A Happier Man: the Refashioning of William Walwyn

The compromises that former radicals make with the world hold perennial appeal for scholars with a taste for schadenfreude. Whether such adjustments result from ageing or from regime-change, they resemble the life-experiences of enough academics for displacement or transference to sharpen the more familiar scholarly satisfactions. Sometimes, though, the politics of compromise are sufficiently striking, or the position of the subject sufficiently complex, to warrant sustained examination. William Walwyn, the erstwhile Leveller leader, seems just such a case, and not only because the Levellers' fate after the upheavals of 1647-49 has so long tantalized historians. Walwyn's pursuit of a new career as a physician after the failure of his political hopes raises questions about relationships between medicine and politics in the aftermath of England's mid-century revolution. And the evidence of political sympathies is tantalizing, for his voluminous and various writings suggest some surprising shifts in overt commitment; they also and just as strikingly disclose some underlying continuities in outlook. The commitments and the shifts evident in Walwyn's work invite us to rethink cliches of continuity and change as we try to situate his career across what historians conventionally cast as the watershed of revolution and Restoration. They also point to the importance of looking beyond the conventional categories, to evidence that amid the more familiar crises and conjunctures of revolution there was as well a politics of affectivity.But first, to the matter of continuity. The Levellers' disappearance from the pages of history even before John Lilburne's second acquittal for treason, in 1653, has recently been a matter of some controversy. The precipitant for debate was the late Richard Ashcraft's determination to establish a pedigree for the revolutionary politics he ascribed to John Locke - indeed, to identify by means of that pedigree a revolutionary Locke. Ashcraft's claims for the continuing influence in radical circles of Leveller arguments and practices, and of individual former Levellers, provoked some scepticism. The late Gerald Aylmer scrutinized the Lockean corpus for evidence of a Leveller taint and found it lacking, while Jonathan Scott urged a distinctly unrevolutionary provenance for Locke's theory of resistance.1 Independently, Gary De Krey has pointed to the continuing resonance in Restoration London of some old Leveller principles like representation and consent and of a characteristic Leveller commitment to the City's liberties; more broadly, Tim Harris has insisted that a Leveller legacy can be discerned in the widespread popular activism in the metropolis, the determined outreach of political leaders for support in the 1660s and 1670s, and the equal determination of ordinary people to get their views heard.2 Further exploration of the political culture of the Restoration will probably uncover more connections, though little that is conclusive is likely to be found. After all, issues and personnel as well as circumstances change over time; few of us would expect the members of today's political parties to honour their platforms of a generation ago, and we do not claim a deep historical disjuncture when they fail to do so.There may be another way to approach the problem of continuities and consequences - not by looking across the political landscape at a given moment in search of wandering Levellers, their plots and plans, but instead by tracking over time the careers of any identifiable Levellers who remained visible and politically active and making due allowance for circumstance. For what we know of the few careers that can be traced challenges easy assumptions either of continuity or discontinuity, and suggests that anachronism is likely in any simple model of coherence that we try to construct. John Lilburne, after alternately dabbling with royalist opposition and promising loyalty to Cromwell in the 1650s, became a Quaker and 'dead to the world'. …