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Protestant polemic: the Leveller pamphlets* The Levellers have, of all the supposedly 'radical' groups to be found in the 1640s and 1650s, been the most extensively investigated. Yet historians remain uncertain about h o w to characterise their thought. Were they heretics or theologically orthodox, Calvinist or Arminian? Were they natural-law theorists, or upholders of the tradition of the English c o m m o n law? Are they to be numbered amongst England'sfirstsecular political theorists, or to be seen as Christian thinkers whose political principles were deductions from some common religious presuppositions? Indeed, did they have a coherent political philosophy at all? This paper has been written in the belief that these questions will be better answered if they are initially deferred. It is proposed to begin this essay by 'bracketing' the question of the ultimate grounding or motivation of Leveller thinking in order to ask instead how much of their writing is explained by the polemical strategies that they were forced to adopt It is hoped that this will, at the very least, enable us to refine the questions that w e address to the Levellers. It might also show us why intellectual coherence should not be the only measure of the Levellers' achievement. To understand the Levellers (and John Lilburne above all) we must start with a consideration of the one thing they undoubtedly were: masterful political pamphleteers. Between them they produced a considerable number of pamphlets, most of them with a quite specific political point to make. In those pamphlets they employed a wide range of arguments in order to persuade the audience they were addressing. It is therefore as polemicists that, in thefirstinstance, the Levellers need to be considered —and, indeed, judged. It would be anachronistic (and unfair) to estimate the achievement of the Levellers in terms of a logical consistency to which they never aspired. Much of their legalistic argument was forensic in nature; much of their religious argument apologetic. How much is the question that requires answering. 1. Leveller Polemic and Leveller Radicalism Before considering in detail the nature of Leveller political argument it may be enlightening to spend some time on the more general issue of the extent of Leveller 'radicalism', for this is more deeply involved with their role as * I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on m y article. Earlier versions of it were delivered to the N e w Zealand Historical Association Conference (May 1991), and to the meeting of Australasian Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe held in Adelaide, September 1991. On both occasions I profited greatly from the audience's questioning. In addition, Mandy Capern, Colin Davis and Andrew Sharp have all read and commented on earlier versions of the article, and I am indebted to their thoroughness and perspicacity. P A R E R G O N ns 11.2, December 1993 46 G. Burgess polemicists than w e might assume. It is not just that 'radical' is a label that few in the seventeenth century, if they understood it, would have wanted applied to themselves. Just as important is the fact that early modern polemical strategy could play a large role in determining whether a work will look (in our eyes) radical or not. The basic conclusion that this approach might lead to is that there was an inverse relationship between the character of the arguments employed by the Levellers and the apparent radicality of what they were actually proposing. The extreme endpoint of this process was reached when John Lilburne came to share the rhetoric of Royalists in 1649: he opposed the 'arbitrary' nature of the execution of the king and others, sharing the Royalist argument that a regime that infringed the rights of the king could not be relied upon to respect anyone else's.1 A shared commitment to the ambiguous slogan 'the rule of law' here joined two groups with very different visions of the path England should follow in 1649. For one group it was a means of rejecting the tyranny of the army in the name of popular freedom; for the other of rejecting that same tyranny as a...

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