Those rather tedious but too often forgotten points may perhaps be summed up by recording the Advice which the Duke of Newcastle, a survivor from the old régime, gave to Charles II after the Restoration. Bishops, he said, are ‘the most effective guards against dissemination of wrong opinions among the people’, and so must be selected with great care. Too much preaching is a bad thing, and should be replaced by the reading of homilies, which will instruct the people in ‘their obedience to their superiors and governors, with all the respect that may be’. There should be less education, and books on controversial subjects should be printed in Latin only, ‘for controversy is a civil war with the pen which pulls out the sword soon afterwards’.3
The reader may from time to time think that I am reading too much between the lines, that I treat what Milton and others wrote as cryptograms to be decoded. But I believe this is the right way to read rebellious writers in the decades before 1640. ‘These times are dangerous for men to write,’ said a Kentishman in the fifteen-nineties, ‘much more to write opinions.’4 ‘Things with us are in such a condition’, the great mathematician Hariot wrote to Kepler in 1608, ‘that I still cannot philosophize freely. We are still stuck in the mud.’1 ‘The times are dangerous’, John Chamberlain told Sir Dudley Carleton in 1622, ‘and the world grows tender and jealous of free speech.’2 ‘I dare go no further,’ wrote Joseph Mede, Fellow of Milton’s college, in a private letter of July 1635, after referring to the Thirty Years War; ‘it may be I have said too much already.’3 Under the Laudian régime Mede dared not even publish the results of his researches into the date of Christ’s Second Coming. Yet if there was an acknowledged scholarly expert in England on this important topic, he was the man.
Aesopian writing is familiar to anyone in the twentieth century who has had to live and write under a censorship. We must be on the alert all the time when reading what Milton published before 1640 and after 1660, for he then had truths to convey which he felt to be vitally important, and which authority felt to be wickedly seditious.4
The minds of men are the great wheels of things; thence come changes and alterations in the world; teeming freedom exerts and puts forth itself.
John Warr, The Corruption and Deficiency of the Laws of England (1649)
It was not a mere reform in the government but a social revolution which this [third] party worked to bring about. … The party was followed by a large number of inferior free-thinkers and fantastical dreamers, the one set in hope of licence, the other of equality of property and universal suffrage.
F. Guizot, History of Civilization in England, lectures delivered 1828–30
Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose public records to be true.
William Blake, p. 962
Historians have long recognized the existence of two conflicting bodies of ideas in the seventeenth century. But increasingly of late they have become aware of a third body of ideas, the popular heretical culture, which rejected the ideas both of court and established church, and of orthodox Puritanism. This third culture is difficult to identify, because its records are normally unwritten: our evidence comes from hostile accounts of church courts prosecuting heretics, of orthodox spokesmen denouncing them. What I say about it in this chapter is necessarily tentative.
Because there was no freedom for unorthodox men and women of the lower classes to print their views before 1640, still less to submit them to rational discussion, such views were often expressed crudely, jumbled up with magical and prophetical ideas: in attempting rational analysis we no doubt flatter the ideas actually held. Nevertheless, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries certain themes recur in lower-class heresy. Whether they have a continuous underground existence, or whether they crop up spontaneously from time to time, the evidence does not permit us to decide. My hunch is the former, but I could not prove it.
Readers of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs believed that they were heirs to a great popular tradition. To the sneering question, ‘Where was your church before Luther?’ they answered (as John Aylmer had done): Wyclif begat Hus, Hus begat Luther, Luther begat truth.1 Perhaps the continuities which certainly existed in some areas between fifteenth-century heresy and seventeenth-century radicalism (e.g. in Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire) relate to the traditional association of weaving with heresy. Domestic work in the clothing industry was spreading in these two centuries. In the revolutionary decades the radical elements in the Lollard tradition were emphasized by men like Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Dell. The point was regularly made from the other side – for example by Charles I,1 by Bishop Joseph Hall, by John Cleveland (‘Presbyter Wyclif’, ‘Tyler’s toleration’), and by John Collop.2 Cowley in 1643 repudiated not only ‘Wyclifians, Hussites and the Zwinglian crew’ but Luther and Calvin as well, preferring Rome to Calvinism.3
We should not with historical hindsight impose too much organizational coherence upon those who transmitted these ideas. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the orthodox spoke of ‘Lollards’; under Elizabeth of ‘Anabaptists’ or ‘Familists’. There were indeed Lollard and Anabaptist groups, and the Family of Love also had some sort of organization. We do not know much about any of them: more research is needed. But I suspect that clerical inquisitors imposed classifications, ‘-isms’, for their own convenience. They started with some idea of what ‘Lollards’, ‘Anabaptists’ or ‘Familists’ ought to believe, just as they started with assumptions about what ‘witches’ believed. Leading questions would no doubt encourage suspects to conform to the expected type.
So though there were ‘Lollard’, ‘Anabaptist’ and ‘Familist’ trends in popular thought, we should not postulate the existence of an organized underground. There are tantalizing hints. Elizabethan Familists are said to have been linked by itinerant weavers, basket-makers, musicians, bottle-makers, joiners. In 1555 servants and husbandmen came long distances for a secret meeting in Colchester. Sixty-seven years later, also in Essex, Thomas Shepard heard of the Grindletonian Familists, lurking in the obscurity of a Yorkshire Pennine valley.4 The clothing industry linked Essex and the West Riding. The Grindletonians were to be associated retrospectively with Coppinger and the Yorkshire gentleman Arthington, disciples of William Hacket who in the fifteen-nineties believed he was the Messiah.5
Familists – like Lollards before them – tended when challenged to recant, but to remain of the same opinion still. This unheroic attitude was related to their dislike of all established churches, whether Protestant or Catholic. Their refusal of martyrdom no doubt helped their beliefs to survive, but it increases the difficulty of identifying heretical