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In Our Time
The Levellers
00:55:32
The political movement during the English Civil War committed to a new idea of equality.
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- [00:00]
Ted Vallance
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
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- [01:10]
Claire Jackson
Hey, it's Jacob Goldstein from Business History. In our new series American Genius, we tell the stories of three great writers who changed the way business works in America. Our first episode is about Benjamin Franklin, who among many other things was a
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Ted Vallance
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Misha Glenny
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Claire Jackson
He's writing this much later in his life, consciously creating this image of himself. And I do want to emphasize how unusual this model is at the time, this self made man myth. Because you don't want to be self made. It's low class to be self made.
- [01:48]
Ted Vallance
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Claire Jackson
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- [02:55]
Misha Glenny
The Crossed Oise Podcast Festival is back bigger and better this year in Sheffield from Thursday the 2nd to Sunday the 5th of July 2026. BBC Sounds and Radio 4 Fringe are treating podcast listeners to an exciting lineup of shows, all for free, including In Our Time. We'll be recording at the Montgomery Theatre on the 4th of July with a special edition of In Our Time on Casablanca. That's Bogart and Bergman and much more. Visit Crossedwires Live Fringe for the full list of programmes and how to get free tickets. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello for really, I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he. That simple idea of equality was what one group of political radicals were calling for during arguably the bloodiest period of English history, the Civil War. They became known as the Levellers, a group who pushed for a new constitution, an extended franchise, but popular sovereignty and religious toleration. The Levellers printed pamphlets, signed petitions and took to the streets in their thousands. Though the movement itself may have been short lived, the arguments that the Levellers made have inspired and challenged generations since. With me to discuss the Levellers are Theresa Beijan, professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College, University of Oxford, Ted Vallance, professor of History at the University of Roehampton and Claire Jackson, Honorary professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Hall, Claire Jackson. The Levellers emerged during the mid-1640s. Can you set the scene for us? What was England like at this time?
- [04:54]
Claire Jackson
So I think the moment we'll be talking about most today, when the Leveler ideas, the movement, the voices I heard most prominently are the year 1645 to 1647. And this is the point at which, militarily, the English Parliament has been victorious in the first Civil War. Parliament had been fighting the King Charles I since 1642, but as we know, as much today as in the 17th century, wars aren't decided permanently on the battlefield. There needs to be truces, ceasefires and some kind of peace settlement in terms of why Parliament and King had gone to war. Charles I had acceded to the thrones of Scotland, England and Ireland in 1625. He was a deeply authoritarian monarch, believed very strongly in the divine right of kings, did not really believe in the right of others to counsel him, and also had a specific vision of the Church that the national Church The Church of England that many people found unacceptably Popish. And Charles found it very difficult to work with the English Parliament. He had embarked on a controversial decade long period of personal rule through the 1630s. Actually, opposition to Charles didn't emerge first in England. It emerged first in Scotland in the late 1630s. That's where arms had first been taken up against Charles and it had necessitated him calling the English parliament in 1640, 1641, there was then an Irish rebellion and finally King and Parliament went to war in England in 1642. And that is, as you said, a really bloody traumatic war. I think somehow in our national consciousness, it probably doesn't have the prominence that it perhaps deserves. But as a proportion of the population of the British Isles, more people lost their lives in the 1640s than in World War I and World War II combined. But, and this is the point in 1645 where Parliament has won the war but now has to reach some kind of settlement. And you begin to see the fracturing, ironically or perhaps inevitably, within Parliament, between a Presbyterian majority in Parliament who can envisage some kind of settlement with the King that is still very much along a traditional lines of King, Lords and Commons, but a rising, what's often referred to as independent force within Parliament, coming from the sectarian congregations, as well as an army that feels it is now being undervalued. There are massive pay, there's a lack of clarity about things like indemnity for soldiers afterwards. Parliament, the Presbyterian majority is very keen to disband it as quickly as possible. And I think this is the army that has won the war for Parliament. But there's rising resentment. They feel that they have not only a right but a kind of responsibility now to act on people's behalf. And this is the sort of fertile ground into which Leveller ideas come from.
- [07:29]
Misha Glenny
Before we get into the ideas and the nature of the movement, tell us about the name Levellers. Where does that come from? What does it actually mean?
- [07:38]
Claire Jackson
Well, it's like most names of most groups, it originally starts as a derogatory term. It's a nickname. One of the most prominent Levellers, John Lilburn, later claims that it was Ayrton Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son in law, who fixed it on them after the Putney debates. I'm sure we'll come to them later in 1647. It's meant to imply very deliberately social levelling, a desire to bring everything down to a parity. The Levellers themselves denied that this was really what they were about. But it evoked ideas of Enclosure riots, rebels. It was taken up very quickly. So November 1647, a Royalist newspaper, Mercurius Pragmaticus, calls its readers to the attention of the despicable and desperate knot of men who endeavor to cast down and level the enclosures of nobility, gentry and property, to make us all even. So that every jack should vie with a gentleman and every gentleman be made a jack.
- [08:29]
Misha Glenny
Thank you very much, Claire. Theresa Bejan. One of the key figures that Claire's just mentioned in this story is this man, John Lilburn. Who was he?
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Theresa Bejan
So it would be wrong to say that Lilburn was the leader of the Leveller movement in any kind of exclusive way, but I do think it's right to say that without Lilburn, and without specifically his pre existing celebrity as a Puritan martyr, nothing like the Leveler movement as we know it, would have emerged. So, basically, Lilburn is the second son of a downwardly mobile gentry family in the north, and he makes his way to London in the 1630s to take up an apprenticeship in the cloth trade. But while he's there, he sort of falls pretty quickly into this radical sectarian subculture and he gets involved with clandestine printing and particularly this kind of Puritan critique of the Episcopal Church of England, so the rule of bishops. And in that capacity, Lilburn finds himself put on trial in 1638 before the prerogative Court of Star Chamber. In his trial, he refuses to acknowledge the authority of the court, he refuses to swear the oath that they put to him. And for this and for printing, he is then sentenced to be whipped from Fleet Prison to Newcastle Yard, so about a distance of two miles. So he's whipped, publicly, pilloried and put in prison. And it's Lilburn's bravery in kind of meeting this punishment that turns him into just an absolute phenomenon. So he becomes known as Freeborn John. He really becomes the poster boy, if you will, for the cruelty of Star Chamber and the kind of excesses of Charles I's personal rule. And so what ends up happening in 1641 is that the Long Parliament orders Lilburn's release from prison as one of its very first acts. And so this really sets. Sets him on a kind of trajectory that will become important for us, I think.
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Misha Glenny
So can you walk us through how the Levellers understood equality? What was distinctive about it?
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Theresa Bejan
Well, I think that the idea of equality that becomes essential in Leveller arguments and Leveller practices is one that Lilburn really comes up with on the fly. In the summer of 1646, in the midst of one of his many legal battles. But basically, Lilburn invokes the natural and universal equality of human beings in the context of this court battle as having basically social and political implications. So in Lilburn's hands, we see the equality of human beings really for the first time, being cited as a kind of basis on which ordinary men and women can make political demands and specifically can demand to stand as equals with the privileged. In the way that that quote you read for us at the beginning shows, we take that kind of sense of equality as sort of obvious. But from the perspective of the history of political thought, it's not obvious at all. Although the idea that every human being was equal is a very ancient idea. You find it in law, you find it in Christianity and early modern natural law, theorizing it was mainly understood as a kind of assertion of, well, every human is somehow equally or indifferently subject to illegal authority, be it the Roman emperor, be it the Christian God, be it the natural law. What Lilburn does is sort of transform that into a kind of demand for social and political standing. So, just to quote for you, Lilburn's wonderful postscript containing a general proposition in the summer of 1646, he says that, quote, all and every particular and individual man and woman that ever breathed in the world, who are and were by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority and majesty, none of them having by nature any authority, dominion or magisterial power, one over above another, but by their mutual agreement or consent.
- [12:06]
Misha Glenny
So there was this focus on Lilburn, the character and Ted Valance. I ought to point out that you are wearing a T shirt with Lilburn on it and a Lilburn quote. But he wasn't the only leading figure in the Levelers, was he? So who else was involved?
- [12:21]
Ted Vallance
Absolutely not. And I'd actually like to come back to what Therese has just been talking about in terms of that quotation from Lilburn is a really useful one, because we can see Lilburn there talking about the equality of women and men, not just men. So you open with that evocative quote from Thomas Rainsborough about the poorest he. But it's not just the poorest he for the Levellers, it's the poorest he and the poorest she. Women are really important in this movement. In fact, we wouldn't be talking about John Lilburn's career as a Leveller were it not for his wife, Elizabeth Lilburn, because it's his wife, Elizabeth, who rides heavily pregnant from London to Oxford to save him from being executed by the Royalists for treason. So there's a glaring example of a woman Leveller intervening in a way which is absolutely fundamentally important.
- [13:07]
Misha Glenny
And presumably she succeeds.
- [13:09]
Ted Vallance
She succeeds. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So women are really important in terms of the organization of the movement. They're critically important in terms of supporting the petitioning campaigns, the printing campaigns that the Levellers get involved in. But there are a number of other male figures that we do associate with the level of movement and who have, I would say, equal importance with Lilbourne in terms of the thought of the movement.
- [13:34]
Misha Glenny
You just mentioned this man, Thomas Rainsborough. Who is he?
- [13:38]
Ted Vallance
So Rainsborough is an officer in the army, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, and he is really seen as one of the most supportive of the level of cause at Putney. It's interesting, though, that the words that he's actually speaking at Putney are words that previously appear in a pamphlet published by John Lilburn in 1646.
- [13:59]
Misha Glenny
Well, I wanted to ask you about that. We've heard about these freeborn rights that are inherent when you're born. But there's this document, Agreement to the People. Is that a sort of manifesto and what does it outline as rights?
- [14:14]
Ted Vallance
Yeah. So the Agreement of the People is a real, if you like, intellectual game changer. It's moving beyond the idea that your documents, like Magna Carta, for example, give people certain rights. This instead is a document which says that by the people establishing a new form of government, certain forms of rights, which are natural and innate and belong to all people, will be protected against any form of governmental infringement, whether that's by the executive or whether that's by the legislature. Now, we think this idea of the agreement of the people is introduced by a figure called John Wildman. And it's Wildman who is one of a few civilian figures, although referred to often as civilian figures, although we think that they probably mostly had served in the parliamentarian army themselves, who were involved with discussions of the army after the end of the Civil War. So once the King's been taken into the army's custody, the army starts to develop its own proposals for negotiation with the king. And what is going on within the army is a struggle between the rank and file and the officers. The officers are seen as wanting a softer piece. So figures like Cromwell, figures like Ireton, are seen as wanting to give away too much to Charles. On the other hand, you've got rank and file representatives, so called agitators, who are pushing for tougher negotiations, associations. And one of the things that they're really conscious of and they really want to protect is any risk of prosecution for actions undertaken in the Civil War. So they want indemnity. Now the problem with that, the practical problem that they face is how do we protect ourselves when a king in our constitution can basically overturn any kind of judgment through prerogative powers, or he can get a parliament to do it through and through statute law, or a parliament which is hostile to the army can do it through passing a law. So the agreement is a way of solving this conundrum, of creating a settlement which the king and Parliament cannot infringe. These certain fundamental rights, which include indemnity, but they also extend to liberty of conscience, which is critically important for puritans like Lilburn and for his fellow believers in extensive religious toleration, Richard Overton and William Wallin.
- [16:33]
Misha Glenny
Again, we're seeing these remarkable demands emerge in how are they being disseminated? Clare, you mentioned print earlier on. What's happening? I mean, we've had the printing press for almost 200 years now. What's happening with pamphlets, books and so on in this period?
- [16:52]
Claire Jackson
So the descriptor that's often used is an explosion in print that with the breakdown of civil authority, there's also a collapse in the state controls of the press. So before the Civil wars, if you wanted to publish anything lawfully, you had to submit it for pre publication approval. Obviously, as authority crumbles, there just isn't capacity to do that. So suddenly you see this explosion in the number of titles. Whereas maybe 450 titles were published a year in the 1630s, it's about 2000 in 1641 and it's over 4000 in 1642. Now that's not a quantitative exponential increase in the sheer amount of print, it's much more a shift towards cheap print that there's many, many more titles, they're shorter, they're sort of brief interjections. They might even just be single sheet, sort of broad sheets. I mean, as historians we're phenomenally lucky because we have some sense of the scale of this, thanks to one man, a London bookseller, George Thomason, who wanted to preserve the sheer output of the press, so bought as much as he possibly could and very conscientiously wrote the date of publication.
- [17:53]
Misha Glenny
So he's a contemporary, who's a contemporary, who's basically collecting them all.
- [17:56]
Claire Jackson
Over 22,000 of these tracts are in the British Library and that's enabled historians to sort of of sequence these debates. But print is straying into areas that were previously sacrosanct. You know, MPs speeches are suddenly being printed. And the Levelers are at the heart of this. I mean, a lot of them have got experience working in underground presses. So much of what they're about is. Is very textual. The source that Lilburn quotes most often, apart from the Bible, is Parliament's own book of declarations that it issued in March 1643. And he wants constantly, by the late 1640s to be showing how Parliament has betrayed the sort of things that went to war. It's also a very visual way of using print there engravings of Lilburn that you can purchase at this time. One is a standard sort of likeness and the other is a standard likeness behind bars. And that's the one that gets circulated to stir up support for his release when he's in prison. So there are paper bullets flying everywhere, if you like, as well as bullets on the battlefield.
- [18:50]
Misha Glenny
And one of the things they're also distributing is petitions. Tent valance. How were the Levellers using petitions? Because they're not quite like we understand petitions today, were they? No.
- [19:04]
Ted Vallance
And I think if we think of a petition today, we might think of it as a fairly kind of low level sort of political engagement or intervention. You know, you click on a link to sign an online petition and you think you've done your bit. That is not what they're doing in the 17th century. It's a lot higher risk, particularly the types of petitions that the Levelers are producing. So if you're producing a petition, you're supposed to be in a kind of supplicatory, humble position to the figures in authority that you're asking to resolve the matter of the petition too.
- [19:36]
Misha Glenny
And one of the things the Levellers didn't like doing was things like doffing their cap. So this symbolism was important.
- [19:42]
Ted Vallance
Yes. So that kind of symbolism also just the language of it. So the petitions that they're producing are very assertive and in fact, they are clearly saying to Parliament, we are in fact the people who should be able to command you to do what we're telling you to do. In this petition, a remonstrance of many thousand citizens says, we are the principals, you are our agents, so you should be doing what we tell you to. So it's reflecting the Leveller's political philosophy and that belief in popular sovereignty. But petitioning activity is also really important, kind of organizationally as well. So you have to think about these as exercises in mobilizing large numbers of people. These level of petitions are reputed to have tens of thousands of people signing them. The large petition of September 1648, 40,000 people were reported to have signed it, which would have been about 10% of the population of London at the time. Now, whether that's accurate or not, the Levellers are using these kinds of figures, again, to show that they have public opinion behind them. The other thing that you see the Levellers doing within these petitions is they are also broadening their appeal. They're not, if you like, just trying to speak to the converted. They're trying to reach out to other sorts of constituencies. So they're trying to appeal to more moderate parliamentarians some of the times in these petitions, they're trying to appeal to the rank and file in the army, they're trying to appeal to their supporters in sectarian churches. So it's a way of coalition building,
- [21:09]
Misha Glenny
too, for them and developing a sense of the political about how you go about growing this movement.
- [21:15]
Ted Vallance
Absolutely. And if you look at kind of what political scientists have said about political kind of campaigning, a lot of them think that this doesn't really happen until we get to the 19th century. But I think you can really see with the Levelers, those sorts of political petitioning campaigns actually taking form in the mid 17th century.
- [21:35]
Misha Glenny
Theresa, was this really a movement which is promising equality for everybody, or were there any constraints?
- [21:42]
Theresa Bejan
Well, certainly, if we look closely at the language of Lilburn's postscript containing a general proposition, it seems pretty clearly to be everyone. It's not just Englishmen, it's all men. And it's not just men. It's women, too, rather explicitly. But for a long time, I think historians have really focused on the sort of universalism of this level or promise of equality, on the one hand, and then looking specifically at, for instance, the various revisions to the agreement of the people which introduce several exclusions. Right. So at Putney, there's a debate about the parliamentary franchise, what they call equal voice. And Rainboro says, look, even the poorest man should have a voice as the greatest, but he doesn't make a case for the poorest she having a vote in parliamentary elections. Indeed, towards the end of what the transcript we have of the debates, Maximilian Petty, one of the civilian Levellers present at the Putney debate, seems to say, well, look, we can agree that servants and alms takers should be excluded from the franchise as well, because they're not sufficiently independent. And so I think historians are really focused on these exclusions and making the argument that they revealed the Levellers to be hypocrites in some sense, violating their own egalitarian principles. But I think that what Claire and Ted have been emphasizing is right, is that we care about the franchise because we think about political equality primarily in terms of the right to vote. But I mean, for a very long time and indeed until quite recently, hardly anyone had the right to vote. Right. So if you want to look at the sort of the radical egalitarian implications of the Leveler arguments, you've got to look to petitioning. And there precisely we find two groups that seem to be excluded from the franchise at Putney. So women and servants not only sort of asserting themselves as equals, but demanding to be acknowledged as equals. And so again, to give you a wonderful quote in which we hear this echo of Lilbrand's proposition, this comes from one of the several women's petitions of spring 1649. The women petitioners open by saying, quote, that since we are assured of our creation in the image of God equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the freedoms of the commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition this honorable house. And there, of course, that's the House of Commons, right? So here we have women demanding a political voice as women, on the basis of this leveling argument.
- [24:08]
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- [25:12]
Claire Jackson
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- [26:35]
Misha Glenny
Now, I haven't pulled up any of you for your liberal references to Putney, and I think we ought to clarify what the Putney debates actually were. Claire who was there, what were they talking about, and why have they taken taken this the sort of center stage of the debate about the Levellers.
- [26:53]
Claire Jackson
So the Putney debates as we think of them now, were discussions within the army with some civilian influence that took place in the autumn of 1648. They didn't have that sort of coherence among contemporaries. They wouldn't have referred to anything like sort of the Putney debates in the way that we do as a shorthand now, because that again, is almost like the serendipity of how we know what happened. Theresa mentioned ago the transcript that we have have and the transcript that we have we owe to the shorthand skills of a young army secretary, William Clark, who was present and noted in a newly learned shorthand verbatim what happened at Putney. So the army is camped about six miles upstream along the Thames, and the army has got very used now to sort of debating how on earth it's going to, you know, what it wants as part of a durable settlement. But those transcripts lay almost hidden in plain sight. But they lay in Worcester College, Oxford, for over 200 years before they were discovered. Towards the end of the 19th century, a young military historian, Charles Firth, was given a tip off by the college librarian and then set To.
- [27:56]
Misha Glenny
It's interesting, but presumably he had to decode the shorthand.
- [28:00]
Claire Jackson
Clark himself had started decoding his own shorthand during the restoration. So in 1662, Clark started decoding his shorthand notes that he'd taken in 1647, and then he didn't live to finish them. He was killed in the Anglo Dutch wars in the mid-1670s. And actually Firth didn't venture into the shorthand, he just reproduced the bits that Clarke himself had transcribed. But the late 19th century is probably the first time as well that professional historians begin to get very detailed reconstructions of events during this incredibly complicated and convoluted period. But then you begin to get this very immersive sense of how the army sought to hear these different voices, some of which were much more radical, some of which, as Ted, were was saying, we're more conservative. And I think Theresa's right to say that as historians in the 20th and 21st centuries, they've tended to hone in on things like the franchise. But looking at the debates as a whole, one gets not only a sense of the Army's keen, acute sense of its own professional honour, and it wants to know that they will be treated properly for the services that they've done. I mean, what is the point of having fought and died for Parliament if they're not going to be granted indemnity or any kind of protections? And if they're going to be treated that badly or shabbily, then that doesn't all go very well for citizens thereafter. So they're interested in things like indemnity, they're interested in legal reform is a standard sort of leitmotif that reappears. Abolishing monopolies, abolishing tithes, really reimagining a settlement that's not only fairer, but also, they hope, durable that won't just lead to some resumption of hostilities.
- [29:32]
Misha Glenny
Thank you, Claire. Ted, one thing that I haven't really understood yet is how coherent and organized a movement is this. I mean, we've heard of one or two characters who are prominent, but do they have. Have membership? Do they have officers? Do they have, you know, local chapters of this organization?
- [29:52]
Ted Vallance
Yeah, and this has been a big subject of debate amongst historians as well. And I think there are some historians who take the view that when we're talking about the Levellers, we are talking about a label that's been created mostly by their opponents to create this image of this sort of organized, radical, dangerous movement. I mean, I gave you that example of the numbers signing up to the September 1648 petition that comes from a hostile royalist news book. And the intention is to show you that there's this level of conspiracy that's about to kind of overturn monarchical government and the sort of established religion. But my view is that we can talk about them as a meaningful organization, and I think that's for a number of reasons. Firstly, once we get to the point of having the agreement of the people, as if you like the level of sort of manifesto, I think there is a coherence to what they're arguing, and that coherence stays with the movement and until through to its sort of end as a meaningful movement in spring of 1649. And I think there is also an organizational structure behind them, and that's something that we see coming through in terms of that petitioning organisation. So some of the information, again, that we get about the petitioning organisation comes from hostile sources. There's a report from a Shoreditch minister called George Masterson, who's basically operating as a spy, and he sneaks into one of these meetings in January of 1648, where they're about to kind of formulate a new petition and get it out. And what he says that they're doing is that they appoint commissioners who are there to basically distribute this petition. They're kind of producing lots and lots of multiple printed copies of the petition so that it can be easily disseminated. They're raising funds to support the petitioning activity. So we're seeing an organization in place through this report. And even though it's a hostile report, we then get people like Lilburn and people like Wildman essentially endorsing what Marston is saying about what they do. And I think we can see kind of similar references later on in later leveler petitioning campaigns that substantiate that sense of a genuine organization.
- [31:59]
Misha Glenny
Teresa There seems to be a consensus that this is a fairly revolutionary moment in English history. But how radical were there, and were there any other people who thought they were actually not radical enough?
- [32:15]
Theresa Bejan
Well, quite so. Clare has sort of alluded to the modern historical reception of this amazing discovery of the Putney transcripts in the late 19th century. And it sort of was not lost on historians at the time that there seemed to be obvious parallels between the demand for equal voice at Putney, so the parliamentary franchise, and sort of modern campaigns for voting rights in this country and also then in the United States. And so there was a well developed kind of historiographical debate in the 20th century about just how Radical the Levelers really were, and in particular kind of in the middle of the 20th century, Marxist historians. So Christopher Hill and others began to make the case that, well, you know what I mean. Sure, the Levelers look radical from the perspective of many of the other sort of possible positions in the mid-1640s, but actually the real radicals, the real egalitarians in the period are the group known as the Diggers, led by the failed mystic and merchant Jared Winstanley, who in the spring of 1649 begins to dig and manure and plant in the wasteland upon George Hill. Right. So the Diggers were kind of elevated as these proto communist figures in the period who made the Levellers and sort of Lilburn's rejection of any kind of economic leveling look like a sort of, you know, to use the kind of Marxist language, the Levellers appeared as just sort of bourgeois defenders of private property and free trade.
- [33:41]
Misha Glenny
Bourgeois. Not a concept at the time, of course.
- [33:44]
Theresa Bejan
Quite. And so I think again, we need to get out from under this kind of modern historiography to sort of get to look anew at what was going on. And so the first thing to say is that this idea that somehow defending private property rights in the mid-1640s wasn't itself radical is just completely ahistorical. I mean, we're short changing level of radicalism in that respect. The defense of the property rights of freeborn English men and women is part of a campaign against monopolies of all sorts. So religious monopolies, economic monopolies, but also print monopolies. So the idea that property rights, property rights also are part of a defense of freedom of speech. But on the other hand, we're also ignoring the extent to which the Diggers. So Winstanley and his comrades on George Hill in 1649, they refer to themselves as the true Levelers and are very self consciously taking up these kinds of arguments from natural equality that you get in Lilburn and other Leveler petitions and saying this also means that we should be able to stand as equals in creation without buying and selling or understanding anyone looking down on or lording over anyone else.
- [34:47]
Claire Jackson
I mean, I think no group has probably suffered more than being sort of placed out of time. I mean, people often say they were ahead of their time, which doesn't help us as historians, or they were kind of remarkably modern. I think it is a fundamentally transformative moment and I think that is part of the sheer upheaval of the country having been at war with itself. I mean, events like the putney debates catalyze a huge amount of radical thinking in unforeseen circumstances. I mean, the idea that you could put your divinely ordained king on trial publicly and execute him with the acts of the common hangman is an incredibly radical outcome. And I think you can certainly see These ideas among 18th century revolutionaries, 19th century Chartists, sort of 20th century trade unionists. I came across exactly sort of 50 years ago. Tony Benn gave this very long lecture in Burford Church about the influence of the Levellers. And he said it was a real comfort for him to have discovered that, you know, class struggles, industrial struggles had this long antecedent. And he asked this brilliantly sort of ahistorical question, what would the Levellers of us if they could see us today? And he identified lots of regions in which he would say, we're not doing so well. Massive inequality of wealth, persistence of poverty, all sorts of ways in which, you know, I can see why many subsequent generations have gone back to their writings and found real cause for inspiration, as well as just remembering what the impact of that kind of upheaval of civil war must have been.
- [36:10]
Misha Glenny
Ted Clare's just pointed to the elephant in the room, which is the execution of Charles I in 1649. Were the level of support supportive of this? Were they involved with it? How did they approach this?
- [36:24]
Ted Vallance
Yes, they were. And I would argue that they're actually very important in explaining how we get to this remarkable point where Charles is put on trial and then executed. Lilburn, again, gives us a bit of a distorting effect because Lilbon comes out publicly in opposition to the trial of the King. But it's important to understand that this isn't because he thinks that Charles is wonderful. He describes Charles as being an evil man, but it's because he thinks that the type of court that has been set up is wrong. It doesn't have a firm legal basis for him. The new government, on the basis of an agreement of the people, should have been established first and then the King should have been placed on trial. But in fact, the Levellers are, I think, really at the forefront of making the argument that responsibility for the civil war sits with Charles. So they talk about kings as being a source of continual oppression to the English people. So it's even the institution of monarchy that may be a problem. And we've been talking about the Putney debates and those famous debates around the franchise. But one of the other things that's going on at Putney is they are discussing what to do with the King and a Number of the people there at Putney are saying, actually, we need to deal with Charles. He is a man of blood, referring to this biblical ideal of blood guilt, that the stain and sin of blood on the land can only be cleansed by killing the person responsible. After the second Civil War, it's the Leveler movement that kicks off the petitioning campaign to bring the king and other leading royalists to justice. But it's not even kind of outside of the court and outside of the trial. We can even see Leveller supporters participating in the trial itself. So an under examined aspect of the trial are the witnesses that are brought to give testimony against the king. Now, a number of these we can see actually have Leveller connections. So there's a witness called Arthur Young, who is an officer in Parliament's army. He's got a certain amount of fame because he's the man who takes the royal standard out of the king's standard bearer's hands at the Battle of Edgehill, the first pitched battle of the Civil War. But importantly, he's also one of these agitators, one of these representatives of the army, rank and file, and he's one of the agitators who signs a petition in support of the agreement of the people in 1647. And we can find other agitators giving evidence as witnesses who also subscrib to that same petition.
- [38:52]
Misha Glenny
Okay, Teresa, you're a professor of political theory, so tell me, are the Levellers political theorists? Are they activists? Are they a new breed of politicians? What are they?
- [39:04]
Theresa Bejan
So I think that this is something that many modern political theorists and historians of political thought have maybe struggled with, sort of how to categorize the Levelers and how, you know, I am a professor of political theory and I like to think of political theory as just the contemplation of politics in the abstract for the sake of doing it better. And on that definition, they're doing political theory, but they're doing it in a way, I think that sort of offends maybe some intellectual historians, like, maybe like Claire and also me and other guys, which is that we like to think that it's really sometimes the ideas and the arguments that are driving the bus, and that the best ideas and the best arguments are the ones that matter most. But I think many of the Leveler's contemporaries at the time were very attuned the fact that a lot of the arguments the Levelers were offering were not particularly good arguments. So Lilburn is a great example. Again, you know, he's something of a jailhouse lawyer. You know, he had a grammar school education, but he never went to university. And so he's really teaching himself about the common law in Magna Carta during his various stints in prison and coming up with really inventive arguments about Magna Carta and everything on that basis. And so William Prynne, one of his former friends and you know, also fellow Puritan martyrs, ends up becoming incredibly critical of Lobern and saying that he is an upstart, monstrous lawyer called to the bar at Newgate prison where he now practiceth. And they're constantly pointing out that he knows nothing about the common law, that the fact that his Latin isn't very good means that he's making inferences that no one better, that a person better educated never would have. But what I like about the Levelers, and I think that they're political theorists in a sense that we need to maybe take more seriously, is that they are discovering arguments that allow them to do things politically and the arguments end up being persuasive insofar as the doing of things looks good to others. And so that's, I think, the key when we see these Leveller arguments proliferate, it's not because they're great philosophers, but they are excellent political activists and political theorists.
- [41:05]
Misha Glenny
Claire, two questions for you off that. First of all, are you offended? And second, they were short lived, the Levellers. What happens to them?
- [41:14]
Claire Jackson
So, no, I'm not offended at all. And I think Lilburn's celebrity at the time, we perhaps tend to look too much to the political theory and expect too much. Among contemporaries. Lilburn is famous for having been put on trial twice for treason and having been acquitted. And that is no mean feat in the 17th century. This is the most serious crime against the state. And two juries in 1649 and 1653 acquit him. And there are, you know, celebrations and bonfires and all sorts of things. So I think among contemporaries, that's where they see his achievement, because it doesn't end well. This movement. The regicide doesn't solve everything. A new utopia isn't created. And very quickly Lilburn's on the case. England's New Chains Discovered is published in February 1649, and then part two in March. And he is put into trial for treason and his trial in October becomes this big set piece trial. There are scaffolds erected for people to watch. He makes this very, very strong claim that anyone who's put on trial for their life should at least be afforded defense counsel. He isn't given it and he appeals to the jury and says, you should be jurors of law as well as of fact. You know, is this a lawful trial? Most of the trial revolves around his own works being read out. And there's great cheers. At one point, the judge sort of tells him he's not here to tell the story of all your life. But when he is then acquitted by a jury, you know, that is a massive humiliation for this new Republican regime. There are medals created with the names of the jurors. And if you want to see the role of civilians as they have today, that's why jury trial and involvement of lay jurors today matter so much to people. It's in that moment.
- [42:42]
Misha Glenny
And just briefly, what happens at Burford? There's an event at Burford.
- [42:47]
Claire Jackson
Burford that sort of epitome of Cotswold charm. Yes, there are. There are small instances of mutiny or rebellion in the ranks in different places. They start in London in April 1649 in Bishopsgate. So, yeah, you have your rank and file and you have the top command, often referred to in a shorthand as the grandees. And Cromwell and the grandees fear that this could become really contagious and that there'll be, as they put it, a sort of standard of sea green, the colour that Levellers have started wearing ribbons and the two sort of forces. A very mutinous regiment is met at Burford with Cromwell's regiment. 300 mutineers are rounded up, held in Burford Church. One of them, Anthony Sedley, inscribes his name Prisoner 1649, into a stone font. Three of these mutineers are then taken out to the churchyard, Corporal Perkins, Corporal Church, Cornet Thompson, and executed. And then, I mean, there's another standoff in Oxford. So these are suppressed very quickly. And again, that's some of the reason for the slightly ambivalent sense of subsequent historians who want to venerate Cromwell as this great military strategist. Military discipline is really important to these people and the of. Idea. Idea that there has been descent in the ranks is quite difficult to accommodate into this sort of heroic story. I mean, Burford is one of those sort of very dramatic moments. And that's exactly why Tony Benn went to go and give this lecture in burford Church in 1976.
- [44:10]
Misha Glenny
Ted, how are Levellers remembered in the 18th century? Are they forgotten or do they actually inspire other movements?
- [44:20]
Ted Vallance
So they're certainly not forgotten. And I think one of the reasons why they're not forgotten is to do with Lilburn and his courtroom Struggle in particular has just been discussed. So his kind of battles to defend his life in these treason trials are seen as resonant with 18th century radicals, battles against authority as well. So in particular John Wilkes and his North Britain case in the issue 45, where he's accused of basically libeling the King for criticising the King's speech over the Treaty of Paris, Wilkes is seen as a successor of Lilburn. He's referred to as a kind of a new Lilburn. And there's a lot of similarities in terms of the style between Wilkes and Lilburn as well. That kind of celebrity radicalism, the emphasis upon the individual, their struggles, their appearance.
- [45:10]
Theresa Bejan
Theresa, you do see these echoes at the end of the 18th century in the American Revolution and then the French Revolution. So it's just the strangest coincidence. It turns out that Thomas Jefferson is actually really related to John Lilburn on his mother's side. So that kind of echo of Lilburn's postscript that we get in the Declaration of Independence, I mean, whether or not Jefferson is self consciously channeling Leveler ideals, then certainly 50 years later when he's reflecting on the Declaration, he describes the palpable truth of equality in the Declaration in language borrowed from another Leveller. So Richard Rumbold, on the scaffold in 1685, who said that the mass of mankind had not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.
- [45:54]
Misha Glenny
But the idea of equality, how important are the Levellers for that? Where do they fit into the development of equality as an idea?
- [46:02]
Theresa Bejan
I think they're hugely important. And something really does change in the 1640s when leveler arguments and activism effectively make the idea of equality effectual in a way that it hadn't been before. It begins to be used to do things politically. And so, I mean, we've been talking about the kind of the sort of slightly paradoxical nature of Leveller reception. So the Leveler movement fails, you know, the agreement of the people is not enacted, but Lilburn is remembered and his legal activism is remembered and that lives on and very sort of successfully in a sort of self conscious way. I think there is also this kind of less self conscious legacy. And I would argue that some of these Leveler arguments about equality are preserved, as it were, in the arguments of their critics. So I'm interested in the way, for instance, that Thomas Hobbes ends up offering effectively a kind of satire of this Leveler understanding of equality in the state of nature. Hobbes says, okay, well, if we are sort of equally lords, then what we would have is a war against all of all, against all, in which these little lordlings try to vindicate their claims to kind of equal respect in ways that are politically disposable, disruptive. But Hobbes's own critics, for instance, the Earl of Clarendon, also noticed the ways in which Hobbes ended up sort of taking on some of the leveler demands in his political philosophy as well, particularly the claim that once we've left the state of nature, we still ought to acknowledge one another as equals by nature, not insult each other. So Clarendon actually accuses Hobbes at one point of having written Leviathan in order to flatter the delight that the common people have in the word equality, which in truth means nothing more than keeping on their hats.
- [47:43]
Misha Glenny
My thanks to Ted Valance, Theresa Bejan and Claire Jackson. Next week, how William the Conqueror decided to deal with Wales after the Norman Conquest. We'll be discussing the Welsh marches in front of an audience at the Hay Festival. Thank you for listening.
- [48:00]
Claire Jackson
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.
- [48:08]
Misha Glenny
Okay, so now we go to the podcast bit, which is where we can sort of kick back a little and be more relaxed. But I have specific questions I want to ask that I've been dying to ask. And Claire, I want to start with you. The War of the Three Kingdoms. Is this the English Civil War, or is that Anglo centric beyond belief? Or is this a War of the Three Kingdoms? What should we call this period?
- [48:33]
Claire Jackson
So I absolutely believe it's the War of Three Kingdoms. That's because, you know, I started my career as a Scottish historian and all of my career has been interested in the interplay of events in England, Scotland and Wales. I think as a shorthand English. I'm happy with English Civil wars rather than the English Civil War. I think war of the Three Kingdoms has become a term that's more often current in academia, and I don't think it's quite caught on, but absolutely this is a single King Charles I, ruling over three separate kingdoms, each of which has a different confessional complexion to its neighbour. And Charles I authority unravels, first in Scotland in the late 1630s and then in Ireland and then in England. And I mean, different historians have characterized it in different ways. Conrad Russell talked about a sort of billiard ball effect. It's just simply that it is very difficult, if not impossible for Charles to solve one of these kingdoms without there being ramifications in the other. And the English become quite resentful of the constant interference of Scottish and Irish events on their part. Politics. But the English parliamentarians probably wouldn't have had such a decisive military victory without the Scots at Marston Moor. And yet the Scots also refused to accept the regicide and immediately crowned the Prince of Wales Charles ii. And that poses a massive security threat to the new republic, forcing Cromwell not only to have a Scottish campaign, but then also an Irish campaign. So this is absolutely three kingdoms.
- [49:55]
Misha Glenny
Great. And then my next question is, what's going on in Europe at all this, this time? And is there an interaction between the Levelers and Europe in any way? Teresa?
- [50:08]
Theresa Bejan
Well, so I think my colleagues are probably better able to speak to the specifics of kind of what's happening in European politics, but certainly we shouldn't lose sight of the kind of transnational sort of radical Protestant kind of aspect of this. So I mentioned Lilburn's initial trial before Starch change chamber in 1638. I mean, he's technically put on trial for smuggling Puritan tracks out of the Netherlands to be sold in London. Right. So there's quite a lot of kind of movement back and forth between radicals and a lot of the unlicensed printing is kind of going on in both places. There's one particular pamphlet that is again published in Rotterdam, I think, and then smuggled into London in 1649, called Tyrannopocrit dispensation Discovered. And so that's the tyrannical hypocrite. But in this pamphlet, I mean, the author, I think we still don't know who it was, but makes a case not only for a lot of kind of standard Leveler claims, but also for the claim for redistributive taxation and the idea that if we're committed to the sort of natural equality of human beings, then we should be committed to eliminating extreme inequalities of wealth, not just in land ownership, which I think think was more authentically what the diggers were after. The author of Tyrannopocrites says, no, we've got to have a redistributive taxation regime, which, again, I don't think you're going to find that sort of argument again until probably the 20th century.
- [51:33]
Ted Vallance
I'd just come in and say that we can see that the Levellers are reported on by foreign observers of the Civil War. So we do get diplomatic correspondence in French and Italian which is talking about the Levellers and is talking about their threat and their radicalism. So there's certainly being no to noticed by international observers as well as domestically. There is an attempt to intervene in the French Civil War, the Fronde, in a way, using Leveler ideas. The French translation of the agreement to the people is made and the radical agitator Edward Sexby is tasked to take it to Bordeaux and sort of distribute it amongst the Frondeurs.
- [52:14]
Misha Glenny
This is the late 40s, early 50s.
- [52:16]
Ted Vallance
This is the 50s, 1650s by this point it doesn't seem to have really caught on in Bordeaux, but there was an attempt to circulate it.
- [52:25]
Theresa Bejan
Theresa in French at the time, in the late 18th century you get the new logism niveilleur, meaning leveller. So that that word is sort of introduced into modern French at the time.
- [52:34]
Misha Glenny
Oh, that's fascinating.
- [52:35]
Theresa Bejan
There's an interest in the Quakers and the politics of pronouns. So the abolition of the plural you is understood as channeling this kind of English Civil War radical religious sensibility and
- [52:47]
Misha Glenny
a demand for social talking of Thomas, Jeff and slave owners. Is there an impact on abolitionism later on at all?
- [52:56]
Ted Vallance
There is, and again it's through Lilburn's courtroom struggles. So in Somerset's case, which is this celebrated late 18th century case of the slave James Somerset, who abolitionist campaigners basically issue writ of habeas corpus to have him kind of freed from his master, amusingly named Charles Stewart. For our purposes, in terms of the thinking about the 17th century resonances, one of the kind of precedents that they use here is a so called Cartwright's case. And Cartwright's case is a precedent that pops up in Lilburn's attempts to get compensation for his punishment by star chamber in the 1630s. And it has this famous phrase which is sort of, you know, this really resonant sort of idea that as soon as a slave puts person steps foot on English soil, they're automatically kind of the shackles drop off. And in fact the case is much more limited than that. It doesn't really make that kind of claim. But it is something where Lilburn is now being connected not only with struggles over freedom of the press, but also in terms of abolitionism.
- [54:04]
Misha Glenny
Clare, I mean, first of all, if there's anything we've missed out, you can now all say what we've missed out. But can I ask you about the relationship between, between Lilburn and Cromwell? Was there anything going on there at all? I mean, did they know each other?
- [54:17]
Claire Jackson
Yes, yes. I mean, in some ways you could see Cromwell using Leveler interest quite cynically at that point, when the bigger enemy is the Presbyterian majority to try and get more support for that independent view of a congregationalist outcome that isn't going to, to sign up to something that looks like a Scots Presbyterian kind of clerisy. So it is very much in Cromwell's interest to engage and preserve army discipline. And I mean there's, there are, there are elements of the Partney debates that don't speak of hostility and suppression. And maybe that's where the shock of the brutal suppressions at Ware and then again at Burford and places, you know, come into play play. Because there is a sense of a shared exploration of ideas at Putney. And you know, again, I mean it would be very easy to be quite sort of, you know, score points on who's the most sort of radical there. But you know, there's a sense that people are thinking aloud and you can see, particularly in Ireton just sort of saying, well, I can see the argument, but that's just not going to wash. I mean, surely to make this work and you know, I think everybody is focused on achieving a settlement that not only does justice to the amount of bloodshed that's been spilled over the past few years, but that lasts. And the regicide isn't that.
- [55:43]
Misha Glenny
Do they exclude monarchy as a form of government? I mean, obviously, as you said, Ted, Charles is an evil man according to Lilburn. But do they say it's done for monarchy?
- [55:57]
Claire Jackson
A lot of leveler language is very much only really focused on the Commons. I mean, one of the reasons they become interested in the army is because they won't deal with the Lords. And their petitions are sort of like we really only want to deal with you as. And their vision of a representative sort of institution is, is a Commons based one. Cromwell is pretty good at speaking whatever he wants to to different audiences. So he will stand up in Parliament and talk about King, Lords and Commons and then sort of say to the army later. Well, I mean that was in Parliament he. Here I'm talking about a different kind of settlement. We didn't talk in the program about the impact of the second Civil War. So just after Putney debates, Charles probably tipped off, probably being fed this line that the army is full of dangerous levelers who might think of assassinating him. Escapes from Hampton Court and for a few days nobody knows where he is. And then he turns up in the Isle of Wight and then he makes an alliance with the Scots who are by this stage two disillusioned with Parliament because they don't feel their Presbyterianism's getting anywhere. And the Second civil war happens and it is much faster, much more brutal, and it lasts through late 1647 and 1648. And that radicalizes a lot of people who maybe weren't prepared to use that language of Charles being the man of blood at Putney 12 months later absolutely will. So by then Cromwell, whether it's apocryphal, the sort of phrase cruel necessity about their regicide or not, by that stage there's many more people who think, think that is this is, this is a man that you cannot negotiate with.
- [57:18]
Ted Vallance
I would say the Levelers are consistently anti tyrannical, but they're not consistently republican. And that's one of the reasons you can see them engaging in conspiracy with royalists in the 1650s to overthrow the protectorate is because, you know, if they can have a monarch who's bound by the agreement of the people, that's okay. It's worse to have a Cromwellian tyrant in place than to have a bounded king.
- [57:42]
Theresa Bejan
And I mean, I mentioned Clarendon briefly at the end, but it seems that one of the reasons Clarendon is so keen to sort of tar Hobbes with the Leveler brush is because Clarendon himself had been trying to entertain a kind of royalist Leveler alliance following the regicide. I mean, if I could just say Ted mentioned this in the main program, but Lilburn, you know, he's just such a dyed in the wool contrarian. So he just never, he never defends the position that you. And once his side seems to be winning, he instantly takes the other side. But sort of what's going on in the late, sort of in 1649 is Lilburn is making the case that not only is the tribunal instituted to try the king illegitimate because it's just not properly constituted, but also the several royalist peers who are being put on trial by similarly special tribunals. Lilburn befriends a bunch of the mollies in the Tower of London and begins to sort of offer them legal arguments for their case. And so he makes the case that even the peers are entitled to the same rights under Magna Carta, including to a trial by a jury of their peers. And so I think that's just a wonderful illustration of, you know, Lilburn's principles leading him to sort of make friends with people you might not expect. And then also just one thing Claire mentioned which I think is worth stressing. So the regicide Charles is executed by beheading with an axe by the public executioner. I mean, if you look forward to the French Revolution and again, the awareness of leveling there. You know, we might think partly what the Jacobins are trying to do is have this idea of leveling up in the sense that even commoners ought to enjoy the privilege of being executed by beheading, which is how aristocrats had traditionally been executed. So again, this kind of. So sometimes the egalitarianism doesn't cash out in the way that maybe we expect it to. But if you look at the details, you can see that, no, they're pretty consistent.
- [59:39]
Misha Glenny
I did find it extraordinary reading about the levelers, how much they anticipate movements which are 70, 100 years later. I kept thinking of Kant and the idea of universalism and universal rights, which, you know, at the time appeared to be revolutionary when Kant starts articulating this. But actually, the level has already said all of this.
- [60:05]
Theresa Bejan
I mean, I just, I don't think it can be stressed enough. Right. You know, intellectual historians and political theorists wanting to think that philosophers drive the bus. I mean, Kant was not driving the bus. Yeah, a lot of people got there first.
- [60:19]
Misha Glenny
Do you want some tea? Here comes Martha.
- [60:23]
Theresa Bejan
Tea, Coffee? Can I get.
- [60:24]
Claire Jackson
I'd love a tea, please.
- [60:25]
Ted Vallance
Tea, please.
- [60:26]
Misha Glenny
Tea.
- [60:28]
Claire Jackson
In Our Time with Misha Glenny was produced by Martha owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. If you've got a scrolling problem, then
- [60:36]
Theresa Bejan
this is the podcast for you.
- [60:37]
Ted Vallance
It's called Top Comment.
- [60:39]
Claire Jackson
With me, Matt Shea and me, Mariana Spring.
- [60:41]
Theresa Bejan
We both investigate social media for a
- [60:42]
Claire Jackson
living, whether it's disinformation, conspiracy theories, Internet culture, memes. We're going to be getting behind the stuff that is popping up on your feed on this podcast. That's Top Comment on BBC Sounds.
- [60:57]
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