THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Lilburne endured five separate periods of imprisonment as the various provoker of Episcopal, Presbyterian,
parliamentary, and republican displeasure. In February 1649 he published an address to Parliament, a reiteration of
Leveller demands coupled with a stinging attack on the Council of State’s proposed legal moves against his party.
Englands New Chains Discovered: or The serious apprehensions of a part of the People, in behalf of the
Commonwealth accuses the Council of acting against the interests of a free nation by lumping together all opposition
‘with such appellations as they knew did most distaste the People, such as Levellers, Jesuites, Anarchists, Royalists,
names both contradictory in themselves and altogether groundlesse in relation to men so reputed; meerly relying for
release thereof upon the easinesse and credulity of the People’. In his later apologia The Just Defence of John Lilburn,
against Such as Charge Him with Turbulency of Spirit (1653), he spiritedly contends that he had suffered in the past
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for ‘the right, freedom, safety and well-being of every particular man, woman and child in England’ as the would-be
preserver of ‘ancient laws and ancient rights’. For the future, he urges every democratic citizen ‘continually to watch
over the rights and liberties of his country, and to see that they are violated upon none, though the most vile and
dissolute of men’.
The writings of William Walwyn (1600-80) and Gerrard Winstanley (?1609-76) stress the importance of
brotherhood and the militant force of Christian love as a means of achieving a radical change in social relationships.
Walwyn’s pamphlet, The Power of Love of 1643, is steeped in the prophetic utterance of the Bible, but it also
represents an explosion of anger at the manifest contrasts between rich and poor, between outward vanity and the
burning inner light of faith. Although he was himself a prosperous merchant of gentleman stock, Walwyn insists in
his preliminary address ‘To the Reader’ that the moral reformer must note ‘the whole body of religious people
themselves, and in the very Churches ... view them well, and see whether they have not this worlds goods ... and the
wants and distresses of the poore will testifie that the love of God they have not’. A related anger at the anomalies of
class privilege and class deprivation surfaces in Walwyn’s attack on those who suppose that all good learning stems
from universities: ‘And as for learning, as learning goes now adaies, what can any judicious man make of it, but as an
Art to deceive and abuse the understandings of men, and to mislead them to their ruine? if it be not so, whence comes
it that ... University men throughout the Kingdome in great numbers are opposers of the welfare of the Commonwealth,
and are pleaders for absurdities in government, arguers for tyranny, and corrupt the judgements of their
neighbours?’ Now that the Scriptures are in English, he insists, ‘why may not one that understands English onely,
both understand and declare the true meaning of them as well as an English Hebrician, or Grecian, or Roman
whatsoever?’
The Leveller insistence on individual freedom and equality in social and religious life took a practical, but to many
local landowners, a particularly objectionable turn in April 1649 with the establishment of a small and emphatically
Christian co-operative community on former Crown Land at St George’s Hill in Surrey. The members of this socalled
‘Digger’ community preferred to be known as ‘True Levellers’. They were obliged to defend themselves before
the Council of War in the following December by claiming that they were recovering what had been originally stolen
from the common people of England by the ancestors of ‘Charles our Norman oppressour’. The most articulate of
these Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, was also aware that he and his comrades were attempting to regain an ideal, a
model of Eden governed not by property rights but by love. Winstanley’s fiercely argued defence of his project, A
New-Yeers Gift Sent to the Parliament and Armie (1649), sees those who opposed the Diggers’ scheme as perpetuators
of the power of the king and defenders of the principles of an unredeemed creation. Towards its conclusion
Winstanley’s defence rises to an apocalyptic emphasis: ‘Therefore, you rulers
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of England, be not ashamed nor afraid of Levellers. Hate them not. Christ comes to you riding upon these clouds.
Look not upon other lands to be your pattern. All lands in the world lie under darkness. So does England yet, though
the nearest to light and freedom of any other; therefore let no other land take your crown. You have set Christ upon
his throne in England by your promises, engagements, oaths, and two acts of parliament ... Put all these into sincere
action, and you shall see the work is done, and you with others shall sing Hallelujah to him that sits upon the throne,
and to the Lamb for evermore.’ Just in case his vision has not had the desired impact on Parliament and its army,
Winstanley adds a dire warning: ‘If you do not, the Lamb shall show himself a lion and tear you in pieces for your
most abominable, dissembling hypocrisy, and give your land to a people who better deserves it.’ Neither Christ, the
‘great Leveller’, nor the new rulers of England (who were inclined to see themselves as Christ’s deputies) moved to
save the doomed Digger community.
James Harrington’s analytical exploration of the basis of an ideal republic, The Common-Wealth of Oceana
(1656), which was also conspicuously dedicated to Cromwell, had a far greater impact both on contemporaries and on