ABSTRACT
This essay argues that Milton, Winstanley, and such Leveller pamphleteers as Walwyn, Overton and Lilburne share in a common project: the creation of a public sphere of discourse which, by its very existence, challenged the hegemony of traditional ruling elites. Milton’s stance in the opening sentences of Areopagitica is that of the private citizen offering “publick advice”, exercising the right of “free born men” to “speak free” to those in positions of authority in the state. Civil liberty, here as in other pamphlets of Milton and by the Levellers Overton and Walwyn, is defined in terms of freedom of access, the willingness of those in power to listen to the grievances of those who seek redress. Winstanley’s pamphlets on behalf of the Diggers, like the other works discussed here, employ the decorum of direct address, urging those who had gained power during the English Revolution to recognize their common cause with the ordinary people, with whose aid and on whose behalf they had overthrown the monarchy. If Winstanley’s Law of Freedom (1652) and Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way (1660) differ in certain respects from earlier political pamphlets by these two authors, one possible reason for this is a consciousness of defeat, a recognition that the conventions of direct address, of counsel freely offered and received, have broken down, so that all that is left is prophetic lament, a farewell to liberty.
