The Rise of the Democracy Part 8

"The transaction was illegal from beginning to end. The impeachment was illegal. The process was illegal. The service was illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. 'A subject,' said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, 'may arrest for treason; the King cannot; for, if the arrest be illegal, the party has no remedy against the King.'"[54]

Both King and Parliament broke rudely through all const.i.tutional precedents in their preparations for hostilities.

The King levied troops by a royal commission, without any advice from Parliament, and Pym got an ordinance pa.s.sed, in both Houses, appointing the Lords-Lieutenant of the counties to command the Militia without warrant from the Crown.

A last attempt at negotiations was made at York, in April, when the proposals of Parliament--nineteen propositions for curtailing the power of the Monarchy in favour of the Commons--were rejected by Charles with the words: "If I granted your demands, I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king."

By August, Charles had raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.

Five years later and Charles was a prisoner, to die in 1649 on the scaffold. That same year monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished by law; the Established Church had already fallen before the triumphant arms of the Puritans.

Then, in 1653, the House of Commons itself fell--expelled by Cromwell; and the task of the Lord Protector was to fas.h.i.+on a const.i.tution that would work.[55] What happened was the supremacy of the army. Parliament, attenuated and despised, contended in vain against the Protector. On Cromwell's death, and the failure of his son, Richard, the army declared for Charles II., and there was an end to the Commonwealth.

THE DEMOCRATIC PROTEST--LILBURNE

In all these changes the great ma.s.s of the people had neither part nor lot; and the famous leaders of the Parliamentary Party, resolute to curtail the absolutism of the Crown, were no more concerned with the welfare of the labouring people than the barons were in the time of John. The labouring people--generally--were equally indifferent to the fortunes of Roundheads and Cavaliers, though the townsmen in many places held strong enough opinions on the matters of religion that were in dispute.[56]

That the common misery of the people was not in any way lightened by Cromwell's rule we have abundant evidence, and it cannot be supposed that the subst.i.tution of the Presbyterian discipline for episcopacy in the Church, and the displacement of Presbyterians by Independents, was likely to alleviate this misery.

Taxation was heavier than it had ever been before, and in Lancas.h.i.+re, Westmorland, and c.u.mberland the distress was appalling.

Whitelocke, writing in 1649,[57] notes "that many families in Lancas.h.i.+re were starved." "That many in c.u.mberland and Westmorland died in the highways for want of bread, and divers left their habitations, travelling with their wives and children to other parts to get relief, but could find none. That the committees and Justices of the Peace of c.u.mberland signed a certificate, that there were 30,000 families that had neither seed nor bread-corn, nor money to buy either, and they desired a collection for them, which was made, but much too little to relieve so great a mult.i.tude."

Cromwell, occupied with high affairs of State, had neither time nor inclination to attend to social reform. Democracy had its witnesses; Lilburne and the Levellers made their protest against military rule, and were overpowered; Winstanley and his Diggers endeavoured to persuade the country that the common land should be occupied by dispossessed peasants, and were quickly suppressed.

Lilburne was concerned with the establishment of a political democracy, Winstanley with a social democracy, and in both cases the propaganda was offensive to the Protector.

Had Cromwell listened to Lilburne, and made concessions towards democracy, the reaction against Puritanism and the Commonwealth might have been averted.[58]

John Lilburne had been a brave soldier in the army of the Parliament in the early years of the Civil War, and he left the army in 1645 with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel (and with 880 arrears of pay due to him) rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of the "new model."

The monarchy having fallen, Lilburne saw the possibilities of tyranny in the Parliamentary government, and at once spoke out. With considerable legal knowledge, a pa.s.sion for liberty, clear views on democracy, an enormous capacity for work, and great skill as a pamphleteer, Lilburne was not to be ignored. The Government might have had him for a supporter; it unwisely decided to treat him as an enemy, and for ten years he was an unsparing critic, his popularity increasing with every fresh pamphlet he issued--and at every fresh imprisonment.

Lilburne urged a radical reform of Parliament and a general manhood suffrage in 1647, and the "Case for the Army," published by the Levellers in the same year, on the proposal of the Presbyterian majority in Parliament that the army should be disbanded, demanded the abolition of monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed common lands, and abolition of sinecures.

Both Cromwell and Ireton were strongly opposed to manhood suffrage, and Cromwell--to whom the immediate danger was a royalist reaction--had no patience for men who would embark on democratic experiments at such a season.

Lilburne and the Levellers were equally distrustful of Cromwell's new Council of State. "We were ruled before by King, Lords, and Commons, now by a General, Court-martial, and Commons; and, we pray you, what is the difference?" So they put the question in 1648.

To Cromwell the one safety for the Commonwealth was in the loyalty of the army to the Government. To Lilburne the one guarantee for good government was in the supremacy of a Parliament elected by manhood suffrage. He saw plainly that unless steps were taken to establish democratic inst.i.tutions there was no future for the Commonwealth; and he took no part in the trial of Charles I., saying openly that he doubted the wisdom of abolis.h.i.+ng monarchy before a new const.i.tution had been drawn up.

But Lilburne overestimated the strength of the Leveller movement in the army, and the corporals who revolted were shot by sentence of courts-martial.[59]

In vain the democratic troopers argued, "the old king's person and the old lords are but removed, and a new king and new lords with the commons are in one House, and so we are under a more absolute arbitrary monarchy than before." The Government answered by clapping Lilburne in the Tower, where, in spite of a pet.i.tion signed by 80,000 for his release, he remained for three months without being brought to trial. Released on bail, Lilburne, who from prison had issued an "Agreement of the Free People," calling for annual parliaments elected by manhood suffrage and the free election of unendowed church ministers in every parish, now published an "Impeachment for High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law, James Ireton,"

and declared that monarchy was preferable to a military despotism. At last, brought to trial on the charge of "treason," Lilburne was acquitted with "a loud and unanimous shout" of popular approval.[60] "In a revolution where others argued about the respective rights of King and Parliament, he spoke always of the rights of the people. His dauntless courage and his power of speech made him the idol of the mob."[61]

Lilburne was again brought to trial, in 1653, and again acquitted, with undiminished enthusiasm. But "for the peace of the nation," Cromwell refused to allow the irrepressible agitator to be at large, and for two years Lilburne, "Free-born John," was kept in prison. During those years all power in the House of Commons was broken by the rule of the Army of the Commonwealth, and Parliament stood in abject submission before the Lord Protector. Only when his health was shattered, and he had embraced Quaker principles, was Lilburne released, and granted a pension of 40s. a week.

The following year, at the age of 40, Lilburne died of consumption--brought on by the close confinement he had suffered. A year later, 1658, and Cromwell, by whose side Lilburne had fought at Marston Moor, and against whose rule he had contended for so many a year, was dead, and the Commonwealth Government was doomed.

WINSTANLEY AND "THE DIGGERS"

The "Digger" movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than Lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is notable for its social significance.

While Lilburne strove vigorously for political reforms that are still unaccomplished, Gerrard Winstanley preached a revolutionary gospel of social reform--as John Ball and Robert Ket had before him. But Winstanley's social doctrine allowed no room for violence, and included the non-resistance principles that found exposition in the Society of Friends.

Hence the "Diggers," preaching agrarian revolution; but denying all right to force of arms, never endangered the Commonwealth Government as Lilburne and the Levellers did.

Free Communism was the creed of more than one Protestant sect in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists on the Continent had been conspicuous for their experiments in community of goods and anarchist society.

Winstanley confined his teaching and practice to common owners.h.i.+p of land, pleading for the cultivation of the enclosed common lands, "that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed."

There was to be no forcible expropriation of landlords.

"If the rich still hold fast to this propriety of Mine and Thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands. And let the common people, that say the earth is _ours_, not _mine_, let them labour together, and eat bread together upon the commons, mountains, and hills.

"For as the enclosures are called such a man's land, and such a man's land, so the Commons and Heath are called the common people's. And let the world see who labour the earth in righteousness, and those to whom the Lord gives the blessing, let them be the people that shall inherit the earth.

"None can say that their right is taken from them. For let the rich work alone by themselves; and let the poor work together by themselves."[62]

With the common owners.h.i.+p and cultivation of land, an end was to be made of all tyranny of man over his fellows.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN HAMPDEN

_After the Engraving by G. Houbraken._]

"Leave off dominion and lords.h.i.+p one over another; for the whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth. Leave off imprisoning, whipping, and killing, which are but the actings of the curse. Let those that have hitherto had no land, and have been forced to rob and steal through poverty; henceforth let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone may enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread with the sweat of his own brow."

Winstanley's argument was quite simple:

"If any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may say, _That is mine_. But if the Lord made these for the use of His creation, surely then the earth was made by the Lord to be a Common Treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some."

Two objections were urged against private property in land:

"First, it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. Secondly, it hath made laws to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil action, and then kills them for doing it." It was a prolific age for pamphlets, the seventeenth century; the land teemed with preachers and visionaries, and Winstanley's writings never attracted the sympathy that was given to the fierce controversialists on theological and political questions.

Only when Winstanley and his Diggers set to work with spade and shovel on the barren soil of St. George's Hill, in Surrey, in the spring of 1649, was the attention of the Council of State called to the strange proceedings.

The matter was left to the local magistrates and landowners, and the Diggers were suppressed. A similar attempt to reclaim land near Wellingboro' was stopped at once as "seditious and tumultuous." It was quite useless for Winstanley to maintain that the English people were dispossessed of their lands by the Crown at the Norman Conquest, and that with the execution of the King the owners.h.i.+p of the Crown lands ought to revert to the people; Cromwell and the Council of State had no more patience with prophets of land nationalisation than with agitators of manhood suffrage. Indeed, the Commonwealth Government never took the trouble to distinguish between the different groups of disaffected people, but set them all down as "Levellers," to be punished as disturbers of the peace if they refused to obey authority.

Winstanley's last pamphlet was "True Magistracy Restored," an open letter to Oliver Cromwell, 1652, and after its publication Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers are heard of no more.

To-day both Lilburne and Winstanley are to be recalled because the agitation for political democracy is always with us, and the question of land tenure is seen to be of profound importance in the discussion of social reform. No democratic statesman in our time can propose an improvement in the social condition of the people without reference to the land question, and no social reformer of the nineteenth century has had more influence or been more widely read and discussed than Henry George--the exponent of the Single Tax on Land Values.

Winstanley was very little heeded in his own day, but two hundred and fifty years later the civilised countries of the earth are found in deep debate over the respective rights of landowners and landless, and the relation of poverty to land owners.h.i.+p. State owners.h.i.+p, taxation of land values, peasant proprietors.h.i.+p, co-operative agriculture--all have their advocates to-day, but to Winstanley's question whether the earth was made "for to give ease to a few or health to all," only one answer is returned.

THE RESTORATION

Under the Commonwealth the landowners were as powerful as they had been under the monarchy. Enclosures continued. Social reform was not contemplated by Cromwell nor by Councils of State; democracy was equally outside the political vision of government. Church of England ministers were dispossessed in favour of Nonconformists, Puritanism became the established faith, Catholicism remained proscribed.

The interest in ecclesiastical and theological disputes was considerable, and Puritanism was popular with large numbers of the middle-cla.s.s. But to the ma.s.s of the people Puritanism was merely the suppression of further liberties, the prohibition of old customs, the stern abolition of Christmas revels and May-day games.

Lilburne did his best to get Cromwell to allow the people some responsibility in the choice of its rulers. Winstanley proposed a remedy for the social distress. To neither of these men was any concession made, and no consideration was given to their appeals.