time: the refreshing river 



was so strongly entrenched, were royalist. It was no coincidence that 

 the chaplains of the volunteer regiments of London were Presbyterian, 

 as opposed to the Anglican and Roman Catholic influence on the other 

 side.^ The golden age of seventeenth-century Anglicanism stood, in 

 fact, in its economic aspect, for a scarcely altered version of mediaeval 

 theocracy. The bishops were "mediaeval clerks," determined to control 

 the market-place. The victories of Cromwell opened the door for 

 the era of capitalist enterprise, and, w^hen the Church of England 

 regained its possessions at the Restoration, it was at the price of most 

 of its militant spirit. In 1692, when one David Jones was so indiscreet 

 as to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard Street, a sermon 

 against usury, his career in London was brought to an abrupt con- 

 clusion. 



The Levellers. 



Let us now cross over to the other side in the civil war in order 

 to trace another movement of great interest — that of the Levellers. 

 If we regard, as we must, the civil war as England's "bourgeois 

 revolution," we should expect to find a certain number of true 

 socialists on the left wing of the revolutionary party, men who would 

 not be content with the political equality which the Cromwellian 

 system would give, but would demand economic equality as well. 

 This is indeed exactly what happened, and from 1647 onwards the 

 parliamentary side was split into two portions, the main body quite 

 satisfied with the defeat of everything that the royalist and anglican 

 forces had stood for, and a smaller body desirous of pushing on 

 towards what we should now call a Socialist State.^ The fortunes of 



^ It must be understood that names which we use today only for religious denomina- 

 tions had in tlie seventeenth century a strong political significance. On the Parliamentary 

 side tliere were few or no Anglicans. Presbyterianism stood for the moderate puritanism 

 of the middle-class merchant interest, and was compatible with compromise as regards 

 the royalist issue until an advanced stage of the Commonwealth. Independency (the 

 predecessor of modern Congregationalism) was adhered to by all the more revolutionary 

 elements, and where the revolution eventually split in taking its inevitable "two steps 

 for^'ard and one step back" was between the so-called "gentlemen-Independents" such 

 as Cromwell, Ireton and the other leaders on the one hand; and the Levellers, Diggers, 

 etc., on the other. 



^ For the Levellers die most accessible book is Henry Holorenshaw's The Levellers 

 and the English Revolution (London, 1939); further see the work of E. Bernstein, 

 Cromwell and Communism; Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution 

 (Allen & Unwin, London, 1930); also English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth 

 Century by G. P. Gooch, 2nd edition, edited H. J. Laski (Cambridge, 1927); T. C. 

 Pease, The Levellers' Movement (Washington, 1916); D. W. Petegorsky, Left- Wing 

 Democracy in the English Civil War (London, 1940); A. S. P. \\'oodhouse, Puritanism 

 and Liberty (London, 1938). 



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