Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- 10 The shape of the English revolution
- 11 Radical reformation (1): the power of love
- 12 Radical reformation (2): outward bondage
- 13 Radical renaissance (1): after monarchy
- 14 Radical renaissance (2): republican moral philosophy and the politics of settlement
- 15 Radical restoration (1): ‘the subjected Plaine’
- 16 Radical restoration (2): the old cause
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
12 - Radical reformation (2): outward bondage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- 10 The shape of the English revolution
- 11 Radical reformation (1): the power of love
- 12 Radical reformation (2): outward bondage
- 13 Radical renaissance (1): after monarchy
- 14 Radical renaissance (2): republican moral philosophy and the politics of settlement
- 15 Radical restoration (1): ‘the subjected Plaine’
- 16 Radical restoration (2): the old cause
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
Summary
[W]here is that liberty so much pretended, so dearly purchased?
John Lilburne, England's New Chains Discovered (1649)There was never yet any prisons or sufferings that I was in, but … for the bringing multitudes more out of prison.
George FoxINTRODUCTION: THE LEVELLERS
It is only having examined the positive aspirations of civil war radicalism that we may understand what it was a struggle against. The insistence upon a living christianity of substance, rather than form, was an attempt to realise the government of God, and through it the reality of social community. This entailed the struggle against outward bondage. Effective submission to God required liberty from the carnal oppression of man.
William Walwyn explained: ‘If ever men shall kindly be brought to be of one mind … it must be by liberty of discourse, and liberty of writing; we must not pretend to more infallible certenty than other men.’ This struggle demanded liberty from religious, clerical, political, economic, legal and social oppression. It was this which first drove radicalism into the political arena, and developed civil war radical political theory.
Even here its focus was religious and pragmatic. Leveller pragmatism was expressed in its fundamental identity as a petitioning movement. The primacy of the religious dimension was identified by Thomas Edwards (‘In one word … liberty of conscience, and liberty of preaching’) and Richard Baxter (‘Liberty of Conscience … was the Common Interest in which they did unite’). It was this which became the revolution's most important domestic practical achievement. From it, however, developed a demand for liberty from oppression of every kind.
- Type
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- Information
- England's TroublesSeventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context, pp. 269 - 289Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000