Hill on Mid-Seventeenth
Century Democratic Thought
Christopher
Hill is the master historian of the English seventeenth century,
which was one of the great transitional periods of recent European history.
Here, in a tiny piece from his 1961 The Century
of Revolution, 1603-1714, he points at
some of the radical democratic rhetoric which arose in mid-century. He
has treated this and related material extensively in several other books.
The purpose here is just to make the point that Locke's ideas ought to
be seen as part of a political ferment which was already generations old
by the time he wrote. Crudely, the 1640-1690 period (the killing of the
King, Cromwell's rule, the 'Glorious Revolution') can be seen as a period
during which the Parliament contested with the Crown for supremacy. Parliament
won: but who did Parliament represent?
...Already in 1646 a group
of democrats in London were saying that Parliament's resistance to the
King, and the sovereignty of Parliament, could only be justified theoretically
if that sovereignty derived from the people. But if the people were sovereign,
then Parliament must be made representative of the people. "The poorest
that lives hath as true a right to give a vote as well as the richest and
greatest"-- so a Leveller spokesman thought. This democratic theory was
combined with demands for a whole series of reforms: redistribution of
the franchise, abolition of monarchy and House of Lords, election of sheriffs
and Justices of the Peace, law reform, security of tenure for copyholders,
throwing open of enclosures, abolition of tithes and therewith of a state
Church, abolition of conscription, excise, and of the privileges of peers,
corporations, and trading companies. Their design, said a hostile pamphleteer,
was "to raise the servant against the master, the tenant against the landlord,
the buyer against the seller, the borrower against the lender, the poor
against the rich."...
At Putney in October 1647 the Levellers draft constitution,
the Agreement of the People, was debated in the Army Council. Civil War,
the Levellers held, meant that the constitution had broken down. They offered
the Agreement as a social contract refounding the state. The franchise
was to be granted to every free man who accepted the Agreement. It demanded
the dissolution of the existing Parliament, redistribution of the franchise,
biennial Parliaments, and the absolute sovereignty of the House of Commons,
limited only by the reservation of religious toleration and freedom from
conscription as absolute rights. There was to be complete equality before
the law, law reform, and an indemnity for all who had taken part in the
Civil War.
The Putney Debates turned very largely on the extent
of the franchise. Some Levellers spoke as though they were in favour of
manhood suffrage. Colonel Rainborough said, in words that have become famous,
"The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he,
and therefore... every man that is to live under a government ought first
by his own consent to put himself under that government." But, rhetorical
flourishes apart, the Levellers wanted the vote to be given only to "freeborn
Englishmen". Unless they had fought for Parliament, servants and those
in receipt of alms -- that is, wage labourers and paupers -- were excluded
from the franchise, because these two groups were not economically independent.
Thinking in terms of small industrial and agricultural units, the Levellers
held that servants -- apprentices and labourers as well as domestic servants
-- were represented by the head of the household no less than were his
womenfolk and children. "Free" Englishmen were those who could freely dispose
of their labour, of their property in their own persons....
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