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. By 1647 the New Model Army was defying Parliament's threat to disband it, so the Levellers set about indoctrinating its newly elected agitators. They persuaded six cavalry regiments to bring 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. 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. They also raised a new and more serious mutiny in the army but after its suppression they lost coherence as an organized movement.