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

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СКАЧАТЬ of whose members were drawn from the Independent churches. However, when its radical wing threatened to take control, this too was closed down. Oliver Cromwell, who as the army’s most effective general had for some time been the de facto ruler of England, was now formally acknowledged as its Lord Protector.

      The following five years brought a degree of stability. Cromwell proved himself to be a shrewd, effective, and even principled ruler, imposing a semblance of order on his war-torn country and normalizing relations with England’s neighbours. He held parliaments at which dissident voices were muffled but not entirely silenced. He did make some attempt to police the population’s moral behavior, although this was much exaggerated by subsequent legends, and he worked hard to root out vestigial royalists. Yet, to howls of betrayal from the Presbyterians, he refused to impose a national church of any kind. Cromwell became the first Protestant ruler anywhere to support religious toleration as a matter of principle, and as a result presided over a sectarian flowering unmatched since Luther had first denounced the “fanatics” in Germany in the 1520s. This toleration was not limitless. It did not extend to Catholics, whom the regime saw as a political threat, and in principle anti-Trinitarians were excluded too. Yet the regime had no stomach for actually persecuting anyone except Catholics. Cromwell claimed his toleration could extend even to Muslims (of whom there were none in England). He also ended England’s centuries-old exclusion of Jews, in the hope of a boost to commerce (which happened) and of mass Jewish conversions to Christianity (which did not).

      And yet the republican regimes did not abolish the underpinning structure of a national church. No one was now compelled to attend a parish church, but most continued to do so. Presbyterian structures were allowed to operate. The government vetted ministerial appointments. Most controversially of all, tithes continued to be legally required. Tithes were the makeshift local taxes that supported parish churches and from which, very often, landowners took a considerable cut. Radicals of all kinds railed against this, but tithes, as a symbol of social order, became totemic for the establishment. The suppression of Barebones’s Parliament in 1653 was triggered by an attempt to abolish tithes: for Cromwell, a step too far.

      As lord protector, Cromwell became king in all but name. One of his parliaments pressed him to accept the crown openly. He and the army leadership refused, but when he died in 1658, he was succeeded as lord protector by his son Richard Cromwell; it seemed pretty monarchical. However, during the next eighteen months the republican regime unravelled amid rising panic about sectarianism. The army, which did not trust Richard, deposed him in May 1659. A bewildering succession of attempted governing structures came and went over the following months, until eventually one of the most powerful of the generals accepted the growing clamour for what seemed like the only viable option: restoring the monarchy. Charles II returned to England in 1660, pledging forgiveness and moderation, promises that he did not violate as thoroughly as some had feared. And so in the end the second option failed utterly: it produced a republic that was simply old England in new dress and all too soon clothed itself in its old rags once again.

      The third option, the impossible option, was the republic not of King Oliver but of King Jesus. This England would have been the Levellers’ vision taken up and transfigured, the firstfruits of a world remade under Christ. This was the explicit aim of the so-called Fifth Monarchists, a group who deduced from the Bible that history would comprise four great human empires followed at the last by a fifth, Christ’s kingdom on earth. In the turmoil of the 1640s, it was not foolish to think that the time had finally come. Immediately after the king’s execution, a petition called on the army to encourage the godly to form themselves “into families, churches and corporations, till they thus multiply exceedingly”. As this self-governing godly republic wriggled free from its cocoon, the husk of worldly government and law would simply wither away. In the meantime, those in power should prepare the way by abolishing tithes, imposing ferocious legislation against immorality of all kinds, redistributing land to the poor, radically simplifying the law, and purging the universities. Levellers wanted the rule of the people, but Fifth Monarchists wanted the rule of the godly.¹⁴ The godly who were actually in power regarded these idealists with a certain patronizing tolerance. In return, especially after the failure of Barebones’s Parliament, the Fifth Monarchists reviled their republican rulers as illegitimate. There was even fruitless talk of armed insurrection.

      One of Cromwell’s policies was a particular betrayal: he made peace with the Dutch in 1654 after a two-year naval war over commercial rivalries. This dashed the hopes that radicals had cherished as a result of Cromwell’s genocidal reconquest of Ireland in 1649–50. Perhaps the Dutch, whose tolerance of Arminians showed them to be apostates, would be next. And then? “How durst our Army to be still, now the work is to do abroad?” one Fifth Monarchist wrote in 1653. “Are there no Protestants in France and Germany (even) now under persecution?” Why could God’s own army not ride all the way to Rome?¹⁵ It is easy to laugh at the notion of Cromwell as a new Alexander the Great, setting out to conquer the world. But 150 years later, Napoleon proved that an army hardened by battle and fired by revolutionary zeal can do remarkable things. Cromwell’s army, formidable as it was, would have had what neither Alexander’s nor Napoleon’s did: the certain knowledge that God was for them. Mercifully, it was not to be. The English republic turned into simply another human power, and the revolutionaries’ restless hopes turned elsewhere.

      In 1647, the army chaplain John Saltmarsh argued, borrowing medieval apocalyptic terms, that the age of the Gospel was coming to an end and that a new age, of the Spirit, was dawning. Christians should no more stay in the old church, stuck as it was in the old ways, than Christ’s original disciples should have stayed in his tomb after he had risen from the dead. On that much, a great many people whom the 1640s had stirred into disquiet could agree. But where should they go?

      The Levellers’ ambitions turned out to be a dead end. After the second Civil War, the Army high command suppressed the Leveller agitators, and a failed Leveller mutiny in May 1649 ended the movement as a political force. But their ideas did not die. A Leveller pamphlet a month earlier had asserted that because women had “an interest in Christ equal unto men”, they too should have equal rights. This was, for the moment, a very marginal idea, but the prominence of women among the sectarians was inescapable. Another advocate of women’s political equality, Anna Trapnel, became one of the best-known Fifth Monarchist prophets. In a religious free market, talent can sometimes rise to the top regardless of gender.

      Later in 1649, another pamphleteer, Gerrard Winstanley, laid claim to the “true Leveller’s standard”. Winstanley’s group, the so-called Diggers, had occupied a plot of land that had been shown to him in a dream and proposed to work it together, holding all property and produce in common. This now looks like Communism, but for Winstanley it was a prophetic act, prefiguring “a new heaven, and a new earth” in which

      none shall lay claim to any creature, and say, This is mine, and that is yours, This is my work, that is yours. . . . There shall be no buying nor selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man, for the earth is the Lord’s. . . . Every one shall work in love: one with, and for another.

      The commune’s purpose was to show the world the true meaning of the freedom for which the war had been fought, for “freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down”.¹⁶

      The Diggers’ experiment was soon forcibly broken up, and Winstanley eventually returned to a life of genteel respectability, but other subversives were pushing in different directions. In the summer of 1649, Abiezer Coppe, a preacher of questionable mental stability, produced a book claiming that “Sword levelling, or digging-levelling” were

      but shadowes of most terrible, yet great and glorious good things to come. Behold, behold, behold, I the eternal God, the Lord of Hosts, who am that mighty Leveller, am coming . . . to Level the Hills with the Valleys, and to lay the Mountains low.

      Coppe had his sights on the “plaguy holinesse” of Presbyterians and Independents alike, people whose religion СКАЧАТЬ