Clare Jackson
speaker
190 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Clare Jackson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
very much along a traditional lines of king, lords and commons, but a rising, what's often referred to as independent force within Parliament, coming from the sectarian congregations, as well as an army that feels it is now being undervalued.
There are massive pay arrears.
There's a lack of clarity about things like indemnity for soldiers afterwards.
Parliament, the Presbyterian majority, is very keen to disband it as quickly as possible.
And I think this is the army that has won the war for Parliament, but there's rising resentment.
They feel that they have not only a right, but a kind of responsibility now to act on people's behalf.
And this is the sort of fertile ground into which leveller ideas come from.
Well, it's like most names of most groups.
It originally starts as a derogatory term.
It's a nickname.
One of the most prominent levellers, John Lilburn, later claims that it was Ayrton, Henry Ayrton Cromwell's son-in-law, who fixed it on them after the Putney debates.
I'm sure we'll come to them later in 1647.
It's meant to imply very deliberately social levelling, a desire to bring everything down to a parity.
The levellers themselves denied that this was really what they were about, but it evoked ideas of enclosure riots, rebels...
It was taken up very quickly.
So November 1647, a royalist newspaper, Mercurius Pragmaticus, calls its readers to the attention of the despicable and desperate knot of men who endeavour to cast down and level the enclosures of nobility, gentry and property to make us all even so that every jack should vie with a gentleman and every gentleman be made a jack.
So the descriptor that's often used is an explosion in print, that with the breakdown of civil authority, there's also a collapse in the state controls of the press.
So before the civil wars, if you wanted to publish anything lawfully, you had to submit it for pre-publication approval.
Obviously, as authority crumbles, there just isn't capacity to do that.
So suddenly you see this explosion in the number of titles, whereas maybe 450 titles were published a year in the 1630s.
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