When the American Congress set out their political principles in the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776, their ideas were taken straight from the English Levellers a century and a quarter before. John Lilburne, considered by most as the premier Leveller, invoked pure natural rights when he stated that men were
by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty.
This natural law dictated that no man had
any authority, dominion or magisterial power, one over or above another, neither have they, or can they exercise any, but merely by institution, or donation, that is to say, by mutual agreement or consent, given, derived, or assumed, by mutual consent and agreement.
Leveller Richard Overton:
By natural birth, all men are equal and alike born to the like propriety and freedom.
and:
To every individual in nature, is given an individual propriety by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any … for every one as he is himself hath a self-propriety, else could not be himself, and on this no second may presume without consent.
Declaration of Independence author, Thomas Jefferson once quoted Leveller Richard Rumbold: ‘The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately.’
The Levellers were an informal alliance of pamphleteers, merchants, apprentices, and army agitators who emerged during the upsurge of political and religious freethinking unleashed by the conflict between Parliament and England’s King Charles I in the 1640s. The most prominent Levellers were John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, John Wildman, Edward Sexby and Colonel Thomas Rainborough.
Lilburne considered the term, ‘Leveller’, pejorative and initially called his supporters “Levellers so-called” and preferred “Agitators”. The term suggested that the “Levellers” aimed to bring all down to the lowest common level. The leaders vehemently denied the charge of “levelling”, but adopted the name because it was how they were known to the majority of people. After their arrest and imprisonment in 1649, four of the “Leveller” leaders – Walwyn, Overton, Lilburne and Thomas Prince – signed a manifesto in which they called themselves Levellers.
To understand the rise of the radical movement of the Levellers, the reign of England’s absolutist monarch, King Charles I, must be examined. Charles was both despotic and inept as a ruler and this combination resulted in The English Civil War, sometimes called The English Revolution, as he was found guilty of treason and executed by decapitation in January 1649, guilty of abusing power by virtue of claiming authority directly from God rather than the laws of the land. Charles believed in the divine right of kings and thought he could govern according to his own conscience. Many of his subjects opposed his policies, in particular the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent, and perceived his actions as those of a tyrant.
The Levellers’ origin as a mass activist-orientated political movement is inextricably linked to John Lilburne not only philosophically but practically. The movement can be seen as coming into being, at least in part, as a reaction to his conflict with the Long Parliament. On leaving the army John Lilburne had continued his involvement in politics, campaigning on the issue of religious toleration. Publishing and distributing several pamphlets critical of Parliament and Parliamentarians on this issue, he was arraigned before the House of Commons on July 19th 1645. Refusing to comply with Parliament’s wishes he was jailed for three months.
In July 1646, the House of Lords put him on trial for publishing literature critical of the Earl of Manchester. Refusing to recognise the Lords’ right to try him, Lilburne defended himself candidly: he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, barred from holding civil or military office and fined two thousand pounds. This harsh sentence inspired an unprecedented level of political action in defence of Lilburne, including mass marches, a petition signed by over two thousand citizens of London and a massive lobby of Parliament, putting into place a political organisation which would emerge as the Leveller party.
The whole basis of the nature of government, sovereignty and its derivation from, and relationship with, the people, had also come sharply into focus because of the civil war and its implications. This focus was in many ways a natural extention of the debate on the organisation and constitution of the Church and religious freedom which dominated the lead-up to the English Civil War.
In Walwyn’s Englands Lamentable Slaverie, published in October 1645, the Levellers’ stance on Parliamentary authority and its relationship with the people was defined for the first time:
… parliamentary authority is a power intrusted by the people (that chose them) for their good saftie and freedom; and therefore a Parliament cannot justlie do anything to make the people less safe or lesse free then they found them.
In the week or so before Lilburne was tried by the House of Lords, Richard Overton and William Walwyn, and possibly the republican parliamentarian Henry Marten, had written and published in early July 1646 A Remonstrance of many thousand citizens, a tract which can be seen as the entry into British politics of the Leveller party. A Remonstrance restated the sovereignty of the people, called for the dissolution of the House of Commons, the abolition of the upper house, equality before the law, called for religious freedom and the end of the Merchant Adventurers Company’s foreign trade monopoly.
Thus, the Levellers in the mid-1640s as a political movement came into being which eventually would become in effect the third party after the Presbyterian and Independents. Other leading figures, apart from John Lilburne and William Walwyn, were Richard Overton, John Wildman, Thomas Prince, Samuel Chidley and William Larner. Both Overton and Larner were veteran pamphleteers and printers, having already come into conflict with the authorities over religious toleration and censorship; Thomas Prince was a merchant who had served in the civil war and was co-treasurer, with Chidley, of the Leveller party; John Wildman, a university graduate and with a legal education, liased closely with the military Levellers, writing or helping to write several of their key documents, including The Case of the Armie Truly Stated.
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 manifesto, Agreement of the People, which is first proposal in history for a written constitution based on natural rights.
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 phase of the 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.
Lilburne, Walwyn, Prince, and Overton were imprisoned in the Tower of London by the Council of State. 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 that have not been, such as an elected judiciary. 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 hearts of libertarians and socialists alike, all those pursuing their own brand of liberty.
Sources:
http://www.immaculateheartacademy.org/outside2/socialstudies/kuhns/The%20Levellers.htm
The Myth of Universal Human Rights by David N. Stamos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers
http://clichesofpolitics.com/Levellers.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England
http://links.org.au/node/1290