Chapter 5. The Levelers and the New Model Army

Despite its premodern, often religious vernacular, the English Revolution had a remarkably modern and secular character. In retrospect, the religious factions that prosecuted its internal conflicts actually had very practical and worldly social goals. Their theological rhetoric tends, if anything, to conceal the extent to which the English Revolution opened the era of the great, basically secular democratic revolutions that were to follow in its wake.

For one thing, the English Revolution had a notably plebeian dimension. It was fought out not only in the halls of Parliament and on various battlefields but also in the streets of London as well as other cities and villages. The House of Commons spoke in the name of “the people,” not of God, to legitimate its claims, declaring that “the people” or at least their “representatives” had sovereignty superior to that of the king. In the free discussion of the 1640s, questions were raised about how representative Parliament actually was of “the people” as a whole. Sir Robert Filmer, a defender of the king, relished the opportunity to point out that the parliamentary electorate, far from comprising the people of England, consisted of perhaps one out of every ten Englishmen—and these were the upper ten in social rank. Like Filmer, radical democrats criticized the narrowness of the parliamentary electorate and tried to extend the franchise to include most of the male population. One such pamphleteer claimed that in the scriptural injunction “Touche not mine anointed” it was the common people who were anointed. Still another pamphleteer warned as early as 1642 that this “dangerous tenet hath been buzzed into the ears of the people as if they only were anointed, none but they.”[28]

Another modern aspect of the “Great Rebellion,” as many British historians call the English Revolution, was the extent to which it was an ideologically selfconscious upheaval, bringing the entire establishment—social as well as institutional—into question. To judge from the documents we have, it was an immensely literate and polemical revolution: presses worked overtime to produce a host of pamphlets and newspapers. Easy as it may be today to take a popular literature for granted, it should be realized that newspapers did not even exist until England moved toward revolution. Whereas in earlier times dissenters had relied primarily on sermons from pulpits to radical congregations to disseminate their message, now incendiary parliamentary speeches, proclamations, and remonstrances were committed to print and distributed widely throughout the country.

The written word was brought into close unison with the spoken word. Parliamentary proceedings became highly visible public arenas, not unlike the Elizabethan stage, where oratory was directed not only to legislators and the court but to the nation as a whole. In this sense, the Revolution was an eminently popular event, at least to anyone who chose to participate in it. Finally, what raised the Civil War of the 1640s from a “Great Rebellion” to a modern social revolution was the emergence of socially challenging radical groups that directed themselves not only against the most sacrosanct institutions of traditional England but against seemingly popular leaders who replaced the established government, nearly culminating in a third revolution by the most radical sectors of the revolutionary movement.

THE FIRST CIVIL WAR

The English Civil War can roughly be divided into two distinct periods, the first lasting from 1642 to 1646, and the second from 1648 to 1649. The first was initially marked by considerable social, political, and religious unanimity among the parliamentary forces. During this time. Parliament did not throw down its gantlet against Charles, whose person remained inviolable, still less against the monarchy as such; rather, it professed to be fighting for “Country” mid “Court,” not “Country” against “Court.” The House of Commons saw itself as defending the traditional constitution against royal “innovations” and fought to constrain the king rather than eliminate his office. Charles was seen, at least for public purposes, as a benign but ill-advised ruler who was transgressing ancient liberties at the behest of an unscrupulous courtly and clerical camarilla.

The most important military leadership during this early period came from wealthy landowners, as indeed it had to, for, following still-existing medieval custom, it was the peers of the realm who were accorded the highest commands in the army and sat on the parliamentary Council of War. Accordingly, the leadership of the parliamentary forces was conferred on Robert Devercaux, the 3^rd Earl of Essex, and Edward Montagu, the 2^nd Earl of Manchester. These aristocratic commanders, far from seeking to remove Charles from his throne, sought merely to rectify the king’s relations with Parliament. Essex in particular had an abiding aversion to facing the king on the battlefield. Nothing seems to have embarrassed him more than when on October 23,1642, during the Battle of Edgehill—the first major engagement in the Civil War—the earl found himself commanding a parliamentary force against royalist troops directly under Charles’s leadership. It was only through the king’s own duplicity and wiliness that he eventually alienated even these moderate parliamentarians and lost their loyalty.

The opening conflicts between “Court” and “Country” were marked by debilitating archaisms that stalemated the civil war inordinately and perhaps inevitably. Thus, the aristocratic commanders relied primarily on the feudal institutions—militias and county administration—that tradition bestowed upon them to conduct a war. But traditional means proved woefully inadequate for achieving victory. Heredity rather than merit did not provide a particularly sound criterion for choosing commanders, and the struggle seemed to lumber along until new, innovative commanders and more committed troops were recruited from lower strata of the social hierarchy to make up the parliamentary army. After 1644, the gentry, the yeomanry, and the so-called “masterless men,” or common laborers, poor tenant farmers, and artisans became involved in the conflict, providing Parliament with more zealous—and socially troubling— forces. Despite the proclivities of these men for radical democratic views, Parliament was compelled to turn to them for aid not only because they opposed the king but, in the best of cases, because of their outstanding courage in battle and the high level of their morale.

In religious affairs, too, the solidarity among Parliament’s supporters was initially extensive but very superficial. Conservative parliamentarians had little quarrel with the Anglican Church, notwithstanding the objections of moderates to Archbishop Laud’s introduction of “popish” features. In 1643, by denying Anglican bishops the right to govern ecclesiastical affairs, the moderate majority in Parliament struck a direct blow at the divine right of kings, which the Anglican Church had tried to validate. But as Anglican clerics increasingly sided with the king against Parliament, moderate and even conservative parliamentarians found it necessary to shift their religious affiliation from the Anglican Church to the once-radical Presbyterianism of Knox and the Scots. This shift had a strategic benefit as well: it enlarged the popular base of the parliamentarians beyond the borders of England by gaining them Scottish support. Even Essex drifted toward Presbyterianism, together with a substantial number of the parliamentarians who formed the majority in the House of Commons.

Although the shift to Presbyterianism allowed Parliament to adapt itself to the increasingly radical turn that the Revolution was beginning to take, it also opened a cleavage between the religious moderates and conservatives, on the one hand, and the religious radicals on the other. These radicals were the sterner Puritans, the Independents, who steadily increased their influence among those who opposed the king. As Congregationalists, the Independents did not look to bishops for religious guidance, nor did they look to presbyters to stand between their congregations and God. Rather, they dispensed with religious hierarchies entirely and formed their own congregations of people with like-minded beliefs, choosing their own preachers and ministers. Most of them sought spiritual guidance entirely from Scripture, while some, essentially pantheists, even denied the authority of the Bible altogether—and the existence of a traditional deity.

Nor was the radicalism of these Independents limited to religious affairs alone. Just as they demanded religious freedom, so too did they demand political freedom. Many, in fact, adopted views that were expressly republican, insisting that the Commons, not the king, was sovereign. And indeed, under the impact and exigencies of civil war, all English political structures were changing rapidly. As the traditional state was partially destroyed, new political institutions were created to replace them. In some towns and villages, revolutionary committees were created, whose members, as one unhappy squire of the Isle of Wight lamented, included people of lower social rank rather than the traditional gentry: “We had a thing here called a Committee which overruled DeputyLieutenants and also Justices of the Peace, and of this we had brave men.” This committee, he observed with disdain, included a peddler, an apothecary, a baker, two farmers, and a poor man. “These ruled the whole Island, and did whatsoever they thought good in their own eyes.”[29] But this extreme situation was far from typical; in fact, most of the new committees were dominated by the gentry and were ultimately brought under the centralized control of Parliament.

The English Revolution was also modern because of its social trajectory: the king’s duplicity and his repeated attempts to impose absolutist rule on England and Scotland thrust the conflict in an increasingly radical direction. More and more, the majority of the Parliament found it impossible to accept the kind of constitutional monarchy that a moderate Puritan like Pym would have wanted and that peers such as Essex and Manchester would have accepted. During the summer campaign of 1645, when the parliamentary army captured York and defeated the royalist cavalry led by Charles’s dashing nephew Prince Rupert, many radicals were already calling for the elimination of the monarchy, not merely for restraining it. Their frustration became intense when their Presbyterian generals proved unwilling to defeat the king decisively in battle. At Newbury in October 1644, the parliamentary commanders Manchester and Sir William Waller deliberately delayed the offensive as long as they could. After it finally began, the enthusiastic parliamentary forces roundly defeated the Cavaliers, only to find that their generals permitted the royalist forces to withdraw, largely intact, from the field of battle with all their equipment. There could be little doubt that Manchester and Waller had no intention of decisively defeating the king and his Cavaliers.

In fact, generals who came from noble families seemed to be more fearful of their increasingly radical officers and troops than of their royalist opponents, and the parliamentary soldiers responded in kind to their aristocratic commanders. Essex avowedly despised the lower classes with all the haughtiness of a peer. In December 1644 he denigrated popular demonstrations in London streets with the remark: “Is this the liberty which we claim to vindicate by shedding our blood? Our posterity will say that to deliver them from the yoke of the King we have subjected them to that of the common people.”[30] What was at issue was not merely differences in social pedigree that divided the parliamentary forces; diverging political aims were also emerging among parliamentary moderates, conservatives, and radicals that essentially divided the army against itself and its officers.

In time, the real leadership of the Roundheads fell to a man from the lower squirearchy, Oliver Cromwell, an outspoken militant who was an iconoclastic Puritan and the ablest of the Independent cavalry officers. Cromwell had risen to the fore of the Independents partly by virtue of his extraordinary military ability and partly by boldly denouncing the conservative generals before the House of Commons. In response to these denunciations, Essex, Manchester, and other Presbyterian leaders made a scandalous attempt to impeach him for sedition, but Cromwell’s capacities as a commander had already made him so indispensable to the war that he eluded removal from the army. He had organized his “Ironsides” cavalry regiment (the name was Prince Rupert’s sobriquet for Cromwell himself) at Cambridge in 1643. At Marston Moor in July 1644, after other parliamentary forces had been routed, Cromwell led a cavalry charge in which his military abilities and the zeal and discipline of his horsemen defeated the royalists and in fact saved the army from ignominious defeat. The subsequent failure of Manchester and Waller to crush the royalist army at Newbury brought Cromwell and his cavalry into open opposition to Manchester and his irresolute supporters in Parliament. “If we beat the King ninety-nine times, he would be King still and his posterity, and we subjects still,” Manchester is reported to have told Cromwell reproachfully, to which Cromwell rejoined, “My lord, if this be so, why did we take up arms at first?”[31]

THE NEW MODEL ARMY

The increasingly plebeian rank and file of the parliamentary forces and their growing mistrust of peers generally fed their scorn for the parliamentary generals whose dilatory tactics and reverses seemed irremediable, giving rise to a radical republican movement that began to form out of the socially mixed parliamentary troops. To the radicals, it was apparent that the old system of military organization had to be scrapped and the army thoroughly reorganized. The Independents introduced a Self-Denying Ordinance into Parliament, which, when passed in April 1645, forbade any member of either House to hold a military command. Inasmuch as peers could not resign from the House of Lords, it forced all parliamentarians to surrender their army positions. No longer would tradition dictate that peers had to command the armed forces; indeed, military rank now had to be based on merit, not on birth, which led to the resignation of Essex and Manchester from the army command.

Nor was Parliament to be trusted to decisively defeat the king. Instead of forming a new parliamentary army, the Presbyterians in Parliament dithered and hoped that their moderate coreligionists in Scotland would take over the war in the absence of the old generals—a prospect that was tenuous at best. Thus, ultimately, they were obliged to authorize the creation of a New Model Army, naming Sir Thomas Fairfax as commander in chief and Cromwell as lieutenant-general in charge of the cavalry. Cromwell proceeded to organize and train his expanded force along the same lines that he had organized his “Ironsides” regiment, obliging it to adhere to the discipline of a loyal and completely zealous crusading force. Preaching and hymn-singing were routine, and complete freedom of discussion reigned in the ranks, forging a deep sense of purpose and commitment and a high level of political consciousness among the troops. The New Model Army was to become a military force that not only won the revolution but was never defeated in battle.

Its yeoman cavalry turned a looming defeat into a decisive rout of the Cavaliers at Naseby on June 14, 1645, a battle that clearly rendered Charles’s cause hopeless. By May 5 of the following year, after a series of royalist defeats, the New Model Army had finally vanquished the king’s forces. The First Civil War ended when the king’s base at Oxford surrendered in June 1646 and Charles gave himself up to the Scots, who turned him over to parliamentary commissioners in 1647.

Although the real power of the country passed into the hands of the House of Commons, sharp divisions opened between its Presbyterian majority and Cromwell’s zealous troops. As conservatives in the Commons began in increasing numbers to drift back to the royalist cause, the Independents radically redefined the entire political perspective of the antiroyalist cause. While Presbyterian political aims focused increasingly on bringing the revolution to an end by negotiating with the king and restoring him to power, radical Puritans began to form an opposition to Presbyterian rule in the Parliament, demanding what were ultimately to be republican goals and an expanded, more popular electorate.

In fact, the only major obstacle to a Presbyterian compromise with Charles was the Army itself. The New Model can truly be regarded as one of the most democratic armies in history. Its ideology was distinctly republican in character at a time when republicanism was seen as outrageously radical in a country saddled with a hierarchy of peers and squires. Once the king had surrendered, Parliament sought quite overtly to eliminate this gnawing obstacle to constitutional monarchy by disbanding the Army, leaving only a small remainder with which it hoped to reconquer Ireland—an enterprise, moreover, that would be under the command of new, reliable officers rather than Cromwell.

To the fury of the Presbyterian-dominated Parliament, however, the Army command and most of the troops simply refused to disband. Most of the politically astute New Model troops did not regard a mere end to the war as the victory for which they had fought. The social and political turmoil of the conflict had unleashed high hopes for a transformation of the social order, arousing millennial aspirations and yearnings for a new social dispensation of justice and freedom, which a restoration of Charles would hardly have produced. Nor was it clear that the existing Parliament was preferable to the king: the House of Commons began to imprison people arbitrarily without trial and to refuse to receive popular petitions, while its members were patently using their positions to enrich themselves at public expense—abuses that produced widespread dismay among the radicals. By 1646, the popularity of the so-called Levelers, or radical democrats, was growing steadily in the ranks of the New Model, impelling it to advance increasingly radical demands, notably the complete elimination of the monarchy and the election of a new and more popular Parliament.

THE LEVELERS

Of all the various independent groups that opposed the moderate and conservative leaders in Parliament, the Levelers were historically the most serious, well-organized, and resolute. It was their movement, both in London and in the Army, that posed the most important revolutionary threat to the ruling strata of the country.

The Levelers emerged just at the moment of Parliament’s victory over the Cavaliers, a time that seemed to call out for radically new political ideas. They were Independents in both a political and religious sense. As a democratic movement, they originally stood for the sovereignty of the Commons, but as its abuses became clear—it had arbitrarily imprisoned one of their foremost leaders, John Lilburne—they began to shift their emphasis to the sovereignty of the people, often against the moderate House of Commons. Congregationalism taught them democratic principles, while a certain messianism convinced the most religious among them that they were the instruments of God. The term Leveler was not one of their own choosing; it was applied to them by Commissary-General Henry Ireton in the fall of 1647 as a term of opprobrium for the democratic faction of the Parliamentary cause, particularly with a view toward discrediting them in the New Model Army, which was exercising an everincreasing political influence on the Revolution. Although some Levelers resented the name, it had acquired an honorable pedigree in English history: in 1607 in Leicestershire and Warwickshire, rebellious tenants and copyholders who were trying to recover their common lands from the gentry had used the word to express their desire not for social equality but to “level” the fences and hedges that were then being raised to enclose land. In the English revolution, the name became popular after the spring of 1648, and in time many radical Independents adopted the Leveler name for their own movement. In fact, Gerrard Winstanley’s communistic Digger movement used the name True Leveler to distinguish itself from the larger movement of radical Independents.

Considering the brutality of the times, the Levelers had a broad sense of social right and decency; indeed, they were exceptionally humane people. Even when English blood was more than overheated with desires for revenge against Irish rebels, who had massacred immigrants from Scotland and England in their struggle for national freedom, the Levelers seem to have stood alone in their sympathy for Irish struggles against tyranny. They emphasized that English folk needed to focus their attention against their own domestic tyrants rather than Ireland’s just attempts to free itself of English rule. Moreover, their movement was very expansive in its attitude toward the oppressed of all kinds. Levelers, observes H. N. Brailsford, “encouraged women to play their part in politics side by side with their husbands and brothers, because they believed in the equality of all ‘made in the image of God’”[32] —a view virtually unprecedented in seventeenth-century Europe.

In the eyes of the Levelers, society was basically divided between the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the dispossessed. “O you Members of Parliament and rich men in the City,” John Lilburne wrote in January 1648, a time of great economic hardship,

that are at ease and drink wine in bowls and stretch yourselves upon beds of down, you that grind our faces and flay off our skins, will no man among you regard, will no man behold our faces black with sorrow and famine?... What, then, are your ruffling silks and velvets and your glittering gold and silver laces? Are they not the sweat of our brows and the wants of our backs and bellies?... What else but your ambition and faction continue our distractions and oppressions? Is not all the controversy whose slaves the poor shall be?[33]

Yet the Levelers were neither socialists nor extreme social radicals. They affirmed with all sincerity that they upheld and would defend the right of property, and indeed, the final version of their program, called An Agreement of the People (issued from the Tower of London on May 1, 1649), explicitly repudiated any intentions to “level mens Estates, destroy Property, or make all things Common.”[34] The ownership of property, in their view, played a fundamentally important social role. Property, Levelers believed, conferred social responsibility, independence, and a basic decency of behavior, even promoting aid for less fortunate individuals in dire material straits. A merchant who owned his own property and employed men or women under decent conditions did not earn their opprobrium—although radical Levelers like William Walwyn did not hesitate to denounce the taking of interest. What irked them far more than a modest measure of wealth were the exploitative prerogatives that royal monopolies conferred, the rising prices that burdened consumers, and the economic regulations that monopolies imposed on basic goods at the expense of the poorer classes.

What the Levelers normally meant by property was the modest competence of the common man, who had to be defended against the rich, the nobility, and the economic monopolists. Such small artisans and yeomen were viewed as the basic sinews of the social and political order, in contrast to the rich and exploitative strata, who held massive accumulations of wealth and reduced thousands of people to servants or beggars dependent on alms. Accordingly, the Leveler pamphleteer Richard Overton demanded that “all orders, sorts, and societies of the natives of this land” be able to

freely and fully enjoy a joint and mutually neighborhood, cohabitation, and humane subsistence, one as well as another, doing unto all men as we would be done unto; it being against the radical law of nature and reason, that any man should be deprived of an humane subsistence.[35]

Despite their considerable influence in English cities, especially London, the Levelers’ influence in the countryside should not be overlooked. Although the Levdlers did not call for a drastic land redistribution, they bluntly challenged quasi-feudal “badges of slavery,” such as the “oaths of fealty, homage, fines” that the nobility and squirearchy (which they identified with the Normans) imposed on the freeholders and tenants of the English countryside. Hence they insisted

that a certain valuable rate be set, at which all possessors of lands so holden may purchase themselves freeholders, and in case any shall not be willing or able, that there be a prefixed period of time after which all services, fines, customs, etc. shall be changed into and become a certain rent, that so persons disaffected to the freedom and welfare of the nation may not have the advantage upon the people to draw them into a war against themselves upon any occasion by virtue of an awe upon them in such dependent tenures.[36]

Modest and reasonable as these demands to eliminate “base tenures” may seem today, they “would have changed the face of England” had they been instituted, observes Brailsford.

A fixed tribute is compatible with mental, social and political independence and with a hopeful spirit of enterprise. The peasant’s improvements would have been his own. The insecurity and the fear of rackrent [i.e., the highest possible rent that can be squeezed from a property] and exploitation, which bent him into a posture of cautious servility, would have vanished. The Levelers, in short, would have peopled the English countryside with an enfranchised peasantry, so securely planted on the soil that it would have dared to stand erect. This, needless to say, was not a communistic policy: it was in its inspiration individualistic, though something of the traditional communism of the open fields would have survived through several generations. But it would have broken the power of the great landed families which ruled England through the next two centuries, by adding immeasurably to the capacity of the villages for resistance. It would have made rural England what rural France became after the Revolution, a land of small peasant owners.[37]

Brailsford regards this trend as atavistic—but was it? An “enfranchised peasantry” might well have placed major limits on the extent and viciousness of English capitalism—limits that might have profoundly shifted England’s economic development along humane and socially progressive lines. The Levelers, in effect, were not only trying to democratize England politically; their program represents a realistic and populist alternative to the brutal capitalist development that the British people would face a century and a half later.

Variously Puritan, Presbyterian, or Anglican in religion. Leveler supporters were generally “the middle sort of people,” noted Lilburne; yet Lilburne, who regarded himself as a “gentleman,” may have snobbishly overemphasized the middle-class nature of the movement. To all appearances, the Levelers seem to have attracted the so-called “leather apron” strata of the population, such as cobblers, weavers, printers, and miners, and among agrarian strata, the poorer tenant farmers and insecure copyholders. (It was these strata that also formed the rank and file of the New Model infantry, as distinguished from the officers, who were commonly recruited from the gentry and yeomanry.) The movement gained some support from individual well-to-do tradesmen and professionals, although the latter for the most part drifted toward the Presbyterians and moderate Independents. But the larger number of Leveler supporters were those who earned less than the forty pounds per year required to gain the legal right to vote.

Hence a central plank in the various versions of the Levelers’ political program. An Agreement of the People, was the extension of the franchise to all Englishmen, regardless of wealth or income. The several versions of the Agreement that the Levelers wrote over the course of the English Revolution shared basic political demands for the overthrow of both the monarchy and the House of Lords and the sovereignty of a single House of Commons, whose members were to be reelected every year by a broad electoral constituency of all males of twenty-one years of age and over, “not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served the late King in arms or voluntary Contribution.” These exclusions from the suffrage may seem harsh to us today, but they were premised on the not unwarranted belief that servants and beggars would use the franchise on the behest of their masters or almsgivers, creating large blocs of votes for the wealthy.[38] The sovereign House of Commons, in turn, was expected to be wholly accountable to the people of England: annual elections and various constitutional guarantees would ensure that Commons would not become tyrannical or arrogant. Along with these tenets, the Leveler demand for absolute religious toleration as an ultimate desideratum of a free society should also be cited—no minor point in a time of considerable religious intolerance.

Individual Levelers often issued pamphlets that were far more radical than the more formal Leveler documents or manifestos. Although John Lilburne had no sympathy for Digger-like tendencies within the Leveler movement that favored communalization of the common lands, his Earnest Petition of January 1648 advanced a notion that at the time would have led to a radically decentralized form of democracy: the election from below—rather than appointment from above, in Westminster—of “sheriffs, justices of the peace, committeemen, grand jury men, and all ministers of justice whatsoever, in their respective counties,” for terms of only one year: in essence, the decentralization and selfgovernment of every parish and county of England, and the end of the hereditary authority of landowning gentry in the rural localities.[39]

William Walwyn, a close associate of Lilburne, came closest to advocating a vague form of communism by denouncing inequities in the distribution of the means of life as the source of all ills. This remarkable man, in effect, advanced what we would call a communistic social dispensation so benign in its intention that government would have been unnecessary. He is reported to have said in conversation that the social situation in England would never be well until all things were held in common. “But will that ever be?” his interlocutor objected. “We must endeavor it,” Walwyn replied. “But that would destroy government,” it was protested. “There would be no need of government,” Walwyn is said to have retorted, “for there would be no thieves or criminals.”[40] Some years later, in April 1649, writing in his defense as a prisoner in the Tower of London, he denied that he had ever called for an end to government or for a communistic society. Yet he did not fail to note that

the community among the primitive Christians was voluntary, not coactive; they brought their goods and laid them at the apostles’ feet. They were not enjoined to bring them; it was the effect of their charity and heavenly mindedness ... a voluntary act occasioned by the abundant measure of faith that was in those Christians and apostles... and not the injunction of any constitution.[41]

Unlike the senior Army officers and other strict Independent Puritans, who would end their political speeches with calls for the severe punishment of swearing, drunkenness, and wenching, the Levelers were not given to sanctimonious prudishness. Quite to the contrary: it was their custom, whenever

Leveler soldiers had suffered under the brutal punishments of the military code to carry them off in a coach for a feast at the Whalebone or the Windmill. They had their own standards of decency and good manners ... for they did not admire grossness. But there was nothing in their temperaments of that Puritan sourness which never tired of condemning the pleasant sins of others.[42]

In a period when a ponderous religious mien and a suitably self-righteous biblical quotation commonly served to mask hypocrisy. Leveler tolerance gave rise to a remarkable degree of secularity. In this respect the Levelers contrasted markedly with Cromwell, a master of pious hypocrisies, whose continual references to Scripture and smug religious philistinism concealed a policy of treachery to his men as well as to his professed religious ideals.

THE LEVELERS IN THE ARMY

By the time the Army moved as a revolutionary force to the forefront of English radical politics, many officers and most of the troops had essentially been plebeianized and were under Leveler influence. The Army saw itself as the savior of the English people, as embodying their will, and as the guardian of their liberties. It was responsible for defending the people against all abuses, whether by king or Parliament. The Levelers, for their part, saw the Army as an institution that could “teach peasants to understand liberty,”[43] and in evergreater numbers, New Model soldiers were becoming receptive to their propaganda. To understand the course of the Revolution, we must look more closely at this revolutionary army, the New Model Army itself, which was so crucial in bringing about the radical phases of the Revolution.

Within the Army, whose total authorized force consisted of 22,000 men, a crucial distinction must be drawn between the cavalry and infantry regiments. A sizable part of the infantry or “foot” consisted of conscripts, but the New Model cavalry was made up of volunteers, many of whom were supporters of the more democratic aims of Army radicals. These small farmers, often freeholders, and artisans were more politically aware than the infantry. Marked by an independence of mind and means, they brought their own horses and weapons into battle, and (in contrast to the infantry, which was largely illiterate), the majority of the cavalry troopers could read and included among their numbers men of some education.

The initial devotion of the soldiers to their commanders—notably Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell—was almost reverential. In their eyes, these officers, together with figures such as Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton, and popular commanders like Colonel Thomas Rainborough, provided the Army with an excellent and trustworthy military leadership. As to their social background, as C. H. Firth has noted, most of the general officers of the New Model Army were

commoners of good family.... A large number of the inferior officers belonged to the minor landed gentry, and came from families whose pedigrees and arms were registered in the visitations of the heralds. A good many were drawn from the trading classes in London and elsewhere, but did not generally rise to command regiments till much later in the war. And throughout the whole period the cavalry officers, like the troopers they commanded, were drawn from a higher social class than the infantry officers.[44]

An extraordinary phenomenon by any historical standard, the New Model was the most ideological force in the country. Cromwell carefully selected his own cavalrymen—of all faiths except Catholics and Anglicans—for their religious zeal and independence. Here religious education went hand in hand with military training. As already noted, the cavalry rode into battle singing hymns, and its soldiers formed congregations for Puritan preachers whom the earlier parliamentary army would have cashiered for their subversive messages. Over the course of its existence, the New Model was continually worked upon by Puritan divines who exhorted it to battle as a matter of sacred duty and in response to a godly calling. Within the cavalry’s ranks, radical Anabaptists fought side by side with moderate Independents, and Presbyterians were tolerated with none of the discrimination they might have been expected to encounter from antihierarchical Puritans.

The ferment in the cavalry was not only religious but intensely political. “In the political movements of 1647 and subsequent years,” Firth observes, “it was always the troopers of the cavalry who took the lead.”[45] After 1647, the New Model cavalry, for all practical purposes, formed the political vanguard of the Revolution, and it was the section of the Army that was most open to Leveler propaganda, indeed to that of radicals generally.

During the first two years of the New Model Army’s life, to be sure, the Army played little role in the political events that were coming to a head in the English Revolution; but following its victory over the Cavaliers at Naseby and the Scots’ surrender of the king to parliamentary commissioners in 1647, the Army encamped itself some forty miles from London, at Saffron Walden, where the soldiers read Leveler propaganda and listened to the preaching of the Independents from the city. Two days after Naseby, a visitor to the Army complained that

a great part of the mischief was caused by distribution of the pamphlets of Overton and Lilburne, against the King and the Ministry and for Liberty of Conscience; and the soldiers in their quarters had such books to read when then had none to contradict them.[46]

It was precisely at this time that the Presbyterian Parliament was obdurately trying to dissolve the increasingly politicized Army, even while it negotiated with the very king whom the Army had defeated, a patent act of treachery that only strengthened the resolve of the New Model not to disband. No less infuriatingly. Parliament had failed to give the soldiers the back pay they were owed over some ten months; indeed, for nearly a year, the soldiers had fought and subsisted without pay, while the Presbyterian Parliament refused to vote it the subsidies it needed, heaping scorn on the Army’s actions and its growing radical ideas.

Finally the anger of the Army boiled over into a head-on revolt against the House of Commons. In the spring of 1647 a council of officers was chosen by the troops to receive the parliamentary proposal that the Army be disbanded. This council, a sizable body in its own right, included even the lowest military ranks, such as subalterns. In fact, the unnerved Parliamentary commissioners who visited the Army’s Saffron Walden headquarters in April 1647 attested that no fewer than two hundred officers met them and almost the same number a month later. These meetings, which were meant to subdue the Army, ended with a resolute refusal by the New Model to disband.

Moreover, differences between Army moderates and radicals began to emerge, leading many rank-and-file soldiers to conclude that their senior officers were not adequately working on their behalf. The “Grandees,” as the commanders were called, seemed overly eager to preserve good relations with Parliament. Creating a new precedent in revolutionary history, the ordinary soldiers and troopers met among themselves to choose representatives of their own, the “Agitators” as they were called—a name that was synonymous with “agents” and had none of its pejorative present-day overtones—to voice their increasingly firm demands. Late in April 1647, Agitators representing eight cavalry regiments formed a council, whose existence they justified in a letter to their generals and to Parliament, expressing both professional (back pay) and political (Leveler) demands. The following month, the infantry followed suit and chose its own council of representatives. C. H, Firth tells us that “the committee of troopers [cavalry) met at St Edmundsbury, and the foot (infantry), who chose two out of every company, sent them to confer with the troopers, and every foot soldier gave fourpence apiece towards defraying the charges of that meeting”[47] The infantry in turn wrote a protest letter of their own that expressed their personal grievances and also raised disquieting Leveler demands. Finally, cavalry and infantry together elected a smaller body that would represent the rank and file of both military divisions. This was dangerous stuff indeed, not only to Parliament but to the leadership of the Army. A soldiers’ council movement had been initiated, which the Levelers in the ranks were only too eager to expand among the New Model soldiers.

The soldiers’ letters and petitions were duly ignored by Parliament, which demanded that the “Grandees” put an end to the councils, and provocatively instituted proceedings against officers who had taken part in these meetings. As if to provoke a confrontation, it disbanded a number of the more restive regiments, whereupon the soldiers, faced by parliamentary obstructions, called for a rendezvous of the entire army for June 4, 1647 at Newmarket to deal with its demands. These events occurred precisely at a time when the Presbyterian Parliament seemed on the point of reaching a compromise with the king—indeed, even to use the king as a weapon against the Army. On June 2–4, on the instruction of the Agitators, a squad of cavalry troopers led by a Leveler soldier. Cornet Joyce, nervily kidnapped the king from his house arrest in Northamptonshire, removing him from parliamentary custody, and brought him to Newmarket, where the rendezvous was taking place. The king was now in the hands of the Army—an Army that was now turning against Parliament as well as the monarchy.

On June 5, the rendezvous accepted by acclamation a document called the Solemn Engagement of the Army, in which it announced that the New Model would not “willingly disband or divide, or suffer itself to be disbanded or divided” until such time as the council was convinced that Parliament would meet the Army’s demands.[48] More significantly, the Solemn Engagement set up a General Council of the Army that, unlike the previous Council of War, was no mere military body of strategizing generals but a body of representatives from all military ranks that would make political decisions on behalf of the soldiers. Two representatives of the rank and file of each regiment and two of the junior or commissioned officers from each regiment were added to the old Council of War, together with its senior officers, the “Grandees.” The rank and file were expected to

choose out of the several troops and companies several men, and those out of the whole number... two or more for each regiment, to act (on the council) in the name and behalf of the whole soldiery of the respective troops and companies.[49]

Also called Agitators, these rank-and-file representatives were to have equal votes with the “Grandees,” regardless of the rank they represented. With this expansion of the council, the General Council of the Army had now become a revolutionary soldiers’ council, perhaps the first to emerge in a modern revolution.

Moreover, councils were now formed throughout the New Model, until they constituted a far-flung network, in great part the result of the work of a militant Leveler known as Private Edward Sexby. Indeed, owing to Sexby’s organizing talents, the New Model established councils, “very like the soldiers’ soviets which the revolutionaries formed in the Russian army in 1917,” observes Jasper Ridley in his account of Puritan leaders. On the higher military level, in turn. New Model soldiers elected Regimental Committees, “and each Regimental Committee elected two delegates to the Army Council of Agitators,” for whom Sexby, in turn, became the “leading spokesman.” Nor were these soldiers’ councils confined to the regiments stationed near London: they were formed not only in the South but also in the North, Sexby having succeeded in networking them throughout most of the New Model Army’s structure.[50]

To all appearances, the Army’s political intention was to overturn Parliament’s nonpayment of salary and to resist parliamentary attempts to disband the Army. But the expanded General Council now became a highly political body in its own right whose goal was to formulate policies for the Army—a network that had, in effect, become a dual power in the land, basically in tension with the Court, Parliament, and the “Grandees” as well.