By the 17th Century, the deep rot within the feudal system had become terminal. The budding bourgeois class was being hemmed in by the limitations of feudalism, and was beginning to vie for political power, leading to conflict with the absolute monarchs of Europe.
The first great expression of this process was in England, in which the struggle against absolutism, Catholicism, and for religious freedom led to the beheading of the King, the establishment of a short-lived republic, and the path being cleared for unbridled capitalist development.
The press, a relatively new invention, played a pivotal role in allowing revolutionaries to spread their ideas, as well as to organise the most radical elements of the revolution.
Pamphlet wars
Publishing was a royal monopoly, meaning that the crown had absolute control over what was printed. In London, for example, there were just 20 authorised publishing houses. Not that this made much of a difference! It is estimated that between 1640 and 1661 there were roughly 28,000 pamphlets and similar materials printed.
Most were produced by the hundreds of illegal printers, run and owned by the bourgeois, in London that pumped out seditious pamphlets, bulletins, declarations, and petitions. These ranged from satirical ballads about political scandals, manifestos of utopian societies, to predictions of the end of the world depicting King Charles I as the antichrist – all expressed in vivid biblical imagery.
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, a 1648 pamphlet penned by Gerard Winstanley – leading figure of the Diggers, a utopian communist sect – is an example of such an illegal publication:
“It is not lawfull nor fit for some to work, and the other to play; for it is Gods command, that all work, let all eat: and if all work alike, is it not fit for all to eat alike, have alike, and enjoy alike priviledges and freedoms? … Weep and howl, ye Rich men … God will visit you for all your oppressions; You live on other mens labours, and give them their bran to eat, extorting extreme rents and taxes on your fellow-creatures. But now what will you do? for the People will no longer be enslaved by you, for the knowledge of the Lord shall enlighten them.”
Another of the same year, named The Mournful Cries of Many Thousand Poor Tradesmen, illustrates the mood of the masses, who were keen to prevent the wavering parliament from compromising with the crown – which had just been defeated militarily in the first civil war – and selling out the revolution:
“O Parliament men, and soldiers! Necessity dissolves all laws and government, and hunger will break through stone walls, tender mothers will sooner devour you, than the fruit of their own womb, and hunger regards no swords nor cannons.”
Clashes between parliament and the monarchy weren’t isolated to the battlefields of the civil war, they were littered throughout the printed material of the day, seeking to win over the masses. In February 1649, a week after the execution of Charles I, Eikon Basilike – an autobiographical account of the civil wars in which Charles states that he did absolutely nothing wrong – was published.
In response, Eikonoklastes was released in October of the same year, a riposte by John Milton that answered the royalists point by point, defending the Commonwealth.
Other notable Royalist papers include Mercurius Melancholicus, Mercurius Pragmaticus, and Mercurius Elenticus. These were full of poetry and verse and were written in a style just as pompous and flowery as their cavalier authors.
Entertainment and intrigue weren’t the only purpose of pamphleteering. They acted as focal points around which more organised groups of radicals would coalesce.
The Moderate
The hotbed for this was the New Model Army, which became a bastion for radical ideas, as well as being an influential factor in events. The Levellers, a group organised around radical-democratic principles, skillfully used the revolutionary press to agitate within this army.
At their peak from 1648-49, the stormiest days of the revolution, the Levellers had a powerful foothold in the army. Their influence could be seen in papers such as Mercurius Militaris – the official paper of the army – as well as their own weekly paper, The Moderate.
The pages of The Moderate were full of scathing criticisms of both the King and the Presbyterian elements in parliament which sought compromise with Charles from day one. In its 30th issue, which was published on 30 January 1649, the day Charles was executed, its main editorial declared that:
“Not death, but the cause makes a Martyr, and who can be more unfortunate, than he that is most wicked? A sinful life is the death of the soul, and as Plato says, The infamy of a Tyrant is immortal: Shall not such as climb up publike and highest sins, fall in open and lowest shame? And those that covet to swim in the blood of Saints, sink in the gulf of God’s eternal wrath? Surely, that man was most miserable, whose life the wicked did so much desire, and at whose death the righteous much more rejoice”
“Let them that intend to lay this yoke upon us, expect our non-submission to it; for it is too heavy for us, although not others to bear, and if any intend to impose it upon us, we may possibly shake it off, and lay it upon the asses backs that are most proper and able to bear it.”
These papers were not just idle commentators, observing events from the outside. They were means of agitating for radical ideas as well as organising tight-knit groups across the country. The Moderate, for example, had correspondents all across England, allowing for the Levellers to have a national influence.
During the Putney debates, a pivotal moment in the revolution in which the radicals of the army clashed with the grandees on what political settlement should follow Charles’ defeat, the Levellers produced The Case of the Armie Truly Stated, a manifesto that would later be developed into the Agreement of the People.
The Agreement was essentially a programme for power of the most radical elements of the revolution, and would be worn by soldiers in their caps during the debates, acting as their political uniform.
In the decisive moments, in which the Presbyterians of parliament were selling out the revolution, papers such as The Moderate were rallying points for the masses to intervene. Various versions of the Agreement were carried in print connected to petitions, mobilising the people of London outside parliament.
Each issue ruthlessly exposed the corruption and betrayals of parliament whenever there was a threat of the revolution being betrayed. Mercurius Militaris proudly displayed “After parliament’s second purge” on its masthead following the New Model Army’s purge of the Presbyterian ministers in the Long Parliament.
This would intensify after the execution of Charles as the new Commonwealth sought to turn against those radical layers that now served as a cause of instability for bourgeois rule.
When John Lilburne was arrested during the purge of the Levellers in 1649, over 10,000 were mobilised outside the Tower of London through a petition carried in The Moderate demanding his release, something that was granted soon after.
The issue of Mercurius Militaris directly following the crushing of the Levellers at the Burford uprising aimed its muskets directly at the new bourgeois republic, saying:
“And yee most excellent Kenell of Canibals, are your zealous stomacks appeased; how! does the blood of Godly men give your hypocriticall fasts a better rellish then the bloud of the wicked? alas poor Oliver that hath been all this while (like Nebucadonozer) feeding upon grasse …”
Radical traditions
The Levellers, along with other radicals were ultimately defeated. Their papers were shut down, their members shot or exiled to Ireland, and one-man rule established under Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. This spelled the ‘beginning of the end’ of the English Revolution. Regardless of this, it had served its purpose, for feudalism had been dealt a blow from which it would never recover.
Due to the low level of the productive forces, this revolution could only ever be filled with a bourgeois content. The lower ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, in which groups such as the Levellers drew from, ultimately lacked the power that the working class has today.
The fate of those most radical elements was therefore sealed. The bourgeois reached a rotten compromise with King Charles II however, this time with the bourgeois firmly in the saddle.
Despite this, their revolutionary traditions live on. A century later another rotten feudal regime would be toppled by revolution, this time more completely. The revolutionaries of the French Revolution picked up the baton left by their English counterparts, and the revolutionary press lay at the very heart of it…
