It is hard to believe as Michael Braddick points out in his
excellent review[1] that this book is the first
full-length study of the Levellers since 1961. Having said that John Rees new
book more than makes up for that. The Leveller Revolution is a tremendous
advance in the study of the Leveller movement and its place in the English
Revolution.
Over the last five years or so interest in the Levellers,
both mainstream and in academia has grown significantly. The Leveller
Revolution follows on from a growing number of studies such as Rachel Foxley's
book The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. The
Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the
English Revolution, Vernon, Elliot, Baker, P to name just two.
Media Interest
This interest has been reflected in response to Rees's book
from mainstream and academic media with reviews in the Financial Times, TLS,
and The Spectator magazine, just to name a few. Why the interest as Braddick
poses? One reason being is that the left learning sections of the media inside
and outside academia have always had a fascination with the Levellers. The
right seeks to tie the Levellers to the Labour Party and dampen any talk of Revolution [2].
Another reason is that the problems that the Levellers
grappled within the 17th century are unfortunately are alive
and kicking in our century. The third reason for such interest in the book and
this is not to denigrate the book which is of a very high standard or the
integrity of the author, but the book does appear at a very precipitous time in
so much that capitalism is going through a great crisis and what usually
happens is that working people start looking for answers to today's problems in
the past. It is, therefore, important for a historian to present and objective
account of any subject they write about. Rees manages a pretty good job.
Much of the groundwork for this new book was done in Rees's
PhD thesis[3]. Unfortunately, his new book is only
partially based on that. However, nonetheless, it deepens our understanding of
these revolutionaries and most importantly counters decades of conservative
revisionist historiography. The book works well on several levels. It does
not give a general history of the English Revolution, but it does give a
significant understanding of the Revolution that coursed through 17th century
England. It reads like a novel but maintains a very high academic standard.
Second, only to the Russian Revolution, I doubt there has
been a decade of revolutionary struggle that equals 1640-1650 of the English Revolution.
This decade produced a revolutionary army the likes the world had not seen. An
entire army had, in another historical first, elected its representatives from
every regiment, challenged their commanders and altered the entire political
direction of the Revolution.
A republic was fought for and established. The House of
Lords was abolished. A king was executed by his people for the first time in
history. As for the national church, it was reorganised, and its leader, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, tried and executed.
As the regicide, Thomas Harrison said, "It was not, a
thing done in a corner." A group of revolutionaries was born that sought
to establish a society based on communistic lines, and their theoretical
writings and perspectives proceeded the development of Marxism by some 250
years.
The Levellers
The political movement known as the Levellers appeared in
the early days of the Revolution. Despite small in numbers, they played a
pivotal role in the character and direction of the Revolution.
While it is correct to say, the Levellers appeared during
the revolutionary decade 1640-1650 Rees has opposed the prevailing view that
they had no history before that. This point has proved most controversial
because up and till now there has been little evidence to counter this view.
And it is not just conservative historians that have this view.
The book challenges historians to study more of how the
Levellers organised. While acknowledging the difficulty researching underground
activity from this far in the past Rees believes it is still possible and backs
this assumption up with evidence and presents it in a very convincing way.
Rees's book also counters some historians who have tried to
present the Levellers as just a loose collection of radicals. Rees provides extensive
evidence to the contrary. While not being a party in the modern sense, they
nonetheless were a well organised and strongly coherent group. One strength of
the book is how Rees traces how the Levellers used secret printing presses and
how they utilised churches as bases for their political activity. The
congregation of these churches were not passive bystanders but circulated
radical Leveller pamphlets and books.
As Rees puts "by 1646, the group' both in the eyes of
their opponents and in the internal ideological support they deliver to each
other, is a functioning collective organisation' (pp.142-4). Rees correctly centres the activity of the Levellers around
its leader John Lilburne. From a very early stage in the Revolution, Lilburne
saw the importance of underground printing [4].
In a few short years, Lilburne had become widely known,
especially in London as a radical against the King. He was imprisoned by
Charles I for distributing illegal pamphlets in the late 1630s.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the book is Rees's
uncovering of the huge amount of material that was printed illegally by the
Levellers. Rees is convinced that these radical pamphlets pushed the Revolution
in a leftward direction. The early part of the Revolution saw the growth of a
republican movement with Henry Marten, who was a Leveller sympathiser being the
first MP to advocate a republic.
To describe the movement as a party is perhaps premature,
but nonetheless, they took on many characteristics of a party that would not
look out of place today. As Rees says, there was then a 'dense fabric of
political opposition in the capital during the early days of the Revolution,
and in some cases from before that, from which the Levellers emerged as an
organised current. Underground activity in churches and taverns, combined with
the secret printing and petitioning activity … provided schooling in organised
politics which would feed into the foundations of the Leveller movement. The
point where meetings in churches and taverns spill over into mass street
demonstrations is possibly an early decisive moment of transition. This is the
point where clandestine or semi-clandestine activity becomes irrefutably public
opposition to established authority' (p.65).
Rees's research has given us a far closer approximation as
to the class character of the Levellers. While it is correct to characterise
them as revolutionaries, they were a movement of the petit bourgeoisie and not
the what could be loosely termed at the time the working class.
For the Russian Marxist Evgeny Pashukanis "the
Levellers undoubtedly were a petit-bourgeois party. While some historians
protest that capitalist relations were not that developed to describe them as
such, I believe that there were sufficient bourgeois-capitalist relationships,
at the 1640s to warrant such a claim[5].
Their call for suffrage was not universal, although even
their call for a wider franchise was a revolutionary demand. They were a
minority and could not mobilise the one class that would have given the poorer
sections of society against Cromwell and his bourgeois allies. Much of their
social composition was made up of the "middling sort" of lesser
gentry, merchants, and craftsmen that made up the same social base as Cromwell.
Historiography and Revisionism
It would not be too controversial to say that Historians
over a long period have underestimated the size and importance of the Levellers
and other radical groups to the English Revolution.
The nineteenth-century Whig historians such as Thomas
Babington Macaulay was deeply hostile to any revolutionary movement. This
conservative historian had profound difficulty in understanding the
revolutionary actions of Oliver Cromwell or for that matter, the class forces
he represented. He could only offer the 'incurable duplicity' of the latter of
Charles 1st.
Macaulay reason for the radicalism in the army as 'the refractory
temper of the soldiers', who were 'for the most part composed of zealous
republicans'.Many historians followed Macaulay's lead into the 20th
century in dismissing the Levellers. Probably the most important aspect of this
book is to challenge this revisionist onslaught.
Current historiography has certainly carried over much of
the worst traits of Whig attitudes towards the Levellers. Some have ignored
them completely, such as John Adamson others have portrayed them as having
little or no influence on the outcome of the war. John Morrill mentioned them
twice in his book The Revolt of the Provinces.
There have been oppositional voices. Edward Vallance has
uncovered a persistent influence of John Lilburne's politics on radicals in the
1700s. He concludes 'historians have undervalued the degree of intellectual
sympathy and continuity between the radicalism of the seventeenth century and
that of the eighteenth'.[6]
The Conservative orientated revisionist is downplaying of
the significance of the Levellers was a by-product of their assault on Marxist
historiography. It is a shame that Rees does not go into greater detail the
political basis of such revisionism. In his PhD thesis, he believes "the
revisionist challenge to liberal and left interpretations of the English
Revolution synchronised with almost suspicious exactitude with the end of the
post-war boom and the abandonment of the welfare state consensus. This change,
beginning in the mid-1970s, achieved its electoral representation when Margaret
Thatcher became prime minister of Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan president
of the US in 1980[7]
He continues "In a way, revisionism was never only
about the English Revolution. Very similar arguments were deployed at much the
same time about the French and the Russian Revolutions. Moreover, the
revisionists depended on a wider conservative turn in social theory. The
Althusserian school of the 1970s, which became the post-structuralist school,
which became the post-modernist school which fed the 'linguistic turn',
provided a theoretical tool-box for the revisionists and those that came after
them.
Perhaps the most often cited attack on the Levellers is that
they had no representation in the army. This downplaying of the army
radicalism was led by Mark Kishlansky, Rees answers this "In my
opinion the revisionist insistence that the Levellers were exterior to the army
is overstated. Many Levellers were of the army themselves. Lilburne had
an exemplary and widely publicised military record. But Lilburne was not alone
in this. Leveller William Allen served in Holles' regiment. Leveller printer
William Larner served as a sutler in Lord Robartes' regiment. Thomas Prince
fought in the London Trained Bands until he was injured at Newbury in 1643.
John Harris ran an Army printing press. Leveller ally Henry Marten had close
engagement in military affairs in London and eventually raised his own regiment
in Berkshire. Thomas Rainsborough and his brother William were Leveller
sympathisers. Edward Sexby was a central figure in the actions of the
Agitators. Army chaplains Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison supported the
Levellers. This list is indicative but far from exhaustive. It does not include
most of the figures directly involved in the mutinies at Ware in 1647, and at
Bishopsgate and Burford, both in 1649. These connections add weight to Foxley's
observation that the Putney debates' marked not the end but the beginning of a
potentially fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals' and
that this 'reverses the picture painted by the standard revisionist
historiography' "(p. 158)[8].
Roll of Women
I am glad that Rees spends some time on the role of Leveller
women during the English Revolution. Rees explains that not only 'mechanicals'
could be found preaching but a significant number of women (p.63).
History and for that matter, historians have not been kind
to women who took part in political activity on both sides of the English Civil
War. There is a dearth of material on women's struggle now. As far as I can
ascertain no major biography exists of two of the most important Leveller women
Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne.
Women Levellers mounted large-scale demonstrations and
organised petitions in favour of social equality. They were met with differing
levels of brutality depending on which class they belonged to. Overall
middle-class women were treated with derision, but largely no violence was
committed against them. This is not the case with the poorer sections of the
women's movement who were often treated severely by MP's and soldiers alike."
Many were thrown into prison, mental institutions, or workhouses. Middle-class
women were simply escorted away by soldiers and told to 'go back to women's
work". One MP told them to go home and wash their dishes, to which
one of the petitioners replied, "Sir, we scarce have any dishes left to
wash"' (pp.290-1).
Leveller women did not fight just as individuals. According
to historian Gaby Malhberg the wives of leading figures of the English
revolution "formed their networks, discussing political issues in the
absence of their husbands. Edmund Ludlow recorded, for instance, that he had
little hope of a pardon from the King because the wife of his fellow republican
Sir Henry Vane had informed Elizabeth 'that she was assured [General George]
Monke's wife had sayd she would seeke to the King, upon her knees, that Sir
Henry Vane, Major Generall [John] Lambert and myself should be hanged."
This extraordinary Revolution radicalised many women into
political action. As Rees points out one of John Lilburne's most important
collaborators, Katherine Chidley, also emerged from the context of the gathered
churches. She published a remarkable defence of independent congregations, and
religious leadership by the socially inferior, including women, becoming a key
figure in Leveller publishing and organising (pp.38-40).
It is not an accident that Rees who is a radical today, has
donated so much of his time to the Leveller movement. In his latest book, he
states "I have tried to…examine the Levellers as a political
movement integrating activists from different constituencies, and creating
still broader alliances with other political currents, for the joint pursuance
of revolutionary ends. (Rees, The Leveller Revolution, p. xx)
In many ways, this is the perspective of the current SWP.
Rees who is an ex-member of the Socialist Workers Party SWP) still observes its
attitude towards historical events. The SWP from the very beginning of their
development adopted the British Communist Party approach to historical events.
The English Labour history industry has presented several books and essays that
see an unbroken historical line of English radicalism.
As Ann Talbot succinctly put it "the Communist Party
sponsored a form of "People's History, which is typified by A.L. Morton's
People's History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to
supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of
political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which
provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine
revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill
was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who
were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of
Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr".
This viewpoint has even been adopted by historians who have
no attachment to the SWP, Ed Vallance's book A Radical History of Britain and
David Horspool's The English Rebel are two that come to mind. It is a perspective that says the English working class is inherently radical and
revolutionary and does not need a Marxist scientific world outlook.
To conclude, this is a very good book. It re-establishes the
Levellers as the leaders of the left-wing of the English Revolution. It
deserves a wide readership and should be read in conjunction with Rees' PhD Leveller
organisation and the dynamic of the English Revolution.
[1] Mike Braddick-Times Literary
Supplement-March 24th, 2017
[2] Jeremy Corbyn is taking Labour
back to the 1640s-David Horspool-The Spectator-Jan 2017.
[3] http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf
[4] See Secret Printing, the Crisis
of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War-David R Como, Past and Present 2007
[5] Evgeny Pashukanis Revolutionary
Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927)
[6] E Vallance, 'Reborn John? p. 21
[7] Leveller organisation and the
dynamic of the English Revolution John Rees Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths,
University of London, 2014.
[8] Review of The Levellers:
Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution-Rachel Foxley by John Rees- http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1519
