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Updated: August 12, 2024
I must haste and see Miss Judith immediately. `Levellers, to horse! the fellow said. What's a Leveller?" thought Jacob.
But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion, as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coëval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.
The doctrines of the Levellers in Cromwell's time, of the Anabaptists in Luther's time, would exalt themselves upon the ruins of society, if governments were weak enough to recognise these spiritual claims in the feeblest of their initial advances.
What had become of Cromwell's principles, avowed so frequently that the whole Army had them by heart the principle "That every single man is judge of just and right as to the good or ill of a kingdom," and the principle "That the interest of honest men is the interest of the kingdom"? Nay, had not the Levellers had more of the real root of the matter in them than it had been convenient to allow, and had not the poor fellow who had been shot as a mutineer at the Rendezvous at Ware been in some sense a martyr?
His life was at stake. The Levellers had threatened to make him pay with his head the forfeit of his intrigues with Charles; and the flight of that prince, by disconcerting their plans, had irritated their former animosity. On the appointed day the first Rushworth, vii. 874. Ashburnham, ii. Berkeley, 377-382. Herbert, 52.
Thus there came into being at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasant War the party of Thomas Munzer, in the great English Revolution the Levellers, and in the great French Revolution, Baboeuf. Besides these revolutionary demonstrations of a class still undeveloped, occurred certain theoretical manifestations of a corresponding nature.
It was the so-called schismatics, ranters, and levellers, the disputatious corporals and Anabaptist musketeers, the dread and abhorrence alike of prelate and presbyter, who, under the lead of Cromwell, "Ruined the great work of time, And cast the kingdoms old Into another mould." The Commonwealth was the work of the laity, the sturdy yeomanry and God- fearing commoners of England.
The levellers propose to subvert the King and parliamentary constitution by a rank and unqualified democracy the friends of its abuses propose to support the King and buy the Parliament, and in the end to overset both, by a rank and avowed corruption.
"True, reverend mother; yet those blasphemous levellers who call us 'Malignants' have dubbed themselves 'Saints." "Then affairs go no better with you in England, I fear, Sir John?" "Nay, madam, they go so ill that they have reached the lowest depth of infamy.
As perhaps my readers may ask the same question, they must know that a large proportion of the Parliamentary army had at this time assumed the name of Levellers, in consequence of having taken up the opinion that every man should be on an equality, and property should be equally divided.
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