"That an inequitable thing it is for one man to
have thousands, and another want bread, and that the pleasure of God is, that
all men should have enough, and not that one man should abound in this worlds good,
spending it upon his lusts, and another man of far better deserts, not be worth
two pence, and that it is no such difficulty as men make it to be, to alter the
course of the world in this thing, and that a few diligent and valiant spirits
may turn the world upside down, if they observe their seasons, and shall with
life and courage ingage accordingly".
William Walwyn
Given the speed that historiography of the English
revolution is moving it is sometimes wise to look at where we have been to find
out where we are going. A review of Francis Dow's book would be a good place to
start.
Written over thirty years ago, Dow's book was aimed
at students and the general public. Her book is of a very good standard and in
no way dumbs down her writing. In fact, given that her target audience was
pre-degree students, it is of a good academic standard.
It is undeniable that there has been a recent resurgence
of interest in the Levellers both in academic and non-academic publications. It
is certainly easier to write on the Levellers today than when Dow wrote her
book.
The
Debate on the English Revolution
Her first chapter begins with a Debate on the English
Revolution. Dow makes clear that her little book is not a narrative of the
events of the English civil war. The first chapter has limited space but gives
a good introduction to the level of radicalism in the English Revolution.
She is clear that the subject of her book has
generated many controversies. Outside of the Russian and French revolutions,
respectively, no other revolution has generated as much academic heat.
Her assessment of 1980s radical historiographies is
precise and informative. Today's readers should bear in mind that at the time
of Dow's book revisionist historians had been attacking any historian who
sought to place the Levellers in their proper historical context.
More specifically, Dow believes that most of the
revisionist's fire had been against Marxist historiography, especially Marxists
insistence of the long-term causes of the English civil war.
Even the use of the term radical to describe groups
such as the Levellers had come under attack by historians as Glenn Burgess
points out "it has been suggested - by Conal Condren and Jonathan Clark
especially - that the term 'radicalism' should not be applied to phenomena that
exist before the term itself was coined. Clark has pointed out that it applies
"to a doctrine newly coined in England in the 1820s to describe a fusion
of universal suffrage, Ricardian economics and programmatic atheism. To speak
of an eighteenth - or a seventeenth-century radicalism is therefore as much of
a solecism as to speak of an eighteenth- or seventeenth-century fascism or
Marxism". His point is essential that in using the term to yoke together
disparate phenomena with a common label, we create false or fictional histories
and traditions. Condren suggests other objections. First, that 'radical' as a
label risks miss-describing the language used by those so labelled. It
attributes to them polemical and rhetorical strategies of subversion and
opposition without considering whether such strategies were adopted. Secondly,
the label risks miss-describing intentionality. Its application suggests an
identity - that a person or group is knowingly and consciously 'radical' -
whether appropriately or not.
It is hard to find Dow's historiographical
preferences. While not rejecting out of hand both the Marxist and conservative
historians she does, however, posit what she calls a third-way argument on the
radical groups.
She says "Hill's picture of a radical plebeian
culture cannot be ignored. The significance of his work and other like-minded
historians prompts the question: can radicalism be put into a new perspective
which considers the convincing arguments of the conservative 'revisionists' but
leaves room for the belief that there was a 'revolution' in the 1640s and 1650s."
This argument anticipated by well over three decades
the current position of the post- revisionist school of historiography. Dow
explains that the turn away from Marxist historiography brought about a
plethora of other explanations as to why the radical groups were not that
radical.
Conservative historians such as by A M Everitt
and later John Morrill sought to examine local aspects of the revolution while
playing down the influence of the radicals.
Studies such as The County Committee of Kent in the
Civil War by A M Everitt and more famously John Morrill's work on the Revolt of
the Provinces emphasised short-term explanations. The rise of local studies
does not necessary mean all the historians who adopted this approach had a
right-wing agenda. David Underdown's Riot, Rebel, and Rebellion book is well worth
a look at.
Other revisionist historians such as John Adamson
limited the civil war to a struggle amongst the nobility not a class struggle
in his Noble Revolt. This perspective leads to an outright denial of class
struggles in the English civil war.
Despite agreeing with many conservative historians,
Dow does not buy into the premise that there were no long-term causes of the
revolution or for the rise of radicalism.
Dow quotes Brain Manning who "forcefully argued
that economic discontent and popular unrest were important elements in
producing an atmosphere of crisis before and after 1640 ... that this eruption
of the lower and middling orders into the political arena crucially affected
the alignment of political groupings within the elite ... parliament's appeal
to the 'middling sort of people' was ... to release one of the most dynamic
forces of the decade and substantially promote the cause of popular radicalism".
Parliamentarians and Republicans
In Chapter Two, Dow examines the philosophical basis
for the Civil War. She explains that before the Civil war, the English ruling elite
was largely content with the divine rule of kings. Society was in order and
that God ordained everything.
Dow correctly spends some time on the philosophy of
James Harrington. The importance of Harrington is that his writings are a
confirmation of the relationship between political thought and political
action. Dow, however, downplays Harrington grasp of the relationship between
property and power saying he was not a "proto-Marxist". While this is
true, he was a writer who anticipated a materialist understanding of history.
The
Levellers
Chapter three, Dow, examines the complex issue of the
Levellers. To what extent were the Levellers able to articulate the political
and social needs of large sections of the population.
Dow believes that the "Mournful Cries of Many
Thousand Poor Tradesmen heard heard throughout the English revolution "O
Parliament men, and Soldiers! Necessity dissolves all Lawes and Government, and
Hunger will break: through stone walls, Tender Mothers will sooner devoure You,
then the Fruit of their owne wombe and Hunger regards no Swords nor Cannons. It
may be some great oppressours intends tumults that they may escape in a croud,
but your food may then be wanting as well as ours, and your Armes will bee hard
diet. O hearke, hearke at our doores how out children cry bread, bread, bread,
and we now with bleeding hearts, cry, once more to you, pity, pity, an
oppressed inslaved people: carry our cries in the large petition to the
Parliament, and tell them if they be still and illegible; the Teares of
the oppressed will wash away the foundations of their houses. Amen, Amen so be
it".
Whether social inequality was to a most important
factor in leading to revolution is a matter of conjecture. What is clear from
Dow's book is that the Levellers amongst other radical groups exploited the
significant rise in social inequality and they politically articulated the
wants and needs of a large section of the population.
People were also beginning to question their place in
the grand scheme of things. The world was being turned upside down and they
needed answers to why.
As the Marxist political writer, David North explains
"Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally
accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the
problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable
authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of
Copernicus's De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt a
death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the
essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe
(1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from
the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested
upon it, was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the
general intellectual environment".
It would be wrong to mechanically apply this type of
reason to the thinking of parliamentary opposition to the King. People's
thinking was mostly confused and not coherently thought out. As Dow mentions on
(p15) "Four major issues were touched upon by these new writers, the
nature, and location of sovereignty, the origins of government in the consent
of the people, the welfare of the people as the end or purpose of government
and the role of common people in resisting the king". Dow attempts in this
chapter to establish a link between the new philosophy and the actions of the
Levellers revolution.
For Dow, the chief ideologues of the revolution were
the radical groups such as the Levellers, Diggers. She states on page 8 that "Ideological
and organisational advances were made by radicals who were not matched until
the 1760s. Although the Levellers did not achieve power and succeeded more in
frightening those who did hold power than in convincing them of the merits of
the radical case., their beliefs and their program opened new vistas of
political participation, religious toleration, and social equality. If not for
all men, then at least for very significant sections of the middling classes".
The Levellers according to Dow were the "founding
fathers of the working-class movement". Dow claimed the Levellers broke
new ground." They grounded their program of a new ideological basis by
developing arguments based on doctrines of natural rights and popular
sovereignty. And they mobilised support for their movement by employing
sophisticated modern techniques of propaganda and organisation".
Dow's assertion is challenged by AL Morton who said
of the Levellers "it was a radical but not a working-class party: indeed,
how could it be at a time when the working class as we know it was only
beginning to exist? Still less was it a 'socialist' party in the sense of
advocating the type of egalitarian and agrarian communism which was widespread
now" and to add was not articulately expressed (until) Winstanley and his
Diggers or 'true Levellers' .
Dow admits it is difficult however to paint an exact
picture of what constituted the Leveller party and it was as the Baptist Henry
Dunne said a "very heterogeneous body".
It is to Dow's credit that she places the rise of the
Levellers in a socio-economic context. "The socio-economic preconditions
for the rise of the movement like the Levellers had been created by long-term
changes in landholding and in the manufacturing. Those changes which had
adversely affected the status and prosperity of the urban and rural 'middling
sort' of people were especially important in providing potential supporters for
the Levellers, who were to become principally the spokesmen for the 'industrious
sort'. Pressure on the smaller peasant farmer who lacked the resources of his
larger neighbour to benefit from the expanding market and rising prices: the
discontent of the insecure copyholder subject to rack-renting and the fear of
the small cottager or husbandman at the prospect of the enclosure, produce
dissatisfaction which the Levellers could tap and issues on which they could
take a stand".
Dow makes the strange assertion that the Levellers
lacked strong leadership and in the end lost all effectiveness as a group. Dow seems
to be saying that the levellers were doomed them from their start: "Leveller
ideology may have frightened the rich, neglected the poor, and been "too
innovative in its assumptions to embrace all the godly 'middling sort"' of
people."
She believed that their social base was that of the
small craftsmen and tradesmen, particularly in the towns, "whose
independence seemed threatened by large-scale merchants and entrepreneurs. The
existence of such problems in London was crucially important, for the capital
was to provide the core of the Leveller movement. Here, a large pool of discontent
existed among journeymen unable, because of changes in the structure of
manufacturing to find the resources to set up as masters in their own right.
Anger smolder among small tradesmen and merchants chafing at the alleged
oppression of the guilds".
Dow makes the point that the Levellers tapped into a
growing hostility from people especially in London towards a deal with the
monarchy. An outward display of this came about through the army at Putney. Dow
makes a very perceptive point that "The radicalisation of sections of the
rank and file did not happen solely, or even directly, because of Leveller
influence, it happened because soldiers' perception of their ill-treatment at
the hands of the Presbyterian majority produced a political consciousness on
which the Levellers could capitalise".
Dow crucially examines the nature of the society, or
specific sections of the society, from which the Leveller movement sprang.
Several attempts have been made to explain a class background to the Leveller
movement and the people whose support it attracted. While it is prudent to
acknowledge David Underdown's warning that "Class is a concept that can be
applied to seventeenth-century English society only with the greatest possible
caution".
Religious
Radicals
I am not sure about the title of this chapter. The
groups that Dow mentions are diverse, and she is hard-pressed to establish a
common thread amongst. Groups like the Fifth Monarchists were feared . One pamphlet
at the time wrote of the Fifth Monarchy men "The scum and scouring of the country...
Deduct the weavers, tailors, brewers, cobblers, tinkers, carmen, draymen,
broom-men and mat makers and then give me a list of the gentlemen. Their names
may be writ in text, within the compass of a single halfpenny. Mercurius
Elencticus (7-14 June I648), British Library, E447/ II, 226.
The
Diggers and the Clubmen-A Radical Contrast
Dow's last chapter is a bit of a theoretical muddle.
The Diggers were on the extreme left wing of the revolution. The Diggers
were part of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political
and social changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century.
They were the true 'Ideologues of the revolution' and had a capacity for
abstract thought. While the Diggers were sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed
from their religion. They had no program to bring about social change; they
never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that
being of small producers, conditioned their ideology.
At no stage did the
Diggers or that matter did the larger group the Levellers constitute a mass
movement. The contradiction between their concern for the poor and their
position of representatives of the small property owners caused some tension.
They had no opposition to private property and therefore they accepted that
inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for a lot of the poor to be
made more equitable.
The lumping of the Diggers in a chapter with the
Clubmen seems to be a bit of an afterthought by Dow. Maybe her editor should have
intervened to separate the two. The Clubmen were in favour of a return to "ancient
ways" and to describe them a radical is stretching it a little. It seems
almost to be a concession to the conservative revisionists that she ends the
book. The world was not turned upside down.
Conclusion
The book is a very good introduction to the subject
of radicalism in the English Revolution. Dow's work on the Levellers is equally
important. Her conclusion is a little disappointing. But I agree with Morton
who said: "A Party that held the centre of the stage for three of the most
crucial years in our nation's history, voiced the aspirations of the
unprivileged masses, and could express with such force ideas that have been
behind every great social advance since their time, cannot be regarded as
wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten".
