Past reviews have been on the whole appreciative. The
Financial Times said “Churchill shows us an age of unbelievable fluidity in the
social order...” The play reminds us sombrely that such moment of potential
pass: they either come to nothing in the first place, or the old order is soon
restored. Michelle Terry and Helena Lymbery each excel in the Putney sequence”.
The play is set amidst the English Civil war so knowledge
of this event is a must before seeing or reading the play. The blurb for the
play by Churchill sets the scene “1649. After years of bloody civil conflict,
an exhausted England is in the hands of radical extremists. Turning the country
upside down, Parliament’s soldiers kill the King and take power into their own
hands. Theirs is a war to establish Heaven on Earth. This is the story of the
most terrifying decade in our history. Struggling to find a voice in the face
of unspeakable suffering, a group of ordinary men and women cling to the belief
that they will be shown a glimpse of unspeakable, transcendent glory”.
Churchill wrote the play in 1976 and the first
productions of the play have a Kafkaesque sparseness to them with only a table
and six chairs for props. In contrast, today’s production is a little more
expensive but in places is visually stunning? Having not been performed for a
good while the play marked as one writer put it “a major UK revival of Churchill’s
seminal play brought to the stage by Polly Findlay and the stellar creative
team behind Thyestes (Arcola) and Eigengrau (Bush)". The play also marked
Churchill’s first collaboration with the Joint Stock Theatre Group.
In her programme notes Churchill correctly bemoans the
fact that the English revolution and particularly its radical groups get scant
attention in modern school history. Churchill’s plays concentrates on three
main groups the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters. While there are programmatic
distinctions between the groups there is much that unites them. While Churchill
does not examine the role of Quakers in her play many leading figures of the
Levellers, Ranters and Diggers would end their days paid up members of the
Quakers.
One word of warning the play as far as I can see does not
follow any chronological order. One critic cautioned that audiences may “find
themselves disoriented by the swirl of events and even by the style of
storytelling. In all productions it seems that six actresses and actors
repeatedly switch roles while playing dozens of characters. Identification is
often deliberately blurred.
Churchill throughout her career to date has tackled
complex historical questions in a simple but thought-provoking way. Earlier
plays have included “Fen" which was about farmworkers in England and
"Mad Forest" on the Romanian revolution. She has also not been scared
to use theatrical different techniques such as the use collage form.
The plays title taken from the Digger Pamphlet The Light
Shining in Buckinghamshire [1]“JEHOVAH ELLOHIM Created Man after his own
likenesse and image, which image is his Sonne Jesus, Heb. I. verse 2. who is
the image of the Invisible God: now Man being made after Gods image or
likenesse, and created by the word of God, which word was made Flesh and dwelt
amongst us; which word was life, and that life the light of men, I Joh. 2. this
light I take to be that pure spirit in man which we call Reason, which
discusseth things right and reflecteth, which we call conscience; from all
which there issued out that golden rule or law, which we call equitie: the sum
me of which is, saith Jesus, whatsoever yee would that men should doe to you,
doe to them, this is the Law and the Prophets; and James cals it the royall Law,
and to live from this principle is calld a good conscience: and the creature
Man was priviledged with being Lord over other inferior creatures, but not over
his own kinde; for all men being a like priviledged by birth, so all men were
to enjoy the creatures a like without proprietie one more than the other, all
men by the grant of God are a like free, and every man individuall, that is to
say, no man was to Lord or command over his own kinde: neither to enclose the
creatures to his own use, to the impoverishing of his neigh- bours, see the
Charter, I. Gen. from 26. vers. to the end of the Chapt. and see the renewing
of the Charter to Noah and his Sons, Gen. 9. from the I. vers. to the 18.
Despite much of the language of the play being couched in
religious phraseology it is clear that many people were starting to examine
their place in the world and were starting to express a profound disagreement
with the way they were being governed.
As David north wrote “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 the 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 under way.[2]
The Play
The play consists of two acts and examines the
revolutionary events before and after the
Putney debates of 1647 . The first group examined by Churchill are the
Levellers. They were by far the biggest and most organized of the revolutionary
groups. The high tide for this group was the Putney debates and Churchill
correctly places an abridged account of them at the center of the whole play.
That Levellers were not the only group to couch their
writings and speeches in religious garb. According to Marx “Cromwell and the
English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and
illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved
and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished,
Locke supplanted Habakkuk. Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions
served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old;
of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its
solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making
its ghost walk again”.[3]
Putney debates
While much of the play has been written by Churchill she
still manages to accurately and skillfully to weave real events and words
spoken at the time. By far the strongest part of the play is the partially
verbatim transcript of the Putney Debates of 1647, which saw rank and file
soldiers and commoners arguing for a broadening of the democratic franchise and
an end to social inequality this was opposed by Cromwell, Ireton and other
leaders of the revolution.
The quotes for this production come from Geoffrey
Robertson’s book[4]. At the Putney Debates Cromwell was clearly taken by
surprise by the arguments of the Levellers. But once Cromwell and other
grandees recovered their composure they opposed every demand by the Levellers
to extend the franchise.
Ireton spoke for the Grandees when he said “no man hath a
right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom...
that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.” Thomas Rainsborough
a Leveller countered by saying “I really
I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the
greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt 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.”[5]
The Levellers were defeated at Putney and before long
were wiped out as a coherent political organization. The play does attempt to
grope for an answer why the Levellers and other revolutionary groups failed to
develop the revolution in a more left wing direction. In this matter Churchill
fails. But in this failure she is not alone. Accomplished historians like
Christopher Hill struggled to provide a significant answer to this conundrum.
Hill says “The Leveller conception of free Englishmen was thus restricted, even
if much wider, than the embodied in the existing franchise. Their proposals
would perhaps have doubled the number of men entitled to vote. But manhood
suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals, generally horrified, pretended
at Putney that the Levellers were more democratic than they were”.
It is hardly possible in this review to explore in any
great detail but a sober evaluation should be made. The Levellers appeared to
take on many of the characteristics of a political party in the years 1645-46.
This is a contentious issue and has been disputed. They were the radical wing
of the Independent coalition and were responsible for many of modern day
political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions,
leafleting and the lobby of MPs. As an aside William Clarke who provided us
with the report of the Putney Debates was an avid collector of books, pamphlets
and leaflets found in his collection was over eighty Leveller pamphlets. The
Levellers strength mainly lay in London and other towns and had not an
insignificant support in the army.
The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a
democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than
the House of Lords. A Leveller would have a wanted redistribution and extension
of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property,
artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layers which made up the
composition of the Levellers themselves.
The Levellers themselves 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. Levellers also wished
to democratise the gilds and the City of London, a decentralization of justice
and the election of local governors and stability of tenure for copyholders.
While the Levellers were sympathetic to the poor, which stemmed from their
religion they had no programme 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 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 the lot of the poor to
be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained “I am no
advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them,
without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore
make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient”.
Knowing that they could not come to power through the
presently constituted electorate the Levellers attempted to find constitutional
ways of getting round it. A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the
Agreement of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war
and must be refounded on the basis of certain fundamental “native rights”
safeguarded even from a sovereign went against one of the most fundamental
reasons for the war in the first place. The Agreement amongst other demands,
called for biennial parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted
into the new state by accepting the agreement were to have the vote.
The one real chance the Levellers had to put their ideas
into practice was to gain control of the army. The development of the new model
army was central to the outcome of the English civil war, who controlled the
army controlled state power. The Levellers had agitated for the arrears of
wages to be paid and that indemnity for actions committed during the civil war
be granted. This agitation had won them considerable support in the army.
In the end as Churchill writes in the Play the only thing
the Levellers got out of Putney was the promise of Cromwell to take things to a
committee.
To put it more simply the generals deliberately
exaggerated the radicalism of a majority of the Levellers in order to label
them extremists and to mobilise their own supporters against them. Cromwell
correctly recognised that if the franchise was widened it would threaten his
position in parliament. Again Hill explains “Defending the existing franchise
Cromwell son in law, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine ‘that by a man being
born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands
here and of all things here’. The vote was rightly restricted to those who ‘had
a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom’. Namely, ‘the person in whom all
lands lies and that incorporation’s in whom all trading lies”.
Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented
them and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded for all free
Englishmen. If by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should
be free. Who could freely dispose of their own labour? Then Ireton could see no
reason why men had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on
to point out that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in
parliament and they will give equal property rights to everybody. This argument
completely confused Rainborowe and undermined his argument.
Cromwell was acutely aware that the ideas of the
Levellers and the smaller groups within them such as the Diggers were becoming
a dangerous business. Cromwell said of what he called the ‘lunaticks’ “You must
break these men or they will break you” Cromwell declared. By May 1649 the
Levellers had been defeated in battle and their influence in the army and in
civilian life disappeared.
In many respects, the true revolutionary of the civil war
was Cromwell and his New Model Army. While not agreeing with the revisionists
that the Levellers were an insignificant movement, they should not also be
hyped into something they were not. They were essentially a movement of the
lower middle class that sought to extend the franchise on a limited basis. The
reason this failed was that the social and economic basis for their ideas had
not yet developed in this sense their egalitarian ideas were a foretaste of
future social movements, not communistic but more in the tradition of social
democracy.
Conclusion
The size and variety of the audiences for the play denote
that ideas discussed have a deep resonance with the people today and the play
does have a contemporary feel to it. The questions of democracy and of social
inequality, the treatment of women, wars and revolution and the subjugation of
Ireland is in many senses still with us. The play works on many levels. People without a knowledge
of the Levellers will still get a lot out of it. The more academically minded
person will also have their intellect satisfied. I would recommend the play
wholeheartedly.
[1] LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, or A Discovery of
the main ground, original Cause of all the Slavery in the world, but cheifly in
England: presented by way of a Declaration of many of the welaffected in that County,
to all their poore oppessed Country men of England, &c. First
Published: 1648, anonymous Digger pamphlet;
Source: From George Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard
Winstanley (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965)
[2] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of
Socialism, By David North 24 October 1996
[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx
1852
[4] The Putney Debates (Revolutions Series) Paperback –
22 Oct 2007
[5] —Putney Debates record book 1647, Worcester College,
Oxford, MS 65. Spelling and capitalisation as in the original manuscript.
