsuch Tavern was located, as its newest centre completed in the 1630s. South of the river, Southwark stretched along the banks of the Thames and was expanding, but it was still only connected to the north bank of the river by London Bridge.6

In 1640 the population of the old City and its associated parishes was 135,000. But the population of the suburbs was already larger. The main trades were clothing, metal and leather working, and building. Manufacture engaged 40 per cent of the working population, retail another 36 per cent. In one parish, St Botolph Aldgate, the proportion of manufacturing workers increased from 48 per cent to 72 per cent between 1600 and 1640.

The City was already a great port. Shipbuilding yards stretched along the Thames at Blackwall, Wapping and Limehouse. South of the river food and drink businesses clustered in Boroughside, watermen congregated in Clink Liberty and Paris Garden, seamen in St Olave’s, along with leather-makers, tanners, candlemakers and soap boilers. Dutch immigrants with new or specialized trades – brewing, felt and hat making, dyeing and glass making – settled in East Southwark.7

THE LONDON CROWD AND THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION

In November 1640 the Root and Branch Petition, calling for radical reformation of Church and state, was presented to Parliament by 1,000 Londoners and signed by 15,000 of their fellow citizens. It was of the pattern that was to become so familiar in the revolution: mass petitioning followed by mass demonstrations in support of the petition. Petitions had traditionally been a method of raising private grievances with MPs or the Crown, but the revolution made them into popular political tools. Hence Sir Edward Dering’s shocked reaction to the printing of the Grand Remonstrance by the Long Parliament in November 1641:

When I first heard of a Remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful Counsellors, we should hold up a Glass unto his Majesty: I thought to represent unto the King the wicked Counsels of pernicious Counsellors . . . I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the King as of a third person.8

Dering was right to worry. Petitions were promoted by radical preachers in sermons, and signatures were collected after services; alehouses were another favourite petitioning site. House-to-house canvassing was also used. Masses of people far beyond the political elite were now being asked, at the very least, to express an opinion about the nation’s affairs of state. Indeed when Lord Digby spoke against the Root and Branch, it was precisely the ‘manner of delivery’ that bothered him. ‘No man of judgment’, he said, ‘will think it fit for a Parliament, under a Monarchy, to give countenance to irregular, and tumultuous assemblies of people. . . . Sir, what can there be of greater presumption, than for petitioners, not only to prescribe to a Parliament, what and how it shall do; but for a multitude to teach a Parliament, what, and what is not, the government, according to God’s word.’ Digby added, unnecessarily, that he did not intend to ‘flatter a multitude’.9

By May the following year, demonstrations were at once more numerous and featured more of the ‘poorer sort’ who were pressing that justice be done against Charles’s advisor, the earl of Strafford. Parliamentary leader John Pym pressed the charge of treason. Crowds variously estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000 blockaded and barracked members of both Houses calling out for ‘Justice and Execution’. Charles, who had intended to come to Parliament, thought better of it, and the Lords sent out a messenger to tell the crowd that they were going to accede to the petition to execute Strafford. John Lilburne had been one of the leaders of the crowd that day; he was arrested and brought before the Lords for the speech he had made to the protestors. Fortunately, the witnesses against him differed in their evidence and he was discharged.10 When the bill proposing Strafford’s execution was debated in the Chamber, many of the earl’s friends were absent – for fear of the mob, they claimed. And when Charles reluctantly signed his confidant’s death warrant it was, explained Charles’s nephew, because ‘the people stood upon it with such violence, that he would have put himself and his, in great danger by denying the execution’.11 But Strafford’s death did not stop the protests.

In the closing days of December 1641 massive crowds of Londoners, often spilling down Ludgate and along Fleet Street and the Strand, came to Whitehall and Westminster. They were angered by Charles’s appointment of a court loyalist as lieutenant of the Tower, seeing this as part of preparations to subdue the capital by force. In the face of demonstrations the appointment was reversed, but more radical demands followed. Now the crowd chanted ‘No bishops! No bishops!’ – the bishops being some of the most royalist members of Parliament. As they tried to take their seats, many were physically prevented from doing so. In response Royalists attacked the crowd with swords. The crowd fought back with bricks, tiles, and cobblestones. As news of the fighting spread, London as a whole mobilized. Some 10,000 armed apprentices surrounded Parliament. The London Trained Bands were called out, but refused to disperse them. On 30 December the Commons impeached twelve leading bishops, and the Lords dispatched them to prison. Church bells pealed across the City and bonfires blazed in the streets.

Less than a week later, on 4 January, the king entered the House of Commons with a sizeable armed guard, intent on arresting the five members of the Commons identified as the leaders of the revolt. Forewarned, the five men had fled to the City and it is likely that they found shelter in the house of one of the emblematic figures of the early phase of the revolution, Isaac Penington. Penington was a wealthy merchant, an alderman of the City and an MP. He was blamed by the Royalists for organizing one of the first political demonstrations aimed at forcing the Long Parliament to adopt the Root and Branch petition. His house was near one of the centres of revolutionary activity, St Stephen’s Church in Colman Street, in the heart of the City. It is probable that it was here that the fugitives sought shelter.12

But if Isaac Penington sheltered them, it was the whole City that stood guard. ‘Gates were shut, portcullises lowered, chains put across streets. For several days, thousands of men stood ready, armed with halberds, swords, staves, and whatever came to hand. Women brought stools and tubs from their homes to build barricades, and boiled water ‘to throw on the Cavaliers’. But the Cavaliers did not come. London, it was clear, had passed to the side of the revolution. It was not to be recovered with the forces to hand. On 10 January, the king fled the capital. The following day, the five MPs returned to Westminster through cheering crowds.13

REVOLUTION AND WAR

Popular mobilization was no less important when the Civil War did break out. ‘In this summer the citizens listed themselves plentifully for soldiers . . . The youth of the City of London made up the major part of [the] infantry.’ In a single day, 26 July 1642, 5,000 enlisted at a muster in Moor Fields.14 Lilburne was in action immediately. He led a heroic defensive action at the Battle of Brentford in November 1642, personally rallying retreating forces back to the front line and buying the time for the artillery train to escape Prince Rupert’s grasp. He was captured and taken to Oxford as a prisoner, the first prominent Parliamentarian to be imprisoned.15

The following day the Royalists advanced to Turnham Green, threatening to invade London, but were halted by the mass mobilization of the London militia and the Trained Bands. They streamed out of London along the western road until 24,000 of them confronted the king’s army of half that number. In a moment of indecision Charles drew back without giving battle, his dream of an early assault on the capital dashed. As S. R. Gardiner, the great Edwardian historian of the revolution, wrote: ‘Turnham Green was the Valmy of the English Civil War. That which seemed to Charles’s admirers to be his triumphant march from Shrewsbury had been stopped in the very outskirts of London.’16

But the Royalist threat to London had retreated for the winter, not disappeared. And, as it would again when the war went badly, the London crowd could also be mobilized in favour of a peace settlement with the king. In 1643 a crowd of women were at the doors of Westminster, shouting ‘Give us those traitors that were against peace!’ and ‘Give us that dog Pym!’ The militia sent to disperse them were seen off with rocks and brickbats, and a troop of horse had to be deployed against them. This demonstration, however, was modest compared to the main mobilization of Londoners that year.17 In early 1643 Londoners began to construct defence works against any renewed Royalist attempt to take the capital. These works were on a massive scale: some eighteen miles of forts, sentry posts, earthworks, trenches and lines of communications that ringed the entire metropolitan area.

Isaac Penington was again at the forefront of promoting the work. But the construction itself was the result of an unprecedented popular mobilization. No doubt some worked out of zeal for the Parliamentary cause, others because they feared what Royalist invasion could mean for them, their families and their property: Prince Rupert’s sack of Brentford was still fresh in the memory.

But, whatever the motivation, the work was an impressive result of popular, collective effort. One contemporary recorded: ‘The daily musters and shows of all sorts of Londoners here are wondrous commendable, in marching to the fields and out-works with great alacritie . . . with roaring drummes, flying colours, and girded swords; most companies being also interlarded with ladies, women, and girls two and two, carrying baskets for to advance their labour . . .’ Obviously the guilds were involved in the mobilization: ‘The greatest company which I observed to march out according to their tunes were the taylors, carrying fourtie-six colours, and seconded with eight thousand lusty men. The next in greatnesse of number were the watermen, amounting to seven thousand tuggers, carrying thirty-seven colours; the shoemakers were five thousand and oddes carrying twenty-nine colours.’18

At times more than 20,000 people were working without pay on the construction of the forts and earthworks. The lines of defence transformed the look of the city, and the diarist John Evelyn travelled to London to view them. Streets in the modern capital commemorate them – Mount Street in Whitechapel, for instance, where the giant Civil War earthwork wasn’t demolished until the early nineteenth century. The efforts of Londoners were not in vain: the capital was never seriously threatened with invasion again. Indeed, the main threat to the revolution in its birthplace was from counterrevolution within, not military force from the outside.

REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION

The Parliamentary camp always contained some who saw the war as a militarized form of negotiation with the king, designed to get him to accept a compromise that he was unwilling to accede to in peaceful discussion. Others reckoned that the king would have to suffer an outright military defeat before he could be brought to accept the ascendancy of Parliamentary rule. Others, still more radical, came to believe that the whole system of government needed to be refounded on the basis of popular sovereignty.

At different points during the revolution, this division expressed itself over different issues. In one critical phase it was fought out over the creation of the New Model Army, with Cromwell leading the ‘win the war’ party against the compromisers. Between the First and Second Civil War the division lay between Cromwell with his son-in-law Henry Ireton and the more moderate forces who were trying to negotiate with the king, on the one hand, and the Levellers on the other. After the Second Civil War it lay between the moderates who wished to return the king to his former powers and Cromwell, Ireton and the Levellers, now in alliance, who had concluded that the king could not be trusted.

THE LEVELLERS AND THE CITY

The political conflicts of the revolution could not help but be reflected in the City of London government. The revolution exploded the quasi-democratic but fundamentally oligarchic structure of livery companies and the Common Council, nominally the representative foundation of City government. The struggle focused on the rights of the commonalty to elect its own officers and leaders: Lilburne and fellow Leveller John Wildman were campaigning for the right of citizens to elect the mayor, sheriffs and burgesses. They also wanted an end to the veto that the mayor and aldermen claimed over decisions of the Common Council. In England’s Birth-right Justified (October 1645) and in two pamphlets written while he was imprisoned in the Tower the following year – London’s Liberty in Chains and The Charters of London – Lilburne demanded reform of the City government. This was not simply a democratic issue, since the same party of compromise that dominated Parliament was also in power in the City. The Common Council was controlled by a group of traders and merchants allied with their Parliamentary co-thinkers.19

Lilburne’s approach was, as ever, both highly polemical and highly legalistic. His argument was that the rights granted by King John to the City of London were being usurped by the current oligarchy. The fundamentals of the Leveller approach are visible in these writings. In Lilburne’s view, ‘the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, for anything I can perceive . . . lay no claim to their pretended power of voting to make laws in the Common Councell but the authority of the Charter of Edward III which in such case is not worth a button.’ For Lilburne,

the only and sole legislative law making power is originally inherent in the people . . . in which the poorest that lives hath as true a right to give vote, as well as the richest and greatest; and I say that the people by themselves, or their legal Commissions chosen by them for that end, may make a law or laws to govern themselves, and to rule, regulate and guide all their magistrates (whomsoever), officers, ministers, or servants.20

These views are strikingly similar, as we shall see, to those expressed the following year when the Leveller programme, the ‘Agreement of the People’, was presented at Putney Church. Lilburne’s struggle against the Presbyterians in the City was part of a wider, tripartite struggle for power that had begun with the end of the First Civil War in 1645. Charles I was intent on regaining as much of his previous power as he could, mainly by playing upon divisions among his enemies. The moderates among the Parliamentarians were willing to restore Charles, as long as he would guarantee a Presbyterian form of national church. The Independents, who did not believe in a nationally enforced form of church worship, were strongest in the officer corps of the New Model Army. The Presbyterians understood that the New Model Army was the obstacle which stood between them and a deal with Charles. So they moved to disband the army, without payment of arrears, and to send some of its regiments to Ireland to suppress Catholic rebels.

The army revolted and the regiments began to elect ‘agitators’ (the then meaning of the term being the same as ‘agent’) to address their concerns. A series of increasingly political manifestos, drafted with the help of those soon to be known as Levellers, began to flow from the presses. In June 1647 the king was seized by a mere junior officer, Cornet George Joyce, who rode to Holmby House in Northamptonshire and took him into the army’s custody.

The Presbyterian ascendancy in Parliament began to raise their own military force. Pro-Presbyterian apprentices rioted, and forced fifty-eight Independent MPs to flee to the army for safety. In response the New Model Army broke camp in August and occupied London. Colonel Thomas Rainsborough’s regiment was the first to gain access to the City from Southwark. Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell and Commissary General Henry Ireton began their own negotiations with the king, now held at Hampton Court and already being urged by some supporters to escape. Leveller Edward Sexby says that these negotiations with the king had left Cromwell’s reputation ‘much blasted’. The New Model Army was now divided between the Grandees, or the Silken Independents as Cromwell and his followers were known, and the agitators and their Leveller allies.

THE LEVELLERS AND LONDON

On 28 October 1647 these forces assembled in Putney Church, then west of London. And it is from this location that the debates held in the church, and on subsequent days in the nearby Quartermaster General’s lodging, take their name. William Clarke, secretary to the New Model Army, took down the Putney debates in his own shorthand. The most remarkable presences are those of ordinary and elected soldiers, debating with the highest officers in the army. ‘Buffcoat’ is all the name Clarke gives one participant. The Levellers and agitators presented the ‘Agreement of the People’, their plan for a more far-reaching and democratic settlement of the nation than anything Cromwell and Ireton had in mind.

Thomas Rainsborough and Henry Ireton were the key protagonists, and it is their formulations which most fully express the opposed positions in debate. The content of the debate addressed the nature of the written constitution itself, but its significance for the participants bore upon what would happen to the revolution in the future. Would it stall? Who would benefit? The Levellers were seeking to detach the radical forces of the revolution from their affiliation with the Grandees, and get them to force through the radical vision of a new England.

One of the most famous exchanges in English political history took place between Rainsborough and Ireton as they discussed the right of the poor to vote for a government – or was this to be the preserve of property-owners? As soon as the ‘Agreement of the People’ was read to the meeting, Ireton objected that it seemed to argue that ‘every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered’.21 Rainsborough’s reply is justly celebrated:

For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it is clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under . . .22

Ireton’s argument for narrowing the franchise was straightforward: ‘All the main thing I would speak for, is because I have an eye to property . . . let everyman consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property.’23

Rainsborough’s words are now carved into the stone balcony at Putney Church. But when they were uttered they were as much an urgent call for the revolution to continue as they were a timeless statement of constitutional rights. We should remember that, while they talked, Robert Lilburne’s regiment (Robert was brother of John, then in the Tower) was refusing to march north as ordered by New Model commander Lord Fairfax. Agents from cavalry regiments addressed them, reading out a letter which urged them to stand up for ‘England’s freedom and soldiers’ rights’. The debates were interrupted by messengers coming for instructions on how they should seek to quell the unrest.

Indeed, the conclusion of the Putney debates was that there should be a rendezvous of the army to consider the issues. The Independents manoeuvred to ensure that this was three separate meetings, not the single assembly the Levellers had imagined was decided. ‘England’s freedom, soldiers’ rights’ was the very slogan that Robert Lilburne’s regiment brought, defying their generals, to the army rendezvous at Ware. The rebellious soldiers were forcibly suppressed by the New Model’s senior officers, and one of their number was shot. The crushing of the Ware mutiny settled, for the time being, the questions that were raised at Putney. But Leveller organization in and around London continued to grow.

On 17 January 1648 John Lilburne and John Wildman addressed a Leveller meeting in Wapping, home of the Rainsborough family. Lilburne had been invited to the meeting ‘by some friends’ in order to answer the scruples and objections that ‘some honest people, in or about Wappin’ had concerning the Large Petition for which the Levellers were canvassing.24 George Masterson, a Presbyterian minister from Shoreditch parish, attended the meeting to spy and the following day he denounced the meeting as a traitorous conspiracy to both the Lords and Commons.

On 19 January, Masterson, Lilburne and Wildman all gave evidence at the bar of the House of Commons. Lilburne was immediately committed once more to the Tower, and Wildman to the Fleet prison. Both were charged with treason. The next day Masterson gave evidence again, to the Committee of Both Houses sitting at Derby House. He published his evidence as a pamphlet on 10 February, and the same material was published by the government at about the same time.25

Lilburne and Wildman hotly contested Masterson’s charge of treason, but, as Norah Carlin has shown, the picture that emerges from Masterson’s account of the Wapping meeting and Lilburne and Wildman’s responses gives us our most detailed picture of how the Levellers and their supporters organized.26 The purpose of the Wapping meeting was to promote the current Leveller petition and, once enough signatories had been gained, to organize a demonstration in its support. At the meeting Lilburne and Wildman fielded questions about the petition and explained the methods by which it was to be promoted. Masterson recorded part of Lilburne’s speech as saying that the Levellers were appointing Commissioners to promote the petition in every town in the Kingdom if they could.27 These Commissioners met in the Whalebone Inn and in Southwark, Wapping and towns in Kent.28

The Whalebone Inn was one of the regular meeting places of the Levellers, located in Lothbury near the Royal Exchange in the City. Lilburne’s speech also revealed ‘that 30,000 of the petitions were to come from the printing presses the following day’. To fund this work, Lilburne told the meeting, money needed to be raised and treasurers had been appointed for the purpose.29 It is some indication of the scale on which the Levellers were operating at this time that 30,000 petitions were being printed: this would be a substantial number for a contemporary political campaign, designed to reach the modern population of the country. Lilburne, Wildman, John Davies and Richard Woodward also sent a letter to the ‘well affected’ of Kent encouraging them to support the petition.30

The picture of the Levellers that emerges from this episode is one of sustained, methodical, widespread political organization. No doubt the same methods that Lilburne describes the Levellers using in January were used in July to gain the 10,000 names for the petition to free Lilburne from the Tower, and, in August and September, to gain 40,000 signatories for the Large Petition and the turnout on the demonstration at Westminster which accompanied its presentation.31

LONDON AND THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

London was a city on edge when hostilities broke out once more in 1648. The Second Civil War was composed of a series of local engagements against Royalist risings, plus the struggle against the invading Scottish army allied to the king. Cromwell was in command of the Parliamentary forces sent to crush the rebellion in Wales and then to oppose the Scots. Sir Thomas Fairfax was in command of the forces that dealt with the Royalist rising in Kent.

The Kent rebellion was led by the earl of Norwich who aimed at a rendezvous at Blackheath, thereby threatening London. Fairfax drove away the 1,000 who gathered at Blackheath on 30 May 1648, and decisively defeated the rest of the Royalists at Maidstone on 1 June. Norwich attempted to gain Blackheath again with his remaining 3,000-strong force, but was seen off by the City militia under the able command of Philip Skippon. Norwich crossed the Thames at Greenwich, the foot in boats and the horse swimming alongside. In Essex his numbers rose again as he was joined by Royalists from London, including Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle. The Royalists were pursued by Parliamentary forces under Colonel Whalley. They reached Chelmsford and then, on 10 June, they decided to enter Colchester, Lucas’s home town. By 12 June Fairfax was two miles from Colchester, having brought his troops across the Thames at Gravesend. Norwich’s Royalists had to make a stand.

The siege of Colchester, lasting for eleven weeks, was the most bloody and dramatic face-off in the Second Civil War.32 But it is not the grisly course of the siege that is of interest here, but the events that attended its conclusion. The eventual surrender of the Royalists, after dismissing three offers of quarter from Fairfax, was a controversial affair. Rainsborough acted as one of the Commissioners who agreed the Articles of Surrender, and Fairfax’s victorious troops entered Colchester on 28 August. Fairfax’s Council of War, which included Commissary General Henry Ireton, Colonel Whalley and Rainsborough, decided that Lucas and Lisle should be executed. This was part of a harsher political climate in the Second Civil War, ‘for during the Second Civil War the New Model’s leaders’ ascription of the term “Man of Blood” to Charles I, as guilty of a deliberate and almost sacrilegious action which, after acceptance of clemency, had cost the lives of others, was sometimes taken to apply to his commanders also.’33

Whalley, Ireton and Rainsborough were charged with ensuring that the verdict of the Council of War be carried out, although it was Ireton who seems to have been most closely associated with the actual execution, involving himself in a lengthy argument with Lucas about the judicial basis of the sentence.34 The Royalists instantly claimed Lucas and Lisle as martyrs, while Fairfax and Rainsborough were demonized for their part in the killings. Only a month after the execution the first attempt on the life of Rainsborough took place. At this time the New Model Army headquarters had moved to St Albans. Shortly before he went north with orders to take over the siege of Pontefract, Rainsborough was riding between London and St Albans, accompanied only by a captain, when he was attacked by Royalists. The report of the event given to the Commons records:

Colonel Rainsborough, it was also informed, was likewise set upon by three of the King’s Party between London and St. Albans, he having a Captain in his Company; the Cavaliers seeing their Gallantry and Resolution, put Spurs to their Horses and rode for it, and being extraordinary well mounted over rid them.35

On this occasion Rainsborough’s bravery prevailed. Other Parliamentarians had also recently survived assassination attempts. On that same day the Commons heard that ‘A Member of the House . . . and another Gentleman, coming yesterday out of the City, were affronted by three Gentlemen, who very well knew the said Member, calling him by his Name: Two of them drew their Swords, and sell [sic] on him, the Third had a Dagger to stab him, but by great Providence and Courage, he gave them a Repulse.’ Others had not been so lucky, for the House was told that ‘A Captain of the Army was likewise killed in London, and a Major the last week’. The final months of the Second Civil War were a dangerous time in London when the animosities generated by years of conflict were reaching a crescendo.

THOMAS RAINSBOROUGH’S FUNERAL

Rainsborough was a Leveller hero after Putney, the highest-ranking officer of the New Model Army to support their cause. He became detested by the Royalists for his role in the siege of Colchester, and was lucky to have survived the attempt on his life on the road outside St Albans. But in late October 1648 he was not so lucky: a Royalist raiding party killed him at his lodgings in Doncaster where he was conducting the siege of the last Royalist stronghold, Pontefract Castle.

The funeral of Thomas Rainsborough was a calculated, political demonstration of the Leveller movement. It was an ‘unofficial, revolutionary pageant’ designed as ‘a gesture of defiance against the established powers’.36 The funeral took place at a politically critical juncture; many radicals feared that Parliament was about to conclude a treaty with the king that would mean an unacceptable restoration of the monarchy. Rainsborough’s funeral was a symbolic moment of resistance to this course of action. The day before the funeral a single-side sheet, ‘An Elegie Upon the Honourable Colonel Thomas Rainsborough’, explicitly argued that Rainsborough’s death should be understood as a providential warning against a treaty with the king:

What if Heaven purpos’d Rainsborough’s fall to be

A prop for Englands dying Libertie?

And did in Love thus suffer one to fall

That Charles by Treaty might not ruine all?

For who’l expect that Treaty should doe good

Whose longer date commenc’t in Rainsborough’s blood?’37

The verse went on to tell ‘noble Fairfax’ and ‘bold Cromwel’ that if they were to ‘Conclude a peace with Charles’ they would end up riding in ‘robes of Scarlet’ dyed in ‘your own dearest blood’, because ‘instead of Gold’ Charles would ‘pay you all with steel’.

It was in this atmosphere that the date and time of Rainsborough’s funeral were announced in the Leveller press. The Moderate, the Leveller news-sheet, gave an account of Rainsborough’s death, ending it with this call to arms: ‘Can the soldiery of this Kingdom be silent, and not revenge the barbarous murder of their incomparable Commander . . . The Lord stir up your hearts to be avenged of these bloody enemies.’ And the Moderate made a public appeal to all the ‘well-affected’ (a term having much the same meaning as ‘citizen’ in the French Revolution) to join the funeral procession:

The Corps of the never to be forgotten, English Champion, is to be brought to London on Tuesday next, the 14 instant, to be there interred. Major Rainsborow his brother, with other of his kindred goes to Tatnam-High Cross to meet them; All the well-affected in London and parts adjacent are desired to accompany them; the hour of ten in the morning is desired to be the longest for their being in Tatnam.38

The scale of the procession must have exceeded the Levellers’ expectations, although the most detailed accounts of the funeral itself come from sources hostile to the Levellers. The Royalist newsbook Mercurius Elencticus described Rainsborough’s funeral as the event that ‘crowned the day’:

[Rainsborough’s] sacred corps conveyed from Doncaster, came this day to London, being met and attended on by a great number of the well affected of all Professions, Will the Weaver, Tom the Tapster, Kit the Cobler, Dick the Doore Sweeper, and many more Apron youths of the City, who trudg’d very devoutly both before and behind this glorious Saint, with about 100 she-votresses crowded up in Coaches, and some 500 more of the better sort of Brethren mounted on Hackney beasts . . .39

Apart from conveying the scale of the procession, this account is immediately striking in two ways. Firstly, an unmistakable note of snobbery pervades the piece, giving us a glimpse of the force of class feeling engendered by the revolution but not so clearly visible on other occasions. Secondly, the particular reference to ‘she-votresses’ exhibits hostility both to the participation of women in politics and to democracy more generally. The account in Mercurius Elencticus does however give us a detailed account of the route of the funeral procession:

The Body came in by way of Islington, and so through Smithfield, (where they should have burnt it) thence along Old Baily (in defiance of Newgate and the Sessions house) and under Ludgate, not through Pauls [for there the Organs stood, but on the backside of the church and so along Cheapside. Sure they were aware of the Ground whereon the crosse was founded] and through Cornwall, in great pompe, and with a variety of sad postures; at length they arrived at Wapping chappell, where they bestowed this precious peece of Mortality, as nigh as might be to the tombe of the Honourable and expert Skuller his father, where the Godly Party (with their hands in their pockets) lamented his untimely Grave.40

As a mark of official respect, the cannon at the Tower were fired as the funeral took place.41 For the Levellers’ supporters, the size of the procession was not the only remarkable element of the day. The inscription on Rainsborough’s tombstone at the family church in Wapping tells its own story:

He that made King, Lords, Commons, Judges shake,

Cities, and Committees quake:

He that fought nought but his dear Countreys good,

And seal’d their right with his last blood.

Rainsborow the just, the valiant, and the true,

Here bids the noble Levellers adue.42

Another moment of symbolism from the day of funeral also became identified with the movement: the adoption of the sea-green colour as an identification of the Leveller movement. ‘Azure and black’ were Rainsborough’s colours and as Ian Gentles records, ‘from the time of his funeral his personal colours, green and black, were adopted as the badge of the Leveller movement.’43 Certainly attacks on the Levellers that associated them with sea-green followed the funeral.

A satirical attack on the Levellers in the single sheet ‘The Gallant Rights, Priviledges, Solemn Institutions of the Sea-Green Order’ tells readers that the Levellers have chosen ‘deep Sea Green . . . our Flag and Colours, and do hereby ordain and authorize it to be worn as the lively badge of Constancy, Sufferance and Valour in grain, the cognizance of Justice, and the mark of Freedom and Deliverance’; it calls on all who ‘groan under the present Extortions, unequal taxes, unjust Levies, inevitable Monopolies, new Charters, plunders and avarice of Committees . . . to take up our Colours . . . and in so doing Sea green shall be their badge of warrant and protection’.44 In what seems likely to be a direct reference to the practice at Rainsborough’s funeral, this sheet continues: ‘That every one so wearing our Colours in hatband, cuff, garment, bridle, mayn, or sail . . . shall hence forth, according to our Noble Order, be intitled the Free born Assistant of Justice . . .’ The sheet was then reprinted, with minor alterations, as an eight-page pamphlet under the title The Levellers Institutions for a Good People and Good Parliament.45

The practice of wearing sea green to denote association with the Leveller cause seems to have become widespread. As we shall see, it was worn again at the funeral of Leveller Robert Lockyer in April 1649. In May Mercurius Militaris was describing ‘the brave Blades of the sea-green order honest Johns Lifeguard’, and the ‘bonny Besses, In the Sea-green dresses’ who strike fear into ‘Nol and his asses’.46 And in July Leveller leader Richard Overton was himself writing to ‘my Brethren of the Sea green Order’.47 One might say that the adoption of the sea-green ribbon by the Levellers marks the invention of the party badge.

The show of force at Rainsborough’s funeral was part of the great Leveller push in the second half of 1648 to stop the moderates coming to a treaty with the king. In order to achieve this end the alliance with the Independents, Cromwell and Ireton – broken at Putney and Ware – had to be re-established. It was this Independent–Leveller alliance that generated sufficient momentum to prevent a treaty, mount Pride’s Purge to drive the moderates from Parliament, execute the king, and declare a republic.

Charles was executed on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall in January 1649. But at the moment of victory the differences between the Levellers and the Independents reasserted themselves. The Levellers saw Cromwell’s regime as illegitimate, because it was not based on any expression of popular will. Having found the Levellers indispensable in the battle against those who wanted to ‘re-inthrone’ Charles, Cromwell and the Independents now found them a danger to the new government. There were revolts brewing, including the mutiny in the army that ended in Burford. In London, a young Leveller named Robert Lockyer was at the heart of another.

A LONDON LEVELLER: ROBERT LOCKYER

Robert Lockyer was twenty-three years old or thereabout in 1649. At sixteen he had undergone adult baptism, a sign of radicalism, in Bishopsgate where he had been brought up. He served in Cromwell’s Ironsides and followed them into Colonel Whalley’s regiment of the New Model Army. Like Rainsborough and Sexby, he was a veteran of the Battle of Naseby. He had also been with Rainsborough at Ware when the mutiny was crushed by the Army Grandees. Whalley’s was a radical regiment of which its chaplain, Richard Baxter, complained the troopers could be heard arguing ‘sometimes for state-democracy, sometimes for church-democracy’. It was one of five regiments that, with John Lilburne’s encouragement, re-elected more radical agitators in September 1647.48

On 24 April 1649 Lockyer was part of a mutiny in his regiment. The regiment was stationed around Bishopsgate when it was ordered out of London, but the soldiers were owed arrears of pay. Lockyer and about thirty other troopers went to the Four Swans Inn in Bishopsgate Street and seized the colours of the regiment and took them to the Bull Inn, also in Bishopsgate Street. When their captain arrived and asked them to account for their actions, they retorted that ‘They were not his colours carriers’ and ‘That they, as well as he, had fought for them’.49 The mutiny lasted into the following day, when some of the back pay was provided by the regiment’s officers. Then a general rendezvous of the regiment was called in Mile End Green, with the intention of at last getting the troopers to march out of the city and find quarters in the surrounding country. But the mutineers stayed fast and ‘put themselves into a posture of defence in Galleries of the Bull Inn, with their swords and pistols, standing upon their guard’.50 There was another attempt to take the colours from Lockyer and his fellow troopers but, again, it was unsuccessful. Then loyal troopers and more senior officers of the regiment were brought down to the Bull to confront the mutineers, but this too proved unsuccessful. The mutineers held to the galleries of the Bull Inn, demanding two weeks’ pay, and ‘cryed out for the Liberties of the people’.51 Finally the Lord General, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the Lieutenant General, Oliver Cromwell, arrived on the scene just at the moment when Lockyer and fourteen others were being taken into custody. Some other mutineers were punished, but only Lockyer eventually faced the death penalty.52

Some accounts of the mutiny sympathetic to the Leveller cause claimed that Fairfax and Cromwell singled out Lockyer because he had participated in the Ware mutiny, demonstrating his support for the Leveller ‘Agreement of the People’.53 Certainly, in reply to demands for clemency, Fairfax said that he would not pardon Lockyer because of the volatile situation in the City and the Army.54

Cromwell and Fairfax were facing more than Lockyer’s mutiny during these days in late April. Three days of demonstrations by women supporters of the Levellers, the ‘lusty lasses of the leveling party’, were held at the doors of Westminster, petitioning for the release of the Leveller leaders from captivity in the Tower. MPs were mobbed by 500 angry women who were undeterred when the sergeant-at-arms was sent out to tell them to go home and ‘look after their own business, and meddle with their huswifery’. In reply to a remark that it was strange to see women petitioning, they replied that ‘it was strange too that you cut off the King’s head, yet I suppose you will justify it’. On 25 April, just as events at the Bull Inn were in motion, twenty women of the ‘sea-green order’ were admitted to Parliament to present a petition said to bear 10,000 signatures. But they were rudely bundled out again by soldiers who cocked their pistols as if preparing to fire.55

John Lilburne and fellow Leveller leader Richard Overton petitioned Fairfax for mercy for Lockyer from their own imprisonment in the Tower, but his sentence was not repealed. He was taken to St Paul’s Churchyard where he faced a firing squad of musketeers. After saying his farewells to friends and family he refused a blindfold, and addressed the soldiers. He said: ‘Fellow soldiers, I am here brought to suffer in behalf of the People of England, and for your Privileges and Liberties, and such as in conscience you ought to own and stand to: But I perceive that you are appointed by your officers to murder me; and I did not think that you had such heathenish and barbarous principles in you . . . when I stand up for nothing but what is for your good.’ Colonel Okey, in charge of the detail, accused Lockyer of still trying to ‘make the soldiers mutiny’. Lockyer asked the firing squad to shoot when he raised both his hands. And so they did.56

Lockyer’s funeral was, if anything, even larger than Rainsborough’s. And it served the same function of rallying Leveller support, though this time in a moment of retreat rather than advance. The procession began in Smithfield and went by way of the City to Moorfields where Lockyer was buried in the New Churchyard, now becoming a favoured resting place for dissenters. Seven trumpeters ‘sounded before the Corpse’. Lockyer’s horse, draped in black and led by a footman, followed the coffin which was covered in rosemary branches dipped in blood and had Lockyer’s sword laid on it. This was an elevation of the ordinary trooper to the status of a ‘chief commander’. Some 4,000 to 5,000 people joined the original procession, among them an estimated 300 soldiers and some discharged men. A company of women brought up the rear of the cortege. When the procession reached its destination, the marchers were joined by more of the ‘highest sort’ who had stayed aloof from the controversial progress through the City. The funeral took place on the 27 April 1649. It was watched by ‘many thousands of spectators’.57 Black and green ribbons, now recognized as the Leveller colours, were widely worn among the mourners.58 There were eulogies but no sermon in the New Churchyard. The speeches pointed up the Leveller programme and aimed criticism at the new government of Grandees.

FROM REPUBLIC TO RESTORATION

Cromwellian London was not the dour capital of a dour nation. The ravages of war, a war in which proportionally more people lost their lives than in any conflict before or since, were gradually overcome. Alehouses and taverns remained popular centres of life. Dancing, street music and fairs continued much as they had always done. The first coffee house opened near the Royal Exchange in 1652; many more followed, and by 1662 in the City alone there were eighty-two coffee rooms. Cromwell, unlike Charles II, did not try to close them.

Religious toleration was wide if not universal, and did not, of course, extend to Catholics. But it did extend to Jews, who in 1656 were ‘readmitted’ to England for the first time in 365 years. They built the first synagogue in Creechurch Lane in 1657.

The return of the Jews to England represented the kind of political compromise crossed with political principle which was the hallmark of Cromwell’s rule. Some Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition were already in England, though they identified themselves as Spanish or Portuguese. While Cromwell was certainly a believer in religious toleration, he was unwilling to raise the issue directly in the case of the Jews; he was chiefly motivated by commercial considerations in seeking to attract Jewish merchants from Amsterdam so as to secure their trading relationships with Spain. He was sympathetic to the appeal from Amsterdam Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel when he came to London in 1655, but referred the issue to the ruling Council of State. The plea for readmission ultimately came before a wider Conference involving lawyers, merchants and ministers, where the lawyers opined that there had never actually been any law forbidding Jews to reside in England.

That was enough for Cromwell, since it made the problem disappear. Just one sticking point remained: the 1650 Act which decriminalized non-attendance at Church on the Sabbath did not apply to Jews. Cromwell met this difficulty by giving Jews a verbal assurance that no action would be taken against them, and indeed the synagogue at Creechurch Lane continued to function unhindered. When war broke out with Spain in 1656, Jews in England attested to their religion rather than have their property seized as Spanish nationals. Land was purchased for a Jewish cemetery in 1657, and a Jew became a broker at the Royal Exchange without having to swear the usual Christian oath. Prejudice there was, but de facto toleration was the norm.59As moneylenders, Jews were under the protection of the Crown and this alone caused much resentment particularly in times of economic hardship when they and other foreign nationals were liable to persecution. Their identification as Christ-killers, and the popularity of the Crusades from the late eleventh to the end of the thirteenth century, also exacerbated hostility towards Jews.

Radical puritans preached more freely than they ever had done, or ever would do until long after the Restoration. The diarist John Evelyn was horrified at the ‘blasphemous and ignorant mechanics’ that he found preaching in London pulpits, sometimes elected by the congregation. It was in fact Parliament, not Cromwell, who ruled against celebration at Christmas, the term ‘Christ’s Mass’ smacking too much of Catholicism; Puritans preferred the term ‘Christ-tide’.

Though theatres were closed, reputed as centres of delinquency, in 1656 the first English opera, ‘The Siege of Rhodes’, was performed and women sang on stage.60 There were many musical clubs and taverns in London, and Cromwell’s court promoted dancing and music. John Milton was Secretary of Foreign Tongues, assisted by Andrew Marvell as Latin Secretary, making Cromwell’s government the only one in British history to contain such unrivalled poets, though neither was known as such at the time.

Evelyn managed to banish the spectre of ‘mechanic’ preachers by attending coach races in Hyde Park. Spring Gardens near Charing Cross was a rendezvous for ‘the young company’ of ‘ladies and gallants’ who could be found there ‘till midnight’, enjoying the fact that ‘the thickets of the garden seemed to be contrived to all the advantages of gallantry’. In all these ways, says historian Stephen Inwood, ‘the puritan decade was a time of change, but change towards, rather than away from, greater individual freedom.’61

The Restoration of Charles II was a moment of political reaction, made possible by Cromwell’s inability to weld the forces that had made the revolution into a stable basis for post-revolutionary administration. Critically, stabilizing the new order meant crushing the Levellers and radical left of the revolution without being able to re-unite with monarchist conservatives. And despite a brief resurgence of the radical old cause when Cromwell died in 1659, the establishment preferred the return of a Stuart monarch – or at least they did at first. Politically, the Restoration meant reaction. Some regicides were executed, others fled to Europe and to America. John Milton escaped with his life, partly due to the pleading of Andrew Marvell. They were both lucky since, with John Dryden, they had marched in Cromwell’s funeral cortege.

There was political retreat, but the state machine was not restored to its condition under Charles I. The French ambassador to the court of Charles II observed, ‘It has a monarchical appearance, and there is a king, but it is very far from being a monarchy.’62 Socially and economically it was even harder to push the wheel of revolution back. On the land feudal tenures had been abolished in 1646, a mighty blow to medieval relations in the countryside, and as soon as Charles II was on the throne he confirmed that abolition.

The Royal Society and the Bank of England can stand as the two symbols of the longer-term deep impact of the revolution. The Royal Society, established in 1660, owed its origins to a group established at Gresham College in the heart of the City in 1645, dedicated to furthering scientific study for business purposes. Scientifically and philosophically cutting-edge ideas would never be subordinate to the Church again. The philosopher John Locke was not a Leveller, but without what they did and thought, his work was inconceivable. In the movement’s wake, work like that of Locke, across the whole spectrum of science and philosophy, could no longer be suppressed. The Bank of England was not established until six years after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 had put an end to absolutist ambitions once and for all, and effectively subordinated the monarchy to the wider governing classes. It made loan capital available on a greater scale, an essential feature of a capitalist economy. Guilds and monopolies were gone and the merchants and money men were now free of the Crown, even if the Crown was not free of them.

The Great Fire of 1666 marked the physical extermination of the old City that had given birth to the revolution. And although it was not rebuilt on the grid-plan that Christopher Wren favoured, it was still a new city in many ways. The Restoration had meant a loss of power for democratic movements in the City as well as in national government. Small masters were driven to the margins in the City companies. But industrial struggles began to assume a more modern form. There were strikes, mutinies and combinations in pursuit of higher wages at the Royal Dockyards in the 1660s. And in the following decade, as London was rebuilt after the Great Fire, sawyers tried to form craft unions. Machine-breaking began: in 1675 a few hundred ribbon weavers, ‘good commonwealth’s men’, broke into houses and destroyed the machines that were putting them out of a job. Cloth workers refused to work for less than twelve shillings a week. ‘The trend of economic development’, says Christopher Hill, ‘was in the direction of sharper differentiation between classes; a landless working class dependent on wage labour increased, the yeomanry and the masters declined.’63

The apprentices, so central to the London crowd of the revolution, had been growing fewer even in the 1640s. The new bosses who emerged fortified by the revolution hastened that decline and a new class was formed, and formed itself, from the same human material. But it took a century in the making. And it formed itself out of long decades of struggle for the democracy that had seemed so tantalizingly close in the 1640s, but had been receding ever since.

The settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the political expression of this new social reality. Absolutism and the Stuarts were gone for good. Constitutional monarchy, albeit a constitution in which the monarch retained real power, was its replacement. But within this new framework, even at the beginning, the new money men were more powerful than they had ever been. In the decades that followed they were set to become more powerful still.