The Leveller Revolution

Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650

John Rees

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784783891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784783907
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The Levellers, formed out of the explosive tumult of the 1640s and the battlefields of the Civil War, are central figures in the history of democracy. In this thrilling narrative, John Rees brings to life the men-including John Lilburne, Richard Overton and Thomas Rainsborough-and women who ensured victory and became an inspiration to republicans of many nations.

From the raucous streets of London and the clattering printers' workshops that stoked the uprising, to the rank and file of the New Model Army and the furious Putney debates where the Levellers argued with Oliver Cromwell for the future of English democracy, this story reasserts the revolutionary nature of the 1642-51 wars and the role of ordinary people in this pivotal moment in history.

In particular Rees places the Levellers at the centre of the debates of 1647 when the nation was gripped by the question of what to do with the defeated Charles I. Without the Levellers and Agitators' fortitude and well-organised opposition history may have avoided the regicide and missed its revolutionary moment. The legacy of the Levellers can be seen in the modern struggles for freedom and democracy across the world.

CHAPTER 1

‘The Maddest Christmas
That Ever I Saw’

The Christmas of 1641 started well enough for Colonel Thomas Lunsford. King Charles had appointed him lieutenant of the Tower of London. It was an important post giving him control of the fortress that dominated the eastern fringe of the capital. The Tower was also the home of the Mint and the depository of much of the City’s merchant wealth. The new role was a political appointment of considerable significance, at a time of heightened crisis. In the already highly charged political atmosphere of late 1641, Charles was determined to regain political control of London, and saw Lunsford’s appointment as an ideal opening gambit.

Charles needed a dramatic change in his fortunes. The year had already been scarred by rebellion in Ireland, causing something close to political panic among both the political elite and the population across Britain. Tales of massacres of Protestants and imminent Catholic invasion circulated like wildfire. In January 1641, Charles’s key minister, the earl of Strafford, had been charged before the Commons and, later, convicted and executed as a traitor in front of a huge crowd at the Tower. In February charges of impeachment were brought against Archbishop Laud, the clerical mainstay of the Stuart government. He in turn had been imprisoned in the Tower. The Commons then dismantled the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission that had been used to enforce Laud’s regime of religious intolerance in July. In November the catalogue of Charles’s failures in the eyes of Parliament, the Grand Remonstrance, was passed and then, later, printed.

Even Charles’s one success, the ending of the Bishops’ Wars with Scotland, a disastrous product of the king’s attempt to impose a new church structure north of the border, had left demobbed soldiers, known as reformadoes, adrift in the streets of London looking for pay and employment in Ireland. Thomas Lunsford was one of them. At the same time the Tower remained the site of continual conflict throughout the year. When the Commons had imprisoned the earl of Strafford in the Tower in May ahead of his execution the king sent soldiers to try and affect a rescue. But the then lieutenant of the Tower, Sir William Balfour, had barred them from entering. Charles now aimed to strike a bold blow in the battle to control London by removing Balfour and putting the Tower in the hands of a figure of unquestioning loyalty.

Thomas Lunsford’s loyalty to the king was beyond question, but everything else about him was less impressive. Perhaps the only bad thing to have been said about Lunsford which was untrue was the accusation of cannibalism; even if he himself did claim that he was ‘fierce enough to eat children’. Lunsford was the very picture of a cavalier. Red-haired and short-tempered, even his own cousin, Lord Dorset, described Lunsford as ‘a young outlaw who neither fears God nor man, and who, having given himself over to all lewdness and dissoluteness, only studies to affront justice, [taking] glory to be esteemed … a swaggering ruffian’. In 1633 he made an attempt on the life of his Sussex neighbour Sir Thomas Pelham after Lunsford’s family were found guilty of poaching Pelham’s deer. Lunsford fired his pistol at Sir Thomas’s coach as it left East Hoathly Church after Sunday morning service. The bullet passed through the coach and lodged in the church door. Lunsford was imprisoned in Newgate but escaped to France, where he became a soldier of fortune and colonel of a regiment of foot that he raised himself. Lunsford owed a fine of £8,000 imposed by order of the Court of Star Chamber. In 1639 Lunsford returned to England to offer his services to King Charles in the Bishops’ Wars. Consequently, Charles pardoned him and dismissed the fine. Lunsford was a loyal soldier and this further recommended him to the king, despite Lunsford’s claim to have killed two mutineers out of hand. So it was that on 22 December 1641 Charles appointed Lunsford to the Tower, apparently on the advice of one of his more irascible courtiers, Lord Digby.¹

Every element of the parliamentary opposition to Charles, and their wider circles of support across the City, reacted with fierce disapproval to Lunsford’s appointment. The City complained and petitioned the Commons, demanding Lunsford be removed. Future Leveller leader Richard Overton was one of the signatures on the City petition which described Lunsford as ‘a man outlawed and most notorious for outrages’ who was ‘fit for any dangerous Attempt’ and who had put the City in the ‘Height of Fear’.² The majority in the Commons agreed and demanded that the Lords join them in protesting the appointment. The Lords refused on the grounds that it was ‘in his Majesty’s power to make choyce of his own Officers’. The Commons insisted that Lunsford was ‘of a decayed and desperate fortune’ and of a ‘desperate condition’ and could not be trusted with the Mint or the merchants’ money. They recalled his attack on Sir Thomas Pelham and added to it Lunsford’s threat to a Captain Buller that he would ‘cut his throat’. In debate the Commons heard that when on the Continent Lunsford was so ‘given to drinking and quarrelling that all civill and sober men avoided his company’, that he had fled the Low Countries to escape debt, that he had stolen money from his own troops, and that he was ‘debauched’ and unfit to control the Tower. Respectable citizens and less respectable apprentices came to the doors of Westminster demanding that Lunsford be dismissed. Republican MP and future Leveller ally Henry Marten was instructed to seize the arms of Lunsford’s supporters. London, particularly the City, was now arming itself. One newsletter from the capital issued this call the day after Lunsford’s appointment: ‘I say still, provide weapons, get muskets, powder and shot. Let not the Popish party surprise us with a riding rod only in our hands’. The cry was not in vain: ‘There is a great ado made for arms … there is not any muskets or other guns to be bought, not iron to make them of, so great is the fears of the people here, especially about the Tower’. Even late on Christmas Day ‘there were hundreds watching voluntarily to prevent some income of the soldiers, the Lieutenant being sworn in. All the merchants have taken out their bullion out of the Tower which was to be coined’. The outcry was so great that on Sunday 26 December the lord mayor visited Charles in Whitehall on two occasions to tell him of the ‘tumultuous rising of the Prentices and other inferior persons of London’ who had warned that if Lunsford were not removed there would be ‘some further inconvenience happen upon it’. This ‘further inconvenience’, the Commons heard, would be ‘an attempt on the Tower’ to force Lunsford out. This did the trick and later the same day the king retreated and removed Lunsford. But this proved to be too small a retreat, too late.³

The crowds still swarmed to Westminster Yard outside Parliament on the following day, Monday 27 December. The news of Lunsford’s removal, far from pacifying the crowd, seemed to ‘increase the uproare’. Some of the crowd were armed with clubs and they called out to the members of both houses, ‘No bishops, no popish lords!’ But the citizens were not the only ones to arrive at Westminster that day. So did the freshly humiliated Colonel Lunsford with about thirty or forty supporters. Neither he nor they were in an even temper. In fact Lunsford was ‘resolved to be revenged upon those which first went about to withstand him’.⁴

Lunsford and his supporters swaggered into Westminster Hall and began abusing the London citizens gathered there. They repeatedly taunted the people, asking, ‘I wonder which of you dare speake against Bishops’. One ‘country gentleman’ stepped forward and told them that ‘my conscience doth tell me that Bishops are no law full’. Swords were drawn but the crowd intervened and parted them. In another incident Captain David Hide, a demobilised soldier from the army, drew his sword and said he would ‘cut the throats of those Round headed Dogs that bawl against the Bishops’. It was said to be the first time that ‘roundhead’ was used as a term of abuse. In the midst of this was a figure already familiar to radical Londoners. This was the future leader of the Levellers, John Lilburne. Lilburne was leading a crowd of apprentices and sailors who confronted Hide. With his own sword drawn Lilburne disarmed Hide ‘and brought both him & his sword up to the House of Commons door’. Astoundingly Hide was immediately released and rejoined Lunsford in Westminster Hall. Then Lunsford’s party ‘all drew their swords and Rapiers, and fell upon the people with great violence’. Lilburne recorded that the cavaliers ‘fell to slashing and cutting’ the crowd, driving them in panic ‘up the very Parliament staire’. Some fled into the adjacent Court of Wards and some up the stairs to the Court of Requests. There they found parliamentarian stalwart Sir Richard Wiseman, who, ‘perceiving how it went, spoke most bravely to animate them to return with such weapons as they had’. Lilburne recalled ‘Sir Richard Wiseman, my selfe, and divers other Citizens with our swords in our hands freely adventured our lives’ to drive back Lunsford’s cavaliers. Wiseman fought two or three of Lunsford’s gang, breaking the rapier of one into two pieces. He was joined by some sailors with clubs. But they were outnumbered until more apprentices and sailors arrived and began to fight back using tiles prised from the floor or walls. A running fight was now in process across Westminster Hall.

News of this was abroad in the City and hundreds of apprentices arrived at Westminster armed with swords and staves. As Lilburne later recalled, ‘I fought with C. Lunsford, and divers others at Westminster (who drew first) with my sword in my hand, to save the Parliament men throats from being cut’. The ‘citizens … fought like enraged lions’ and Lilburne and his supporters got the better of Lunsford and ‘his crue of ruffians’, as they were later to describe them. Half the gentlemen ran away at the first volley of stones, and eventually all the gentlemen of the Court scattered or were ‘beat down’. Lunsford himself had to escape the crowd by wading into the Thames until the water came over the tops of his boots in order to make his getaway in a boat.⁵

That night the lord mayor and sheriffs rode around the City attempting to calm the mood. The City gates were locked, and the watch was strengthened. The next morning, the Trained Bands, the local militia, were called out to defend the City. The king demanded that Trained Bands also be deployed to ‘Guard his Royal person, and his Consort and Children at Whitehall’. Charles was unnerved by the ‘disorderly and tumultuous conflux of people at Westminster and Whitehall’. His courtiers were disquieted and he had heard the ‘most seditious language being uttered under His own windows’. Furthermore, punishment of these offenders had been ‘interrupted and stopped’. It was to no avail. Fighting broke out again the following day, Tuesday 28 December.⁶

The crowds now seem to have turned their attention from Westminster Hall to nearby Westminster Abbey. The archbishop of York had to be rescued by Lord Dover and Lord Faulconbridge from a hostile crowd that thronged the Yard. The protestors were intent on rescuing fellow apprentices who had been detained and were being examined by the archbishop. The apprentices cried ‘a Bishop, a Bishop’ when they saw the clerics approach the palace on the Thames and prevented them from coming ashore. The bishops had to keep ‘rowing up and down for about an hour, and at last went back’. One of their number ‘thanked God they knew not me to be a Bishop’.

As night fell the crowd attempted to force an entrance into the abbey but only succeeded in bursting ‘part of the door to pieces’. They threatened to pull down the organ and altar. But the doors were held against them. Meanwhile, the abbey’s defenders, including some scholars from the nearby Westminster College, got up onto the roof of the building and ‘endeavoured to beat them off with Stones’. It was also reported that shots were fired at the crowd. As the battle turned, some thirty or forty of the abbey defenders rushed out and charged at the crowd ‘pell mell with pistols and swords drawn’ in a ‘cruell and most Butcherly manner’. Several protestors were hurt. John Lilburne, once again in the thick of the fighting, was ‘very sorely wounded’, according to one contemporary report.

Another injury, even more serious than Lilburne’s, was sustained by his ally in the fight the previous day in Westminster Hall, Sir Richard Wiseman, who in the end received such serious injury that he later died of his wounds. He was a hero among the apprentices and elegies at his death were printed and distributed by his supporters. The apprentices collected the money that paid for Wiseman’s funeral. The funeral procession wound from Westminster to the radical heart of the City, St Stephen’s in Coleman Street. It was composed of 200 apprentices and another 400 citizens decked in black ribbons and with their swords at their sides.⁷

One of the elegies produced for Richard Wiseman, The Apprentices Lamentation, was printed by William Larner.⁸ In the same year, Larner also printed the early pamphlets of both John Lilburne and fellow future Leveller Katherine Chidley. He was also printing material by William Kiffin, then a key supporter of Lilburne and a leading religious radical. Larner was to become a mainstay of Leveller printing throughout the movement’s existence.⁹

On the same day that Wiseman was killed Charles issued a proclamation that all citizens should cease their assemblies. He also instructed the lord mayor to tell the captains of the Trained Bands that they should shoot to kill the crowds. Charles directed that if the crowd

shall refuse to retire to their homes peaceably, that then for the better keeping of the peace and preventing of further mischiefs, you command the captains and officers of the train bands by shooting with bullets or otherwise to slay and kill such of them as shall persist in their tumultuary and seditious ways and disorders.¹⁰

The following day, Wednesday 29 December, no doubt taking the lead from his king, one MP was in such a state of panic at the ‘riotous and tumultuous Assembly of vaine and idle persons who presume to begirt our House’ that he also proposed that if they could not be persuaded to disperse then the best course was to ‘shoot at them’ as ‘it will bee the best and speediest means to repell them’.¹¹

This was just the kind of talk to warm Thomas Lunsford’s heart. Charles had been forced to remove him as lieutenant of the Tower but he was certainly not out of favour. The king had knighted him and awarded him £500 a year for life. He also appointed him to guard duties in Whitehall. Charles had ordered that all courtiers wear swords and that a guardhouse be built in Whitehall. Lunsford’s soldiers were on guard duty on the afternoon of Wednesday 29 December when they were at the heart of yet another attack on a large crowd that had been gathering since early morning. That day there were 10,000 ‘mechanic citizens and apprentices’ in Whitehall south of Charing Cross. They were armed with halberds, staves and some swords. The earl of Huntington reported to his son, ‘They stood so thick that we had much ado to pass with our coaches … They cried “No Bishops, no papist lords”, looked in our coaches where [whether] any bishops were therein … we went in great danger’. Inevitably, the soldiers became involved in an argument with some of the crowd and one of the protestors threw a clump of mud at the officers. In response the officers came out of Whitehall and ‘cut and hacked the apprentices that were passing to Westminster’. In the affray there ‘much hurt ensued, very many wounded on both sides, some hands cut off, others arms, others sides of their faces cut off’. Again the insults ‘cavalier’ and ‘roundhead’ were bawled across Whitehall. Some thirty or forty of the apprentices ‘were wounded, and lost their hats and cloaks’.¹² But the crowd remained densely packed at nightfall and ‘though it were a dark night their innumerable links made it as light as day’. Constable Peter Scott ‘tried to appease the prentices by promising to release their fellows detained in the Mermaid tavern’. But when he arrived at the door of the tavern one of his fellow constables was attacked with a sword from within. This enraged the apprentices and they broke into the tavern. The keeper of the Mermaid was later charged with riot.¹³

The House of Commons supported the crowds against their attackers, telling the Lords that protestors had committed ‘no offence at all’ and that criticism of them was ‘a true violation of the liberty of the subject, and an affront to parliament’. The Commons then dispatched MP and Alderman Isaac Pennington at the head of a delegation of three other MPs to free those apprentices that had earlier ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: ‘The Maddest Christmas That Ever I Saw’
• Chapter 2: The First Leveller, John Lilburne
• Chapter 3: London, the Great Leveller
• Chapter 4: Levelling by Print
• Chapter 5: Civil War
• Chapter 6: The War, the Church and the State
• Chapter 7: The Coming of the Levellers
• Chapter 8: Petitions and Prison
• Chapter 9: Agitators
• Chapter 10: Putney Church and Corkbush Field
• Chapter 11: Counterrevolution
• Chapter 12: Revolution
• Chapter 13: Defeat in Victory
• Chapter 14: Lieutenant Colonel John Rede’s Last Stand
• Chapter 15: The Levellers and the English Revolution
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index