Introduction: Finding the Levellers and Their Successors

Abstract

The Levellers and their followers were adaptable and non-doctrinaire proponents of accountable government, personal rights, and liberty of conscience. They expressed the political aspirations of sectarian communities in London and elsewhere. After 1649, the Levellers and their successors remained loyal to an agenda of political and religious rights that they revised and reasserted in the climacterics of unsettlement that recurred through 1688. The Levellers’ pre-1649 efforts can thus be tied to republican opposition to the Cromwellian Protectorate, to popular support for the revived Commonwealth of 1659, to opposition to the coercive policies of the Restoration church and state in the reign of Charles II (1660–1685), and even to sectarian support for the 1687–1688 toleration implemented by James II before the Glorious Revolution.