It is important to point out that the Levellers and Parliament were not the same group. Although much of their support came from London and The New Model Army which was controlled by the Parliament, they did not necessarily agitate for the Parliament’s cause. Their leader John Lilburne, for example, denounced Members of Parliament (MPs) for living in comfort while their soldiers suffered at the battlefields, and was consequently arrested in 1645. He was arrested again in 1646 for accusing the Earl of Manchester of being a Royalist sympathiser. So whilst Levellers were quite clearly not Royalist, they can’t be understood as just a simple faction of the Parliamentarians. Rather, they were radicals who challenged Parliamentarian control. Their hopes, in the simplest terms, were to democratise the country, which would have threatened the power and supremacy of the Parliament in England.

The short answer in regards to literacy programmes is – probably not. I have not seen references to any such education programme. Although if it were to exist it would most likely have been funded by Parliamentarians, as they were the ones in control of London and all of its resources in the Civil Wars, including its finance.

London also included the major printers – although Royalists had printing power in Oxford and York, they were not able to print nearly as much. Parliament therefore had a greater mass production capacity for propaganda. Their cause was also helped by lapsed censoring laws.

Literacy levels are hard to estimate in the seventeenth century, for a person who can sign their name may not be able to read or write a full petition and so on. I believe that the general estimates of literacy across the country in the 1640s do not rise much above 25% of the population. Which, whilst not an entirely small fraction, it is not a large one either. We know that women’s literacy rates were even lower. So printed pamphlets, even though many of them were written in rather simple language, may not have been accessible to too many people, particularly those in more rural areas.

But this being said, propagandists had many ways to reach wide audiences. We know, for example, that the pamphlets and other texts were often read in town squares, alehouses, taverns, the newly-introduced coffee shops and other public places. It was not a new form of communication. A lot of libels and stories were also shared in the form of a poem or a song sung to a well-known tune. Both of these mediums have tremendous power to stick in a person’s mind – it could then be passed on orally to many more people, literate and not.

Similarly, the power of graphic satire and general imagery was incredibly strong. The 1640s were a time when woodcut images were thriving. Some of my favourites are the woodcuts depicting the atrocities of the Irish Rebellion of 1641; a lot of the time, such images had not only physical depictions of violence, but also text to accompany it.

There is also evidence that pamphlets and images were not simply read and looked at – some were worn! Nailed to hats, clothes, staffs.

The question of how many people this propaganda reached and how many people were mobilised with it remains a contested topic in the historiography. It is something that we may not ever know for sure, but recent studies of allegiance in the Civil Wars are immensely interesting and well overdue.

Hope this has been helpful!

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Useful/interesting books on this topic include:

Andrew Hopper, Turncoats and renegadoes: changing sides during the English Civil Wars (2012).

N. H. Keeble (ed), The Cambridge companion to writing of the English Revolution (2001).

David Cressy, ‘Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England: More Evidence’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977), 141-150.

David Cress, Literacy and the social order (1980).

Helen Pierce, Unseemly pictures: graphic satire and politics in early modern England (2008).