Oliver Cromwell, arrived on the scene just at the moment when Lockyer and fourteen others were being taken into custody. Some other mutineers were punished, but only Lockyer eventually faced the death penalty.52
Some accounts of the mutiny sympathetic to the Leveller cause claimed that Fairfax and Cromwell singled out Lockyer because he had participated in the Ware mutiny, demonstrating his support for the Leveller ‘Agreement of the People’.53 Certainly, in reply to demands for clemency, Fairfax said that he would not pardon Lockyer because of the volatile situation in the City and the Army.54
Cromwell and Fairfax were facing more than Lockyer’s mutiny during these days in late April. Three days of demonstrations by women supporters of the Levellers, the ‘lusty lasses of the leveling party’, were held at the doors of Westminster, petitioning for the release of the Leveller leaders from captivity in the Tower. MPs were mobbed by 500 angry women who were undeterred when the sergeant-at-arms was sent out to tell them to go home and ‘look after their own business, and meddle with their huswifery’. In reply to a remark that it was strange to see women petitioning, they replied that ‘it was strange too that you cut off the King’s head, yet I suppose you will justify it’. On 25 April, just as events at the Bull Inn were in motion, twenty women of the ‘sea-green order’ were admitted to Parliament to present a petition said to bear 10,000 signatures. But they were rudely bundled out again by soldiers who cocked their pistols as if preparing to fire.55
John Lilburne and fellow Leveller leader Richard Overton petitioned Fairfax for mercy for Lockyer from their own imprisonment in the Tower, but his sentence was not repealed. He was taken to St Paul’s Churchyard where he faced a firing squad of musketeers. After saying his farewells to friends and family he refused a blindfold, and addressed the soldiers. He said: ‘Fellow soldiers, I am here brought to suffer in behalf of the People of England, and for your Privileges and Liberties, and such as in conscience you ought to own and stand to: But I perceive that you are appointed by your officers to murder me; and I did not think that you had such heathenish and barbarous principles in you . . . when I stand up for nothing but what is for your good.’ Colonel Okey, in charge of the detail, accused Lockyer of still trying to ‘make the soldiers mutiny’. Lockyer asked the firing squad to shoot when he raised both his hands. And so they did.56
Lockyer’s funeral was, if anything, even larger than Rainsborough’s. And it served the same function of rallying Leveller support, though this time in a moment of retreat rather than advance. The procession began in Smithfield and went by way of the City to Moorfields where Lockyer was buried in the New Churchyard, now becoming a favoured resting place for dissenters. Seven trumpeters ‘sounded before the Corpse’. Lockyer’s horse, draped in black and led by a footman, followed the coffin which was covered in rosemary branches dipped in blood and had Lockyer’s sword laid on it. This was an elevation of the ordinary trooper to the status of a ‘chief commander’. Some 4,000 to 5,000 people joined the original procession, among them an estimated 300 soldiers and some discharged men. A company of women brought up the rear of the cortege. When the procession reached its destination, the marchers were joined by more of the ‘highest sort’ who had stayed aloof from the controversial progress through the City. The funeral took place on the 27 April 1649. It was watched by ‘many thousands of spectators’.57 Black and green ribbons, now recognized as the Leveller colours, were widely worn among the mourners.58 There were eulogies but no sermon in the New Churchyard. The speeches pointed up the Leveller programme and aimed criticism at the new government of Grandees.
FROM REPUBLIC TO RESTORATION
Cromwellian London was not the dour capital of a dour nation. The ravages of war, a war in which proportionally more people lost their lives than in any conflict before or since, were gradually overcome. Alehouses and taverns remained popular centres of life. Dancing, street music and fairs continued much as they had always done. The first coffee house opened near the Royal Exchange in 1652; many more followed, and by 1662 in the City alone there were eighty-two coffee rooms. Cromwell, unlike Charles II, did not try to close them.
Religious toleration was wide if not universal, and did not, of course, extend to Catholics. But it did extend to Jews, who in 1656 were ‘readmitted’ to England for the first time in 365 years. They built the first synagogue in Creechurch Lane in 1657.
The return of the Jews to England represented the kind of political compromise crossed with political principle which was the hallmark of Cromwell’s rule. Some Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition were already in England, though they identified themselves as Spanish or Portuguese. While Cromwell was certainly a believer in religious toleration, he was unwilling to raise the issue directly in the case of the Jews; he was chiefly motivated by commercial considerations in seeking to attract Jewish merchants from Amsterdam so as to secure their trading relationships with Spain. He was sympathetic to the appeal from Amsterdam Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel when he came to London in 1655, but referred the issue to the ruling Council of State. The plea for readmission ultimately came before a wider Conference involving lawyers, merchants and ministers, where the lawyers opined that there had never actually been any law forbidding Jews to reside in England.
That was enough for Cromwell, since it made the problem disappear. Just one sticking point remained: the 1650 Act which decriminalized non-attendance at Church on the Sabbath did not apply to Jews. Cromwell met this difficulty by giving Jews a verbal assurance that no action would be taken against them, and indeed the synagogue at Creechurch Lane continued to function unhindered. When war broke out with Spain in 1656, Jews in England attested to their religion rather than have their property seized as Spanish nationals. Land was purchased for a Jewish cemetery in 1657, and a Jew became a broker at the Royal Exchange without having to swear the usual Christian oath. Prejudice there was, but de facto toleration was the norm.59As moneylenders, Jews were under the protection of the Crown and this alone caused much resentment particularly in times of economic hardship when they and other foreign nationals were liable to persecution. Their identification as Christ-killers, and the popularity of the Crusades from the late eleventh to the end of the thirteenth century, also exacerbated hostility towards Jews.
Radical puritans preached more freely than they ever had done, or ever would do until long after the Restoration. The diarist John Evelyn was horrified at the ‘blasphemous and ignorant mechanics’ that he found preaching in London pulpits, sometimes elected by the congregation. It was in fact Parliament, not Cromwell, who ruled against celebration at Christmas, the term ‘Christ’s Mass’ smacking too much of Catholicism; Puritans preferred the term ‘Christ-tide’.
Though theatres were closed, reputed as centres of delinquency, in 1656 the first English opera, ‘The Siege of Rhodes’, was performed and women sang on stage.60 There were many musical clubs and taverns in London, and Cromwell’s court promoted dancing and music. John Milton was Secretary of Foreign Tongues, assisted by Andrew Marvell as Latin Secretary, making Cromwell’s government the only one in British history to contain such unrivalled poets, though neither was known as such at the time.
Evelyn managed to banish the spectre of ‘mechanic’ preachers by attending coach races in Hyde Park. Spring Gardens near Charing Cross was a rendezvous for ‘the young company’ of ‘ladies and gallants’ who could be found there ‘till midnight’, enjoying the fact that ‘the thickets of the garden seemed to be contrived to all the advantages of gallantry’. In all these ways, says historian Stephen Inwood, ‘the puritan decade was a time of change, but change towards, rather than away from, greater individual freedom.’61
The Restoration of Charles II was a moment of political reaction, made possible by Cromwell’s inability to weld the forces that had made the revolution into a stable basis for post-revolutionary administration. Critically, stabilizing the new order meant crushing the Levellers and radical left of the revolution without being able to re-unite with monarchist conservatives. And despite a brief resurgence of the radical old cause when Cromwell died in 1659, the establishment preferred the return of a Stuart monarch – or at least they did at first. Politically, the Restoration
