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Roots of Radicalization
In 1649, following the beheading of King Charles I in January of that year, the radical Welsh preacher Vavasor Powell published a poem which summed up his view of the political and religious turmoil of that momentous year in British history. It contained these arresting lines,
“Of all kings I am for Christ alone,
For he is King to us though Charles be gone.” 1
Shortly before that, an anonymous Scottish pamphlet-writer had urged the English Parliament to overthrow King Charles because, in his view, there was a stark choice that lay before the people of the British Isles: “The quarrel is whether Jesus shal be King or no?” And, as if that question was not enough to shock his readers out of any support for earthly monarchy, the pamphleteer rammed the message home further: “O that England may never seek the death of crowned King Jesus! May never comply with dying Antichrist…”2 The choice was simple: King Jesus or Antichrist (Charles I)? God as King or the agent of the Devil?
This book explores a dramatic period in British history, which reverberated in North America too. At its heart lies the period of the British Civil Wars (1642–53),3 and the Commonwealth and Protectorate that followed and which lasted until the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. Its subject matter, however, spills out of this time period since the upheavals in Scotland dated from the signing of the Scottish National Covenant of 1638 and the activities of some of the radical actors in this political and religious drama continued well after 1660, as we shall see. This book explores the ideas and actions of these seventeenth-century Christian radicals along with the legacy that they left in the United Kingdom and in North America.
“SAINTS” AND “SINNERS”
It was a period in which large numbers of influential Christians came to believe that they had to choose between having God as King or, at best, a poor human substitute or, at worst, Antichrist himself!4 Even many men and women who would draw the line at the killing of the king still saw themselves in a unique position in history in which they had the opportunity to use law and government to build the kingdom of God on earth in a way that had never before been possible. Technically, most did not intend a “theocracy” (government in which priests, or their equivalent, rule in the name of God or a god),5 since they were content to work this righteous revolution through existing institutions, such as a godly Parliament or civil magistrates. But it was semi-theocratic, since it aimed to make the nation more accountable to God than ever before and this would not be achieved through an earthly monarch but through the “rule of the saints”. Plus there were those whose aim was theocracy, however narrowly defined.
For those who were dissatisfied with what they saw as the lack of biblical holiness and order in both the established church and their society, it was a revolution that was about to break out and transform the nation. With regard to terms: from the 1560s onwards the description “Puritan” was used to identify those who were demanding a stricter, more “reformed” Protestantism in the Church of England, although they themselves preferred the labels “the godly” or “the saints”. The same process of puritanical dissatisfaction and radicalization was going on in Scotland too. Since then, the term Puritan has so entered popular use that it is negatively and inaccurately used of a wide range of groups but it will be used here when describing those who stayed within the national church – and the trend they represented – in a more neutral sense than was used at the time by their enemies. In contrast, the terms “the godly” and “the saints” will be more frequently used of groups both within and outside the national church, and especially when referring to the way they regarded themselves, their values, and the kinds of outlook they espoused. This is particularly important to remember as many among the godly were, as we shall see, Separatists who decided to leave any national church system. When the word “puritanical” is used it will be in a general sense that describes attitudes across these groups.
When these groups used the term “saints” they meant people like themselves of a radical puritanical outlook who had come to believe that their view of God, their interpretation of the Bible, their understanding of what form the church should take, and their vision of how society should function, was superior to all other outlooks and, indeed, was the only one that was truly in line with God’s will and purpose. All alternative views were at the least mistaken and more likely to be the work of the Devil and Antichrist. Clearly, if there were “saints” who should rule, then there were also “sinners” who required disciplining. For the saints, though, it truly was a time When God Was King. And since the period saw the breakdown of the established Anglican church, with its system of bishops, and the expansion of semi-independent congregations of believers (alongside breakaway groups), this opportunity for influencing the running of the country drew in people who would never previously have been included in the religious leadership of the nations involved.
As Cromwell himself told the “Barebone’s Parliament” in 1653,
You are as like the forming of God as ever people were…
You are at the edge of promises and prophecies.6
That this parliament – which only sat for just over five months – is also remembered as the “Nominated Parliament” or “Parliament of Saints” only adds to the sense of special calling, apocalyptic hope and expectation that is clear in Cromwell’s words. It is an illustration of how history can seem stranger than fiction to recall that it was named after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone, who represented the City of London, and that he had a brother named Fear-God Barebone.7 Their given names are signposts to the age in which they lived; an age of the saints. For the 1640s and 1650s were a time in which old certainties and conformities had collapsed and anything seemed possible. And for some at the time, the boundaries of “anything” stretched very far indeed; heaven did not seem beyond reach. Either God would come down or his elect would build a society so godly that it would, as it were, be raised up to him.
Many of those who held these views were well educated and sophisticated; while others were self taught and, made confident by their beliefs, had overcome the kinds of social controls and stigma that had hitherto been used to keep them in their place. The key point is that this was not just the outlook of one isolated social group of discontented people. Rather, it was a widespread movement. It cut across class, gender, wealth and educational experience. It united fenland gentlemen-farmers like Oliver Cromwell and Scottish Presbyterian ministers; a violent Fifth Monarchist prophetess such as Mary Cary and soldiers of the Parliamentary New Model Army of the Civil Wars; MPs and street preachers; London apprentices and emigrants to the New World of North America; women and men. In a short period of time this disparate group would find enough things to fall out over among themselves. Then they would be willing enough to redefine Antichrist so that he took the form of those who were in opposing camps of the godly movement itself; earlier they would have united behind identifying him with the papacy and/or Charles I. But between them, at key points in the seventeenth century, these hugely confident and driven men and women were influential (if at times mutually antagonistic) participants in the chaotic kaleidoscope of winning the British Civil Wars, overcoming monarchy, killing the king, setting up a republic, attempting to implement a theocracy, enforcing the rule of the saints on the rest of society, establishing rural communism, and founding godly colonies in North America.
A MIXED MESSAGE
At times some of the views of these radical Christians echo surprisingly modern concepts of individual worth, participation in government and social equality. At other times their attempts to impose the rule of the saints (and even Old Testament law) is reminiscent of issues relating to Islamic Sharia Law and society in the twenty-first century. While some of them were precursors to modern parliamentarians and, in the case of Oliver Cromwell, merit a statue to that effect outside the House of Commons,8 some others possessed a mindset more reminiscent of ISIS/Daesh or Boko Haram. And if the latter parallel seems extreme, the shocked reader might be referred to what happened to Irish Catholics (the Infidel-equivalent) at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 at the hands of an army of saints. Furthermore, as we shall see in Chapter 6, largely as a result of the 1649–53 campaigns of Parliamentary forces in Ireland, it has been calculated that perhaps as many as 500,000 (overwhelmingly Catholic) Irish died, out of a total Irish population of 1.5 million. The vast majority had died as a result of the actions of the Parliamentary army.9 The rule of the saints could lead to something that today would be described as ethnic cleansing and genocide. And there were many and varied victims of godly rule as it sought to root out sinful opposition and track it to its source. For example, as we will explore in Chapter 5, it has been calculated that 60 per cent of all those (almost always women) who were executed for alleged witchcraft in Britain between 1450 and 1751, died between 1644 and 1646.10 The evidence suggests that almost all were innocent of the charges laid against them. Godly rule could come at a very high price for those classified as its enemies, whether they were Irish Catholics or East Anglian alleged witches.
Faced with this we are justified in asking: how had this astonishing situation developed and been made possible? We shall shortly explore the situation in the years preceding the Civil Wars that led to this tumultuous explosion of ideas. First, however, it will help to look at two very different traditions that these radicals drew on. For these contradictory back stories will help us understand both something of the competing outlooks at the time, and also the sharply contradictory cross-currents that flowed in this turbulent river of ideas.
TWO RATHER DIFFERENT BACK STORIES
Many of the godly in seventeenth-century Britain looked to the way that Protestant Christian politics had developed on the Continent in the sixteenth century. But they drew their inspiration from two different sources; sources that were not designed to work together, to put it mildly. This was because the Reformation had caused such an upheaval in church and state across Europe that it had been experienced and implemented by a wide range of different groups whose motives and objectives varied hugely.
In 1521 Martin Luther had made his decisive break from the authority of the pope, following the Diet of Worms before the leaders of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther himself had wanted no such break but was hoping to reform the Catholic Church. However, others were in favour of a more radical break with the past and were committed to challenging society as well as church. Though they were not strictly part of this process of Reformation, the peasants who rose in revolt across Germany in 1524 and 1525 took their cue from a sense of radical change being possible. Huge numbers died during the German Peasants’ War and it sparked wildly different reactions among early Protestant reformers. Martin Luther condemned it. One can get a flavour of his attitude from the title of a pamphlet that he wrote, Against the Murdering Plundering Hordes of Peasants, in which he advised lords to crush the revolt. On the other hand, some Christian leaders, of a more revolutionary disposition, applauded it and later sought to emulate its attack on the wealth and power of the world. As a result, among many south German peasants there would be calls for a much more radical definition of “Reformation”, in defiance of Luther and the established order. Later revolutionaries at Münster in Westphalia, in 1534–35, would see themselves as the heirs of this revolutionary tradition that had earlier been seen in the bloody events of the German Peasants’ War. These were the Anabaptists whose exploits would later thrill or horrify different groups among the seventeenth-century British saints, depending on their predilection. Clearly, the Reformation was to have both a socially conservative and a revolutionary track.
From 1529 the term “Protestant” entered the vocabulary as some German princes backed Luther’s calls for reform; they were also keen to restrict the power of the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. By 1541 any hope of reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants broke down following the Diet of Regensburg. Years of indecisive warfare between the Catholic emperor and German Protestant princes led in 1552 to the Treaty of Passau, which recognized the continued existence of the Protestant German states; then the Peace of Augsburg (1555) ended this period of fighting. For these Protestant German states the Reformation basically meant significant changes in the church but without this threatening the status quo in state and society. Something similar happened in Sweden and Denmark, where there was little or no violence or disruption to society. Under the rule of godly princes the new German Lutheran church put great emphasis on the Bible and on preaching; rejection of Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary and saints; the use of German (not Latin) in services; and the acceptance of married ministers in place of celibate priests. However, Lutheranism allowed ideas and practices associated with Catholicism as long as they were not banned in the New Testament. This was in contrast to more extreme Protestants who only allowed these to continue if they were explicitly commanded in the Bible. This meant that Lutheran churches had rather more of a Catholic look and feel than the more austere churches (and doctrines) that developed in harder-line communities. Luther, therefore, got off the “Reformation bus” several stops earlier than some other Protestants.
Elsewhere things were more complex. In France and the Netherlands, where rulers attempted to suppress the new ideas, there was violence and upheaval. In Switzerland a more austere Protestantism developed under Huldreich Zwingli (1484–1531). Zwingli stayed on the “bus” much longer than Luther. In fact he and Luther irretrievably broke off relations in 1529. In the Swiss churches there was a far more intense form of Protestantism: organs, pictures and statues were all removed. Switzerland was soon divided between Catholic and Protestant cantons. War flared but the division survived and Zurich and Geneva became standard-bearers of a more “reformed” kind of Protestant church than was developing in the Lutheran areas. Eventually the Catholic Counter-Reformation would roll back early Protestant advances in Bavaria, Poland, Austria, France, Belgium, and Bohemia. Here many Protestants were to die for their faith as Catholicism reclaimed these areas of the Continent.
While all this was happening, a different kind of Protestant Reformation was developing on a parallel route. The fragmentation of papal power had allowed the appearance of groups well to the left of Luther and with more challenging ideas. Those termed “Anabaptists” believed that only adult believers should be baptized, church members should elect their leaders and be involved in church decision-making, and that all beliefs should come from the Bible only. The belief in adult believers’ baptism was a revolutionary statement since, if a person could choose faith (rather than it be mediated through family and church hierarchy or state power), then it was not much further to claim political rights too. And many did. Some were pacifists, such as the Mennonites in Germany and the Netherlands. They were founded by Menno Simmons (1496– 1561) in Friesland. On the other hand, a minority were prepared to use force to enact change, such as the revolutionaries at Münster in 1534. Some w...
