Editing Levellers (section)

== Political ambitions ==
The Levellers' agenda developed in tandem with growing dissent within the [[New Model Army]] in the wake of the First Civil War. Early drafts of the [[Agreement of the People]] emanated from army circles and appeared before the [[Putney Debates]] of October and November 1647, and a final version, appended and issued in the names of prominent Levellers Lt. Col. Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton and Prince appeared in May 1649. It called for an extension of suffrage to include almost all the adult male population (but excluding wage-earners, for reasons mentioned below), electoral reform, biennial elections, religious freedom, and an end to imprisonment for debt. They were committed broadly to the abolition of [[Political corruption|corruption]] within the parliamentary and judicial process, toleration of religious differences, the translation of law into the common tongue and, arguably, something that could be considered democracy in its modern form – arguably the first time contemporary democratic ideas had been formally framed and adopted by a political movement. The Levellers have been seen as having undemocratic tendencies by some as they excluded household servants and those dependent upon charitable handouts from suffrage as Levellers feared that poor, dependent men would simply vote as their masters wished. It would also have excluded women; most adult women were married and, as wives, were legally and financially dependent on their husbands.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/361/361-28.htm |title=J.P. Sommerville, "Free-born John" The English Rev, 1647–1649 |access-date=18 March 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130531032229/http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/361/361-28.htm |archive-date=31 May 2013 |url-status=dead}}</ref>

Some Levellers like Lilburne argued that the English Common law, particularly the [[Magna Carta]], was the foundation of English rights and liberties, but others, like William Walwyn, compared the Magna Carta to a "[[mess of pottage|mess of potage]]". Lilburne also harked back in his writing to the notion of a [[Norman yoke]] that has been imposed on the English people and to some extent argued that the English were simply seeking to reclaim those rights they had enjoyed before the Conquest.

[[File:ThomasRainsborough.gif|thumb|Thomas Rainsborough]]
Levellers tended to hold fast to a notion of "[[natural rights]]" that had been violated by the King's side in the Civil Wars (1642–1651). At the Putney Debates in 1647, Colonel [[Thomas Rainsborough]] defended natural rights as coming from the law of God expressed in the [[Bible]]. Richard Overton considered that liberty was an innate property of every person. [[Michael Mendle]] has demonstrated the development of Leveller ideas from elements of early parliamentarian thought as expressed by men such as [[Henry Parker (writer)|Henry Parker]].

According to [[George Sabine]], Levellers held to "the doctrine of [[consent of the governed|consent]] by participation in the choice of [[representative democracy|representatives]]".<ref>[[George Sabine]] (1937) [[A History of Political Theory]], p. 489, [[Holt, Rinehart and Winston]]</ref><ref>{{Cite web |date=2013 |title=From a representation of the army |url=https://libcom.org/history/representation-army }}</ref>