The Levellers

26:10And why have they taken the sort of centre stage of the debate about the levellers? So the Putney debates, as we think of them now, were discussions within the army with some civilian influence that took place in the autumn of 1648. They didn't have that sort of coherence among contemporaries. They wouldn't have referred to anything like sort of the Putney debates in the way that we do as a shorthand now because that, again, is almost like the serendipity of how we know what happened. Theresa mentioned ago the transcript that we have. And the transcript that we have, we owe to the shorthand skills of a young army secretary, William Clarke, who was present and noted in a newly learned shorthand verbatim what happened at Putney.

26:50So the army is camped about six miles upstream along the Thames and the army has got very used now to sort of debating how on earth it's going to, what it wants as part of a durable settlement. But those transcripts lay, hidden in plain sight, but they lay in Worcester College, Oxford, for over 200 years before they were discovered towards the end of the 19th century. A young military historian, Charles Firth, was given a tip-off by the college librarian and then set to... It's interesting, but... Presumably he had to decode the shorthand first of all. Clark himself had started decoding his own shorthand during the Restoration.

27:27So in 1662, Clarke started decoding his shorthand notes that he'd taken in 1647. And then he didn't live to finish them. He was killed in the Anglo-Dutch Wars in the mid-1660s. And actually Firth didn't venture into the shorthand. He just reproduced the bits that Clarke himself had transcribed. But the late 19th century is probably the first time as well that professional historians begin to get very detailed reconstructions of events during this incredibly complicated and convoluted period. But then you begin to get this very immersive sense of how the army sought to hear these different voices, some of which were much more radical, some of which, as Ted was saying, were more conservative.

28:07And I think Theresa's right to say that as historians in the 20th and 21st centuries, they've tended to hone in on things like the franchise. but looking at the debates as a whole one gets not only a sense of the army's keen, acute sense of its own professional honour and it wants to know that they will be treated properly for the services that they've done. I mean what is the point of having fought and died for parliament if they're not going to be granted indemnity or any kind of protections and if they're going to be treated that badly or shabbily then that doesn't augur very well for citizens thereafter so they're interested in things like indemnity, they're interested in legal reform as a standard sort of like motif that reappears, abolishing monopolies, abolishing tithes, really reimagining a settlement that's not only fairer, but also, they hope, durable, that won't just lead to some resumption of hostilities.

28:55Thank you, Claire. Ted, one thing that I haven't really understood yet is how coherent and organised a movement is this. I mean, we've heard of one or two characters who are prominent, but do they have membership? Do they have officers? Do they have, you know, local chapters of this organisation? Yeah, and this has been a big subject of debate amongst historians as well. And I think there are some historians who take the view that when we're talking about the levellers, we are talking about a label that's been created mostly by their opponents to create this image of this sort of organised, radical, dangerous movement.

29:33I mean, I gave you that example of the numbers signing up to the September 1648 petition. that comes from a hostile royalist news book and the intention is to show you that there's this level of conspiracy that's about to overturn monarchical government and the established religion. But my view is that we can talk about them as a meaningful organisation and I think that's for a number of reasons. Firstly, once we get to the point of having the agreement of the people as if you like the level of manifesto I think there is a coherence to what they're arguing and that coherence stays with the movement until through to its sort of end as a meaningful movement in spring of 1649.

30:16And I think there is also an organisational structure behind them and that's something that we see coming through in terms of that petitioning organisation. So some of the information again that we get about the petitioning organisation comes from hostile sources. There's a report from a Shoreditch minister called George Masterson who's basically operating as a spy and he sneaks into one of these meetings in January of 1648 where they're about to kind of formulate a new petition and get it out. And what he says that they're doing is that they appoint commissioners who are there to basically distribute this petition.

30:51They're kind of producing lots and lots of multiple printed copies of the petition so that it can be easily disseminated. They're raising funds to support the petitioning activity. So we're seeing an organisation in place through this report and even though it's our style report, We then get people like Lilburn and people like Wildman essentially endorsing what Marston is saying about what they do. And I think we can see kind of similar references later on in later Leveller petitioning campaigns that substantiate that sense of a genuine organisation. Teresa, there seems to be a consensus that this is a fairly revolutionary moment in English history.

31:30But how radical were there? And were there any other people who thought they were actually not radical enough? Well, quite. So Claire has sort of alluded to the modern historical reception of this amazing discovery of the Putney transcripts in the late 19th century. And it sort of was not lost on historians at the time that there seemed to be obvious parallels between the demand for equal voice at Putney, So the parliamentary franchise and sort of modern campaigns for voting rights in this country and also then in the United States. And so there was a well-developed kind of historiographical debate in the 20th century about just how radical the Levellers really were.

32:11And in particular, kind of in the middle of the 20th century, Marxist historians, so Christopher Hill and others, began to make the case that, well, you know what? I mean, sure, the Levellers look radical from the perspective of many of the other sort of possible positions in the mid-1640s. But actually, the real radicals, the real egalitarians in the period are the group known as the Diggers, led by the failed mystic and merchant Gerard Winstanley, who in the spring of 1649 begins to dig and manure and plant in the wasteland upon George Hill. So the diggers were kind of elevated as these proto-communist figures in the period who made the levellers and sort of Lilburn's rejection of any kind of economic levelling look like a sort of, you know, to use the kind of Marxist language, the levellers appeared as just sort of bourgeois defenders of private property and free trade.

33:04Not a concept at the time, of course. No, not quite. And so I think, again, we need to get out from under this kind of modern historiography to sort of get to look anew at what was going on. And so the first thing to say is that this idea that somehow defending private property rights in the mid 1640s wasn't itself radical. It's just completely ahistorical. I mean, we're shortchanging level of radicalism in that respect. The defense of the property rights of freeborn English men and women is part of a campaign against monopolies of all sorts. So religious monopolies, economic monopolies, but also print monopolies.

33:36So the idea that property rights also are part of a defense of freedom of speech. But on the other hand, we're also ignoring the extent to which the diggers, so Winstanley and his comrades on George Hill in 1649, they refer to themselves as the true levelers and are very self-consciously taking up these kinds of arguments from natural equality that you get in Lilburn and other leveler petitions and saying, This also means that we should be able to stand as equals in creation without buying and selling or anyone looking down on or lording over anyone else. I mean, I think no group has probably suffered more than being sort of placed out of time.

34:14I mean, people often say they were ahead of their time, which doesn't help us as historians, or they were kind of remarkably modern. I think it is a fundamentally transformative moment. And I think that is part of the sheer upheaval of the country having been at war with itself. I mean, events like the Putney debates catalyse a huge amount of radical thinking in unforeseen circumstances. I mean, the idea that you could put your divinely ordained king on trial publicly and execute him with the axe of the common hangman is an incredibly radical outcome. And I think you can certainly see these ideas among 18th century revolutionaries, 19th century chartists, sort of 20th century trade unionists.

34:52I came across exactly sort of 50 years ago, Tony Benn gave this very long lecture in Burford Church about the influence of the levellers. And he said it was a real comfort for him to have discovered that class struggles, industrial struggles, had this long antecedent. And he asked this brilliantly sort of ahistorical question, what would the levellers make of us if they could see us today? And he identified lots of regions in which he would say, we're not doing so well. Massive inequality of wealth, persistence of poverty, all sorts of ways in which I can see why many subsequent generations have gone back to their writings and found real cause for inspiration as well as just remembering what the impact of that kind of upheaval of civil war must have been.

35:33Ted, Claire's just pointed to the elephant in the room which is the execution of Charles I in 1649. Were the levelers supportive of this? Were they involved with it? How did they approach this? Yes, they were. And I would argue that they're actually very important in explaining how we get to this remarkable point where Charles is put on trial and then executed. Lilburn, again, gives us a bit of a distorting effect because Lilburn comes out publicly in opposition to the trial of the king. But it's important to understand that this isn't because he thinks that Charles is wonderful. He describes Charles as being an evil man, but it's because he thinks that the type of court that has been set up is wrong.

36:16It doesn't have a firm legal basis. For him, the new government on the basis of an agreement of the people should have been established first and then the king should have been placed on trial. But in fact, the levellers are, I think, really at the forefront of making the argument that responsibility for the civil war sits with Charles. So they talk about kings as being a source of continual oppression to the English people. so it's even the institution of monarchy that may be a problem and we've been talking about the Putney debates and those famous debates around the franchise but one of the other things that's going on at Putney is they are discussing what to do with the king and a number of the people there at Putney are saying actually we need to deal with Charles he is a man of blood referring to this biblical ideal of blood guilt that the stain and sin of blood on the land can only be cleansed by killing the person responsible After the Second Civil War, it's the leveller movement that kicks off the petitioning campaign to bring the king and other leading royalists to justice.

37:21But it's not even kind of outside of the court and outside of the trial. We can even see leveller supporters participating in the trial itself. So an under-examined aspect of the trial are the witnesses that are brought to give testimony against the king. Now, a number of these we can see actually have leveller connections. so there's a witness called Arthur Young who is an officer in Parliament's army he's got a certain amount of fame because he's the man who takes the royal standard out of the king's standard bearer's hands at the Battle of Edgehill the first pitched battle of the Civil War but importantly he's also one of these agitators one of these representatives of the army rank and file and he's one of the agitators who signs a petition in support of the agreement of the people in 1647 And we can find other agitators giving evidence as witnesses who also subscribed to that same petition.

38:15OK, Teresa, you're a professor of political theory. So tell me, are the levellers political theorists? Are they activists? Are they a new breed of politicians? What are they? So I think that this is something that many modern political theorists and historians of political thought have maybe struggled with, sort of how to categorise the levellers and how, you know, I am a professor of political theory, and I like to think of political theory as just the contemplation of politics in the abstract for the sake of doing it better. And on that definition, they're doing political theory, but they're doing it in a way I think that sort of offends maybe some intellectual historians, like maybe like Claire and also me and other guys, which is that we like to think that it's really sometimes the ideas and the arguments that are driving the bus, and that the best ideas and the best arguments are the ones that matter most.

39:07But I think many of the Levellers contemporaries at the time were very attuned to the fact that a lot of the arguments the Levellers were offering were not particularly good arguments. So Lilburn is a great example. Again, you know, he's something of a jailhouse lawyer. You know, he had a grammar school education, but he never went to university. And so he's really teaching himself about the common law in Magna Carta during his various stints in prison and coming up with really inventive arguments about Magna Carta and everything on that basis. And so William Prynne, one of his former friends and also fellow Puritan martyrs, ends up becoming incredibly critical of Lohbergen and saying that he is an upstart monstrous lawyer called to the bar at Newgate Prison, where he now practiceth.

39:50And they're constantly pointing out that he knows nothing about the common law, that the fact that his Latin isn't very good means that he's making influences that a person better educated never would have. But what I like about the levelers, and I think that they're political theorists in a sense that we need to maybe take more seriously, is that they are discovering arguments that allow them to do things politically. And the arguments end up being persuasive insofar as the doing of things looks good to others. And so that's, I think, the key when we see these leveler arguments proliferate. It's not because they're great philosophers, but they are excellent political activists and political theorists.

40:28Claire, two questions for you off that. First of all, are you offended? And secondly, they were short-lived, the Levellers. What happens to them? So, no, I'm not offended at all. And I think Lilburn's celebrity at the time, we perhaps tend to look too much to the political theory and expect too much. Among contemporaries, Lilburn is famous for having been put on trial twice for treason and having been acquitted. And that is no mean feat in the 17th century. This is the most serious crime against the state. And two juries in 1649 and 1653 acquit him. And there are celebrations and bonfires and all sorts of things.

41:02So I think among contemporaries, that's where they see his achievement. Because it doesn't end well, this movement. The Regicide doesn't solve everything. A new utopia isn't created. And very quickly, Lilburn's on the case. England's New Chains Discovered is published in February 1649 and then part two in March. And he is put into trial for treason. And his trial in October becomes this big set piece trial. There are scaffolds erected for people to watch. He makes this very strong claim that anyone who's put on trial for their life should at least be afforded defence counsel. He isn't given it.

41:32And he appeals to the jury and says, you should be jurors of law as well as of fact. You know, is this a lawful trial? Most of the trial revolves around his own works being read out. And there's great cheers. At one point, the judge sort of tells him he's not here to tell the story of all your life. But when he is then acquitted by a jury, you know, that is a massive humiliation for this new Republican regime. There are medals created with the names of the jurors. And if you want to see the role of civilians as they have today, that's why jury trial and involvement of lay jurors today matters so much to people.

42:04It's in that moment. And just briefly, what happens at Burford? There's an event at Burford. Burford, that sort of epitome of Cotswold charm. Yes, there are small instances of mutiny or rebellion in the ranks in different places. They start in London in April 1649 in Bishopsgate. So, yeah, you have your rank and file and you have the top command, often referred to in a shorthand as the Grandees. And Cromwell and the Grandees fear that this could become really contagious and that there'll be, as they put it, a sort of standard of sea green, the colour that levelers have started wearing ribbons.

42:39And the two sort of forces, a very mutinous regiment, is met at Burford with Cromwell's regiment. 300 mutineers are rounded up, held in Burford Church. One of them, Anthony Sedley, inscribes his name Prisoner 1649 into a stone font. Three of these mutineers are then taken out to the churchyard, Corporal Perkins, Corporal Church, Cornet Thompson and executed. And then, I mean, there's another standoff in Oxford. So these are suppressed very quickly. And again, that's some of the reason for the slightly ambivalent sense of subsequent historians who want to venerate Cromwell as this great military strategist.

43:16Military discipline is really important to these people. And the idea that there has been dissent in the ranks is quite difficult to accommodate into this sort of heroic story. I mean, Burford is one of those sort of very dramatic moments. And that's exactly why Tony Benn went to go and give this lecture in Burford Church in 1976. Ted, how are levellers remembered in the 18th century? Are they forgotten or do they actually inspire other movements? So they're certainly not forgotten. And I think one of the reasons why they're not forgotten is to do with Lilburn and his courtroom struggles in particular has just been discussed.

43:52So his kind of battles to defend his life in these treason trials are seen as resonant with 18th century radicals battles against authority as well. So in particular, John Wilkes and his North Britain case in issue 45, where he's accused of basically libeling the king for criticising the king's speech over the Treaty of Paris. Wilkes is seen as a successor of Lilburn. He's referred to as a kind of a new Lilburn. And there's a lot of similarities in terms of the style between Wilkes and Lilburn as well, that kind of celebrity radicalism, the emphasis upon the individual, their struggles, their appearance.

44:34You do see these echoes at the end of the 18th century in the American Revolution and then the French Revolution. So it's just the strangest coincidence. It turns out that Thomas Jefferson is actually related to John Lilburn on his mother's side. So that kind of echo of Lilburn's postscript that we get in the Declaration of Independence. I mean, whether or not Jefferson is self-consciously channeling leveller ideals then, certainly 50 years later, when he's reflecting on the Declaration, he describes the palpable truth of equality in the Declaration in language borrowed from another leveller. So Richard Rumbled on the scaffold in 1685, who said that the mass of mankind had not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred ready to ride them.

45:17But the idea of equality, how important are the levelers for that? Where do they fit into the development of equality as an idea? I think they're hugely important. And something really does change in the 1640s when leveler arguments and activism effectively make the idea of equality effectual in a way that it hadn't been before. It begins to be used to do things politically. And so, I mean, we've been talking about the kind of the sort of slightly paradoxical nature of leveler reception. So the leveler movement fails, you know, the agreement of the people is not enacted. But Lilburn is remembered and his legal activism is remembered.

45:55And that lives on and very sort of successfully in a sort of self-conscious way. I think there is also this kind of less self-conscious legacy. And I would argue that some of these leveler arguments about equality are preserved, as it were, in the arguments of their critics. So I'm interested in the way, for instance, that Thomas Hobbes ends up offering effectively a kind of satire of this leveler understanding of equality in the state of nature. You know, Hobbes says, OK, well, if we are sort of equally lords, then what we would have is a war of all against all, in which these little lordlings try to vindicate their claims to kind of equal respect in ways that are politically disruptive.

46:33But Hobbes' own critics, for instance, the Earl of Clarendon, also noticed the ways in which Hobbes ended up sort of taking on some of the leveler demands in his political philosophy as well, particularly the claim that once we've left the state of nature, we still ought to acknowledge one another as equals by nature, not insult each other. So Clarendon actually accuses Hobbes at one point of having written Leviathan in order to flatter the delight that the common people have in the word equality, which in truth means nothing more than keeping on their hats. My thanks to Ted Vallance, Theresa Bejan and Claire Jackson.

47:10Next week, how William the Conqueror decided to deal with Wales after the Norman conquest. We'll be discussing the Welsh marches in front of an audience at the Hay Festival. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. OK, so now we go to the podcast bit, which is where we can sort of kick back a little and be more relaxed. But I have specific questions I want to ask that I've been dying to ask. And Claire, I want to start with you. The War of the Three Kingdoms. Is this the English Civil War or is that Anglo-centric beyond belief or is this a War of the Three Kingdoms?

47:54What should we call this period? So I absolutely believe it's the War of Three Kingdoms. That's because I started my career as a Scottish historian and all of my career has been interested in the interplay of events in England, Scotland and Wales. I think as a shorthand, I'm happy with English Civil Wars rather than the English Civil War. I think War of the Three Kingdoms has become a term that's more often current in academia, and I don't think it's quite caught on. But absolutely, this is a single king, Charles I, ruling over three separate kingdoms, each of which has a different confessional complexion to its neighbour.

48:28And Charles I's authority unravels first in Scotland in the late 1630s, and then in Ireland, and then in England. And, I mean, different historians have characterised it in different ways. Conrad Russell talked about a sort of billiard ball effect. It's just simply that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for Charles to solve one of these kingdoms without there being ramifications in the other. And the English become quite resentful of the constant interference of Scottish and Irish events on their politics. But the English parliamentarians probably wouldn't have had such a decisive military victory without the Scots at Marston Moor.

49:03And yet the Scots also refused to accept the regicide and immediately crowned the Prince of Wales, Charles II. and that poses a massive security threat to the new republic, forcing Cromwell not only to have a Scottish campaign, but then also an Irish campaign. So this is absolutely three kingdoms. Great. And my next question is, what's going on in Europe at all this time? And is there an interaction between the levellers and Europe in any way? Teresa? Well, so I think my colleagues are probably better able to speak to the specifics of kind of what's happening in European politics. But certainly we shouldn't lose sight of the kind of transnational sort of radical Protestant kind of aspect of this.

49:47So I mentioned Lilburn's initial trial before Stardegs Chamber in 1638. I mean, he's technically put on trial for smuggling Puritan tracks out of the Netherlands to be sold in London. Right. So there's quite a lot of kind of movement back and forth between radicals. And a lot of the unlicensed printing is kind of going on in both places. There's one particular pamphlet that is, again, published in Rotterdam, I think, and then smuggled into London in 1649 called Tyrannipocrite Discovered. And so that's the tyrannical hypocrite. But in this pamphlet, I mean, the author, I think we still don't know who it was, but makes the case not only for a lot of kind of standard leveler claims, but also for the claim for redistributive taxation.

50:33And the idea that if we're committed to the sort of natural equality of human beings, then we should be committed to eliminating extreme inequalities of wealth, not just in land ownership, which I think was more authentically what the diggers were after. The author of Tyrannoprocrits says, no, we've got to have a redistributive taxation regime, which, again, I don't think you're going to find that sort of argument again until probably the 20th century. I'd just come in and say that we can see that the levellers are reported on by foreign observers of the civil war. So we do get diplomatic correspondence in French and Italian, which is talking about the levellers and is talking about, you know, their threat and their radicalism.

51:13So they're certainly being noticed by international observers as well as domestically. there is an attempt to intervene in the French civil war, the Fronde, in a way using level or ideas. The French translation of the agreement to the people is made and the radical agitator Edward Sexby is tasked to take it to Bordeaux and sort of distribute it amongst the Frondeurs. This is the late 40s, early 50s. This is the 1650s by this point. It doesn't seem to have really caught on in Bordeaux, but there was an attempt to circulate it. Teresa? In French at the time, in the late 18th century, you get the new logism nivelleur, meaning leveller.

51:54So that word is sort of introduced into modern French at that time. Oh, that's fascinating. There's an interest in the Quakers and the politics of pronouns. So the abolition of the plural you is understood as channeling this kind of English civil war, radical religious sensibility and a demand for social policy. And talking of Thomas Jefferson and slave owners, Is there an impact on abolitionism later on at all? There is, and again it's through Lilburn's courtroom struggles. So in Somerset's case, which is this celebrated late 18th century case of a slave, James Somerset, who abolitionist campaigners basically issue writ of habeas corpus to have him kind of freed from his master, amusingly named Charles Stewart, for our purposes in terms of thinking about the 17th century resonances, one of the kind of precedents that they use here is a so-called Cartwright's case and Cartwright's case is a precedent that pops up in Lilburn's attempts to get compensation for his punishment by Star Chamber in the 1630s and it has this famous phrase which is sort of this really resonant sort of idea that as soon as an enslaved person steps foot on English soil they're automatically kind of the shackles drop off And in fact, the case is much more limited than that.

53:15It doesn't really make that kind of claim. But it is something where Lilburn is now being connected, not only with struggles over freedom of the press, but also in terms of abolitionism. Claire, I mean, first of all, if there's anything we've missed out, you can now all say what we've missed out. But can I ask you about the relationship between Lilburn and Cromwell? Was there anything going on there at all? I mean, did they know each other? Yes. Yes. I mean, in some ways you could see Cromwell using leveller interest quite cynically at that point when the bigger enemy is the Presbyterian majority to try and get more support for that independent view of a Congregationalist outcome that isn't going to sign up to something that looks like a Scots Presbyterian kind of clerisy.

54:06So it is very much in Cromwell's interest to engage and preserve army discipline. And there are elements of the Putney debates that don't speak of hostility and suppression. And maybe that's where the shock of the brutal suppressions at Ware and then again at Burford and places come into play. Because there is a sense of a shared exploration of ideas at Putney. And, you know, again, I mean, it would be very easy to be quite sort of, you know, score points on who's the most sort of radical there. But, you know, there's a sense that people are thinking aloud and you can see particularly in Iraton just sort of saying, well, I can see the argument, but that's just not going to wash.

54:48I mean, surely to make this work. And, you know, I think everybody is focused on achieving a settlement that not only does justice to the amount of bloodshed that's been spilled over the past few years, but that lasts. And the regicide isn't that. Do they exclude monarchy as a form of government? I mean, obviously, as you said, Ted, Charles is an evil man, according to Lilburn. But do they say it's done for monarchy? A lot of level of language is very much only really focused on the commons. I mean, one of the reasons they become interested in the army is because they won't deal with the lords.

55:27And their petitions are sort of like, we'll really only want to deal with you as their vision of a representative sort of institution is a commons based one. Cromwell is pretty good at speaking whatever he wants to to different audiences. So he will stand up in Parliament and talk about King Lords and Commons and then sort of say to the army later, well, I mean, that was in Parliament. Here I'm talking about a different kind of settlement. We didn't talk in the programme about the impact of the Second Civil War. So just after Putney debates, Charles probably tipped off, probably being fed this line that the army is full of dangerous levellers who might think of assassinating him, escapes from Hampton Court.

56:04and for a few days nobody knows where he is and then he turns up in the Isle of Wight and then he makes an alliance with the Scots who are by this stage disillusioned with Parliament because they don't feel their Presbyterianism is getting anywhere and the Second Civil War happens and it is much faster, much more brutal and it lasts through late 1647 and 1648 and that radicalises a lot of people who maybe weren't prepared to use that language of Charles being the man of blood at Putney 12 months later absolutely will so by then Cromwell, whether it's apocryphal the sort of phrase cruel necessity about the regicide or not.

56:36By that stage, there's many more people who think this is a man that you cannot negotiate with. I would say the Leblers are consistently anti-tyrannical, but they're not consistently Republican. And that's one of the reasons you can see them engaging in conspiracy with royalists in the 1650s to overthrow the protectorate. It's because, you know, if they can have a monarch who's bound by the agreement to the people, that's OK. It's worse to have a Cromwellian tyrant in place than to have a bounded king. And I mean, I mentioned Clarendon briefly at the end, but it seems that one of the reasons Clarendon is so keen to sort of tar Hobbes with the leveller brushes because Clarendon himself had been trying to entertain a kind of royalist leveller alliance following the regicide.

57:19I mean, if I could just say, Ted mentioned this in the main programme, but Lilburn, you know, he's just such a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian. So he just never defends the position that you... And once his side seems to be winning, He instantly takes the other side. But sort of what's going on in the late sort of in 1649 is Lilburn is making the case that not only is the tribunal instituted to try the king illegitimate because it's just not properly constituted, but also the several royalist peers who are being put on trial by similarly special tribunals. Lilburn befriends a bunch of them while he's in the Tower of London and begins to sort of offer them legal arguments for their case.

57:59And so he makes the case that even the peers are entitled to the same rights under Magna Carta, including to a trial by a jury of their peers. And so I think that's just a wonderful illustration of, you know, Lilburn's principles leading him to sort of make friends with people you might not expect. And then also just one thing Claire mentioned, which I think is worth stressing. So the regicide, Charles is executed by beheading with an axe by the public executioner. I mean, if you look forward to the French Revolution, and again, the awareness of levelling there, you know, we might think partly what the Jacobins are trying to do is have this idea of levelling up in the sense that even commoners ought to enjoy the privilege of being executed by beheading, which is how aristocrats had traditionally been executed.

58:49So again, sometimes the egalitarianism doesn't cash out in the way that maybe we expect it to. But if you look at the details, you can see that they're pretty consistent. I did find it extraordinary reading about the Levellers, how much they anticipate movements which are 70, 100 years later. I kept thinking of Kant and the idea of universalism and universal rights, which, you know, at the time appeared to be revolutionary when Kant starts articulating this. But actually, the level has already said all of this. I mean, I just I don't think it can be stressed enough. Right. You know, intellectual historians and political theorists wanting to think that philosophers drive the bus.

59:36I mean, Kant was not driving the bus. Yeah. A lot of people got there first. Do you want some tea? Here comes Martha. I'd love a tea, please. Tea, please. Tea. In Our Time with Misha Glenny was produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. If you've got a scrolling problem, then this is the podcast for you. It's called Top Comment with me, Matt Shea. And me, Marianna Spring. We both investigate social media for a living. Whether it's disinformation, conspiracy theories, internet culture, memes. We're going to be getting behind the stuff that is popping up on your feed on this podcast.

1:00:14That's Top Comment on BBC Sounds.

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