Levelling Up

There are a few political rallying cries which stir most liberal Westerners: freedom and slavery, for example. This has been an issue in certain right-wing arenas during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs and other restrictions on freedom of movement. The freedom from having irresponsible people infect me with a possible lethal and (at the time) hard to treat illness does not seem to be quite so much on the agenda, but no one is perfect.

Equality before the law is another thing upon which liberal democracy is founded, as is the universal franchise, that is that all people should have a vote in deciding who is going to represent them. These things were not always part of our national structures, of course. The obtaining of them was a struggle, and took, in fact, centuries.

One of the early groups to argue and agitate for those things we now consider to be rights under our national constitution were the Levellers. These are to be distinguished from the Diggers (discussed a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, the Diggers seem to have regarded the Levellers as insufficiently radical, describing themselves as the ‘True Levellers’.

The Levellers had their beginnings in the First English Civil War (1642-6). They were never a united political party; more a few well-known leaders and their followers, and a large number of pamphlets and tracts describing a program of reforms. Their main claims and arguments were for a reform of Parliament and religious tolerations. Everyone was born equal in their political philosophy, and no one had a natural right to govern or rule over another free-born person. Government had, therefore to be by consent.

Fair enough, but that begs the question of ‘consent by whom?’ to which the answer was ‘the people’. That raises another question, of whom ‘the people’ are. The complaint was that Parliament was, in two ways, undemocratic. Firstly, the undemocratic elements, the House of Lords and the Monarch had to be stripped of their power. Secondly, while Parliament was officially democratic, in fact, the franchise was so small in many constituencies and many seats were in the pockets of the local gentry as rotten boroughs, the democracy as the voice of the people, in general, was stifled.

The Leveller suggestions were to elect Parliament more frequently – every year or two (depending on which pamphlet we read), giving MPs a modest salary to prevent them being dependent on rich patron and their programs and for the electorate to be all men over 21 except servants (who were expected to vote as their employers directed), the recipients of alms (ditto) and royalists (who would have to wait a decade). If voting was a birthright, it was only to be removed from those who had squandered it – criminals, supporters of the king, the wage earners and so on. Thus the Levellers actually limited the franchise significantly and never seem to have considered the right of women to vote.

The Leveller position was founded on Scripture, a fact which those who regard them as the foundation of the British political left might like to ponder a little. Limitations on the power of government were necessary because the human heart was corrupt and magistrates were likely to err. Certain freedoms were to be respected no matter what Parliament decreed, be it never so democratically elected. Freedom of conscience was likewise to be protected. Conscription was to be outlawed and everyone was to be treated equally under the law.

There were to be limits, of course. True freedom of conscience was liable to land up with trouble. Freedoms should not land up troubling other people or endangering the state. Natural law, of comeliness and civility, should trump religious freedom when required. For the Levellers, perhaps, political liberty was the route to religious liberty. The two could not, at the time, be separated.

For the Levellers God did not choose the university-educated men to be ministers of the Gospel, but the ill-educated, the fishermen and tent-makers of the New Testament. Anyone could, therefore, preach; clergy who spoke of obedience and submission to the government were serving other gods than Jesus. This is a consequence of the Reformation and the printing press – the Bible was available for all the read and discuss, and people did, drawing their own conclusions.

However, people also needed to be instructed in the Gospel, and hence there was a case for having ministers, but these should be elected by the people of gathered churches, rather than imposed by the government and a national church. The Levellers therefore would have separated church and state, something which was not to the liking of many in the country at the time. Politics and religion were not that easily separated.

Of course, theological positions among the Leveller pamphleteers varied, and there is dispute as to how much of their program (such as it was) was theological. Lilburne of course was a well known religious radical, in trouble as a young man before the outbreak of the civil war over distributing banned pamphlets. Many Levellers seem to have taken the core of Christianity as the Golden Rule and it was the basis of their arguments for equality. Old Testament forms of government were overturned by the incarnation. The Old Testament was not, according to the Levellers, a prefiguring of later practices. If the church was a voluntary assembly, then Old Testament ideas of church and government could not apply.

After the 1647 Putney debates, the Levellers were suppressed. They had been too influential, particularly in the army, for the comfort of the government and an ill-timed and ill-planned mutiny led to their decline. They may well have felt betrayed by Cromwell (who spent some time defending Lilburne) and Parliament. The impact of the Levellers was rather small; they existed as a group, albeit loosely, for around six years. None of their proposals were established, and they were forgotten about for two to three centuries, until the Chartists revived some of their demands and, slowly, some of the demanded freedoms were established.

Their program was radical – equality under the law, inalienable natural rights, freedom of conscience, limitations on government, concepts of natural justice and voting rights for the poor. These had never existed, except in their imagined Anglo-Saxon past (before the Norman yoke was imposed). It is little wonder that their demands were too rich for the grandees of the time and, in many places, are still too much for governing classes to swallow.