Peter Marshall - Demanding the Impossible

The work has been called by Christopher Hill ‘a draft constitution for a communist commonwealth’ but it appears more like a blueprint for a communist State. 20 In fact there are two clear phases to Winstanley’s thought. In his early work, he depicted an anarchist society, but after the experience of the Diggers’ colony at George’s Hill he began to revise his views about the immediate possibility of a free society. 21

In The Law of Freedom in a Platform , he thus offered a new and authoritarian version of communist society. His fundamental premisses were the same. He held firm to his belief in God as the principle of motion and interdependence in nature, and in the efficacy of love, reason and justice in human affairs. He continued to assert with his doctrine of inner light that human beings act rationally and in accordance with natural law. He saw the natural state of humanity to be a co-operative and united society held together by common preservation. Above all, he still celebrated freedom as the free development of every individual and saw it only possible where there was economic security: ‘True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth’. 22

But the experience of the Diggers’ colony on George’s Hill, especially of the Ranters within and the hostile freeholders without, made him have second thoughts about human nature. Man might be sociable and reasonable by nature, but in existing society he often appeared unruly and confused. Digger covetousness suggested to Winstanley the need for some form of external social control. Thus because ‘transgression doth and may arise from ignorance and rude fancy in man’, he now felt that law and government would be necessary in a commonwealth to regulate society. 23

During the struggle to keep the colony on George’s Hill together, Winstanley had already begun to argue that the Diggers were opposed to the government which locks up ‘the treasures of the earth from the poor’ and not against ‘righteous government’ as such. 24 Now he went so far as to assert ‘Government is a wise and free ordering of the earth and the manners of mankind by observation of particular laws and rules, so that all the inhabitants may live peacefully in plenty and freedom in the land where they are born and bred.’ 25 He further defended the need for law as ‘a rule whereby man and other creatures are governed in their actions, for the preservation of the common peace’. An army, in the form of a popular militia would be needed to enforce the laws, to protect the community against the ‘rudeness of the people’ and ‘to resist and destroy all who endeavour to keep up or bring in kingly bondage again’. 26

Winstanley now proposed an annual parliament as the supreme governing body in the land and drew up a rigidly artificial code of laws. The subtitle of The Law of Freedom was ‘True Magistrary Restored’ and was dedicated to the arch-statist and general Oliver Cromwell because ‘the power of the land [is] in your hand’. 27 He suggested that magistrates should be elected annually. All citizens had to work by law and only those who contributed to the common stock could benefit from it The laws were based on the principle of revenge—‘an eye for eye’—although they were intended to be corrective rather than punitive. Sanctions would include whipping, forced labour and loss of civil rights. The death penalty was rehabilitated for murder, buying and selling, rape or following the trade of lawyer or parson. He upheld the authority of the father in the family and advocated ‘overseers‘(planners) to direct the economy and enforce the laws, and ‘taskmasters’ to reform criminals. While allowing complete freedom of religious belief and opinion, he called for compulsory and general education. Winstanley had come to believe that the people were not ready to be free and a long process of education and preparation was first necessary before they were capable of governing themselves.

At his lowest ebb, he now defines freedom in the narrow economic sense of a ‘freeman’ enjoying the fruits of his labours, being capable of choosing or being a representative, and having young men or maids to be his servants in his family. Liberty was no longer universal. Clearly, Winstanley’s libertarian genius had left him after his exhausting experience of practical communism. If The New Law of Righteousness is one of the first great anarchist texts, The Law of Freedom for all its rugged language reads like a proto-Manxist tract Hill has suggested that it was a ‘possibilist’ document dedicated to Cromwell in the hope that he would implement its suggestions, but it seems unlikely that Winstanley could seriously believe that Cromwell would be converted to the cause of the true Levellers. 28

Winstanley wrote nothing more after his communist Utopia disintegrated, and he disappeared into obscurity; he seems to have become a prosperous farmer and possibly a Quaker. The Ranter Lawrence Clarkson accused him later of misusing his Reason to hold sway over others and to win personal fame: ‘There was self-love and vainglory in his heart.’ Clark-son also lamented Winstanley’s ‘most shameful retreat from George’s-hill with a spirit of pretended universality, to become a mere tithe-gatherer of prosperity’. 29

The libertarian communism of Winstanley and the Diggers was lost on the early anarchist and socialist movement William Godwin, whose rationalist scheme of philosophical anarchism so closely resembles Winstanley’s, dismissed the doctrines of Winstanley and the Diggers as ‘scarcely indeed worthy to be recorded’ in his mammoth History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–8). 30 It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that socialists rediscovered him, and only this century that the Diggers have been acknowledged as ‘the earliest recognizably anarchistic movement’. 31

It was the Ranters, whom Winstanley despised, who proved the most consistent libertarians and the true heirs of the Heresy of the Free Spirit. They are the most anarchistic individuals to emerge in the English Revolution. As antinomians, they sought total emancipation from all laws and rules, and advocated free love. They attacked private property and called for its abolition, and rejected all forms of government, whether ecclesiastical or civil. They hoped humanity would be returned to its original state where there would be no private property, class distinctions or human authority.

Because of their persecution from all sides, many Ranters adopted a private language and carried on a clandestine propaganda. They formed part of the ‘lunatic fringe’ in the English Revolution, and were quite happy to play out their radical madness in the darkness of Cromwellian sanity. They emerged after the defeat of the Levellers at Burford in 1649 which put an end to the most serious threat to Cromwell’s rule from the Left. The most famous amongst the Ranters were Abiezer Coppe and Lawrence Clarkson, although Joseph Salmon and Jacob Bauthumely or Bottomley also left some writings.

The Ranters were often confused with the Quakers, and many may have crossed over from one group to the other. Both discarded outward forms of worship and believed that true religion was to be found in the ‘indwelling spirit’ or ‘inner light’ in the individual soul, and that the power of love would be enough to bring about a new era of peace and freedom. A contemporary, Thomas Collier, asserted that the doctrines of the Ranters and the Quakers were identical: ‘no Christ but within; no Scripture to be a rule; no ordinances, no law but their lusts, not heven nor glory but here, no sin but what men fancied to be so.’ 32

Like the adepts of the Free Spirit, the Ranters adopted a kind of materialistic pantheism: God is essentially in every creature; all created things are united; there is neither heaven nor hell except in the human breast. A person with God could therefore commit no evil. Joseph Salmon, a former army officer, records how in a brief period of exaltation: