C17th: The Levellers – shaping an epoch of revolution

The Levellers were early christian radicals whose ideas helped to shape the American and French revolutions, and inspired generations of socialists.

The right to a say in government

The issues raised in the historic conflict between Charles I, resting his claim to govern Britain on the divine right of kings, and Parliament – representing, however imperfectly, a demand for the wider sharing of power – concerned the use and abuse of state power, the right of the governed to a say in their government, and the nature of political freedom.

‘They found spokesmen in John Lilburn, Richard Overton, William Wallwyn, Gerard Winstanley and others…’

The Levellers grew out of this conflict. They represented the aspirations of working people who suffered under the persecution of kings, landowners and the priestly class, and they spoke for those who experienced the hardships of poverty and deprivation. They developed and campaigned, first with Cromwell and then against him, for a political and constitutional settlement of the civil war which would embody principles of political freedom, anticipating by a century and a half the ideas of the American and French revolutions.

Freedom of speech

The Levellers found spokesmen and campaigners in John Lilburn, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, Gerrard Winstanley the True Leveller or Digger, and others. These men were brilliant pamphleteers enjoying a short-lived freedom to print, publish and circulate their views at a time when censorship was temporarily in abeyance, and printing presses newly cheap and easy to set up.

They developed their own traditions of free discussion and vigorous petitioning and used them to formulate and advance their demands.

The Agreement of the People

A Leveller constitution: The 1649 Agreement of the Free People of England

The Levellers’ demands were encapsulated in a remarkable document called An Agreement of the People outlining a new and democratic constitution for Britain. The preamble to the third draft of this Agreement, published on May 1 1649, states that:

We, the free People of England, to whom God hath given hearts, means and opportunity to effect the same, do with submission to his wisdom, in his name, and desiring the equity thereof may be to his praise and glory, agree to ascertain our Government to abolish all arbitrary Power, and to set bounds and limits both to our Supreme, and all Subordinate Authority, and remove all known Grievances.

And accordingly do declare and publish to all the world, that we are agreed as followeth:

‘The people’s sovereign rights were only loaned to Parliament, which should be elected on a wide popular franchise…’

1. That the Supreme Authority of England and the Territories therewith incorporate, shall be and reside henceforward in a Representative of the people consisting of four hundred persons, but no more; in the choice of whom (according to naturall right) all men of the age of one and twenty yeers and upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served with the late King in Arms or voluntary Contributions), shall have their voices…

‘Freeborn Englishmen’

The Levellers held themselves to be freeborn Englishmen, entitled to the protection of a natural law of human rights which they believed to originate in the will of God – rights vested in the people to whom alone true sovereignty belonged. These sovereign rights were only loaned to Parliament, which should be elected on a wide popular franchise and hold the people’s rights in trust.

The Levellers’ debt to the Bible

Oliver Cromwell: a deeply religious man, who like the Levellers drew political inspiration from the Bible

As well as reflecting the clash of interests between 17th century haves and have-nots, the Levellers’ ideas can be traced right back to the teachings of the Bible. The conflict in the Old Testament between the kings and the prophets, between temporal power and the preaching of righteousness, lay at the heart of the arguments in the English revolution – both the one between the King and Parliament, and that between Cromwell and the Levellers.The deep conviction to be found in the Old Testament that conscience is God-given, or derives from nature or reason and must be supreme over man-made law, was the foundation of the Levellers’ political creed.

They noticed that when Jesus Christ, the Carpenter of Nazareth, was asked by one of the scribes what commandment was the first of all, he replied that after the commandment to ‘Love thy God’, the second was to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these’.

‘The relation of Master and Servant has no ground in the New Testament…’

The Levellers took from these texts the idea of man’s relationship with God as a person-to-person relationship, neither needing nor requiring us to accept the intervention of an exclusive priestly class which claims a monopoly right to speak on behalf of the Almighty – still less of a king claiming a divine right to rule.

Leveller pamphlets abounded with religious quotations. As they read it, divine teaching expressly prohibited the domination of man by man. As one Leveller put it:

The relation of Master and Servant has no ground in the New Testament; in Christ there is neither bond nor free… The common people have been kept under blindness and ignorance, and have remained servants and slaves to the nobility and gentry…

A ‘common storehouse for all’

A detail from an anti-Ranter pamphlet, summing up the religious radicals’ rejection of the ‘old ways’

The Diggers, or True Levellers as they described themselves, went even further and advocated absolute human equality – including equality between men and women – and at the same time anticipated today’s environmental and green movements in seeing the earth as a precious ‘common storehouse for all’. The Digger leader, Gerard Winstanley, wrote in his pamphlet The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced, published on April 26th 1649.

In the beginning of Time, the great Creator, Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes and Man, the Lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another … And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Storehouse for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured…

The Digger Gerard Winstanely refusing to doff his cap in deference to General Fairfax (contemporary cartoon).

Unsurprisingly, the ideas of the Levellers were considered extremely dangerous by those with a vested interest in the preservation of privilege, property and power.By 1650 the Levellers’ movement had been effectively crushed. Cromwell’s Commonwealth represented a formidable advance compared to the reign of King Charles which preceded it. But it did not – and in terms of its historical and industrial development probably could not – adopt the principles that Lilburn, Overton Walwyn, and still less Winstanley, were advocating. Ten years later came the Restoration of Charles II. In 1688 Britain witnessed the shadowy beginnings of a constitutional monarchy which had little in common with real political democracy.

Declaration of Independence

A Leveller manifesto: the text of a speech by William Everard to the Army ‘Grandees’ in 1649.

But the elimination of the Levellers as an organised political movement could not obliterate the ideas which they had propagated. From that day to this the same principles of religious and political freedom and equality have reappeared again and again.When the American Congress set out their political principles in the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776, the ideas were taken straight from the English Levellers a century and a quarter before:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the governed.

‘Politics is really about education, not about propaganda.’

The Americans had also drawn heavily on the writings of Tom Paine, who was a direct heir of the Leveller tradition, and whose Rights of Man also won him a place in the history of the French Revolution (he was elected a Deputy to the first French Constituent Assembly surmmoned to implement the principles of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’). The English reformers of the early 19th century also drew many of their ideas and language from the Levellers’ mix of Christian teaching, religious and political dissent, social equality and democracy. It fired the imagination of generations of Congregationalists, trade union pioneers, early co-operators, Chartists, and socialists.

And so it will always be. For politics is really about education, not about propaganda. It is about teaching more than management. It is about ideas and values and not only about Acts of Parliament, political institutions, and ministerial office. The Levellers, thank God, still teach us that.

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Related Links

Articles

• The Masquerading Monarch – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/charlesii_masq_01.shtml
• Oliver Cromwell – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/cromwell_01.shtml
• The Civil War in the West – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/west_01.shtml
• Choosing Sides in the English Civil War – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/choosingsides_01.shtml
• Was the American Revolution Inevitable? – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/american_revolution_01.shtml

Multimedia Zone

• Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Journey – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/launch_ani_bonnie_prince.shtml
• Kings and Queens Through Time – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/launch_tl_kings_queens.shtml
• Weapons Through Time – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/launch_gms_weapons_thru_time.shtml

Historic Figures

• The Levellers – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/levellers.shtml
• Charles I – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/charles_i_king.shtml
• Oliver Cromwell – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/cromwell_oliver.shtml

Timelines

• British Timeline – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/launch_tl_british.shtml

BBC Links

• BBC News: Cromwell-Hero or Villain? – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/326121.stm
• BBC Radio 4: Voices of the Powerless-Civil War – http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/voices/voices_chester.shtml

External Web Links

• The Cromwell Association – http://www.cromwell.argonet.co.uk/
• British Civil Wars and Commonwealth – http://www.skyhook.co.uk/civwar/
• Spartacus: The Levellers – http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/STUlevellers.htm

About the author

Tony Benn is MP for Chesterfield, and Labour’s longest serving MP, having been first elected (for Bristol South) in 1950. He campaigned for the right not to inherit his father’s title and thus sit in the House of Commons, and has always been on the radical Left of the Labour Party. He was three times a cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Published on BBC History: 2001-06-01
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Actually it wasn’t that way at all, and it is an injustice to the debates to pretend that they were. In fact, they were much more interesting and far more subtle. As CB Macpherson showed more than 40 years ago, the Putney debates are an intense, undistracted and potent discussion about who should be included in the franchise and who should not. There were, Macpherson argued, four main positions at Putney. Position number one limited the vote to owners of freehold land worth 40 shillings a year and freemen of trading corporations; this was the position supported by Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, the key officers at Putney. Position two limited the vote to all male householders assessed for relief of the poor, excluding servants and those receiving alms; this was the position supported by the Agreement of the People, the army manifesto that formed the initial agenda at Putney. Position three gave the vote to all men except servants and alms-receivers; this was supported by most of the Leveller participants at Putney. Position four gave the vote to all men except criminal and delinquents; this position was supported by some Levellers at Putney. Yet even Rainborough makes clear at one stage in the debate that he does not want to create a democracy in which “the poor” outvote “the people”. According to Macpherson, in the England of the 1640s, position one would have given the vote to 212,000 men: position two to 375,000; position three to 417,000; and position four to around 1,170,000. Macpherson has had his critics down the years, but his essential schema remains an essential starting-point for an understanding of what did happen at Putney – and what didn’t.

So while we should be inspired by the words of Rainborough, Sexby and the rest, we should also be inspired, albeit in a different way, by the words of Ireton and Cromwell too. For what rings unbroken down the centuries since 1647 is less the absolute finality of the argument (which never existed) but the quality and practicality of the discussion. If only all politics could be as incisive as this. Right from the start, when Ireton asks whether the Agreement of the People implies that the franchise should be given to those who had previously had it or to every inhabitant – and is immediately told by the civilian Leveller Maximilian Petty that “those who have lost their birthright”, ie servants and alms-takers, were excluded – we are witnesses to an absolutely practical debate about the limits as well as the principles of democracy. I know nothing in English political history to match the potent clarity of the Putney debates. Ever since I acted in a reconstruction of the debates at university – in which no less a luminary of 17th century history than Christopher Hill also took part – it has always seemed to me that notetaker Clarke is the true hero of Putney.

Always assuming that he got it right, of course. Because actually Clarke may not have done. As always, the clerk has the last word. If you read Cromwell’s words at Putney they are measured and serious. But when the important Leveller Richard Overton looked back on the events of October 1647 a couple of years later, he described Cromwell’s conduct as “insolent and furious”, not at all the image that emerges from Clarke’s transcript. “You shall scarce speak to Cromwell about anything but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes and call God to record,” Overton wrote. “He will weep, howl and repent even while he doth smite you under the fifth rib.”

So don’t romanticise Putney. It was a tense and eloquent argument about where the limits to radical ideas should be drawn in the real world as it appeared to those who took part. It took place in exceptional times. It was also a power struggle. And in any power struggle someone wins and someone loses. “Any man that makes a bargain, and does find afterwards ’tis for the worse, yet is bound to stand to it,” insists Ireton on November 1, 1647. The wonderfully but in context misleadingly named London Leveller John Wildman replies bitterly that: “They were cozened, as we are like to be.” Those who demand the radical reform of our constitution in 2007 need to remember everything about Putney, not just the inspiring bits. The true lessons of 1647 are that in the end it all comes down to practicalities and power. Gordon Brown is a leader who simultaneously puts his hand on his breast while smiting his opponents in the ribs. The message for today’s constitutional reformers is the same. They are not going to create heaven on earth. But with luck you may establish something that will work and be honoured for centuries to come.