The Last of the Levellers

offered up such a piece in the Guardian at the end of August. The Levellers have long been seen as proto-democrats among many on the left, the pioneers of an egalitarian society, celebrated by the likes of Tony Benn and Michael Foot, who were regular attendees at Levellers’ Day, a commemoration held at Burford churchyard since 1975. There, on May 17th, 1649, Cornet Thompson, Corporal Perkins and Private Church were executed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell. In recent years, the Levellers have also attracted a more right-wing following, with that most eurosceptic of MEPs, Daniel Hannan, praising them for their libertarian tendencies alongside his friend, the sole UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell, their point of view owing something to Alan Macfarlane’s thesis outlined in his 1978 study, The Origins of English Individualism.

Whatever one’s politics, it is true that the ideas put forward by the Levellers, outlined brilliantly by Sarah Mortimer in a previous issue of History Today (‘What Was at Stake in the Putney Debates?’, January 2015), had significant constitutional impact; much of their Officers’ Agreement, for example, was incorporated into John Lambert’s Instrument of Government of 1653, which remains Britain’s only written constitution. Yet, while Putney and Burford are well known, less familiar is the Levellers’ end. John Lilburne, ‘Free-born John’, the most celebrated of them, sank into quietude having converted to Quakerism, not then an especially quiet creed.

Others, most notoriously Edward Sexby, aggrieved by what he saw as the Protectorate’s abandonment of the ‘Good Old Cause’, conspired with Royalists at home and in exile to bring down the Cromwellian regime through acts of terror. The ‘other’ Gunpowder Plot of January 1657, when Miles Sindercombe, another former Leveller in the pocket of Sexby, sought to burn down Whitehall with Cromwell inside it, is nowhere near as well known as it should be, but shows how desperate some of the Levellers became. As ever, the myth is an untroubled version of the history.

Paul Lay is the editor of History Today.