to promote the petition in every town in the Kingdom if they could.27 These Commissioners met in the Whalebone Inn and in Southwark, Wapping and towns in Kent.28
The Whalebone Inn was one of the regular meeting places of the Levellers, located in Lothbury near the Royal Exchange in the City. Lilburne’s speech also revealed ‘that 30,000 of the petitions were to come from the printing presses the following day’. To fund this work, Lilburne told the meeting, money needed to be raised and treasurers had been appointed for the purpose.29 It is some indication of the scale on which the Levellers were operating at this time that 30,000 petitions were being printed: this would be a substantial number for a contemporary political campaign, designed to reach the modern population of the country. Lilburne, Wildman, John Davies and Richard Woodward also sent a letter to the ‘well affected’ of Kent encouraging them to support the petition.30
The picture of the Levellers that emerges from this episode is one of sustained, methodical, widespread political organization. No doubt the same methods that Lilburne describes the Levellers using in January were used in July to gain the 10,000 names for the petition to free Lilburne from the Tower, and, in August and September, to gain 40,000 signatories for the Large Petition and the turnout on the demonstration at Westminster which accompanied its presentation.31
LONDON AND THE SECOND CIVIL WAR
London was a city on edge when hostilities broke out once more in 1648. The Second Civil War was composed of a series of local engagements against Royalist risings, plus the struggle against the invading Scottish army allied to the king. Cromwell was in command of the Parliamentary forces sent to crush the rebellion in Wales and then to oppose the Scots. Sir Thomas Fairfax was in command of the forces that dealt with the Royalist rising in Kent.
The Kent rebellion was led by the earl of Norwich who aimed at a rendezvous at Blackheath, thereby threatening London. Fairfax drove away the 1,000 who gathered at Blackheath on 30 May 1648, and decisively defeated the rest of the Royalists at Maidstone on 1 June. Norwich attempted to gain Blackheath again with his remaining 3,000-strong force, but was seen off by the City militia under the able command of Philip Skippon. Norwich crossed the Thames at Greenwich, the foot in boats and the horse swimming alongside. In Essex his numbers rose again as he was joined by Royalists from London, including Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle. The Royalists were pursued by Parliamentary forces under Colonel Whalley. They reached Chelmsford and then, on 10 June, they decided to enter Colchester, Lucas’s home town. By 12 June Fairfax was two miles from Colchester, having brought his troops across the Thames at Gravesend. Norwich’s Royalists had to make a stand.
The siege of Colchester, lasting for eleven weeks, was the most bloody and dramatic face-off in the Second Civil War.32 But it is not the grisly course of the siege that is of interest here, but the events that attended its conclusion. The eventual surrender of the Royalists, after dismissing three offers of quarter from Fairfax, was a controversial affair. Rainsborough acted as one of the Commissioners who agreed the Articles of Surrender, and Fairfax’s victorious troops entered Colchester on 28 August. Fairfax’s Council of War, which included Commissary General Henry Ireton, Colonel Whalley and Rainsborough, decided that Lucas and Lisle should be executed. This was part of a harsher political climate in the Second Civil War, ‘for during the Second Civil War the New Model’s leaders’ ascription of the term “Man of Blood” to Charles I, as guilty of a deliberate and almost sacrilegious action which, after acceptance of clemency, had cost the lives of others, was sometimes taken to apply to his commanders also.’33
Whalley, Ireton and Rainsborough were charged with ensuring that the verdict of the Council of War be carried out, although it was Ireton who seems to have been most closely associated with the actual execution, involving himself in a lengthy argument with Lucas about the judicial basis of the sentence.34 The Royalists instantly claimed Lucas and Lisle as martyrs, while Fairfax and Rainsborough were demonized for their part in the killings. Only a month after the execution the first attempt on the life of Rainsborough took place. At this time the New Model Army headquarters had moved to St Albans. Shortly before he went north with orders to take over the siege of Pontefract, Rainsborough was riding between London and St Albans, accompanied only by a captain, when he was attacked by Royalists. The report of the event given to the Commons records:
Colonel Rainsborough, it was also informed, was likewise set upon by three of the King’s Party between London and St. Albans, he having a Captain in his Company; the Cavaliers seeing their Gallantry and Resolution, put Spurs to their Horses and rode for it, and being extraordinary well mounted over rid them.35
On this occasion Rainsborough’s bravery prevailed. Other Parliamentarians had also recently survived assassination attempts. On that same day the Commons heard that ‘A Member of the House . . . and another Gentleman, coming yesterday out of the City, were affronted by three Gentlemen, who very well knew the said Member, calling him by his Name: Two of them drew their Swords, and sell [sic] on him, the Third had a Dagger to stab him, but by great Providence and Courage, he gave them a Repulse.’ Others had not been so lucky, for the House was told that ‘A Captain of the Army was likewise killed in London, and a Major the last week’. The final months of the Second Civil War were a dangerous time in London when the animosities generated by years of conflict were reaching a crescendo.
THOMAS RAINSBOROUGH’S FUNERAL
Rainsborough was a Leveller hero after Putney, the highest-ranking officer of the New Model Army to support their cause. He became detested by the Royalists for his role in the siege of Colchester, and was lucky to have survived the attempt on his life on the road outside St Albans. But in late October 1648 he was not so lucky: a Royalist raiding party killed him at his lodgings in Doncaster where he was conducting the siege of the last Royalist stronghold, Pontefract Castle.
The funeral of Thomas Rainsborough was a calculated, political demonstration of the Leveller movement. It was an ‘unofficial, revolutionary pageant’ designed as ‘a gesture of defiance against the established powers’.36 The funeral took place at a politically critical juncture; many radicals feared that Parliament was about to conclude a treaty with the king that would mean an unacceptable restoration of the monarchy. Rainsborough’s funeral was a symbolic moment of resistance to this course of action. The day before the funeral a single-side sheet, ‘An Elegie Upon the Honourable Colonel Thomas Rainsborough’, explicitly argued that Rainsborough’s death should be understood as a providential warning against a treaty with the king:
What if Heaven purpos’d Rainsborough’s fall to be
A prop for Englands dying Libertie?
And did in Love thus suffer one to fall
That Charles by Treaty might not ruine all?
For who’l expect that Treaty should doe good
Whose longer date commenc’t in Rainsborough’s blood?’37
The verse went on to tell ‘noble Fairfax’ and ‘bold Cromwel’ that if they were to ‘Conclude a peace with Charles’ they would end up riding in ‘robes of Scarlet’ dyed in ‘your own dearest blood’, because ‘instead of Gold’ Charles would ‘pay you all with steel’.
It was in this atmosphere that the date and time of Rainsborough’s funeral were announced in the Leveller press. The Moderate, the Leveller news-sheet, gave an account of Rainsborough’s death, ending it with this call to arms: ‘Can the soldiery of this Kingdom be silent, and not revenge the barbarous murder of their incomparable Commander . . . The Lord stir up your hearts to be avenged of these bloody enemies.’ And the Moderate made a public appeal to all the ‘well-affected’ (a term having much the same meaning as ‘citizen’ in the French Revolution) to join the funeral procession:
The Corps of the never to be forgotten, English
