Abiezer Coppe and the well-favoured Harlot: The Ranters and the English Revolution

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 20, Issue 1, 1 May 1987, Page 17

Abiezer Coppe and the well-favoured Harlot: The Ranters and the English Revolution

J. C. DAVIS

Historians in search of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century have come, in recent times, to seek it not amongst those well-known heroes of old, but amongst the obscure and lowly. John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell and John Milton are swept aside as conservative and ultimately repressive. The authentic voice of revolution comes from other less famous mouths: Jacob Bauthumley, George Foster, Laurence Clarkson and, perhaps, Richard Coppin. There is an ironic nicety about this setting at nought of the things that are by those that are not, which would have appealed to Abiezer Coppe and his alleged Ranter colleagues.

For Coppe, as for other seventeenth century radicals, we have to stitch together the appearance of biographical understanding from scattered scraps of information. Coppe’s appearance is unknown to us; his life obscure, except for a flurry of notoriety in 1650-51. 1 He was born in Warwick on 30 May, 1619. At the age of seventeen, he went up to All Souls, Oxford, but soon transferred to Merton College. Apparently, in Oxford, he showed Presbyterian leanings, but he left the university without a degree on the outbreak of civil war in 1642. In the mid-1640s he reappears as a Baptist and preacher to the garrison at Compton House in Warwickshire. Richard Baxter, then lecturer to the Coventry garrison, thought him the most competent and effective Baptist preacher in the region of Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire. However, despite their patronage by sonie sections of the army, Baptists were vulnerable to persecution and Coppe is reported, at this time, as imprisoned for fourteen weeks.

In 1649 he broke with the Baptists, being ejected from their London meetings. His repudiation of the formalism of the gathered churches springs from this time. On 4 January 1650, his A Fiery Flying Roll appeared in the booksellers. Four days later, the Council of State issued a warrant for his arrest on the curiously phrased charge of writing ‘some blasphemous truths’. 2 He was arrested and imprisoned in Warwick. On 1 February, a Friday, the usual day on which the House devoted itself to religious issues, the Rump condemned A Fiery Flying Roll. All copies were to be seized and destroyed. Specimens were to be burned by the hangman in several

places about London. 3 The following day, the Council of State ordered Coppe to be brought to the capital. Various delays ensued, but on 19 March the transfer took place. Clearly, however, some urgency had gone out of the situation. On 19 July, the Rump ordered a committee to deal with those responsible for A Fiery Flying Roll. Two months later, it was still urging similar action on another committee. 4 Not until 2or 3 October was Coppe finally hauled before a Parliamentary committee. We have no record of its proceedings, and the press accounts, hostile and sensational, have to be treated with caution. Clearly, however, the committee hearing was abortive in the sense of producing no resolution or finding. Coppe apparently questioned the committee’s authority to act judicially, and its members seemed to experience difficulty in finding a charge to bring against him. 5

Three months later, in January 1651, he published, from prison, A Remonstrance dissociating himself from sensational reports of his beliefs and conduct. Also in this work, he tried to demonstrate the compatibility of his beliefs with the so-called Blasphemy Act of August 1650. The ambiguity of this ordinance has hardly yet been recognised by historians. It was primarily directed against atheists, only secondly against blasphemers, and ironically—in terms of Coppe’s views—it also laid down penalties for religious formalism. In July 1651, Coppe published a further clarification of his views, and sometime between then and September he was released from prison after a possible incarceration of 21 months, with no formal charges ever brought against him. In 1657, he published a work called Divine Fireworks, thematically close to A Fiery Flying Roll. After the Restoration, he practised as a physician under the sardonically assumed name of Dr Higham. He was buried at Barnes in Surrey in 1672. One last twist: in 1680, Coppe’s verse, Character of a True Christian, was published as a broadsheet, with the printer’s advice that it might be sung to the tune of‘The Fair Nimphs’. 6

What have historians made of him? The nonconformists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries —Barclay, Masson, Whiting, Rufus Jones, Tindall and Nuttall —were universally condemnatory. The Ranters epitomised the excesses of enthusiasm; Coppe, their leader, a kind of spiritual dementia which was devastating for other nonconformists because it pushed the authorities into the repression of the Blasphemy Act. From the 19505, however, other historians began to take an interest from a very different direction. Two books in 1957, Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium and A. L. Morton’s The Everlasting Gospel (a study of the historical antecedents of William Blake’s thought), presented the Ranters as something substantially more than a provocation on the margins of nonconformity. In 1970, Cohn published an article

in Encounter in which he argued the affinities between Ranterism and the counter-cultural movements of the late nineteen sixties. In the same year, Morton published his collection of essays, The World of the Ranters, in which Ranterism became a movement in its own right, influential throughout the length and breadth of England, evoking and only being suppressed by a systematic campaign of savage repression. In 1972, Christopher Hill gave the imprimatur of his enormous prestige to this evolving edifice in his brilliant study The World Turned Upside Down. The Ranters here assumed an ideologically leading and enormously significant role in the attempt at revolution from below; what Hill called the revolution within the revolt, or the second revolution. They were linked explicitly with the theories of Herbert Marcuse and implicitly with those of Antonio Gramsci.

The doors were open. The movement became a phenomenon. A flood of writings followed. G. F. Ellens, Frank McGregor, Barry Reay, Nigel Smith, David Underdown, Barry Coward, Anne Hughes, have all written at length on them. Ranter writings have been edited and subjected to literary analysis. Anonymous scraps of manuscript are now identified as Ranter on the basis of their style. Textbooks ignore them at their peril. 7 Thesis writers, the final sign of a field which has ‘arrived’, are and have been busy. A British student journal, The Ranter , is in publication.

Surprisingly, there remains a good deal of confusion about which individuals in the seventeenth century were Ranters. Hill and Morton have insisted on the existence of a mass movement with a certain ideological vagueness at the core. McGregor sees nothing but the core, which he defines much more tightly. In both accounts, however, Coppe is a if not the leading figure. Moreover, the general consensus is that there are two central, identifying, features of Ranter thought; its antinomianism and its pantheism. For Ranters, as antinomians, the moral law was no longer binding. It was the Joachite third age of the Spirit. The laws of the first and second commissions, the Old and New Testaments, were dead letters to them. The Spirit spoke directly. Scripture had become a useless, if not pernicious, old book to be cast aside. To the pure, infused with the spirit, all things were pure. This could mean a practical antinomianism as well as a theoretical, an acting out of sin in order to show one’s participation in the majesty of God. Swearing, drinking, smoking, fornicating, blaspheming, these were as much worship of the divine for the children of the Spirit as the cringing formalisms of those still enmeshed in the second commission. Indeed, they were more so. Closely associated with this was a pantheism which, seeing God in all things, could not acknowledge sin as a separate category. God was in darkness as well as light.

To understand the significance which this group took on for those historians writing about them since 1970, we have to look at the British Communist Party Historians’ Group and the programme which they developed for themselves between 1946 and 1956, when many of them left the party. s Christopher Hill and A. L. Morton were prominent in that group, as were E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Donna Torr and Rodney Hilton. Their two goals were, first, to demonstrate that there existed a long tradition in British history whereby the people sought to make their own history, rather than remaining a passive screen on which dominant social groups left an impress shaping that history, and, secondly, that Britain’s high cultural tradition was not separable from these concerns; hence Hill on Milton, Morton on Blake, and Thompson on Morris.

These issues remained to the fore in their work after their split with the party. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Classes is, in large part, an attempt to demonstrate that the English working classes made themselves; always struggled to control their own destiny and cultural forms. Similarly, Hill’s World Turned Upside Down is about the attempt to control the flux of the English Revolution from below. Three further influences bore on this work: Gramsci’s notion of the hegemony of the dominant classes as being expressed in all available forms, including the internalisation of values by the subordinate classes —notions of place, appropriate role, decency, modesty and so forth; secondly, Herbert Marcuse’s idea, and the contribution of the Frankfurt school to seventies revolutionary theory, that there could be no true revolution without the casting aside of all forms of repression. Inverting Lenin, permissiveness was a revolutionary stance. A third influence was the ferment of revolutionary liberation in 1968 in the capitals and on the campuses of the West and in the streets of Prague. The year itself, 1968, came to symbolise revolutionary spontaneity, direct action and authenticity. When it came, the true revolution could come without programmes, almost without ideology.

In this framework, the English Revolution of Hampden, Cromwell and Milton took on new meaning. The groups or classes who came to power in the English Revolution, the men of property brought with them the protestant ethic, a discipline for themselves and a means of disciplining the under classes. Sin and hell internalised control on behalf of the dominant classes; the more successfully they were internalised, drummed into the lower orders, the more marginal could the means of overt physical coercion remain. Sin and hell made a police state and a standing army unnecessary. They made ‘civilised’ repression possible and saved the propertied taxpayer money.

The Ranters were the spearhead of the struggle against the internalised repression of the puritan sense of sin, or guilt. As Frank McGregor puts it, ‘their ultimate aim was the attainment of freedom from the burden of sin’. 9 Antinomianism and pantheism were instruments to that end. By 1984, Hill was arguing that the truly revolutionary voice of the seventeenth century was heard only in the writings of Abiezer Coppe, George Foster and Laurence Clarkson, three Ranters. By accepting property, the Levellers inevitably blunted the revolutionary edge of their cause. Winstanley and the Diggers rejected property but, by accepting sin, Winstanley ultimately endorsed the need to repress and diverted his vision of a better society into a utopianised totalitarianism. It is the Ranters who, in rejecting sin and repression, epitomised the negation of the protestant ethic and its accompanying cultural forms which have been major props of the hegemony of the ruling classes ever since. 1,1 This is the framework which has underlain the claim that the Ranters warrant our attention and the significance which has been attached to them over the last fifteen years.

Coppe is a spearhead, a leader, a defining instance of Ranterism. Morton’s view was that it is ‘in his writings that the Ranter attitude to good and evil was most powerfully developed’. 11 In Hill’s version, there was a mystical, quietist wing of the Ranters led by Joseph Salmon, but Coppe was the leader of the ‘drinking, swearing, smoking Ranters’ acting out sin so as to repudiate it as a restraining category. 12 Despite the absence of evidence that Coppe ever engaged in these practical antinomian activities, he continued to be seen as their advocate. A Fiery Flying Roll, according to McGregor emotional and incoherent, was the text of practical antinomianism, declaring ‘all religious ordinances obsolete’. 13 Coppe’s reputation as a leader of the Ranters rests, therefore, on a reading of this text. My view is that such a reading is a gross misreading, and that it is their overall framework or paradigm that forces these good historians to major distortion and egregious error in this case. It is a cautionary tale I tell. The people make their own history. They must have resisted the protestant ethic, a hegemonic projection of their masters. To do so, they must have repudiated sin and hell in gestures of antinomian and pantheistic defiance. The Ranters led that struggle. Coppe was a Ranter. Therefore A Fiery Flying Roll must have said these things. Let us see.

Like many of his contemporaries in 1649 —the year of the downfall of monarchy, Lords and the ancient constitution —Coppe was dwelling with an electrifying sense of the imminence of God’s second coming, of an approaching millenium, a third dispensation. It was a world in which things that are not would set at nought the things that are. In which, Coppe suggested to illustrate the

inversion to come, woman would no longer be a weaker vessel. Two themes were stressed in his writing of 1649. One was the end of property as a consequence of the practical effect of Christian ethics; the rich in giving to the poor would divest themselves of their wealth. Secondly, that it was religious formalism, of all types, which hypocritically stood in the way of this practical Christianity—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, fatherless and afflicted —the practical Christianity of the heart. 14 These are still themes which are central to A Fiery Flying Roll when it appears in January 1650. The Roll is a deliberately controlled, but extraordinarily savage, attack upon every manifestation of formalism. Form without praxis is the cancer of hypocrisy. The marrow of true Christianity is in its practical charity. The consequences of the wholehearted pursuit of practical Christianity would be the undermining of a property system whose moral basis was covetousness and hardness of heart. The indebtedness of Coppe to the Levellers, with their emphasis on practical Christianity, and to Winstanley’s indictment of covetousness is clear. lr> But he rejects ‘sword’ levelling and Winstanley’s ‘digging’ levelling for a levelling based on moral renewal inspired by God’s spiritual informing of individuals; the setting at nought of things that are by God’s use of the things that are not. 16

The language of A Fiery Flying Roll is deliberately startling. It is meant to communicate the urgency of an imminent divine coming, both inward and outward in its effects, which is not so much comforting as unsettling, disturbing and overturning. In addition, Coppe had to impress upon his readers the awesome, distracting legitimacy of his own prophetic role. There is, accordingly, a good deal of semantic athleticism about the work, but it would be a confusion to suggest that there is anything of the mystical about it. Rather than a rejection of Scripture, the tract is a meditation upon two scriptural texts, Hosea ii. 9 (with the Lord’s threat to return and recover his corn, wool and flax) and the whole of The General Epistle ofjames, but especially chapter one’s injunction to practical Christianity and chapter five’s warning to the rich. In fact, rather than repudiating Scripture, Coppe rejects the allegorising of these texts. Scripture and spiritual illumination must co-exist, like a jewel and its cabinet. The thrust of the tract is a balanced attack on formalism with, on the other hand, a condemnation of sterile religious enthusiasm.

The heart of true Christianity is in the self-denying work of charity. ‘He that hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother in want, and shutteth up the bowells of compassion from him, the love of God dwelleth not in him; this man’s Religion is in vain .. . he never yet broke bread —that hath not forgot his [meum].’ 17 As

William Walwyn had argued that the levelling effect of true Christianity would be to ‘empty the fullest Baggs, and pluck down the highest plumes’, lx so Coppe warned that ‘the mighty Leveller’ was coming to infuse men’s hearts with a charity which would bring down the established order, both within men and in society at large. Those who resisted would be judged, punished and eventually swept away. 19

Who are they who stand in the way: these things that are; frustrating the things that are not? The rich, obviously, but also those religious formalists, devious in their appearances, who everywhere diverted religious performance from its true work in charity, into the niceties of observance and speculation. Coppe saw his work as ‘a terrible threat to the Formalists’. The formalities of religion were amongst those things which had been set on high and must be cast down in the day of the Lord. 20 The meticulous, intolerant observances of the ‘Precisian’ were no more than hypocrisy ‘for under them all there lies snapping, snarling, biting, besides covetousnesse, horrid hypocrisie, envy, malice, evill surmising’. Not only are anglicans, presbyterians and independents wanting in this regard, so too the gathered churches of the sects, the ‘anti-free-communicants’, setting themselves apart to quarrel over sprinkling, dipping and the like, masked their hypocrisy behind a contentious preoccupation with forms. 21 Even so, and it is important to recognise this, Coppe’s attack does not stop here. Amongst those who abandon forms altogether is yet a new kind of formalism. Strutting through his work is a character, ‘the young man void of understanding’ alias the ‘well-favoured Harlot’. The

sexual inversion, the male harlot, is typical of Coppe. This figure also rejects the formal churches and their ordinances in favour of the sufficiency of the spirit within, the antinomian speculations of the ‘Spirituall Notionists’. 22 Their posturing also produces nothing in terms of practical Christianity. It is an anti-formalist formalism, still clothing religion in hypocrisy, still sterile, still the enemy. So worrying to Coppe is it, that the prime objective of the second part of A Fiery Flying Roll is to discover ‘the secret villanies of the holy Whore, the well-favoured Harlot (who scorns carnall ordinances, and is mounted up into the notion of Spiritualls)’. The wellfavoured Harlot, scorning Scripture, ‘speaking nothing but Mystery, crying down carnall ordinances, &c. is a fine thing among many, it’s no base thing (now adaies) though it be a cloak for covetousnesse, yea though it be to maintain pride and pomp; these are no base things. These are things that ARE, and must be confounded. But this, by our historians’ definition, is the Ranter antinomian, demolisher of the protestant ethic. Yet for Coppe he is one of the things that are —to be overthrown by the things that are not.

The extraordinary thing here is that Coppe is denouncing the very image with which he has been mistakenly identified. The antinomian dabbler in the liberty conferred by inner illumination is anathema to him, another devious formalism which chokes the practice of living by Christ. For a moment, he is depicted even as the carrier of sin’s bacillus, the deceiver of the Last Days.

I see a brisk, spruce, neat, self-seeking, fine finicking fellow (who scornes to be either Papist, Protestant, Presbyterian, Independent or Anabaptist) I mean the Man of Sin, who worketh with all deceivableness of unrighteousness, 2. Thes.2. Crying down carnall ordinances, and crying up the Spirit: cunningly seeking and setting up himself thereby. 24

Formal ordinances were indeed to come down: but not for avid inner religion, a new formalism, but for the righteous performance of a practical Christian charity. Even a calculating charity was a type of formalism, a restraint on the true practice of charity. Coppe’s well-known story of his encounter with a beggar illustrates that there can be no holding back, no limit, in the practical exercise of Christianity. Sunday, 30 September 1649, in Coppe’s recounting of it, 25 saw him wrestling with his conscience before an abject beggar encountered in the open country. His first instinct was to give two pence. Then another dimension of his hypocrisy urged him to give six pence, ‘enough for a Squire or Knight, to give to one poor body’; enough because ‘hee’s worse than an Infidell that provides not for his own Family, True love begins at home, &c . . .’. As an itinerant preacher, his

maintenance was uncertain and it was necessary to ‘Have a care of the main chance’. All this prudence urged in favour of sixpence but, on searching his pocket, Coppe found that all he had was a shilling piece. The beggar, naturally enough, had no change for this and Coppe was reduced to offering to leave him sixpence at the next town. As Coppe turned and rode away, prudence and conscience fought within him. On the one hand, his necessities, having ridden all day with little food or drink and still eight or nine miles to go, ‘my horse being lame, the waies dirty, it raining all the way, and I not knowing what extra-ordinary occasion I might have for money’. On the other hand, the injunctions of the Epistle of St. James, chapter five, its warning to the rich and the Epistle’s

injunction to practical Christian charity thundered in his ears and finally Coppe, suffused with ‘sparkles of a great glory’, threw all that he had into the beggar’s hands. True Christian charity knows no limits. The hypocrisy of conventional religion, the wellfavoured Harlot, is its fertility and subtlety in finding restraints. Compared to the wickedness of this, cursing and swearing ‘base impudent kisses’ and lust are innocuous offences. As Christopher

Hill is obliged to acknowledge, ‘Coppe agreed that adultery, fornication and uncleanness were sins’, but he regarded the wickedness of those who hypocritically preached Christianity while evading their real obligations as Christians as so much worse. Coppe’s tragedy is that he has, nevertheless, been transformed by the same historian into the ‘leader of the drinking, smoking, swearing Ranters’. 26

Coppe’s vision was therefore of a soon to be purged and reformed society. The spirit of Christ would cast down the mighty and the wealthy, sweep away the hypocrisy of formal religion and open the hearts of men and women to a life of true charity, of true righteousness. It is a noble vision and one deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. Moreover, it owes nothing, in this version, to pantheism, antinomianism or liberation from the restraints of a religion which demands self-effacement. Indeed, through the work runs a heavy insistence on the arduous and even frightening social obligations of Christianity. It is an insistence which is abroad in the later 1640 s and culminates in different ways in Walwyn, Winstanley and Coppe. ‘The true communion amongst men, is to have all things common, and to call nothing one hath, ones own. And the true externall breaking of bread, is to eat bread together in singleness of heart, and to break thy bread to the hungry, and tell them its their own bread &c. els your Religion is in vain.’ 27 In one of his typical, and yet scriptural, inversions Coppe insists that this rigorous self-denial and service ‘is perfect freedom and pure Libertinisme’. With its performance, ‘Sin and Transgression is finished and ended’. 28

Such a vision was critically alarming precisely because it could be argued to have some warrant in the teachings of Christ. It therefore had to be dissociated from them, and it is not at all surprising that accusations of blasphemy and immorality swiftly followed. What is surprising is the credulity of some historians in the face of these charges and their unwillingness to examine Coppe’s denials seriously. As we have seen, Coppe was swiftly imprisoned after the appearance of A Fiery Flying Roll but was dealt with lethargically, even by seventeenth century standards, thereafter. Beyond Parliamentary condemnation, he was never, as far as we know, officially found guilty of anything, including any offence under the Blasphemy Ordinance of 9 August 1650; which is, of course, supposed to have been occasioned by the sort of Ranter excess Coppe is alleged to have incited and taken part in.

His Remonstrance and Copps Return to the Wayes of Truth, both of 1651, can be read as the sincere protestations of a man whose social and ethical message has been blanketed under a welter of accusations of blasphemy and immorality without the issue ever being brought to the test in court. But historians have thought otherwise.

Because he is identified as a Ranter, his ‘recantations’ must be suspect. Ambiguity is held to typify their protestations. 29 Read in this light, his guilt is presumed and any assertions of innocence are to be regarded with suspicion. Moreover, the burden of proof has fallen on Coppe. Nigel Smith, for example, finds him wanting in that he denies accusations of immoral behaviour but ‘with no supporting evidence’. Copps Return is held ‘to read like the parody of an apology, as if Coppe is mocking the authorities’. 30

My claim is that Coppe has been misread because he has been read against the overriding preoccupations of the people’s history in the Communist Party Historians’ Group sense, rather than against the context of seventeenth century concerns and, in particular, the Biblicism of its Christianity. Moreover, I believe that that kind of misreading has clouded our view of the Ranter phenomenon as a whole.

There was no Ranter movement and consequently no savage repression. Frank McGregor recognised this as long ago as 1968. Quaker and Baptist ‘evidence’ of such a movement is suspect because the ‘Ranter’ was used by both movements, as McGregor has shown, to discipline their own members, to sectarianise them, and to distance themselves from unacceptable sectarian excess. And yet Quaker and Baptist sources provide the most prolific ‘evidence’ of a protean Ranterism. In this connection, it is worth remembering Thomas Edwards’s depiction of Independents in 1646. In his account, they practised incest, bigamy, rape, adultery and fornication of all kinds. They were, according to him, notorious for their drunkenness. They neglected religious observance, were ostentatious in dress, wore long hair, laughed, jested and were generally frivolous. Were this not enough, an Independent had been heard to assert his liberty to worship the sun, moon, or a pewter pot if he saw fit. 31 Before the Ranters existed, they were prefigured in Edwards’s view of the Independents, illusory as it might have been, and elsewhere.

These are projections of deviance which tell us more about moral anxieties and uncertainties, about the need to reassert moral boundaries, than they do about substantive historical reality. Sociologists and some historians are used to dealing with these categories of projected deviance and moral panic. There is a lurid, semi-por-nographic, yellowpress sensational literature produced in some quantity in late 1650 to early 1651 which depicts Ranter orgies, promiscuity and blasphemy. Historians have, with the left hand, expressed caution about it while, with the right hand, using it as evidence of a Ranter movement. There is an absurdity here. We can link almost all of this output to a very small circle of printers and writers, of the Grub Street variety, producing their material rapidly

and repetitively for an avid, but evanescent, market. 32 Nevertheless, it is intriguing how these fictions deploy images familiar from the Theophrastian character books, in particular the character of the athiest, and from the prodigy books of the early seventeenth century. All this fits the pattern of contraries and inversions so characteristic of the seventeenth century mind, as Stuart Clark, Michael Flunter and others are making clear to us. 33 As the athiest had warned people, anxious about irreverence, of the moral collapse which the inversion of true religion would bring, so the Ranter inverted sectarian seriousness and stood as a warning of sectarian excess. What is particularly striking, in this context, about the sensational literature is the image of the woman on top, which Natalie Zemon Davis has observed in early modern charivari. 34 Ranter women are sexually aggresive, defiant of their husbands and masters, of appetites unlimited. I suspect that, on this level, the Ranter phenomenon’s legislative connection is, in fact, closer with the Adultery Act of 1650 35 than with the Blasphemy Act of the same year.

If the Ranter myth of 1649-50 was a projection relating to fears of sectarian deviance rather than its actuality in antinomian practice and pantheistic belief, what of the others, apart from Coppe, who have been alleged to be Ranter leaders and spokesmen? My readings again indicate the need for great caution. George Foster was a millennialist who believed that practical Christianity would lead to the sharing of possessions in equality 36 ; closer to Winstanley and Coppe than the stereotype of the Ranter. Joseph Salmon was a Seeker, advocate of the life of spiritual contemplation. 37 Richard Coppin, a perfectionist Arminian who stressed the legitimacy of the indwelling spirit, proved extremely difficult to convict of blasphemy in his own day, despite repeated and malicious attempts to do so. 38 Like Coppin and Foster, Jacob Bauthumley is best seen in the context of Winstanley. All four were concerned with the tensions of an inner dualism to which the imminent rise of the spirit of righteousness within each individual could bring an end. ‘And so I see, that if men were acted and guided by that inward law of righteousness within, there need be no laws of men, to compel to restrain men, and I could wish that such a spirit of righteousness would appear, that men did not act or do things from externall rules, but from an internall law within.’ 39 The words are Bauthumley’s but they might easily be Winstanley’s. As Lionel Lockier observed in 1652, ‘Ranter’ was a label used by formalists to discredit those who sought a true Christian community. 40 It is Laurence Clarkson, who, in A Single Eye All Light (1650), comes closest to the antinomian pantheism required of the Ranter type, but there is no evidence of any sustained connection between him and Coppe or

any of the other alleged leaders of the Ranters. His so-called autobiography, The Lost Sheep Found (1660), has to be treated with extreme caution. It is a work of Muggletonian polemic and, I would argue, its polemical purposes override any intention to provide a record of actual events.

There was no coherent core of Ranter ideologues providing leadership for a mass movement, nor even for a loosely associated conjunction of individuals. There were no Ranters but there was a Ranter phenomenon, dissociated from reality and projecting an image of ultimate sectarian deviance, disintegration and inversion. There was a hegemonic structure in the seventeenth century but it was not challenged by the Ranters who did not exist. Rather Ranterism; an antinomian libertinism, pantheistic immoralism and a spiritual enthusiasm slighting Scripture; was a projection of that hegemonic aspiration. It was a control myth as the myth of atheism or that of the excesses of Munster were before it. The curious irony is that the myth of the right in 1650, the myth of Ranterism became the myth of Marxist historiography in the 1970 s and 1980 s. Coppe did challenge the hegemonic structures of his day but not in the name of Ranterism, of an antinomian libertinism throwing off all moral restraint to be free of the protestant ethic. Rather his protest was in the name of a Scripturally based ethic of Christian charity and antiformalism. It was more dangerous and difficult to deal with precisely because it was rooted in the established order’s own legitimations.

In this instance, it is not simply a question of dotting i’s and crossing t’s, but, to use a pregnant and familiar phrase a matter of turning the world upside down or setting it back on its feet. The Ranters were not, as historians have suggested, a coherent group, or even a movement, who challenged Scripture, rejected sin and hell, declared an antinomian liberty and the pantheistic legitimation of all things equally; in other words, repudiated the protestant ethic and its hegemonic apparatus. These people did not exist. We cannot find them. The more closely we look, the more completely the chimaera of their sect, group, movement disintegrates before our gaze. But the belief in their existence was real enough in the seventeenth century, as it has been latterly in our own time. Who benefitted then from the belief s dissemination? Certainly not those who aspired to free religious speculation, unfettered spiritual illumination: the mission of the things that are not to set at nought those things that are. The belief in Ranterism was a terrible warning against the speculative liberty of the untutored, against spiritual enthusiasm, against plebeian religion, against allowing the slightest authority to the things that are not. Ranterism was a hegemonic myth, a repressive myth —not its counter. It was used by those who

wished to defuse a freely proliferating sectarianism and, either in society at large or as leaders of sects like the Baptists or Quakers, to bring religious speculation to its senses, place it under control, making the sects respectable, orderly, cautious —in other words, repressed. That repression could not have been achieved by a myth of practical Christianity, of levelling charity —Coppe’s myth—but only by a myth of excess, of a collapse of theological and moral bearings, of spiritual disintegration, of, as it were, religious irreligion. Who, one might finally ask, benefits then from the myth’s resurrection and inversion in our own time? Only those whose commitment to the notion of the people’s history as a counter-cultural struggle against oppression outweighs their desire to understand the past in its own terms. In this sense, they may happily prove as mythic as the Ranters.

REFERENCES 1 See the entry under ‘Coppe, Abiezer’ in R. Greaves and R.L. Zaller (eds.), A Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Brighton, 1982-4). For the Ranters generally see: A. L. Morton, The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (London, 1979); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1975); Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London, 1983); J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986). 2 Calendar of State Papers (Domestic) 1649-50, p. 563. 3 Commons Journals, VI, 354. The resolution was printed as a broadside (Thomason Tracts, 669 f. 15 [11]). 4 Commons Journals, VI, 444, 474-5. 5 J. F. McGregor, ‘The Ranters 1649-1660’ (unpublished B. Litt. thesis, Oxford University, 1968), pp.B2-3. 6 B. L. Lutt. 11. 35. 7 See, for example, Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England 1603-1658 (London, 1986) pp. 289-90; Alan G. R. Smith, The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England 1529-1660 (London, 1984) pp. 353-4. 8 For a useful account of the group and its aims see Bill Schwarz, The People in History: the Communist Party Historians’ Group 1946-56’, in Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz and David Sutton (eds.), Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics (London, 1982), pp. 44-95; Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Cambridge 1984). 9 McGregor, ‘The Ranters, 1649-1660’, p. 47. 10 Christopher Hill, ‘God and the English Revolution’, History Workshop, 17 (1984), 19-31. 11 Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, entry under ‘Coppe, Abiezer’. 12 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, p. 210.

13 McGregor, ‘The Ranters, 1649-1660’, pp. 16,32. 14 Coppe, Some Sweet Sips of Some Spirituall Wine (1649). 15 J. C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Christianity’, in B. Manning (ed.) Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973) pp. 223-50; Davis, Utopia and the IdeaPSociety (Cambridge, 1981) Ch. 7. 16 Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (1650); facsimile produced by The Rota, Exeter, 1973; edition in Smith (ed.), Collection of Ranter Writings, pp. 80-116. 17 Coppe, Fiery Flying Roll, Part 11, p. 22. Coppe’s square brackets. 18 William Walwyn, A Still and Soft Voice (1647) pp. B-9. 19 Coppe, Fiery Flying Roll, Part I, Chs. 1-6/ 20 Ibid., Part 11, pp. 9-11 (mispaginated in the original). 21 Ibid., Part 11, Chs. 6-8. 22 Ibid., Part 11, p. 15. 23 Ibid., Part 11, title page, p.ll (mispaginated as 9). 24 Ibid., Part 11, p. 17. 25 Ibid., Part 11, Chapter 3. 26 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 210, 212. 27 Coppe, Fiery Flying Roll, Part 11, p. 21. My italics. 28 Ibid., The Preface, A. 1, p.l. 29 Smith (ed.) Ranter Writings, p. 27; Morton, World of the Ranters, pp. 107-8; Hill, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 212-13. Both A Remonstrance and Copps Return are to be found in Smith (ed.) Ranter Writings, pp. 118-123, 124-156. 30 Smith (ed.), Ranter Writings, p. 27.

31 Thomas Edwards, Gatigraetia (1646) 111, pp. 185-191. 32 See Davis, Fear, Myth and History, pp. 107-110. 33 Stuart Clark, ‘lnversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present, 87 (1980), 98-127; Michael Hunter, ‘The Problem of ‘Atheism’ in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sth series, 35 (1985), 135-57. 34 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1978), pp. 124-51. 35 Keith Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered’, in D. H. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978), pp. 257-82. 36 George Foster, The Sounding ofthe Last Trumpet (1650); The Pouring Forth of the Seventh and Last Viall (1650). 37 Jo Salmon, Heights in Depths and in Heights (1651). 38 Richard Coppin, A Hint of the Glorious Mystery of Divine Teachings (1649); Anti Christ in Man (1649); The Exaltation of All Things in Christ (1649); Saul Smitten for not Smiting Amalek (1653); A Man-Child Born (1654). 39 Jacob Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650) p. 76. 40 Lionel Lockier, The Character of a Time Serving Saint (1652).