When Lilburne was captured at Brentford, and imprisoned in Oxford Castle awaiting trial for taking up arms against the king, he smuggled out a letter to his Elizabeth. She was pregnant, but had been following the army, as the wives of poorer men did. She had not been idle, daily and hourly petitioning the House of Commons to help her husband. She managed to reach the Royalist headquarters, after ‘so many sad and difficult accidents to a woman in her condition as would force tears from the hardest heart’. She contrived to get Lilburne released as an exchange, and he was greeted as a hero on his return to London.
Like many businesses, Lilburne’s brewery had all but collapsed in its master’s absence, and John sold it almost at once. Elizabeth had obtained a government position for him at a generous salary, but he turned it down, declaring that he would rather fight for eightpence a day, and he re-enlisted at once, recruited by Cromwell. Elizabeth set off to follow him again, with the baby.
Nevertheless, he left the army in the spring of 1645 because he would not take the Covenant, and he was soon imprisoned again, this time by Parliament, for insulting the Speaker. Elizabeth went with him to Newgate Prison in the late summer of 1645, until his release in October. She was again pregnant, so it was especially miserable that when the Lilburnes reached Half-Moon Alley, they discovered that the officers who had ransacked their house had stolen the carefully stored childbed linen. Like Ann Fanshawe, Elizabeth had lost the household stuff that was important to her, the valuable household linen which defined a wife’s identity and often constituted her wealth. There were public quarrels, too, between husband and wife. She tried – desperately – to persuade him to give up the cause, to take care of his wife and children.
But by then John Lilburne was politically articulate, and there was no holding him. He wanted the Commons elected and meeting annually; the Self-Denying Ordinance should be enforced, and payment given to poor MPs for attendance. He wanted an end to the Solemn League and Covenant, to church tithes, to excise, to laws in tongues other than English. Between the spring of 1646 and late September 1649, he produced almost forty pamphlets. Hardly anyone escaped uncriticized. Lilburne saw his own imprisonment as the first proof of injustice and the loss of ancient liberties, and from that it followed that he and every other right-thinking person was engaged in a battle to defend liberty – against the Long Parliament, Commons and Lords both, the judiciary. Some titles reveal Lilburne’s vitality, but also his debt to the ferocious pit-bulls of the wartime London press: Liberty Vindicated Against Slavery (1646); Jonah’s Cry out of the Whale’s Belly and The Juglers Discovered (1647); A Whip for the Present House of Lords, or the Levellers Levelled, and The Prisoners Mournful Cry (1648). It was less that Lilburne had a coherent ideology than that he was relentlessly against all those in power, whether acquired recently or long ago. And he was an icon, like his masters Bastwick and Burton.
A month after Mary Overton’s arrest, Elizabeth found her home too was being ransacked by the Stationers’ Company, and the following day (8 February 1647) she was arrested for distributing the books John had written. She and her husband found themselves before the Committee of Examinations. John read them a paper he had prepared demanding a public hearing, but was interrupted so many times that finally Elizabeth lost her temper. ‘I told thee often enough long since, that thou would serve the Parliament, and venture thy life so long for them, till they would hang thee for thy pains, and give thee Tyburn for thy recompense, and I told thee besides, thou shouldst in conclusion find them a company of unjust and unrighteous judges, that more sought themselves, and their own ends, than the public good of the kingdom, or any of those that faithfully adventured their lives therefore.’ John managed to get the committee to agree to discharge his wife, on the conventional grounds that she could not be held responsible for his actions.
When the army reached London, Lilburne was in the Tower once more, with the Overtons and other Levellers. The newswriters expected the army to free him, but nothing happened. Elizabeth, as always, had to make it happen; she was constantly petitioning army headquarters to press for his release. More turmoils followed; ordered from Westminster Hall, Lilburne was preparing to fight for his freedom in the most literal fashion, but Elizabeth hurled herself against him to protect him from his foes’ drawn swords. She adored him, but she hardly ever had him at her side. Finally, he was hauled off to the Tower again – one of his children was even named Tower to commemorate his absence. Elizabeth got him back for a while during the Second Civil War, but by then everything that made for household calm had collapsed, including all visible means of financial support. He had no estates, no income, no business and no trade. (Eventually, he became a soap-boiler.) And soon he was back in the Tower again. Commentators noted that he had become thin and haggard in gaol, but his family may also have suffered, for shortly after the Burford mutiny, Elizabeth and all three children fell sick with smallpox. The eldest boy called desperately for his father, and the authorities allowed Lilburne to visit his family, but both his sons died. Elizabeth and his daughter young Elizabeth slowly recovered, but Lilburne thought his sons’ death a worse trial from God than years in gaol, and wrote that he was ‘weary of any thing I might see abroad’. The political conflict had been one long ordeal for an honest, decent family man who longed only to live in peace:
Parties of horse and foot are sent at unreasonable hours to hale and pull people out of their beds and houses, from their wives and children, without so much as ever summoning of them and without any crime or accusation shown or accuser appearing or the least pretence or shadow of law produced – some sent into remote garrisons, where they have been most barbarously used and endeavoured to be starved and tossed from garrison to garrison, others locked up close prisoners with sentinels night and day upon their doors, and all due trials and help at law stopped and denied, and no remedy to be obtained.
Lilburne’s proper place, he says, is quietly at home with his wife and children. Yet he rarely chose to occupy it. Like Overton, he tried to defend his wife. Lilburne complained that Elizabeth was ‘attacked at the very Parliament-door, when she was peaceably waiting there with eight Gentlewomen more, for an Answer to her late Petition, and for Justice from the House, about my illegal sufferings … a piece of unmanlike cruelty and barbarism … which renders him to be one of the malicious, basest, unworthiest, and cowardliest of men, to use a gentlewoman in such a manner’. Lilburne excused Elizabeth by saying that ‘she is my wife, and set at work to do what she did at the earnest desire of me her (unjust imprisoned) husband, and truly I appeal to every one of your own consciences, whether you would not have taken it very ill at the hands of any of your wives, if you were in my case, and she should refuse at your earnest desire to do that for you’. Overton went further, claiming to have written his wife’s petition, and indeed its language is extremely close to one of his own. Lilburne claimed that ‘I was led presently to take care, to do something for my wife as the weaker vessel … and for that end I drew her presently up a few lines, which I read unto her, and gave her instructions … unto which she readily assented, and set her name to it, which verbatim thus followeth’. The women’s petitions were also republished in pamphlets written by their husbands, as if taken under the protective embrace of marital ideology. ‘We, our husbands, brethren, friends, and servants, contrary to all law, severally, and in a forced and unjust separation from our husbands, are kept and mewed up in your several starving, stinking, murdering prison houses.’
The Levellers’ moment came when they made contacts in the increasingly dissatisfied New Model Army in the spring of 1647. Parliament, the Army thought, seemed determined to dismantle it for the most part – its disbandment was ordered formally on 27 May 1647 – and (worse) to send the remaining remnants to Ireland. The Army radicals suspected Parliament of Presbyterian leanings. Some in the Army were Presbyterian too, but many were not, and no one was keen to be forced to choose between being sent home without pay and being posted to Ireland.
The soldiers had also experienced authority more directly and frustratingly than they might have as smallholders or bakers or husbandmen. Faith in Parliament was weakened when they came to feel that it was not protecting them; not considering them, not paying them. The soldiers were starved: of pay, of care, of attention. Like shambling unwanted children, too, they were about to be thrown out of home, sent to Ireland, as if the Army had no stake in England but was merely a band of mercenaries. Fearful, angry, longing to be acknowledged, the Army wanted, at least, to be heard. But their foes in Parliament were deaf. Denzil Holles and the Presbyterians expressed Parliament’s ‘high dislike’ of the Army’s petition for indemnity for acts committed in war, security for arrears, provision for the maimed and for the widows and children of the dead, and no service in Ireland. The Army showed its wounded feelings when it called this the Declaration of Dislike. Its sense of honour was affronted, and its sensible, blunt commander was offended too. Fairfax and his council of war, who had been fighting for Parliament all this time, decided, momentously, not to disband the Army on Parliament’s orders.
In June 1647, the New Model Army acted. It became a political entity – almost like the Roman army – when it stole the king from Parliament’s custody at Holmby House, and began marching in sweeps towards London and Westminster. As the Army moved, it communicated: a series of declarations were produced. One claimed that they ‘were not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of state, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of parliament to the defence of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties. And so we took up arms in judgement and conscience to those ends.’ These declarations came not from the Army’s commanders, but from its ranks.
But the Levellers could scarcely hope to gain what they wanted by petitioning Parliament. The House of Commons, to which they addressed their pleas, was a cosy club for portly gentlemen and merchants, who had no enthusiasm for what they called ‘the meaner sort’. Those who had begun the war – men like the Five Members – had never had the slightest intention of changing the social order fundamentally, only of protecting what was theirs as members of the gentry, and preserving – not radicalizing – the Church. Rebuffed, the Levellers began to think that the New Model Army was more to be relied on.
The Army swept down on London, and terrified its Presbyterian MP opponents into hasty flight, and in this situation the Levellers saw an opportunity to enter the world of national politics. They united with newly elected Army agitators to produce The Case of the Army Truly Stated, a long and miserable grizzle, but at its heart lay An Agreement of the People, the key text for the exciting debates held at Putney between the Army and its commanders from 28 October until 9 November 1647.
The press was not supposed to report the proceedings, but a few writers managed to leak terse remarks. ‘Not fit to be presented to the public view’, said the newspapers coyly. But copies of An Agreement of the People were in wide circulation, in two editions, and the newspapers gave summaries of it. It was an astounding wish-list for political change. It called for the dissolution of both houses of Parliament on the grounds that they had been there for long enough to grow corrupt. They were to be replaced by a sovereign body of 400 men, which would be elected by manhood franchise, a principle embodied in a swingeing critique of the seventeenth-century system of rotten boroughs: ‘That the people of England being at this day very unequally distributed by counties, cities and boroughs for the election of their deputies in parliament, ought to be more indifferently proportioned according to the number of the inhabitants: the circumstances whereof, for number, place, and manner, are to be set down before the end of this present parliament.’ This body was to have absolute authority over monies and foreign policy, and was to safeguard freedom of conscience in matters of religion: ‘We do not empower or entrust our said representatives to continue in force, or to make any Laws, Oaths, or Covenants, whereby to compell by penalties or otherwise any person to any thing in or about matters of faith, Religion or God’s worship or to restrain any person from the profession of his faith, or to exercise of Religion according to his Conscience, nothing having caused more distractions, and heart burnings in all ages, then persecution and molestation for matters of Conscience in and about Religion.’ They also demanded one law for rich and poor alike: ‘That in all laws made or to be made, every person may be bound alike; and that no tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth, or place do confer any exemption from the ordinary course of legal proceedings whereunto others are subjected.’ These things, they said, we declare to be our native rights.
All the time, however, a man named William Clarke was trying to make notes that summarized what was said at Putney, in a newfangled shorthand system. After the Restoration, he set out to write up his notes, though historians didn’t discover their existence until the nineteenth century. Thus for two hundred and fifty years, the Putney debates were a secret at the heart of Civil War history; when they were uncovered, they changed our sense of the possibilities of the age.
The Putney debates provided an arena in which the Levellers and the grandees of the Army struggled to win the minds and hearts of junior officers and common footsoldiers.
To Cromwell and Ireton, the debates might have seemed an infuriating interruption to the process of reforming the state and negotiating with the king. Sensible officers, they knew that mutineers could be pacified only if officers were willing to hear their grievances. But like most busy people, they probably resented the leisurely pace of democratic process. And yet the very fact that the debates were held at all – that the grandees thought such things could be debated – was astounding. The debates themselves undermined the certainty of the very system the Army grandees wanted to defend. It was even more extraordinary that such debates could be held – and could only be understood – inside the Army. This was a result of the army’s own experience, and not just in the New Model. War offers an atypical experience, and thus provokes ideas of further change. The New Model Army felt itself victorious. In the very first paragraph of An Agreement, it presents itself as the protector of liberty:
Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom, and God having so far owned our cause as to deliver the enemies thereof into our hands, we do now hold ourselves bound in mutual duty to each other to take the best care we can for the future to avoid both the danger of returning into a slavish condition and the chargeable remedy of another war. For as it cannot be imagined that so many of our countrymen would have opposed us in this quarrel if they had understood their own good, so may we safely promise to ourselves that when our common rights and liberties shall be cleared, their endeavours will be disappointed that seek to make themselves our masters.
The Army radicals saw themselves as martyrs for the liberties of the people: ‘For your safety and freedom we have cheerfully endured hard labours and run most desperate hazards. And in comparison to your peace and freedom we neither do nor ever shall value our dearest blood; and we profess our bowels are and have been troubled and our hearts pained within us in seeing and considering that you have been so long bereaved of these fruits and ends of all our labours and hazards.’ What they meant was that the Army commanders did not appreciate the cause for which they had fought. It was in this attitude of intransigence that they came to Putney.
Not all MPs turned a deaf ear to the Army radicals. Thomas Rainborough was a member of the tiny republican group of MPs led by Henry Marten. He was the son of a naval commander, brought up to be a sailor, and served for a short spell at sea as a vice-admiral. Then he became a colonel
and raised a regiment under Manchester, officered mainly by men who had emigrated to New England but come home. He managed to capture Crowland Abbey, which made his name; he was given command of a regiment in the New Model Army, and fought at Naseby and Bristol; at Bristol he took Prior’s Hill Fort, and put everyone in it to the sword. He was tall and hefty, strong, intimidating, known both for his daring and for the very strict discipline he imposed on his men. He was especially gifted at siegecraft, and he liked to use the pike, a weapon suited to his great size and strength. He had pikeman values, too: stand together or fall apart.
But he was hotheaded, and always went just a little further than other people. He became more radical as the 1640s wore on. Disgusted especially by Charles’s intransigence in rejecting the Heads of the Proposals, he spread the story of his stubbornness through the army. His dislike of the king meant that he distrusted Cromwell and Ireton for continuing to talk to Charles. In his ardent republicanism he was influenced by Henry Marten and hence by the political philosophies of the ancients, but it was also the outcome of his experience and his reading. He was also angry that Cromwell had opposed his appointment as vice-admiral. Cromwell saw him not only as a personal enemy, but as ‘endeavouring to have no other power to rule but the sword’.
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