Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (22 page)

Like the adepts of the Free Spirit, the Ranters adopted a kind of materialistic pantheism: God is essentially in every creature; all created things are united; there is neither heaven nor hell except in the human breast. A person with God could therefore commit no evil. Joseph Salmon, a former army officer, records how in a brief period of exaltation:

Most Quakers and Diggers, however, thought they were far too extreme and turbulent. It was probably his experience of Ranters in the George’s Hill colony that led Winstanley to believe that some laws and rules were necessary in his ideal commonwealth to deal with the idle and the ‘self-ended spirits’.
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After meeting some of them in prison, the Quaker leader George Fox complained that they claimed they were God and would ‘rant, and vapour, and blaspheme’. At one of his meetings, he found that they were ‘very rude, and sung, and whistled, and danced’.
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William Penn further asserted that the Ranter wing among the Quakers ‘would have had every man independent, that as he had the principle in himself, he should only stand and fall to that, and nobody else’.
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If the mainstream Quakers were shocked then it is no wonder that the upright Dissenting divine Richard Baxter should condemn their ‘Cursed Doctrine of
Libertinism’
which led them to assert that ‘to the Pure all things are Pure, (even things forbidden)’.
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It was their total amoralism which most shocked their contemporaries. Lawrence Clarkson in his Ranter period believed that since all acts are from God, there can be no sinful act before God. He affirmed ‘there was no sin, but as man esteemed it sin, and therefore none can be free from sin till in purity it be acted as no sin, for I judged that pure to me, which to a dark understanding was impure, for to the pure all things, yea all acts, are pure.’
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He recalled how he believed that ‘God had made all things good, so nothing evil but as man judged it; for I apprehended there was no such thing as theft, cheat, or a lie, but as made it so: for if the creature had brought this world into no propriety, as
Mine
and
Thine
, there had been no such tide as theft, cheat or a lie, for the prevention thereof
Everard
and
Gerrard Winstanley
did dig up the Common.’
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He argued moreover that there was no evil in swearing, drunkenness, adultery and theft: ‘sin hath its conception only in the imagination’.
⁴⁰
He advocated absolute self-exaltation:

Clarkson joined a Ranter group called
‘My one flesh’
who were the most uncompromisingly antinomian sect, practising free love and revelling in bouts of drinking and feasting.

The same anarcho-communistic attitudes found in the Free Spirit continue amongst the Ranters. They felt the earth was a treasury for all to enjoy and that they should have one purse. Abiezer Coppe declared: ‘All things which God created are common!’
⁴²
This extended not only to property but also to women. In Samuel Sheppard’s
The Joviall Crew, or, The Devill turn’d Ranter
(1651), his intended satire has an authentic ring when he describes their communism:

and their rebellious spirit:

The Ranters in fact went beyond the Puritan sexual revolution which sought to replace property marriage by a monogamous partnership. Coppe declared ‘give over thy stinking family duties’, argued that fornication and adultery were no sin, and advocated a community of women.
⁴⁴
The Ranters asserted the right of the natural man to behave naturally.

Without birth control, this call for freedom tended to be for men only. Nevertheless, many women, who had formed an important part of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, were quick to accept the arguments of the radicals who maintained that the soul knows no difference of sex. The Quaker George Fox asked: ‘May not the spirit of Christ speak in the female as well as in the male?’
⁴⁵
Winstanley had insisted that ‘Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love.’
⁴⁶
The Ranters however advocated and practised free love and refused to be possessive; they were notorious for their celebration of wine, women and song. Coppe felt that sex had a divine power: ‘by wanton kisses, kissing hath been confounded; and externall kisses, have been made the fiery chariots, to mount me swiftly into the bosom of him whom the soul loves, [his excellent Majesty, the King of glory].’
⁴⁷

The Ranters offered a unique opportunity for women to become independent and voluntary beings with a right to sensual pleasure. Not surprisingly, the Ranter teaching which seemed to offer such a lively and joyful affirmation of life and freedom attracted many women. A description of a female Ranter in the hostile tract
The Routing of the Ranters
(1650) conjures up wonderfully their Dionysian exuberance:

The most celebrated Ranter was Abiezer Coppe who was born in Warwick in 1619. He left university at the outbreak of the Civil War and became an Anabaptist preacher in the Warwick area. He felt he was at one with humanity, especially the wretched and the poor. He recounts how he once met a strange, deformed man on the road, and his conscience — the ‘wei-favoured harlot’ – tempted him to give this man all he had, take off his hat and bow seven times to the beggar. Coppe was no elitist, and felt the greatest privilege was to be able to give and to share.

His first important work
Some Sweet Sips of Some Spirituall Wine
(1649) was extremely critical of formal Christianity. But it was
A Fiery Flying Roll
(bound together with
A Second Fiery Flying Roule)
, dated 1649 but published in 1650, within a year of the execution of the king, which brought him notoriety. Subtitled ‘A Word from the Lord to all the Great Ones of the Earth’, in it Coppe not only attacked organized religion but presented a vision of a purged society in which property was to be held in common. Where the Levellers had excluded servants and others from their notion of equality, Coppe extended it to embrace all men and women. Like the Diggers, he also advocated a form of voluntary communism which echoes the early Apostolic Church and the visions of John Ball: ‘give, give, give, give up your houses, horses, goods, gold, Lands, give up, account nothing your own, have ALL THINGS common’.
⁴⁹

Like most Ranters, Coppe was a pacifist, rejecting ‘sword levelling, or digging-levelling’.
⁵⁰
He insists that he never drew a sword or shed one drop of blood: ‘we (holily) scome to fight for any thing; we had as live be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’th market place, and account these as good actions as taking the poor abused, enslived ploughmans money from him.’
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Nevertheless, he warned the wealthy and powerful: ‘Kings, Princes, Lords, great ones, must bow to the poorest Peasants; rich men must stoop to poor rogues, or else they’l rue for it.’
⁵²
He was adamant that it was necessary to chop at one blow ‘the neck of horrid pride, murder, malice and tyranny, &c.’ so that ‘parity, equality, community’ might bring about on earth ‘universall love, universall peace, and perfect freedome’.
⁵³
Coppe joined a group of Ranters who believed that all humanity was one and that we should recognize our brotherhood
and sisterhood. He joyously declared the death of sin and called for a life beyond good and evil: ‘Be no longer so horridly, hellishly, impudently, arrogantly wicked, as to judge what is sinne, what not … sinne and trangression is finisht, its a meere riddle.’
⁵⁴

Coppe was not content to preach merely but turned himself into a surrealistic work of art. He became a master of happenings. In London, he would charge at carriages of the great, gnashing his teeth and proclaiming the day of the Lord had come. He wanted to make his listeners’ ears ‘tingle’. But it was always with a subversive aim: ‘I am confounding, plaguing, tormenting nice, demure, barren
Mical
with
Davids
unseemly carriage, by skipping, leaping, dancing like one of the fools; vile, base fellowes, shame-lessely, basely, and uncovered too, before handmaids.’
⁵⁵
His supreme confidence was based on his conviction that his message came from ‘My most Excellent Majesty [in me] who is universall love, and whose service is perfect freedome’.
⁵⁶

It was all too much for the government and the Protestant Establishment. It was not enough merely to dismiss Coppe as mad; he and his fellow Ranters posed a real threat to Cromwell’s rule. The publication of the
Fiery Flying Rolls
prompted the government to pass an Act of Parliament against ‘Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions’. They were condemned by Parliament to be publicly burned. Coppe was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate prison. When brought before the Committees of Examination, he apparently feigned madness, talking to himself, and ‘throwing nut-shells and other things about the room’.
⁵⁷
Obliged to recant he issued in 1651
A Remonstrance of the sincere and zealous Protestation
and
Copps Return to the wayes of Truth.
Written in his best ranting manner, Coppe replied to his accusations, although he remained true to his social message.
⁵⁸
The Wings of the Fiery Flying Roll were not entirely clipped. While denying the belief that there is no sin, he declares that all men are equally sinful in the eyes of God. Again, he reasserts that he will call nothing he has his own: ‘As for community, I own none but that Apostolical, saint-like Community, spoken of in the Scriptures … I own none other, long for none other, but the glorious (Rom. 8) liberty of the Sons of God. Which God will hasten in its time.’
⁵⁹

For all their enthusiasm and originality, the Ranters never developed into a coherent or organized movement. They mainly formed loose associations or affinity groups, probably with a dozen or score of people. They drew support mainly from the lower strata of the urban poor who shared the aspirations of John Ball. The Ranters became quite numerous for a time, especially in London, and at their height there was no part of England which did not feel their influence. But their leaders were picked off in 1650 and 1651; five years later they were in serious decline. But their influence
lingered on and was still strong enough in 1676 for the respectable Quaker Robert Barclay to publish an attack on
The Anarchy of the Ranters and other Libertines.
Fox also reported that Ranters were at work in New England in 1668.

The exact nature and influence of the Ranters is still open to dispute. The term ‘Ranter’ like anarchist today was often used in a pejorative way to describe anyone with extreme or dangerous opinions; Ranterism came to represent ‘any anti-social manifestations of the light within’.
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To a large extent, the image of the Ranter as an immoral rascal was developed by sensationalist pamphleteers working on behalf of established Protestantism who wanted to suppress its ‘lunatic fringe’. In a similar vein, the Marxist historian A. L. Morton called them ‘confused mystical anarchists’ who drew support from ‘the defeated and declassed’ groups after Cromwell had crushed the Levellers.
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But men like Coppe and Clarkson were far from despairing and for a time after the execution of the king it seemed possible in England that true levelling could lead to a genuine commonwealth of free and equal individuals. In the event, as in so many later revolutions, the military dictator Cromwell crushed the extreme left which had helped to bring him to power.

For all their mystical language, the Ranters expressed a wonderful sense of exuberant irreverence and earthy nonconformity. They are not only a link in the chain that runs between Joachim of Fiore and William Blake, but from peasant communism to modern anarcho-communism. They looked back to the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit of the Middle Ages and anticipated the counter-culture of this century.