Introduction
Grievances against monopoly power played an essential role in the Levellers’ account of what constituted legitimate public authority. Monopolies operated as illegitimate private powers that were eminently capable of violating a variety of Englishmen’s fundamental rights. If Parliament’s claim to supreme authority were to be legitimate, it would need to ensure equal protection from other private citizens’ attempts to encroach on particularly vulnerable rights. As Richard Overton memorably described the demand, the task of public authority was “authoritatively and legally to remove from amongst [us] all oppressions and tyranies, oppressors and tyrants, how great soever in name, place or dignity, and to protect, safeguard, and defend [us] from all such unnaturall monsters, vipers, and pests.”Footnote 1 Monopolists were chief among the monsters, vipers, and pests that needed to be eliminated.
Though the Levellers have consistently been recognized as ardent antimonopolists, the extant literature has yet to recognize the essential role that monopoly power played in the formation of the Levellers’ constitutional arguments. Marxist scholars in the 1970s understood the Levellers as proto-economic liberals whose objections to prerogative monopolies parallelled objections to an absolutist state for the sake of securing a bourgeois freedom.Footnote 2 These interpretations are due for serious reconsideration in light of emerging scholarship that demonstrates the absence of a strong, coherent, centralized, and expansive early modern state.Footnote 3 Short of this, however, we see that the Levellers’ objections to monopoly power actually resulted in a plea for a unitary public authority formidable enough to abolish and make restitutions for monopolies’ illegitimate private governmental capacity.
More recently, Elizabeth Anderson and Gary de Krey have directed our attention to how the economic aspects of Leveller thought highlight their egalitarian commitments and concerns about power’s arbitrariness.Footnote 4 But these accounts do not trace the way in which the Levellers’ arguments against monopolies shaped their arguments for parliamentary supremacy. Quentin Skinner’s analysis of Leveller neo-Roman liberty, Markku Peltonen’s account of their arguments for constitutional alterability, and Jason Peacey’s study of how local bureaucratization shaped seventeenth-century theories of political accountability all leave Leveller antimonopolism unaddressed.Footnote 5 Conversely, Alan Houston focuses entirely on the Levellers’ antimonopolism and worries about factionalism, but his emphasis on their metaphorical and rhetorical use of monopoly—rather than seeing “the true genuine sence of the word monopoly” as a material source of commoners’ political grievancesFootnote 6—causes him to underspecify the way in which monopolies’ endangerment of equal rights shaped the Levellers’ positive theory of legitimacy.Footnote 7
Across distinct Leveller leaders and thinkers—and subsequently across the movement’s diverse interpreters—antimonopolism is recognizable as a consistent facet of Leveller thought. However, the pertinent literature has yet to capture its fundamental importance in the development of the Levellers’ theory of parliamentary authorization and accountability. Against Royalists and Parliamentarian adversaries—who either defended monarchy or grounded Parliament’s claim to supremacy in its capacity to serve the public good—the Levellers insisted that legitimacy depended on Parliament’s protection of individuals’ fundamental rights. This is a distinction that emerges especially clearly in the antimonopoly context. Even less has been said about one overlooked source of the Levellers’ political theory of antimonopoly: an anonymously published 1645 treatise entitled A Discourse Consisting of Motives for the Enlargement and Freedome of Trade.Footnote 8 I here argue that this treatise exhibits an early Leveller language for understanding monopolies as a constitutional problem, which converged with John Lilburne’s arguments from 1645 onward, Richard Overton’s from September 1646 onward, and, to a lesser extent, William Walwyn’s in 1652. Discourse is therefore worth assimilating to the more familiar main body of Leveller thinking. In imagining the necessary conditions for Parliament to claim legitimacy as the supreme public authority, monopolies served as the Levellers’ foil. Thus the abolition of monopolies became a consistently appearing Leveller prerequisite for Parliament’s securing popular legitimacy.
Early objections to monopoly
By 1645, in the heart of the first Civil War, grievances against corporate monopolies had already been well rehearsed. Lingering in English memory were Elizabeth I’s “scandalous phase” of granting monopolies for frivolous commodities, the disastrous Cockayne Project’s decades-long enfeebling of the cloth trade with the Dutch,Footnote 9 the Long Parliament’s expulsion of monopolists from the Commons in 1640,Footnote 10 and the publication of the second and third parts of Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes, wherein Coke counterposed monopoly with the liberty of the subjects.Footnote 11 By 1645, however, the Levellers had not even developed a united movement, never mind a coherent and recognizably “Leveller” theory of antimonopoly.Footnote 12
In William Walwyn and Richard Overton’s early writings, we find some echoes of the 1620s discovery that monopolies only pretextually served the common good,Footnote 13 but one enduring and understudied contribution to political antimonopoly argumentation is the 1645 Discourse. The treatise, which declared that “there is nothing more pernicious and destructive to any Kingdome or Common-wealth, then Monopolies,” was a diatribe against the Merchant Adventurers’ Company, which was the most politically, socially, and economically powerful monopoly of the 1640s, and which the author condemned as simultaneously contrary to the law of nature, the law of nations, and positive law.Footnote 14 Though Discourse was hardly the first to rehearse antimonopoly arguments of these sorts, it is an early demonstration of the way in which the Levellers would transform their antimonopoly grievances into positive constitutional demands. Integrating Discourse into the larger corpus of Leveller writings is thus helpful in seeing the importance of monopoly as a way of understanding the Levellers’ political thought.
Discourse and Leveller Connections
Discourse is most commonly attributed to one Thomas Johnson, about whom very little is known. As described in Johnson’s 26 January 1646 A Plea for Free-Mens Liberties, he was a small merchant who was kept out of the cloth trade by the Eastland Company. He situates himself as a “late servant to Mr. Whitlock, one of the East Country Monopolizing Marchants,” and explains how the Eastland Company had deprived him of his freedom and confiscated his position within the company.Footnote 15 It is likely that John Lilburne had read a copy of Plea prior to its publication. This is because, on 6 January 1646, which was twenty days prior to the publication of Plea, Lilburne described Johnson in Innocency and Truth Justified just as Johnson would describe himself in Plea: “Mr. Johnson, late servant to Mr. Whitlocke, one of the East Country Monopolizing Marchants.” Johnson’s 26 January Plea in turn cited Lilburne’s “late book called Innocency and Truth justified.” Johnson and Lilburne had thus likely prepared the texts in consultation with one another.Footnote 16 A few months later, in March 1646, Johnson contributed to a petition that decried a number of monopolies and echoed the reasoning of both Discourse and Plea.Footnote 17 Johnson was also likely the brother of Richard Overton’s wife, Mary Overton.Footnote 18 So we know that Thomas Johnson authored Plea and the 1646 petition, that he was a merchant excluded by the Eastland Company, and that he was close with Lilburne and the Overtons.
We do not know whether Johnson was the author of Discourse. William Haller first attributed the text to Johnson in 1934 based on similarities between Discourse and Plea.Footnote 19 This is not an improbable conclusion. Indeed, Discourse, Plea, and Johnson’s 1646 petition all have a good deal in common in both substance and style. However, this does not explain how Johnson, whose grievance and experience were with the Eastland Company, would have acquired such extensive familiarity with the Merchant Adventurers, or why Lilburne never named Johnson as the author of Discourse,Footnote 20 though he ostensibly would have known that Johnson had authored the text. And whereas the Leveller leaders tended to use many of the same printers for their pamphlets, or to print their pamphlets in house with Overton and Lilburne’s illicit presses, Discourse was formally licensed and registered with the Stationers’ Company. Neither Plea nor any other of the Levellers’ major writings went through the company’s official channels.Footnote 21 None of the people involved with the printing of Discourse appear to have any obvious relation to the Leveller movement or its members,Footnote 22 and neither Discourse nor Plea exhibits the typographical or ornamental features characteristic of Leveller pamphlet design.Footnote 23
Ultimately, whether or not Discourse can accurately be attributed to Thomas Johnson, and whether or not we opt to call Johnson a “Leveller,” what is clear is that Discourse was an important precursor to the Levellers’ constitutional antimonopoly argument. This is not to claim that Discourse was the Levellers’ main or only source of antimonopoly thought. To the contrary, the Levellers (Lilburne especially) were heavily informed by the Elizabethan and Jacobean antimonopoly debates that had preceded them—particularly as pertained to the limits of the royal prerogative’s use and delegation. But Discourse served as a touch point that marked a distinctly contemporary way of thinking about monopoly in the context of civil war and regime collapse. Let us now turn to understanding the substance of that text before tracing parallels through the thought of subsequent Leveller antimonopolists.
The public good
In early modern England, monopolies were defended in the name of the “public good” or “common weal.” Monopolies were thought to protect subjects by excluding the masses from certain trades and by ensuring that subjects received commodities in sufficient quantity, for just prices, and of acceptable quality. Domestically, monopolies were said to be necessary for safeguarding the public from the irresponsible manufacture of staple commodities like soap, salt, and glass.Footnote 24 In overseas trading, monopolies were “granted in the infancy of trade to incite people to the encrease and improvement of it” and to protect unskilled Englishmen from being taken advantage of by cunning foreign merchants.Footnote 25 Each defense invoked, at least pretextually, “necessity,” salus populi, and service of the public good via royal prerogative used for the sake of orderly governance.
Discourse’s primary task was to expose the Merchant Adventurers for failing to genuinely serve the public good and for instead producing devastating economic consequences both at home and abroad. The author argued that monopoly protections were unnecessary for a company that had already brought their trade to the “height of perfection,” and that they weakened England’s trading position, left citizens unemployed, and stunted the beneficial mores that trade could cultivate.Footnote 26 These social and economic arguments appear to have been immediately persuasive, as a copy of the treatise was apparently sent to the House of Commons in May 1645 alongside a petition from various merchants and sailors.Footnote 27
Ultimately, however, the author’s public-good arguments were not the ones that would echo most loudly in the succeeding annals of Leveller thought. Rather, the key insight to which Discourse contributed was the idea that, above and beyond whether they were socially or economically beneficial, because monopolies endangered Englishmen’s fundamental rights, they were illegitimate enclaves of unlimited private power. This argument was also distinct from the antimonopoly discourse of the early seventeenth century, which was primarily concerned with taming the abuse of the royal prerogative and its infringement on the common law and statute—all done in the name of the public good.Footnote 28 By contrast, Discourse mentions the prerogative only once across fifty pages. For the Leveller leaders, antimonopoly was not only a negative claim against prerogative infringement and monarchical domination, but also part of a positive claim for parliamentary supremacy.Footnote 29 As we will see, this move—grounding antimonopoly not solely in salus populi but in the priority of fundamental rights—would later form the basis of the Levellers’ most pointed departure from Henry Parker.
Oaths and right to conscience
Discourse illustrated how an ongoing and principled objection to oaths applied to the context of corporate monopoly. By 1645, opposition to oath taking had already developed sturdy roots. Lilburne’s own opposition to oath taking began as early as 1637, when he refused to swear an oath of truthfulness and was consequently held in contempt of court and imprisoned.Footnote 30 Discourse contributed to this line of argument in expressing a grievance against the Merchant Adventurers’ oath of fealty, which demanded that members be “obedient and assistant” to the company governor and his deputies in all countries where the company was privileged. Members could “keep no singular regard to your selfe in hurt or prejudice of the Common wealth of the said Fellowship” and were required to turn over any persons who intended to harm the company or its privileges.Footnote 31 Such oaths were common requirements not only for obtaining membership of corporations, but also in legal and ecclesiastical contexts.
Refusing to swear a corporation’s oath came at great material cost. As Lilburne would later explain, companies could “detaine mens freedoms from them if they refuse to take the [oath] … by meanes of which, they doe (as much as in them lyes) destroy them, and all that depends on them.” This was true even for individuals who had faithfully completed an apprenticeship.Footnote 32 Lilburne, who had finished his apprenticeship, would have had to swear an oath of allegiance in order to partake in the cloth or wool trade.Footnote 33 Thomas Johnson, too, had been expelled from the Eastland Company because he “rejected their monopoly and diabolicall oath” on the grounds that the company had no authority to “force it upon [his] conscience.”Footnote 34
Per the author of Discourse, the Merchant Adventurers’ imposition of oaths was a claim to a kind and degree of power well beyond the reach of that which was legitimately claimable by any private citizen: “By the words of this extravagant Oath, one may see what high, illegal and transcendent power they assume to themselves to make Statutes, which is proper and peculiar only to Parliaments: Moreover, they stile themselves a Commonwealth, inso much that though they cannot be termed Regnum in Regno, they may be well termed Dominium in Dominio.”Footnote 35 The problem with the Merchant Adventurers’ oath was not simply that its terms were unfavorable, inconvenient, or even harmful to the oath taker; it was also not simply that the company was an overstretched delegation of prerogative power. As Lilburne would articulate in his January 1646 Innocency and Truth Justified, the oath “tied those that take it, to be papists, in some sence, for they must swear by an implicite faith, to be observant to what Mr. Governour shall establish.” Not only was the oath extravagant, it was also limited by no conception of justice, word of God, or positive law, but by the governor’s will alone.Footnote 36
Discourse does not itself articulate a robust conception of a right to conscience, but the Levellers would assimilate monopolies’ capacity to impose oaths as a violation of that same right—which the Levellers had already been contemplating well prior to 1645. In addition to Lilburne’s 1637 imprisonment, Walwyn argued just over a year before Discourse that compelling one against their conscience was sinful, even if it “be in it selfe good.”Footnote 37 Lilburne, Overton, and Johnson would all articulate this right to conscience in slightly different ways than Walwyn, but what remained relatively consistent was that an individual’s right to conscience was grounded in each person’s equal capacity for reason, or “rational soul,”Footnote 38 and emanated from a duty to use one’s reason in pursuit of God. Reason had not been corrupted by the Fall, and it was the only means by which an individual might access the otherwise inaccessible mind of God.Footnote 39 This is why Lilburne likens an oath taker to a papist and why Johnson calls the oaths “diabolicall.”Footnote 40 The Leveller leaders were agreed that, if one had a duty to obey that which their “Consciences dictate to be the mind of God,”Footnote 41 then oaths of fealty constituted a violation of an individual’s right to conscience.
For the author of Discourse, the capacity to infringe on one’s conscience conferred on the Merchant Adventurers an “illegal and transcendent power” that was “proper and peculiar only to Parliament.” To claim such power was to “appropriate and assume unto [oneself] the office and sovereignty of God.”Footnote 42 As the Levellers would later articulate, the locus of the “sovereignty of God” immediately rested in the people, and could only mediately be entrusted to another authority. So the seeds of the Levellers’ account of political authorization and demands for parliamentary accountability can be found in these earlier objections to oath-taking—which we find rehearsed in Discourse.
What rendered the Merchant Adventurers dominium in dominio was that its monopoly power enabled it to endanger rights that were both natural and protected by the “positive Law of the Land.”Footnote 43 Not only did monopoly power confer on the company a capacity to unilaterally “contrive and impose oaths,” but it also gave to the company “an extrajudiciall power to imprison the Subject without baile or mainprize, to take away his goods … to lay and levy taxes without limitations, and convert them to private profit to the prejudice of others, which is the truest badge of a Monopoly.”Footnote 44 Indeed, the company exercised a vast number of pseudo-governmental powers that endangered the right to conscience: it could require individuals to testify against themselves,Footnote 45 it could make Englishmen “subject to the Company in a servile kinde of obedience,”Footnote 46 and it could “usurp a right, and liberty, to restore it againe for money.”Footnote 47 These capacities were “against the naturall right and privilege of free born Subjects, as appears by Magna Charta, and Petition of right.”Footnote 48 The “truest badge of Monopoly” was a private person’s ability to withhold and violate Englishmen’s natural rights, which, for the author of Discourse, were also codified in England’s law.
Birthrights
Most relevant among the rights that the company could usurp was Englishmen’s birthright to benefit from the country’s abundant wool—which was England’s most substantial and staple commodity—by turning it to vendable cloth. This was because “Nature, the handmaid of God Almighty, hath furnished this Island, and wherein she hath given every freeborn Inhabitant equall interest, as matter for his industry to work upon.”Footnote 49 Then, among the “native Rights of the freeborn subject” was not just access to England’s abundant cloth and wool, but also “the exercise of [each freeborn subject’s] Invention and Industry, to convert this universal native Commodity to his best advantage at home, or abroad … which God and Nature [had] ordaynd for his subsistence.”Footnote 50 Per the “law of nature,” each inhabitant of England held an equal right not just to access the country’s abundant wool, but to use their natural human faculties to turn that wool into cloth, and to then trade that cloth in order to provide for one’s subsistence.Footnote 51
By arrogating God and nature’s gift to but a few individuals, the Merchant Adventurers denied the excluded their birthright to make a living for themselves using the natural resources and industrious human faculties that nature had gifted them. If nature had given these gifts in common, “Surely she hath never intended that a thin handfull of men, a small contemptible number in comparison of the whole … should appropriate to themselves the disposing and venting of the two thirds of this general grand Commodity.” Dispersing trade among the many could certainly have beneficial consequences for the public good but an even more essential concern was that the Merchant Adventurers could violate individuals’ natural and legal rights as it pleased.Footnote 52
Because the author understood this birthright to have been codified in law, the Merchant Adventurers were rendered dominium and not regnum. The author extensively quotes a 1496 statute (12 Hen. VII c. 6), which granted every person the ability to use themselves to their most advantage, and to make exchanges freely at their pleasure. The statute also required that this entitlement be provided without any person collecting an exaction, fine, imposition, or contribution for its provision.Footnote 53 So the company’s capacity to “usurp a right … [and] restore it againe for money” was an abject violation not just of Englishmen’s natural birthright, but also of their positively protected legal rights.
Here, we run into the formidable task of positioning Discourse’s conception of rights amid the constellation of Leveller thinkers’ and predecessors’ varying, and often contradictory, understandings of rights. Even though the Levellers acknowledged that some natural rights were surrendered in the moment of constitution, they disagreed about how best to positively ground the natural rights which did survive constitution.Footnote 54 Discourse appears to share Lilburne and Johnson’s faith in the English constitution, Overton’s emphasis on a right to self-preservation,Footnote 55 and the collectivity inherent in Sykes’s and Johnson’s formulation.Footnote 56 Lilburne especially followed Coke in treating the rights and liberties of England’s ancient constitution as part of a birthright.Footnote 57 Discourse does not make much of Walwyn’s contention that Magna Carta was a set of weak concessions “wrestled out of the pawes” of the Norman conquerors.Footnote 58 However, it is not my aim here to accurately locate Discourse among Leveller rights’ varying ontologies and sources. Let it suffice to say that, in Discourse, the pertinent rights were initially bestowed divinely “by the hand of nature” who is “the handmaid of God,”Footnote 59 and those natural rights were further guaranteed by various sources of positive law. What we are primarily concerned with here is the function that fundamental rights played in connecting grievances against monopolies to a Leveller theory of political legitimacy. As we will see, natural rights were the asset that the people entrusted to Parliament.
* * *
Though the author of Discourse was hardly the first to oppose oaths or complain of asymmetrical access to natural resources, the text brought together a number of conceptual tools which parallelled the Leveller leaders’ understanding of monopolies as a problem of political legitimacy. First, monopolies threaten Englishmen’s God-given liberty of conscience. Second, monopolies deprive Englishmen of their birthright to benefit from the country’s natural resources through labour and trade. And third, the capacity of a few private men to endanger these fundamental rights should be understood as a problem of dominium, or the exercise of illegitimate political power.
Crucially, for the author of Discourse, the violation of rights took priority over any advantageous public consequences that monopolies might promise. This was a hierarchy that, as we will see, placed the Levellers in direct conflict with Parliamentarian faith in salus populi suprema lex est. For example, where the Merchant Adventurers argued that it alone was wealthy enough to purchase all the white cloth produced in England, and thus to prevent unprofitable surplus production, Discourse posed the question, “But suppose they be able to buy all the Clothes, is it not against common reason, and the Subjects birth-right, that therefore they should be permitted so to doe and others debard[?]”Footnote 60 At base, the company’s monopoly was problematic because it constituted a violation of an equally held right. Under “the pretence” of “Regularity and Conformity,” which “is the same that all monopolizing Patents have,” the company was able to “usurp a right, and liberty,” from citizens whenever and however it pleased.Footnote 61
The Levellers’ antimonopolism
John Lilburne was the first of the main Leveller leaders to seriously take up the monopoly question. His first published articulation of antimonopoly grievances appears to be England’s Birth-Right Justified, which was published six months after Discourse. In that text, Lilburne rehearsed objections to the Merchant Adventurers that Discourse had also articulated, before extending them to other monopolies. Lilburne refers his reader directly to Discourse to learn about the company’s “mischievousnesse,”Footnote 62 but he himself reemphasizes the rights that monopoly power put at stake: wool was “the stapell Commoditie of the Kingdome, and freee by the lawes and Constitutions of the land, for all the Free-men of England to trade in.” The enjoyment of wool was “so essentiall a privilege to all the Commons of England, that whosoever [assumes it to themselves] are guilty of Robbing the Free men of England, of their birth-right and Inheritance.”Footnote 63 Lilburne took seriously Discourse’s closing plea that, above and beyond service of the public good, “as free-borne Subjects of this Kingdome our birth-right and hereditary Priviledges are neerly concerned, and therefore we ought in conscience to endeavour to preserve them for our posterity, as they have been transmitted to us.”Footnote 64 For Lilburne, these rights were so precious that there “is no reason why the free men of England should have so great a part of their Birth-right, as this is, taken from them by force and violence.”Footnote 65
Lilburne invoked 1 Kings to bolster this claim to the inalienability of Englishmen’s birthright. Just as “Naboath would not part with his Vineyard (which was his Inheritance) to the King, although he would have given him as much money as it was worth, or a better for it,” Englishmen should, under no circumstances, allow themselves to be stripped of their natural rights to labour and trade. In 1 Kings, Ahab seeks to buy Naboth’s vineyard to turn it into an herb garden. Naboth refuses, saying that no amount of Ahab’s money, nor compensation with a different vineyard, could replace his own vineyard, which was the inheritance of his fathers. On the orders of Ahab’s wife, Naboth is stoned to death for his refusal to sell.Footnote 66 Per Lilburne, then, no amount of a monopolist’s money—or even promised public advantage, for that matter—could justly compensate an English citizen for the confiscation of their birthright. Indeed, one’s natural rights were worth dying for.
Who has a birthright?
We must be careful here. On some interpretations, rights are personal property that simply have no essential relationship to equal standing.Footnote 67 This is incorrect. First, at the heart of the Levellers’ thought was a concern for realizing both a formal and a relational equality in treatment among citizens.Footnote 68 Second, the Levellers did not think in terms of self-possession but instead saw property as largely conventional and subject to the well-being of others.Footnote 69 Rights were pre-political claims whose possession and use partially constituted relationships of moral equality among persons equally able and obligated to exercise their God-given reason. They were important to the Levellers as part of a conception of equal standing and treatment among equal persons, not just as a person’s property, which may or may not be used in ways that comport with equality.
This insight is crucial for determining who possessed and could exercise the pertinent natural rights. The Levellers’ copious use of “free-born” and “birth-right” might at first seem to delimit the scope of rights entitlement to a native economic elite. But we must read the Levellers in context. As numerous scholars have observed, the Levellers likely used the term “free-born” to mean anyone who was not in a state of bonded labour or villeinage. By 1640, no Englishman was. Indeed, per Lilburne, “every particular individuall freeman of England; yea, of the meanest Cobler and Tinker, as well as the greatest Gentleman or Nobleman” may enjoy their birthright.Footnote 70 So the Levellers’ use of “free-born” and “free-men” was likely inclusive and did not distinguish a select economic group from the remainder.Footnote 71 While it is unclear whether the Levellers sincerely imagined nonnative inhabitants as possessing an English birthright,Footnote 72 we can be sure that at least all native Englishmen, universally, equally, and regardless of social and economic status, were entitled to it.
The Stationers’ Company monopoly
In Discourse, the pertinent equal rights are an emerging conception of a right to conscience, and quite literal rights to labour and trade wool. The rights become more capacious with Lilburne’s application of antimonopoly arguments to the Stationers’ Company. Like all other monopolies, the Stationers’ Company’s monopoly was justified on arguments about its necessity for the public good.Footnote 73 After the company was granted a monopoly in 1637, amidst an immense crackdown on seditious publications, only twenty other printing houses could print in London provided that they abided by the company’s regulations and restrictions. Until 1641, the Star Chamber and High Commission were tasked with enforcing the company’s monopoly, which meant that offenders risked having their types defaced or printing presses confiscated. After both judicial bodies were dissolved, the company began using its own extralegal means and discretion for searching for and seizing publications that violated its privileges. Sometimes the company would lobby the Lords to send in men; other times it depended on its own cronies.Footnote 74
Though Lilburne also argued that the Stationers’ Company harmed the public good, the fundamental issue for him was again the company’s status as an illegitimate private power capable of violating rights. The company’s monopoly permitted it to circulate “whatsoever Books, Pamphlets and Libells they please, though they be full of Lyes, and tend to the poysoning of the Kingdom with unjust and Tyrannicall Principles.” Conversely, the company “suppresse[d] every thing which hath any true Declaration of the just Rights and Liberties of the free-borne people of this Nation.”Footnote 75 By regulating the sale of bibles, the Stationers’ Company not only hindered the Gospel’s being circulated, but contributed to bibles’ “dearth and dearnesse.”Footnote 76 While high prices were in se undesirable, the undergirding problem was that individuals’ right and duty to exercise their God-given reason was contingent on paying a high price. Like the Merchant Adventurers, it would seem the Stationers’ Company could also “usurp a right and restore it again for money.”
The company’s private policing powers were particularly pernicious to the Leveller leaders. In 1637, following the Star Chamber’s crackdown on subversive publishing, Lilburne was pilloried, whipped, and imprisoned indefinitely.Footnote 77 In the years after 1641, the company enforced its monopoly by calling a “number of deboyst men with Smiths and Constables, yea and the trained Bands also (when they please) to assist them” to “break open and rifle” through citizens’ houses and belongings “under pretence of searching for scandalous Books.” Per Lilburne, it was apparently a “common thing for such lawlesse men to breake in, and search honest mens shops.”
In October 1645, Lilburne himself became victim to one such raid. A “tall pale-faced fellow” called Joseph Hunscott, along with his cronies, barged through Lilburne’s front door, “ranne up into the Chambers, & stole out of [Elizabeth Lilburne’s] Drawers, diverse pieces of her Child-bed linen and such other things as they pleased.” The Company was known to “employ the Bishops old Theeves and Roagues” to undertake its searches and seizures. Hunscott and his associates were infamous for using the company’s warrant for searching out “dangerous Bookes” as pretext for robbing honest Englishmen’s houses.Footnote 78 In a June 1646 petition, Hunscott himself confessed that he and his men found no scandalous books during their raid.Footnote 79
Similarly, in August 1646, a man called Robert Eeles of the Stationers’ Company barged into the Overtons’ bedroom unannounced with additional armed men outside the house. Eeles, brandishing his sword, commanded Overton to get out of bed and dress himself, at which point he “pick’d [Overton’s] pockets, taking what he pleased out of them,” before “ransak[ing] a Trunk, and taking out of a pair of Britches [which he] felloniously pick’d the pockets thereof.” Meanwhile, Mary Overton was “lying sick in Child-bed.” Richard Overton demanded that they explain under what authority they had raided the house and with what intention, but the company’s men continued harassing Overton without producing an answer.Footnote 80 This incident appears to have incited Overton to take up the kind of antimonopoly arguments already circulating between the Discourse, Lilburne, and Johnson.
Just as the Merchant Adventurers had assumed to itself an “illegal and transcendent power,” Lilburne declared that the Stationers’ Company’s police powers “invested [it] with an Arbitrary unlimited Power” that was “contrary to all law, justice, equity and reason.” Not only could this power exclude citizens from a trade, and thus their means of subsistence, but “without either Censure or Resistance of Higher Powers,” the company’s monopoly power allowed it to “absolve the wicked, and condemne the just, and so doe whatsoever they list.”Footnote 81
Thomas Johnson’s 26 January 1646 A Plea for Free-Mens Liberties used similar language to articulate the problem with the Eastland Company. Johnson argued that “every free born subject, is acknowledged as his right to have freedom to trade.” The Eastland Company was then demonstrated “to deprive the Subiect of his right,” and Johnson hoped that “every honest man will be willing with heart and hand to endeavour the recovery of our birthright which the law so evidently makes our owne from these unjust oppressors.” Those birthrights were not only natural, but also codified in positive law—hence Johnson declares that the “life of the patent, so far as it extends, is the death of the law.” Just as the Merchant Adventurers’ Company was dominium and the Stationers’ Company was “an Arbitrary unlimited Power,” the Eastland monopoly was
an arbitrary government introduced, & put into the hands of those whom the subject doth not own to have any right of power and rule, and that in so high a nature as can be no lesse then monarchicall, for what can a monarchicall power be, but to make lawes, and to punish the transgressors according to those lawes, by confiscation of goods, imprisonment, or taking away the life of the vassals, all which they may doe by their patent …Footnote 82
Whereas Discourse had not yet connected the monopoly problem to the constitutional questions at stake during the English Civil Wars, in 1646 we begin to see the Levellers explicitly connecting antimonopoly grievances to the constitutional issues germane to their own political crisis. In the text quoted above, Johnson associated monopoly power with “monarchicall power.” This association is the inheritance of earlier debates over royal prerogative and also demonstrates the Levellers’ markedly antimonarchic position.Footnote 83 In the case of Hunscott and Eeles, however, the Stationers’ Company had lobbied the House of Lords to provide what Lilburne derided as “the colour of Parliamentary Authority.”Footnote 84 As Overton described it, just as Parliament had for four years been defending itself against the “illegall, unnaturall and barbarous” Crown, his case demonstrated commoners’ need to defend themselves against the unauthorized and unaccountable Lords. Then, more radically than the well-rehearsed association of monopoly with the Crown’s prerogative, Lilburne and Overton associated the Stationers’ Company with unauthorized and unaccountable (and thus illegitimate, but conspicuously not prerogative) power emanating from the Lords.Footnote 85
What differentiated the “arbitrary government” of monopolies from legitimate public authority was that the latter’s authority was founded on common consent. For Lilburne, the problem posed by the Merchant Adventurers’ arbitrary government was that “their foundation is not upon a law made by common consent in Parliament, (and therefore uniust and illegall).”Footnote 86 Just days later, Johnson too explained that, unlike the Eastland Company, legitimate authority required “common consent in Parliament.”Footnote 87 Monopoly power, then, served as a foil to legitimate public authority, which needed to be authorized by the people in common. If monopoly represented illegitimate private power, let us turn to understanding what the Levellers took to constitute legitimate public authority.
Legitimate public authority
Sovereignty and authorization
The Levellers’ conception of political legitimacy was novel because it turned Parliamentarian logic against itself. Despite a catalogue of radical solutions in Parliamentary parlance, and despite their internal disagreements, Parliamentarians of all stripes were of one mind about two principles: (1) legitimate political authority was originally founded upon the consent of its subjects, and (2) in the process of consenting, limitations could be placed on the exercise of power.Footnote 88 Debates about parliamentary sovereignty and authority were ongoing—and had already been influentially shaped by Henry Parker and Royalist responses—well before the Levellers would meaningfully interject in the conversation. The Leveller objection to these accounts continued evolving between 1645 and 1648, but they ultimately disagreed with those who insisted that Parliament functioned as a representation or image of the people in miniature, and that therefore Parliament was itself sovereign, infallible, and unalterable.
On Parker’s account, Parliament was a literal re-presentation of the originally sovereign people. In his 1644 Jus Populi, for instance, he described Parliament as “indeed nothing else, but the very people it self artificially congregated, or reduced by an orderly election, and representation, into such a Senate, or proportionable body.” Parliaments were preferable to princes because they were “a more full and neer representation” of the people,Footnote 89 but once elected, Parliament had the same power and responsibilities as would the Crown. If “Princes [had been] created by the people, for the peoples sake and so limited by expresse Laws as that they might not violate the peoples liberty,” then it would nonetheless “remaine undeniable, that salus Populi is suprema Lex: and that bonum Publicum is that which must give Law, and check to all pretences, or disputes of Princes whatsoever.”Footnote 90 In the same way, Parker argued that Parliament’s power was necessarily bound by its imperative to serve the public good. Just as the good prince would not “counsell or consent to any thing, but what is publikely advantagious,”Footnote 91 Parliament was sure to serve the public good because it “can have no interests different from the people represented, or at least very few, and those not considerable.”Footnote 92 Indeed, Parker attests, “no age will furnish us with one story of any Parliament freely elected, and held, that ever did injure a whole Kingdome, or exercise any tyranny, nor is there any possibility how it should.”Footnote 93 Because Parliament was elected to be the people in miniature, harm to the body politic entailed harm to itself. This made Parliament immune to particular interests (or at least far more so than the Crown) and thus also beyond popular repudiation.Footnote 94
Royalists responded by taking the Parliamentarian argument ad absurdum. An early response from Henry Ferne in 1642 argued that if Parliament could reassume power from the Crown, what would stop the people from at any time reassuming power from Parliament?Footnote 95 The next year, John Spelman argued that Parliament could not be a “more full and near representation” of the people than the Crown, because, without full enfranchisement, members of Parliament were not in fact “sent with equality from all parts, nor sent by all.”Footnote 96 The same year, Dudley Diggs added that, even if Parliament were a better representation than the Crown, Parliament’s dependence on majority voting made it vulnerable to factionalism in a way that the Crown’s “owne Interest,” which is “altogether the same with the publique,” was necessarily impervious.Footnote 97 Per Royalist objections, Parliamentarians would need to show that Parliament was indeed more thoroughly, completely, and incontrovertibly authorized than the Crown, and that the creation of the people’s likeness was sufficient to guard against particular interests.Footnote 98
Though Walwyn had endorsed it in 1643 and again in 1646,Footnote 99 by 1645 Lilburne and Overton had also begun to reject elements of Parker and other Parliamentarians’ arguments for Parliament’s infallibility, and thus absolute sovereignty. Lilburne argued that though he “look[ed] upon the House of Commons, as the supream Power of England, who have residing in them that power that is inherent in the people,” the Commons were “not to act according to their owne wills and pleasure, but according to the fundamentall constitutions, and Customes of the Land, which I conceive provides for the safety and preservation of the People.”Footnote 100 We have here an early expression of the idea that, though the House of Commons was the supreme and unitary public authority, it was not absolutely sovereign. The people retained sovereign power even after the moment of contract.Footnote 101 Some months later, in January 1646, Lilburne thus repeats Parker verbatim, but with a crucial addition: “power is but secondary and derivative in Princes, (and say I in counsells likewise).”Footnote 102 Where Parliamentarians effectively shifted sovereignty from Crown to Parliament, Lilburne here kept sovereignty always with the people.
Overton targeted the idea of Parliament as an image of the people. While he subscribed to the idea that representation could create an image of the people, he rejected the notion that Parliament actually or accurately did so. In his July 1647 An Appeale from the Degenerate Representative Body, Overton explained that “such as is the represented, such and no other must the figure or representation be, such as is the proportion, countenance and favour of the man, such and so must be the picture of the man, or else it cannot be the picture of that man, but of some other.” And when the representation fell short of portraying a full and accurate picture of the man represented, it could no longer be called a representation at all. Thus, when parliamentary representatives failed to serve the interest of the represented people, they not only stood to lose the “betrusted authority of the people,” but were “no longer their representatory Deputies, or Trustees” at all.Footnote 103 Together, the Levellers agreed that Parliament should be the “Supreme Authority of England” and that it operated as “Representative of the people.”Footnote 104 However, Lilburne and Overton made clear between 1645 and 1647 that parliamentary supremacy was contingent on Parliament’s faithfully and actually serving as representatives—not merely a representation, per Parker, but as the people’s spokespeople, whose authority could always be either renewed or revoked. Unlike Parker, who held that a constitution’s basic structure remained constant even as forms of government evolved, by November 1648 the Levellers were explicitly arguing that “all Governments come originally from the People, and are mutable at their pleasure, for their further good and wel-being.”Footnote 105 Thus, Parliament’s authority was neither absolute nor infallible, but perpetually contingent on authorization by the people’s sovereign power.
Election was the means by which the people consented to and authorized a representative government.Footnote 106 For Parker, elections were mechanisms for creating the most faithful image possible of the body politic, but were not an instrument of popular authorization.Footnote 107 For the Levellers, however, elections were the means by which the people expressed its consent, which was an “ongoing operation” in need of renewal.Footnote 108 Elections were an expression of the people’s political autonomy. As John Wildman and Maximilian Petty put it in October 1647, “the people have right to new successive election for Parliaments … [for elections were] so essentiall to their freedome, that without it they are no better then slaves.”Footnote 109 This thinking ultimately found its way into a 1653 Leveller tract which stated, “Supreme Authority cannot be devolved upon any person, or persons, but by Election of the free people.”Footnote 110 Elections were thus the means by which each individual used their God-given reason to choose, consent to, and authorize other individuals as their trustees in the Commons.Footnote 111
But if God had originally vested sovereignty in the people, surely the people needed good reason to authorize any governing entity? Overton gives us a clear answer in July 1646: convenience. Writing to Parliament, Overton claimed, “For effecting whereof, we possessed you with the same Power that was in our selves, to have done the same; For wee might justly have done it our selves without you, if we had thought it convenient; choosing you [as Persons whom wee thought fitly quallified, and Faithfull,] for avoiding some inconveniences.”Footnote 112 If the people were capable of acting as a collective agent themselves, government would be unnecessary. But without the capacity for such agency, a representative Parliament would be responsible for “making that happy return unto the people which they justly expect.”Footnote 113 However, whereas for Parker a resolution’s having been made by Parliament was sufficient grounds for treating it as though the decision had been taken ab omnibus,Footnote 114 the Levellers insisted that “making the happy return unto the people” consisted in doing that which the people actually might have done themselves.
Parliament as trustee of rights
For the Levellers, Parker’s assumption that parliamentary representation would always abide by the maxim salus populi suprema lex est was inadequate reason to even originally, let alone ongoingly, consent to Parliament’s authority. They instead turned to natural rights. As Discourse had already illustrated in the context of the Merchant Adventurers, the priority of fundamental rights over the public good was not merely a negative constraint on power, but, as the Levellers argued, the affirmative basis on which any claim to govern had to rest. Indeed, the very purpose of establishing a supreme public authority was to authorize a limited fiduciary capable of protecting each citizen’s fundamental rights—this was what the people “justly expected.” Thus the legitimacy of the Commons’ claim to supreme public authority was to be measured by its effectiveness in protecting the people’s natural rights.Footnote 115
Though the Levellers each had different ideas about the pertinent rights’ provenance, in their fiduciary theory of political legitimacy rights functioned as a bailment entrusted to a Parliament authorized and made accountable through election. The people must “choose their servants” via election,Footnote 116 after which those servants were authorized to “become their absolute Commissioners, and lawfull Deputies, but no more.”Footnote 117 As Overton’s February 1647 petition put it, the people had “elected, invested, and betrusted you with our indubitable and natural power and Birth-rights, for the just and legall removal of our Nationall Evils.”Footnote 118 Parliament was thus imbued with “but a Power of trust, [which is ever revokable, and cannot be otherwise …].” The people remained the “Principals” and the representatives their mere “Agents” tasked “by a meere donation of the people” with being “imployed to no other end, then [their] own wel-being.”Footnote 119 The relationship between the people and their representative fiduciaries was thus one of trust.
In a time when the law was already largely inaccessible to commoners and the poor, monopolists’ unauthorized and unaccountable power to determine whether and how Englishmen’s rights were recognized and respected further removed lawmaking and law enforcement from the people’s control.Footnote 120 Monopolies were enclaves that effectively remained in the “state of nature”: every individual’s rights were jeopardized by the unilateral judgment of another private party’s will.Footnote 121 Thus Wildman demanded in his 1647 Putney Projects that “oppressions by forced Oaths, by Tythes, Monopolies … &c. should have suitable remedy contrived.”Footnote 122 But we are reminded too of Johnson’s earlier language: the “life of the patent, so far as it extends, is the death of the law.”
Parliament was thus tasked with protecting the people from monopoly power because the people “justly expected” the equal protection of their rights. Echoing Discourse, Lilburne, and Johnson before him, in February 1647 Overton argued in a petition that “Pattentee-Monopolizers,” having “no power over our bodies and Estates,” “therefore may not commit our bodies to prison.” He explained, “All monopolies at home, and all restraint of trade abroad to distinct companies of men, are all opposite to the antient rights of the people.” Monopolies, he said, sought “to set up a tyranicall Government, tending to the utter vassalage and overthrow of all the free people of this Kingdome together with their Naturall, Nationall, and Legall Rights and Liberties.”Footnote 123 In autumn of the same year, Wildman and Petty helped articulate soldiers’ grievances in The Case of the Armie Truly Stated, which was presented to Thomas Fairfax on 18 October. Among the army’s demands were “reliefe for the people in any of their oppressions, by arbitrary powers, Monopolies, iniustice in the proceeding Law, Tythes, Excize, &c.” Indeed, the injustice brought about by “Monopolies, and restraint of free trade” were among the precedents that the authors understood as underwriting the “imfamy of Parliamentary authority.”Footnote 124.
Part of any legitimate public authority’s task, then, must be to protect citizens from unauthorized and unaccountable enclaves of rights-violating private law. Lilburne articulated this demand by explaining that “the end of Government was to prevent oppressions, to limit and restrain the excessive power and violence of great men, to open the passages of Justice with indifferency towards all.”Footnote 125 Nine months later, Overton declared it Parliament’s responsibility “to remove from amongst them all oppressions and tyrannies … and to protect, safeguard, and defend them from all such unnatural monsters, vipers and pests.”Footnote 126 The next year, popular petitions adopted similar language: “the end of [Parliament’s] trust was freedome and deliverance from all kinde of grievances and oppressions”;Footnote 127 and, as articulated in the army’s demands, “the supreame power of the peoples representors” must be declared to include the power “to call to an account all officers in this Nation whatsoever, for their neglect or treacheries in their trust for the peoples good.”Footnote 128 Whereas, for Parker, the collective rights which survived the transition from pre-political to political condition were baked into the contract’s salus populi suprema lex est,Footnote 129 for the Leveller leaders Parliament’s legitimacy was constantly contingent on its actually protecting individuals’ fundamental rights.
Abolishing monopolies
If Parliament were to avoid lapsing back into the kind of unauthorized and unaccountable power that characterized the Crown’s prerogative, and therefore the Lords’, it needed to exterminate monopolies. Monopoly power was an extension of sovereign power “further then from the represented to the representers.”Footnote 130 It was “out of the limits of our Trust; for the People, who are the Trusters, are as well limited as their Elected Trustees: they cannot confer more then they have in themselves.”Footnote 131 Whereas consent to Parliament’s authority “may be removed” by the people, no such revocation was possible for monopoly power.Footnote 132 As Overton argued in 1647, the problem with monopolists’ power was that they were “not elected thereunto by the Free-men of England.”Footnote 133 Later the same year, army radicals demanded that Parliament ensure that “all Monopolyes be forthwith removed, and no persons whatsoever may be permitted to restraine others from free trade.”Footnote 134 This association of antimonopolism with electorally accountable public authority had such wide purchase that even pamphlets distanced from the heart of the Leveller movement began associating the desire for “a speedy establishment of a Just and Equall Government” with the demand that “all Monopolies and restraint of trade, under colour of any Companies, Fraternities, or otherwise be forthwith abolished.”Footnote 135
If Parliament were truly authorized by and accountable to the people, it would eliminate monopolies. In Lilburne’s words, “it is impossible for justice, peace, or prosperity, to flourish in this Kingdom, till [all Pattentee-Monopolizing-Corporations] be all abolished.”Footnote 136 This had to begin by expelling monopolists who held seats in Parliament because, contrary to Parliament’s purpose, monopolists only served to enlarge private interests. If Parliament was “principally called for the maintenance of the Laws, and redresse of mischiefs and grievances,” then it must also “continue freed, and inlarged from all private aims, personal respects or passions whatsoever.”Footnote 137 This was why the Long Parliament expelled all monopolists from its ranks within the first week of its reconvening in 1640.Footnote 138 It is also why Lilburne called for the removal of various members in 1649,Footnote 139 and demanded that “the Votes of this House Novemb. 19. 1640 against [all Monopolizers] sitting therein, may be forthwith put in due execution.”Footnote 140 In their Agreement of 1649, the Levellers collectively demanded that Parliament cease the restraint of trade under monopolies.Footnote 141
In addition to expulsion from Parliament and ceasing to issue monopolies, the Levellers implored solutions and penances that required Parliament’s heavy-handed intervention. In response to the increased strength and activity of Irish pirates that had resulted from the Merchant Adventurers’ monopoly, the Levellers demanded the creation of a “speedy and powerfull Guard appointed for the Seas.”Footnote 142 They also demanded “that all Monopolizers may give good reparation to the Commonwealth, and to particular parties who have been damnified by them.”Footnote 143 Monopolies were “to be proceeded against as publique delinquents to the State.”Footnote 144
First among such “delinquents to the State” was Sir Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. Lilburne drew a parallel between Strafford and the Merchant Adventurers. Strafford was beheaded in 1641 for having “acted arbitrarily, against the sence and mind of the law, to the ruine and destruction of the freedome of the people.” Like a monopolist, Strafford directed a private government. As Lord Deputy of Ireland, he acted without parliamentary consent and wielded prerogative power over the colony. Among other charges, he had insinuated that the Crown could levy taxes without parliamentary consent, for which the Commons executed him. If Strafford could not legally impose fines and impositions without the people’s consent through Parliament, “much lesse can the Marchant Adventurers doe it.” Lilburne concluded that, just as Strafford was deemed, and executed as, a traitor, “the chief procurers and preservers of this Monopoly, do deserve as much as he.” Strafford and actual monopolists were cut from the same cloth: all were examples of precisely the kind of “oppressors and tyrants,” “great men,” and “unnatural monsters, vipers, and pests” imbued with the very unauthorized and unaccountable private power against which the Commons had been mandated to protect English subjects. If monopolies were not eliminated, they would, like Strafford, “endeavour with all their might to perswade Parliamentary power to make us slaves by a law.” So what else but “Strafford’s Reward” might monopolists expect, Lilburne agitates, when these men “have seene their punishment before their eyes”?Footnote 145
Conclusion
The horrors that monopoly powers imposed on commoners profoundly shaped what the Leveller leaders imagined was necessary to legitimate Parliament as supreme public authority. Discourse was an early and contemporary articulation of a Leveller antimonopoly argument that could transform economic grievances into constitutional principles. For example, it demonstrated that, above and beyond worries about the public good, what monopolies put at risk was the guarantee of various fundamental rights. This sentiment was not merely a polemical feature of Discourse but would become a durable Leveller constitutional commitment. As late as 1652, Walwyn (clearly a latecomer to the Levellers’ serious antimonopoly thought) echoed Discourse’s prioritization of rights over the public good: “those who desire a continuance of forraine trade under Companies, and those that propose an absolute freedome therein, doe both hold forth the publike good, as that which ought to be submitted unto.” However, “the true way of discerning what is to be deemed a publique good in England … is to find out what is Common Right in England.”Footnote 146
Monopoly power, in addition to being an abject violation of natural equality, allowed some private men to unilaterally withhold or violate their fellow citizens’ rights. This rendered monopolies dominium in dominio, or illegitimate private powers that operated without authorization from or accountability to the people. For the Levellers, monopoly power came to represent a foil to what they imagined as Parliament’s legitimate public authority. It was thus in part against the backdrop of monopoly powers that the Levellers formulated the argument that sovereignty passed, via election, from the people to Parliament as an ever-revocable trust of the people’s equal rights.
In this light, the Levellers’ grievances against monopolies emerge not as a defense of market liberalism, nor as a rejection of centralized authority as such, but as an early theory of popular legitimacy for a unitary public authority. Where Parliamentarians like Parker had grounded legitimate authority in the promise of the public good, the Levellers—schooled in part by the concrete experience of monopolies’ rights violations—demanded something more exacting: a Parliament perpetually accountable to people whose natural rights it had been authorized to protect. For the Levellers, the test of Parliament’s legitimacy was its capacity to protect all citizens from the illegitimate monsters that withheld or encroached on their fundamental rights. Then, by juxtaposing antimonopoly arguments from Discourse and the Leveller leaders’ subsequent interventions, we begin to see that legitimate public authority begins where the dominium of monopoly power ends.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Turkuler Isiksel, David C. Johnston, Carl Wennerlind, Karuna Mantena, Daniel Luban, David Guerrero, Nadia Urbinati, and the members of the Green Ribbon Club—Teresa M. Bejan, Richard R. John, Justin Schwartz, Nigel Smith, and Shannon C. Stimson—for generous feedback on this article. I also thank participants of the Oxford Political Thought Seminar, the APSA 2024 Annual Meeting, and the MPSA 2024 Annual Meeting for their engagement. Archival work for this project was supported by the Columbia Center for Political Economy and Columbia ISERP.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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