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By Root 1255 0

From these ideas, discernible in 1645, sprang a campaign that the army championed, carrying through a political revolution which was of significance to the history of the west as a whole – a people’s army championing ideals resembling the secular democratic values of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West. The practical significance of their ideas, according to this view, derived from their influence over the army: it was from the Levellers, and not from their commanders, that the New Model Army derived its political ideas and ‘democratic drive’.10 Here, too, the exchanges of 1645 offer some support – as well as arguing for the abolition of tithes and for religious toleration, Overton’s Martin’s Eccho argued for the payment of the soldiers” arrears. This was the basis of a political alliance, since refusal to pay up was another sign, so Overton thought, of the sin of Presbyterian half-heartedness in prosecution of the war effort.11

Both claims – about the relationship between Leveller ideas and democracy, and about the influence of the Levellers over the New Model Army – are now contested.12 The rediscovery of the Levellers may have resulted in an exaggeration of their modernity and practical significance to the events of the 1640s. Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn’s convergence in 1645 probably reveals more about the networks and mechanics of 1640s polemics than it does about the motive force of practical politics during these crucial years. Nonetheless, by the summer of 1645 the Stationers” Company was trying to shut Overton down.13

Polemicists in this highly competitive environment were forced to assert the authority of their views. Lilburne’s first defence of himself employed a full ‘apparatus of erudition’: margins stuffed with textual references, a text interspersed with Latin phrases and constant scriptural allusions. His textual authorities included well-established touchstones of constitutional thinking – Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and Coke’s Institutes – but also Husbands” Exact Collection. The latter was itself a confection from the plethora of publications in the first years of the Long Parliament and Lilburne’s deployment of it reflects the ways in which this print culture fed off itself.14 Indeed, the Levellers were themselves a print phenomenon long before they were a ‘movement’ – comrades in arms in the paper war before they had actually met, and sympathetic pamphleteers long before they could have been claimed to have been a party.15

It is now difficult to know what to make of this coalescence therefore: whether it was just paper talk or the expression of the views of a larger constituency. It is possible to see in 1645 traces of radical religious networks with roots in sectarian congregations, mobilizing to secure a complete military victory in order to safeguard the gains made for reformation since the collapse of Laudianism. The convergence of these three polemicists bears testimony to the ways that print had become a source of authority and community in itself. Even if it was just paper talk, in other words, it is still significant. For the generation of the 1950s and 1960s democracy mattered; for that of the early twenty-first century so does paper talk, even if it’s not true.

As the war drew to a close, and victory approached, Thomas Edwards became the leading figure in Presbyterian polemics against these views. A relatively hot Calvinist; he had run into trouble during the 1630s, partly because of his beliefs and partly because of his combative personal style. Naturally sympathetic to the anti-Laudian politics of the period 1640–42 he had, nonetheless, been quick to identify the dangers of Independency – the attack on Laud, and then on episcopacy, was welcome, but beyond that had to lie a comprehensive and reformed national church. In 1641 he had published an attack on Independency which had elicited only one response – from Katherine Chidley. A principal reason for this relative silence was the agreement reached in November 1641 among leading Puritans not to engage in public controversy