{"podcast":{"title":"Consequential Actions Podcast","slug":"consequential-actions-podcast-7101158","podcast_index_feed_id":7101158,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/465374/s/4746.rss","website_url":"https://jeffkellick.substack.com/s/consequential-actions-podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/465374/s/4746/89d62bf29b5f4bd7e0065e8d1dd33837.jpg","author":"Jeff Kellick","episode_count":110,"summary":"A discussion on the decisions that impact security, technology, and the economy.","last_synced_at":"2026-09-06T20:17:46.793969+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158"},"episode":{"title":"The Levellers","slug":"the-levellers","published_at":"2026-08-07T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/the-levellers","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158","url":"https://jeffkellick.substack.com/p/the-levellers","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/210039703/c3435f25df26fab83c3c5cb67fea9d6c.mp3","summary":"The Constitution England Wrote in 1647 — and Never Adopted In April of 1638 a twenty-three-year-old named John Lilburne was tied to the back of an ox cart and whipped two miles through London, then locked in a pillory at Westminster. He had been convicted of no crime. His offense was refusing to swear an oath that would have bound him to answer whatever the King’s court chose to ask him, including questions designed to draw a confession out of his own mouth. He told them no man was bound to accuse himself. Nine years later, he and the men around him were arguing that every government in England — court, Parliament, and crown alike — held its authority on nothing more and nothing less than the consent of the people who had to live under it. Episode 9 traces the Levellers, the print-and-petition network of London radicals and army agitators who took Sir Edward Coke’s defense of English liberty and moved its foundation out from under it. Coke had argued that English rights were safe because they were ancient. The Levellers argued something far more dangerous: that they were true. We follow the collapse of censorship that made the movement possible; the three men at its intellectual center — Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn — and the distinct edge each of them pressed; the Agreement of the People, which set down in one written instrument a government of granted and limited powers together with rights reserved above the ordinary legislature; and the argument at Putney between Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, who grounded a man’s right to a voice in the man himself, and Henry Ireton, who grounded it in a permanent fixed stake in the country. The episode is careful about what it claims. The Agreement was not the first written political covenant in the English-speakin…","meta_description":"The Constitution England Wrote in 1647 — and Never Adopted In April of 1638 a twenty-three-year-old named John Lilburne was tied to the back of an ox cart…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3473,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/episodes/the-levellers/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/the-levellers.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}