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16

Post-War Politics

Print, Polemic and Mobilization

Certainties were easier to find on the battlefield than at the negotiating table: there was a limited number of outcomes, quickly apparent, which had a more or less obvious significance. The experience of battle was in that sense appealing to those looking for God’s hand in this world. At Langport, Major Thomas Harrison, watching the Cavalier army crumble before the heroic attack of the New Model across a river and up a narrow lane lined with musketeers, ‘with a loud voice [broke] forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions as if he had been in a rapture’. Oliver Cromwell seems to have been particularly persuaded by such signs. At Marston Moor, he exulted that God had made the enemy ‘as stubble to our swords’, and of the great victory at Naseby he wrote: ‘this is none other than the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory’. Like Harrison he was equally certain about Langport: ‘Thus you see what the Lord hath wrought for us… Thus you have [Langport] mercy added to Naseby mercy. And to see this, is it not to see the face of God?’1

By the time final victory came, however, it was not at all clear what it meant, either in the limited sense of what the parliamentary coalition had ended up fighting for or in the deeper sense of what cause God had smiled upon. As a practical problem this was more difficult for the victors – it was clear that the royalists would now be negotiating a rearguard action. But in three stages Parliament had taken measures which put its cause in a different light: the administrative and financial escalations of 1643; the military alliance with the Covenanters; and the formation of the New Model, with all that was taken to imply. What was the peace that all this was intended to achieve? Following victory there were plenty of ideas about that question, and attempts to make victory a vehicle for them, but that made the peace no easier to win than the war had been. In the world of print, where these conflicting visions were promoted among overlapping publics, there had been another, less easily quantified, set of costs and benefits. Lost coherence in contemporary debate, a crisis of common sense, created the opportunity to fly kites and make creative arguments; as those opportunities were taken up, so the world of public debate seemed more and more anarchic.

On 19 July 1645, just over a month after Naseby, William Walwyn and a deputation of religious and political radicals were at Westminster, accusing the Speaker of sustaining correspondence with the royalists and with the King. Walwyn was by that time in his mid-forties, the second son of a landed gentleman, a member of the Merchant Adventurers and a medical practitioner of some substance. A conversion experience moved Walwyn from a relatively orthodox predestinarian Calvinism to belief in free grace, accepting love and inner peace. This led him to advocate freedom of conscience, arguing that as long as knowledge was imperfect, men would differ. As a result such differences should be tolerated. Since the world was not divided between the elect and the reprobate, and redemption was available to all, everyone should be free to follow God’s promptings: there should be no human constraint on the conscience. He advocated this position in seven pamphlets published anonymously between 1641 and January 1646. Here was a man for whom the parliamentary cause was the pursuit of full reformation, and for whom, presumably, compromise with the King, which jeopardized freedom of conscience, was an ungodly act.2

While at Westminster on that day in July 1645, Walwyn met John Lilburne, who was there to answer charges about the publication of illicit political tracts. Lilburne had reached his twenties during the Laudian domination of the church, and that had radicalized him. An associate of Henry Burton, he was already a significant figure in radical Puritan circles by 1640 – released from the Fleet prison at the petition of Oliver Cromwell in November and the subject of an upmarket engraving