ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9
The Constitution England Wrote in 1647 — and Never Adopted
In April of 1638 a twenty-three-year-old named John Lilburne was tied to the back of an ox cart and whipped two miles through London, then locked in a pillory at Westminster. He had been convicted of no crime. His offense was refusing to swear an oath that would have bound him to answer whatever the King’s court chose to ask him, including questions designed to draw a confession out of his own mouth. He told them no man was bound to accuse himself. Nine years later, he and the men around him were arguing that every government in England — court, Parliament, and crown alike — held its authority on nothing more and nothing less than the consent of the people who had to live under it.
The Levellers, London radicals and army agitators, took Sir Edward Coke’s defense of English liberty and moved its foundation out from under it. Coke had argued that English rights were safe because they were ancient. The Levellers argued they were true. Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn set down in the Agreement of the People a government of granted and limited powers with rights reserved above the ordinary legislature, and at Putney Colonel Thomas Rainsborough and Henry Ireton argued over whether a man’s voice rested in the man himself or in a permanent fixed stake in the country. The Agreement was not the first written political covenant — Plymouth in 1620 came earlier — but ordinary Englishmen wrote down the form a free constitution would take more than a century before it became familiar.
Their franchise excluded servants, alms-takers, and women, and the Leveller women who carried a petition to the House of Commons were told to go home and mind their housewifery. The movement ended in the churchyard at Burford on the seventeenth of May, 1649, where three New Model Army soldiers were shot against a wall — and on the lead lining of the font inside, where a prisoner named Anthony Sedley scratched his name. It is still there.
The question we put to every episode: did this leave people more free, or more governed?
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 — The Whipping of John Lilburn and the Star Chamber
4:00 — Introduction: Episode 9 — The Levelers
5:11 — The New Model Army and the Collapse of Censorship
8:40 — Who Were the Levelers?
10:14 — John Lilburn: "Freeborn John" and the Right Against Self-Incrimination
13:23 — Richard Overton: Self-Ownership and Natural Rights
17:11 — William Walwyn: Religious Toleration and Equality Before the Law
19:49 — Unionizing an Army: Agitators and the Solemn Engagement
22:42 — An Agreement of the People: Reserving Rights Above the Legislature
28:06 — The Putney Debates: Rainsborough vs. Ireton on Voting Rights
33:51 — The Franchise Gap: Excluded Classes and Leveler Women
40:19 — Three Objections: Defeat, American Influence, and Democracy
47:49 — The Burford Mutiny: The End of the Levelers
50:40 — The Liberty Test: Does a Written Constitution Constrain or Protect?
52:56 — Conclusion: The Shift to Natural Rights
55:45 — Preview of Episode 10: Sidney and Locke
📚 Companion article: “The Levellers — The Lost Constitution,” Article 9 of Self-Evident. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution
