Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution

JOHN DONOGHUE is associate professor at Loyola University Chicago specializing in the history of the early modern Atlantic world. He lives with his family in Pittsburgh.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-15765-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07286-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.001.0001 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Donoghue, John (Historian)

Fire under the ashes : an Atlantic history of the English revolution / John Donoghue.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-15765-8 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-07286-9 (e-book)

1. Great Britain—History—Civil War, 1642–1649.    2. Great Britain—History—Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660.    3. Great Britain—Colonies—America.    4. Slavery—America.    I. Title.

DA415.D656 2013

942.06′2—dc23

2013009940

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Fire under the Ashes

An Atlantic History of the English Revolution

JOHN DONOGHUE

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

To the memory of my father, James L. Donoghue—

"I have fought the good fight.

I have finished the race.

I have kept the faith."

2 Timothy 4:7

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I

1. Reformation Work

2. Colonization and Its Discontents: The English Atlantic before the English Revolution

3. To Engage You All to Rise Up in Your Might: The Outbreak of the English Revolution

4. Monsters, Savages, and Turbulent Carriages: The Revolutionary Atlantic in Motion

PART II

5. An Arrow against All Tyrants: Popular Republicanism and the English Revolution

6. That Crimson Stream of Blood: The Imperial Turn of the English Revolution

7. The Axe Is Laid to the Root: Freedom against Slavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

THERE are many pleasures involved in writing a book. One of the greatest is thanking the people and institutions that make them possible.

Generous research funds were provided by the American Historical Association; the Boston Athenaeum; the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World (Harvard University); the Forum for European Expansion and Global Interaction; the College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage of Loyola University Chicago; and the Department of History and Center for West European Studies of the University of Pittsburgh.

Research for the book was conducted in several European and American archives. I am grateful to the staffs of the libraries listed here for their expert help and assistance: the Bodleian Library (University of Oxford); the Boston Athenaeum; the British Library (London); the British Museum (London); the British National Archives (Kew Gardens); the Cudahy Library (Loyola University Chicago); Dr. Williams’ Library (London); Hillman Library (University of Pittsburgh); the Houghton Library (Harvard University); the Folger Library (Washington, DC); the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA); the International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam); the John Carter Brown Library (Brown University); the King’s Inns Library (Dublin); the Library of Congress (Washington, DC); the London Metropolitan Archives; the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston); the Neville Public Museum (Milwaukee); the National Library of Ireland (Dublin); the Newberry Library (Chicago); the Newport (RI) Historical Society; the Long Room Library (Trinity College Dublin); the Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence); and the Rhode Island State Archives (Providence). A short-term fellowship from the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, gave me the opportunity to spend more time researching the English Republic’s conquest of Ireland. I am grateful for this opportunity and for the many kindnesses that Jason McElligott, Jane Ohlmeyer, Micheál Ó Siochrú, and Graeme Murdock showed to me during those happy days in Dublin.

Special thanks also go to David Armitage, Bernard Bailyn, Simon Middleton, and Billy G. Smith, who in different venues and at different stages of my research encouraged me to continue developing the themes that eventually came to mark this book. Along with a legion of other Atlanticists, I owe a particularly deep debt to Bernard Bailyn, whose International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University has launched so many excellent scholarly projects. For decades, Professor Bailyn has labored tirelessly, selflessly, and successfully, especially through his work with rising scholars, to establish Atlantic history as a rich and vibrant field of study.

Many colleagues, friends, students, and mentors assisted and encouraged me throughout the writing of the book with their time, insight, support, and not a few very excellent meals: Aaron Brunmeier, Dina Berger, Robert Bucholz, Corey Capers, Denver Brunsman, Bernard Capp, Anthony Cardoza, Charlotte Carrington, David Dennis, Todd Depastino, Anthony DiLorenzo, Seymour Drescher, Mari Dumbaugh, Erin Feichtinger, William Fusfield, Alison Games, Michael Goode, Elliott Gorn, Janelle Greenberg, Drew Haberberger, Christopher S. Hayward, Esq., Evelyn Jennings, Nathan Jeremie-Brink, Suzanne Kaufman, Anthony Kieran, Michael Khodarkovsky, Peter Kotowski, Peter Linebaugh, John McAdoo, Fr. Matthew McClain, Fr. John McManamon, SJ, Ted Mette, Michelle Nickerson, John Powell, the students of Hist 300: Slavery and Abolition—Then and Now (spring 2009), Elodie Peyrol, John Pincince, Barbara Rosenwein, Kim Searcy, Peter Thompson, Laurel Trojan, Prof. David Twining and the Westminster College (PA) History Honors Society, Peter Way, and Betty Wood. Simon Middleton has repeatedly gone above and beyond the call of duty to help in this undertaking and deserves special notice here. Like Simon, my fellow Harvard Atlantic Seminarian Denver Brunsman has been an unfailing source of insight and inspiration for many years. Jonathan Scott, who served on my dissertation committee, has had a powerful influence on my work; he also became a good friend, patient teacher, and benevolent taskmaster while we were both at the University of Pittsburgh. A special note of thanks goes to my all-star editor Robert Devens of the University of Chicago Press, whose wit and conversation are as sharp as his editorial eye. Although Robert left the Press in the final publication stages of the book, his work and that of his former colleagues at Chicago, Russ Damian and Ruth Goring, have made it much better than it would have been otherwise. I apologize in advance to all those I have inadvertently failed to acknowledge here. You know who you are—thank you.

I am very lucky to work at Loyola University Chicago, which through its Jesuit mission strives to make the pursuit of social justice an integral part of higher education. I am grateful for the help and friendship of my colleagues in the history department and elsewhere in the university, whose collegiality, good humor, and dedication to teaching, service, and scholarship have been a true inspiration. I thank them all collectively here, with special mention to Timothy Gilfoyle, a brilliant historian and dear friend whose devotion to his family, colleagues, and profession, as well as his warm Irish hospitality, is impossible to match but easy to admire.

Sadly, another Chicago-based scholar, the great historian of the American Revolution Alfred F. Young, passed on as I readied Fire under the Ashes for publication. Al took a special interest in my work and spent a lot of time improving it. Perhaps the best tribute that I can pay to Al is to say that if he had not rediscovered George Robert Twelves Hewes, I would never have found Samuel How.

The scholar to whom I owe the most is my friend and fellow creature Marcus Rediker at the University of Pittsburgh. The deep humanity that pervades his work has served as a constant source of inspiration for me as a teacher, as a scholar, and as a citizen of the world. I’ve learned from Marcus that the archives are full of freedom stories, and that they can serve as the highest form of intellectual history.

Finally, it’s beyond my powers as a writer to properly thank my family. The wheel of fortune turned kindly in my favor when I inherited Ray and Fran Golli as in-laws. Their love and vivacity flow from a seemingly inexhaustible source. My hipster brother-in-law Jon and his precociously accomplished partner, Kathryn Heidemann, have done their best to keep me from drifting into hopeless nerd-dom; while they have failed terribly, they bear no part of the blame. My cousin Sean Donoghue provided welcome relief from the daily grind of scholarship with epic tales of sport and family lore, while another cousin, Tom Wickham, revived my spirits a long way from home during research trips to Boston and Dublin. My brother Patrick, the real intellectual in the family, has one of the most eccentric senses of humor known to humankind, something which my gallant sister-in-law Missy bears with the patience of a real saint. I’ll never forgive Pat for turning a double play from second better than I could have ever dreamed; but aside from this not insignificant grudge, his friendship is one of the greatest prizes of my life. My sister the award-winning teacher Ann Haring moved away to Rome as I began this book. The fact that the man who carried her away, my brother-in-law Paul, is such a mensch makes the distance a little easier to bear. Annie first introduced me to the puritans during her college days as an American studies major, and I’ve never looked back. Her own faith has been a light to me and to countless others; now it shines in the Eternal City. My mother, Ann Donoghue, is the strongest person that I know; it was her sense of history and her love of justice that first awakened my own interest in the past and how it lives among us in the present. How can I begin to thank her for this? My wife Laura deserves her own book of acknowledgments. Laura has been the love of my life since the age of fifteen, my compass star in a sea of storms, and my best friend across three decades. This book simply could not have been written without her. Laura has also given me two miracles named Meredith and Norah, who have finally taught me what matters most in life. I see the spirit of my late father James Donoghue shining through their eyes every day. Dad died after a long and difficult battle with esophageal cancer during the writing of this book. He fought till the end like the Irishman that he was. He was the toughest and kindest man I’ve ever known. This book is dedicated to him with love and gratitude.

INTRODUCTION

Half the story has never been told.

—Bob Marley

ON JANUARY 17, 1661, in the cold, crowded confines of an Old Bailey courtroom, the former Bay Colonist Thomas Venner was brought to trial on a charge of treason. It was a sorry spectacle, as Venner weathered a stream of abuse and insults from the bench. He lay all the while on a litter, bloody bandages covering the nineteen wounds he had suffered in the City of London at the head of a band of republican rebels who had set out to overthrow King Charles II. Although he could have pled for mercy from his judges, Venner faced his accusers without remorse; his head remained unbowed.

As one of the rebels had explained to a friend, the insurgents had taken up arms to pull Charles down, and settle a free state so that an English republic might once again rise on the ashes of monarchy. Venner’s tiny militia, which included former colonists and veterans of the New Model Army, had been inspired by republican principles and apocalyptic expectations that had circulated around the Atlantic during the age of the English Revolution. In early January 1661, the rebels seemed to erupt everywhere in the City, scattering copies of their revolutionary manifesto, A Door of Hope, about the streets, as the bookseller George Thomason noted, while battling the trained bands and the King’s Life Guard in hand-to-hand street fighting.¹

The rebels spilled first blood at St. Paul’s Cathedral as dusk descended on January 7. That evening they melted away to Ken Wood, only to reappear on Coleman Street two days later like wild enthusiasts . . . besotted with hellish notions. That winter morning and for the next three days, Venner’s rebels threw London into a state of panic, with shop owners shuttering their windows and citizens gathering arms as desperate firefights raged around the City and its northern suburbs. Samuel Pepys wrote that gentlemen would only venture out into the streets armed with pistols and swords. Pepys came by this information firsthand, as he had armed himself for his own foray into the City to see what he could learn of the uprising. By the evening of January 9, a troop of Royalists led by Colonel Cox had put the uprising down, capturing Venner and over twenty of his men after killing the rest. When the fighting finally subsided on January 10, Pepys noted in his famous diary that the rebels had broken through the City gates twice, put the King’s Lifeguard to flight, and repulsed repeated charges by the trained bands. In light of this impressive display, Pepys estimated that the rebel force numbered at least five hundred. He was incredulous to learn that he had greatly overestimated the size of Venner’s militia. A thing that never was heard of, he wrote, that so few men should dare and do so much mischief.²

Facing his hostile judges a week later, Venner delivered a remarkable speech from his bloody litter, listing the reasons why he and his men had once again unsheathed their swords on behalf of the Good Old Cause. For the edification of the court, the wine cooper recounted the seditious course of his political education, launching into a bottomless discourse about how the testimony of his life in New England had inspired his faith in the principles that had moved the saints to revolution in Old England. As Venner’s rebels proclaimed in A Door of Hope, the crusade of the saints was about much more than the fate of England, for they had brought true reformation out of the American Wilderness in order to emancipate the world itself from antichristian bondage.

But Chief Justice Robert Foster remained unimpressed and sentenced the rebel to death. The next day, troops hauled Venner through the streets on a sledge to the old Fifth Monarchist meeting house in the City’s Coleman Street Ward, described by a Royalist pamphleteer as that old nest of sedition. Venner and his men had hatched their conspiracy in this very neighborhood, which the state, as a terror to other republicans, had selected as the site where the rebel chief would be hanged, drawn, and quartered.³

Venner’s dramatic courtroom reference to New England, while perfectly intelligible to his contemporaries, leaves today’s reader wondering how life in America informed his attempt to revive the English Revolution in the streets of London. From our current vantage point, the New Jerusalem of New England seems a world apart from Restoration London. But while on trial for his life, Venner directly connected his New England testimony, or the meaning of his accumulated experiences in America, to his insurgency against Charles II. The rebel leader’s New England allusion confirmed the dim view of the region long entertained by Royalists. In one of the dozens of tracts written in the wake of Venner’s rising, a Stuart partisan fumed, We’ll never deny [Venner’s] New England testimony, which has made Old England smart, having been the nursery and receptacle of sedition for too long. In choosing these metaphors, the anonymous pamphleteer construed the region as both a breeding ground and a refuge for revolutionary puritans. The author felt no need to explain his symbolism, confident that his contemporaries shared his assumptions about the American sources of the Good Old Cause.⁴ But while contemporaries were quick to recognize the Atlantic context in which the English Revolution unfolded, only a talented and enterprising handful of historians have followed suit. Interest in the subject has, however, increased of late, and this book has been written with a mind to contribute to this growing body of work. It argues that our own confusion about Venner’s New England testimony might be clarified by moving beyond national historiography to recapture the seventeenth-century view of colonization and the English Revolution as interrelated, interdependent developments in a wider Atlantic history. Following the circulation of goods, people, information, experience, and ideas around the early seventeenth-century Atlantic helps us recognize that the varied and often conflicting principles and programs of the English revolutionaries emerged from a historical context that reached far beyond the isles of Britain and Ireland.

THE smoke of Restoration bonfires had hardly cleared before scholars of the day, including the inestimable Thomas Hobbes in his opus Behemoth, began trying to make sense of the English Revolution. Why the revolution occurred, its place within the history of Britain and Ireland, the part it played in the genesis of the English (and later British) empire, and its relationship to the wider history of political and religious liberty have generated libraries of scholarship. Moreover and not less importantly, political movements from the late seventeenth century to the present have turned to England’s mid-seventeenth-century revolutionaries for inspiration, cautionary tales, and political perspective.⁵

Not very long ago, however, some historians began writing as if mid-seventeenth-century England, a land turned upside down by revolution, was a place void of revolutionary ideas and ideological discord. A few of the most outspoken scholars within this set laid dubious claim to superior powers of empirical insight and methodological expertise. Some even proclaimed that their interpretations of the period would remain unassailable, as they supposedly elided the political bias they found so circumspect in the work of the historians they opposed. Thankfully, more recent work has critically revived the reality of the Revolution, if not the ideological agenda of some of the scholars who had denied its historical importance. Accordingly, in this book no space will be wasted discussing whether these events (ca. 1640–60) amounted to a revolution: the abolition of monarchy and episcopacy, the execution of the king, the establishment of an English republic, and the first concerted attempt by the state to build an English empire in the Atlantic. It is self-evident that such profound changes were fundamental, systematic, and therefore revolutionary in nature. What is not self-evident at all is how to interpret, in the words of one of its most accomplished and deservedly celebrated historians, the nature of the English Revolution, for the event has never failed to provoke debate and disagreement.⁶ Fire under the Ashes hardly proposes to supply the definitive answers to these debates. Instead, the purpose of this book is to open up new discussions regarding the Revolution, particularly how its origins, progression, and legacy can be fully understood only in reference to the wider Atlantic world.

The book represents part of a more general effort by a small group of Atlantic historians to move the study of the Revolution beyond European context as well the limiting confines of the national paradigm of historical analysis. Building on the work of these Atlanticists as well as that produced by historians of the Caribbean, early America, and early modern Britain and Ireland, Fire under the Ashes is the first monograph to explore both the Revolution’s impact on the colonies and how the Atlantic-wide circulation of colonial experience shaped the course of the Revolution in England. In this approach, the islands of Britain and Ireland join English colonies in the West Indies, New England, and the Chesapeake to form the English Atlantic, so called because English ambition brought these places into relationship with one another as well as with Native Americans and other European colonial powers. Although I do not treat events in Scotland in the depth that they deserve, Ireland, long studied by Irish historians as an early modern English colony, will be explored in this book as part of the larger Atlantic sphere in which revolutionary England pursued its colonial ambitions. While Africa and continental Europe did not fall under English domination, they were integral in the formation of the English Atlantic and are thus discussed as part of it. While the book gives ample attention to the Revolution’s origins in the political and religious conflicts that engulfed England, Ireland, and Scotland in the 1630s and 1640s, it is not a chronicle of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.⁷ This book is about the English Revolution; Fire under the Ashes thus focuses on the revolutionaries themselves and forgoes a more general discussion of politics and warfare in the Three Kingdoms during the Revolutionary era, which would require a much deeper understanding of Royalism, popular English neutrality, and the competition for power in Scotland and Ireland than appears in these pages.

Additionally, while I have drawn deeply upon Carla Gardina Pestana’s invaluable survey of colonial politics, religion, and economic life during the Revolutionary era, my book treats the European aspects of the period’s Atlantic history in much more detail than does Professor Pestana’s work, examining the relationship between colonization and humanist thought, the Protestant Reformation, and the social, political, and economic change that occurred in England in the decades before the outbreak of the Revolution. I thus enlist early modern European social and religious history and the manifold crises that gripped England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1639 to 1642 to explain the origins of the Revolution, its progress around the Atlantic, and the subsequent birth of English empire-building in the 1650s. Moreover, through its attention to colonization and empire-building, Fire under the Ashes explores how the history of the English Revolution intersects with the colonial history of native American conquests and the construction of an unfree labor regime that enslaved and exploited tens of thousands of people from Africa, the Americas, Britain, and Ireland. From this Atlantic perspective, the book examines how the political economy of the Revolutionary era helped give birth to the frontier and the plantation as colonial institutions that became integral to the formation of seventeenth-century racial hierarchies, steeped as they were in the blood and violence of mass enslavement, settler annihilation of Indian peoples, and catastrophic wars fought for the glory and power of empire.

In terms of method, Fire under the Ashes, as one of many possible Atlantic histories of the English Revolution, uses the godly entrepôt of Coleman Street Ward, London, as a case study. My approach here, called cis-Atlantic history by the historian David Armitage, concentrates the global in the local to highlight how one particular point in the Atlantic shapes and is in turn shaped by the history sweeping across the entire region. Scholars have long noted Coleman Street Ward’s exceptional reputation within London, and indeed across the entirety of England, as an influential citadel of puritan religion and politics. None, however, have recognized the ward’s truly global importance. By taking the cis-Atlantic approach, I document how Coleman Street’s community of saints spawned diverse and contentious groups of puritan revolutionaries in England and its colonies. One group consisted primarily of ministers, merchants, and planters who through commerce, colonization, and revolution became heavily invested in the prospects for Reformation in England and abroad, not to mention the profits to be made from producing and trading provisions and cash crops in the colonies.⁸ While most of these figures remained in England, some, such as John Davenport, Theophilus Eaton, and Edward Hopkins, became important colonists, helping to found the New England church way and serving many terms as governors and counselors and as transatlantic emissaries for New Haven, Connecticut, and the United Colonies. While none of the figures in the first group are unknown to historians, this book, particularly through the case of the merchants Maurice Abbot and Martin Noell, argues that the full import of their contributions to early colonization, the imperial turn of the Revolution, and the construction of an unfree labor regime in the English Atlantic has yet to be appreciated. Another segment of Coleman Streeters hailed from classes and occupations that ranged from printers and merchant clothiers to sailors and cobblers; compared to their puritan opponents on Coleman Street, the members of this group, such as William Walywn and Samuel How, pursued a more radical vision of the Protestant Reformation that challenged the Revolutionary state and its imperial ambitions as gross betrayals of the Revolution.⁹ A third group of Coleman Streeters from varied social backgrounds included returned colonists such as Hanserd Knollys and Richard Saltonstall Sr. They would be joined on Coleman Street by other New Englanders, including Thomas Venner, Samuel Gorton, and Wentworth Day; unlike Knollys and Saltonstall, however, Venner, Gorton, and Day eventually made their mark as high-profile radicals in London who maintained their opposition to the Revolutionary regime throughout the interregnum. A final pair of colonists who circulated around the English Atlantic, Henry Vane and Roger Williams, had little to do with the puritan enclave of Coleman Street per se, but the transatlantic political networks they forged over the course of the Revolution contained strong ties to both the weak and powerful in the ward’s thriving puritan community. As this brief review of Coleman Street Ward’s colonial connections implies, and as this book will demonstrate, the surprising degree of geographic mobility that marked the mid-seventeenth century helped make the English Revolution an Atlantic event.

This book does not focus on Coleman Street Ward because it was typical or representative; instead Coleman Street has been featured because it was atypical and exceptional in terms of how the people who lived there and the events that transpired there came to figure in the Revolution’s history in England proper. Coleman Street also offers an ideal place to locate an Atlantic history of the Revolution, which in turn allows us to grapple on a wider scale with what the late historian Christopher Hill called the Revolution within the Revolution, an apt phrase to describe how the internal tensions within the godly movement ultimately fractured the ranks of the revolutionaries along ideological lines. Fire under the Ashes builds on Hill’s thesis to show how the circulation of the godly’s colonial experience around the English Atlantic, informed by many of the same internal tensions that plagued the movement in England, shaped the Revolution and the fragmentation of the Revolutionary coalition, which developed in part due to the political polarization occasioned by the Revolutionary state’s decision to launch an ambitious project of empire-building around the Atlantic world.

While important revolutionaries called Coleman Street Ward their home, the ward itself played host to historically significant events and developments in the decades before and during the English Revolution. These included the design of a public-private partnership by which the English state, merchants, and planters combined to force the English poor into unfree colonial labor, the lynching of Dr. John Lamb during the Petition of Right controversy, London’s most concerted resistance to the payment of ship money, the formation of the congregational church model, the development of the antinomian underground in London, the launching of petitioning campaigns and crowd actions during the constitutional revolution of 1640–42, the hiding of the five members who escaped King Charles I’s search for them in the House of Commons, the operation of Richard Overton’s radical underground printing press, the rise of the Leveller movement, planning for the invasion of the Spanish West Indies, and the rise of the most militant branch of the Fifth Monarchy movement. It also played host to Thomas Venner’s 1661 Fifth Monarchist rebellion, which represented the final act of the English Revolution. Coleman Streeters played important parts in the outbreak of the Revolution, made instrumental contributions to its advance throughout the 1640s, and guided the imperial turn the Revolution took in the 1650s. Other Coleman Streeters became indispensable figures in the most radical political causes undertaken during the Revolution, championing religious toleration and democratic republicanism in ways that put them at odds with their corevolutionaries. Throughout the 1650s, Coleman Street’s most militant republicans would organize their political efforts in a general disavowal of the massive scale of corruption, slavery, and carnage that accompanied the Revolution’s imperial progress as orchestrated in large part by their elite peers on Coleman Street. Taking its cue here from Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra,¹⁰ Fire under the Ashes does not shy away from the violence of imperial expansion nor from that occasioned by its corollary, the proliferation of global capitalism. Indeed, my book purposefully provides a detailed account of the blood spilled in order to assess one of the Revolution’s most disturbing legacies: the needless killing and enslavement of hundreds and thousands of people from around the English Atlantic for the sake of profit, Protestantism, and English imperial glory.

I have elected not to summarize each chapter in this introduction, as the ends of the chapters themselves include short synopses. In the process of organizing the chapters of the book, it simply proved impossible to create an intelligible straightforward chronological narrative capable of covering all the critical events as they unfolded at the same time around the Atlantic. Accordingly, the chapters move alternately, with some overlap in time, back and forth across the Atlantic. I also move back and forth across the Atlantic within several chapters, most notably 4, 6, and 7, to reinforce how the circulation of people, goods, ideas, and experience around the Atlantic littoral shaped the English Revolution. Finally, on a more technical note, all dates, punctuation, and spelling appear in their modern forms.

This introduction began with an epigraph from the lyricist, musician, and revolutionary Bob Marley, a man of mixed African and English heritage. Marley, of course, hailed from Jamaica, the sugar colony first brought into England’s imperial orbit through the Revolutionary government’s invasion of the Spanish West Indies. This book addresses Marley’s admonition about leaving half the story untold in two ways. First, it casts a cold eye on the Revolutionary birth of the English empire by confronting its death-dealing genesis. Second, it recovers a lost legacy of the Revolution, an alternative vision of human freedom that formed in reaction to the empire’s birth. Fire under the Ashes demonstrates that over the course of the English Revolution there were people around the English Atlantic who recognized that slavery would prove lethal to godly liberty under republican forms of government. At bottom, and contra to the canon of Western political philosophy, these radicals were beginning to realize that the freedom of some could not rest with justice on the enslavement of others. I argue that in this realization, inspired in part by the rebellions of slaves themselves, lay the ideological origins of abolitionism, and thus the English Revolution’s most vital historical legacy.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Reformation Work

. . . And if things be not shortly reformed, [the people] will work a reformation themselves.

—Anonymous billet, Coleman Street Ward, London, June 1628¹

AS IN all London pubs worthy of the name, a few rounds at the Nag’s Head could transform even the quietest drinkers into silver-tongued orators, inspired with the kind of eloquence that can only be found at the bottom of a brimming tumbler. But on that day in 1639, the spirit moving the man at the bar with the booming voice was not John Barleycorn’s. The cobbler Samuel How had come to preach and not to drink, and judging by the crowd buzzing at his elbow, the veteran of the King’s forces land and sea had learned his latest trade very well.² Climbing into his impromptu pulpit, a wooden cask refitted for the occasion, How quoted Acts 10:34 and proclaimed to the assembled that God respects no man’s person . . . The enigmatic phrase, as the cobbler explained, meant that the Lord had no regard for the man-made distinctions of social class that justified the rule of the rich and eminent over the poor and the weak.³ Punctuating a rolling passage with a quote from 1 Corinthians 1:29, the mechanic preacher went on to warn that no flesh shall glory, a caution to the wealthy and well-educated that their achievements in this world did not guarantee glory in the next. How aimed these barbs straight at his invited guest, the Cambridge MA and noted puritan divine John Goodwin.⁴

As the vicar of St. Stephen’s Church, Goodwin did not have to travel far that day to hear How hold forth at the Nag’s Head, for both the pub and the parish could be found in Coleman Street Ward in the City of London. Londoners had long regarded the neighborhood as a kind of seminary for zealots of the puritan persuasion, a place where wild-eyed Bible-thumpers instructed the faithful in their strange and strident gospels. With a leathery, old cobbler preaching out of a barrel in a smoke-filled barroom, the scene at the Nag’s Head hardly dispelled these notions. Taking his text from the twelfth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, How proclaimed that God’s ordinary way is among the foolish and weak and vile, so that when as the wise, rich, noble and learned come to receive the gospel, they then come to make themselves equal with them of the lower sort, the foolish, vile and unlearned; for those be the true heirs of it . . .⁵ As a former soldier and sailor who had turned to mending shoes, How had run the gauntlet of some of early modern England’s least lucrative occupations; in preaching the Word to a Coleman Street audience consisting mostly of the commonality or the working poor, How personified this upside-down vision of the Christian kingdom.⁶ Unlike Goodwin and the other ordained ministers among the hundred or so who packed the pub that day, How did not pretend to be above or even different from the commonality, for as a cobbler he was truly one of them. Through the leveling power of the Holy Spirit, How hoped that the clergy would turn away from the pride of their learned wisdom and toward the inspired humility of the London poor, to find the courage and compassion to purge rather than serve the antichrist that they condemned.⁷ Samuel How went to prison for his sermon and died in jail in September 1640, hailed by his friends as a martyr murdered by the enemies of reformation.⁸ But while How’s aged and work-worn body proved too weak for prison, we will see later how the strength of his spirit helped to inspire the English Revolution. How’s story calls to mind another rebel shoemaker, the American Revolution’s George Robert Twelves Hewes, who like How had once sailed the seas and shouldered a soldier’s musket. As the historian Alfred F. Young once wrote about George Hewes, Samuel How was a nobody who became a somebody in the Revolution and, for a moment near the end of his life, a hero.⁹

As How’s set-to with Goodwin attests, before the English Revolution the godly made Coleman Street a central venue for interpuritan disputation as well as militant Protestant organization, all of which made religious issues political, economic, and social ones as well. Because it was the seventeenth century, interpuritan discord never revolved purely around religion. Evolving within the turbulent contexts of state centralization and the rapid economic and demographic changes sweeping early modern England, interpuritan disputation also became a catalyst for popular politicization and class-conscious¹⁰ social criticism and reform. For many well-to-do saints, mastering the poor, seditious, and morally degenerate elements of the commonality became part of their own wide-ranging reformation project, although commoners inside and outside the godly fold would challenge such efforts by work[ing] their own reformation. As a result, from the late sixteenth century through the middle of the next, the desire for reformation, to transform the world in the image of divine purity and justice, ranged far beyond the realm of religion and remained a matter of ideological conflict rather than cohesion for the diverse echelons within the godly camp.

Reformation work also took the saints far from home in the early seventeenth century, when Coleman Street puritans emerged at the forefront of English commercial and colonial expansion in the Atlantic world. Inspired by the lure of profits and the ideals of English humanism, puritans from the ward and their godly partners spearheaded privateering ventures and joint stock companies that created colonies and trading networks in New England, the Chesapeake, and the West Indies. As an alternative to the crown’s seemingly weak stance against Catholic Spain, the saints promoted these colonial projects as militant Protestant, civic solutions to the manifold crises facing the English nation at home and abroad. Their efforts created an English Atlantic of largely autonomous colonial commonwealths; a generation later, England’s Revolutionary government, led by many of the same colonial projectors, would try to consolidate these scattered Atlantic enclaves into a mighty and prosperous empire, a project that, as we will see, only exaggerated the ideological discord that radicals like Samuel How had helped to excite within the ranks of those who would lead England into revolution.

AS one of the hundreds of thousands of desperately poor people living in London in December 1619, Walter Hill embodied the most tragic features of life in the booming metropolis. As a young, homeless child, Hill wandered the streets of a City whose resident gentry reaped rising rents and woolens profits from their newly enclosed country estates.¹¹ Members of London’s mercantile elite looked outside England for their riches and expanded their fortunes in proportion to the reach of their global ventures. Predictably, wealth accumulated rapidly at the top. The city’s population grew as well, but mostly at the bottom, doubling in the seventy years following the turn of the seventeenth century so that London became Europe’s largest city, a sprawling metropolis of half a million people.¹² While higher birth rates can help account for the growing English population, they alone do not explain England’s appalling levels of poverty and the destitution of London’s swelling masses: for such an explanation we must consider how those who owned the English economy actually organized it. When John Winthrop, a future founder of the Bay Colony, took note of the suffering of poor people in the City like young Walter Hill, he saw a social crisis groaning for reformation. Why, asked this Suffolk puritan in 1623, meet we so many wandering ghosts in the shape of men, so many spectacles of misery in all our streets, our houses full of victuals, and our entries of hunger starved Christians? Our shops full of rich wares and under our stalls lie our own flesh in nakedness?¹³ Historians have borne out the reality behind Winthrop’s lament. According to the research of the historian Paul Slack, the numbers of people on poor relief increased four times over and above the rate of population increase during the Tudor/Stuart era.¹⁴

When Winthrop wondered aloud about the causes of poverty, he posed rhetorical questions—he knew that vagrants did not drop from the sky. The poverty of people like Walter Hill was produced, as Winthrop later wrote, largely by the greed of opportunistic, enclosing, and rack-renting gentry. Eager to capitalize on profits from foodstuffs and the woolens trade, landlords enclosed common lands for grazing, converted other commons to private fields for arable agriculture, dispensed with feudal land tenures, and paid poverty wages to rural laborers, who emerged as a new class during the early modern period due in large part to these changes. Rural wage laborers had come to make up about half the English population at this time, although the roads, towns, and cities were also choked with homeless wanderers, made so in many cases through the so-called economic improvements undertaken by landlords. Rising rents, soaring food prices, and periodic declines in trade and agricultural prices: the personal impact of impersonal markets that operated increasingly on national and international scales hurt rural workers as well as the small producers of England’s towns, villages, and cities. The English poor surged forth from this unsettling yet profitable confluence of market forces, made worse in times of dearth and disease, taking to the roads in search of work in unprecedented numbers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹⁵

Arriving in London, poor newcomers who could afford it settled in the backstreets. The novelist Daniel Defoe, whose family owned a warehouse in Coleman Street Ward, noted that the neighborhood was, and is still remarkable particularly, above all the parishes in London, for a great number of alleys and thoroughfares, very long, where people on the economic margins crowded into rickety, jerry-rigged tenement buildings. These tenements lined the alleys that traversed Coleman Street proper in a series of long, narrow, crooked passages that led to a warren of courtyards and lanes. The most important of these byways were Swann Alley, Bell Alley, and White Alley. One account described Swann and Bell Alleys as so narrow that a horse and cart could not pass through. The narrowness of the streets, coupled with the lack of open space within the Square Mile, forced Londoners to build up when they added on, and often three and four stories were piled atop the original timber-framed daub-and-wattle dwellings, with each addition jutting several feet farther into the street. Seventeenth-century London poll taxes illustrate how the burst of tenement building affected the back lanes of Coleman Street Ward, which, like London’s other subterranean warrens, grew steadily more crowded in the decades before the Revolution. Between 1603 and 1637, the number of buildings in the ward tripled, with 176 new multi-tenant houses sprouting up in the midst of 102 preexisting single-family dwellings. One can easily imagine the swelling concourse of the poor streaming through the City streets. There, as a contemporary noted, posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the houses, lest with jostling one another the crowds of people should shoulder them down. Lost in these crowds were many children like Walter Hill who, having entered the ranks of the destitute after being orphaned or abandoned, had not even a hovel to call home. Home was in the streets.¹⁶

The descent of impoverished youngsters like Hill contrasted starkly with the ascent of self-made men like the wealthy Maurice (or Morris) Abbot, who like others of his station, lived on Coleman Street proper, a fair and large street, on both sides builded with diverse fair houses. While Abbot and those from his class typed Hill and other indigent children as wild and masterless threats to the commonwealth, they entertained high opinions of themselves as the founding fathers of England’s economic expansion. As Abbot’s friend the East India Company member Dudley Digges wrote in 1615, within a few years . . . well-minded merchants . . . like Hercules in the cradle would make England a staple of commerce for all the world . . . to advance the reputation and revenue of the Commonwealth. Hercules, as the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have written, served as a model for the exploration, trade, conquest, and plantation that inspired writers, statesmen, and colonial venturers of the early modern period.¹⁷ Maurice Abbot had taken on the labors of Hercules, through which he acquired a level of wealth and influence that few in London’s mercantile community could hope to rival. His initial voyage to Aleppo in 1588 provided him with an insider’s knowledge of the Mediterranean trade that vaulted him to the Levant Company chairmanship from 1607 to 1611. In 1600, a budding acumen for Asian commerce had led to a founding membership in the East India Company, where he would serve as a director until 1624, when his peers elected him company governor, a post he held until 1639.¹⁸ The commercial ventures launched by Abbot and other cosmopolitan capitalists reached northward into the Baltic, circled the Atlantic, lined the African coastline, ranged across the Mediterranean, and spread into the East Indies and beyond all the way to Japan. As a colonial entrepreneur, Abbot partnered with a faction of puritan noblemen and merchants looking to unite their trading interests in the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans with a commercial and plantation empire in the Americas. Joining forces with the militant Protestant earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, to secure profits and to thwart the imperial expansion of their most despised foreign enemy, Catholic Spain, Abbot’s faction helped found the Virginia Company (1606) and the Somers Island (or Bermuda) Company (1615). Abbot’s career offers an excellent case study of how the rise of the English Atlantic depended on previous experience with commerce and cash-crop plantation production in Africa and all the lands encompassing the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean regions. But as wild as his dreams of riches grew, as high as his hopes for godly reform soared, and as far as his ships sailed into the world’s oceans, the London poor would always be with Maurice Abbot.¹⁹

IMAGE 1. This early nineteenth-century drawing of seventeenth-century housing in Moorfields, immediately adjacent to the northwest of Coleman Street Ward, gives us a vivid image of the conditions in which the London poor lived during the era of the English Revolution. Taken from J. T. Smith, Ancient Topography of London (London, 1815). Photo appears courtesy of The Newberry Library (folio F 02455 .798).

As a member of the St. Stephen’s parish vestry and as a common councilor and alderman for the City of London, Abbot administered poor relief in the parochial and municipal realms. He also helped draft ordinances against poor people like Walter Hill who, in violation of sixteenth-century antivagrancy laws, illegally decamped in London parishes. Importantly, Abbot paid the poor relief rates that he helped to set, a duty to the public good that we can be sure he and the more economically ambitious people from his class did not relish. While trying to keep the poor from starving, these self-styled guardians of the public weal also argued that the poor must not be allowed to starve the commonwealth of their labor. Their idle destitution, as the argument ran, equated economically with lost productivity and an upward trend in relief rates.²⁰

Abbot’s public-spirited concern about the poor’s detrimental impact on the commonwealth found ample support in the literature of early modern English humanism. The commonwealth writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who worked within this tradition had a highly class-conscious view of politics and confined what they alternately called the people, the body politic, or civil society to three orders: the nobility, the gentry, and the propertied men of the third order. In his much-studied book De Republica Anglorum, the Elizabethan scholar, diplomat, and statesman Thomas Smith defined the commonwealth as a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together by common accord and covenants among themselves for the conservation of themselves as well in peace as in war. Smith argued that the commonwealth (or state) existed primarily for two reasons; first, it must uphold the rule of law in civil society as the foundation of the people’s liberties; second, the public good required the state to create conditions conducive for free men to enrich themselves in ways that worked toward the common profit of the people, as the body politic would waste away without fresh infusions of economic lifeblood. For Smith and other political anatomists, increasing prosperity depended upon increasing economic innovation, which often came at the expense of the fourth order, the unpropertied commonality. In Smith’s concept of the commonwealth, propertyless commoners did not belong to civil society. They were not part of the people, who according to the fictional covenant struck by its constituent members existed to conserve themselves as well as their civil liberties, which flowed from their status as property owners. Smith, along with most other English humanists, classified the propertyless as subjects without rights, to be mastered by their social superiors. Without a stake in the state, they were bound to remain in profitable subjection to the propertied, to become, as the famous biblical phrase had it, hewers of wood and drawers of water.²¹

As Smith wrote, in the body politic only the wealth of the lord is . . . sought for, not the profit of the slave or bondman. The commonality were bondsmen, slaves, and tools to be used as instruments for the gain of their lord(s), the multitude of men in the body politic. Through the liberty allowed them in their covenant, free men possessed the sovereign power to expropriate the value of the commonality’s labor for their own increase and for the increase of the commonwealth at large. Smith saw a role for the state in this relationship and according to some historians even went so far as to craft a 1547 statute calling for the temporary enslavement of poor commoners. Regardless of the question of Smith’s authorship, the slave statute enjoyed a very short life, as his compatriots were unwilling to take the bold step of legally enslaving other English people, at least in England itself.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Smith’s thinking on the body politic and the public good is that it evolved mere political theory into a nascent political economy, a move that reveals how humanist principles regarding the commonwealth could translate easily into an ideology of colonization and empire-building. Smith and his contemporaries applied theory to practice in Ireland through the bloodshed of the Elizabethan conquests. Hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics were killed in the Desmond (1569–73, 1579–83) and Tyrone Rebellions (1594–1603), through violence or planned famine, after resisting the plantation or colonization of Munster and Ulster. Few lofty-minded English humanists lost much sleep over the carnage; some such as Edmund Spenser infamously gloried in it. Less poetic than Spenser, Lord Justice Sir William FitzWilliam described the Irish to the Renaissance man Sir William Cecil as a brute and bestial people . . . more craftier, viperous, and undermining a generation than any other. According to Cecil’s humanist logic, if such savages stood in the path of civility’s progress, they could be justly destroyed for resisting the colonization of their own country. For his part, Thomas Smith invested in and actively promoted the lethal violence required for the conquest and colonization of Ulster, Ireland’s northernmost province. His successors in the seventeenth century would expand the lessons learned across the Irish Sea farther west, across the Atlantic Ocean in new English colonies.²²

Much like the Catholic Irish as they faced off against their would-be colonizers, members of the English commonality entertained ideas about their own self-worth that conflicted with the dehumanized status afforded to them by English humanism. While deference shaped the norms of early modern England, so too did the values of Christian equity and a cherished heritage of political liberty, rooted in popular perceptions of the Magna Carta and an ancient constitutional tradition vested in the laws of Edward the Confessor. In economic terms, poor commoners understood their increasing destitution not simply as poverty but as impoverishment; destitution had causes, which pierced the thin skin of early modern deference. As a consequence, throughout the period poor commoners petitioned against press gangs, price-gouging shopkeepers, enclosing and engrossing landlords, monopolistic merchants, abusive magistrates, and machinating privy councilors, accusing them of the kind of sinful self-seeking that subjected the freeborn English people to their own corrupt and tyrannical designs. Importantly,