Defoe: The Last Leveller

Defoe was the last Leveller and just thinking about this great movement makes me sad and angry, primarily because of the Levellers’ potential relevance to today.

Delighted to hear that Defoe The Divisor has been collected in the 2000AD Ultimate Editions, alongside Bill Savage. It contains very imaginative art from the talented Stewart Moore and was my final Defoe story. Its publication has reminded me of just how important Defoe is to me.

From Defoe The Divisor, drawn by Stewart Kenneth Moore

The clockpunk elements in particular fascinated me. Steampunk had briefly and brilliantly surfaced in Nemesis the Gothic Empire and with Defoe there was the opportunity to do something quite unique with the inventions of an earlier era.  You will doubtless remember the clockwork robots in Doctor Who: The Girl in the Fireplace, which I found very inspiring. Amongst my favourite devices was an early machine gun I came across that I featured  with round bullets for humans and square bullets for zombies. I recall some readers were sceptical of the idea, but reality is always more deranged than fiction. The original gun had round bullets for Christians and square bullets for Muslims. Defoe’s volley gun with multiple barrels was equally wild. And all the hardware was beautifully rendered by Defoe co-creator Leigh Gallagher, including a steam-driven James Bond-style car. 

It was an era of fantastic inventions which has been dramatised in various novels and original texts, but never in comics before, as far as I know.  These included  17^th century accounts of space missions to the Moon. Defoe artist Colin MacNeil had mentioned the accounts to me and I just loved the idea. I read everything I could find on the subject and Stewart supplemented them with some truly amazing ideas of his own. I originally wanted to call the story ‘Jacobite Zombies in Space’, a title I regard as far more in keeping with classic 2000AD, but it was regarded as too humorous.

Defoe was the last Leveller and just thinking about this great movement makes me sad and angry, primarily because of the Levellers’ potential relevance to today.  They were ‘a political movement committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance. The hallmark of Leveller thought was its populism, as shown by its emphasis on equal natural rights, and their practice of reaching the public through pamphlets, petitions and vocal appeals to the crowd.^’ I’d add to this Wikipedia description that they were also proto-socialists.  

It was the dawning of an age of literacy – hence the reference to pamphlets. And there were also the primitive, crudely illustrated Chapbooks, the predecessors to Penny Dreadfuls. How widespread literacy was is questionable. Thus I’ve seen the  deeds to the 17^th century cottage in Colchester I lived in, that had originally belonged to a cork maker. He simply made his mark on the deeds. Nevertheless, new ideas were spreading and with them new challenges to the ruling elite.

It wasn’t just the Levellers who were exploring new ideas on how society should be organised once the nobility were disempowered. Among my particular favourites were the Ranters. According to Wikipedia: They denied the authority of the church, of accepted religious practice and of Scripture. In fact, they denied the power of any authority in general. Gerrard Winstanley, a leader of another English dissenting group called the Diggers, commented on Ranter principles in characterising them by their "general lack of moral values or restraint in worldly pleasures". I also recall reading that the Ranters aimed to reach a higher spiritual state by endless swearing and smoking tobacco. That’s probably a gross simplification written by jealous rivals, but it’s fascinating nevertheless.

But the Levellers are amongst Britain’s greatest heroes. They are infinitely preferable to murderous Knights, with their faux-chivalry bullshit, or butchering soldiers of the British Empire that the establishment likes to hold up for our admiration. Yet they are never covered in standard history curriculums and I barely knew about them before I started writing Defoe.

I discovered that Cromwell destroyed them. Ordinary soldiers were refusing to go and fight in Ireland for him. This led to the Bishopgate mutiny. Certainly not something to include in school history books during ‘The Troubles’. It might just give squaddies ideas. Thus I knew one soldier who refused to fight in Northern Ireland. I told his story and how he was punished – in fictional form – in Finn.      

Wikipedia states that: 300 infantrymen of Colonel John Hewson's regiment, who declared that they would not serve in Ireland until the Leveller programme had been realised, were cashiered without arrears of pay, which was the threat that had been used to quell the Corkbush Field mutiny.

When Soldiers of the regiment of Colonel Edward Whalley stationed in Bishopsgate London made similar demands they were ordered out of London. They refused to go fearing that once outside the City of London they too would be given the choice of obey or be cashiered without arrears of pay. The mutineers surrendered after a personal appeal by Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. Fifteen soldiers were arrested and court martialed, of whom six were sentenced to death. Five were pardoned but Robert Lockyer, a former Agitator within the regiment, was executed by firing squad in front of St Paul's Cathedral on April 27, 1649.

The clampdown against the Levellers continued in Oxford. According to the Oxford Mail, a parade happens every year to commemorate the execution of three soldiers in the town in 1649:

The men were the ringleaders of more than 300 members of the Levellers movement who were locked up in Burford Church by Oliver Cromwell’s men over their protests about dictatorship.

The ringleaders were executed in the churchyard on May 17, 1649, on Cromwell’s orders after they had branded him a dictator following the Civil War.

The parade became a tradition after Labour politician Tony Benn came and read at the church in 1976.

Jeremy Corbyn has attended memorials to the movement  on Levellers Day 20^th May.

Cromwell was rewarded with gold by the Grandees of the City of London for destroying the Levellers. Does he remind you of anyone?    

It’s surprising just how much of our past is censored. Even working class Robin Hood was not acceptable to our elite, so they made him the Earl of Huntingdon. He wasn’t lower class anymore and lost his pagan roots – roots that I’ve celebrated in Sláine. And anyone even nearer our own times – like the Levellers – is definitely off the curriculum.

Why might this be so? Are our ruling classes so shit-scared of revolutions and mutinies, especially in these dark times with the threat of a NATO war on the horizon? It will be a ‘just war’, of course. They always are and so many people are brainwashed into actually believing such lies. Any view to the contrary and the establishment will show their claws.

See, for instance, the Tories hysterical reaction to the Monocled Mutineer of World War One. And when Bernard Shaw, at the commencement of the conflict, advised British and German soldiers to shoot their officers and go home, he was immediately cancelled with a huge critical pile-on by his fellow ‘patriotic’ authors and ‘friends’. Suitably punished,  Shaw later sold out, had dinner with mass-murderer General Haig and supported the war as a ‘necessary evil. That war was actually brought to a close by the German navy Kiel mutineers, although the establishment don’t want us to know that. According to them, it was the mass-murderers who won it. 

So Defoe is the Last Leveller, one of a group of heroes that were noticeably missing from my ‘Boys Book of Heroes’ when I was a kid.  He needed a working class hero’s face so I asked Leigh Gallagher to base him on Ray Winstone. I think we’ve had more than enough elitist ‘heroes’ in fiction and real life. Defoe is guilt-ridden that he’s helped the ruling class and has even become Zombie Hunter General, by crown appointment. Rather how my Marshal Law is horribly embarrassed to lead a group of prancing, fuckwit superheroes running on one leg, and asks Police McCommissioner McGland , ‘Er – is there a back way out of here?’

All heroes should have flaws, and that is Defoe’s flaw before he finally finds redemption when he goes after the real enemy: not zombies, but the ruling class.  Because of his unrealised potential and significance, I’m sad at his passing, but I’m comforted that the various Defoe books are still out there. And our paranoid rulers have such a weak hold on power, that they dare not let the public know about true icons.