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Scholars have long debated the extent and efficacy of English censorship in the 1640s. Drawing on publication and censorship data, this chapter argues that the infamous 1643 Licensing Ordinance proved more effective than many scholars have allowed. While writers, printers, and publishers enjoyed greater liberty to produce and circulate polemics in the 1640s, the measures adopted by Parliament and the Council of State limited the freedom of the press. Yet something changed fundamentally during this decade of civil war: at moments in the 1640s, the government lost control not just of the presses but of the discourse surrounding censorship. By examining the contests that arose over censorship, culminating in a discussion of John Lilburne’s treason trial, this chapter traces the vicissitudes of censorship in the 1640s and registers the discursive changes in debates about press freedom.

The introduction sets out the challenges offered by revisionist and postrevisionist historians to the celebratory and sometimes anachronistic view of the Levellers in the older standard works, and offers ways forward. It provides a brief outline history of the Leveller movement in the context of the events of the civil war and regicide period, including an introduction to the lives of the Leveller leaders William Walwyn, Richard Overton, and John Lilburne, and a summary of the Levellers’ demands. The introduction concludes with a brief discussion of methodology.

Chapter 2 offers significant original research grounded in a rich and detailed trove of archival sources, including pamphlets, broadsides, and rare manuscript sources not ordinarily considered as major parts of the Leveller oeuvre and builds on the work of historians such as Michael Braddick, David Como, David Adams, Gary DeKrey, Jason Peacey, and Rachel Foxley, who have come to understand the Levellers as a community and not just a political movement. Having laid out both the historical and the theoretical stakes of the project in the preceding chapter, this second chapter traces the Levellers’ refinement of their hermeneutics of collectivity through a domestic heuristics that rested upon an analogy between the House of Commons and commoners’ houses.

The creation of the New Model Army in 1645 brought unprecedented polarization to parliament’s cause. Common ground between “presbyterians” and “independents” eroded and, increasingly, Roundheads were driven into competing camps. This polarization was exacerbated by the polemical interventions of the most extreme independents, most notably the clique associated with Richard Overton’s secret press. The resulting political battles were conducted using the full range of techniques and practices outlined in previous chapters. Parliamentary maneuver was complemented by grass-roots mobilization, including petitioning, co-optation of the city government, sermons and countermeasures, rumors, street placarding, and calculated print campaigns, hinting at significant transformations in the conduct of political life. Paradoxically, these conflicts worsened with parliament’s victory at Naseby, as the competing sides gathered strength to struggle over the final settlement. The chapter concludes by examining the political rise of John Lilburne, with his controversial claims for the supremacy of the House of Commons.

This chapter examines ideological developments unfolding in the last months of the civil war. In particular, it examines the coalescence of a “propaganda collective,” centering on John Lilburne and his closest collaborators, which began to promulgate a distinctive vision of political reality, put forward as the need for a final settlement became evident. This “collective” established many of the ideological, organizational, and personal ligatures that would hold together the Leveller movement in 1647. However, this collective remained in 1645 an integral part of the wider “independent” coalition, sharing broader political and ideological objectives with other constituents of that coalition. Moreover, there were also important developments among other independent sympathizers, evident most notably in the emergence, for the first time, of overtly republican sentiments and arguments at the end of 1645.

This chapter shows how the victors in the civil wars emulated the royalist regime by isolating enemies in island prisons. Victims of the Commonwealth and Protectorate included cavalier conspirators sent to the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands, religious radicals held on the Isle of Wight and Scilly, and dissident army officers exiled to Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man. Revolutionary England supported a chain of offshore prisons, where inmates often likened themselves to the godly prisoners of Scripture. Sufferers included the Leveller John Lilburne, the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers, the Unitarian John Biddle, and the republican Robert Overton. Some construed their prison island as Patmos, and Oliver Cromwell’s England at Babylon.

This chapter provides an overview of the ideas and organizational ligatures that emerged by the 1630s to challenge the policies of Charles I’s personal rule. The chapter outlines some of the striking political ideas put forward by members of the “puritan triumvirate.” It also surveys the various ecclesiological alternatives championed by more rigorous puritans as alternatives to the existing episcopal and ceremonial order. Finally, it surveys the networks of clandestine print and distribution, centered in the Netherlands and anchored by sectarian puritans, which were responsible for disseminating these ideas and programs in England. The chapter concludes with three local case studies—London, Bristol, and Hertford—that illustrate these interlinked themes. The chapter argues that in terms of personnel, organizational structure, and ideological formulation the 1630s had already witnessed key developments that would have a deep impact on civil-war politics.

This chapter presents an account of the constitutional ideas of a political group known as the Levellers. Formed during the course of the English revolution, they survived only a few years and failed to achieve any of their main objectives. Leveller ideas nevertheless acquire importance as the first movement to expound the main precepts of modern constitutional democracy. The development of that movement is sketched and the key themes of their constitutional thought examined. Arguing that modern British constitutional practice has developed in ways that diverge from Leveller ideas, the chapter shows how, by focusing on their ideas, the tensions within contemporary governmental arrangements—especially those between the discourses of governing and of constitutionalism—can be more clearly delineated.

Braddick explores how John Lilburne used Christian tropes of suffering and martyrdom to dramatize imperilled civic liberties rather than the true religion. His sufferings grew out of his religious commitments, but his public appeal was to all Englishmen, many of whose religious beliefs he would have found objectionable: what he had in common with them was his legal inheritance, not a shared religious identity. This line of argument was more comprehensible to later generations than the more inspired spiritual radicalism of many of his contemporaries, and his example continued to appeal to eighteenth-century audiences. To the Romantics, however, his perspective seemed cramped and limited: Carlyle thought that he lacked the transcendent vision of the true hero. While Lilburne had helped to secularize the tropes of martyrdom, its appeal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depended on their being reinvested with transcendent political ideals rather than the defence of particular rights.