Levellers

Levellers. A popular democratic movement which emerged fully in 1647, though its leading pamphleteers, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, had campaigned earlier for specific rights and reforms. The Levellers' basic principle was that all men and women are born equal, and are rightfully subject to no authority except by agreement and consent. Their so-called ‘Large Petition’ of March 1647 confronted Parliament with a wide range of grievances, but was burned by the common hangman in May. By then the New Model Army was defying Parliament's threat to disband it, so the Levellers set about indoctrinating its newly elected agitators. They made some converts, notably Edward Sexby, but most soldiers remained loyal to their commanders. They therefore persuaded six cavalry regiments to adopt new agents or agitators, and through them brought a revolutionary ‘Agreement of the People’ before the army's general council in the famous Putney debates. Implying the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, the agreement proposed that biennial, popularly elected parliaments should wield supreme authority, subject only to certain ‘native rights’ such as liberty of conscience and equality before the law, which the sovereign people reserved to themselves. Unwisely, they accompanied their agitation among the soldiery with incitements to mutiny. They suspended their opposition during the second civil war, but when the Commonwealth was established their leaders (Walwyn excepted) denounced it virulently in Englands New Chains Discovered and other tracts. They also raised a new and more serious mutiny in the army. After its suppression they lost coherence as an organized movement, and some of them later intrigued with the royalists against Cromwell's Protectorate.

The Levellers' claim to be true democrats has been challenged, because they later qualified their demands for manhood suffrage by excluding those who subsisted by alms or worked as servants in a master's household; but this modification was tactical rather than principled. It was their principle, however, to preserve property, and not ‘level men's estates’; here they differed from the self-styled True Levellers, or Diggers.

Austin Woolrych