The English Radical Tradition: The Levellers

"None comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him."- Richard Rumbold, Leveller.

I should not be amazed any more, but it still surprises me so many radical people in England (and elsewhere in the West, for that matter) seem to relive the Bolshevik daydream when it comes to considering political change. It is ridiculous when you consider England (and every other Western country, if you are prepared to look) has its own radical political traditions which it can draw upon. We have the whole resistance to the post-1066 "Norman Yoke"; the 1381 Peasants Revolt; the Levellers in the English Civil War; Tom Paine; the Chartists; the mutualist and co-operative movements. Even with the events of 1917-18, when English Radicalism (and its Scots and Welsh counterparts) was swept under the carpet by both Labour and the Leninists, there must be hope that, with both of these political traditions' political bankruptcy increasingly apparent, almost a century after they achieved their hegemony over "the Left", people will rediscover their radical traditions and embrace them.

With that in mind, it's great to see that people are beginning to see the relevance of the Levellers and the 1647 Putney Debates. Labour-loyalist intellectual Tristram Hunt tries to pin the Levellers and their ideas to Labour's flag in the article below, but hopefully people will see through that!



The Putney Debates, 1647

A jewel of democracy: Last year we asked readers to nominate the neglected event in Britain's radical past that best deserves a proper monument. You chose the Putney debates of 1647, where ordinary people established the principle of votes for all. At last, its place in history will be celebrated - at St Mary's parish church, starting tonight
Tristram Hunt, The Guardian, Friday October 26, 2007

From this evening, British democracy has a new HQ. Modestly placed part way between the Palace of Westminster and the Magna Carta memorial at Runnymede, Putney parish church is now a living monument to the story of English liberty. And it is all thanks to Guardian readers. In summer 2006, G2 ran a competition to unearth Britain's radical past. We argued that despite major advances over the past 10 years in opening up popular understandings of "heritage", the radical inheritance was still not nearly as well represented as it could and should be.

For the most part, it was the cathedrals and castles that continued to dominate the national memory. The stories, monuments and myths that traditionally linked progressive people with their heroic past had steadily retreated from public consciousness. As Nick Mansfield of the People's History Museum, Manchester, put it, "In the past, conservation planners and architectural historians have concentrated on protecting buildings of artistic value or those associated with 'great men' and their achievements. Sites associated with the labour movement or the history of working people have been largely overlooked." What we wanted to do was tell another story of Britishness and, in the process, make sure we preserve and popularise our inspiring radical history.

You responded in your thousands, highlighting the forgotten landmarks of the progressive past: from Bodmin parish church in Cornwall - scene of the 1549 Prayer Book rebellion - to Discovery House in east London with its connections to the Poplar rate dispute of 1921; from Queen's Square, Bristol - the setting for the reformist riots of 1831 - to Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire and its symbolic role in the 1984-85 miners' strike.

There could only be one winner, but since the launch of the competition radical heritage has come alive. The People's History Museum and Monmouth Shire Hall, venue for the show trials of Chartists following the failed 1839 Newport risings, have both received substantial grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund (of which I am a trustee) to interpret and explain their collections. In Manchester city centre, plans are under way for a proper commemoration of the 1819 Peterloo massacre. And in London, discussions are well advanced for a liberty trail across the capital to chart the streets, institutions and buildings that marked some of the milestones towards modern democracy. But the jewel in the crown is Putney, in south-west London, where support from the Guardian, Lady Antonia Fraser, the Heritage Lottery Fund and numerous kind donors has funded a new exhibition centre.

Why Putney? Because Guardian readers were adamant that this delicate little church, situated on the edge of the Thames amid all the vulgar bustle of wealthy south-west London, retains an unrivalled foothold in the story of Britain. The debates that began at St Mary's church on October 28 1647 pioneered the liberal, democratic settlement: a written constitution, universal suffrage, freedom of conscience and equality before the law. "From its first ascendancy here at St Mary's, there may be traced the acceptance - centuries later in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and now in two-thirds of the nations of the world - of the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens, irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth," in the words of Geoffrey Robertson's new introduction to the Putney debates.

By summer 1647, the Roundheads were winning the English civil war. At Marston Moor and Naseby, Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army had crushed the Cavaliers and King Charles I himself was now in custody. But among the victorious soldiers there was a gnawing fear that parliament and the army generals (or "grandees") were preparing to sell them out. Some MPs, fearing the religious militancy of the army and keen for a settlement with the king, wanted to cut soldiers' pay, disband regiments, refuse indemnity for war damage and pack them off to Ireland. Most loathsome of all, they also looked set to betray the religious and political ideals the New Model Army had spent the previous five years fighting for. "We were not a mere mercenary army hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth ... to the defence of the people's just right and liberties," the soldiers complained.

Their grievances were taken up by Leveller agitators within the army rank and file. The Levellers ("who declared that all degrees of men should be levelled, and an equality should be established", according to critics) put forward a postwar manifesto entitled the Agreement of the People. This was a response to "The heads of the proposals", which the grandees had submitted to the king - a highly conservative document that did little to challenge the existing power structures. By contrast, the Agreement of the People was a purposively radical text proposing a constitutional settlement that would be the envy of many post-conflict nations today. It urged religious toleration ("The ways of God's worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power"); a general amnesty and an end to conscription; a system of laws that must be "no respecter of persons but apply equally to everyone: there must be no discrimination on grounds of tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place"; regular, two-yearly parliaments and an equal distribution of MPs' seats by number of inhabitants. At its heart was a profound belief in human liberty and a conviction that politicians were as dangerous as princes when it came to undermining personal freedom. It was the people who were sovereign.

With Oliver Cromwell in the chair, the general council of the New Model Army came together at Putney church, in October 1647, to argue the case for a transparent, democratic state free from the taint of parliamentary or courtly corruption. It proved to be one of the greatest intellectual encounters in western political thought. What was first of all remarkable was the active involvement of rank and file soldiery. And it is thanks to the shorthand notes of the army secretary, William Clarke, that 360 years on we get to hear their political theory. "Never again, even up to today, have private soldiers been allowed to question their officers," as one Guardian reader remarked during the competition.

On the second day of the debates, after a good five-hour prayer session, the soldiers focused on the question of the franchise. Who had the right to vote? For the Levellers, the answer was clear: all those who placed themselves under government should have the right to elect it. The vote was a natural right, irrespective of property or position. "I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he," in the celebrated words of Colonel Rainsborough, "and therefore ... 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."

The wealthy, socially conservative grandees were horrified by this spectre of egalitarian democracy. To their minds, it presaged anarchy and corruption with wealthy politicians able to buy up the votes of the uneducated, dependent masses. Instead, Cromwell's son-in-law, Henry Ireton, proposed that the franchise be limited to those with a "fixed local interest", that is, the independent, propertied sort. For Rainsborough, such a solution was a wretched betrayal of the civil war sacrifice. "I would fain know what we have fought for: for our laws and liberties? (Yet) this is the old law that enslaves the people of England - that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all!" In the end, they reached a compromise that the vote should be granted to all adult males - excluding servants, apprentices, foreigners, beggars and, obviously, women.

The debates then went on to discuss how to deal with the problem of Charles I. And it was during those chilly autumn days, in the pews of Putney, that the mood hardened against that "man of blood" King Charles and a deadly momentum developed to put him on trial for high treason. The road to the English republic - that epic moment in these islands' history - flowed downstream from Putney to parliament.

Given such subversive sentiments, it was unsurprising that Clarke's shorthand manuscript (subscribed into long hand after the Restoration) was kept hidden. Many of the ideas expressed at Putney - liberty of conscience; a government dependent upon the sovereign will of the people; equality before the law - would, via the ministrations of John Locke, make their way into American political thought and the US constitution. But in Britain these philosophies remained buried late into the 19th century until the Clarke Papers were finally unearthed in Worcester College, Oxford, by the historian CH Firth. They then received popular notoriety thanks to ASP Woodhouse's 1938 work, Puritanism and Liberty, which implicitly conjoined the struggle against fascism with Rainsborough's cry of liberty.

Today, the debates at Putney speak to our modern politics with an equally powerful voice. For the ideal of democracy and liberty the Levellers proposed seems a horribly long way off from our deracinated political system with its party hierarchies, executive arrogance and parliamentary pomposity. Not to mention our murky system of peerages. Their notion of the political life would appear far closer to the extra-parliamentary activities of pressure groups, activists and campaigners than the cosy world of three-party politics. As Gordon Brown edges closer towards a written constitution and a new Bill of Rights, the debates of 1647 might also serve as something of an inspiration. What the Levellers posited nearly 400 years ago was precisely the kind of secular constitution guaranteeing freedom of conscience and speech alongside a sovereign parliament which many regard today as much needed political safeguards.

But the Levellers were not simply secular democrats in prototype: the Putney debates were more a mass prayer meeting than constitutional symposium. Every day the soldiers sought God's guidance in their search for a political solution to the civil war and a post-monarchical settlement. While the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins might find it uncomfortable, the story of British democracy is intimately bound up with the theology of Protestant Christianity. Yet Putney was also a gathering of soldiers. With the British army seeming once more to be led by evangelical Christians (with the chief of the general staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, making no secret of how religion informs his leadership) unafraid to make their spiritual beliefs dictate questions of public policy, it might be pertinent for our defence establishment to look back upon the debates as both an inspiration and a warning.

More importantly, as the government searches for histories and narratives to bind Britain's increasingly disparate communities together, the story of democracy is as good a one as any. What the Putney debates highlight is this nation's extraordinary role in the development of participatory democracy. In our diffident relativism we tend to shy away from it, but from the Magna Carta onwards, we have played a pioneering role in the emergence of equality before the law, universal suffrage, an independent judiciary and freedom of speech. The struggle for these rights is precisely the history we should be teaching our schoolchildren and new migrants.

At Putney, we have made a start. The Guardian's money has helped to fund a small but permanent exhibition centre with digital copies of the Debate transcripts, explanations of the civil wars and the context of 17th-century Putney, and a historical commentary on the meaning and legacy of 1647. In addition, this week the church is hosting a series of events - from plays to debates to re-enactments - to involve as many new audiences as possible in the story of Putney. The problem is that these exhibitions are operating in a vacuum: only one (fee-paying) school in the area is teaching the civil war in the history AS/A-Level syllabus. As government initiatives eat into the school day with anodyne citizenship lessons, the one part of our history that teaches the fundamentals of modern citizenship - democracy, toleration, quality - is being quietly abandoned. Can you for one moment imagine French schools not teaching the 1789 Revolution or American high-schools omitting the Wars of Independence?

So the battle for radical restoration goes on. More landmarks need to be preserved and opened up to the public. We need to free our radical heritage from the crusty, self-contented ghettoes to which it has succumbed and make the point that this is our history. At the same time, we must guard against the philistines intent on dismantling our progressive inheritance - and few are currently quite so brazen in this regard as the Labour councillors (Labour councillors!) of Waltham Forest in London who are trying to flog off the superb William Morris gallery. At least south of the Thames there is now a proper memorial and explanation of one of the great radical moments of our past, suitably housed in the Reverend Giles Fraser's progressively ecumenical church. And since you helped to choose it, you should now go and visit it.



From this evening, Putney church will be hosting a series of events to mark the 360th anniversary of the Putney debates. Visit putneydebates.com for more information. A new edition of the Putney Debates and surrounding texts, with an introduction by Geoffrey Robertson QC, has been published by Verso, priced £7.99.