Mutiny and Leadership by Keith Grint

Author:Keith Grint [Grint, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

This was the turning point for the new regime: it was going to be either a democratic republic rooted in the Agreement of the People or a military republic under Cromwell, and it turned out to be the latter. As Rees (2018: 4) suggests,

The Levellers revolted against this turn of events in word and deed. The title of Lilburne’s pamphlet England’s New Chaines Discovered was a four word summary of their view. Their supporters in the army mutinied and were defeated by forces under Cromwell, at Bishopgate in London, at Burford and in the Oxford Garrison. That broke the Levellers as an effective and coherent organization.

de Krey (2017: 252–3) is more sceptical that the mutinies were strongly inspired by dedicated Levellers and much more confident that the regime chose to label the mutineers as Levellers as a way of maintaining the figment of loyalty from the NMA to their military leaders. It also enabled them to explain the mutinies as the result of Leveller ‘seduction’ and ‘deceit’ who had intended to despoil the country with atheism, to abolish both private property and the natural hierarchy. That none of these claims were true was irrelevant; the mutinies were defeated and the Levellers were on the defensive, configured by the regime not as the embodiment of popular support for the Commonwealth but as enemies of the people. This was not the end of the Levellers; they disappeared from political discourse for hundreds of years, but many of their ideas and idealism returned 300 years later.

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