Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ its denial of the network of parish churches; the army, forever on the move, was by definition outside that network. Its chaplains were under its own discipline, and its soldiers, risking their lives in God’s service, had their own voices. We have testimony to this from Richard Baxter, one of the most humane pastoral theologians of his age. Baxter had believed that Parliament’s war was being fought in defence of “our old principles . . . only to save the Parliament and Kingdom from papists and delinquents, and to remove the dividers, that the King might again return to his Parliament”. But shortly after the battle of Naseby, he visited the army’s encampment:

      Among Cromwell’s soldiers, I found a new face of things which I never dreamed of: I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their intention to subvert both Church and State. Independency and Anabaptistry were most prevalent; Antinomianism and Arminianism were equally distributed.⁹

      Something shockingly new was brewing in the army’s ranks. The “old principles” were no longer to be had.

      So when the king finally surrendered in 1646, he faced a divided gaggle of victors: a staunchly Presbyterian and increasingly powerless Westminster Assembly; an army seething with radicalism, keen to fulfil its providential destiny, and unwilling to demobilize until its soldiers’ substantial arrears were paid; and Parliament, trying to balance the books and hold the ring. The king, trying to divide his enemies, spun out round after round of talks. As he did so, the mirage of a settled Presbyterian church vanished over the horizon. Many parishes and some regions did set up Presbyterian institutions, yet participation in this supposedly national church was essentially voluntary. Every parish church had become de facto Independent, whether it used that freedom to submit to Presbyterian discipline, to stick to something very like the supposedly banned Prayer Book, or to explore wilder shores.

      Meanwhile, the army’s frustration was growing. The symbolic point at which the political initiative passed from Parliament to army was 4 June 1647, when the army seized the king to forestall any attempt to impose a deal against their wishes. Those wishes were at this point still a work in progress. The leading officers were willing to contemplate a political settlement that permitted a fair degree of religious toleration but otherwise looked just about recognizably like pre-crisis England. For many of the men, however, the time for that had passed.

      Enter the group known to history as the Levellers, justly famous as the world’s first advocates of representative democracy. Their ambitions were first articulated in a series of pamphlets published in 1645 and 1646, but in 1647 the movement was taken up in earnest by the army’s rank and file and reinforced by London-based petitions that gathered tens of thousands of signatures. The Levellers demanded that Parliaments be elected every two years, by something not too far from universal male suffrage, along with freedom of religion and equality under the law. As to the king, some openly called for a republic. They certainly refused to cede any real power to the man who had “intended our bondage, and brought a cruell War upon us”.¹⁰

      After that war, merely restoring the status quo felt inadequate. The Levellers in the army declared that their wartime service made plain “at how high a rate we value our just freedom”. In any case, the past was irrecoverable. A new world needs new rules. Even some royalists were tempted by Leveller ideas; if you feared parliamentary tyranny, regular elections with a reformed franchise had an appeal.¹¹

      Underpinning all of this was an explicitly Protestant conviction that this was an apocalyptic crisis. The living God who acts providentially in history had renewed his Gospel through Martin Luther. Antichrist had mustered all his forces in response. Now this had come to a head in a catastrophic war that had convulsed all Europe and had at last come to the Gospel’s last outpost, Britain, at earth’s westernmost end. Finally, at terrible cost, victory had been won, and power providentially given to God’s own army. It was a hinge in the world’s history. God was about to do something new.

      So the Levellers rejected Presbyterianism as “a compulsive mastership, or aristocratical government, over the people”. They envisaged a government with no authority over religion at all, insisting that it was a sin to accept any externally imposed orthodoxy instead of “what our Consciences dictate to be the mind of God”. Respectable Calvinists generally held that orthodoxy was policed by the scholarship of university-trained ministers. But what if the universities had become self-serving guilds that excluded inconvenient truths? What use is book learning when the Spirit of God is at work? The Presbyterians’ rule, claimed the radical army chaplain John Saltmarsh, was that “God must not speak till man give him leave.” Saltmarsh instead appealed to “the infinitely abounding spirit of God, which blows when and where it listeth”. The Levellers felt that breath on their necks.¹²

      They could never have succeeded. Even if, impossibly, they had secured truly free elections, they would have been routed. Their awkward argument that Catholics and royalists should be disenfranchised shows that they knew it. But in any case, the discussions were cut short. It does not do to leave a live king out of your calculations. In December 1647, Charles escaped and gathered fresh supporters. Old royalists were joined by some Presbyterians, who had concluded that the army’s radical ways were a more serious threat than the king. A second civil war ensued, which lasted for much of 1648, although Charles himself was swiftly recaptured. The new royalist coalition was potentially formidable but was disparate and disorganized, and the New Model Army did what it did best. Local revolts were put down one by one. A Scottish royalist army was taken unawares by a slightly smaller English force at Preston in Lancashire and beaten into a bloody surrender.

      Now the army, officers and men alike, were unforgiving. King Charles was a war criminal, a “man of blood” who bore responsibility for his subjects’ deaths. By restarting a war he had already lost, he had openly defied God. There was talk of forcing him to abdicate in favour of one of his sons, but even now such a compromise was not Charles’s style. He tried to strike a deal with the parliamentary leadership over the army’s heads. A parliamentary vote on 5 December that suggested it might happen triggered an open coup. The army moved into Westminster. Forty-five MPs were briefly imprisoned, and nearly 300 more were excluded, leaving a hard core of about 70 sympathetic to the army’s views. Eventually, another 130 or so would be allowed to trickle back into the body known, cruelly but fairly, as the Rump Parliament. By then, it had already carried out the task for which it was created. It put its sovereign lord, King Charles I, on trial for treason, and on 30 January 1649, cut off his head.

Journeys into the Unknown

      The king’s death opened up three possible ways forward. One was to conclude that with this exceptionally awful king gone, normality of some kind could resume. This was the path chosen by the Scots, who proclaimed the dead king’s eighteen-year-old son King Charles II as soon as the news from London reached them. The new “king”, in Continental exile, was reluctant to accept the filleted crown that Presbyterian Scotland was offering him, but even royal beggars cannot be choosers, and in 1650 he landed in Scotland to claim it. Relations with his Scottish subjects were not warm. Nor was England’s response. The army, under Cromwell’s leadership, invaded, defeating the Scots royalists in a series of brutally effective battles. In 1651, Charles himself narrowly escaped to peripatetic exile once again. So the first option, a restored monarchy, failed, but not utterly. It slept until the second had run its course.

      The second possible response, taken by the new regime in London, was to reform the state’s abuses while still maintaining a degree of continuity. Following the king’s execution, a republic was declared, but the purged House of Commons insisted in February 1649 that it was “fully resolved to maintain the fundamental laws of this nation”.¹³ It was in that spirit that the republican leadership experimented with a series of governing structures over the following decade. The Rump Parliament, ineffective and increasingly friendless, was forcibly dissolved by the army in 1653 when it tried to make its own rule perpetual. The army then made a brief and quixotic attempt СКАЧАТЬ