Quite what the Lord General might make of all this, however, was open to question. Sir Thomas Fairfax – although he commanded the army which, following its remodelling in 1645 into the most formidable fighting force in Europe, had brought the king to defeat – did not approve of regicide. Already, on 16 April, he had been alerted to the activities of the Diggers. Winstanley, summoned to Whitehall to explain himself, had on that occasion succeeded in persuading Fairfax that he and his project presented no threat to the order of the Commonwealth; but now, one month on, circumstances had changed. Mutiny had broken out. Only swift action by Fairfax and his deputy Oliver Cromwell, a general as formidable as he was devout, had succeeded in breaking it. The mutineers had been taken by surprise at night in Burford, a town west of Oxford. The next morning, three of them had been executed in a churchyard. Order had successfully been restored. Fairfax, however, as he headed back to London, had good reason to view the Diggers with renewed suspicion. Christ, who had foretold the doom of the rich, and whose return would see the poor inherit the earth, was hailed by Winstanley as ‘the greatest, first, and truest Leveller that ever was spoke of in the world’.4 The title of ‘Leveller’ was not in fact original to him. It was one that the mutineers had already claimed as their own. Like Winstanley, they believed that rank and wealth were evils; that all were by nature equal; that Christ’s work was to be ‘the Restorer and Repairer of man’s loss and fall’.5 Soldiers, though, could not be Diggers. Without rank there would be no discipline; and without discipline there would be no army. Godliness in England did not stand so secure that it could afford that. Cromwell, leaving Burford, had begun to prepare an expedition to Ireland, a notorious sump of popery, where royalists continued to plot the return of monarchy to England, and the overthrow of everything that the army had fought so long and hard to achieve. The responsibility of Fairfax, meanwhile, was to keep his lieutenant-general’s rear secure. The Lord General, as he turned off the highway to London and rode with his attendants to inspect St George’s Hill, had much on his mind.
Arriving before the Diggers, he gave them a short speech of admonition. Winstanley, though, was nothing daunted. Scorning to remove his hat, he scorned as well to moderate his views. Soberly though he spoke, he was not the man to bit or bridle the Spirit. More than a century before, in the first throes of the Reformation, Thomas Müntzer had proclaimed that scripture itself was a less certain witness of truth than God’s direct speaking to the soul; and now, in the hothouse of the English Commonwealth, the Spirit was once again bringing enlightenment to common men and women. ‘I have nothing,’ Winstanley insisted, ‘but what I do receive from a free discovery within.’6 The proofs of God’s purpose were more surely to be found in a ploughboy whose heart had been suffused with an awareness of the essential goodness of mankind than they ever were in churches. Just as Müntzer had done, Winstanley despised the book-wrangling of pastors. ‘All places stink with the abomination of Self-seeking Teachers and Rulers.’ True wisdom was the knowledge of God that all mortals could have, if only they were prepared to open themselves to the Spirit: for God, Winstanley proclaimed, was Reason. It was Reason that would lead humanity to forswear the very concept of possessions; to join in building a heaven on earth. His foes might dismiss Winstanley as a dreamer; but he was not the only one. The occupation of St George’s Hill was a declaration of hope: that others some day would join the Diggers, and the world would be as one.
Wild talk such as this had always provoked alarm. ‘Anabaptist’ remained a dirty word across Europe. If common men and women were to cast themselves as vessels of the Spirit, unmediated by the guidance of their betters, then who knew where it might end? Truth could not compromise with error. Pastors and presbyters – anxious to preserve from damnation the souls of those in their care – believed this no less devoutly than any inquisitor. The horrors of Münster had not been forgotten. Liberty might readily become a menace. Heresy, idolatry, schism: all had to be sternly guarded against. There might even be need – should an offender prove contumacious – to invoke the ultimate sanction. Calvin himself, in 1553, had approved the burning at the stake of a particularly notorious heretic, a propagandist for views on the Trinity so shocking as barely to be trinitarian at all. Within living memory, in 1612, a heretic had been burned in England for questioning in a similar manner the divinity of Christ and the Spirit. The vast majority of Puritans, taking up arms against the king in 1642, had fought him in the conviction that toleration was ‘the whore of Babylon’s back door’.7 If the elements of popery in the Church of England were a palpable evil, then so too were the blasphemies of Protestant sectarians. When even scripture might count for nothing before the claims of tinkers and housemaids to direct revelations from God, there was a risk, it seemed to many Puritans, that God himself would end up doubted. ‘A liberty of judgment is pretended, and queries are proposed, until nothing certain be left, nothing unshaken.’8
Victory over the king, though, had not led to a tightening of the reins of discipline. Quite the opposite. Despite the passing in 1648 of a blasphemy ordinance that punished anti-trinitarianism with death, and a host of other heresies with imprisonment, it had proved impossible to enforce. The streets of London – which had witnessed an archbishop of Canterbury as well as a king being led to the block – seethed with contempt for the very notion of authority. Practices and beliefs that previously had lurked in the shadows burst into spectacular flower. Baptists who, as the more radical of the first generation of Protestants had done, dismissed infant baptism as an offence against scripture; Quakers, who would shake and foam at the mouth with the intensity of their possession by the Spirit; Ranters, who believed that every human being was equally a part of God: all made a mockery of any notion of a single national church. Their spread, to enthusiasts for Presbyterian discipline, was like that of the plague. Christian order in England seemed at risk of utter disintegration.
Yet one believer’s anarchy might just as well be another’s freedom. Presbyterians who sought to make criminals of other Protestants for laying claim to the gifts of the Spirit had to tread carefully. Aflame as they were with the transformative effect of God’s grace, they might easily be cast as hypocrites. Milton, whose visit to Galileo had steeled him in his loathing for censorship, warned his fellow Puritans that Calvin’s example risked dazzling them. To idolise the reformers of an earlier age was to behave no better than papists. The course of true reform was never done. It was always a work in progress. Every Christian had to be free to seek his own path to God. It was not the business of a state, still less that of a church, to trammel the workings of the Spirit. ‘No man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men’s consciences but their own.’9
But what, in a Protestant country, was ‘religion’? Cut from its Catholic moorings, the word had come to evolve two distinct meanings. It was, so Charles I had declared, ‘the only firm foundation of all power: that cast loose, or depraved, no government can be stable’.10 Presbyterians agreed. The conception of religion for which both sides in the civil war had been fighting was essentially the same: an understanding of what England’s proper relationship to God should be. If this alone was to be viewed as true, then plainly it could not tolerate a rival. The Reformation needed to be completed; its victory had to be total. Yet that was not the whole story. Religion was also something intimate, personal. A word once used to describe the communal life in an abbey or a convent had come to take on a very different meaning: the private relationship that a Protestant might have with the workings of the Spirit. Fairfax, admonishing the Diggers, spoke both as a Presbyterian and as a man charged by his office with the maintenance of true religion in England; but Winstanley, when he spoke of his duty to God, and refused point blank to abandon St George’s Hill, was equally being obedient to his religion. Fairfax, aware of this, opted not to force the issue. Satisfied a second time that the Diggers presented no threat to public order, he returned to the road, and continued on his way to London. Winstanley and his companions, meanwhile, went back to their digging.