"The Levellers" — The Lost Constitution

“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it is clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.” — Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, at the Putney Debates, 29 October 1647¹

Putney

It is late October of 1647, and the first war is over. The king’s field armies have been beaten, the king himself is a prisoner, and the men who defeated him have discovered that victory settled almost nothing about what should come after. In the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, in the riverside village of Putney a few miles upstream from Westminster, the General Council of the New Model Army has gathered to argue about the future of England. Officers and elected soldier representatives sit together — an extraordinary sight in itself, common troopers seated in council with their generals — and the question before them is the most basic question a political community can ask. Who is entitled to a say in the government he lives under?

We know what was said in that church because a young man named William Clarke, secretary to the Army’s high command, took down the debate in shorthand and later transcribed it. His notes are the reason the Putney Debates exist for us at all, and they should be taken in the context for what they are: an incomplete record, fullest for only a few of the days, set down in the heat of a live and overlapping argument and transcribed afterward. We cannot reconstruct the room — who stood where, how the voices rose and fell, what the faces did. What survives is the language, and the language is enough.

The pivotal exchange came over a single proposition buried in a longer document the soldiers were debating: that representation in Parliament ought to be apportioned “according to the number of the inhabitants.” Read one way, that phrase implied something no major kingdom or national parliament then practiced — that every man, or something close to every man, should have a voice in choosing those who made the laws. Colonel Thomas Rainsborough rose to defend the radical reading, and gave it the words that have outlived everything else spoken at Putney. The poorest man in England had a life to live as much as the greatest, he said, and no man was bound to a government he had never consented to put himself under.²

Henry Ireton answered him. Ireton was Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, a formidable lawyer-soldier and the sharpest mind among the Army’s senior officers, the men known as the grandees. He did not dispute that all men were born under some claim to natural liberty. He disputed who had a stake permanent enough to be trusted with a share in disposing of the kingdom’s affairs. No person had a right to a voice in choosing the makers of the law, Ireton replied, who did not have “a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom” — a real and lasting stake, meaning in practice a freehold or other settled property interest, whether in land, corporate standing, or a recognized trading stake that tied a man permanently to the realm.³ Extend the vote to every man who breathed English air, and you had cut the vote loose from any stake in the country; and a franchise cut loose from property, Ireton warned, would in the end abolish property itself.

Here, compressed into an afternoon’s argument between two soldiers in a country church, was a question the modern world has never stopped asking. Does a person’s right to a voice in his own government come from what he owns, or from what he is? Rainsborough grounded it in the man; Ireton grounded it in the vested interest. Neither of them invented the question. But the men debating it at Putney pressed it further, and staked more on the answer, than almost anyone in the English-speaking world had done before — and to understand how common soldiers came to be debating political philosophy in a requisitioned church, we have to understand what had broken open in England to let them.

The World Turned Upside Down

The war that ended in 1647 had begun five years earlier as a quarrel over exactly the questions the previous article left unresolved: whether the king’s power ran only as far as the law allowed, or whether the crown held reserves of authority above the reach of Parliament and the courts. Charles I had inherited his father’s conviction that a king answered to God alone, and he had spent the 1630s governing without Parliament at all, raising money by expedients that his opponents held to be unlawful. When he finally called Parliament back in 1640, driven by his need for funds, the confrontation his father had begun with Coke and the Petition of Right moved past argument and into arms. By 1642 the king and Parliament were at war.

Parliament won, and it won largely because it built a new kind of army. The New Model Army, created in 1645, was a professional force promoted for merit and discipline rather than birth, and it was saturated with the radical religion of the age — Independents, Baptists, and sectaries of every description who read Scripture for themselves and drew their own conclusions about authority, hierarchy, and the equality of souls before God. An army of men who believed that no bishop and no king stood between them and God proved to be an army difficult to send quietly back to the plough.

Two other collapses opened the ground beneath the whole conflict. The first was the collapse of censorship. The elaborate machinery that had licensed and controlled printing broke down in the early 1640s, and a torrent of cheap print poured through the gap — pamphlets, petitions, broadsides, printed sermons, arguments and counterarguments, sold on the street and read aloud in taverns and barracks. Ideas that had circulated in manuscript among the learned, or not at all, were suddenly available for a few pence to anyone who could read or who could stand near someone reading. The second collapse was the collapse of settled authority itself. When a nation cuts off arguing about whether the king may tax without consent and starts fighting about it, when the machinery of the old order stops working and men have to decide by force what will replace it, questions that had seemed permanently closed crack open. If the king could be resisted, what could not be questioned? If authority rested on consent, whose consent, and how measured, and what happened to a government that never had it?

Out of that opening came the movement its enemies called the Levellers — a name meant as an insult, implying that they wished to level all distinctions of rank and property, which they repeatedly and emphatically denied. They were not a party in any modern sense, and not a tidy or unanimous group. They were a loose network of London radicals, pamphleteers, and their allies among the soldiers, bound together by a cluster of convictions about consent, law, and the rights of the individual against arbitrary power. Three men gave the movement its intellectual center, and each pressed a distinct edge of the argument.

Freeborn John

The most famous of them, in his own time and after, was John Lilburne, whom his supporters called “Freeborn John” — a nickname drawn from the phrase he made his own, the rights of the freeborn Englishman. The word “freeborn” carried his whole argument in a single term: that certain rights belonged to a man simply by virtue of being born free in England, that they were his birthright and not the gift of any king, court, or Parliament, and that no authority could lawfully strip them from him.

Lilburne had begun making that argument, at cost to his own body, before the war. In 1637, hauled before the Court of Star Chamber — the prerogative court that had become the great engine of Stuart censorship — for importing and circulating unlicensed Puritan books, he refused to swear the oath the court demanded. The oath required a man to answer, under penalty, whatever questions the court chose to put to him, including questions designed to convict him out of his own mouth. Lilburne refused to take it, arguing that the oath was against the law of God and the law of the land, and that no man was bound to accuse himself.⁴ For that refusal he was whipped through the streets from the Fleet prison to Westminster, pilloried, and gagged when he would not stop haranguing the crowd. He was, at the time, in his early twenties.

The principle he insisted on there — that a man cannot be compelled to be the instrument of his own conviction — was not yet settled law when Lilburne stood on it. His resistance helped make it so. Star Chamber was abolished by Parliament in 1641, and Lilburne, more than any single figure, had turned the right against self-accusation from a contested claim into part of the common-law inheritance. We will follow that particular thread across the ocean before this article is done, because it has one of the most clearly documented afterlives of anything the Levellers touched.

But the trait that made Lilburne the movement’s public face was not primarily doctrine. It was a genius for turning his own persecution into public argument. Every time authority moved against him — and it moved against him under the king, under Parliament, and under Cromwell in turn — Lilburne made the proceeding itself the trial of English liberty. He demanded to be told the charges against him. He demanded to confront his accusers, to see the indictment, to have the benefit of the law he insisted applied to every freeborn Englishman. At his 1649 trial for treason, standing alone against the power of the new republic, he turned the jury into his audience and the courtroom into a stage, and the jury acquitted him to such an eruption of public cheering that, by one account, it took the court half an hour to restore order.⁵ A medal was struck to commemorate the acquittal. A hostile contemporary quip had it, with weary accuracy, that if none were living but Lilburne, then Lilburne would quarrel with John and John with Lilburne. He was vain, litigious, impossible, and incapable of letting an injury pass. He was also, precisely because of those qualities, the most effective one-man demonstration in the century of what it looked like for an ordinary subject to hold a government to its own law.

An Arrow Against All Tyrants

If Lilburne supplied the movement its drama, Richard Overton supplied one of its deepest ideas. Overton was a printer, a satirist, and a religious radical, and in 1646, writing from Newgate prison where the House of Lords had confined him, he produced the pamphlet that carries the Leveller argument to its philosophical root. He gave it a title worthy of the century’s pamphlet wars: An Arrow Against All Tyrants, shot, as the full title has it, from the prison of Newgate into the prerogative bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords.

The argument opens with a proposition Overton states as though it were self-evident. To every individual in nature, he wrote, is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any; for every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself.⁶ The claim is worth unfolding slowly, because it does a great deal of work in very few words. Overton is saying that each person owns himself — that “self-propriety,” a property in one’s own person, is the root fact from which all other rights grow. No one may invade it without violating the most basic principle of justice between one person and another. “No man has power over my rights and liberties,” he went on, “and I over no man’s.” From this root of self-ownership Overton derived the rest: that all men are born equally to liberty, that legitimate authority can arise only by the consent of those who own themselves, and that any power exercised over a man without his consent is usurpation, however ancient or exalted the usurper.

It is worth being careful about what Overton was and was not doing. He was arguing, in the theological and natural-law vocabulary available to a radical Protestant in 1646, that God and nature had made each person the proprietor of himself, and that this fact set a limit no earthly power could rightly cross. He was not writing a modern treatise on property rights, and it would be an error to read back into his pamphlet the fully worked-out systems that later thinkers would build on similar foundations. What can be said is more interesting for being bounded: Overton put into forceful English, and pushed to a radical conclusion, the idea that the individual person is the basic unit of right and the origin of legitimate authority. That idea would have a long life. When later generations argued that government exists to secure rights the individual already possesses, and derives its just powers from consent, they were developing a proposition Overton had stated, in his own idiom and for his own moment, with unusual clarity. The resonance is real. It is also a resonance, not a straight line, and this article will not pretend the one is the other.

The Quiet Radical

The third of the movement’s central minds was the least theatrical and, in some ways, the most far-reaching. William Walwyn was a merchant, well-read, calm where Lilburne was combustible, and his radicalism ran less toward self-dramatization than toward a settled and genuinely unusual tolerance. Where much of the age argued about which religion the state should compel, Walwyn argued that the state should compel none — that liberty of conscience was a right, that a person’s beliefs were answerable to God and not to the magistrate, and that the long habit of enforcing religious uniformity by law had produced not godliness but cruelty, hypocrisy, and endless strife.

Walwyn pressed this toward a tolerance broad even by the standards of the movement’s other radicals, extending his concern to those the age was quickest to despise, and grounding it not only in Scripture but in a plain compassion that reads, across the centuries, as strikingly modern. He was equally insistent on equality before the law — that the same rules must bind the great and the humble alike, without the exemptions and privileges that rank had always claimed. In an age that took hierarchy to be the natural order of creation, the proposition that a law must apply identically to a lord and a laborer was not a modest reform. It was a quiet revolution in what law was for.⁷

Toleration, self-ownership, the rights of the freeborn: three men, three edges of a single argument that authority is legitimate only by the consent of those it governs, and that certain rights stand as walls the government may not cross whatever its majorities or its traditions. What the Levellers did next was try to write that argument down as law.

The Agreement of the People

In the autumn of 1647, as the Army argued with itself at Putney, there lay on the table a remarkable document. It was called An Agreement of the People, and it attempted something with almost no precedent in England itself: to set down, in a single written instrument, a national frame of government and the rights it could not touch, and to derive the whole from the direct consent of the people rather than from custom, conquest, or royal grant. Earlier English colonial compacts across the Atlantic had already experimented with founding a government on a written covenant; what made the Agreement startling was the attempt to do this for the English nation itself, and to reserve certain rights from ordinary political power altogether.

To see why that was extraordinary, recall what the previous article established about the constitution the Levellers had inherited. England’s constitution was unwritten — a vast, accumulated body of common law, custom, statute, and precedent, understood by men like Coke as immemorial, reaching back beyond record into a Saxon past. Its authority came from age. Its content was known to the trained lawyer who could say what the ancient custom required. The Agreement proposed something different in kind. It proposed to place the foundation of government not in the depths of the past but in a present and deliberate act of consent — a document the people would subscribe, fixing what the government could do and reserving what it could never do.

The reserved rights are the heart of it, and they are the Leveller idea at its most consequential. The Agreement granted the people’s representatives a wide authority to make and unmake law — and then carved out of that authority a set of matters the people had never handed over and never would. The representatives’ power, the document declared, extended to whatsoever was “not expressly or impliedly reserved by the represented to themselves.”⁸ Everything not reserved was granted; the reserved matters were withheld absolutely, placed beyond the reach of any parliamentary majority. And the document named them. Matters of religion and the worship of God were “not at all entrusted by us to any human power.” No one was to be forced, by impressment, to serve in the wars against his conscience. No one was to be held to account, once the war was over, for his part in the public quarrels of the late conflict. And in all laws made or to be made, “every person may be bound alike” — no rank, estate, charter, or birth conferring exemption from the ordinary course of the law.⁹ These things, the Agreement concluded, “we declare to be our native rights.”¹⁰

Read that structure again, because a free people would one day build on it, whether or not they knew its name. A written instrument, deriving its authority from popular consent. A government of granted and limited powers. And a set of rights reserved to the people and placed above the ordinary legislature, so that no majority could vote them away. There were several versions of the Agreement — the Army’s of 1647, and further versions in 1649, including one that Lilburne, Walwyn, Prince, and Overton drafted from the Tower — and they differed in their particulars. But the design held across all of them, and that design prefigured, with a clarity that still startles, the written constitutions and reserved rights that lay in the future.

The care the last article urged is worth restating here, because the temptation to overclaim is strong. The Agreement of the People was among the earliest sustained attempts in English political history to found a national government on a written constitution derived from popular consent and limited by reserved rights.¹¹ To say more than that — to call it simply the first written constitution, full stop, or to draw a clean line from its clauses to Philadelphia — would be to trade a defensible claim for an impressive one. What is defensible is impressive enough. Ordinary Englishmen, in the wreckage of a civil war, reasoned their way to the form a free constitution would eventually take, and wrote it down, more than a century before the form became familiar.

They did not, however, agree among themselves about who the consenting people included. That question is what drove them back to Putney, and it is where the honest reckoning with the Levellers has to begin.

The Honest Reckoning

A series that traces the inheritance of liberty owes its readers the whole of these men, and the whole includes the gap between what they said and what they proposed, and the flaws of the men who said it.

Begin with the gap, because it opens at the movement’s most quoted moment. Rainsborough’s “poorest he” rings across the centuries as though it announced universal suffrage, one man one vote, the whole democratic future in a sentence. It did not, and the Levellers themselves did not propose that it should. When they set down the actual terms of the franchise they wanted, most of them stopped well short of every man. The various Leveller proposals generally excluded servants and those who took alms or wages from another — on the reasoning, shared with Ireton more than the “poorest he” rhetoric suggests, that a man dependent on another’s will could not cast a free and independent voice. Whether the wage-laborer was in or out shifted from draft to draft and debate to debate. Women were not part of the proposed electorate at all; the political nation the Levellers imagined was a nation of men. The movement that produced the century’s most stirring words about the poorest man’s equal stake proposed, when it came to the ballot, to leave a great many of the poor outside the door.¹²

This should be stated plainly and not explained away, and it should also be measured against its age rather than ours. Even the bounded franchise the Levellers proposed was radical past the point of danger in 1647 — a vast expansion beyond the propertied sliver that actually voted, and one that terrified the grandees precisely because it went so far. The Levellers were, by the standard of their century, extraordinarily inclusive. They were not, by the standard of the sentence everyone remembers, as inclusive as the sentence sounds. Both things are true, and the account holds both: the reach of the words outran the reach of the proposals, and the proposals were still radical enough to help make their supporters enemies of the men who commanded the Army.

Then there are the men. Lilburne’s vanity and litigiousness were not incidental blemishes on an otherwise serene public servant; they were woven into everything he did. He quarreled with nearly every ally he ever had. He could not distinguish a great constitutional principle from a personal grievance, and he pursued both with the same inexhaustible fury, which meant that the movement’s most famous champion was also a chronic source of its divisions. Overton’s gift for savage satire made enemies the cause could not always afford. The Levellers never built a durable organization, never resolved their own internal disagreements about how far the franchise should reach, and never commanded the kind of disciplined loyalty that might have let them hold the ground they briefly seized. They were pamphleteers and agitators of genius who were not, in the end, builders of institutions.

The fair judgment is the harder one. These were flawed men who did not fully live up to their own most expansive language, working in a movement that never cohered into lasting power and was crushed within a few years of its peak. And they articulated, more clearly than anyone in their world had yet done, principles that would outlast every one of their failures: that government rests on consent, that the individual owns himself, that rights can be written down and placed beyond the reach of power, that the law must bind all alike. The principles outran the men and outran the limits of what the men proposed. That is not a reason to gild the men. It is a reason to take the principles seriously on their own terms, which is what the men themselves asked their readers to do.

The Skeptic’s Case

Against the account offered here, a serious reader can raise at least three objections, and each deserves its full strength before any reply.

They Failed and Changed Nothing

The first objection is the simplest and the hardest. The Levellers lost. They lost completely. Within two years of Putney their leaders were in prison or broken, their soldier allies were shot or scattered, and their movement was finished as a political force. They did not win the franchise they wanted. They did not get their Agreement adopted. The republic they had helped bring into being turned on them and destroyed them, and then that republic itself gave way to a military dictatorship under Cromwell and, after him, to the return of the very monarchy the whole convulsion had overthrown. Measured by results in their own time, the Levellers accomplished nothing that lasted. Their supposed importance, the objection runs, is a thing read back into them by later admirers who needed distinguished ancestors — a retrospective construction laid over a total and unambiguous defeat.

The facts in this objection are almost entirely correct, and they should be conceded without softening. The Levellers were defeated as thoroughly as a political movement can be. What the objection assumes, and what does not follow, is that a movement’s contemporary defeat settles the worth or the influence of its ideas. This series has met that assumption before and will meet it again, because it is one of the recurring shapes of the whole story: ideas that lose in their own moment can survive their defeat in print, be read by people the authors never imagined, and win arguments generations later that their first champions lost. The Levellers’ pamphlets did not vanish when the movement did. They were preserved, collected, and eventually read again. Whether the ideas in fact traveled far enough to matter is a fair question — the next objection presses exactly that — but the mere fact of the Levellers’ defeat does not answer it. Defeat and irrelevance are not the same thing, and this series is in large part the history of the difference.

The American Line Is Thin and Reconstructed

The second objection grants that the ideas survived on paper and strikes at the claim that they went anywhere. The line from the Levellers to American constitutionalism, it holds, is thin to the point of vanishing. The founders did not cite Lilburne. The Agreement of the People was not a text they studied; most of them had likely never read it. By the eighteenth century the Levellers were a half-forgotten episode, remembered when at all as a byword for the chaos of the Interregnum. To claim them as ancestors of the written American constitution is to build a lineage after the fact, connecting endpoints by resemblance and calling the resemblance descent. Similar ideas appearing a century apart do not prove that the earlier caused the later; the parallels may be convergence, two responses to related problems, rather than transmission.

This objection is the one to respect most, because it names a real discipline, and the reply must observe that discipline rather than evade it. Two different kinds of claim have to be kept apart. The first is a claim of documented, traceable influence, and it should be made only where the documents actually support it. There is at least one such channel, and it is well attested. John Lilburne’s stand against being made to testify against himself — his refusal of the Star Chamber oath, his insistence that no freeborn man was bound to accuse himself — entered the common-law tradition as one major foundation of the right against self-incrimination, and that right crossed the ocean and was written into the Fifth Amendment. This is not a resemblance noticed later. It is a line that legal history traces directly: when the Supreme Court of the United States set out the modern law of that right in Miranda v. Arizona in 1966, the Court’s opinion reached back through the history of the privilege to Lilburne and the abuses he had resisted, and Justice Hugo Black regarded the Leveller struggle as part of the foundation of the protections the Bill of Rights secured.¹³ Where a channel like that can be documented, the influence is real and should be claimed.

The second kind of claim is looser and must be labeled as what it is: convergence, not proven descent. The broad architecture of the Agreement — a written constitution, granted and limited powers, rights reserved to the people above the ordinary legislature — reappears in American constitutionalism, but the reappearance cannot be traced through a clean chain of citation from Leveller pamphlet to founding document. The honest description is that the Levellers were among the first to articulate a form that the American founders, drawing on many sources and their own experience, would later give enduring shape. They are better understood as early travelers on a road that others would map, than as the direct authors of the destination. That is a bounded claim, and it is the one the evidence will bear. It is also, kept within its bounds, a significant one: to be among the first to reason your way to a form the future will need is no small thing, even when the future does not remember your name.

They Were Not Democrats, So the Praise Is Anachronistic

The third objection turns on the words we use. To call the Levellers democrats, champions of popular sovereignty and the rights of the common man, is to dress seventeenth-century radicals in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clothes. Their actual franchise, as the reckoning above conceded, excluded servants, excluded the alms-taking poor in most versions, excluded women entirely. Their world was one of natural hierarchy, godly commonwealth, and the rights of freeborn Englishmen — a national and historical claim, not a universal one. Reading them as forerunners of modern democracy, the objection holds, projects a later ideal backward onto men who would not have recognized it and did not hold it.

There is real force here, and the reply is not to deny it but to be precise about what is claimed. The Levellers were not modern democrats, and this article has not called them that. Their franchise was bounded, their vocabulary was that of their century, and to flatten those facts into a tidy origin story for universal suffrage would repeat exactly the error the previous article named in Coke’s admirers: reading a later triumph back into an earlier moment that did not contain it. What can be said, and defended, is narrower. The Levellers pressed the principle of consent further down the social order than nearly anyone in their world, and stated it in terms — the poorest he, self-propriety, native rights not entrusted to any human power — that were more universal than the bounded proposals they attached to them. The words they chose could be taken up later and applied more broadly than they had applied them, and in time they were. That is not the same as calling the Levellers democrats. It is recognizing that they minted language whose logic ran past the limits its coiners set, which is one of the ways ideas outgrow the people who first speak them.

Burford

The movement’s end came in a country churchyard, and it is worth standing in it for a moment before we leave these men.

In the spring of 1649, with the king executed and the republic newly declared, the unresolved quarrel between the Levellers and the grandees came to its crisis. Regiments of the New Model Army, many of them sympathetic to the Leveller program and inflamed by grievances over pay and by orders to ship out for the reconquest of Ireland, mutinied. Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax moved against them with speed and surprised the main body of mutineers at Burford, in Oxfordshire, in a midnight attack. Some three hundred and forty men were taken and locked in the parish church of St John the Baptist as prisoners. After a brief court-martial, three of them, held to be ringleaders, were taken out into the churchyard and shot against the wall on 17 May 1649: Cornet James Thompson, Corporal Perkins, and Private John Church.¹⁴ The rest were made to watch, and then pardoned. Within weeks Cromwell reported to Parliament that the mutiny was suppressed, and by late summer he was in Ireland.

That was, for practical purposes, the death of the Levellers as a force. The revolutionary moment had opened wide enough to let common soldiers debate the foundations of government in a church at Putney; eighteen months later it closed, and it closed with common soldiers shot in a churchyard by the commanders they had followed to victory. The men who had won the war against arbitrary royal power found, as revolutionaries so often do, that the power they had seized was not eager to submit itself to the principles they had fought under. Cromwell would rule, in the end, with a degree of military-backed authority that would have horrified many of the men who had first taken up arms against the Stuarts.

The Road Continues

And yet the words were already loose in the world, and words in print are hard to kill. The Levellers were crushed, their movement broken, their leaders scattered or dead, their Agreement never adopted. By every measure that a general or a magistrate would recognize, they lost. But they had said things that could not be unsaid, and they had written them down where they could be found again: that the poorest man has a life to live as much as the greatest; that every person owns himself, and no man has power over another’s rights and liberties; that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed; that a free people may set down their fundamental law in a written instrument and reserve to themselves rights that no majority and no ruler may cross. These propositions did not die at Burford. They waited, in pamphlets and prison-written tracts, for readers who would need them.

The Levellers grounded the subject’s liberty in something Coke’s backward-looking constitutionalism had not fully reached. Coke had defended English liberty by its antiquity — these rights are old, immemorial, inherited, and therefore beyond the king’s power to revoke. The Levellers reached back to that inheritance too; Lilburne wrapped his radical claims in Magna Carta and the rights of the freeborn Englishman, and never cleanly traded the old idiom for a new one. But they added to it a different and more dangerous foundation: not that these rights are ancient, but that they are ours by nature, given to each individual as a self-owning person, and legitimate only where we have consented. A liberty grounded in antiquity can be lost if the history is shown to be false. A liberty grounded in the nature of the person does not depend on any Saxon past. The Levellers did not abandon the argument from history. They braided into it an argument from nature and consent that would prove, in the long run, harder to refute and harder to forget.

That argument from nature would find, in the generation after the Levellers, its most rigorous and enduring statements. Two men in particular would take up the questions the Levellers had raised in the streets and the barracks — consent, resistance, the rights that precede government — and give them the philosophical form that would carry them into the age of revolutions. One would pay for his convictions with his head. The other would write the book that a later revolutionary generation — including a young Virginian charged with putting independence into words — would draw upon when it came to justify resistance. To the martyr and the philosopher, the next article turns.

This is the road to 1776, and we are still walking it.

Self-Reflection Prompts

1. Rainsborough grounded the right to a voice in government in the man himself — the poorest he has a life to live as the greatest he. Ireton grounded it in a permanent, fixed stake in the country, meaning property. Which argument do you find more persuasive, and what does your answer imply about who should have a say in the laws they live under? Is a voice in government something a person is owed simply for being governed, or something earned by a stake in the community?

2. The Levellers proposed to write down a fundamental law and reserve certain rights beyond the reach of any majority — rights the people “never entrusted” to their representatives at all. This is the idea of rights placed above ordinary politics. What is gained by putting some rights beyond the reach of a majority vote, and what is lost? Who decides which rights belong on that list, and what happens when a later generation disagrees with the choice?

3. Overton argued that each person owns himself — that “self-propriety” is the root from which all other rights grow, and that no one may invade it without consent. How far does that principle reach? If a person owns himself, what may a government legitimately require of him, and where does his self-ownership set a limit that no law may cross?

4. The gap between the Levellers’ words and their proposals was real: “the poorest he” in the rhetoric, a bounded franchise in the actual plan that left out servants, the alms-taking poor, and women entirely. When a movement states a principle more sweeping than it is willing to apply, is the principle discredited by the inconsistency, or does the principle retain a force that can later be turned against the very limits its authors accepted? How should we judge people whose language outran their practice?

5. The Liberty Test. The Levellers wanted a written constitution that would fix the powers of government and reserve certain rights the government could never touch — a fundamental law that no ordinary majority could alter. Measured against the question this series always asks — did it leave people more free, or more governed? — is a written constitution that binds even the majority a guarantor of freedom, a limit on self-government, or, in some measure, both at once? When the people’s own representatives are told there are things they may not do however they vote, is that liberty protected or liberty constrained?

   
   

Endnotes

1. Colonel Thomas Rainsborough (also spelled Rainborowe, Rainborough), speech at the General Council of the Army, Putney, 29 October 1647, in The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, vol. 1, Camden Society, new series, 49 (London, 1891), 301. Quoted here in modernized spelling; the manuscript reads “poorest hee.” The debates were recorded in shorthand by William Clarke and survive in the Clarke manuscripts at Worcester College, Oxford (MS 65). A widely used modern edition is A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1974), 53.

2. Rainsborough, 29 October 1647, in The Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, vol. 1, 301; Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 53. The proposition under debate — that representation be apportioned “according to the number of the inhabitants” — is the first article of the Agreement of the People then before the Council; see note 7.

3. Henry Ireton, 29 October 1647, in The Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, vol. 1, 301–2; Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 53–54. The text reads: “I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom … that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.” Spelling modernized.

4. On Lilburne’s 1637 refusal of the Star Chamber oath, see The Trial of John Lilburne and John Wharton (1637), in A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell, vol. 3 (London, 1816), cols. 1315–68; and Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: George G. Harrap, 1961), 49–64. Lilburne’s objection that the oath was against the law of God and the law of the land, and that no man was bound to accuse himself, is recorded in the trial account; the phrasing here paraphrases rather than quotes.

5. On the 1649 treason trial and acquittal, see The Trial of Lieut. Colonel John Lilburne (1649), in A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Howell, vol. 4 (London, 1816), cols. 1269–1470; and Gregg, Free-Born John, chaps. 24–25. The account of the crowd’s reaction to the acquittal derives from contemporary reports reproduced in the State Trials; the “half an hour” detail is as reported there and should be read as a contemporary account rather than a precise measurement.

6. Richard Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny, Shot from the Prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords (London, 1646), 3–4. A modern critical text appears in Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 54–55. Overton’s dating of the pamphlet is 12 October 1646. The quoted passages — “To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any,” and “No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s” — follow the modernized text in Sharp.

7. On Walwyn’s arguments for liberty of conscience, see [William Walwyn], The Compassionate Samaritane, Unbinding the Conscience (London, 1644), and [William Walwyn], Toleration Justified, and Persecution Condemned (London, 1646); modern texts in Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft, eds., The Writings of William Walwyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), and selections in Sharp, ed., The English Levellers. On Walwyn’s insistence that liberty rested on more than inherited legal forms — his rebuke of Lilburne’s reliance on Magna Carta — see England’s Lamentable Slaverie (London, 1645), in McMichael and Taft, eds., Writings.

8. An Agreement of the People, for a Firm and Present Peace, upon Grounds of Common Right and Freedom (London, 1647), art. 4, in Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, 94–96; also in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 443–45. The document was presented to the General Council of the Army at Putney in late October 1647. The reserved-powers formula — that the representatives’ authority extends “to whatsoever is not expressly or impliedly reserved by the represented to themselves” — appears in article 4. The first Agreement is best understood not as a simple Leveller manifesto authored by Lilburne but as a text emerging from the politicized New Model Army and its civilian radical allies; on the authorship and provenance question, see Elliot Vernon and Philip Baker, “What Was the First Agreement of the People?,” The Historical Journal 53, no. 1 (2010): 39–59.

9. An Agreement of the People (1647), reserved matters following art. 4, in Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, 95–96; Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 444–45. The reserves named include liberty of conscience in religion (”matters of religion and the ways of God’s worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power”), exemption from impressment, indemnity for acts done in the late conflict, and equality before the law (”that in all laws made or to be made, every person may be bound alike”).

10. An Agreement of the People (1647), closing declaration, in Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, 96; Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 445: “These things we declare to be our native rights.” On the several versions of the Agreement — the Army’s of 1647 and the further versions of 1649, including An Agreement of the Free People of England (1 May 1649) drafted by Lilburne, Walwyn, Prince, and Overton from the Tower — see Sharp, The English Levellers, xv–xxviii, and the texts collected there. On the Agreements as the earliest sustained attempts to found the government of the English nation on a written constitution derived from popular consent, see Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon, eds., The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), introduction; and, on earlier colonial written covenants, note 11 below.

11. On earlier written political covenants in the English-speaking world, see the Mayflower Compact (1620), in The Federal and State Constitutions, ed. Francis Newton Thorpe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), vol. 3, 1841, and the Avalon Project text at Yale Law School; and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639), in Thorpe, vol. 1, 519–23. These colonial compacts predate the Agreement and are frequently treated as early written frames of government in English America. The claim made here is accordingly limited: the Agreement of the People was among the earliest sustained attempts to found the government of the English nation itself on a written constitution derived from popular consent and limited by reserved rights, not the first written political covenant anywhere in the English-speaking world.

12. On the contested scope of the Leveller franchise, see J. C. Davis, “The Levellers and Democracy,” Past & Present 40 (1968): 174–80; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), chap. 3, arguing that the Leveller franchise excluded servants and wage-earners; and, contesting or qualifying Macpherson, Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2013), and Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon, eds., The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The scope of the proposed franchise varied across the several versions of the Agreement and remains a live scholarly dispute.

13. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), esp. 458–59 and n. 27, tracing the privilege against self-incrimination through the seventeenth-century English struggle in which Lilburne was a central figure; the Court’s account of the privilege’s “long and expansive historical development” reaches back to the abuses Lilburne resisted. On Justice Hugo Black’s view of the Leveller struggle as part of the foundation of the Bill of Rights, see the discussion in Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-Incrimination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), which treats Lilburne as the catalytic figure in the establishment of the right in the common law. The claim advanced here is limited to this documented channel and does not assert a general line of descent from the Agreement of the People to the United States Constitution.

14. On the Burford executions of 17 May 1649, see Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and Its Debates, 1647–1648 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), for the Army context; and H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (London: Cresset Press, 1961), chaps. 28–29, for the mutiny and its suppression. The three men executed in the churchyard of St John the Baptist, Burford, were Cornet James Thompson, Corporal Perkins, and Private Church; the memorial tablet at the church records “Cornet Thompson, Corporal Perkins, Private Church, Executed and buried in this Churchyard, 17th May 1649.” Cornet Thompson was the brother of William Thompson, a Leveller leader killed separately at about the same time.

    
    

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

• An Agreement of the People, for a Firm and Present Peace, upon Grounds of Common Right and Freedom (London, 1647). Modern text in Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92–101; and in A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1974), 443–45.

• An Agreement of the Free People of England. Tendered as a Peace-Offering to this Distressed Nation (1 May 1649), by John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton. In Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, 168–78.

• Richard Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny (London, 1646). In Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, 54–72.

• The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, vol. 1, Camden Society, new series, 49 (London, 1891). The primary record of the Putney Debates, from William Clarke’s shorthand, Worcester College, Oxford, MS 65.

• A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1974). The standard teaching edition of the Putney and Whitehall debates.

• A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell, vols. 3–4 (London, 1816). Contains the accounts of Lilburne’s 1637 Star Chamber proceedings and his 1649 treason trial.

Secondary Works

• Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Introduction and headnotes; the most convenient scholarly gathering of the central texts.

• Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: George G. Harrap, 1961). The standard life of Lilburne.

• H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (London: Cresset Press, 1961). The classic full-length study of the movement.

• Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and Its Debates, 1647–1648 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). On the Army councils and the Putney context.

• Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon, eds., The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). On the Agreements as written constitutions.

• Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2013). On Leveller ideas of citizenship, the franchise,

• and the freeborn Englishman.

• J. C. Davis, “The Levellers and Democracy,” Past & Present 40 (1968): 174–80. On the bounded character of the Leveller franchise and the anachronism problem.

• C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), chap. 3. The influential (and much-contested) argument that the Levellers’ franchise excluded servants and wage-earners; read alongside the critiques by Foxley and others.

• Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-Incrimination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). On Lilburne and the descent of the right against self-incrimination into American constitutional law.

• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972). On the wider explosion of radical thought in the 1640s.

  
  

Next: Article 10 — “The Martyr and the Philosopher”