No way to the old way:
a contemporary view of religious radicalism ©
The Levellers were an informal alliance of pamphleteers and
army agitators who emerged during the upsurge of political and
religious freethinking unleashed by the conflict between
Parliament and king in the 1640s. The most prominent Levellers
were John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, John
Wildman, Edward Sexby and Colonel Thomas Rainborough. By the
end of the first civil war in 1646 their ideas had come to
dominate the thinking of soldiers and officers in the
all-powerful New Model Army, and the Levellers briefly held
the balance of political power.
Their programme - published as The Agreement of the People
in 1647 - was sweepingly democratic. They held (in the words
of Richard Overton) that 'by natural birth all men are equally
and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and freedom', and
that government should be a contract between equal citizens.
They called for a secular republic, with separation of
legislative and executive powers and abolition of the House of
Lords; equality before the law; the right to vote for all
except beggars and servants; free trade; abolition of
censorship, freedom of speech and complete religious
toleration.
In March 1647 the Army's rank-and-file began to elect
agitators to voice their demands for radical political reform.
Cromwell, Ireton and Fairfax, the army's high command, were
deeply alarmed, but needed the Army's co-operation to maintain
control over Parliament and the country. The result was one of
the most remarkable contests of the civil war, as ordinary
soldiers sat down with generals in a church in Putney to
deliberate the rights and wrongs of revolution. At this
meeting Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainborough argued the case
for universal suffrage as the only way of ensuring the consent
of the governed:
I think the poorest he that is in England hath a
life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I
think it's clear that every man that is to live under a
government ought first by his own consent to put himself
under that government.
Over the next year the outbreak of the second civil war and
the despatch of part of the Army to fight in Ireland helped
the generals to re-established their authority, and by 1649
Leveller influence in the New Model was waning. An attempted
mutiny by radical regiments in Berkshire was crushed at
Burford church, and three Leveller soldiers - Corporals Church
and Perkins and Cornet Thompson - shot by Cromwell's men. John
Lilburne was tried for high treason, convinced the jury of his
innocence and was acquitted - only to be re-tried by
Parliament a year later, convicted and sent into lifelong
exile in the Netherlands.
But Leveller ideas lived on in the profoundly influential
'natural right' theories of John Locke, in Rousseau's social
contract, and in the thinking of democrats ever
since. |
