Gideon understood that he was unwelcome on these jaunts. He did not know why. It seemed to him only that Robert had established a routine he did not wish to break and that he had sources to protect. When Robert found news to report, he would be bright-eyed and enthusiastic as he set the text in the print shop the next day.
Arrangements for becoming a Commonwealth did not always run smoothly. When a proclamation went to sheriffs and mayors to promulgate the Act for Abolishing the Kingly Office, even the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Abraham Reynoldson, refused, because it went against his conscience; he was summoned to the bar of the House, stripped of his office and thrown in the Tower for a month. The City was ordered to elect a new lord mayor — and one with a compliant conscience was immediately produced.
The House of Commons was working hard. Some days Robert Allibone could hardly scribble down all the matters of note. On the same day, the 2nd of April, when Alderman Reynoldson's conscience was discussed, plenty of fascinating items vied for prominence.
'They gave an order for a committee looking into the affairs of Colonel Rainborough's widow,' Robert reported. 'She is to be given a grant of land from the confiscations from deans and chapters — three thousand pounds was mentioned to me by an informant. Then who turns up in the House of Commons but your friend Sexby!'
'Sexby?' Gideon experienced a pang.
'Quite the crawler, nowadays.' Robert distrusted Sexby, despite his Leveller links. 'There have been Scots commissioners lurking around since the attempt to make a Presbyterian peace. These dour souls are outraged by us lopping off a head that could have mouthed the Covenant. They scampered off, heading for The Hague, to make a devil's pact with the Prince of Wales, begging him to make us all slaves of the Kirk.'
'You must say, "Charles Stuart, eldest son of the late King"!' Gideon reproved Robert.
'Strip me naked, so I must.'
'So what of Sexby?'
'Honest Edward tells Parliament he has chased gallantly after the Scotch commissioners and has personally arrested them at Gravesend — with not a moment to spare (as he told it). He has tucked them up safe under guard in a fort — for which he has been awarded twenty pounds, not a penny less.'
'Handsome!'
Robert heard the edge in Gideon's tone. 'Did you obtain any benefit for that secret work of yours in January?'
'I was allowed to buy dinner for Colonel John Fox.'
'A colonel! Should he not have treated you?'
'He lacks his arrears,' replied Gideon dryly.
Robert was still niggled. 'I do not know how Sexby showed his face, preening himself, when that very day a petition was brought for the four Levellers who are languishing in the Tower.' John Wildman, John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince had been arrested on suspicion of promulgating republican pamphlets called England's New Chains Discovered and The Second Part of England's New Chains Discovered. 'There was no time for them,' snarled Robert. 'The petition got short shrift — the Commons had to rush to the day's most pressing business.'
'And what fine work was that?'
' "Ordered, That the Committee of the Revenue do take care, and give Order, That the Seats in the House be repaired".'
'Seats, Robert?' For a moment Gideon was flummoxed, then he sadly grinned. 'All you can expect from a Rump, I suppose.'
Of the civilian Levellers, William Walwyn was in some respects the most influential, yet the most discreet. Anne Jukes and Robert had a high opinion of him: a quiet, home-loving man who always said his favourite occupations were a good book and the conversation of friends. There was no evidence that Walwyn had contributed to the England's Chains pamphlets. His guiding principles were toleration and love. It was thought astonishing that he had been arrested, unlike Lilburne, who had spent so much time in the Tower of London that at least one of his children was born there and given the name Tower. 'The pathetic soul died,' said Anne Jukes. 'As you might expect!'
The critical pamphlets had been condemned in Parliament as scandalous and highly seditious, destructive to the present government, tending to division and mutiny in the army and to the raising of a new war. 'Somebody must have read them carefully,' scoffed Gideon.
The four Levellers were arrested by troops of horsemen, dragged from their beds in dawn raids. They were taken to Whitehall and charged with treason. During John Lilburne's examination by the Council of State, at one point he was sent into an adjoining room; he could hear Oliver Cromwell losing his temper and shouting at Lord Fairfax: 'I tell you, sir,' — thumping the table — 'you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them, or they will break you!'
The fear of army mutiny was justified: unhappiness homed in on impending service in Ireland. With England now settled, Cromwell was to make an expedition to end the long unrest there. Three hundred infantrymen in Colonel Hewson's regiment swore they would not leave for Ireland until the Levellers' programme had been introduced; they were cashiered without pay arrears. The next serious event, which caused Gideon a desperate crisis of conscience, happened in London. This involved Robert Lockyer, a young Particular Baptist from Bishopsgate; Anne Jukes, whose family also came from Bishopsgate, had grown up with some of his relatives. Lockyer served in Whalley's regiment, which had incorporated some of Cromwell's original Ironsides; although Whalley himself was more or less a Presbyterian, there were radicals among his men. This regiment was guarding the King at Hampton Court when Charles escaped to Carisbrooke. They subsequently fought at Colchester. Whalley himself supported Pride's Purge, was a member of the High Court of Justice and signed the King's death warrant. He believed his regiment was governed by 'Reason, not Passion' — but he was wrong.
With the King dead, soldier Levellers as well as civilians had realised the execution merely gave the army grandees uncontrolled power. They had installed a republic, yet would ignore the Levellers' constitutional programme. Paying arrears, providing for the wounded and their dependants, and protecting soldiers from enforced service abroad also still remained a low priority.
Eight troopers had petitioned Fairfax to restore the original Council of the Army, with its regimental Agitators. The response was to court-martial five and subject them to the painful punishment called 'riding the wooden horse'. The civilian Richard Overton, who for once was not in prison, greeted this with a celebrated pamphlet likening the soldiers to foxes cruelly hunted down by beagles. Alone among the Leveller leaders, Overton approved the trial and execution of the King; he called it the finest piece of justice that was ever had in England.
A month later, part of Lockyer's troop was stationed in Bishopsgate. Radicals among them were already fired up, as the planned expedition to Ireland gave them a focus. The Levellers believed that the native Irish Catholics had the same right to their own land and to self-determination as the English — an opinion in which they were virtually isolated. Their ideals forbade travelling across international boundaries. Soldiers saw themselves as volunteers who could only be sent abroad with their own consent. Cromwell's intended expedition was gunpoint imperialism. The Levellers believed that any man might refuse to obey commands that were incompatible with his ideas of reason and justice.
When they were ordered to leave their quarters, thirty of Whalley's men seized their colours and barricaded themselves into the Bull Inn in Bishopsgate Street. When their captain tried to carry off the flag, Lockyer and others hung onto it. Colonel Whalley arrived on the scene to be told that the mutineers only wanted their arrears, to pay for their quarter before they left London. Money was promised, therefore, though not enough. A large crowd of civilians gathered and threatened a riot, but were dispersed by loyal soldiers. Next morning Fairfax and Cromwell turned up. Lockyer and fourteen others were arrested. In their subsequent trial, six were condemned to death, of whom Fairfax pardoned five. Lockyer was picked out as the ringleader.