The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  Other MPs were more equivocal. Henry Ireton was a man whose name begins with the word ‘ire’, and sounds like ‘iron’; both are suggestive and relevant. He was the intellectual star of the Putney debates: their head, if Rainborough is their heart. Ireton was a hard man who insisted that property in land or a freehold of trading rights was the foundation of civil society, but he left no writings behind him save one letter. At Putney he was also relatively young, just thirty-six years old. He had been at Trinity College, Cambridge and at the Inns of Court, and he knew how debates were supposed to go. He was fresh from commanding the left at Naseby, from accepting the surrender of Bristol, from overseeing the surrender of Oxford, and from marrying Oliver Cromwell’s daughter Bridget, a young woman of twenty-two. He was the man of the moment, the man in form.

  Ireton had had a difficult adolescence; he lost his father when he was only thirteen, and after that he was the oldest male, with four brothers and three sisters to protect and instruct. Being with Cromwell was a relief and also a source of tension; Ireton was used to being in the lead, but also liked being fathered, Lucy Hutchinson was married to his cousin, and she took note of him. ‘A very grave, serious, religious person’, she thought. Zealous in promoting the godly interest, Ireton was modest, prudent, ‘very active, industrious, and stiff in his ways and purposes’, thought Bulstrode Whitelocke. Until the war he had lived quietly, believing himself accountable only to God. He raised a troop of horse for Parliament in 1642, prompt to declare that the king had violated its powers. Himself elected MP in 1645, he sat in silence. Like Margaret Thatcher in our time, he was disliked even by people who admired his abilities, and admired even by those who disliked him and his ideas.

  His peace terms to Charles (the Heads of the Proposals) were the best and sanest offer Charles could have expected, and only Charles would have refused them. They show what Ireton too might have wanted: biennial Parliaments, Parliamentary control of the militia for ten years, the exclusion of leading Royalists from office. There would be religious toleration of everyone except Catholics, and neither the Book of Common Prayer nor the Covenant was to be compulsory.

  Clever, and a powerful influence on Cromwell’s slower mind, Ireton could also seem too certain of everything, sure that absolute truth could be got at. This silent, intense, inward man was to speak for the grandees at Putney, who opposed the Army agitators and Rainborough. ‘Proud self-ended fellows’, John Lilburne thought them. The grandees wanted reform of the existing system: a king restrained by a Parliament that represented men of property. An Agreement of the People called for something completely different from anything seen in England before, an assembly elected by all men.

  The debate began when leading agitator Edward Sexby, outrageously blunt, told Cromwell and Ireton that their reputations had been damaged both by their attempts to placate Charles and by their service to a ‘rotten’ Parliament. Cromwell then gave a response to The Case of the Army Truly Stated. A man recorded as ‘Buff-coat’, but actually Robert Everard, replied with his own account of the purpose of the meeting: ‘we have [here met] according to my engagement, that whatsoever may be thought to be necessary for our satisfaction, for the right understanding one of another, that we might go on together. For though our ends and aims be the same, if one thinks this way, another way, that way which is best for the subject is that they may be hearkened unto.’

  Immediately Cromwell began grilling him about The Case of the Army, which he called a paper:

  Truly this paper does contain in it very great alterations of the very government of this kingdom … although the pretensions in it, and the expressions in it, are very plausible, and if we could leap out of one condition into another that had so specious things in it as this hath … How do we know if, whilst we are disputing these things, another company of men shall gather together, and put out a paper as plausible perhaps as this? … And not only another, but another, and another, but many of this kind. And if so, what do you think the consequence of this would be? Would it not be confusion? Would it not be utter confusion?

  He went on to declare his faith in the workings of providence: ‘God will manifest to us to be the thing that he would have us prosecute’, he asserted. He also argued fiercely that everyone must consider any engagements they already had, any pledges to others. Ireton agreed. But Rainborough said, ‘I shall speak my mind’, and responded that it was true that every honest man was bound in duty to God and to his conscience, let him be engaged in what he will. He also responded to Cromwell’s point on division and difficulty by alluding to the war they had just fought, pointing out that the kind of conservatism Cromwell now appeared to be advocating would have meant that it was never fought at all. When Cromwell and others said of the constitution proposed in An Agreement of the People, ‘It’s a huge alteration, it’s a bringing in of New Laws’ (Rainborough’s scathing summary), Rainborough commented, ‘if writings be true there hath been many scufflings between the honest men of England and those that have tyrannized over them’.

  Crucially, Cromwell argued that the Army was committed to what it had itself said about its intentions. A long wrangle ensued about what exactly was binding on the Army. But it was not dully bureaucratic; it was shot through with the language of the Bible, of the coming of God in glory. William Goffe, for example, spoke of God ‘throwing down the glory of all flesh’, by which he meant that no one could rise above being God’s instrument. One reason the debates are eloquent is that most of the participants were more used to hearing issues discussed theologically than in committee. John Wildman broke up a consensual interchange between Goffe and Ireton on the centrality of God to debate, reminding everyone sharply that the people’s grievances were not being redressed by Parliament. He also pointed out that the army wanted to be heard at once, not after weeks had gone by. Wildman exemplified the fervour of the committed Levellers. To them – as, perhaps to us – what they wanted was so obviously just and right that they couldn’t see why they shouldn’t have it at once. This roused Ireton’s ire. He explained:

  If you will resort only to the law of nature, by the law of nature you have no more right to this land, or anything else, than I have. I have as much right to take hold of anything that is I have a desire to for my satisfaction, as you. But here comes the foundation of all right that I understand to be betwixt men, as to the enjoying of one thing or not enjoying of it; we are under a contract, and, we are under an agreement, and that agreement is what a man has for a matter of land that he hath received by a traduction from his ancestors, which according to the law does fall upon him to be his right.

  In other words, he interpreted the Levellers within the Army as a potential threat to the right to own property. Wildman responded by asking whether an engagement to do an unjust thing could be binding, and explained that he meant the plan to bring in the king ‘in such a way as he may be in a capacity to destroy the people’. This point was expressed still more bluntly by Captain Lewis Audley: ‘if we tarry long, if we stay but three days before you satisfy one another, the king will come and say who will be hanged first’. Despite robust assertions of the rights of the Commons, the ghost of monarchical terror sometimes seemed to haunt the Putney debaters. Like John Pym in the early 1640s, they knew that if they did not win they were doomed. What they feared was that the moderates in Parliament would make an agreement with the king that excluded them.

  Cromwell and Ireton were groping for a starting-point that might create consensus, and that might also prevent a march on London and an Army coup. It was as part of the drive for consensus that the commanders established a committee to look into the Army’s declarations. Of course, a committee is also a way of not doing something, but this was not Cromwell’s intention. He wanted a resolution.

  The key debate on Friday 29 October took place by accident, almost in private. Everyone agreed to hold a prayer meeting originally suggested by William Goffe, feeling uneasily that God hadn’t so far blessed anyone with a comfortable comp
romise. At the house of a Mr Chamberlain, every godly man and officer gathered, and after several hours of prayers and testimonies, the Levellers arrived to confer with the committee. Noticing that a large and sympathetic audience was already present, they immediately wanted to launch a debate on the Agreement. Cromwell was against it, pointing out that everyone was tired after a late-night debate and five hours or so of prayer, but Rainborough (who had skipped the prayer meeting) seized his chance and supported the Levellers. Rainborough’s right to be there at all was debatable, since he was by now a vice-admiral and not a colonel; Cromwell had approved his appointment after all, as a way of getting rid of him. It hadn’t worked.

  The debate began to turn on property, in response to some of what Ireton had said the day before. Maximilian Petty said that so far from the paper destroying property, it preserved it. ‘For’, he said, ‘I judge every man is naturally free, and I judge the reason why men chose representatives when they were in so great numbers that every man could not give his voice was that they who were chosen might preserve property for all … and I would fain know, if we were to begin a government, [whether you would say] “You have not forty shillings a year, therefore you shall not have a voice.” Whereas before there was a government every man had such a voice.’

  Ireton responded:

  If a man be an inhabitant upon a rack rent for a year, for two years, or twenty years, you cannot think that man hath any fixed or permanent interest. That man, if he pay the rent that his land is worth, and hath no advantage but what he hath by his land, is as good a man, may have as much interest, in another kingdom as here. I do not speak of not enlarging this representation at all, but of keeping this to the most fundamental constitution in the kingdom, that is, that no person that hath not a local and permanent interest in the kingdom should have an equal dependence in election.

  What Ireton meant was that property-owning landlords had a stake in the nation, and that those without land didn’t. This was common sense to most educated men, but it was precisely this link between power and ownership that the Levellers were questioning. Colonel Nathaniel Rich worried that an assembly of such men would vote in equivalency of goods and estate. And, he added, thinking of ancient Rome, ‘if we strain too far to avoid a monarchy in kings, [let us take care] that we do not call for emperors to deliver us from more than one tyrant’.

  But Rainborough was not satisfied. He kept asking how it came about that some freeborn Englishmen had properly and its rights, while others did not. Another Leveller, Cowling, pointed out that the law worked absurdly, so that ‘there is a tanner in Staines worth three thousand pounds, and another in Reading worth three horseskins’. But only the first ‘has a voice’. Ireton clung determinedly to the idea that the identity of electors had been established long ago, intelligently appealing to the dread of foreigners intervening in government in defence of the interests of the landed gentry. But Sexby was having none of it; ‘We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, we have had little property in the kingdom as to our estates, yet we have had a birthright. But it seems now, except a man has a fixed estate in his kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom … I do think the poor and mean of this kingdom … have been the means of preservation of this kingdom.’

  Powerfully, he argued that the Army at least had proved its interest in the kingdom by shedding its blood. Rainborough took up the theme: ‘I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.’

  Ireton was determined to carry the debate back to the origins of rights rather than their results: ‘I will tell you what the soldier of the kingdom hath fought for. First, the danger that we stood in was that one’s man’s will must be a law … they thought it [the law] was better to be concluded by the common consent of those that were fixed men, and settled men, that had the interests of the kingdoms in them.’

  And he kept on saying this, and kept on repeating that only these fixed and settled men could be counted on. For Ireton, the right to choose representatives was not a natural right, but a constitutional right, available because property ownership conferred ‘a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom’. For Ireton this part of the constitution safeguarded property; without it, property was under threat. If a man has the right to elect by right of nature, then he has exactly the same right to any goods he sees. It’s hard to believe Ireton’s anxiety wasn’t motivated by the experience of how the soldiers had actually behaved during the war, picking up anything not red-hot or nailed down, and arguing that its ownership by ‘malignants’ gave them a title to it. Men fought, he said, ‘that the will of one man should not be a law, but that the law should be by a choice of persons who were chosen by fixed men and settled men that had the interest of this kingdom in them’. Sexby, for the Levelling party, retorted that the soldiers had fought to ‘recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen’. Note that the soldiers were not demanding new rights, but claiming that the rights they had always enjoyed were being taken away. If Ireton was correct, he said, ‘we have fought all this time for nothing’, and he added that had they known, ‘I believe you would have had fewer under your command to have commanded.’

  And it was in this obscure, odd, highly religious context, and in response to this iron obduracy in Ireton, that Rainborough produced the ringing statements for which he will be remembered for ever.

  I do not find anything in the law of God that a lord shall choose twenty burgesses and a gentleman but two, or a poor man shall choose none.

  I am a poor man, therefore I must be pressed [conscripted]: if I have no interest in the kingdom, I must suffer by all their laws, be they right or wrong … gentlemen with three or four lordships (God knows how they got them) can always get into Parliament and evict the poor from their homes. I would fain know whether the potency of rich men do not this, and so keep them [poor men] under the greatest tyranny that was ever thought of in the world.

  Really I think the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore, truly sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government, and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.

  Though the Levellers didn’t use the word democracy in this sense, Rainborough’s final statement is democratic in that it imagined people making decisions who had previously been shut out of all choice.

  Now Cromwell groped for compromise and tolerance. Perhaps, he said, everyone could at least agree that suffrage might be improved, and he suggested that great and inevitable solution to the breakdown of political consensus, the formation of a committee. Ireton agreed and pointed out that he had been among the first to press for the dissolution of the present Parliament and the introduction of regular elections. He too agreed to a committee that would consider extending the franchise to ‘freemen, and men not given up to the wills of others’. Another Leveller, Petty, responded that he now saw the reason for the exclusion of servants and apprentices, but this may not mean all Levellers were convinced, since Petty was not a leader among them. It was meant to remind the Levellers that they too felt franchise had its limits, and to move towards compromise.

  A committee was duly created, and both Rainborough and Ireton sat on it. It met several times, though we have no records of what was discussed; the proposals it prepared, though, show that the battle lines remained the same as before.

  And here everyone not already keenly interested must prepare to be just as excited as one usually is by political committees and their work; they are not unimportant, but the longueurs are considerable. There was redrafting, no end of redrafting, negotiation, compromise. Ireton thought kings and lords should have veto powers over laws affecting their persons or estates. Rainborough and Wildman rejected the idea, Ra
inborough expressing surprise that Ireton was keen to preserve a constitution broken repeatedly by the Commons since the beginning of the war. The committee did end up recommending a package in which the king’s reserve powers were almost invisible and in which the Commons was firmly sovereign, but the grandees continued to be dismayed by its radical elements.

  There were in the end four drafts of the laboured-over Agreement of the People: the First Agreement, the one debated at Putney; the Second Agreement, drafted by the committee; the Officers’ Agreement, a rewriting of the Second by the Council of Officers; and the Third Agreement, published by the imprisoned Levellers in May 1649, who felt that the Officers’ Agreement should have been submitted to the people and not to Parliament.

  Historians have usually admired Ireton’s arguments more than Rainborough’s, but in fact Ireton won the battle and lost the war. It was his fate to be clever, but unpersuasive to his audience. When he defended the provisions he himself had made for the king, he did so high-handedly, dismissing the idea that the Army might be sovereign. Debate rumbled on for months, and slow piecemeal progress was made towards acknowledging the Levellers’ position. Under the committee’s proposals, explicit rights were reserved to the people: the representative body could not press for war; interfere with religion; arraign men for acts committed during the war (unless for being Royalists); punish contrary to law; or ‘take away any of the foundations of common right, liberty or safety contained in the Agreement’.