The Levelers — The First Modern Revolutionaries

by Michael Livingston

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the high point of the English revolution, the year 1649, and of the first modern revolutionary movement, the Levelers. While the Leveler movement continued for several years after 1649, it did not pose a serious threat to the regime after that year. Today, in the 350th year since the peak of their influence, and on the eve of the 21st century, the Levelers still have much to offer radicals and theirs is an important legacy for us to recall. (The present article supplements a more detailed account of the Leveler movement, reprinted from the 1949 Fourth International. See elsewhere in this issue, the two items by G.F. Eckstein, “Cromwell and the Levelers: Tercentenary of the English Revolution: 1649–1949” and “Ancestors of the Proletariat.”)

On January 30, 1649, Oliver Cromwell and his officers executed King Charles I. This was the turning point in the long revolution that pitted the British monarchy and the old feudal aristocracy against Parliament and Cromwell’s military government. Like all revolutions, the English Revolution of 1642–1660 unleashed hitherto quiescent social forces. One of the most radical of these, the Levelers, took to the streets after the execution of the king. Demanding the election of a new parliament based on universal suffrage and advocating a radical social program, they had the support of the common people of London and much of the rank and file of the New Model Army, the military force commanded by Cromwell and Parliament.

In May 1649, a Leveler-inspired and Leveler-led military revolt broke out in the army. Cromwell and his leading generals personally took the field against the revolutionaries and on May 17 crushed them.

Beginnings of the Leveler Movement

In 1629 King Charles I dissolved Parliament and began a period of dictatorial rule, but just over a decade later, in 1640, he was forced to recall Parliament in order to raise money for an army to suppress the revolt that had broken out in Scotland. This parliament became known as the Short Parliament because it sat from only April to May of 1640 before being dissolved by the king.

The king was forced to recall Parliament in November 1640 after the English defeat by the Scots. This new parliament, known as the Long Parliament, was distinctly hostile to the king. The Long Parliament began a process of dismantling royal power. The conflict between king and parliament intensified still further when rebellion broke out in Ireland in November 1641. Needing to raise an army to suppress the rebellion there, the Long Parliament adopted more radical measures against the king.

The root cause of this conflict between crown and Parliament was the rise of capitalism in England. England had slowly, over the previous century, developed a unitary state. This state was governed by the “crown in parliament,” meaning the king in coalition with the ruling elite represented by Parliament. With the rise of capitalism in England, the capitalist class had increasingly come to dominate Parliament. The capitalists wanted the state to maintain order, protect property, and promote their interests. The capitalists did not want to see the continuation of a feudal monarchy that, through royal monopolies and royal power, competed with them. The revolution was essentially a class war for control of the unitary state.

The hardships of war and the need of the capitalist class to win support from yeomen and urban artisans opened political opportunities never before available to the English masses (also known as “the mob” to the ruling elites of the time). The need for mass support let the cat out of the bag, as it were, and, to use Christopher Hill’s expression, “the world was turned upside down.” (Hill is today’s leading historian of the period — see the section below on Further Reading.) The entrance of the masses into the conflict terrified the ruling elites, causing a process of defection away from Parliament’s cause to that of the king. Thus elements of the rising capitalist class kept trying to reach an agreement with the king and many defected to the king’s side. At the same time Parliament spent almost as much time fighting the real champions of democracy and liberty as they did Charles I. After Charles’s execution in fact, Cromwell turned the full repressive force of the state against the radicals, but this jumps ahead in our story a bit.

Charles I was forced to act to protect his power. He tried, unsuccessfully, to arrest the leaders of the opposition in Parliament. When this failed (in January 1642) he withdrew from London, and in August of that year military conflict broke out between Charles and Parliament. At first the king’s troops held the advantage, but they could not take London because of fierce resistance from trained bands of troops from the city. London, at the time, was the political, economic, and population center of the country. Without London, the king could not rule England.

A deadlock ensued. Parliament sought an alliance with Scotland against the king, concluding a treaty with Scotland (called the Solemn League and Covenant) in September 1643. The first fruit of this alliance was a decisive military victory over the king’s forces at Marston Moor in July 1644 by forces from Parliament and Scotland. Parliament did not follow up on this victory, however, and intense political conflict broke out between two political groups in Parliament: the Presbyterians and the Independents, the former being more conservative, the latter more radical. While both represented the capitalist class, the Presbyterians favored a state religion (as an instrument of state control) and were more likely to seek reconciliation with the king.

In 1645 the Long Parliament tried to reorganize the army in order to defeat Charles. The Self-Denying Ordinance was passed in April, removing military command from members of Parliament, and the army was reorganized. The New Model Army, as it was known, quickly triumphed over the king in June 1645. Made up of urban artisans and free yeomen — the pre-proletariat, as Frederick Engels called them — the New Model Army promoted officers on merit, not rank. It quickly became a fearsome fighting force and a dynamic political entity. Charles formally surrendered in June 1646, ending what is usually called the first civil war. Parliament now controlled the king’s fate.

Leveler Movement Founded in London

It was during 1645–1646 that the Leveler political movement (it was later to be an organization as well) came together in London. The four principal leaders of the movement were John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and John Wildman. Lilburne was the most popular figure, a fiery activist of unquestionable toughness and integrity. Together with Wildman, they were the group’s leading spokespeople and the link between the London radicals and the rank and file of the army. Overton and Walwyn were the movement’s intellectuals, formulating much of the political program for the party. All four were topflight political theorists, and all four represented the pre-proletariat, or the “middle of the road,” to use their own phrase.

The Leveler leaders carried out their struggle through the use of pamphlets and mass organizing. They were the first to make use of the printing press as a major tool of political organizing, and they wrote in a clear, forceful style that had a deep impact on later writers such as Jonathan Swift and Thomas Paine. In addition to pamphlets, they also started newspapers that gained wide circulation throughout the country. Because they faced enormous repression and censorship, they had to move their printing presses from place to place and print their pamphlets clandestinely. Incredibly, they led much of the revolutionary activity from their prison cells, as they spent most of the crucial years in prison, either by order of the king or by order of Parliament.

Lilburne’s fate illustrates the fate of the other Leveler leaders. He was imprisoned in 1638 for trying to import literature critical of Charles I into England. He was tried three times for treason (and acquitted three times by a jury). Between 1645 and 1650, the period of Leveler political activity, he was imprisoned seven times by Parliament. Finally, in 1650 he was banished for life from England only to return again in 1653. Upon his return he was arrested again and tried for treason. He was acquitted yet again by a jury, but Cromwell refused to release him until shortly before his death in 1657.

Origin of the Term “Leveler”

The word “Leveler” (also spelled “Leveller”) had been around for almost 50 years before it was applied to this particular political movement. The name had originally been used in 1607 to describe a group of common people in Northamptonshire who, to protest the enclosure of land by capitalist sheep raisers, leveled fences and filled in ditches. During the Putney Debates in 1646, representatives of the capitalist class used the term to describe their left-wing opponents. The label was initially used only by the political opponents of the Levelers, and was at first resented by Lilburne and other radicals. In a short time, however, it came into common usage, partly because it so aptly described the political program of the Levelers.

On July 7, 1646, the Levelers published A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens. The Remonstrance, written most likely by Overton with the aid of Walwyn and others, was a bold attack not just on Charles I (he had surrendered earlier that year) but on kingship and aristocracy. The Remonstrance asserts that the House of Commons should be the lawmaking body, and must be accountable to the people. It then goes on to address specific grievances, forming essentially a political platform. Among the demands we find that men (women were excluded from Leveler discourse until after 1649) should not be forced to answer questions against themselves, that there must be freedom of the press, and that all individuals should be free to worship and believe what they wish.

The Levelers also demanded the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the right to refuse military conscription, the elimination of oppressive taxes, and relief for the poor. Finally, the Remonstrance demanded annual elections to Parliament at set times. Remonstrance became the political platform of the Levelers. This platform was to change and grow over the next few years as the Levelers deepened their analysis and learned from the struggles of the masses.

The Levelers now began to circulate parts of their platform in the form of petitions. These petitions were than presented to Parliament. Parliament was placed in the awkward position of refusing to grant what the people wanted. This series of petition drives culminated in the so-called Large Petition of March 1647. The petition so shocked Parliament that they ordered it burned by the hangman. At this point, the Levelers shifted their organizing and agitating to the New Model Army.

The Putney Debates and the Agitators

Strife within the New Model Army over the invasion of Ireland, the attempt by Parliament to disband the army (without paying soldiers what they were owed in back pay), and the political course of the “Grandees,” Cromwell’s senior officers, led to the emergence of Agitators. Agitators were the elected representatives of their regiments. As the elected representatives of the rank and file soldiers, they sought to propose not just military policy but a new constitution for England. This written constitution, the first in recorded history, was based on the idea of inalienable human rights. Drafted by Lilburne and other Leveler leaders in London, this constitution was entitled An Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace, upon Grounds of Common Right and Freedom.

The exact relationship between the Levelers and the Agitators is still not clear. We do know that some of the Agitators and some of the rank and file were Levelers. Included among this number were Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, the chief spokesperson for the Agitators in the Putney Debates, and Colonel Robert Lilburne, John’s younger brother. It is also the case that John Lilburne himself had fought in the Civil War. Enlisting in 1642 he fought under Cromwell and had risen, on merit, to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before leaving the army in early 1645. A number of historians refer to the Leveler faction within the New Model Army and the existence of elected representatives (the agitators) to a council was a standard Leveler demand. (Incidentally, the word “agitator” first appeared in the English language at this time — being used to denote an elected representative of the rank and file.)

The debate in the army council over the Leveler proposal was historically unique, both because it took place at all and because of the content of the debate. The debate in Putney Church was held from October 28 to November 11. Essentially a parliament of the army in which all were equal, be they private or general, the Putney Debates pitted the representatives of the rising capitalist class, principally Cromwell and his son-in-law, General Ireton, against the elected representatives of the rank and file of the army. Chief among the spokespersons for the rank and file were Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, a Leveler, and Private Sexby, also a Leveler leader. The Agitators also brought two civilians with them, one of whom was John Wildman, one of the main Leveler leaders. Wildman, like Lilburne, had served previously in the army against the king and had risen through the ranks to the position of major.

For Universal Human Rights

In the debates, Rainsborough and the Agitators argued forcefully for universal human rights. Ireton and the other representatives of the capitalist class argued equally forcefully for the restriction of human rights and the danger that such a doctrine would present for private property. The debates went against the capitalists in the main, but Cromwell and his generals outmaneuvered the Agitators by stalling, using personal attacks, and watering down the radical proposals in subcommittees. They also prevented the army from meeting to discuss the proposals, as the Agitators wanted, instead insisting that individual units meet separately to discuss the proposals.

The army generals were able to stall long enough to prevent any action from being taken. They also were aided in this by the need to recapture the king, who had meanwhile escaped from Hampton Court, where he was being held prisoner to the Isle of Wight. As happened before and would happen again, fate seemed to smile on Cromwell — although we cannot exclude the possibility that Cromwell may have helped arrange the escape himself. It is certain that the king had help from some members of Parliament in effecting his escape. The need to recapture the king and the opening of what was to be the second round of military conflict (the so-called Second Civil War) had the effect of uniting the army behind the generals.

After the Putney Debates, Cromwell purged radical officers and agitators. As with the escape of the king, Cromwell was again favored by fate when Rainsborough was murdered. That fall, Rainsborough led his troops in the spectacular capture of Colchester from the Royalists. Cromwell then transferred Rainsborough to the north of England to capture the nearly impregnable fortress of Pontefract. Early one Sunday morning he received two visitors, who claimed they had a message from Cromwell. These visitors were Royalists (although Cromwell’s participation is also possible) sent to kill Rainsborough. Finding him unarmed, the Royalists removed Rainsborough from his tent. He fought them with his bare hands. The Royalists then killed him with their swords.

Rainsborough’s funeral in London became a massive political demonstration. Mourners wore sea-green, Rainsborough’s regimental colors. From that moment on, sea-green symbolized the Leveler cause. With an important rival out of the way, Cromwell then reestablished control of the army by means of martial law and court-martials.

After the breakdown of the Putney Debates the Levelers circulated An Agreement of the People as a petition. They aimed to bring about a constitutional revolution by means of an extragovernmental plebiscite. Their activity resulted in many thousands of signatures to An Agreement of the People. It was presented to Parliament by five respectable Levelers, but Parliament ignored the petition and jailed the five.

In late December 1647 and the early months of 1648 the Levelers sought to build up an effective and more powerful political organization. Organization meetings became a regular feature of the movement. Leveler organizers were sent to all parts of the country. Dues were collected from members and treasurers were elected. Finally, local groups elected representatives to a national group, which elected the overall leadership of the organization. The main political tactic of the Levelers remained the mass petition. They also tried to organize regional meetings to discuss and debate the direction of the country. Finally, drawing on their experiences in the New Model Army, they tried to organize democratically elected councils among workers and yeoman farmers.

1649 — The Year of Living Dangerously

After the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649, the Levelers increased their political activity against Cromwell and the Long Parliament, seeking to overthrow the government. The government acted forcefully against the Levelers, arresting the entire leadership in March. Overton called on the people to rule through a joint council of officers and men democratically elected by the rank and file of the army. He also called on the army and people to fight against Cromwell’s dictatorship. Cromwell acted quickly, disbanding some rebellious units and attempting to shift others to Ireland.

Mutiny broke out in the army in late April and early May. Cromwell suppressed this mutiny and had the Leveler leader of the mutiny, Robert Lockyer, executed. Lockyer’s funeral in London was attended by many thousands all wearing sea-green and black ribbons. On May 1, the Levelers presented a new petition to Parliament, An Agreement of the Free People of England. This petition contained almost 100,000 signatures.

On May 17, another Leveler-led mutiny was crushed at Burford. The rebel Leveler units were trying to join with others when Cromwell offered to negotiate with them. Then at midnight, while they were billeted in the village of Burford, he made a surprise attack and was able to capture over 300 of them. Over 500 escaped, but without their horses and many of their weapons. Disillusioned, these man returned to their homes and did not present any further threat to the government. Cromwell then had the leaders of the Leveler unit shot in front of their comrades in arms. One of Cromwell’s officers observing the executions remarked that “the corporals died bravely.”

The Levelers continued to organize using their mass petitions and in September presented yet another petition to Parliament with almost 100,000 signatures on it. This was to be the last major act of the Levelers as a political organization. Leaderless and facing massive repression from the consolidated power of Cromwell, Leveler members and allies began to abandon the group, withdrawing into passivity or shifting to other political activities (such as plotting the assassination of Cromwell). The Levelers were now in political decline.

Levelers and Diggers

As the Leveler leadership faced the hard hand of political repression from March 1649 onward, new forces started to move. In particular, yeomen who for many years had been suffering from the enclosure of land by rural capitalists seized land and began to farm it collectively. There is evidence of these land seizures in at least ten counties. The yeomen forming these collective farms were known as Diggers, a term that had originated earlier in the century around the same time as the term Leveler.

The most famous of these digger collective farms was at St. George’s Hill. We know about St. George’s Hill mostly because of the work of Gerrard Winstanley, a leader at St. George’s Hill and the author of a number of pamphlets defending the Diggers. The Diggers faced harsh repression from authorities and the local lords of the land who used private gangs of thugs to destroy Digger crops and homes. The Digger movement generally collapsed in 1652 as a result of this constant repression, although a few Digger communities survived into the 1660s. Winstanley wrote a detailed presentation of Digger principles for a collectivist utopia entitled The Law of Freedom in a Platform in 1652.

Like the Levelers, Winstanley bases his argument on the notion of natural rights for all humans. Claiming that all are born equal (and while a product of his patriarchal times, he argued for considerable rights for women in such fields as voting, marriage, sexual relations, and education), Winstanley argued that God gave the earth to humankind as a common treasury and that private property (except things like private dwellings, clothes, and a few personal possessions) must be eliminated completely. Winstanley here draws to its logical conclusion the idea of natural rights for all: that human rights and capitalism are incompatible, a conclusion already foreseen by Ireton and the other capitalist leaders in the Putney Debates.

Like the exact relationship between the Agitators and the Levelers, the exact relationship between the Diggers and the Levelers is not known. We do know that many Diggers, including Winstanley, were familiar with and influenced by Leveler political philosophy, even going so far as to call themselves True Levelers. Some of the Leveler leaders such as Lilburne were critical of the Diggers, but others, such as Overton, were much more sympathetic. By the time of the founding of the collective farm at St. George’s Hill, the Levelers had gained members and formed local organizations among the yeomen and rural laborers. Although still primarily based among urban artisans, the Levelers did have a rural base. The Leveler paper, The Moderate, published Digger manifestos without any critical or hostile comments, and a number of Leveler groups and meetings adopted resolutions of support for the Diggers. It is likely, then, that there was some overlap between the Diggers and the Levelers.

Compared to the size and power of the Levelers, the Diggers are an interesting sidelight. Many historians (both liberal and Stalinist) have focused on the Diggers and given short shrift to the Levelers for political reasons. While the Diggers are both interesting in themselves and interesting because their actions anticipate socialism, their real significance lies in the fact that they drew to its logical conclusion the Leveler political philosophy of natural rights for all.

The Levelers and Our Revolutionary Heritage

The Levelers were “pioneers of many tomorrows”; they were the first to develop the modern concept of a democratic state; the first to develop the idea that individuals had certain inalienable rights that no government, not even a democratic one, could take away; the first to organize a revolutionary political group; the first to argue for democracy in the work place (in their case, the New Model Army). Among their specific proposals were a bill of rights, regular elections of parliament, term limits, and universal suffrage. Their bill of rights included freedom of speech and assembly, the right to legal counsel, freedom of conscience, and a separation of church and state and a tolerance for all religious beliefs, including the right not to believe. They also argued for the right to refuse military conscription, not just for religious beliefs but for any reason of conscience. Finally, in the last years of the movement, they argued for land reform, workers rights, and the common ownership of land. They were, to paraphrase Fenner Brockway, the first modern revolutionaries.

The political enemies of the Levelers sought to wipe out their memory from history. There are still historical debates about the radical nature of the Levelers’ demands, the extent of their influence, the role they played in the revolution. It is only in the last 60 years that historians have really examined their role in the revolution, and many questions are yet to be answered. What we can say, however, is that the ideas of the Levelers haunted the rising capitalist class like a ghost that could not be exorcised. The political philosophy of Locke and others was a response to the Leveler ideas.

The one 18th-century historian who did discuss Leveler ideas, Catherine Macauley, passed on those ideas to the political radicals of France and the American colonies. The radical political leadership of both the American and French revolution were shaped by these ideas. The state constitutions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Carolinas all showed the influence of the Agreement of the People. I cannot help speculating also on the direct importation of these ideas to the American colonies by English immigrants arriving on these shores during and after the English revolution. Given the broad base of the Leveler movement among the English masses, it is not farfetched to imagine that some of the immigrants had been Levelers or, at the least, were familiar with Leveler political ideas and organization.

While some parts of the Leveler program have yet to be achieved (such as the right to refuse military service and abolition of the death penalty), what is crucial is not the specific ideas they proposed but their radical spirit, which emphasized the inalienable rights of human beings under all conditions and at all times. This radical commitment to human rights forces us to realize that, as Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood have written, “liberty and property are, beyond a certain point, incompatible.” Such a radical vision, of inalienable rights and democracy for all everywhere, is the very essence of socialism and our revolutionary heritage.

Further Reading

If you are interested in reading more about the Levelers and the English Revolution you can select from a number of good books. For general background there is the now classic The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972) and The Century of Revolution: 1604–1714 (New York: Norton, 1980), both by Christopher Hill. Hill is the leading historian of the period. You can read the Leveler documents themselves in three collections: Leveller Manifestos of the Puritan Revolution (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), edited, with introduction and commentaries, by Don M. Wolfe; The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), edited by G.E. Aylmer; The English Levellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), edited by Andrew Sharp. Finally, there are two excellent treatments of the Levelers from a socialist perspective: Britain’s First Socialists (London: Quartet Books, 1980), by Fenner Brockway; and A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688 (New York: New York University Press, 1997) by Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood. Brockway’s book is a history of the Levelers, while the Woods’ book examines political theory, including a chapter on Leveler political thought.