Old Normal: New Normal
It is forty-one years since I first read The World Turned Upside Down. I was in the Upper Sixth, studying ‘Stuart England’ over the first winter of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, the last winter of the seventies. Looking back, it seems to me there was already a growing sense that the world – our British corner of it – was starting to turn; the agenda was shifting, a ‘new normal’ was elbowing accepted ideals and principles out of the way. The direction of travel had changed, but only time would show in whose interest.
Brought up in the north of ‘that most disloyal county of Buckinghamshire’, the English Civil War (strictly ‘wars’ of course, involving not just the English, but the Scots, Irish and Welsh) haunted my childhood. Every school-day morning the bus obeyed the finger-pointing statue of Colonel John Hampden, as ‘The Patriot’ ushered us across Aylesbury’s market square towards the stygian fumes of the town’s subterranean bus station.
To wade into Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down – not an easy read for a seventeen year old – was to discover a whole other story of those troubled times, a story with some of the same concerns but with a completely different cast of characters. Hill’s story was about a different class of men (and women): disaffected soldiers, disobedient clergy, libertine visionaries, bankrupted tailors, depressed shoemakers, shepherds, day labourers and masterless wanderers. But, like their better-off contemporaries, they drew no distinctions between spiritual and political aspirations; for them too, it was all of a piece.
In my A Level studies I had already encountered the Independents and Presbyterians in parliament. I had met ‘freeborn’ John Lilburne and the Leveller faction of the New Model Army, and read about their part in the Putney Debates. The World Turned Upside Down set itself to explore a much more diverse landscape of political, social and religious eccentricity. Not just Levellers but embryonic Baptists, Familists, Grindletonians, Diggers (or True Levellers), Ranters, Seekers, early Quakers, Fifth Monarchists and Muggletonians. Hill showed how two decades without official censorship, nearly a century of exposure to scripture in the vernacular, the expansion of print and increased literacy, all contributed to the proliferation of radical ideas. This, coupled with the breakdown of traditional authority – the ‘Church of England’, bishops and the House of Lords were all abolished and the king executed –, freed the imagination of many, permitting the thinking of the unthinkable. The wars killed more than 200,000 people, crippled and ruined others, and devastated communities especially in Ireland. People looked to a better future – even heaven on earth – but whose vision, whose agenda would triumph? Where was God, or was there a God, in all this mayhem?
There were two reasons why I decided to revisit The World Turned Upside Down in September 2020. Last summer I was given and read Andrew Bradstock’s Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England (I. B. Tauris, 2011), a fascinating and concise account, exploring the religious thinking of seven radical groups of the period. Despite forty years of fluctuating fashions in history writing, Hill’s oeuvre (he wrote more than twenty books on related subject matter) is still influential.
Re-reading it, I experienced a great thrill of rediscovery as I delved into each chapter, reminded again and again that this was where I had first encountered the often unacknowledged progenitors of many later and better-known thinkers, poets and polemicists. The Leveller thinkers – Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton – prefigured the secular, democratic ideas of Swift, Voltaire and Paine. The extraordinarily prolific inspirer of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, a great writer, for whom God was ‘Reason’ and whose nuanced views on property, production and the commonwealth, would find later expression in Marx and Morris. The biblical criticism developed by Strauss, Feuerbach and others, finds precursors in Milton, Henry Parker and especially Samuel Fisher.
I felt the second ‘revisiting prompt’ while mulling over another book, read just after the December 2019 election. Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (Apollo, 2018) is an exploration of the essential Englishness of Brexit, of how a country that once had vast colonies (of which 17th century Ireland was the first) is being recast as an ‘oppressed nation’, requiring ‘liberation from the imperialist European project’. Our British corner of the world seemed to be turning in on itself, when – while our attention was elsewhere – the whole world turned upside down as the Coronavirus pandemic hit. People got sick and some died; but the roads emptied and the skies fell silent, greenhouse gases diminished, carbon in the atmosphere went into reverse; many people were cared for and provided for, and community ties were strengthened. Suddenly a different answer to the most serious questions of our time seemed plausible. When this is all over, could there be a genuinely ‘new normal’?
After the immense upheaval of civil war – and the death and destruction – despite the wild experimentation and the great ferment of ideas, the ‘Republic of Heaven’ did not arrive. For the vast majority of people, and for the land, very little changed. A different ‘elite’ – the new moneyed – had hijacked the agenda; and for those with few resources – the lower-middling and the poor – the ‘new normal’ looked remarkably similar to the ‘old normal’. For many who had backed or fought for Parliament’s cause, it must have felt like a far-from-heroic failure, as if defeat had been snatched from the jaws of victory. Christopher Hill explores this phenomenon in his later book The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (Faber & Faber, 1984).
When this pandemic recedes, will there be ‘More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire’ and everywhere else, or will the opportunity to create a genuinely ‘new normal’ be missed?
‘O power where art thou,
Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom as a Platform, 1652.
that must mend things amiss?
Come change the heart of man,
and make him truth to kiss.’
Andy Kemp has been a member of SOF since 1993. He lives on the Wirral and works for two Methodist charities.