New work on the Levellers and other radicals of the seventeenth century underlines the crucial role they played in the English Revolution, argues John Rees

In an age of phrase makers that numbered two of the greatest poets in the English language, John Milton and Andrew Marvell, it was Thomas Rainborowe who spoke some of the most famous words of the English Revolution. In the great confrontation between the Levellers and Cromwell’s supporters at Putney Church in 1647 it was this mariner turned soldier who told the ‘Grandees’ of the army that,

‘The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … I think it’s 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.’

But what was it that brought Thomas Rainborowe to that famous moment? The story of the Rainborowe family has long needed a popular historian to tell it. And Adrian Tinniswood, fresh from doing a similar service for another seventeenth-century dynasty in The Verneys, proves to be the man for the job.

The story of the Rainborowes is the story of one of the essential threads of radicalism that made the English Revolution. Thomas’ father William Rainborowe was a mariner and ship owner in Wapping. He did good service, and was rewarded for it, fighting pirates in Charles I’s navy. But Charles’ autocratic bent in politics and religion severed the links between the Rainborowes and the Crown, as it did for many of their circle.

Among the family and its close kinship network were the founders of New England, including the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop. Many Puritans fled to New England to escape Charles I’s rule. This vital connection is especially well detailed by Tinniswood. More on this can be found in another interesting recent book, John Donoghue’s Fire Under the Ashes, An Atlantic History of the English Revolution.

The New Englanders were there to escape Stuart rule, but they flooded back once the revolution began. Thomas Rainborowes’ regiment was full of them, including his brother and fellow Leveller William and Stephen Winthrop, son of John.

William and Thomas were at Putney together. Tinniswood may be too uncritical of modern conservative interpretations of the English Revolution and of the Levellers. But he is right to conclude: ‘The Rainborowes mattered … because they were there at a moment when the world changed. And they helped to change it.’

The volume of essays about The Agreement of the People edited by Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon is a very different proposition. It is a compendium of the most recent historical research the Levellers’ political programme. When Rainborowe spoke at the Putney debates in 1647 he was advocating the first edition of this document. There were two others issued by the Levellers themselves by 1649 and other similar proposals were also issued by other radical forces, including New Model Army officers, before the end of the revolution.

Baker and Vernon’s volume is a milestone in the post-revisionist revival of interest in the Levellers by contemporary historians. The revisionist current that arose in the 1980s had little time for the Levellers, denying their impact on the course of the revolution. Post-revisionist historians in the last decade have begun to reject that conservative interpretation.

Some historians represented in this collection of essays probably still take the revisionist frame of reference as their starting point. But a number of others – Rachel Foxley, Ian Gentles, Edward Vallance, Ann Hughes – are either actively critical of revisionism or, at the least, pay it little mind.

Rachel Foxley’s work on Leveller ideology is best seen in her recent book, which I have reviewed elsewhere. But her essay here contains important discussions of the interface between religion and politics in Leveller thought. And it emphasises the new conceptions of democratic citizenship that they brought to political debate. Ian Gentles is the foremost modern authority on the New Model Army and he has long contested the revisionist attempt to diminish the influence of the Levellers among parliament’s soldiers.

Ann Hughes careful discussion of the Diggers and the Levellers makes an essential point that Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley’s prophetic politics left him appealing to Cromwell to realise his vision rather than relying on the ‘more familiarly political activities of publishing, lobbying, petitioning or rallying public support amongst soldiers, London sectaries and sympathetic parliament-men, characteristic of the Levellers’.

This point speaks directly to the issue of the degree to which the Levellers were an organised political ‘party’. Frances Henderson’s careful and precise investigation of the army officer’s version of the Agreement of the People looks at this issue. Both she and Ian Gentles conclude that it was the joint action of the officers around Cromwell and the Levellers which finally brought the revolution to its conclusion in Prides’ Purge and the execution of Charles I.

Jason Peacey places more emphasis on the alliances that the Levellers constructed than on the organisational structure they created. But this is a knife that cuts two ways. In order to be able to create alliances with others, the Levellers themselves had to be a relatively organised and homogeneous organisation in tehir own right.

This fact has sometimes been overstated to mean that they were a party in the modern sense, which they clearly could not be in the 1640s. But they were and organised political movement. And the fact that historians more than 350 years later are still discussing the political programme with which they were associated is perhaps the best proof of that.

Baker and Vernon’s volume does not represent a new consensus on the Levellers, and certainly not a new radical consensus. But it does represent a new debate that no longer takes place on the ground staked out by revisionism. Everyone interested in the Levellers and the radical impulse of the English revolution will welcome these volumes and profit from reading them.