Backstory:
Morgan Reynolds was born in the fens of East Anglia, the heartland of English Puritanism, to a nonconformist father and a Welsh mother: the daughter of a business acquaintance of his father. Reynolds' family came from the minor squirearchy; they had a small stone house, and their lands were worked by about a dozen families. His father was active in the wool trade, and this – together with the income from the rich, half-flooded farmlands of the Fens – ensured a relatively prosperous life for the family.
Reynolds' father, like most of the local landowners, was a devout Puritan – an Independent who advocated pure local control of church matters, free from the authority either of bishops or of councils. From him, Morgan inherited his bone-deep Puritan sensibility: a deep distrust of earthly authority, a distaste for pomp and spectacle, a ferocious moral earnestness, a self-effacing dedication to his principles, and – above all – an iron self-control rooted in the belief that every action carried with it an eternal moral charge. From his Welsh mother, on the other hand, Reynolds learned his love of poetry and literature, flowers and song - and a lifelong suspicion that women were capable of a good deal more than most physicians and philosophers claimed. His parents' marriage was happy, companionate, motivated by Puritan notions of friendship and respect and not by mere economic advantage. And Reynolds would remember his childhood with great affection later in life. He spent countless hours exploring the endless marshes of the fens, criss-crossed by dykes and boardwalks; he learned to hide himself from sight amid the reeds and mudflats, and to swim – a less common skill then than it is now. His parents did not enforce rigid social segregation on their lands, and Reynolds grew up playing with the children of his family's tenants. His later politics may have owed much to this experience: Morgan Reynolds had too much faith in "good gentry" like his father to be a Digger, but his deep sympathy and friendship for the tenant class would still drive him toward the Levellers later in life. He could stomach economic inequality, but not political inequality; he had experienced the common humanity of tenant and gentry too clearly for that.
From the age of eight, Reynolds was sent away to grammar school in Ely, where he spoke nothing but Latin for several years on end, and was immersed in the classical authors and in the Scriptures. Much of this was rote learning, but it gave Reynolds the tools that he needed to teach himself history, law, and rhetoric – which he began to do from an early age, spending long hours in the library. He proved well-loved of his Puritan teachers, and at the age of sixteen, they sent him along to their brethren at the Sidney Sussex College of Cambridge University. There, Morgan received formal training in Greek, French, and Hebrew – not to mention classical and English history, formal logic, and rhetoric. It was a grueling education, drilled into him by the rod – but it honed Morgan’s mind. His earliest adult writings come from this period: a translation from Hebrew of the Story of Susanna - in which his poetic style, spare but richly passionate, is already evident - and a somewhat amateurish but very creative defense of Baconian empiricism as a moral imperative for a Reformed society.
After he left Cambridge in 1634 at the age of nineteen, Reynolds moved to London and studied the law at Gray’s Inn of Court. His studies were cut short by the unexpected death of his beloved mother. Reynolds returned to the fens to bury her, and a few days after her funeral he appears to have experienced a religious epiphany: he alludes in letters to having been "reprieved, by Grace unsought and unearned, of that iron collar the weight whereof bowed my head and set mine eyes only upon the mire." It seems likely that the grave sin of which Reynolds felt a need to be redeemed was carnal: his relationship with Elizabeth Martins, the daughter of a bencher at Gray's Inn whom Reynolds had courted until her father forbade the match upon pain of Reynolds' expulsion from the Inn. The two likely continued their affair in secret thereafter, and at one point Reynolds may even have fought a duel over Elizabeth; certainly, he developed a consuming interest in swordsmanship at this point in his life, for which he would be noted ever afterward. After his epiphany, Reynolds and Elizabeth publicly eloped and were married; Reynolds was duly expelled from Gray's Inn; and he spent several years helping his father with the wool business before finally finishing his studies at the Inner Temple. The lesson that Reynolds drew from the whole affair seems to have been simple: never live in sin, and never yield on principle. If he lived with integrity and paid the price, then God would see him right in the end.
By this time, civil war was brewing in earnest. From 1638 to 1642, Reynolds was astonishingly productive for a young lawyer. He published one legal treatise arguing for Parliament's exclusive power of the purse, and another denying the right of the nobility to enclose traditional commons without Parliament's sanction; he wrote a religious tract about the iniquity of fighting in an unjust war (implicitly, the Bishops' Wars); he so incensed the Earl of Sandwich with his opposition to enclosure that he was obliged to defend (successfully, in the end) his own family's title to its land against aggressive legal challenge. Perhaps most notably, he became a well-regarded and fearless champion of John Lilburne. In one pamphlet, written under a false name but bearing all the hallmarks of Reynolds' style, he upbraided the oath ex officio as "the most damnable form of tyranny; for while the rack of the Inquisition but turns a man's body against his mind, this unholy oath cannot end but by turning a man's conscience against his God." In another pamphlet, foreshadowing Milton's superior work in Areopagitica, Reynolds argued for a radical freedom of the press: for while a seditious book would be insufficient to turn the reader against a good king or true religion, it could be a vital spur to rejecting a tyrant or false superstition, and therefore the oppressive licensing of the press was a threat and not a buttress to the security of the realm. Somehow, in the midst of this furious activity, Reynolds also managed to invent a kind of solar still - he had hoped to use it for irrigation, but quickly found that the lenses were far too expensive and the sun did not shine enough in East Anglia for it to be useful - and he published his only volume of original poetry, a book of religious verse that was modestly well-received and that reads, today, like a respectable imitation of George Herbert.
What happened next is a matter of historical record. In 1642 King Charles I tried to arrest five Puritan members of the House of Commons; the Parliament responded by calling for a citizen army to muster. The Civil War had begun. When the Militia Act reached East Anglia, Reynolds' father was already too frail to campaign; Reynolds, by contrast, seems to have been ablaze with revolutionary fervor, convinced that a new and better world lay on the other side of the killing. In more private letters, he also acknowledged that a Royalist victory would likely result in reprisals against him for his prior writings; he had a personal stake in the war. So like thousands of other untrained citizen-soldiers, Reynolds brushed up on his De Bello Gallico, purchased a harquebusier's harness, and rode to muster: in Reynolds' case, with Edward Whalley’s new Regiment of Horse.
The next three years were a brutal education. Commissioned a captain for little reason but that he was a gentleman, Reynolds lost half his company at Edgehill and most of the survivors at Adwalton Moor the following year. In between, he was shot, sabered, lost a finger and part of an ear to frostbite, and suffered almost constant illness; he wrote dryly to Elizabeth of "dysentery that hath proved a more faithful companion than any sergeant, so that thou needst never fear I should be lonely." He began to keep a diary during this period, and his entries reflect a marked inner hardening: initially appalled at the slaughter of battle, he quickly became more appalled that the Royalist troops seemed to be so much better at it than his own. He began to spend much of his time in camp honing his skills with sword and firelock, and writing memoranda to himself on the need for speed, aggression, discipline, ruthlessness, brutality. Reynolds noted with grim honesty that most English smallfolk did not want to choose a side in the war, and recorded in February 1643 that he had watched his men beat a farmwife to death when she tried to fight them for her last sack of grain. "You may find me much changed when I return," he wrote Elizabeth, "if God should grant me life in the new commonweal for whose birth we bleed. I pray you, love me for what I will have won, and not what I will have lost." A few days later, at Marston Moor, he was stabbed through the thigh and left with a limp that would last him the rest of his life. When the wound became infected, Reynolds only barely survived, and he spent his convalescence writing his first openly Leveller tract: stating bluntly that if Christian virtue was any qualification for leadership, then any one of his cavalry troopers had as much right to sit in Parliament as the Duke of Essex.
The Self-Denying Ordinance and the birth of the New Model Army changed Reynolds' fortunes just as they changed the course of the war. Since dozens of aristocratic members of Parliament surrendered their commissions, Reynolds' status as a captain suddenly came to grant him authority in fact as well as in name. New training and recruitment systems replenished the ranks of his company: "Godly men," he told his diary, "and killers." At Naseby, Reynolds' company led the charge that shattered the Royalists' left flank and secured the victory; forever afterwards, it was the only battle about which Reynolds showed the least romanticism. "Good clean wind, and a thousand banners blowing in it," he wrote in a poem in his diary. "God's pleasure in the air, like spring rain yet to fall." At Langport, Reynolds was present for the destruction of the last Royalist field army in England, and captured the colors of the Northern Horse. He spent the final year of the war securing Parliament's control of Hampshire: seizing isolated castles and towers, for the most part. In one case, Reynolds attacked a tower without warning at dawn out of the east, using the rising sun to blind defenders and the mad press of fleeing civilians to keep the gate open until his troopers were inside. Rather than surrender his sword, the garrison commander informed Reynolds that he was an honorless blackguard; according to his own men, Reynolds then beat the man to the ground, seized the sword, and snapped its blade under his heel. Tossing the hilt back to the officer, Reynolds stated: "Now you are welcome to it." In his diary, Reynolds simply recorded: "Took Warblington Castle without losses. Ordered Willis and his troop out to requisition. Two killed by clubmen defending their farms. Hanged twelve militia. God, let it end."
It did, soon enough, at least for a time. Less than six months later, Oxford fell and the King surrendered to the Scots. Reynolds returned briefly to his family lands in Cambridgeshire, and to Elizabeth. His diary stops abruptly during these few months, but his household accounts are striking: Reynolds almost completely ceased collecting rent from most of his tenants, probably as a result of the combination of plague and failed harvests that devastated England in 1646-47. As a result, Reynolds fell sharply into debt, and he clearly needed his captain's salary and pension - both of which were more than eighteen months in arrears. When Parliament ordered the New Model Army to Ireland, and warned that any who refused would not be paid at all for the war they had already fought, Reynolds rode to rejoin the Army in Newmarket and was elected by his regiment as one of two representatives - the so-called "Agitators" - that formed an Army Council alongside senior officers. Reynolds then assisted in drafting the Solemn Engagement - the Army's petition to Parliament - and he supported the Army's refusal to follow Parliament's subsequent order to disband: noting that Parliament had sat for seven years without new elections, and so had no greater claim to legal legitimacy than the Army Council.
In the subsequent months, wounded by political unrest and personal financial hardship, Reynolds' political views hardened. He was among the drafters of the Agreement of the People: England's first proposal for genuine democracy, which demanded universal male suffrage, equipopulational constituencies, Parliamentary sovereignty, equality before the law, and freedom of conscience. Reynolds defended the Agreement of the People at the Putney Debates against more conservative officers - known as "grandees" - of the Army Council, but he failed to carry the day: the grandees promised troops their long-delayed pay in full so long as they rejected the Agreement. And after the Corkbush Field mutiny, when it became clear that to challenge the result of the debate would merely invite a civil war within the New Model Army, Reynolds placed his hope in peaceful pressure instead. "To-day," he wrote in an open letter to more extreme Levellers, "let him that hath bled for this land's liberty enjoy the just reward of his toil. For on the morrow, he shall yet remember the Good Old Cause for which he fought, nor fail to require its very incarnation of them that deny it." In a slew of petitions and pamphlets, themes in Reynolds' political writing - going back to his defense of John Lilburne a decade earlier - now began to take their final form: asserting "freeborn rights" that ranged from liberty of the press and of conscience to the abolition of debtors' prison. In fact, Reynolds' 1647 petition An Appeal to Memory was cited- nearly three centuries later - by Justice John Marshall Harlan of the United States Supreme Court.
Reynolds seems to have greeted the news of Charles I's escape, his Engagement with the Scots, and the outbreak of the second civil war with a kind of perverse relief. For one thing, the Army was finally paid again, and he was able to put his family's finances back on a more stable footing. At a deeper level, as Reynolds wrote Elizabeth, "peace such as this hath been - a peace of starvation, stagnation, and betrayal - requireth, as doth a fallow field, some cleansing flame that it might in time bear good fruit." He rode north with a small group of veterans of his old company, and helped Sir Arthur Haselrig raise a new regiment of horse from Northumberland; as a brevet-colonel, Reynolds won a sharp engagement with the Scottish horse at the River Coquet, denying them the fords and forcing the main body of the Scottish advance west toward Preston. There, Reynolds led the northern cavalry and shattered the Scottish right flank. When the battle was over, Cromwell congratulated Reynolds on his success: the only time the two men spoke. According to John Lambert, Reynolds declared: "We have won the war for you, sir; you must win the peace for us." Cromwell replied: "Sir, I fear you burn too hot for any peace these mortal hands could frame."
Events would prove Cromwell correct. Even with Charles I in prison, Parliament continued to attempt to negotiate with the king. From his regimental camp in Yorkshire, Reynolds drafted yet more petitions and pamphlets calling for new elections, and declaring that "a nation that hath fought a war against tyranny cannot be governed by men who bargain with it." Instead, the New Model purged Parliament of its moderate members, leaving a rump loyal only to the Army. This Rump Parliament tried, convicted, and beheaded Charles: a momentous historical act that Reynolds witnessed with grim satisfaction, and of which he wrote Elizabeth: "Would that all the men we slew, these past eight years, had so richly deserved their end."
But even at this moment of triumph, Reynolds sensed - correctly - that the purge of Parliament marked the end of his great dream. No new and better world lay on the far shore of all this horror: only military dictatorship. A few weeks later, Cromwell arrested John Lilburne; in a pamphlet arguing that the arrest was illegal, Reynolds asked plaintively, "Shall all our friends have died only so that Honest John can face the rack before a different pack of knaves?" When Leveller troops mutinied at Banbury, Cromwell promised them that force would not be used, but then ordered a night attack and had the ringleaders executed. The dead included Captain William Thompson, who had fought with Reynolds at Naseby. "Better I had died in the clean wind of that morn," Reynolds told his diary, "than lived to see this foulness. What cause have I now for living? I have blackened my soul with all these years of blood, and in the end, 'twas all for a cheap jape." In July of 1649, there is good evidence that Reynolds suffered a mental breakdown, and perhaps even attempted suicide. Certainly, a letter to Elizabeth from that month reads very like a suicide note: asking her pardon for his long absence, and for her prayers in many years to come. Reynolds' diary then goes silent for several days, resuming on July 21 with nine words: "All is grace. The empty tomb. No more despair."
It would prove a difficult promise to keep. In late August 1649, less than a month after his breakdown, Reynolds and his regiment - by now a mix of officers and sergeants from Cambridgeshire who had served with him in the first civil war, and of the Yorkshire cavalry troopers whom Reynolds had raised in the second war - were ordered to Ireland. Reynolds' diary is a crucial primary source for the notorious sack of Drogheda. He wrote, in the exhausted shorthand that he often used after battles: "Ordered to assault with second wave. Gave short speech: God, liberty, Good Old Cause, save us all from menace of Rome. Hard to believe now, save for the last. Climbed over bodies of first wave heaped waist-high at breach in walls. No-quarter order received - drove defenders to ground in church - set church ablaze - shot burning men as they fled - heads displayed on guildhall. Told men no raping - do not believe other colonels gave such orders. Thank God these folk are Papists. Could not bear it otherwise, not again." In his letter to Elizabeth, Reynolds wrote: "We will redeem this country. God grant that some Irish yet breathe to be redeemed, when we are done with it."
His faith clearly waned as the campaign continued. At Wexford, Reynolds led one of the regiments that stormed the town, and recorded in his diary the sight of hundreds of bodies floating, "silent," in the River Slaney. He was not aware, at the time of the attack, that the town's garrison was in negotiations with Cromwell; when he learned of this afterward, Reynolds wrote furiously to old comrades in England that the Army had been "made the instrument, all unawares, of our Commonwealth's disgrace." A few months later, Reynolds lost almost a quarter of his regiment to typhus while in winter quarters, including several sergeants who had served with him since Edgehill in 1642. His diary entry for 11 January, 1650, reads simply: "Why? Why, why, why, why, why? Why do I bury him in this bog, after all these years? I can fathom nothing of this. I am alone in the dark, and all is shifting sand beneath me." The following spring, Reynolds' troopers were ordered dismounted to assault the walls of Clonmel, and they were driven back at the cost of hundreds more dead. Reynolds was wounded in the leg - the same leg he had nearly lost at Marston Moor - and when he had recuperated enough to walk, he struggled to Cromwell's tent to know why his men's lives had been squandered. He found that Cromwell had left Ireland the previous day to put down yet another Scots revolt: this time in support of Charles II, the exiled boy-king. "We killed the boy's father," Reynolds wrote to Elizabeth, "and thought that was an end of it. But the father had a son. All these fathers, dead at Drogheda and Wexford, they all have sons also. Where can it end?"
The answer seemed ever more uncertain. True, organized Irish resistance crumbled. At Scarrifholis, Reynolds' regiment played a tangential role in destroying Irish forces in Ulster; at Knocknaclashy, his troopers wore down Irish pike squares with repeated volleys of pistol-fire until the foe was disorganized enough that the New Model cavalry could charge with the sword. "Led from the front and shot nine men to-day," Reynolds noted in his diary. "One in the groin, and I could hear him scream for a long time. Took pains to run him through when we charged afterward, and end his suffering." As the Irish Confederacy collapsed and the enemy fled to hills and mountains to continue the fight by guerilla warfare, Reynolds and his regiment were assigned to enforce what would today be described as a "free-fire zone" in County Wicklow: any remaining Catholic Irish were to be killed or chased off, and any foodstores or structures were to be put to the torch, in preparation for Protestant colonization. Reynolds' diary, in this period, becomes exhausted and curt: "Burned: 4 houses. Killed: 3 men. Interned for deportation: 7 men, 11 women, 9 children. Did not burn the barley - horses need it. God, God, God." Such missions would take up the last eighteen months of his life.
But Morgan Reynolds was also notable for another reason: he was one of a very few full colonels in the New Model Army who was still, quite publicly and unrepentantly, a political Leveller. The last two years of his life, which were spent almost entirely on campaign in Ireland, offer some evidence of the seething conspiracies and counter-conspiracies that lay beneath the surface of Parliamentary rule. Only a few letters between Reynolds and John Hewson - the Parliamentary governor of Dublin, a political radical and former shoemaker with whom John Lilburne had once been an apprentice - survive. Those that do, in concert with Reynolds' cautious diary entries, reveal a startling truth: the Parliamentary army in Ireland, rife with disease and dissension, was also host to a Leveller cabal that kept the Agreement of the People alive among the rank-and-file. As Reynolds' moral disgust (and strategic qualms) with the unending campaign in Ireland mounted, so too did his audacity. "A generation of England's finest flowers shall drown in this Papist bog," he warned Hewson in a surviving letter, "and such godly and decent men shall never again be seen. What we lose here can never be recovered." What exactly the cabal intended to do remains murky - but there is some evidence that Reynolds was in contact with Edward Sexby, and so it is not out of the question that their ultimate goal encompassed the death of Oliver Cromwell.
But Reynolds' circle was not the only conspiracy within the army in Ireland. Letters from Sir Hardress Waller to his superiors in London indicate the existence of a counter-cabal, founded by Henry Ireton and anchored by army grandees, that was bent on curbing the spread of Leveller ideology within the army. Morgan Reynolds was clearly known to this group, and they understood the threat that he posed to the stability of Cromwell's regime. It is in this context that we must read Reynolds' final orders from army command: instructing him to proceed, alone, to an isolated tower in Connaught for briefing on a matter of "the most profound consequence." Official records indicate that, in a matter of hours before or after that rendezvous at Aughleam, Colonel Morgan Reynolds was killed in an ambush by Irish rebels. It has been debated ever since whether Reynolds was, in fact, assassinated by the faction within the army that aligned with Cromwell and the grandees. The best evidence for such a conspiracy is surely Reynolds' last letter to Elizabeth, in which he seems entirely aware of his immanent death. "I remember London, when we were young," Reynolds wrote. "And how I would come to your window, and know the touch of your skin. I shall never touch it more, now. I have spent too little time in your company, for I did not know how brief my time was to be. But I could not have loved you any more than I did; nor could any man. You are all the joy I have ever known or needed. And when my day comes, I shall climb your window one last time, and wait there - in the still and the dark - until that hour when we shall never more be parted."
Morgan Reynolds died, sword in hand, on 27 October 1651. He was buried in Westport, where his grave was destroyed in the rebellion of 1798. Elizabeth Reynolds never remarried, and after her death and the Restoration, Reynolds' lands passed to the Earl of Sandwich. His name is little known, today, nor much remembered; only a few legal and military historians pore over the details of his life. Upon his tomb, before it was defaced, Elizabeth had a single verse from Isaiah inscribed: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever."
Cause of death: Killed in battle near Aughleam, Connaught, in Ireland, 27 October 1651. Historians have debated ever since whether Irish rebels or agents of Oliver Cromwell were responsible.