Eduard Bernstein’s Cromwell and Communism is a work of history and political argument, first written in German in the 1890s and translated into English by H. J. Stenning. It examines the radical movements that surfaced during the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century — the Levellers, the Diggers, and the religious sectaries around them — and asks what their demands and experiments meant for the socialist tradition that claimed their memory. Bernstein writes as a socialist and a historian at once, reconstructing the economic and social conditions of England from the Tudors through the Commonwealth, and measuring the revolutionaries against the possibilities of their own age.
His central claim is that the English Revolution, though it broke out a century and a half before the French, followed a comparable arc: parties and classes came forward in succession, the movement outran its proclaimed aims, and the outcome was military dictatorship, restoration, and finally a weaker repetition of the upheaval in 1688. The mapping is explicit — Presbyterians against Girondists, Independents against Jacobins, Levellers against the Hébertists, Cromwell as Robespierre and Bonaparte in one. But the analogy has a limit, and the limit is the book’s real subject: the Levellers resembled the extreme French faction only as the element that never itself governed, and at their height they produced a communistic offshoot — the “true Levellers,” or Diggers — whose experiment in communal cultivation and whose sketch of a reconstructed society Bernstein believes historians have neglected.
From the Tudor Enclosures to the Diggers’ Spades
The Editor’s Frame and the Cast of Two Revolutions
The Schocken paperback of 1963 carries Stenning’s translation of Bernstein’s 1895 Sozialismus und Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution, first Englished in 1930. Seventeen chapters run from an introduction through the sects, the Levellers and their Agreement of the People, the “True” Levellers and their practical communism, Winstanley’s utopia, the army revolt, Lilburne’s last years, Hobbes and Harrington, Plockboy, the Quakers and James Naylor, John Bellers, to a conclusion.
Bernstein opens by setting the English Revolution beside the French. England rose against absolute monarchy a century and a half earlier, under coarser conditions: a remnant of feudal nobility, commercially run estates, a numerous free peasantry, a middle class strong but narrow. Both revolutions outran their proclaimed aims, threw up successive parties and classes, and ended in military dictatorship, restoration, and a weak repetition—1688 answering 1830. His mapping is brisk: Presbyterians are Girondists, Independents Jacobins, Levellers Hébertists, Cromwell Robespierre plus Bonaparte, Lilburne Marat and Hébert in one. The Levellers resembled the Hébertists only as the extreme wing that never ruled; at its height the movement threw off a communistic offshoot, the “true Levellers,” whose experiment in self-help and sketch of reconstruction historians have neglected. Most Levellers were Puritan, though a minority of leaders professed deism or atheism. Carlyle dismissed “Freeborn John” as a mischief-maker; even Godwin was often unjust, though his History of the English Commonwealth shows the Levellers’ effect. Bernstein leans on Gardiner, Gooch, and Berens.
The Agricultural Nation and Its Wages
England held some five million people, three-fourths rural; Gregory King counted London at 530,000, Petty nearer 690,000. Bristol and Norwich lived off wool. Industry lagged the Continent until Flemish weavers, driven out by the Netherlands’ religious wars, spurred weaving in Norfolk and the west. King’s 1688 figures put agriculture at 4,265,000 souls against 240,000 in trades and 246,000 in commerce. Rents slid from competition to famine levels, offset in the east and north by by-industries; Marx’s alternation of corn and cattle periods is invoked, with the Dutch wars halting wool sales and spreading weaving. The Elizabethan Statute of Labourers broke up combinations and bound apprentices to freeholders’ sons; justices fixed wages at Easter, which Rogers says were always exceeded, Hewins says were paid, Cunningham says only penalised underpayment. Commonwealth wages stood legally higher than under the monarchy before or after—Rogers would have preferred the Puritan—and Marx noted the people rose during the republic. Antagonism ran between small peasants, farmers and labourers on one side and great landlords on the other; weavers in 1555 complained of rich clothiers, and Mary’s Act limited looms to two in towns, one in the country.
The Pilgrimage of Grace and Ket’s Rebellion
The Pilgrimage of Grace demanded no communism: lower farm rents to Henry VII’s level, an end to dovecotes (“nests of robbers”) and feudal exactions, and a ban on priests buying land—which refutes the charge that priests instigated it. Lingard’s Catholic reading is conceded only so far; Lollard and Anabaptist teaching was more evident than sympathy with Popery. Paget wrote to Somerset that old religion was forbidden and the new not yet printed in eleven of twelve parts of the realm, and urged a swift march citing the German Peasant War. Ket let religion stay private, letting Parker and others preach from the Reform Oak. Norwich’s small craftsmen backed him wholly; its respectable citizens proved doubtful friends and later pleaded compulsion by the poor. Northampton’s army was beaten; Ket told the herald the King pardons evil-doers, not the innocent, and would not disarm on general promises. Warwick crushed the rising on August 28 with German mercenaries. Ket, “the people’s judge,” returned prisoners unharmed, yet was hanged for treason—from Norwich’s church tower on December 7, after Somerset’s fall. Warwick held a court on captive peasants; landlords bayed for entrails burnt before dying eyes until he answered that none would be left to plough. Somerset was beheaded in 1552; Warwick, now Northumberland, followed him to the scaffold under Mary, whose persecutions drove the sects together.
Puritanism as a Social Creed
Elizabeth finished the Reformation and broke Catholic resistance, while Puritan opposition grew—a name for all who wanted the Church purified and morals with it, and eventually for resistance to absolutism in Church and State. Its adherents spanned nobility, clergy, citizens, craftsmen, peasants.
The Ware Muster and the Tearing of the Emblems
At Ware the army’s radical wing came into the open. A majority of the soldiers and many officers wore copies of the Agreement in their hats, inscribed with the motto “England’s Freedom—Soldiers’ Right.” Robert Lilburne’s cavalry and Thomas Harrison’s infantry carried a rebellious spirit, and prominent Levellers from other regiments joined them. John Lilburne, Colonel Rainsborough—the hero of the storming of Bristol—and Major Scott rode from division to division, urging the men to stand firm for freedom. Cromwell, with Fairfax and the general staff, rode along the front of the more moderate regiments, where a remonstrance refuting the agitators’ complaints was read and applauded. Harrison’s men listened quietly and pulled the emblems from their hats as seditious. Lilburne’s cavalry met Cromwell and Fairfax with defiant shouts and drowned Fairfax’s reading in taunts. Cromwell rode forward and demanded the papers be taken from their hats; the answer was a shout of “No, no!” He rode into the rioters, tore out the emblems with his own hands, and arrested fourteen of the most refractory as mutineers. A court martial condemned three to death; the drawing of lots freed two, and Richard Arnold was shot. Parliament issued warrants against Major Scott and Captain Bray for defending the mutineers and calling Arnold’s execution a breach of the Petition of Right. The remaining meetings passed off quietly. Discontent had been suppressed, not removed: Arnold was cherished as a martyr, and demands later arose for expiation of his “innocently shed blood.”
Carlyle’s Picture and the Second Civil War
Cromwell acted under dire necessity, needing a united front against Presbyterians and Royalists. He reshaped the army to weed out unreliable elements and carried a resolution that no more addresses be sent to the King and that no member hold commerce with him without Parliament’s permission. Carlyle’s picture of the crisis—a King not to be bargained with at Carisbrooke, a great Royalist party, a great Presbyterian party headed by London City, “the Purse-bearer of the Cause,” a headlong Levelling party, and a Commons of some seventy members split in halves—is judged mainly accurate, though Cromwell was pushed toward the policy the Levellers wanted. No union of the anti-Royalist forces was reached. The right-wing Presbyterians leaned on Scotland, where a Presbyterian-Royalist army of forty thousand gathered to invade England. In April 1648 a rising of apprentices crying “God and King Charles” was crushed within three days; the years 1646 to 1651 were dear ones, 1648 the worst. In May rebellion spread through Kent, Essex and Wales, and the Marquis of Hamilton marched forty thousand men into England. The Independent generals met at Windsor, prayed a whole day, and resolved to bring Charles Stuart, “that man of blood,” to account—a decision that restored harmony with the troops. Fairfax reduced Essex and Kent; Cromwell turned first on Wales, then on the Scots. While he was in the North, the London Presbyterians raised their heads, and about the time of Lilburne’s release Parliament voted him compensation in confiscated lands of greater value than the cash first proposed.
Lilburne’s Letter to Cromwell
“Honest John,” as the hostile Mercurius Pragmaticus called him, was loath to earn Presbyterian favour by intensifying his attacks on Cromwell; revenge was not in him. Soon after leaving prison he wrote to Cromwell through Captain Edward Sexby, formerly an agitator, holding out the hand of reconciliation, and later sought him in his camp. The letter, dated “Westminster, August 3, 1648, the second day after my liberation,” declares that he scorned revenge though he had twenty opportunities for it, and that if ever his hand were upon Cromwell it would be when Cromwell stood in full glory, should he decline from Truth and Justice. The author rejects Gardiner’s dismissal of the letter as “amusing self-sufficiency,” finding in it proof that Lilburne was closely in touch with the situation. Cromwell’s victories in late August 1648 restored his ascendancy; had he been defeated, he and the advanced democrats would have stood in a critical position. Lilburne could not be persuaded back into the army, but he sent word that Cromwell was expected to help the good cause and to understand “the principles of a just government”—a message that prompted Cromwell to instruct his friends in London to negotiate with the Levellers.
Mutual Need and Rainsborough’s Murder
Cromwell and the Levellers needed each other equally. Parliament was bargaining with the King: control of the army and the officers for twenty years, the Presbyterian Church as State Church after three years’ probation. Parliamentary dictatorship was obnoxious to Cromwell, largely from personal interest and enmity, and to the Levellers from doctrinal antipathy.
The Purged Parliament Strikes at the King
The Rump moved quickly once the Army had cleared its enemies from the House. On 23 December 1648 it set up a commission to consider proceedings against Charles; by New Year’s Day the commission recommended impeachment for high treason against the nation, and Parliament resolved to create a special tribunal to try him. When the handful of Lords still sitting refused to sanction the court, the Commons answered on 4 January with a declaration that the people are, under God, the original of all just power—so that the Commons, as their elected representatives, held supreme authority and could legislate without King or Lords. Two days later Parliament named 135 men to a High Court of Justice. Cromwell and the Army grandees sat on it; Robert Lilburne was a member, and John Lilburne was offered a seat, as he later claimed without contradiction. He refused. His scruple was legality: the tribunal was “an act of the sword clothed in a legal form,” and he denied that this purged remnant could pose as the people’s representatives. He wanted the King tried by an ordinary court, not a special commission. His objection went nowhere. Charles was condemned on 27 January 1649 and beheaded on the 30th. Parliament then ratified Pride’s purge, abolished the Lords as “useless and dangerous” (Henry Marten wittily moved to strike the word or insert “not”), and abolished kingship itself as “unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous.” A Council of State of forty-one members followed, Cromwell and Fairfax among them, and in May England was proclaimed a Free Commonwealth.
Lilburne’s New Chains
Lilburne had been in the North on private business, disillusioned and ready to quit public life. Too proud to take a well-paid government post, he set up as a soap-maker in Southwark and swore he would not fatten on the want of working people. He held out only weeks. By 26 February he was back at the Bar of the Commons, heading a deputation of London citizens against the Council of State’s plans to silence “disturbers of the peace” in the Army. Discontent was real: regiments near London wore sea-green ribbons, the Levellers’ badge, because much had been done for Parliament’s rights and nothing for the people’s. The Council of War responded by forbidding soldiers to petition anyone but their officers or to correspond with civilians on politics, and asked power to hang inciters by court martial. Lilburne’s petition attacked these measures, and he published the accompanying memorial as England’s New Chains Discovered. It exposed the changes the grandees had slipped into the Agreement of the People and denounced the new Council of State as a mere creature of the Army’s Council of War. He wanted accountable commissions, frequently rotated, under a Parliament sitting permanently until a fresh Commons relieved it—and complete freedom of the press as the people’s unconditional right.
Mutiny, Court Martial, and the Levellers’ Decline
The protest reached into the ranks. On 1 March a letter to Fairfax signed by eight soldiers catalogued the Army’s grievances against its own leaders, accused Cromwell of aiming at royal dignity, called Parliament a reflector of the Council of War and that council a tool of Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison, and denounced rule by the sword: “We are English soldiers engaged for the freedom of England and not outlandish mercenaries to butcher the people for pay.” They endorsed Lilburne’s petition and pledged to stand or fall by it. Brought before a court martial on 3 March, three of them broke and submitted. Opponents meanwhile painted the Levellers as men sending servants against masters and beggars on horseback, and even sympathetic mediators like “Philolaus” warned that Utopian schemes would prove worse than any known alloy. The prisoners in the Tower—Lilburne, Walwyn, Prince, Overton—answered with a Manifestation denying any design to equalize estates, since that would be unjust without universal consent and early Christian communism had been voluntary. It did not restore their position. Cromwell’s influence over the Army decided matters, and his vigorous foreign policy won him support. Lilburne’s son died while he was in the Tower and Parliament had ignored his pleas to see the sick child; released on bail, he was rearrested in September over An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell, ruined in purse and convinced he could make no headway. His offer to go to the West Indies went unanswered, and he was tried at the Guildhall in October. He argued that the court’s constitution violated fundamental law and that the jury were judges of law as well as fact; the bench called this damnable heresy. After three days the jury acquitted him. The Guildhall erupted, caps waved for half an hour, the cheering spread through London and the suburbs, bonfires burned at night, and a medal was struck: “
Hobbes Among the Utopists
The text turns first to the fate of Hobbes, whose name it Latinises as “Master Hobbs.” Questions of pure expediency, it argues, cannot be raised into theoretical axioms with impunity, and Hobbes did not escape being described after his death as a socialist and Utopist. Swap “absolute sovereignty of the people” for the absolute sovereign or assembly, and his quoted passages become a revolutionist’s handbook. Despite his materialism, Hobbes is a Utopist even as philosopher of monarchical absolutism, since he derives that absolutism from problematical “rights.” He suggests the Sovereign might delegate many rights and yet remain suzerain, provided he keeps control of armed power, taxation, and the right to decide which doctrines may be propagated—yet never says how this could happen. Instead he blames the civil war on the spread of the “opinion” that these powers were divided between King, Lords, and Commons; without that opinion, “the people had never been divided.”
Harrington’s Life and Oceana
Among the replies Leviathan drew, the one that matters here is James Harrington’s Oceana. Harrington was no more a socialist than Hobbes, but his literary activity exercised a great and legitimate influence on socialist ideas; with his good bourgeois sentiments, he has more claim to a place in socialism’s history than many builders of “States of the future.” Born in 1611 into a well-to-do Rutlandshire family, he was studious in youth, cheerful and witty in manhood. After Oxford he travelled through Holland, Denmark, Germany, France, and Italy, especially impressed by Venice. Returning home after his father’s death, he educated his siblings and managed his estates. He attended Court without seeking office, and though he sided with Parliament, he kept Charles I company at Holdenby, the Isle of Wight, and St. James’, and finally accompanied him to the scaffold. The King’s violent death touched him, but could not turn him against the Commonwealth. In seclusion he wrote Oceana to point a way out of the social confusion. Informants had warned the Government about it, and the printing was confiscated at Whitehall; only through Cromwell’s favourite daughter, Lady Bridget Claypole, did he recover it. Dedicated to Cromwell, it drew the remark that the author would like to lure him from power, but he would not abandon for a few sheets of paper what he had won by the sword.
Controversy and the Balance of Property
Oceana appeared in 1656 and provoked replies, nearly all from theologians. Harrington answered them in diffuse but erudite and witty polemics: The Prerogative of Popular Government against Matthew Wren’s For Monarchy, the satirical The Politicaster, a brief ironic reply to Richard Baxter’s The Holy Commonwealth, and, at friends’ request, The Art of Law-giving, Systems of Politics, aphorisms, a dialogue, and Seven Examples of Political Constitutions. His theory makes constitution depend on the balance of property, though geography may distort it; England’s insular position permits undistorted development. His “people” are the middle classes—paupers existed, but not yet a permanent proletariat. Freemen and servants divide by whether they “live of themselves”; income above £100 serves in the cavalry, below in the infantry; all under thirty join the field army. Conscription is universal, with no Leveller exemptions. The wealthy elect a Senate of three hundred; the popular assembly of six hundred is elected mostly by those under £100, giving them the majority and the final voice—Bills are printed six weeks ahead and voted, not debated. Class election aims to guarantee the less prosperous a majority, since the well-to-do would otherwise generally be elected. Schools, sciences, and industry are amply provided for, with care for the aged and infirm, and religious liberty reigns alongside political liberty—which is why Churchmen and Presbyterians assailed him while he made theologians, Oxford’s especially, targets of his wit. He predicts England’s industrial supremacy over Holland: the Hollander farms a foreign manufacture, while England’s growth is native. Marx, a footnote notes, quotes a similar dictum by Petty, who borrowed much from Harrington. French absolutism he explains by the nobility’s landlordism propped by a strong hierarchy; when the middle classes grew stronger, hierarchy and absolutism both fell. Hume admired Oceana as “a work of genius and invention”; Sieyés and Saint-Simon show its influence unmistakably. Harrington is a precursor—not in his postulates but in his theoretical expositions—of modern scientific socialism. A footnote compares Napoleon’s Consular Constitution to Oceana‘s division of a deliberative and a voting body, likely borrowed by Sieyés, with the safeguards struck out and the garbled draft sanctioned by plebiscite, 3,011,700 against 1,562.
Quakers and the Reform Tradition
The book turns to the Quakers as a movement, noting their prominence in every great reform cause of the eighteenth century. In England and America they were pioneers of the anti-slavery struggle and stood in the front rank of penal and prison reform; scientists, educators, and later political reformers came out of their ranks, and Friends appear among the Chartists of the “moral force” wing and among the Owenites. Owen himself owed them a practical debt: in 1809, when his partners demanded he abandon his schemes for the workers of New Lanark for the sake of profit, only Bentham and Quakers—or sons of Quakers—put up capital to keep the reforms alive. William Allen gave him trouble over religion, but Owen’s autobiography records deep gratitude to others, above all John Walker, who invested £30,000. Two young Manchester Quakers had shaped his mind before New Lanark: the chemist John Dalton, and a fellow student of twenty-one named Winstanley—possibly a descendant of the True Leveller of Cromwell’s day. Between Gerrard Winstanley and Owen stands another Friend: John Bellers.
The Condition of the Poor after the Restoration
Historians agree that the poorer classes, agricultural labourers especially, fared badly from 1660 to the century’s close. The restored monarchy legislated for the great landlords, and the revolution of 1688 merely admitted the commercial classes to a larger share of power. A 1677 Act treated all tenancies as short leases absent contrary agreements, which small holders could rarely produce, so they could not defend their rights at law. Export bounties were fixed lest better cultivation lower corn prices; enclosure of forests, marshes, and heaths squeezed smallholders; poaching was forbidden from James I’s time. Prices and profits rose while wages were held down by judicial assessment—the private soldier’s weekly pay fell from 7s. 6d. under the Commonwealth to 4s. 8d. in 1685. Poor rates consumed over a third of the government budget, and Davenant reckoned the poor and beggars at nearly a quarter of the population in 1696. Two responses emerged: one sought to rid the comfortable classes of the “pauper plague,” the other to raise the poor for their own sake. John Bellers represents the second.
Bellers and the College of Industry
Born in 1654 to well-to-do parents, Bellers married a Quakeress and through her became Lord of the Manor of Coln Aldwyns in Gloucestershire. His sect barred him from politics, so he gave himself to study and philanthropy; his friends included William Penn and the physician Sloane, founder of the British Museum. He died in 1725, and Marx called him “a veritable phenomenon in the history of political economy.” His first publication, from 1695—one of the seven lean years—proposed a College of Industry of All Useful Trades and Husbandry, in effect a labour colony. He chose “College” over “Workhouse” because it pleased the ear, allowed instruction, and avoided the taint of Bridewell; “community” was wrong because not everything would be held in common. He conceded the rich must profit, “because the Rich have no other way of living but by the Labour of others,” and argued a comfortable life was the rich man’s debt to the industrious labourer, not his charity. Capital for three hundred able-bodied persons he estimated at £15,000, with shares from £25 and votes scaled to contribution, no one holding more than five.
The Scheme’s Budget and Its Second Edition
The college’s composition—forty-four industrial workmen, eighty-two women and girls, twenty-four field labourers—would supply all its needs, with further hands covering fuel, iron, rent of buildings, and ground. Assuming £15 of yearly produce per worker, Bellers calculated a rate of surplus value of 45 per cent, drawn from his observation that barely half the nation were useful workers. Savings would come from cutting out shops, middlemen, lawyers’ fees, and bad debts, from cheaper housing and food, more productive women and children, and the marriage of industry with agriculture. The expected support from the Children of Light did not materialise, so a second edition appeared the next year, dedicated to Lords and Commons rather than the Friends. Parliament was asked to examine the plan and grant concessions, though Bellers claimed no monopoly; subscriptions were to be lodged with a merchant and a lawyer, and working capital rose to £18,000. A 1697 pamphlet to the Friends carried an appeal signed by some forty-five Quakers, Penn and Barclay among them, urging a trial. The added sentences pressed the treasure idle hands could bring England, and called the college “a Civil Fellowship rather than a religious one.”
The Levellers’ Programme and the Limits of Its Hour
The Levellers’ written programme, above all the successive versions of the Agreement of the People, is where Bernstein locates the movement’s originality. Supreme authority was to rest in a representative body of four hundred; all men of age who received neither wages nor alms were to be eligible to vote or sit; Parliaments were to be annual, members ineligible for the two following; lawyers in the House were barred from practice; religious coercion and tests were to go; tithes, tolls, and excise abolished and replaced by a direct tax on real and personal estate; laws printed in English and prosecutions tried before a sworn jury of the district. Bernstein notes how much of this anticipates the Contrat Social, and how deliberately it avoided the communist-Utopian speculation that also found champions in the Leveller camp. The exclusion of wage-earners from the franchise was not, in his reading, mere timidity: there was no industrial proletariat to speak of, journeymen stood between apprentice and master, and extending the vote to agricultural labourers would have strengthened the reactionary party. The Levellers were ideologues who saw facts through abstract theories; Cromwell was the practical politician who saw things as they were. Bernstein grants Cromwell’s superiority in the politics of the moment and still credits the Levellers with championing the political interests of the working class before that class had a historical hour of its own.
Winstanley’s Commonwealth Without Buying and Selling
Gerrard Winstanley’s utopia is the book’s most sustained piece of reconstruction, and Bernstein treats it as a serious work of social thought rather than a curiosity. Its premises are theological and legal at once. Land is held either by creation right, in which case the earth is his and mine alike, or by conquest — and if by the King’s conquest, that title fell with the King; if by the Commoners’ conquest over the King, then the title belongs to every brother who helped carry on the war. From this Winstanley derives the abolition of buying and selling, which he calls the “fall” of the human race: the cheat of the market, the man who sends a bad horse to deceive a plain-hearted neighbour, the wars that follow from it. His answer to the objection that some must be richer than others anticipates the nineteenth-century socialists Bernstein knows well: no man gathers an estate of hundreds and thousands a year without the labour of other men, so that great riches are the fruit of others’ toil and the rich live at ease on other men’s labours. Yet the communism is carefully bounded — each family keeps its house, its furniture, its wife and children as property for its peace; honours are earned by office, age, or discovery in nature; lawyers vanish because there is no buying and selling, and the law is to be written so plainly it needs no interpretation.
Sectaries, Projectors, and the Quakers
Around the Levellers and Diggers Bernstein assembles a wider cast of religious and economic radicals. Richard Overton and the deistic or rationalist strain among the Leveller leaders complicate any picture of the movement as uniformly Puritan; Henry Marten, friendly but never one of them, belongs to the same freethinking current. P. Chamberlen’s The Poor Man’s Advocate proposes nationalizing Crown, Church, and forfeited land as the patrimony of the poor, pooled into a national stock for roads, canals, manufactures, schools, and machinery — a programme Bernstein reads as radical mercantilism with a semi-communist lever inside it, published by the same Giles Calvert who printed the Levellers’ Agreement. Samuel Hartlib’s Macaria imagines a state organized as an economic institution through five councils of agriculture, fishery, land commerce, maritime commerce, and colonies, and his later schemes for a registry of employment and free exchange of inventions harmonize, in Bernstein’s account, with nascent capitalism. The Quakers enter the story through James Naylor, the “King of Israel,” and the sectarian ferment of the 1650s; Peter Cornelius Plockboy and John Bellers carry the thread of communistic and philanthropic projection beyond the Restoration.
What the Defeat Meant
The book closes on the suppression of the Levellers and on Cromwell’s own words about them. His speech opening the Protectorate Parliament in September 1654 defends the distinction of nobleman, gentleman, and yeoman as “a good interest of the Nation,” and denounces Levelling principles for tending to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. Bernstein sets against this Lilburne’s career — the whippings and pillory, the repeated imprisonments, the acquittal at the Guildhall in October 1649 that set London cheering and bonfires burning — and Hume’s description of him as the most turbulent but the most upright and courageous of humankind. The judgement Bernstein finally passes is double-edged. Cromwell was right that the time for dissolution had not come, that hostile elements were too numerous to risk a new election; the Levellers’ hour had not struck, and their suppression became a political necessity once the old regime was beaten. But the demands they raised, and the communist experiment at St. George’s Hill, belong to the prehistory of the labour movement, and Bernstein’s book exists to keep that prehistory from being written off as mere fanaticism.
