SOURCE: "The Later Life of Gerrard Winstanley," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, January-March, 1965, pp. 133-36.

[In the following essay, Vann reviews the scant evidence available regarding the later years of Winstanley's life, examining the way in which the few known facts may support or contradict the portrait of Winstanley painted by the pamphlets he wrote in the late 1640s and early 1650s.]

The Digger Gerrard Winstanley published his last pamphlet in 1652. Almost three centuries passed before his collected works were edited by George H. Sabine and made the subject of a book by D. W. Petegorsky.¹ But neither Sabine nor Petegorsky could do much to dispel the obscurity cloaking the life of Winstanley after his retirement as a pamphleteer. The only glimpse of Winstanley was in 1660, when he appeared as a plaintiff in chancery and as a "tithe-gatherer of propriety" in the pages of a hostile pamphlet. In 1948 Wilhelm Schenk could comment that "the known facts about Winstanley's life are tantalisingly meagre and it is extremely unlikely, after the patient researches of Petegorsky and Sabine, that any more will be discovered in the future."²

This prediction has proven to be unduly pessimistic. Recently discovered evidence allows us a fuller picture of Winstanley's later life, no longer as polemicist and communist theorist, but as corn-chandler, Quaker, and litigant.

After the final dispersal of the Digger community in Surrey, Winstanley spent the late summer and autumn of 1650 as steward to the eccentric prophetess Lady Eleanor Douglas on her estate at Pirton, Hertfordshire. From a letter found in the Huntington Library we know that Winstanley had to defend himself from a charge of dishonesty in the keeping of his accounts. Characteristically, Winstanley interpreted his relationship to Lady Eleanor as one of seeking her conversion rather than commerce: "I came not under your rooffe to earn money like a slave. It is the convertion of your spirit to true Nobilities, which is falne in the earth, not the weight of your purse that I looke after." But his services had gone beyond the spiritual, for as he reminds her, "I was your Saviour in this last Somer's crop in getting the sequestracon taken of [off] your estate, and you freely promised before Ellin to give me 20£." Not only had this promise not been fulfilled, but the "prophetesse Melchisedecke" had appeared suddenly "like a theeff in the night" to audit Winstanley's accounts, and apparently they had a violent falling-out.³

Winstanley may have continued his activities as a steward, since in 1660 he was attacked for taking tithes by the Ranter Laurence Claxton. In his The Lost Sheep Found, or the Prodigal Returned to his Father's House, Claxton claims to have detected vanity in Winstanley's proceedings as a Digger, and charges him on page 27 with an ignominious, though not unexpected retreat from his principles:

I made it appear to Gerrard Winstanley there was a self-love and vain-glory nursed in his heart, that if possible, by digging to have gained people to him, by which his name might become great among the poor Commonality of the Nation, as afterwards in him appeared a most shameful retreat from Georges-Hill, with a spirit of pretended universality, to become a real Tithe-gatherer of propriety; so what by these things in others, and the experience of my own heart, I saw all that men spoke or acted, was a lye.… ⁴

Claxton's veracity is questionable, but since any steward of an estate with impropriated tithes would be involved in tithe-collection there may well be some basis for his attack.

But much the best evidence for Winstanley's later life lies in the documents of two actions brought by him in chancery. One is his complaint of October 1660 against Robert Western, Francis Barnes, and Edward Lewies; the other is an action brought 23 June 1675 by Winstanley and his wife, her two sisters, and their husbands, against Ferdinando Gorges and John Holland, guardian of the infant Thomas Coningsby.⁵

Winstanley's dispute with Western, Barnes, and Lewies arose out of his former dealings in cloth-trading with Richard Alsworth of London. Winstanley, who was a member of the Merchant Taylors' company, had been in debt to Alsworth by almost £500 when he left off trading in 1643, but he claimed that he had since discharged all his obligations. Unfortunately Winstanley's books had been lost or defaced during the Civil War, and he had never bothered to obtain any "acquittance, receipte or discharge" from Alsworth for the money paid him. Now Alsworth's executors were pressing for payment of a note which they claimed to be in Winstanley's own handwriting, acknowledging a debt of £114 15s. 3d, which Winstanley had promised to pay from a debt of £114 owed him by one Philip Peake of Dublin. Winstanley had already been arrested for the debt and put under subpoena into chancery.⁶ His complaint asked that Alsworth's books be examined so that the repayment could be verified.

Since Alsworth's executors thought Winstanley could repay 114 pounds, it appears that his financial situation must have improved since 1650, when he spoke of the unaccustomed necessity to do daily labor for his bread. It also appears that Winstanley had been accustomed to fairly large and far-flung transactions. This impression is amply confirmed by proceedings involving his wife and her sisters, the daughters of one Gabriel Stanley. Winstanley here claimed that Ferdinando Gorges owed him £1,850 by an indenture of 10 April 1666 and that he had also promised a £200 annuity to the three sisters. These sums were to be paid out of the revenues of Hampton Court manor in Herefordshire. However, Winstanley admits that he gave the "writings" for Hampton Court estate to Gorges after the latter had made a sustained effort to wheedle them from him. He even describes himself as a "plain illiterate Man as hee the sd. Mr. Gorges well knew." Winstanley was using the word in its contemporary sense of "simple" or "unsophisticated," as Gorges retorted that "the Comp"s are all of them Literate person and write faire and intelligeable hands." Gorges, in this response of 30 May 1676, singled out Winstanley and Fisher as "persons of indigent and low fortunes."

There is no further record of the suit, for Winstanley died on 10 September 1676. The record of his death has been found in burial registers kept by the Westminster Monthly Meeting of the Quakers.⁷ Winstanley, whose occupation is given as "corn chandler," was aged about 62, according to the Friends' register. He had two sons by his wife Elizabeth: Gerrard, born about 1665 and dying 20 August 1683 and Clement, born about 1670 and dying 2 October 1684. Elizabeth subsequently remarried Giles Tutchbury (also Tutchberry and Tichbury), a cooper, at the Bull and Mouth meeting of London Friends.

One great remaining puzzle about Winstanley's life is the void between 1660 and 1675. It is, of course, possible that the man who filed suit in the latter year and died a Quaker in 1676 was not the Digger. No other references to Winstanley in Quaker records have been discovered, nor has any burial record of Susan, Gerrard Winstanley's first wife. On the other hand, the name is uncommon. It does not occur at all in those contemporary London parish registers which have been printed (almost one-third of those surviving). This would make it seem unlikely that there were in London two men of this name, both about the same age.

More pertinent is the well-known similarity between the religious thought of Winstanley and that of the early Friends.⁸ As Carlyle remarked of Winstanley's interview with Fairfax, during which he refused to remove his hat, "The germ of Quakerism and much else is curiously visible here."⁹ On the basis of the consonance of Winstanley's The Saint's Paradise, which they thought to have been written in 1658, and contemporary Quaker tracts, G. P. Gooch and Eduard Bernstein supposed that Winstanley must have become a Friend. The Saint's Paradise has since been correctly dated as 1648,¹⁰ but this mistaken date does not affect the community of ideas shared by Winstanley and the Friends—a community too close merely to be explained as "the result of the general environment of the period."¹¹

Certainty on this question (if it can ever be attained) and further knowledge of Winstanley's later life must probably depend on more serendipity. Friends' records, printed London parish registers, and the indexes to the London probate registries and to chancery plaintiffs have been thoroughly examined. But even if nothing more is found, if we accept the probability that all our present evidence pertains to the same person, we can sketch in more fully the picture of the man who was the spokesman for the short-lived Digger movement.

It is a picture puzzlingly at variance with what one would expect. His entrance into the grain trade, for example, is doubly surprising in view both of his denunciation of trade in the fruits of the earth and of the widespread popular detestation of corn-dealers.¹² Although it may be held that Winstanley produced a "proletarian ideology," he followed the classic bourgeois pattern of a gentleman's son from Lancashire who came to London and joined one of the city companies.¹³ Perhaps he atoned for his interest in commerce by his subsequent incompetence in pursuing it. His ineptitude in business is consistent, and after his forced leaving of the cloth trade, his dispute over his accounts with Lady Eleanor Douglas, his failure to obtain important receipts and his self-confessed simple-mindedness in handing over vital documents, it is not surprising that at the end of his life his fortune was "indigent and low." The experiment in Digger communism would seem to have come between the ruin of a career as a Merchant Tailor and the scarcely propitious beginning of one as a steward and corn-trader. These few facts about his life seem to invite the interpretation of the radical as one who turns on a system in which he personally has failed. But it is doubtful that such fragments of a biography can explain Winstanley, much less explain him away. After all it is only worthwhile collecting them because of what he wrote and did in a few months of the Commonwealth of England. His historical justification, if he finds one, will be not of works but of faith.

Notes

¹ See The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, with an Appendix of Documents Relating to The Digger Movement, edited by George H. Sabine (Ithaca, 1941), and D. W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (1940). Sabine wrote without reference to the work of Petegorsky, which gives a somewhat more detailed account of Winstanley's life.

²The Concern for Social Justice in the Puritan Revolution (1948), 97.

³ This letter was discovered and edited by Paul H. Hardacre for the Huntington Library Quarterly, XXII, 4 (1959), 345-49.

⁴ Quoted by Andrew Brink in Friends' Historical Society Journal, 49, 3 (1960), 179-80. See also Petegorsky, 229-30.

⁵ Winstanley's complaint against Western, Barnes, and Lewies is C.9/412/269 and their replies are C.6/44/101 and C.5/415/123 in Chancery Proceedings, Public Record Office. The complaint of Gerrard Winstanley and Elizabeth his wife, William Fisher and Anne his wife, and John Hicks and Elizabeth his wife is C.5/581/55; the responses are C.6/244/96 and C.5/581/55. Sabine, 6, and Petegorsky, 123, did not know of the second suit and quote only Winstanley's complaint from the various documents of the first one.

⁶ Winstanley's affluence then was perhaps not so great as is suggested by H. N. Brailsford, who says in The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), 659, that Winstanley in 1660 "had evidently become more prosperous, since he was able to file a suit in Chancery to clear up his financial affairs."

⁷ Richard T. Vann, "From Radicalism to Quakerism: Gerrard Winstanley and Friends," Friends' Historical Society Journal, 49, 1 (1959), 41-46.

⁸ This is discussed in greater detail in Friends' Historical Society Journal, 49, 1 (1959), 41-46.

⁹ Quoted in Lewis H. Berens, The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth (2nd ed., 1961), 38.

¹⁰ Sabine, 91, and Petegorsky, Appendix I, 248.

¹¹ Petegorsky, 248.

¹² Max Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances 1660-1714 (Oxford, 1938), 73.

¹³ His father was a mercer in Wigan and, to judge from the honorific "Mr." that preceded the record of his burial in the Wigan parish register, was a man of social prominence.