Zagorin, P. A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution.

London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1965.

INTRODUCTION

he revolutionary decades, 1640-60, are of the highest significance

T in the history both of English and of European political philo­

sophy. In England, no other period of comparable brevity has
borne so splendid a harvest. There appeared then all the important
writings of Hobbes and Harrington, of the Levellers and Winstanley.
That the two former have a place in the general history of European, as
well as English, political thought, no one will deny. That the Levellers
and Winstanley have such a place also, and a high one, is, I think, now
being increasingly recognized. Moreover, the occasion of great and
unprecedented times, when the old order was being shaken to its founda­
tions, prompted small men, men who would have been mute in quieter
days, to take pen in hand. Hobbes, no doubt, would have written a
system whether he were a schoolman with Occam o f a reformer with
James Mill. But only in revolutionary years were men moved to rush
into print who had previously brooded in silence over their Bibles and
their grievances. So it is that in hundreds of pamphlets of social protest
and proposals for reforms we hear the authentic voices of the small
trader, the artisan, and the peasant of the mid-seventeenth century.
And thus the political thought of the time comprises a double richness :
there is the passionate and many-sided agitation of the little-known and
unknown pamphleteers, and there is the more systematic ratiocination
of the leading theorists. Together, these accomplished the preview or the
consummation of ideas that had a superb role to play for a century and
a half, and more, after 1660. Their achievements made English political
thought the most advanced in Europe at that time. Indeed, most of the
leading principles which inspired the eighteenth-century revolutions in
Europe and America received their first commanding expression during
the years when the Long Parliament defeated the king and Cromwell
set up his power.
The political ideas which we are to consider here are democratic,
radical, and royalist. To suggest a criterion for the last of these offers no
difficulty. Royalist ideas are those whose main intent it was to vindicate
b 1
 INTRODUCTION
the constitutional claims of the crown and to provide a theoretical justi­
fication for monarchy. The question of democratic and radical thought
is more complicated, and also more important, for it is the theories in
these categories with which we shall be largely concerned. What is
meant by democratic and radical is determined by the view which is
taken here concerning the nature o f political philosophy. It has often
been held that the problems of philosophy are eternal and unchanging,
and that the history of any of its branches is merely the record of how
the same problems have been dealt with down the ages. On such a view,
political philosophy would have as one of its problems, for example, the
relation between the state and the individual, and its history would con­
sist partly of the treatments which this has received at the hands of
particular thinkers. But further reflection, I think, will disclose the
illusory character of this notion. In the case of the problem just in­
stanced, the political theorist does not meditate on The State as such.
His concern, rather, is with some historically-determined political order,
which is the only state he can know. So the problems of political philo­
sophy are not the same but different problems, and the state of Plato’s
meditations is not the state of Aquinas or of Hobbes. This suggests one
of the principal reasons why utopian writings differ. For though a
thinker may intend his utopia to be the best of all possible communities
eternal reason can devise, he is, in reality, prescribing a political order
which we can neither comprehend nor assess except as we know its
relevance to the historically-given and, therefore, transient problems of
his own time.
It is from this standpoint that the democratic and radical doctrines
of the following essay are to be discriminated. I have in mind those
doctrines, which, consciously or not, were in opposition either to the
traditional order as it appeared before the revolution, or to traditional
methods of thinking about that order. Ultimately, the results of the
work done under each of these headings came to the same thing, or
complemented one another : that is to say, they justified, or advocated
acquiescence in, or demanded extension of the far-reaching changes
which the great struggles of the 1640s brought about. Specifically,
among the ideas to be looked at are those, for example, which upheld
the franchise as every man’s right or defended a republic as superior to
monarchy; which vindicated the revolutionary governments that sup­
planted the rule of Charles I or founded a theory of politics on the
subjective claims of the individual. In the context of seventeenth-century
England, and of Europe, too, these were perturbing and essentially
inimical to the inherited order of things.
Some of them were identified and denounced by seventeenth-century
royalists. The most notable instance is the decree passed by the Uni­
versity of Oxford in July 1683 against ‘certain pernicious books, and
2
 INTRODUCTION
damnable doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of princes, their
state, and government, and of all human society’. Twenty-seven opinions
are singled out for condemnation, among which are many of the
dramatis personae of this study. ‘Wicked kings and tyrants ought to be
put to death ; and if the judges and inferior magistrates will not do their
office, the power of the sword devolves to the people.’ ‘King Charles I.
was lawfully put to death, and his murderers were the blessed instru­
ments of God’s glory in their generations.’ ‘Self-preservation is the
fundamental law of nature, and supersedes the obligation of all others,
whensoever they stand in competition with it.’ ‘Possession and strength
give a right to govern, and success in a cause. . . proclaims it to be lawful
and just. To pursue it is to comply with the will of God, because it is to
follow the conduct of his providence.’ ‘The powers of this world are
usurpations upon the prerogative of Jesus Christ, and it is the duty of
God’s people to destroy them in order to the setting Christ upon his
throne.’1
Something now requires to be said concerning the affiliation of these
and the other ideas examined in this study to the tradition out of which
they emerge. That they are innovative, in the main, I have no doubt.
Yet some of them still retain striking traces of the religious presupposi­
tions upon which political thinking was for so many centuries conduct­
ed. It would be quite misleading to ignore these traces, as has sometimes
been done in an effort to exhibit the political thought of the revolution
as essentially secularized.2 But it would be equally misleading to regard
the revolution’s thought, particularly the denunciations of contemporary
social injustice, as a mere echo of the old Christian condemnation o f the
acquisitive society.3 We have to do with something more complex than
either of these evaluations would allow for, a complexity which is
determined by the special character of the seventeenth century itself.
This century is, I think, the critical stage in the shift from the medieval
to the distinctively modem way of comprehending the world.4 In those
hundred years, the declining theological-transcendental mode of thought
was at last disintegrated, and the first phase of the naturalistic-immanen-
tal mode of thought consummated. It was the century of the ‘new
philosophy’ created by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes, and of the new
science created by Galileo and Newton. It was the age when the denun-
1 Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, ed. D. Wilkins, 4 vols., London, 1737,
IV, 610-12.
2 Cf., e.g., D. Fetegorsky, Left-wing democracy in the English civil war, London,
1940, and C. Hill and E. Dell, The good old cause, London, 1950.
3 Cf., e.g., W. Schenk, The concern fo r social justice in the Puritan revolution,
London, 1948.
4 Cf. H. Wolfson, The philosophy o f Spinoza, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1934, II, Ch.
XXI; B. Willey, The seventeenth century background, London, 1934; and P. Hazard,
La crise de la conscience européenne, Paris, 1935.
3
 INTRODUCTION
dation of scholasticism, inaugurated earlier, reached its climax ; when
political economy, one of the most profane of studies’ experienced its
first real development ; and when religious passion was giving place to
that Augustan calm which held enthusiasm on sacred subjects in con­
tempt.
This shift, however, was not accomplished smoothly. And therefore
we often find in seventeenth-century writers strange combinations of
discrepant beliefs, the essence of whose opposition lay in the growing
disharmony between the claims of religious thought and those implied
by science.1 These two departments had become ‘divided and distin­
guished worlds’.®If some minds sought for eclectic solutions to bridge
the widening chasm, others succumbed, in their perplexity, to a kind of
disorientation which is exposed for us in John Donne’s familiar lament
that the ‘new philosophy’ had deprived the old religious outlook of
coherence and credibility.1*34Throughout the century we may see this
disharmony at work, and we may see, as well, the conclusive triumph
of the mechanistic philosophy toward which the science of the time
pointed. Religion, accordingly, was forced to accommodate itself to
this momentous fact, and to give ground.
Now in English political thought, too, the seventeenth-century dis­
harmony was operative. Here it was exemplified by the naturalistic
notions covertly inhabiting doctrines which were inspired by religion,
by the tendency of these latter to become secularized, and by the germ
of traditional moral teaching which gave birth to claims that were really
new and without precedent. Confronted by these conflicting elements,
we must not omit to give them due consideration. At the same time, we
must be careful to distinguish plainly the main line of development.
That this latter conforms to the movement of seventeenth-century
thought as a whole, there can be no doubt. Political ideas were becoming
detached from the religious associations in which they had been steeped,
and were taking on a decided secular character. In this process, it is the
revolution that marks the critical moment. The struggles of those two
decades provided the opportunity to push doctrines to their conclusions,
and the result was a transformation in the tone of political thought.
This is obviously true of the work of Harrington and Hobbes, for their
affiliation with the most advanced philosophic currents of their day was
unambiguous and undisguised. It is no less true of the writings most
immediately influenced by that strong religion which, despite all its
varieties, we may here generally call Puritan. Puritanism, it has been well
pointed out, has affinities with science in its impatience of traditional
1 Cf. D. Bush, ‘Two roads to truth: science and religion in the early seventeenth
century,’ English literary history, VIII, 2.
* The phrase is, o f course, Sir Thomas Browne’s (Religio medici, I, xxxiv).
* An anatomie o f the world. The first anniversary, lines 205-14.
4
 INTRODUCTION
authority and in its stress on progress, utility, and reform.1 And the
more radical the political beliefs were of those men whose ultimate
inspiration was Puritanism, the more these affinities tended to show
themselves. Of this fact, Gerrard Winstanley is a conspicuous illustra­
tion. The ultimate ideal consequence, though it does not, of course, hold
empirically for all the radicals of the period, was the bursting and the
sloughing off of the religious husk in which their thought had germin­
ated.
Our study begins with the Levellers because only with them did the
ideas present in germ at the revolution’s outset receive a really wide and
thoroughgoing application. Prior to the Levellers’ appearance, how­
ever, there were several competent writers on Parliament’s side who
ought briefly to be noticed because of the new positions they were main­
taining.
The most important was Henry Parker, perhaps the ablest of Parlia­
ment’s publicists, but one whose views were more extreme than those
entertained by the majority of his party. In his Observations upon some
o f his Majesties late Answers and Expresses (1642), Parker made out a
case for the sovereignty of Parliament without the king,12 insisting that
Parliament ‘is neither one, nor few, it is indeed the State itself.3But for
the development of democratic ideas, such affirmations as these were of
small significance in comparison with his declaration that political
power derives from the agreements of men, that the ‘Charter of nature’
entitles all men to safety, and that ‘there bee . . . tacite trusts and
reservations in all publike commands, though of the most absolute
nature, that can be supposed’.4 It was these which assisted the growth
of democratic doctrines in his own day and were of some influence on
the Levellers.®
Another writer who went beyond the general Parliamentarian stand­
point was Samuel Rutherford, a resplendent ornament among the
Scottish Presbyterians. Rutherford’s main ideas were not especially
original,® but he held some notions whose effect was to redefine out of
all possibility of recognition the traditional role of monarchy in Eng­
land. In his chief political work, Lex, Rex (1644), he assei/fed that the
king is merely the people’s creation, and altogether denied any principle
of legitimacy, affirming that the crown passes not by descent but by
1 D. Bush, op. cit., 89.
* Cf. W. K. Jordan, Men o f substance, Chicago, 1942, Ch. V; M. Judson, The crisis
o f the constitution, New Brunswick, 1949, 429-30; J. W. Allen, English political
thought, 1603-1644, London, 1938, 426-35. Professor Allen has needlessly compli­
cated Parker’s views.
8 Observations, 34.
4 Ibid., 1, 4.
* Cf. M. Judson, op. cit., 416-17.
8 Cf. J. W. Allen, op. cit., 424.
5
 INTRODUCTION
popular choice from one generation to the next. No nation, he said, is
bound either to one royal line or to monarchy, nor can any generation
bind the conscience of its posterity to any family or to kingship.1
Rutherford declared, too, that the people’s safety is the supreme law,
taking precedence over all other laws.2 Resistance to an unjust king, he
said, is not resistance to a king at all, but to a tyrant.® He also glanced
at the possibility of popular resistance to Parliament, and asserted that
if Commons ‘abuse their fiduciary power to the destruction of these
Shires and Corporations, who put the trust on them . . . the people
may . . . resist them, annul their Commissions and rescind their acts,
and denude them of fiduciary power... There is nothing, however, to
show that Rutherford ever considered such a development capable of
occurring, and, indeed, in 1644 he was unlikely to do so. Despite his
pronounced aristocratic bias—he seems never to have meant by the
‘people’ anything but the pars valeniior—Rutherford’s ideas could be
made to serve purposes he himself abhorred, and a few years later, the
Levellers occasionally culled supporting passages from Lex, Rex.
The Levellers’ coming introduces a new force. They are the first left-
wing party in English history. They had their press and propaganda,
their theorists and agitators, and an independent programme. In 1647,
when they first began to function as a separate movement, the conflict
of interests present on the parliamentary side from the outset was at
last irreparably dividing it. The triumph over the king in the first civil
war had removed the danger of Parliament’s defeat and opened the way
for a split among the victors. The coalition made up of peers and
landed gentlemen, rich merchants, middle and small traders, craftsmen,
as well as some copyholders and other tenants, was not a firm one at
any time. To the differences based on economic interests were added
others, equally important, rising from the refusal of Presbyterians to
tolerate religious opinions other than their own. In the ranks of the
Independents and the sects, where sprang most of the opposition to
Presbyterian persecution, there had grown up deep divisions also, some
men desiring political and social changes which seemed menacing and
visionary to others.
It was from the middle and small people, economically speaking,
among the adherents o f Independency and the sects that the Leveller
leaders won their supporters. To conservatives, victory over the king
seemed to conclude the revolution. To the Levellers, it seemed to begin
it. Many of the former were reluctant revolutionaries from the outset
and took more than one look back along the furrow they felt forced to
plough. The latter, in contrast, had shouted hymns and hallelujahs
while they girded on their swords to defend Israel. To them, the real
1 Lex, rex, 1-78. 4 Ibid., 218-19.
8 Ibid., 212-13. 4 Ibid., 152.
6
 INTRODUCTION
meaning of the war lay still unfulfilled in 1647. On one aspect of this
meaning, they were in agreement with the aristocratic Independents,
Cromwell and his friends. Cromwell defined liberty of conscience with
less latitude than the Levellers, but while its fate remained in doubt
owing to the sway of Presbyterian gentlemen over Commons, neither he
nor the Levellers could rest. Yet to the latter the meaning of the war
included not only liberty of conscience, but the redress of political and
economic grievances. What they called grievances did not mostly seem
so, however, to aristocratic Independents. Hence, by the end of 1647,
despite their common advocacy of toleration, the Levellers were separ­
ated from the Cromwellians by a fundamental difference. And because
the Levellers had succeeded in winning many supporters in the rank and
file of the army, Cromwell’s position was seriously endangered.
The Leveller movement arose mainly to prosecute a political and
economic programme. For this reason, its identity did not consist so
much in its broad tolerationist views as in its left-wing political ideas.
For brief periods during 1647 and 1648, it was in uneasy alliance with
Cromwell and his followers. But the latter were unwilling partners.
They joined with the Levellers when they could not avoid it because
they required a counterbalance against the Presbyterians. They broke
with the Levellers as soon as they could and suppressed them in the army
and out of it. Yet for a time, the Leveller movement was a considerable
force. Its leaders, John Lilbume, Richard Overton, William Walwyn,
and John Wildman, could number their adherents by the thousands.
And in the days of their defeat, the Levellers’ last Agreement o f the
People bore witness still to the wondrous hopes the English revolution
had kindled in the minds and hearts of many men.