Levellers

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See Levellers (disambiguation) for alternative meanings.

The Levellers were a mid 17th century English political movement, who came to prominence during the English Civil Wars. They had no centralised manifesto at all and it is hard to tell that there was a Leveller movement until 1649 when much of their support had dissipated. They gathered most of their support from the City Companies in London and enjoyed connections with members of the New Model Army like Edward Sexby.

1 Brief history
2 Timeline
3 Other usage
4 See also
5 Further reading
6 Footnotes

[edit] Brief history

[edit] Origin of name

They were labelled 'Levellers' by their enemies, who claimed that they were intent on bringing all down to the lowest common level. This was a charge that they vehemently denied, but ironically after their arrest and imprisonment in 1649 four of the 'Leveller' leaders- Thomas Prince, William Walwyn and John Lilburne signed a manifesto which called themselves Levellers.

[edit] Political ambitions

The Levellers had no coherent agenda. Before 1649, there is no record of their having sat down together to develop a manifesto. However, they were committed broadly to the abolition of corruption within the Parliamentary and judicial process, toleration of religious differences, the translation of law into the common tongue, and some kind of expansion of the suffrage. These aims fluctuated. Some Levellers like John Lilburne argued that the English Common law, particularly Magna Carta, were the foundation of English rights and liberties, but others, like William Walwyn, compared Magna Carta to a 'mess of potage'.

[edit] Secular foundation

Levellers tended to hold fast to a notion of "natural rights" that had been violated by the king's side in the Civil Wars. At the Putney Debates in 1647, Colonel Rainborough defended natural rights as being coextensive with the law of God. Michael Mendle has demonstrated the development of Leveller ideas from elements of early Parliamentarian thought as expressed by men such as Henry Parker.

[edit] Timeline

In July 1645, John Lilburne was imprisoned for denouncing Members of Parliament who lived in comfort while the common soldiers fought and died for the Parliamentary cause. His offence was slandering William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons, whom he accused of corresponding with Royalists. He was freed in October after a petition requesting his release, and signed by over two thousand leading London citizens, was presented to the House of Commons.

In July 1646, Lilburne was imprisoned again, this time in the Tower of London, for denouncing his former army commander the Earl of Manchester as a Royalist sympathiser, because he had protected an officer who had been charged with treason. It was the campaigns to free Lilburne from prison which spawned the movement known as the Levellers. Richard Overton was arrested in August 1646 for publishing a pamphlet attacking the House of Lords. During his imprisonment he wrote an influential Leveller Manifesto, An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny.^[1]

The Levellers in the New Model Army elected Agitators from each regiment to represent them. It was agreed by the Agitators and senior officers in the Army (nicknamed "Grandees") to hold some debates on the issues which divided them. These debates are known as the Putney Debates, and they were held in St. Mary's Church, Putney, in the county of Surrey, between October 28 and November 11, 1647. The Agitators were assisted by some civilians, and the Grandees were represented by Henry Ireton (son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell), Oliver Cromwell, and some others. Each party put forward a pamphlet to lay out their position. The Levellers' pamphlet, written by civilians, was entitled Agreement of the People^[2]. The Grandees' pamphlet, endorsed by the General Council of the Army, was written by Henry Ireton, and entitled The Heads of the Proposals^[3]. It put forward a constitutional manifesto which included the preservation of property rights and maintenance of the privileges of the gentry. The debates help to throw light on the areas on which supporters of the Parliamentarian side agreed and those on which they differed. For example, Ireton asked whether the Levellers' phrase "according to the number of the inhabitants" gave a foreigner just arrived in England and resident in a property the right to vote? He extends this argument to say that a person must have a "permanent interest of this kingdom" to be entitled to vote. He then argued that "permanent interest" means owning property, which is where he and the Levellers disagreed. To modern eyes the debates seem to draw heavily on the Bible to lay out certain basic principles, but this is to be expected in an age still racked by religious upheavals in the aftermath of the reformation, and particularly in an army where soldiers were, in part, selected for their religious zeal.

The Corkbush Field rendezvous on November 17, 1647, was the first of three rendezvous to take place as agreed in the Putney Debates. The Army commanders Thomas Fairfax and Cromwell were worried at the strength of support that the Levellers had in the Army, so they decided to impose The Heads of the Proposals as the army's manifesto instead of the Levellers' Agreement of the People. When some refused to accept this, because they wanted the army to adopt the Levellers' document, they were arrested, and one of the ringleaders, Private Richard Arnold, was executed. At the other two rendezvous, the troops who were summoned agreed to the manifesto without further protest.

The Levellers' largest petition, entitled To The Right Honovrable The Commons Of England, was presented to Parliament on September 11, 1648 after amassing signatories including about a third of all Londoners.^[4]

On October 30, 1648, Thomas Rainsborough was killed. He was a Member of Parliament and also a Leveller leader who had spoken at the Putney Debates. His funeral was the occasion for a large Leveller-led demonstration in London, with thousands of mourners wearing the Levellers' ribbons of sea-green and bunches of rosemary for remembrance in their hats.

In January 1649, Charles I of England was tried and executed for treason against the people. In February, the Grandees banned petitions to Parliament by soldiers. In March, eight Leveller troopers went to the Commander-in-Chief of the New Model Army, Thomas Fairfax, and demanded the restoration of the right to petition. Five of them were cashiered out of the army.

Three hundred infantrymen of Colonel John Hewson's regiment, who declared that they would not serve in Ireland until the Levellers' programme had been realised, were cashiered without arrears of pay, which was the threat that had been used to quell the mutiny at the Corkbush Field rendezvous.

In the Bishopsgate mutiny soldiers of the regiment of Colonel Edward Whalley stationed in Bishopsgate London made demands similar to those of Hewson's regiment; they were ordered out of London. When they refused to go, fifteen soldiers were arrested and court martialled, of whom six were sentenced to death. Of this six, five were subsequently pardoned while Robert Lockier (or Lockyer), a former Levellers agitator, was hanged April 27, 1649. "At his burial a thousand men, in files, preceded the corpse, which was adorned with bunches of rosemary dipped in blood; on each side rode three trumpeters, and behind was led the trooper’s horse, covered with mourning; some thousands of men and women followed with black and green ribbons on their heads and breasts, and were received at the grave by a numerous crowd of the inhabitants of London and Westminster." ^[5]

In 1649, Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton were imprisoned in the Tower of London by the Council of State (see above). It was while the leaders of the Levellers were being held in the Tower that they wrote an outline of the reforms the Levellers wanted, in a pamphlet entitled An Agreement Of The Free People Of England (written on May 1, 1649). It includes reforms that have since been made law in England such as the right to silence, and others, such as an elected judiciary, that have not.^[6]

Commemoration plaque for two Levellers in Gloucester Green, Oxford.

Shortly afterwards Cromwell attacked the "Banbury mutineers", 400 troopers who supported the Levellers and who were commanded by Captain William Thompson.^[7] Several mutineers were killed in the skirmish, but Captain Thompson escaped, only to be killed in another skirmish near the Digger community at Wellingborough. The three other leaders – William Thompson's brother, Corporal Perkins, and John Church – were hanged on May 17, 1649. This destroyed the Leveller's support base in the New Model Army, which by this time was the major power in the land. Although Walwyn and Overton were released from the Tower, and Lilburne was tried and acquitted, the Leveller cause had effectively been crushed.

[edit] Other usage

In 1724 there was a rising against enclosures in Galloway, and a number of men who took part in it were called “Levellers” or “Dykebreakers” (A. Lang, History of Scotland, vol. iv). The word was also used in Ireland during the eighteenth century to describe a secret revolutionary society similar to the Whiteboys.