Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism

I

For all the ink spilled over the many varieties of radicalism that emerged during the 1640s, we remain surprisingly ignorant as to the question of how and under what circumstances these striking and novel forms of radicalism came into being. Partly this is a consequence of the waves of revisionism that swept the field of early modern British history beginning in the late 1960s. By stressing the consensual and conservative nature of early Stuart political culture, and by de-emphasizing the dramatic constitutional and religious conflicts that had exercised earlier historians, revisionist scholars tended on the whole to downplay the significance of Civil War radicalism.¹ Yet even those Whig and Marxist scholars who preceded the revisionists never managed to offer a satisfactory account of how these innovative forms of religious and political ideology and practice emerged. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the Levellers. Despite the immense amounts of scholarly attention lavished on the Levellers in the last century, the whole issue of the origins of the movement, in terms of both ideology and personal history, remains intractably mysterious.²

It is perhaps a sign of the state of the historiography that one of the most critical studies of the first stages of the Leveller movement was written in 1904. In that year, the pioneering bibliographer H. R. Plomer published his seminal article 'Secret Printing during the Civil War'. Through careful typographical analysis, combined with information harvested from printed sources, Plomer uncovered the existence of a series of clandestine presses that operated between 1644 and 1646. Using these concealed presses, London radicals had issued a succession of tracts — including The Araignement of Mr. Persecution, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, An Alarum to the House of Lords and Divine Light — which argued against monarchy and the power of the House of Lords, against the creation of a uniform established Church, and in favour of what might be termed 'natural rights'. Many of these ideas were, of course, startlingly new and radical, representing a watershed in the history of English political thought, and marking the first drum roll on the march towards Putney. Not surprisingly, this initial flurry of 'proto-Leveller' pamphlets provoked a chorus of indignation and alarm. In March 1646, an intensive investigation, managed by the House of Lords, and co-ordinated with the urban authorities and the Stationers' Company, swung into motion. First to be swept up in the dragnet was the radical bookseller William Larner,who was arrested and imprisoned for distributing the books. Larner refused to name his co-conspirators, however, and in the months that followed, the secret press continued to do its work. Behind the scenes of this operation stood the incorrigible propagandist Richard Overton, who not only wrote or edited many of these tracts, but also was intimately involved in their production and distribution. In August 1646, after a protracted manhunt, Parliament finally caught up with the renegade Overton. In a dramatic dawn raid, a detachment of musketeers stormed his Southwark house, surprising him and his wife in bed, and seizing his press, his papers and his person.³

Although Plomer himself did not use the word 'Leveller' at all, his research into secret printing provided a foundation stone for the scholars who followed him, and his study remains a central source for understanding the shadowy origins of the movement. Yet Plomer's underground presses were not without antecedent. Subsequent scholarship revealed that, long before 1640, dissident puritans had established secretive and elaborate networks for printing and smuggling books into England from the Netherlands.⁴ The present article deals with one such clandestine operation, a secret press which in many ways set the stage for the activities of Overton and the Levellers. Again, the press under consideration here was first identified through the painstaking researches of twentieth-century bibliographers, most notably A. F. Johnson. Johnson uncovered a run of English puritan pamphlets, published in 1640 and 1641, which used an identical typeface and a distinctive set of printers' ornaments. Particularly unusual was an oblong Dutch device...