Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (29 page)

Part II

Leviathan and the Infinitesimal

The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics.

—BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE

6

The Coming of Leviathan

DIGGERS

On Sunday, April 1, 1649, a group of poor men gathered with their families on St. Georges Hill, near the town of Kingston in Surrey, England. The hill was barren and seemed an unpromising locale for a new settlement. But the newcomers had come to stay: they had brought their belongings with them, and quickly set about building huts to shelter them from the elements. Then they began to dig. Day after day they continued digging, carving out trenches and planting vegetables on the rocky hill, while calling on others in the nearby towns to join them. “They invite all to come in and help them,” noted one observer, “and promise them meat, drink, and clothes.” They confidently predicted that “they will be four or five thousand within ten days,” and while this proved overly optimistic, the community did attract newcomers, their numbers soon reaching several dozen families. And yet they went on digging.

As the community slowly grew, suspicion of the “Diggers” in the surrounding towns and villages grew along with it. “It is feared they have some design in hand,” noted the same observer, and he was not mistaken. Digging trenches on a barren hill may seem like an innocent act to us, but things were different in seventeenth-century England. With their actions, the Diggers were asserting ownership and their right to cultivate enclosed lands that were owned or controlled by the local grandees. It was a calculated and open assault on the ownership rights of the propertied classes, and if their intentions were not sufficiently plain from their actions, the Diggers soon followed up with a pamphlet they distributed far and wide. “The work we are going about is this,” they explained: “To dig up
Georges Hill
and the waste Ground thereabouts … that we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor … not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation.”

Such a bold denial of the rights of private ownership would have been enough to send chills down a landowner’s spine, then and now. But there was more: “that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft.” All private property was, according to this logic, stolen, and should by all rights be returned to its rightful owner: the people. True, the Diggers professed pacifism and made a point of disavowing the use of force to reclaim the land. But since several of their members were veterans of the English Civil War and its ravages, the “better sort” of people in Weyburn and surroundings were far from reassured. Having been labeled thieves and murderers, and their property rights denied, they were understandably alarmed. Fearing for their land and possessions, not to mention their lives and safety, they struck back.

As established members of society, they first turned to the authorities: Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander of the New Model Army, was stationed nearby, and the landowners appealed to him to remove the squatters. Fairfax was probably the most powerful man in England at the time, having led the Parliamentary forces to decisive victories over the Royalist armies of Charles I. A gentleman and a knight, Fairfax had little sympathy for the revolutionary demands of the Diggers, and the landowners expected him to take their side. Fairfax, however, equivocated: He arrived at St. Georges Hill with his troops and engaged in several discussions with the Diggers’ leader, Gerrard Winstanley. Beyond this, however, he took no action. If the landowners had an issue with Winstanley’s band, Fairfax informed them, they needed to take it up with the courts.

Though disappointed at Fairfax’s response, the landowners did precisely that—and more. They charged the Diggers with sexual licentiousness, and prevailed on the courts to bar them from speaking in their own defense. Meanwhile, Francis Drake, lord of the nearby manor of Cobham, organized raids on the Diggers’ settlement, ultimately succeeding in burning down one of their communal houses. Faced with a concerted legal and physical assault, the Diggers gave way. By August they had been forced to leave St. Georges Hill and move to a new location some miles away. When this new refuge also came under attack, they abandoned the land and largely dispersed. The landowners had won.

The drama at St. Georges Hill is one of the best documented attempts to subvert the established social order in early modern England. But it was not an isolated incident. Other digging colonies sprang up during the period, and other forms of protest, subversion, and even insurrection abounded. For, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, from 1640 to 1660, England was a land in turmoil, and traditional institutions were in flux, if they had not disappeared altogether. Less than forty years after the death of the brilliant “Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth I (1558–1603), her successor once removed, Charles I, was driven from London by Parliament, his armies defeated in the field and he himself imprisoned and ultimately executed. The Church of England, created by Elizabeth and her father, Henry VIII (1509–47), was effectively dissolved, its bishops forced into exile and its great cathedrals seized by rival Protestant churches. A Scottish army had invaded and, for a time, occupied the northern counties; while in Ireland, a Catholic uprising had laid waste to the lands of English lords and settlers, massacring many of them and forcing others to flee. Amid this national crisis, with the state decapitated, the official Church suppressed, the law of the land ignored, and print censorship removed, a multitude of groups emerged from the shadows, dedicated to turning the old world upside down. The Diggers of St. Georges Hill were but one of them.

THE LAND WITHOUT A KING

The causes of what is variously known as the English Revolution, the English Civil War, or simply the Interregnum, are debated by historians to this day. Political, religious, social, and economic causes are all cited, and indeed there is no doubt that all contributed in some way to the collapse of the English government in 1640. This much, however, is clear: ever since 1603, when James I (1603–25) of the House of Stuart succeeded Elizabeth I on the English throne, England’s kings were increasingly at odds with Parliament, a body that represented large swaths of the English propertied classes. In part, this was a straightforward power struggle. Parliament, whose roots went back to the thirteenth century, had by the time of Elizabeth’s reign acquired the exclusive right to levy taxes. Since raising and maintaining an army and a navy were by far the most costly undertakings of an early modern state, and could be financed only through taxes, this meant that the king could not pursue a foreign policy without Parliament’s approval. Due to its control over state revenues, Parliament had the power to veto policies it did not like, and it did not hesitate to use it. As long as royal policies were acceptable to Parliament, there was little trouble. Such was the case with Elizabeth’s long, expensive, and inconclusive war with Spain, which nevertheless retained broad popular support. But when James I made peace with Spain, and when Charles I decided to aid King Louis XIII of France in crushing the Protestant Huguenots, things changed. Parliament refused to authorize taxes to fund what it viewed as “godless” and “tyrannical” actions, making it impossible for the English king to effectively carry out his policies.

The Stuart monarchs found this situation intolerable. Only the king, they insisted, had the power to set policy and levy taxes, and Parliament’s stranglehold over taxation was an illegal usurpation of royal power. They looked enviously at the French kings, who had humbled their own assembly, the Estates-General, and were successfully concentrating all power in their own hands. James I, perhaps the most scholarly of English kings, even penned a treatise entitled
The Trew Law of Free Monarchies
, in which he argued that kings ruled by divine right, and under no circumstances could the people legitimately resist royal decrees.

With Parliament growing ever more assertive and the Stuart kings ever more furious, a confrontation was inevitable: in 1629, Charles I dissolved Parliament and refused to call a new one. For the next eleven years he ruled alone, while the treasury was slowly drained and his freedom of action became increasingly restricted. Finally, in 1640, following a disastrous attempt to reform the Scottish church that led the two nations to the brink of war, Charles could hold out no longer and recalled Parliament. His intent was only to approve funds for the Scottish war and then quickly dissolve the unruly body. But Parliamentary leaders struck first: to prevent a repeat of Charles’s “tyrannical” rule, they immediately passed a resolution that Parliament stay in session until it dissolved itself. It remained formally convened for the decade, and is known to history as the Long Parliament.

The constitutional crisis of 1640 was a clash of two fundamentally opposing views of the proper political order. The Stuart kings struggled mightily to establish an absolutist monarchy on the French model, in which all authority resided with the divinely sanctioned king. Parliament, meanwhile, stood for a constitutional monarchy (though the term had not yet been coined). Even the king, in its view, could not trample on the ancient rights of freeborn Englishmen. Royal power must be tempered and, when necessary, resisted by “the people,” as represented in Parliament. Needless to say, parliamentary leaders never dreamed of including the lower classes and the poor among “the people” of England. Only property owners were represented in Parliament, so only they had the right to share power with the king. Even so, the Parliamentary party stood for a vast expansion of the political class in England, which was precisely what the Royalists were determined to prevent.

Today we are accustomed to thinking of constitutional issues, such as the proper balance of power between king and Parliament, as distinct from religious issues. But in seventeenth-century England, politics and religion were inseparable. Parliament’s audacity in challenging the power of the king was derived in no small measure from the new Protestant faith, which taught that all men had equal access to God’s grace through faith and prayer. Whereas in Catholicism, grace was channeled exclusively through ordained priests endowed with special powers, all Protestant denominations subscribed to the principle of the “priesthood of all believers.” All men, accordingly, were “priests” before God, capable of receiving grace directly from Him. And if all men were equal before God, why should they accept the absolute rule of the king, who was, after all, a man like them?

This Protestant outlook, to be sure, did not mean that the Parliamentarians believed that “all men were created equal.” Far from it. But it did mean that the divine right of kings—men elected by God to rule over the people—was harder to maintain in Protestant England than in Catholic lands, where royal supremacy was buttressed by the authority of the Church. Consequently, the English Parliament was far more aggressive in asserting its rights and powers than its continental equivalents. Whereas Parliament challenged the early Stuarts at every step, the French Estates-General and the Spanish Imperial Cortes soon wilted before the divinely sanctioned authority of their kings.

The intertwining of politics and religion meant that the constitutional struggle between king and Parliament in England was also a religious struggle over the proper forms of worship and their meaning. The Church of England was a compromise reached after sharp swings between radical Protestantism and conservative Catholicism. Under the Elizabethan settlement, the Church retained the Calvinist theology of the radicals but combined it with an institutional structure and liturgy hardly distinguishable from Catholicism. Alone among Protestant denominations, Anglicanism retained bishops, a strict church hierarchy with the king at its apex, and solemn rituals in grand cathedrals conducted by resplendently attired Church grandees. Anglicanism was an uncomfortable marriage of two very different notions of faith and community, but it allowed each of the competing factions to emphasize its own favored aspect of the compromise. Parliamentarians, broadly speaking, emphasized the Calvinist theology with its egalitarian implications; the kings, by contrast, favored the hierarchic, Catholic-like forms. As James I famously put it, “No Bishop, no King!”

By 1640 the rift between Parliament and the king had deepened to the point where the Anglican compromise no longer seemed tenable. The dominant factions in Parliament advocated the abolition of bishops and the entire Church hierarchy, in order to bring Anglicanism more in line with other Protestant denominations. The Stuart kings, meanwhile, flirted openly with Catholicism, and appeared inclined to abandon the Protestant experiment altogether and reunite with Rome. The religious conflict was inseparable from the political crisis, and made the latter ever more difficult to contain. With not just power but also faith and conscience hanging in the balance for both sides, the room for compromise between king and Parliament was shrinking fast. By 1640 it had all but vanished.

When the Long Parliament met in 1640, it began a systematic assault on the authority of both king and Church. It appointed an “Assembly of Divines” to come up with a plan for radical Church reforms, and it prosecuted, and ultimately executed, Charles I’s chief minister, the Earl of Strafford. The dominant Parliamentary party, known as Presbyterians, advocated a Scottish-style Church government, meaning the abolition of bishops and their replacement with councils of lay elders (“presbyters”). Denying the king money to fund an army, they instigated a military crisis by inviting the Scots to invade the northern counties. By 1642, Charles had fled London and was raising an army in the north, with the aim of ousting the rebellious Parliament and reasserting his royal rights. Parliament countered by forming its own militia, and for the next two years civil war raged across England, with neither side gaining the upper hand. Large engagements were few and far between, but the sacking of manors and towns, disease, and devastation were plentiful, bringing misery to the British Isles.