Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.

A number of other freedoms, besides freedoms of speech and press, also developed out of the conflicts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England – most notably freedoms for the criminally accused, many of whom were prosecuted for the crime of their religious faith. As Puritans and others were charged with the crimes of preaching and printing dissident religious beliefs, they raised objections to each element of criminal prosecutions: searches, arrests, imprisonments, trials, and punishments. The most vocal objectors were the Levellers, radical "Puritans of the Left," who supplemented their objections with proposed freedoms or rights against unjust elements of prosecutions. Their objections and proposals were mostly in the fervent language of religious speech – religious appeals laden with biblical references – whether in statements at trial, transcripts of proceedings, or pamphlets. The best known Leveller leader, John Lilburne, in his three major criminal trials and in related pamphlets, identified and claimed all thirteen freedoms of the criminally accused that, 150 years later, were collected together in the Fourth through Eighth Amendments of America’s Bill of Rights. Lilburne also sought to legitimate and secure those rights as part of the rights of "free-born Englishmen" or of "the birthright of Englishmen."* Other Levellers advocated those rights.

The calls for freedom of press in the mid-seventeenth century, like the earlier calls for freedom of speech, also came mostly from devoutly religious people: Puritans and Nonconformists and their religious-based demands. That religious basis was mostly a desire to disseminate religious preaching and knowledge, and an imperative to do that not only by preaching and other speech but by publishing religious books and pamphlets, in addition to a religious basis in freedom of conscience. John Milton, the trailblazer in seeking "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience," tried to extend parrhesia from speech to publications, and built his case in Areopagitica and in other pamphlets on freedom of conscience, on Bible passages, and on similar religious messages. Though Areopagitica is generally described in scholarly literature as unnoticed and overlooked until the end of the seventeenth century, it in fact was relatively widely known, as nearly fifty quotations or allusions show before that century’s end. Besides Milton, other Puritans were the dominant advocates for freedom of press before the end of the seventeenth century, including three who wrote a generation before Milton (an anonymous minister, Leonard Busher, and William Ames), and Levellers and others.