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Presidential Address: Collective Mentalities in mid-Seventeenth-Century England: III. Varieties of Radicalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

G. E. Aylmer
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Abstract

SINCE the terms radical and radicalism were not in use before the nineteenth century, it may fairly be asked what they signify when applied to the mid-seventeenth century. The simplest answer is a pragmatic one: by radical I mean anyone advocating changes in state, church or society which would have gone beyond the official programme of the mainstream puritan-parliamentarians in the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines. In the Parliament I therefore exclude here the ‘political Independents’, alias the War Party, other than the handful of pre-1647–8 republicans. In the Assembly I exclude the ‘Five Dissenting Brethren’, who were the spokesmen of moderate Congregationalism, but outside it I include some religious Independents whose radicalism will be presently defined. To borrow another nineteenth-century figure of speech, if we look to the Left of the mainstream Puritans and Parliamentarians, what a bewildering profusion of groups and individuals appears. It is scarcely necessary to have studied the period at all to be familiar with the names of many such sects or movements, if not perhaps of all: Anabaptists, Antinomians, Behmenists, Brownists, Comenians, Diggers, Familists, Fifth-Monarchy Men, Grindletonians, Levellers, Mortalists, Muggletonians, Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, and Socinians. Yet simply to reel off such a list is to omit many interesting and remarkable groups and individuals: would-be reformers of the professions and of law, medicine and education, free-traders, agricultural improvers, philo-semites and proto-feminists, to mention only some of the most obvious. Any reader of Thomas Edwards' Gangraena and other contemporary commination or of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down and his other writings will be familiar with most of them and no doubt with others too.

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Research Article
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 38 , December 1988 , pp. 1 - 25
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Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1988

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References

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33 Vindication, p. 1.

34 Ibid., pp. 53, 77, 87-9. William Ball the pamphleteer was not the recruiter M.P. for Abingdon of that name, who died in the spring of 1648, but is described as Esquire of Barkham in 1646 and was still alive in the 1650s (Catalogue of the Pamphlets … collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661 (2 vols., 1908), Index, II, 468Google Scholar; Wing, D., Short-Title Catalogue … 1641–1700, vol. I (2nd edn.N.Y., 1972), B586–598Google Scholar; Victoria County History of Berkshire, iii, 201, 238, 361; Brunton, D. and Pennington, D. H., Members of the Long Parliament (1954), 33, 207, 226Google Scholar; Cal. S.P. Dom., 1651, p. 503,1656–7, p. 580).

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36 Great Instauration, ch. IV.

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57 In an important paper, delivered in Oxford in May 1987, but unfortunately not published, Ms Sheila Lambert has suggested that this is so, and has offered some instances where drastic revision of previous views may be necessary, though I cannot claim her support for anything that is said here.

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59 Reprinted in H. Barbour and A. O. Roberts (eds.), Early Quaker Writings 1650–1700 (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1973), Part D. no. 9, pp. 407–21. Most of the work for this paper had been done before I read Reay, B., The Quakers and the English Revolution (1985)Google Scholar, in which this and other pamphlets cited here are discussed.

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70 , W. L. (Leach, William of the Middle Temple, Gent.), A New Parliament, or Representative …… (1651), Wing 1775A, pp. 4–6Google Scholar, contains an ingenious scheme for handing in paper slips with only the names of the voters' preferred candidates showing; Edmund Leach of New England, Merchant, A short Supply or Amendment To the Propositions for the New Representative (dated by Thomason, 2 11 1651. E. 644–9), pp 5–7Google Scholar, glosses this (a) to guarantee the sitting Members of the Rump, (b) always to have a carry-over of ½ or 1/5 of MPs from one parliament to the next, and (c) only to allow the voters to ballot for two out of four nominees for each constituency. For the references to the two Leachs I am grateful to ProfessorWoolrych's, AustinCommonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), pp. 21–2Google Scholar, although my emphasis is slightly different from his.

71 Kishlansky, Mark A., Parliamentary Selection Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), for 1640–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar see particularly ch. 5.

72 DrBrooke, Humphrey, ‘The Charity of Church-Men ….’ (1649)Google Scholar, in Haller, and Davies, (ed.), Leveller Tracts, p. 345Google Scholar.