A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  In July, the army met at Reading, the first of several meetings of that year, to discuss whether it should move on London. The product of these discussions was a set of peace terms, the Heads of the Proposals, drafted largely by Henry Ireton, a document that betrayed some influence of Leveller ideas. As Ireton would later point out to his critics at the Putney Debates, in the Heads of the Proposals he had already publicly advocated biennial parliaments and a ‘more equall distribution of Elections’. Leveller writers such as John Wildman heavily criticised Ireton for going in person to Charles, to ‘kneele and kisse and fawn upon him’ in order to get his approval of the terms – an attempt that proved fruitless as Charles once again preferred to play his opponents in Parliament and in the army against each other.14 At the same time as the army was considering alternative peace terms with the King, counterrevolutionary mobs threatened MPs sympathetic to the army, forcing them to flee the House. The following month, the army marched on London to prevent the capital from falling under the control of the Presbyterians and restore the Independent MPs to Parliament.

  However, as the attacks on Ireton indicated, army unity itself was now disintegrating, as the leadership and the new ‘Agitators’, elected in September 1647 to act as delegates for the lower ranks, disagreed over how best to settle the kingdom. The grievances of some of the rank and file were expressed in a pamphlet, The Case of the armie truly stated, published in October 1647 and probably largely written by Edward Sexby, originally a trooper in Fairfax’s regiment. The pamphlet accused the ‘Grandees’, as Cromwell and Ireton were known, of betraying the ‘Solemn Engagement’ signed in June 1647 by their independent negotiations with the King. The Case called for the dissolution of the Long Parliament and the election of a new ‘representative’ (future Parliament) by all ‘freeborn’ men. The Grandees reacted by attempting to soothe discontent within the army. They called the new Agitators and their civilian associates, the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty (a member of an Oxfordshire gentry family), to a meeting at St Mary’s Church, Putney, where the terms of The Case and a new manifesto produced by the civilian Levellers, the Agreement of the People, would be discussed.

  The Putney Debates, which began on 28 October 1647, now represent the most famous event in the history of the Leveller movement. At the time, Putney was a small town of fewer than a thousand people on the outskirts of London. It was chosen because of its closeness to the City and its good transport links both by land and by water – the church itself was close to the river. Also, it was there that the Independent minister, close friend of Oliver Cromwell and participant in the Debates, Hugh Peters, had regularly preached. Thus geographical convenience and an army connection via Peters led Putney to be chosen as the site for one of the most remarkable political discussions in English history.

  In 2006, the Putney Debates were voted the most overlooked radical event in British history in a competition sponsored by the Guardian. But the prominence given to the Debates both in academic histories of the civil war and in ‘public history’ is a recent phenomenon. The text of the discussions held was not published until 1891. Until then, the little-known manuscript had gathered dust in the archives of Worcester College, Oxford. For over two hundred years, references to the Putney Debates and the Levellers were few and far between. Although a permanent record of the discussions was kept by the general secretary of the army, William Clarke, they were barely mentioned in contemporary news-sheets and pamphlets.

  This secrecy was unsurprising. Discussion of the franchise, the most celebrated element of the Debates for recent historians and commentators, were not, at the time, the most controversial subject on the agenda and so not the one to which most attention was paid. The focus instead was on settling the kingdom: in particular, the King’s role in any future peace negotiations. During the Debates, two soldiers referred to Charles I as a ‘man of blood’, a tyrant who had waged war against his people and must be brought to retributive, divinely willed justice. Religious language suffused the talk at Putney; those attending also gathered for prayer meetings charged with apocalyptic language. Putney saw a major shift from the pursuit of a negotiated settlement with the King to the decision to bring him to trial. In the chaotic political circus that followed the first civil war, few of the participants in the discussions, Cromwell least of all, were prepared to leave hostages to fortune by letting the proceedings be reported in public.

  Indeed, some elements of the Putney Debates look positively archaic to modern eyes. The focus of earlier historians on the question of the extension of the franchise led them practically to ignore the first half of the Debates, which concerned the obligations placed on the army by previous covenants and agreements, such as the ‘Solemn Engagement’ of June 1647.15 When the question of franchise finally came up for discussion, the Leveller spokesmen all called for a very broad extension. The irony, however, was that this was one element in the debate in which the participants were able to reach a compromise. It was also a point that was fudged in the Levellers’ first Agreement of the People, in which they attempted to set out their ideas for a post-civil war settlement.

  The Putney Debates are now most famous for the apparently irreconcilable clash between Colonel Thomas Rainborowe, MP for Droitwich, vice-admiral of the English navy and an implacable opponent of Oliver Cromwell, and Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton: a clash between a view of politics based on a commitment to equal rights and one based on ‘interest’ and property. Rainborowe expressed his belief that all men who signed the Agreement should be eligible to vote: ‘For really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he … every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent put himself under that government.’ Ireton responded: ‘No person has a right to an interest or share in the disposing or determining of the affairs of the kingdom … that has not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.’16

  At Putney, the Levellers presented a consistently radical position on the franchise. The civilian Leveller Maximilian Petty, along with John Wildman and Thomas Rainborowe, defended the idea of universal male suffrage.* Wildman’s response to Ireton was essentially the same as Rainborowe’s: ‘Every person in England has as clear a right to elect his [note the masculine pronoun] representative as the greatest person in England.’17 Petty concurred, arguing that ‘before there was a government, every man had such a voice’.18 The arguments advanced by Wildman, Rainborowe and Petty were consistent with those promoted by John Lilburne in several pamphlets published in 1646 that called for democratic elections for the government of the City of London.19

  However, the Levellers’ manifesto, the Agreement of the People, was noticeably less clear-cut in its discussion of the franchise. Point one of the Agreement stated:

  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.20

  If we can detect a clear statement about the franchise here, it was to argue more for a moderate revision along the lines of the Great Reform Act of 1832, with the equalisation of the number of constituencies on the basis of population, rather than the kind of mass enfranchisement enacted by the 1918 Representation of the People Act. Indeed, as far as elections were concerned, the text of the Agreement was markedly similar to that of Ireton’s Heads of the Proposals.

  At the Putney Debates, Ireton’s reaction to the Agreement’s discussion of the franchise seems, consequently, disproportionate. The Agreement did not say that every man should have an equal voice in elections, as Ireton implied. That position was only clearly taken in the The Case of the armie, a document originating from the soldiers, not the civilian Levellers: ‘all the freeborn at the age of 21 yeares and upwards be the electors’.21 Ireton may
have wished to push the civilian Levellers into supporting the more radical proposal in a bid to scupper the Agreement. However, it is also possible that he may simply have been trying to clear up the apparent inconsistency between the two documents. The relationship between the The Case and the Agreement was not clear, a confusion increased by the fact that at Putney there appeared to be two political discussions going on at the same time: one strand of the debate, the one targeted by Ireton and noted by most historians, referred to the franchise; the other, addressed by Rainborowe and later Petty, referred to the process for ratifying the new constitution.

  We should look again at those famous words of Rainborowe’s, now painted in gold on the walls of St Mary’s Church, Putney. Though Rainborowe spoke movingly of the rights due to the ‘poorest he’, neither he nor any of the other leading Leveller spokesmen was firmly wedded to universal male suffrage. Rather, they were arguing that the new form of government created by the Agreement had to be established by plebiscite. Petty brought the discussion round to the idea of the origins of government in a ‘state of nature’, before the creation of the state and the control of behaviour by positive law. Arguably, by dissolving the old Parliament and erecting a new form of government, the Levellers were proposing to return England, if briefly, to that original state.22 In that quotation, Rainborowe did not mention the vote, or even the broader term ‘franchise’. Instead, he went on to claim that ‘every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent put himself under that Government’. Rather than dwelling on elections, as is usually assumed, Rainborowe was speaking of the moment when the Agreement, like an oath of loyalty to the new regime, would be tendered to the nation for subscription, when all men would choose whether to put themselves ‘under that Government’.

  By focusing on the most apparently ‘modern’ aspect of the Putney Debates, the franchise discussion, we have omitted to mention that there appeared to be plenty of room for compromise between the officers and the Levellers. Hugh Peters’s suggestion that the discussion of the franchise should be moved to a committee and settled by it was accepted. Ireton seemed willing to compromise on the formula of the franchise, allowing ‘That all soldiers and others, if they be not servants or beggars, ought to have voices in electing those which shall represent them in Parliament, although they have not forty shillings per annum in freehold land.’ And we know that Ireton sat on a committee which recommended that the Commons should decide on the franchise ‘soe as to give as much inlargement to Common freedome as may bee, with a due regard had to the equality and end of the present Constitution in that point’. That committee’s recommendations also made it clear that all who had fought for Parliament ought to have the vote. The Levellers themselves largely kept to this compromise position in subsequent Agreements of the People.23 This consensus should not surprise us: constitutional arrangements that gave large numbers of adult male inhabitants the vote were not unusual in early modern Europe or America.24

  As mentioned earlier, the narrow focus on the franchise obscures the most significant part of the Agreement: not its rather vague pronouncements on the vote, but the ‘reserves’, those rights with which the new elected representative would not be able to tamper. This was a momentous development. For the first time in British history, the Agreement, probably the work of the legally trained John Wildman – or John Lawmind, as he sometimes anagrammatically liked to style himself – set down a number of rights that could not be abrogated by government. This marked an evolutionary leap forward from earlier charters and petitions, which could claim only the (often temporary) acquiescence of the monarch as their source of authority. Here were freedoms, liberty of conscience, equality before the law, that no power in the land could encroach upon.

  The Agreement sought to deal with the potential political problems of the present, as well as to remedy the shortcomings of the past. The heavy emphasis in Parliamentarian rhetoric on the political sovereignty of the Commons threatened to replace royal absolutism with parliamentary tyranny. This danger became particularly acute for the army, as Parliament came to be dominated in the later 1640s by a hostile Presbyterian faction, bent on counter-revolution. The reserved rights detailed in the Agreement would be protected from parliamentary infringement. These ‘reserves’ included the right to freedom of worship, freedom from conscription, indemnity from prosecution, equality before the law and a commitment that the content of the law itself must be fair: ‘That as the laws ought to be equal, so they must be good and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people.’

  The committee appointed in October 1647 also found common ground here, as with the franchise. Many other elements of the Leveller programme gained assent: the present parliament would be dissolved by September 1648; biennial elections would be introduced; Parliament would sit for at least six months, and a council of state would govern between parliaments; the monarchy and lords would remain, but with reduced powers. The idea of a set of reserves – rights protected from assault by either the executive or legislature – can be found not only in the Agreement but also in the ‘Instrument of Government’, the first protectoral constitution, drafted by Major-General John Lambert, who also had a hand in writing the Heads of the Proposals.25 In the autumn of 1647, no longer at loggerheads, agitators, Levellers and Grandees had achieved a remarkable degree of consensus.

  But the main sticking point between the Grandees and the Levellers remained: what to do with the King. Possibly the most radical element of the Agreement was that it proposed coming to a settlement without involving the monarch. It was not an overtly republican document, but it envisaged a procedure whereby Charles would effectively be left out of the decision-making process (a pragmatic suggestion, given what was to follow). While the Putney Debates were taking place, Wildman accused Ireton and Cromwell in print – not without some justification – of going behind the army’s back and continuing to press for a negotiated settlement with the King. On 11 November, matters were thrown into greater confusion by Charles’s escape from his army captors at Hampton Court – where he had been under house arrest since August – and his flight to the Isle of Wight, where he hoped the governor of the island, Robert Hammond, would let him take a ship to the continent.* The King was to be disappointed, however, as Hammond chose instead to obey the orders of his cousin Oliver Cromwell: he put the King into custody in Carisbrooke Castle. Nonetheless, Charles was now less closely confined than he had been at Hampton Court, and once again started negotiations with Presbyterian MPs in the Commons.

  The army, meanwhile, was increasingly divided. On 15 November, the first of three scheduled rendezvous took place at Corkbush Field near Ware in Hertfordshire. Some of the soldiers were in a mutinous mood, Colonel William Eyre and Major Thomas Scott leading calls for the army to support the Agreement over a newly drafted Remonstrance presented by General Fairfax. Rainborowe handed the General a copy of the Agreement and a petition supporting it. Two more regiments, Thomas Harrison’s and Robert Lilburne’s, now appeared, though they had not been summoned to the rendezvous. These soldiers wore copies of the Agreement, bearing the slogan ‘England’s freedom and soldiers’ rights’, like totems in their hats. The mutineers were dealt with forcefully, some of Fairfax’s officers riding among them and pulling the pamphlets from them. Eight or nine men identified as ringleaders were court-martialled on the spot, but only one, Private Arnold, was shot. Arnold was appropriated as a martyr to the Leveller cause, although, given the usual exercise of military discipline at the time, Fairfax’s response was remarkably lenient. Moreover, the general’s own manifesto repeated his commitment not just to the core issues of pay and indemnity but also to regular parliaments, elected on such terms as to ‘render the House of Commons … an equal representative of the people that are to elect’.26

  With the suppression of the army mutinies came worse news for the Leveller cause: the London Independent and Baptist churches issued a declaration distancing themselves from t
he movement. It ‘cannot but be very prejudicial to human society, and the promotion of the good of commonwealths, cities, armies or families, to admit of a parity, or all to be equal in power,’ they stated.27 Two key bases of support for the Levellers, the army and the Independent and Baptist churches in London, appeared to be seriously wavering in their commitment to the radicals’ programme.

  At this point both the army Grandees and the majority in Parliament were continuing to pursue a settlement with the King. They were unaware, however, that Charles was signing an ‘Engagement’ with former Covenanters to use a Scottish army, combined with English pro-Royalist risings, to recover his kingdom on the most generous terms possible. News of the King’s treachery and his failed attempt to escape from the Isle of Wight led Parliament to pass a ‘Vote of No Addresses’ on 3 January 1648, declaring that it would no longer receive overtures from the King, nor would it make any. Plotting, subterfuge and double-dealing had been the hallmarks of Charles I’s political behaviour from the beginning of the first civil war. The second civil war constituted the last in a long line of disastrous attempts on his part to reverse the revolutionary process by force. The Royalist risings in England and Wales occurred before the Scots had raised an army, and the New Model Army was consequently able to deal with its enemies in turn, rather than simultaneously.

  The notion that the King must be brought to justice had first been mooted at Putney. By the time of the army prayer meeting at Windsor Castle, held from 28 April to 1 May, the officers’ attitude to Charles had clearly hardened. The agitator William Allen recalled their resolution to ‘call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord’s cause and people in these poor nations’.28 There was a hardening, too, in the attitude of the army towards those who once again took up the Royalist cause – in Cromwell’s words, ‘their fault who have appeared in this summer’s business is certainly double to theirs who were in the first [civil war] because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses God has borne’.29 The Royalist commanders of Colchester, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir John Lisle, were executed without trial after the town fell to Fairfax’s forces.* The rout of the Royalist forces was completed by Oliver Cromwell, as his soldiers utterly crushed the Scottish army at the Battle of Preston, killing a thousand of their men and taking nearly two thousand prisoner.