style="font-size:15px;"> Lilburne’s approach was, as ever, both highly polemical and highly legalistic. His argument was that the rights granted by King John to the City of London were being usurped by the current oligarchy. The fundamentals of the Leveller approach are visible in these writings. In Lilburne’s view, ‘the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, for anything I can perceive . . . lay no claim to their pretended power of voting to make laws in the Common Councell but the authority of the Charter of Edward III which in such case is not worth a button.’ For Lilburne,
the only and sole legislative law making power is originally inherent in the people . . . in which the poorest that lives hath as true a right to give vote, as well as the richest and greatest; and I say that the people by themselves, or their legal Commissions chosen by them for that end, may make a law or laws to govern themselves, and to rule, regulate and guide all their magistrates (whomsoever), officers, ministers, or servants.20
These views are strikingly similar, as we shall see, to those expressed the following year when the Leveller programme, the ‘Agreement of the People’, was presented at Putney Church. Lilburne’s struggle against the Presbyterians in the City was part of a wider, tripartite struggle for power that had begun with the end of the First Civil War in 1645. Charles I was intent on regaining as much of his previous power as he could, mainly by playing upon divisions among his enemies. The moderates among the Parliamentarians were willing to restore Charles, as long as he would guarantee a Presbyterian form of national church. The Independents, who did not believe in a nationally enforced form of church worship, were strongest in the officer corps of the New Model Army. The Presbyterians understood that the New Model Army was the obstacle which stood between them and a deal with Charles. So they moved to disband the army, without payment of arrears, and to send some of its regiments to Ireland to suppress Catholic rebels.
The army revolted and the regiments began to elect ‘agitators’ (the then meaning of the term being the same as ‘agent’) to address their concerns. A series of increasingly political manifestos, drafted with the help of those soon to be known as Levellers, began to flow from the presses. In June 1647 the king was seized by a mere junior officer, Cornet George Joyce, who rode to Holmby House in Northamptonshire and took him into the army’s custody.
The Presbyterian ascendancy in Parliament began to raise their own military force. Pro-Presbyterian apprentices rioted, and forced fifty-eight Independent MPs to flee to the army for safety. In response the New Model Army broke camp in August and occupied London. Colonel Thomas Rainsborough’s regiment was the first to gain access to the City from Southwark. Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell and Commissary General Henry Ireton began their own negotiations with the king, now held at Hampton Court and already being urged by some supporters to escape. Leveller Edward Sexby says that these negotiations with the king had left Cromwell’s reputation ‘much blasted’. The New Model Army was now divided between the Grandees, or the Silken Independents as Cromwell and his followers were known, and the agitators and their Leveller allies.
THE LEVELLERS AND LONDON
On 28 October 1647 these forces assembled in Putney Church, then west of London. And it is from this location that the debates held in the church, and on subsequent days in the nearby Quartermaster General’s lodging, take their name. William Clarke, secretary to the New Model Army, took down the Putney debates in his own shorthand. The most remarkable presences are those of ordinary and elected soldiers, debating with the highest officers in the army. ‘Buffcoat’ is all the name Clarke gives one participant. The Levellers and agitators presented the ‘Agreement of the People’, their plan for a more far-reaching and democratic settlement of the nation than anything Cromwell and Ireton had in mind.
Thomas Rainsborough and Henry Ireton were the key protagonists, and it is their formulations which most fully express the opposed positions in debate. The content of the debate addressed the nature of the written constitution itself, but its significance for the participants bore upon what would happen to the revolution in the future. Would it stall? Who would benefit? The Levellers were seeking to detach the radical forces of the revolution from their affiliation with the Grandees, and get them to force through the radical vision of a new England.
One of the most famous exchanges in English political history took place between Rainsborough and Ireton as they discussed the right of the poor to vote for a government – or was this to be the preserve of property-owners? As soon as the ‘Agreement of the People’ was read to the meeting, Ireton objected that it seemed to argue that ‘every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered’.21 Rainsborough’s reply is justly celebrated:
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; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under . . .22
Ireton’s argument for narrowing the franchise was straightforward: ‘All the main thing I would speak for, is because I have an eye to property . . . let everyman consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property.’23
Rainsborough’s words are now carved into the stone balcony at Putney Church. But when they were uttered they were as much an urgent call for the revolution to continue as they were a timeless statement of constitutional rights. We should remember that, while they talked, Robert Lilburne’s regiment (Robert was brother of John, then in the Tower) was refusing to march north as ordered by New Model commander Lord Fairfax. Agents from cavalry regiments addressed them, reading out a letter which urged them to stand up for ‘England’s freedom and soldiers’ rights’. The debates were interrupted by messengers coming for instructions on how they should seek to quell the unrest.
Indeed, the conclusion of the Putney debates was that there should be a rendezvous of the army to consider the issues. The Independents manoeuvred to ensure that this was three separate meetings, not the single assembly the Levellers had imagined was decided. ‘England’s freedom, soldiers’ rights’ was the very slogan that Robert Lilburne’s regiment brought, defying their generals, to the army rendezvous at Ware. The rebellious soldiers were forcibly suppressed by the New Model’s senior officers, and one of their number was shot. The crushing of the Ware mutiny settled, for the time being, the questions that were raised at Putney. But Leveller organization in and around London continued to grow.
On 17 January 1648 John Lilburne and John Wildman addressed a Leveller meeting in Wapping, home of the Rainsborough family. Lilburne had been invited to the meeting ‘by some friends’ in order to answer the scruples and objections that ‘some honest people, in or about Wappin’ had concerning the Large Petition for which the Levellers were canvassing.24 George Masterson, a Presbyterian minister from Shoreditch parish, attended the meeting to spy and the following day he denounced the meeting as a traitorous conspiracy to both the Lords and Commons.
On 19 January, Masterson, Lilburne and Wildman all gave evidence at the bar of the House of Commons. Lilburne was immediately committed once more to the Tower, and Wildman to the Fleet prison. Both were charged with treason. The next day Masterson gave evidence again, to the Committee of Both Houses sitting at Derby House. He published his evidence as a pamphlet on 10 February, and the same material was published by the government at about the same time.25
Lilburne and Wildman hotly contested Masterson’s charge of treason, but, as Norah Carlin has shown, the picture that emerges from Masterson’s account of the Wapping meeting and Lilburne and Wildman’s responses gives us our most detailed picture of how the Levellers and their supporters organized.26 The purpose of the Wapping meeting was to promote the current Leveller petition and, once enough signatories had been gained, to organize a demonstration in its support. At the meeting Lilburne and Wildman fielded questions about the petition and explained the methods by which it
