Militant Seedbeds Of Early Quakerism
by David Boulton

This article appeared originally on the Quaker Universalist Voice website and is included here in appreciation of the author's thorough research on Gerrard Winstanley and the English Digger ideas and experiences as they may have interrelated to George Fox and the early Quaker movement. URL where this article was found: http://universalistfriends.org/library/militant-seedbeds-of-early-quakerism

Editor’s Introduction

The Quaker Universalist Fellowship has previously published in pamphlet form two documents that testify to the presence of both revolutionary politics and universalist beliefs among 17th-century Quakers. They are The Light Upon the Candlestick (1992) and Fifty nine Particulars (2002), which George Fox addressed to Parliament only months before the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660. It seems fitting to follow them up with the two historical essays presented here.

These pieces are reprinted with permission of the author from Real Like the Daisies or Real Like I Love You? Essays in Radical Quakerism, a booklet published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Dales Historical Monographs in association with the Quaker Universalist Group. My review of “Daisies” appeared in Universalist Friends (number 39). The collection is now on sale from the bookstore of Friends General Conference in Philadelphia but is not generally available elsewhere in the United States.

David Boulton is a member of Kendal Monthly Meeting in Britain and the Quaker Universalist Group. A broadcaster and author, he has written widely on Quaker history and radical theology. An American edition of his latest book, The Trouble with God: Building the Republic of Heaven, will be published in October by John Hunt Publishing. He has lectured and led workshops in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. In May, 2005, he joined Kitty and David Rush in leading a weekend workshop at Pendle Hill on The Experience and Understanding of Nontheism in Contem-porary Quakerism.

— Rhoda R. Gilman
Winstanley And Friends

This essay combines an article written for Friends Quarterly, April 2000, and a paper delivered to the Conference of Quaker Historians at Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, USA, in June 2000. It also draws on an article in Political Theology, May 2001.

Was Gerrard Winstanley a Quaker? Did he have any direct connection with Quakers? Did George Fox read his books and pamphlets, and was he influenced by them? These questions—the first two, at least—were asked in the seventeenth century, and have been asked again by historians and scholars in the twentieth. Those of us who have been inspired by Winstanley’s radicalism have hoped that the piecemeal scraps of documented information will indeed prove him “one of us”: those who distrust his politics, and particularly his communism, will breathe a sigh of relief if it can be shown that True Levelling and Quakers never did more than flirt with each other, and certainly never consummated their coy relationship. This article is an attempt to set out the known facts, and to summarise the conclusions I have reached while researching my book, Gerrard Winstanley and the Republic of Heaven.

Winstanley was born in Wigan, Lancashire, in 1609. He was probably educated at Wigan grammar school, as his writing is fluent if not particularly scholarly, and he made use of the occasional Latin tag. In or around 1630 he travelled south to London to be apprenticed to a merchant tailor, Sarah Gates, who was probably a kinswoman. She was the widow of a former puritan minister turned cloth merchant and possessed a well-stocked theological library in her home, where Winstanley probably lodged. In 1637 he became a freeman of the Merchant Tailors Company and in 1640 married Susan King, daughter of a small landowner in Cobham, Surrey. In 1643, with the country plunged into civil war, his cloth business failed. “I was beaten out both of estate and trade,” he wrote, “and forced… to live a country life”. He seems to have been employed by his father-in-law as a grazier and cowherd in Cobham.

The great swirl of political and religious dissent soon pulled him into its vortex. From having been brought up “a strict goer to church… and hearer of sermons”, he turned to “the ordinance of dipping” (baptism), at a time when the more radical Baptist congregations were denouncing all forms of church establishment and providing a stream of recruits to the Leveller movement and the New Model Army. (The same stream would later be diverted into Quakerism). But Winstanley preferred the pen to the sword. Early in 1648 he delivered to a notoriously radical-sectarian printer, Giles Calvert, who had a printing shop in the crowded alleys behind the old pre-fire St. Paul’s cathedral, the manuscript of the first of three pamphlets he would publish that year. Another seventeen would follow within four years, mostly published by Calvert, who was printer to the Levellers and, a few years later, to the Quakers.

The Mysterie of God was an extraordinary literary debut. It is probably the first theological work in the English language to argue what became known as the “universalist” doctrine that everyone, however sinful, would be saved. The prevailing Calvinist orthodoxy preached that the fate of all was divinely preordained, the few to salvation, the many to damnation. Even those like the General Baptists who denied predestination accepted that eternal damnation was the lot of the unrepentant sinner. Winstanley’s sweeping universalism had radical political as well as heretical theological implications: puritanism tended to identify the “better sort”, the successful and wealthy, with the elect, and the “baser sort”, the poor, with the damned. The great and the good were one, as were the small and the bad. Universalism clearly tended to blur if not altogether erase the distinction between the great unwashed and those who had been washed in the blood of the Lamb. It was a truly levelling doctrine.

But Winstanley was not content to argue that the poor would be saved. In The Mysterie of God and the two pamphlets which followed, he teaches that it is the poor who are to be God’s agents in bringing about the kingdom of heaven on earth. When he dares to connect the poor with the radical sectaries, the subversive and revolutionary potential of his doctrine is clear, to priest and magistrate alike.

In his next two pamphlets Winstanley presses the point with a daringly metaphorical interpretation of Biblical scripture. The devil is not a person but the embodiment of selfishness and self-seeking. God is Reason, or seflessness, or community. Christ is not “a man [who] lived and died long ago at Jerusalem” but “the power of the spirit within you”. God is not to be looked for “in a place of glory beyond the sun, but within yourself… He that looks for a God outside himself… worships he knows not what, but is… deceived by the imagination of his own heart”. Winstanley shared the millenarian expectations of his contemporaries, but the Christ who would come again would be a spirit “rising in despised sons and daughters”, an “indwelling power of reason”, a “sea of truth” which would wash away corruption and ensure that the lowly and meek inherited the earth.

Moreover, the coming “saints’ paradise” was to be built not on clerical book-learning and authority but on direct experience, “experimental knowledge of Christ”, “a teacher within”. Years before George Fox would say much the same, in almost identical words, Winstanley writes: “What I hear another man speak is nothing to me until I find the same experience in myself. The testimony of others is known to be true by the testimony of the same experience within myself”. And again, like Fox, he applied this to the books of the Bible no less than to those of his contemporaries.

But Winstanley was no armchair theoretician, content to sit back and wait for Christ to rise in sons and daughters. Early in 1649 he had a vision, much as Fox was to have at Pendle three years later. In his vision, or “trance”, Winstanley was instructed: “Work together. Eat bread together. Declare this all abroad… I the Lord have spoke it”. Winstanley interpreted this as a call to action, and on April 1, with a small band of fellow-Diggers, he took possession of some common land at St. George’s Hill, near Walton-on-Thames, and established a community to till the ground in common, sharing labour and produce. One of his companions, William Everard, reportedly predicted that they would be thousands-strong within ten days. In fact, some fifty men with their families joined them, and over the next twelve months perhaps thirty similar communes came into being, albeit tentatively and briefly, throughout south-east England.

The St. George’s Hill community was immediately attacked by mobs led by those who claimed exclusive proprietary rights to the commons. Leadership of the mob was quickly assumed by the local parson, John Platt, a puritan minister and landlord who objected in both capacities to the actions of those who were now calling themselves “True Levellers”. Crops were dug up, shelters pulled down and burnt, and women and children physically assaulted. The winter of 1649, following a disastrous harvest and seven years of crippling warfare, was one of hunger and hardship nation-wide. For Winstanley and his comrades it was a grim struggle to survive, made no easier when a group of Ranters attempted to join, preaching community of women as well as land, and urging violent resistance to the mobs.

A stream of pamphlets from Winstanley’s pen denounced parson Platt and his corrupt church, the landlords and their corrupting wealth, and the Ranters and their corrupting influence. He insisted that violence could not be met with violence: God (or Reason) would not rely on “carnal weapons”.

The Digger’s war was a “Lamb’s War” against the dragon of property, the principle of selfishness which was the devil incarnate. Winstanley’s arguments for making the earth a “common treasury”, for turning republican England (Charles I had just been executed) into a republic of heaven, are formulated in a total of twenty pamphlets and books, which output is surely among the most lucid and inspirational in England’s rich tradition of polemical literature. As Michael Foot writes, “If there were such a thing as a sacred canon of radical English literature, Winstanley’s works would be there, not far behind those of Milton, Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt and William Morris”. And none of these wrote under such conditions of persecution and destitution as Winstanley endured in the first year of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish republic.

But Christ did not rise in sons and daughters, even with the assistance of the Diggers’ spades and Winstanley’s eloquent pen. Twelve months after the experiment began it was ended with the brutal sacking of the community and the forced dispersal of the dwindling band of comrades. The satellite communes quickly collapsed in turn. Winstanley, who had taught the evils of wage labour, had to turn to wage labour himself to keep himself and his longsuffering wife alive. He wrote one more major work, The Law of Freedom, published early in 1652. It is a detailed blueprint for a communist society, and it is addressed to Oliver Cromwell. “Now I have set the candle at your door”, he writes, “for you have power in your hand… to act for common freedom if you will; I have no power”. Winstanley has not entirely given up hope that “the Lord”, understood as a benevolent cosmos, will signal the start of the long-awaited millennial reign; but he now looks to state power to assist Christ’s rising, where a year or two earlier he had seen state and church together as the twin-headed dragon that would be overcome by the lamb.

The Law of Freedom is an astonishing work, on the basis of which Winstanley would subsequently be labelled a proto-Marxist (though it has been suggested that Marx might more aptly be called a neo-Winstanleyite). Some have seen in the short four years separating The Mysterie of God in 1648 from The Law of Freedom in 1652 an abandonment of mystical theology for secular politics, but it is plain to me that the politics are already embedded in the first pamphlet and the radical theology remains the core of the last. Politics and religion, the secular and the sacred, were one to Winstanley, as they were to Fox and early Friends, whose new Quaker movement began to achieve lift-off just as True Levelling crash-landed.

Twenty-four years after The Law of Freedom, and two years after Winstanley’s death, the Dean of Durham, Thomas Comber, published a book, Christianity no Enthusiasm, claiming that the Quakers “derived their ideas from the communist writer Gerrard Winstanley”, which in his view made “repression of Quakerism… not only a service to God, but a preservation of every man and his property”. Although the alleged connection seems not to have been closely pursued at the time (perhaps because by the 1670s the widely-recognised attachment of respectable Friends to private enterprise was enough to give the lie to Comber’s crude smear), it was taken up again when Winstanley was rediscovered by nineteenth-century Marxists. Eduard Bernstein in 1895, G. P. Gooch in 1896 and Lewis Berens in 1906 all claimed that either Winstanley became a Quaker or that the Quakers derived much of their theology from Winstanley. The respectable Quaker historians Rufus M. Jones and William C. Braithwaite thought the connection doubtful, suggesting that Winstanley and Fox seem, in Braithwaite’s words, to be “independent products of the peculiar social and spiritual climate of the age”. David Petegorsky’s Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: a Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement, 1940, was more emphatic, saying “there is no evidence whatever” for any contact between Winstanley and Friends, and this was the view of George Sabine, who published his monumental Works of Gerrard Winstanley the following year—though Sabine recognised the “close similarity of religious experience” in Winstanley and Fox. Richard T. Vann charted what he saw as Winstanley’s journey “from radicalism to Quakerism” in Journal of Friends Historical Society, Vol 49 (1959-61), but was almost alone among Quaker scholars in searching out the documentation.

There matters stood till the late 1970s when historian Barry Reay unearthed in the Friends House archive a letter sent in August 1654 by Edward Burrough in London to Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor. Burrough and Francis Howgill had been dispatched to the capital by Fox as Quaker missionaries, and Burrough reported that “Wilstandley says he believes we are sent to perfect that work which fell in their hands. He hath been with us”. There can be no doubt that the sorely mutilated “Wilstandley” is our man; that he had “been with” Friends, which probably means he had attended their first London meetings; that he saw the new religion from the north as a continuation of his own work; and that Burrough (the most politically radical of early Friends) was not unsympathetic.

It would be very interesting indeed to have sight of whatever reply Margaret Fell may have made. Quakerism had established its headquarters in a gentry house, under the patronage and matronage of a family which had greatly benefited in wealth and influence from their Cromwellian politics and entrepreneurial adventures. The Fells can hardly have been unaware that “the work” associated with Winstanley was a levelling work, a communist work, dedicated to the overthrow of private property and its replacement by common ownership, under the power of an indwelling God who was more sweet reason than lord of lord protectors. It seems not unlikely to me that Margaret Fell and George Fox discouraged further contacts with so notorious an agitator. Certainly we hear no more of “Wilstandley” from Burrough, Howgill, and the growing band of London Friends.

Not, at least, for many years. But 22 years later we find (or Richard T. Vann found, and recorded in the article I have cited) Winstanley’s burial record. It is not in any parish register but in that of Westminster Monthly Meeting, which records the burial at Long Acre of Gerrard Winstanley, corn chandler, of St. Giles in the Field. It has been suggested that Winstanley’s widow, Elizabeth (he had remarried after Susan’s death) persuaded Friends to give him a Quaker funeral in honour of his radical past, but this is surely far-fetched. A communist past was not something a widow was likely to want to honour in the reactionary 1670s, and Friends were most unlikely to bury any but their own. It seems clear that some time before he died Gerrard Winstanley became a Quaker. It may be that Elizabeth herself had Quaker connections, for when she remarried in 1681 it was to a Quaker, and the deaths of the three children of Gerrard and Elizabeth are all recorded in the Quaker registers.

But if we can now confidently claim Winstanley as a Friend at the last, we can do so only by opening up another mystery. Other researchers, led by the Canadian scholar James Alsop, have discovered that shortly after his doomed courtship of Friends in 1654, Winstanley took possession of his father-in-law’s Surrey estate and began to live the life of a country gentleman. By 1659 “Mr Winstanley” was a waywarden in the parish of Cobham, by 1660, as England reverted to monarchy, he was an overseer, by 1668 a churchwarden, and by 1671 a chief constable—in which capacity he presumably had responsibility for prosecuting Quakers and other dissenters under the Clarendon Code! So it seems that the young radical, forsaken by Reason in his attempt to create a communist republic of heaven, cold-shouldered by Quakers, and then tempted by comfort, security and respectability, had followed the familiar road from radicalism to reaction, before a death-bed repentance brought him back to his radical roots. Christ could yet rise in sons and daughters, even if the republic of heaven was to be a republic not of this world.

In my book I have argued that Winstanley’s political and theological trajectory is less baffling once we begin to understand the huge changes in the context within which this all happened. Winstanley changed, certainly, but so did the political and religious world he inhabited. And so too did Quakerism. In 1649 it was distinctly possible to believe that the revolution then in full swing might lead to the extinction of “kingly power”, including the rule of wealth and property. The Quaker movement of the 1650s was in part a response to the failure of that revolution to materialise, with a consequent tendency to internalise and spiritualise the republic of heaven as “within” and mystical rather than “without” and this-worldly. The counter-revolution and restoration of monarchy in 1660 put an end to any remaining hopes that the new Jerusalem might be built in England’s green and pleasant land. And by the 1670s, their militant republicanism and identification with the “Good Old Cause” conveniently forgotten, Friends were well down the road of respectability, with a reputation for shrewd but honest business dealings, drab clothing and fearsome consciences: “the harmless people of God called Quakers”. In truth, the final journey Winstanley made from gentleman to Quaker is not as long as it seems. Friends met him half way.

But if we now know beyond reasonable doubt that Winstanley did have contact with Friends in the 1650s and did join Westminster Friends in the 1670s, we still lack direct evidence to help us resolve the remaining conundrum: did Winstanley’s pre-communist pamphlets influence Fox and early Friends, as the hostile priest Comber alleged? Were the similarities in their works coincidental, attributable to “the spirit of the age”, or did Fox read Winstanley and derive some of his inspiration from the older man?

George Fox was some fourteen years younger than Winstanley, born of parents with spectacularly pious pedigrees. He left his Midlands home in 1643, the second year of the civil war, the year Winstanley’s cloth business was ruined, and sampled London (where he too had a kinsman). By 1646, his Journal tells us, he understood that the university-educated ministry of “hireling priests” was a hindrance to true religion, so he “looked more after the dissenting people”, only to find that the separatist preachers could not speak to his condition. What he knew, he knew “experimentally”. In 1647 he met up with radical Baptists—“shattered Baptists” he calls them—where he apparently recruited his first followers. As the Journal tells it, Fox seems to have been curiously oblivious of the civil discord all around him till, jailed for blasphemy, he was visited in 1651 by a recruiting party for the New Model Army. The recruiting party seems to have regarded his radical dissent as eminent qualification for a commission—which, as he tells us in the Journal, he refused. Released later that year, he began his journeyings through the north which would culminate in his meeting the Westmorland Seekers in 1652 and the emergence of an organised Quaker movement.

Thus Winstanley’s and Fox’s radical religio-political ideologies were formed and framed by the revolutionary convulsions of the 1640s, which saw the established church lose its historic power, the Lords their hereditary seats, and the king his head. There is a critical difference between Winstanley’s and Fox’s account of these tumultuous times: Winstanley’s was written as the revolution progressed, every one of his works reflecting a new twist and turn in the power struggle on earth and its cosmic projection in heaven; while Fox’s account was dictated and edited-together many years later, when it was no longer politic to foreground the political dimension, which in Fox’s mind had by then become almost wholly subsumed in the religious and spiritual. But these very different lenses on the events of the forties cannot disguise the similarities of experience—that which each man “knew experimentally”. Both had stopped being a “goer to church”, had explored dissent, had been with the radical Baptists, had mixed with Seekers, had tangled with Ranters and with the law, and had found their liberation in an experience of what they believed to be unmediated communion with a God who for the one was sweet Reason “rising in sons and daughters” and for the other was the light of conscience in every man and woman.

I want to suggest a number of ways in which the similar experience of these two spiritual and subversive giants led to congruent positions on a number of critical issues. But these suggested congruities are not simply between Winstanley’s thought and Fox’s, but between True Levelling and first-generation Quakerism en masse. I will break these down into ten points, some more complex than can adequately be pursued here, others simple and obvious and requiring little elaboration.

One: Winstanley and Quakers shared an overwhelming conviction that the overturning times through which they were living had a cosmic dimension. God was working his purpose out through the religious, political and social tumults of the times. Three and a half centuries before Fukuyama, Winstanley and Fox believed they were witnessing the beginning of the end of history. The conviction was shared by all the sects and seekers, and notably by Cromwell. True Levellers and Quakers each subscribed to a realised eschatology which rested on a metaphorical interpretation of the Second Coming. “The rising up of Christ in sons and daughters,” Winstanley writes, “is his second coming”. For Fox and Friends, the second coming was Christ’s indwelling power as manifested in “the people of God called by the world Quakers”.

Two: For both Winstanley and Fox, the source of worldly corruption was a fallen church, led by university-educated priests who traded in the gospel as a merchant trades in corn. Anti-clericalism was rife in the forties, but nowhere more virulent and sustained than in Winstanley’s writings and the Quakers’ subsequent contemptuous denunciation of “hireling priests”. True Levellers and Quakers opposed tithes precisely because they financed the clergy: no tithes, no clerics. For Winstanley the church was part of the “kingly power” to be overthrown, for Fox even separatist preachers like Francis Howgill and Thomas Taylor (among his earliest lieutenants) were beyond the pale till they gave up the stipends they had been paid by their Seeker congregations. Priests, whether “Common Prayer men” or Puritan “professors”, were the devil’s disciples. From this came Winstanley’s and Fox’s opposition to all church ordinances, and their advocacy of toleration, by which they meant a rooted objection to any interference by magistrates with religious belief or practice—a position learnt from the forties Baptists. Also taken straight from the Baptists was first Winstanley’s, then Fox’s, championing of unordained and untaught “mecanickal preachers”. “The Scriptures of the Bible”, Winstanley writes in Fire in the Bush (probably 1650), “were written by the experimentall hand of Shepherds, Husbandmen, Fishermen, and such inferiour men of the world; And the Universitie learned ones have got these mens writings; and flourishes their plaine language over with their darke interpretation, and glosses, as if it were too hard for ordinary men now to understand them; and thereby they deceive the simple, and make a prey of the poore, and cosens them of the Earth, and of the tenth of their labors”. Winstanley and Fox certainly differed when it came to church organisation: Winstanley was a congregationalist, insisting on the independence of each local church, where Fox became an ever more convinced centralist. But in their hostility to clericalism and legally enforceable prescription they were at one.

Three: Closely allied to their renunciation and denunciation of ecclesiastical authority was the conviction that, in the new dispensation, no “outward teacher” was necessary. No book (including the Bible), no sermon, no ministry had any authority except in so far as it confirmed what the reader or hearer knew and understood “experimentally”. At a stroke, this undercut all academic, expert and learned authority, as well as all processes of systematic reasoning, analysis and logic, despised as producing mere “notions”. Baptists and other sectaries in the mid-forties were fond of quoting Jeremiah 31: 33-4, which had prophesied a time to come when the law would be “written in men’s hearts… And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour… saying Know the Lord”. This has proven a great misfortune for historians, since it discouraged the sectaries from ever admitting that they had learned anything from a book or a human teacher, which greatly complicates attempts to plot influences and connections. Winstanley mentions only one man, William Everard, with whom he was associated, and Fox notoriously cites hundreds whom he “convinced”, but none who ever convinced him of anything. In The Mysterie of God in 1648 Winstanley is at pains to make it clear that what he has to say he knows “first, by my own experience”, and this is contrasted with the mere book-learning of the educated clergy: “He that preaches from the book and not from the annointing is no true minister but a hireling that preaches only to get a temporary living”. What he knows he knows experientially or “experimentally”. Compare Fox over and over again: “And this I knew experimentally”.

It is worth recalling that the language of experience and experiment was a very contemporary phenomenon. What was to become the Royal Society (“for Improving Natural Knowledge”) started meeting in 1645, just three years before Winstanley first broke into print, its aim being to explore “experimental philosophy” and promote “experimental learning”. This was the language of emergent science: a thing was true if it worked, and whether it worked was tested by experiment. First Winstanley and then Fox were using the newly-fashionable language of the day to revolutionise attitudes to religious authority, just as Newton and his “natural philosophers” were using it to displace superstition by science.

Four: For Winstanley as for the Quakers, the inward teacher was God or Christ, often symbolised as an inner “light”. Winstanley, before Fox and Friends, urges the importance of “walking in the light”: The enlightened “come to see the spirituall Light that is in every creature, and in that power and light do walk righteously towards other creatures, as well beasts as man-kinde” (New Law of Righteousness, 1649).

Although neither Winstanley nor Fox acknowledge their influence, the works of the continental mystics Henry Niclaes and Jacob Boehme made repeated use of light symbolism (elaborated, of course, from John’s Gospel). Significantly, the works of both Niclaes and Boehme began to appear in English translations in 1646 and, perhaps more significantly, those of Niclaes were printed by Winstanley’s and Fox’s printer, Giles Calvert. God is spoken of as an “inner light” by mid-forties radical Baptists, though the revolutionary implications of seeing God as within rather than without soon frightened off the Baptist hierarchy, which by 1650 was vehemently condemning the spiritual anarchy of “a God within, and a Christ within, and a word within”. Winstanley was branded an atheist for insisting that there was no outward God, and Fox’s imprisonment for blasphemy in 1650 followed his claim that God was in him, as in Christ. George Sabine in his Introduction to The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (1965) (from which all my Winstanley citations are taken) comments that the resemblance between Winstanley’s and Quaker perceptions of the immanent God “is astonishingly close”, and “closest of all perhaps in the case of George Fox himself, whose sense of `Christ within’, of worship as communion with God, and of such communion as an inward source of serenity and energy seems almost identical to Winstanley’s conception”. If there is a difference, it is that Winstanley sees God as an indwelling power in both humankind and nature—a pantheist (or panentheist) vision—whereas Fox focuses on “that of God in every man”. Winstanley’s eco-centrism prefigured modern Creation Spirituality: Fox’s merging of the human and the divine prefigured modern religious humanism.

It is worth noting that the “inward light” motif, which quickly became the most distinctive mark of Quakerism, was appropriated as much from emergent science and contemporary art as from Niclaes’ Family of Love and Boehme’s works of misty mysticism. Descartes philosophically and Newton experimentally were much preoccupied with the newly-discovered properties of light. Rembrandt, exploring the contrasts between painted oceans of light and oceans of darkness to penetrate mystery and heighten emotional response, and Vermeer, who was already experimenting with a camera obscura to organise his light on canvass, had both made light a fashionable subject. Again, we find Winstanley and Fox right up there with the latest trends and preoccupations.

Five: Almost as important as the “light” in Fox’s theology is the “seed”, which reoccurs again and again in the Journal. But here too we find Winstanley anticipating him. In Fire in the Bush (1649 or 1650) he writes of “the Seed or blessing” which will “rise up… to work deliverance”; and again, “they that are at liberty within, in whom the Seed is risen to rule, doe conquer all enemies by Love and patience…The Seed or Christ then is to be seen within, to save you from the curse within, to free you from bondage within; he is no Saviour that stands at a distance”. For both Winstanley and Fox, the seed is a multiple metaphor: it is the Biblical promise to Abraham, but it is also a saving power within, and yet again it is the people themselves in whom Christ has risen: for Winstanley, all True Levelling communists, for Fox, “the elect seed of God called Quakers” (Journal, Nickalls 1975 ed., p. 281).

Six: Winstanley and Fox had similarly radical de-constructionist attitudes to the scriptures. Each man knew his Bible intimately, and the writings of both are saturated in biblical imagery, but both valued “experimental knowledge” far above Bible teaching. For Winstanley, scripture had value as a record of the experiences of spiritually-minded men and women in far-off times and places, and (like Fox) he wasn’t above a bit of Bible-bashing himself when specifically addressing the churches. In his early works he elaborately allegorised Biblical passages, much as Niclaes and Boehme had done, though later his interest in using texts as scriptural batter-ingrams waned.

When Cromwell quoted scripture at him, Fox retorted that “all Christendom (so-called) had the Scriptures, but they wanted the power and the Spirit that those had who gave forth the Scriptures”. Fox’s university-educated friend and Friend Samuel Fisher put it more boldly: it was silly to call the Bible the Word of God, since it had no more authority than the Koran. It was “a bulk of heterogeneous writings, compiled together by men taking what they could find of the several sorts of writings that are therein, and… crowding them into a canon, or standard for the trial of spirits, doctrines, truths” (The Rustics Alarm, 1660). Fisher’s book, comments Christopher Hill, is “a remarkable work of popular Biblical criticism, based on real scholarship. Its effect is to demote the Bible from its central position in the protestant scheme of things, to make it a book like any other book”—which is exactly what it was to Winstanley. The Bible, he said, usefully illustrated truths of which one was already convinced by experiment. Fox said much the same: “What the Lord opened to me, I afterwards found was agreeable” to scripture.

Sabine is worth quoting again, since what he says of Winstanley could equally well be inferred from Fox’s teaching: “Winstanley’s belief in the sufficiency of an experimental religion, consistently carried out, made a clean sweep of the mythology of the Christian tradition, and more particularly of Protestant bibliolatry. By placing the whole religious drama within the setting of the human mind, the mystics quite destroyed the external or, so to speak, the physical existence of those entities upon which all doctrinal forms of Christianity depended. Christ and the devil, Winstanley says over and over again, are not forces outside human nature; they are the impulsions and inclinations, respectively, of good and evil—the flesh and the spirit—which every man experiences as the controlling motives of his own action. The Devil is not `a middle power between God and me, but it is the power of my proud flesh’. And `the power of the perfect law taking hold thereupon threw me under sorrow and sealed up my misery, and this is utter darkness’. Heaven and Hell are therefore located within the soul; they are not places far off. Similarly, Christ is the generating power of goodness within every man, not the historical character who lived long ago in Palestine.” Sabine quotes from Winstanley’s The Saints Paradice, (1648): “And therefore if you expect or look for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, you must know that the spirit within the flesh is Jesus Christ, and you must see, feel, and know from himself his own resurrection within you, if you expect life and peace by him. So that you do not look for a God now, as formerly you did, to be [in] a place of glory beyond the sun, moon, and stars, nor imagine a divine being you know not where, but you see him ruling within you, and not only in you, but you see him to be the spirit and power that dwells in every man and woman; yea, in every creature, according to his orb, within the globe of the creation.”

It was this insistence on dispensing with literal inter-pretations of the Bible, this creative impulse not only to allegorise scripture but to mine it for new myths and stories appropriate to a new dispensation, which severed both Winstanley and the Quakers from mainstream puritanism and the established Christian tradition. Neither Winstanley nor Fox invented scriptural allegorisation: it had a long history in the underground movements of the “Everlasting Gospel”. But they both dragged it from under ground, brought it into the light, and used it as a double-edged sword to lay into biblical literalism and bibliolatry.

Seven: There are striking similarities in Winstanley’s and Fox’s theologies of resistance in relation to the use of force. This is a complex matter. Neither man, at least before the 1660s, was what we would now call a pacifist: both believed that the New Model Army was a necessary instrument of revolution. But both were unequivocal in their advocacy of non-violence, or turning the other cheek, when they and their followers were under attack, and both saw non-violence as the mark of those within whom Christ had risen.

Since the discovery by Profesor G. E. Aylmer in 1968 of Winstanley’s early-1650 pamphlet Englands Spirit Unfoulded, it has been clear that Winstanley supported Cromwell’s Engagement, which rested on the victories of the army and its de facto rule. When Winstanley attacked the army, as he frequently did, it was not for its reliance on the sword but for its failure to enforce a revolutionary settlement. Winstanley saw the army as the vanguard of the poor, and it was his faith and hope that Christ would rise in and through the revolutionary regime, not in spite of it. The Council of State was the agency which would deliver freedom, not the obstacle to freedom. Fox’s position, at least before 1660, was similar. Although he had declined the offer of a commission in 1651, by 1652 he was deliberately targeting the military for Quaker recruits. (See my article “The Quaker Military Alliance” in Friends Quarterly, October 1997, reprinted hereafter.) As late as 1658 he is lambasting Cromwell for not carrying his republican crusade into Holland, Germany, Spain, Turkey and the Vatican itself, urging “Let thy soldiers go forth… that thou may rock nations as a cradle”. For Margaret Fell too, the army was “the Battle-axe in the hand of the Lord”.

But while True Levellers in the forties and Quakers in the fifties saw military power as the indispensable guarantee of republican freedom, which in turn was the foundation of the “New Heaven and New Earth” which they believed they had been called to build, both movements renounced the use of violence to further their own ends, even in self-defence. Before starting his communist experiment, Winstanley had written in The New Law of Righteousness: “The Lord himself will do this great work, without either sword or weapon; weapons and swords shall destroy, and cut the powers of the earth asunder, but they shall never build up”. When the Cobham community was repeatedly attacked, its members beaten, its houses burnt, its crops uprooted, Winstanley insisted that retaliation of any kind was not an option for those in whom Christ had risen. “For my part, and for the rest [of the Diggers]”, he writes in A New-yeers Gift (1650), “we abhor fighting for Freedom, it is acting of the Curse and lifting him up higher; and do thou uphold it by the Sword, we will not; we will conquer by Love and Patience, or else we count it no Freedom: Freedom gotten by the Sword is an established bondage to some part or other of the Creation; and this we have declared publickly enough… Victory that is gotten by the Sword, is a Victory that slaves gets one over another;… but Victory obtained by Love, is a Victory for a King… This great Leveller, Christ our King of righteousness in us, shall cause men to beat their swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks…” In The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649), written after the first mob attacks on his commune, Winstanley declares that they are willing to shed their own blood, but not that of their enemies: “We shall not do this by force of Armes, we abhorre it”. And when his community was finally routed and dispersed, he writes: “We have declared our Testimony, and now let freedom and bondage strive who shall rule in Mankind: the weapons of the Sonnes of bondage being carnall, as fire, club and sword; the weapons of the Sonnes of freedom being spiritual, as love, patience and righteousness”.

In his last book, The Law of Freedom, where he attempts a constitution for a state which has adopted common ownership of the land, Winstanley does allow for armed defence, and for capital punishment for serious offences. Early Friends also tacitly accepted that a state dedicated to the building of heaven on earth had the right and duty to defend itself against God’s enemies, and it was many years before they began to challenge capital punishment. In only one important and somewhat bizarre respect did Winstanley’s teaching differ sharply from Fox’s: The Law of Freedom advocated capital punishment for preachers who accepted payment for their trade. Such “shall be put to death for a witch and a cheater”.

This apart, the active non-resistance of the True Levellers closely prefigures that of Friends. “Like George Fox”, writes Sabine, “…Winstanley distrusted the efficacy of force to accomplish any permanent moral results, and this was altogether in accord with the belief that morality begins with a change of heart. Hence the root of moral regeneration is a kind of passivity, submissiveness of the better impulse that will rise if it be given the chance, a silence and a waiting until the wiser thought and action ripens”. Here is the essence of what became Quaker pacifism, and it is at the heart of everything Winstanley wrote and enacted.

Eight: Not only does Winstanley’s theology of nonviolence prefigure Fox’s, but so too does some of the graphic imagery with which it is advanced. Quakers made much of the imagery of “the Lamb’s war” to describe their own militant engagement with the “beast”, the “dragon”. But Winstanley was there before them. In his Letter to the Lord Fairfax (1649) he writes: “In this work of Community in the earth, and in the fruits of the earth, is seen plainly a pitched battaile between the Lamb and the Dragon, between the Spirit of love, humility and righteousnesse, which is the Lamb appearing in flesh; and the power of envy, pride, and unrighteousnesse, which is the Dragon appearing in flesh”. And again, in The Bloudie and Unchristian Acting (1649), in one of his most powerful passages: “But now O England know this, that thy striving now is not only Dragon against Dragon, Beast against Beast, Covetousnesse and Pride against Covetousnesse and Pride, but thou now begin’st to fight against the Lamb, the Dove, the meek Spirit, the power of love… The battell between the Dragon and the Lamb is begun in the midst of thee, and a few years now will let all the world see who is strongest, love or hatred, freedom or bondage”. Thereafter the language of the Lamb’s war is never absent from Winstanley’s writings, and it is soon to find a central place in Quaker polemics.

Nine: Winstanley and Fox shared a radical social vision which was all the more threatening to the powerful in its explicit appeal to the powerless. Both men attacked the social hierarchies of church and state, both rammed home the awkward message that God’s promises were to the poor and the meek. Both preached a kingdom of God on earth: salvation or freedom was for now and for this life, not for later, in some other world. Winstanley went much further than Fox in demanding full economic equality and common ownership of the land, but Fox, ten years after the True Levellers’ commune, came close to matching him when he called in 1659 for the confiscation of all former monastic lands, glebes, and the great gentry estates. Fox’s diatribes against the great ones who “cumbred the ground”, who were “harlotted from the truth, and such gets the earth under their hands, commons, wastes and forrest, and fells and mores and mountains, and lets it lie waste, and calls themselves Lords of it, and keeps it from the people, when so many are ready to starve and beg”—all this reads like pure Winstanley. Indeed, in arguing that church buildings and Whitehall itself should be turned over to the poor, that the people should respond to tithe demands with civil disobedience, that lords of the manor should have their fines confiscated and that the gentry should be disarmed, Fox arguably went even further than Winstanley—though his revolutionary demands (with the notable exception of civil disobedience against tithes) were quietly forgotten after the Restoration, and dropped as an embarrassment from Fox’s incomplete Complete Works.

Ten: Finally, Winstanley and Fox both had a genius for propaganda. It was Winstanley who pioneered the publication of “sufferings” to attract sympathy for his communes, and the Quakers famously made good use of the tactic. Moreover, when Gervase Benson and Anthony Pearson first published Friends’ sufferings, their printer was Winstanley’s: Giles Calvert.

So I now approach the critical question: are these congruities simply coincidental, the result of contemporaries drawing from the same well of dissent, or did Winstanley’s writings have a direct if wholly unacknowledged influence on Fox and early Quakerism? As noted earlier, as early as 1678, two years after Winstanley’s death, Thomas Comber claimed in his anti-Quaker pamphlet Christianity no Enthusiasm that Quakerism was but a rehash of Winstanley’s teachings, which in his view made repression of Friends “not only a service to God, but a preservation of every man and his property”—perhaps the first recorded instance of an anti-communist smear campaign! As we have seen, the nineteenth-century Marxists who rediscovered Winstanley and claimed him as one of their own all suggested Quakers derived much of their distinctive theology from the True Leveller. But Quaker historians were doubtful, cautiously content, perhaps, to leave Winstanley with the Marxists. Even Richard T. Vann, in his important essay charting Winstanley’s journey “from radicalism to Quakerism” (Journal of Friends Historical Society, No. 49, 1959-61) placed more emphasis on Winstanley’s movement towards Quakerism than on his possible role in shaping it.

But there is something oddly unsatisfactory about this notion that radical ideas somehow floated in the ether of mid seventeenth-century England, to be caught and absorbed independently by Winstanley in London and Fox in the north. Ideas are not like pollen grains, wafting about in the spring air. Ideas are born by being spoken or written, and they are spread by being heard or read. In seventeenth-century England the mass media of communication were the pulpit (professional and lay) and the printing press (official and unofficial). We are therefore entitled to a little healthy scepticism about claims to learn only from an “inward teacher”: or, if we don’t wish to be sceptics, we are entitled to conclude that the inward teacher made efficient use of outward agents—the preachers and pamphleteers who spread the word and made it their business to turn the world upside down.

Winstanley and Fox both tell us how, as seekers, they sampled the sects, where they will have heard preachers galore. They tell us virtually nothing, however, of what they read. But are we to suppose that the unprecedented flood of pamphlets, of political and religious debate in the newly-emergent free press, simply passed them by? That they read only their Bibles? That Winstanley clung so faithfully to his inward teacher that he never strayed into the books in Sarah Gates’ theological library, and that Fox’s fidelity to his “openings” preserved him from reading anything written by his fellow-seekers? I don’t believe it.

Consider: When the young, seeking George Fox was having his first “pure openings of the Light without the help of any man” (Journal, p. 33) in 1648, Winstanley’s first three pamphlets were streaming off Calvert’s press. When Fox teamed up with Elizabeth Hooton in 1649, the news-sheets were full of Winstanley’s dig, which was the talk of the country. By the time Fox was touring Yorkshire in 1651 and putting together the first building-blocks of what was to become the Quaker movement, Winstanley was working on his twentieth publication. The demand for these works was such that Calvert had to reprint several of them: The Mysterie of God and The Breaking of the Day of God, both first published in 1648, were reissued the following year, and again in 1650 when they were included in a Winstanley collection, Several Pieces Gathered into one Volume. Two editions of The Saints Paradice appeared in 1648 and another in 1649. Truth Lifting up its Head of 1649 was reprinted in 1650. The New Law of Righteousness of 1649 was reprinted the same year. It is clear that Winstanley’s works had an eager readership, and those readers must surely have been the very radicals, seekers and separatists in whose excited, enthusiastic meetings early Quakerism was at that very moment taking root. It is hard to believe that Fox himself was not among those readers.

To what extent the congruities and similarities of Winstanley’s and Fox’s writings were the result of serendipity or direct influence remains hard to pin down. It is clear that both men derived much of their distinctive teaching from common sources such as the teachings of Niclaes and Boehme (not to mention John’s Gospel and the Book of Revelation), the theological radicalism of “shattered Baptists” and seekers and the social radicalism of the Lilburne Levellers (a group quite distinct from the True Levellers). But the startling similarity of language and imagery strongly suggests that Fox knew Winstanley’s works. The fact that these works were being published at the precise time when Fox was beginning to give shape to his own ideas, and issued from the same press which was soon to publicise Quakerism, make a degree of direct influence highly probable. Thus both the internal and the external evidence combine to suggest that the inward teacher benefited from a helping hand. Fox knew what he knew experimentally: but his experience surely included reading and absorbing the inspirational words of his immediate predecessor, who lived and died in the hope that Christ, the spirit of love and community, might yet rise in sons and daughters.

It is clear to me that Winstanley the True Leveller was a formative influence on early Quakerism, a maker of the tradition we have inherited. We should pay him more attention than we have done hitherto. And we could begin by identifying his burial place and agitating for the erection of a plaque to honour this extraordinary pioneer of social justice, non-violence, and religious humanism.

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