This remarkable book is a sequel to David Como's earlier study, Blown by the spirit: Puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-civil-war England (2004). Both works explore the disruptive potential of radical Puritanism, but the volume under review turns to the dramatic years between 1640 and 1646. It aims to explain ‘how the English Civil Wars metamorphosed into an English Revolution’ (p. 15). The structure is chronological, and the narrative unfolds through a series of episodes: political and religious controversies that galvanised and radicalised Puritan Parliamentarians. At the heart of the story are the future Levellers, the pamphleteers John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton, a figure whose secret printing operation is located ‘at the center of the tumultuous intellectual maelstrom of civil-war puritanism’ (p. 397).
Yet Radical Parliamentarians is more than simply the definitive pre-history of the Levellers, and if its cast of characters is familiar, its insights are often startling. It argues persuasively that writers, printers and activists on the ‘sectarian fringe’ became the leading edge of the Parliamentarian cause, the first to voice daring political ideas that were widely broadcast and eventually taken up by the leaders of ‘the independent coalition’. The book analyses these ‘ideological escalations’ (p. 363), brilliantly reconstructing key moments and publications through virtuoso archival research and book history. We see how radical parliamentarians took ‘a series of novel ideological steps’ (p. 362), demanding natural rights, religious toleration, the abolition of the House of Lords, a kingless republic and egalitarian redistribution. The approach is explicitly post-revisionist, for Como seeks to reunite what revisionists were inclined to put asunder: manuscript and print culture, godly zeal and constitutional thought, metropolis and provinces, high politics and popular politics. The emphasis throughout is on the symbiosis, interplay, interpenetration or ‘feedback loop’ (p. 149) between these supposed polarities. He also argues ‘against the grain of recent scholarship, that most of the basic theoretical and practical positions that led to the regicide, the establishment of the English republic, and the abolition of the upper house of parliament were in place by the end of the First Civil War’ (p. 6).
The book starts with Henry Burton's pamphlet, For God, and the king (1636), published by the Amsterdam printer, J. F. Stam. Here already we find a preoccupation with reform in Church and State, radical ecclesiology combined with natural-law contract theory. Later chapters examine and contextualise over thirty of the era's most audacious pamphlets, including Samuel How's Sufficiencie of the spirit's teaching (1640); Burton's The Protestation protested (1641); A question answered (1642); Edward Bowles's Plaine English (1643); the Dissenting Brethren's Apologeticall narration (1644); Walwyn's Compassionate Samaritan (1644); England's birth-right justified (1645); and The last warning to all the inhabitants of London (1646), ‘perhaps the first book ever printed in England … to suggest overtly that monarchy should be abolished’ (p. 409). Many of these texts are familiar to historians, but repeatedly Como provides vital new information on their production and reception, and explains how each contributed to ideological escalation.
A central argument is that the escalation of radical political thought occurred in tandem with the rise of religious heterodoxy, and that the purveyors of one were purveyors of the other. The book traces the emergence of ‘new puritan heterodoxies’ (p. 182): in ecclesiology (lay preaching, popular congregationalism, Anabaptism and the Seeker rejection of ordinances); in soteriology (antinomianism, Arminianism and even universalism); and in eschatology (millenarianism, and the prospect of latter-day apostles and prophets). This was the intellectual milieu of Richard Overton and other future Levellers, and it proved as fertile in ‘political’ as in ‘religious’ thought. That was no accident, for there was an elective affinity between radical religion and radical politics. The future Levellers were all admirers of Samuel How, the lay preacher who emphasised the Spirit's empowerment of the lowly. Their experience of popular congregationalism was also influential, for church polity had implications for civil polity: ‘Ascending, bottom-up forms of “congregational” church government helped to ease the acceptance of dispersed, ascending and popular visions of civil authority’ (p. 429). Here Como revives an argument of A. S. P. Woodhouse, himself taking his cues from contemporaries such as Richard Baxter (who witnessed New Model Army soldiers debating ‘church democracy’ and ‘state democracy’). Como notes that ‘radical Puritan thinkers started to question not only the constitutional makeup of the polity – the relationship between king and parliament, or parliament and people – but deeper structural features of social order, including law, social distinctions and even property relations’ (pp. 182–3). Thus, already by 1646 we can see how radical Puritanism prepared the way for the Levellers, the Ranters and the Diggers.
Historians have sometimes dismissed this sectarian subculture as a separatist (or even ‘lunatic’) fringe, with little impact on the mainstream of English Parliamentarianism. One of the achievements of Como's research is to challenge this prejudice by documenting the high print runs and wide circulation of these pamphlets and showing how their arguments resonated with readers beyond the sects, including the astrologer William Lilly, the journalist Marchamont Nedham, the merchant Thomas Juxon and the Kentish gentleman Sir Cheney Culpeper. (Although the focus is primarily on London, there are revealing forays into provincial towns and counties, notably Bristol and Hertfordshire.) The book helps us to understand how radical ‘religious independents’ could appeal to a wider coalition of ‘political independents’ who shared their commitment to total defeat of the king, parliamentary supremacy, religious toleration and the thwarting of clerical power. Yet it also recognises ‘the hopeless fragmentation of the parliamentarian front’ (p. 430), as well as the irony that Parliamentarianism fostered a rhetoric of liberty alongside a newly centralised fiscal-military state.
Inevitably, this work has echoes of Christopher Hill, who would have appreciated its celebration of ‘the radical propaganda collective’ and ‘egalitarian redistributionism’. But Como goes beyond Hill in his mastery of manuscript sources and book history. Building on the research of David Adams, he examines damaged letters to identify the printers of anonymous pamphlets, and he demonstrates that ornaments and devices from the Stam Press and the separatist Cloppenburg Press were subsequently used by Richard Overton in the Margery Marprelate Press and in later clandestine printing operations. Moreover, in his meticulous attention to the unfolding chronology of these years, and the interplay of political, military and ideological developments, Radical Parliamentarians bears more resemblance to S. R. Gardiner's History of the great civil war than to The world turned upside down. Like Hill, Como does sometimes imply that biblical language was mere idiomatic packaging, a linguistic shell containing a conceptual kernel: the tolerationist writings of Henry Robinson and Roger Williams are ‘turgid works, larded with scriptural passages’ (p. 261) that Walwyn helpfully scraped off, while the natural rights arguments are presented in ‘theological trappings’ that were later ‘clipped away’ (p. 429). Yet elsewhere the evidence presented suggests something rather different: that religious reasoning was constitutive of political thought. In any case, Radical Parliamentarians is a worthy post-revisionist successor to the seminal Whig and Marxist texts of Gardiner and Hill. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the English Revolution and the radical Puritans who shaped its course.
