Honorary Proletarian

Exactly 360 years ago today, on 30th January 1649(*), Charles Stuart, Kind of England, was publicly beheaded in Whitehall for high treason to his country.  This marked an epoch in the history of Britain, and for that matter of Europe – although kings had of course been murdered, imprisoned and deposed before, never had a sovereign been openly tried by a court appointed by representatives of (some of) his subjects, and sentenced to death according to the law of the land.

Charles and his supporters were utterly bewildered.  At the beginning of the trial and even on the scaffold the King denied that the court had any authority to try him – he simply did not understand where such authority could come from.  “A sovereign and a subject”, he said, ” are plain different things”.  His insistence on hisfeudal world-view is almost tragic, for a new world had dawned.  The full significance of the event lies in the fact that unlike the French National Assembly a century and a half later, Parliament did not abolish the monarchy and then commit the former King to trial as a common citizen – they acknowledged Charles’ title and indicted him as King, in order to emphasise that in future no-one, whatever his or her position, could be above the law.  Feudalism and feudal privilege were thus dealt their quietus in the person of their representative, and the subsequent abolition of the monarchy, on 17th March, was merely a formality.

 It is right, therefore, to call the execution of Charles Stuart a revolutionary act, and a foundation stone of our democratic rights.  However, we republicans are prone to exaggerate the modernity of the Parliament of the 1640s and the Commonwealth.  It was the 17th Century, after all – there was no example of any bourgeois democracy in the world, no example of a democratic movement apart from elements within the German and Dutch uprisings of the previous century, and no example of sovereign elected institutions unless you could read Livy (for the Roman oligarchic version) or Aristotle (for the Greek version that depended on slavery).  The Parliament that put Charles on trial wasn’t elected on anything like a democratic franchise, and some of its members had been arbitrarily excluded by the army.  It had far more legitimacy than the King, but by no means did it represent the people!

The fact that there was no popular democratic theory makes the emergence of democratic currents within the English Revolution all the more remarkable.  The best-known such current is the Levellers, an organised party that demanded a parliamentary republic with much wider suffrage (not though, in the case of their “mainstream”, for women, servants, apprentices or people dependent on poor relief) regular parliaments, absolute rule of the elected Parliament subject to the rule of law and certain absolute rights (freedom of religion and freedom from conscription).  To their left were groups like the Diggers (or “True Levellers” as they called themselves), who fought for a truly egalitarian society and agrarian communism in the countryside.  The Levellers organised soldiers’ committees in the army and drew up a proposed constitution for an English Commonwealth, which was debated in the democratically elected Army Council at Putney, against the elitist constitution proposed by the Generals and their supporters in Parliament.

The Diggers were before their time in social philosophy and unable to formulate a programme for the whole of society because the material basis for a socialist society did not yet exist.  The Levellers were defeated because they could not keep their radical coalition of urban artisans and traders, yeoman farmers and soldiers from a similar class background together, while the wealthy, who had been split between Parliament and King, reunited in defence of their property.  Two Levellers were shot by Cromwell in Oxford and three in nearby Burford (hence Levellers’ Day in that picturesque Tory village).  Most of the Levellers’ basic programme was actually achieved in the course of the nineteenth century, by people a lot less “radical” in their methods and rhetoric than the Levellers were (though, of course, under pressure from the growing trade union movement and at times in fear of revolutionary action from mass movements like the Chartists).

This doesn’t mean, however, that the Levellers and their demands were not revolutionary in their time.  Theirs was a world dominated by the remnants of feudalism and emerging mercantile capital, in which the “middling sort” – artisans, traders, yeoman farmers – constituted a revolutionary class against the big landowners and established merchants whose power and wealth depended at least partly on privilege as well as mere possession of capital.  Even when making limited demands, the Levellers based their philosophy on universal equality (“The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”, sald Rainborough at the Putney Debates – and Cromwell’s son-in-law Ireton taxed him with wanting to share out property equally).  In the nineteenth century, by contrast, Britain became a capitalist society in which the main cleavage was between the owners of capital and the providers of labour.  In the Levellers’ time, the wealthy were sure that the implementation of the Leveller programme would fatally undermine their position.  Two centuries later that was no longer the case.  Universal suffrage no longer automaticall had socialistic implications, although it still represented huge progress and, of course, a sine qua non of labour and socialist political representation.

The pioneer socialist William Morris noted “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes about it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name”.  Even within fundamentally similar societies the content of a political programme can change while its form remains the same – in the 1840s, when both state bureaucracy and civil society were much less developed than they are now, the Chartists’ demands were revolutionary and it would have taken a revolution to achieve them, but most of them have long since been incorporated into our political constitution without any fundamental disturbance, though again it required the existence of a militant labour movement to bring this about.

Today socialists and trade unionists can follow in the footsteps of the Levellers – and the Parlaimentarians who called Charles Stuart to account – not by congratulating ourselves that we live in a society where their demands have been made reality, but by formulating a programme that will provide a rough equivalent in our own society of the revolutionary mobilising impact the Agreement of the People had in theirs.  We may not achieve it, but we will not have to wait another 360 years.  Human beings now have exponentially more knowledge and mastery of nature than our ancestors did in 1649.  With its unprecedented power to destroy both human beings and the environment in which we live, and its unprecedented capacity for mass communication of ideas – good, bad indifferent and some purely evil – modern industrial capitalist society has to choose between the two options Rosa Luxemburg identified nearly a century ago – socialism or barbarism.  The human race has the ability to shape its own destiny in this world.  Our activity, our articulations of hope and determination to build a better world for our descendants to live in, can move society in the right direction.

(*)  In the 17th Century Britain used a different calendar from the Gregorian calendar of Catholic Europe, and celebrated the New Year in March: so to most of the rest of Europe the execution took place on 9th February 1649, while in Britain it was 30th January 1648.  Subsequent calendar reform kept the original dating but changed the date of the New Year, so in modern parlance the date is 30th January 1649.  In any case, Janus, Roman god of doorways and changes, seems a more suitable patron for a revolutionary event than the month of fevers.