Chapter 6. The Putney Debates

Had it not been for the “Grandees” on the Army’s General Council, the New Model Army might well have made a successful third revolution of its own in England. After two fruitless months of negotiations in the summer of 1647 between the Army and Parliament, the Agitators expressly called upon the Army to march on the capital and occupy it. Over the strong objections of Cromwell and Ireton, this powerful, well-disciplined, and socially conscious military body that no force of arms could defeat began moving toward the capital, bringing England to the edge of a radical political democracy and perhaps even an agrarian and artisanal social democracy. On June 14, in an extraordinary appeal to Parliament and indirectly to the people—again, perhaps, the first of its kind in modern revolutions—the Army issued its Declaration of the Army, in which the soldiers justified their involvement in politics and declared that the New Model was very different from the conventional armies of the day. In this moving, indeed thrilling, document, unprecedented by a military force thus far, the soldiers solemnly declared:

We were not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament, to the defense of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties. And so we took up arms in judgment and conscience to those ends, and have so continued them and are resolved ... to assert and vindicate the just power and rights of this kingdom in Parliament, for those common ends premised, against all arbitrary power, violence and oppression, and against all particular parties or interests whatsoever.[51]

The Declaration did not merely define the Army’s view of its own role in the Civil War but asserted its claim to be the guardian of the people’s “just rights and liberties” against tyranny. These liberties, it declared, were based on “principles of Right and Freedom,” and “the just Principles and the Law of Nature and Nations, being that law upon which we have assisted” the people of England.[52] It demanded that the Long Parliament be terminated and replaced with an elected body, based on a franchise that was more representative of the people’s wishes. This was clearly Leveler thought and language.

In the meantime, Parliament, controlled by its majority of Presbyterians, did an about-face once the king had been defeated: it began to deal with him differently and tried to restore the authority he had enjoyed before the Civil War. But the Army’s march toward London threw Parliament and the well-to-do middle classes into utter consternation. The City placed its militia under Presbyterian control and tried to mobilize it, but to no avail: by early August, all parliamentary resistance simply collapsed, and the New Model occupied London, forcing eleven Presbyterian members from the House. After installing the king in Hampton Court (he was still being held under military guard, essentially as a hostage), the Army basically took over complete control of the country. As Denzil Holies, a Presbyterian parliamentarian who fiercely opposed the New Model, lamented, “The Army now did all, the Parliament was but a Cipher, only cry’d Amen to what the Councils of War had determined. They make themselves an absolute Third Estate.”[53] A third revolution, in effect, had begun, led by radical Independents and Levelers.

CROMWELL AND “THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY”

The Army now controlled the country—but who controlled the Army? And what future did its leaders have in mind for England? To these questions, there was as yet no unified answer, even within the Army itself.

What seems to be clear is that, even before the march on London, Cromwell and the “Grandees” on the Council of War patently feared the Leveler and Agitator movement in the rank and file far more than they feared the royalists and the Presbyterians. At most, they had to put up with the Levelers owing to the considerable support that they enjoyed among the soldiers, particularly the cavalry, and, far from leading the radical political developments in the Army, Cromwell and Ireton prudently but uneasily followed them. Whenever Cromwell appeared to support the Levelers, his principal goal seems to have been to contain an outright Army revolt, but as a member of the General Council of the Army he shrewdly worked to restrict the soldiers’ demands for a redress of professional grievances and to abort the social, economic, and political program into which the Levelers had so successfully educated the rank and file. Indeed, feeling the Army slipping from his fingers, Cromwell proceeded to pack the General Council with conservative soldiers from all ranks—in some cases, even with privates who could be used to countervail the more sophisticated Agitators.

At the same time, he also used upper-class fears of the Levelers as a bargaining chip in dealing with the king and the then-Presbyterian Parliament. In August 1647, just before the Army marched on London, the “Grandees,” firmly entrenched in their official Council of War, drew up Heads of the Proposals of the Army, a set of propositions for a new political order for England. Prepared by Commissary-General Henry Ireton, who wrote most of the “Grandee” documents, this hazy document was meant to be used as the basis for the Army’s negotiations with the parliamentary commissioners. Unlike the Leveler-based programs, particularly their versions of An Agreement of the People, the Heads of the Proposals was favorable to the king: not only did it preserve the House of Lords, it essentially restored Charles to a condition of safety and honor, without limiting his ability to exercise his personal rights, and even gave him the right to veto parliamentary legislation. To blunt Leveler criticism, it modestly expanded the franchise. During the drafting of the document, in fact, Ireton had secretly met with an agent of the king, modifying several articles in the hope of placating Charles and gaining his support. Indeed, the army leaders are suspected of having been negotiating with royal agents with a view toward acquiring earldoms for themselves if the king and Parliament could work out any of their differences. So frequent were these meetings that Cromwell was obliged to ask a royal agent to visit him less often, “the suspicions of him being so great that he was afraid to lie down in his own quarters.”[54]

At length, when the Heads of the Proposals appeared, whatever remaining political support the rank-and-file soldiers had for Cromwell and Fairfax evaporated rapidly. Most of the soldiers had still not been paid by the hostile Parliament, and a number of them faced criminal prosecution by the courts for acts that they had been compelled to commit in combat. As reports of secret meetings between the Army leaders and the king circulated among the soldiers, rumors abounded that Cromwell would restore to the king all his rights, and many soldiers began visibly to lose faith with the general officers under whom they served, giving rise to the prospect of an open split between the “Grandees” and the ranks.

By the autumn of 1647, even as the army occupied the capital, rank-and-file opinion turned against Cromwell and the “Grandees.” To add fuel to the Army’s anger, Parliament banned all meetings in September between the officers and men—although meetings between the officers and the king were still permitted. The Agitators and many officers of lower rank now openly accused the generals of usurping authority over the General Council of the Army. As C. H. Firth puts it, the “democratic party” within the Army opposed not only Cromwell’s negotiations with the king but the influence that the “Grandees” and superior officers exercised in the Army’s deliberations generally.[55] “When Cromwell and Ireton, and their faction of self-interested officers, thought they had got the soldiery fast by the brain,” as a Leveler pamphlet later summed up the events,

as to dote sufficiently upon their transaction and conduct of business, they then decline the Agitators, decline the Engagement, slight their Declarations and Promises to the people and the Army, rendering the Agitators but as ciphers among them ... by degrees, step after step they cast out the interest of the soldiery from among them, destroyed the Engagement, and broke the faith of the Army.[56]

By October 1647, the discontent of the more radical New Model soldiers was virtually uncontrollable. In Yorkshire, as Jasper Ridley tells us, the local Council of Agitators “arrested their Commander-in-Chief, the Presbyterian General Poyntz, accusing him of treason in seeking to provoke a new civil war between Parliament and the Army. They sent Poyntz as a prisoner to Fairfax’s headquarters at Uxbridge.” Fairfax, the nominal head of the New Model, was “shocked at this act of indiscipline” and “released Poyntz at once.”[57] Further, five cavalry regiments decided that the Agitators who had been representing them were either incapable of fulfilling their task or else had willingly betrayed it, and they proceeded to elect even more radical representatives, now known by the name of New Agents.

Aided by the democratic leaders from outside the Army, the ten Agents of the cavalry regiments published a manifesto titled The Case of the Army Truly Stated, a document that bluntly stated that “all power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this nation.” It demanded that the nation establish a “law paramount”—that is, a fundamental law—that Parliament be elected every two years “by all the freeborn at the age of 21 years and upwards ... excepting those that have or shall deprive themselves of that their freedom” by fighting for the royalist cause. This demand, giving even recipients of wages and alms the franchise, was, in its day, an extraordinary step that symbolized the growing radicalization of the ranks.

The documents of this period, in fact, reveal a remarkable advance over earlier, more restrictive suffrages and demands. The first Agreement of the People, issued in late October, virtually amounted to a draft Leveler constitution for England. What makes this document remarkable is that it addressed itself to the people of England rather than to Parliament and called for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, establishing the Commons as supreme power in the state. Lest any doubt exist that Parliament gained its authority from the people, the Agreement declared: “Parliaments are to receive the extent of their power and trust from those that betrust them; and therefore the people are to declare what their power and trust is, which is the intent of this Agreement.”[58] Moreover, the document emphasized that

If any shall inquire why we [i.e., the Army] should desire to join in an agreement with the people to declare these to be our native Rights, and not rather petition to the Parliament for them: the reason is evident. No Act of Parliament is or can be unalterable, and so cannot be sufficient security to save you [the people) or us harmless, from what another Parliament may determine, if it should be corrupted.

Although the Agreement vested authority in the Commons, certain rights— such as freedom of religion, freedom from impressment, and equality before the law—were regarded as the “native rights” of all Englishmen that no Parliament could diminish or take away.[59] Not only did the Agreement demand manhood suffrage, equal electoral divisions, and biennial Parliaments, it significantly demanded that enclosed common lands should be restored to the poor, and that monopolies and sinecures should be abolished, a demand of paramount economic importance for the destiny of the country and its lower classes. The Levelers in the Army thereupon presented the Agreement to the General Council of the Army on October 28, 1647, recommending that it be accepted by the Council and placed before the country as a whole.[60]

Thus, two essentially irreconcilable factions within the Army, each with its own basic document about the future of England and ways of determining it, stood in open confrontation with each other—a confrontation whose outcome was to decide the future of the Revolution and of the realm.

THE PUTNEY DEBATES

The form this confrontation took was the justly famous Putney Debates between the Army radicals—among whom Leveler influence and political interest in a more democratic England had now reached their peak—and the largely conservative “Grandees.”

The debates occurred between October 28 and November 11, 1647, in St. Mary’s Church at the Army’s headquarters in Putney, a short distance from London. Formally, they consisted of a series of meetings by the General Army Council on whether the New Model Army would place before the House of Commons the Heads of the Proposals prepared by Ireton or the Agreement of the People prepared by the Levelers as the basis for future government in England. We are fortunate that a member of Fairfax’s secretariat, William Clarke, kept a nearly verbatim account of the key debates, which brings to life the often heated exchange of views that exploded between the Levelers and their “Grandee” opponents.

The debates were chaired by Cromwell and attended by a sizable complement of officers of all ranks as well as ordinary soldiers and a few civilians. Ironically, Fairfax, the nominal commander of the New Model, was absent. Instead, Cromwell’s son-in-law and close political associate, Commissary-General Henry Ireton, emerged as the principal spokesman for the “Grandees,” although as chairman, Cromwell himself was anything but neutral; his repeated interventions on behalf of Ireton and his reprovals of the Levelers occasionally reached menacing proportions. The Lieutenant-General even threatened to resign his command if the Council adopted the Agreement, which set the debaters on edge and unnerved many of its observers. His was an intimidating voice rather than a compromising one.

The Levelers, in turn—which is to say, a large portion of the Army—were represented by the Agitator Private Edward Sexby and by two London Levelers, John Wildman and Maximilian Petty, among others, whose presence turned the debates into a relatively popular forum. Perhaps their most effective debater was Colonel Thomas Rainborough, an extraordinary man whose clear, pointed arguments provide us with one of the most outstanding articulations of radical opinion in mid-seventeenth-century England, and whose almost aphoristic observations were to reappear in radical British tracts long after the Revolution had passed into history. Rainborough, perhaps the only figure who could have replaced Cromwell in the leadership of the Army, would have been indispensable to the Leveler cause in the coming years, but in one of the tragedies of the Revolution, he died in a skirmish with Royalists in 1648.

The Putney Debates are all the more remarkable for having placed some of the most paramount social issues of the time in their proper context and place. They covered not only the full range of topics on democratic rights and social relations in seventeenth-century England but inferentially even the redistribution of property, if the logic of an unrestricted franchise were followed to its logical end. Nor did the “Grandee” debaters fail to point out that the views of the Levelers would lead precisely to this end.

The major topic that came to the foreground at Putney was the franchise: would all Englishmen be free to vote in parliamentary elections? Underlying this discussion were issues that concerned the consequences of so sweeping a franchise, notably its impact on wealth and the basic structure of government. The Levelers, as radical republicans, plainly wanted to bring the monarchy and the peerage to an end, just as surely as the “Grandees” hoped to retain a political and social hierarchy in the realm.

Ireton and the “Grandees” stood firmly with the social status quo, apart from small modifications offered by their Heads of the Proposals, such as more equal electoral districts. They plainly viewed the Leveler attack upon civil laws versus the “laws of nature” (or natural rights) as a political challenge to the entire social order. From the very outset of the debates, Ireton emphatically affirmed,

I do not seek, or would not seek, nor will join with them that do seek, the destruction either of Parliament or King. Neither will I consent with those, or concur with them, who will not attempt all the ways that are possible to preserve both, and to make good use, and the best use that can be made, of both for the kingdom.”[61]

This was the voice, of course, of a constitutional royalist who was closely attuned to aristocratic as well as economically privileged social interests.

By contrast, the Levelers at Putney upheld their Agreements assertion that the House of Commons was the sole national authority, answerable to the people, and called for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords. They expressly opposed blind obedience to unjust civil law. “I confess to me this principle (of obedience] is very dangerous,” declared John Wildman, one of the civilian Levelers. “... It is contrary to what the army first declared” in the June 14 declaration: “that they stood upon such principles of right and freedom, and the laws of nature and nations, whereby men were to preserve themselves though the persons to whom authority belonged should fail in it.”[62]

At issue here was the nature of the basis of the franchise. Was it a right based on natural law, as the Levelers argued? Or was it a privilege, depending upon property ownership, as the “Grandees” argued, in which case some people could justly be deprived of the right to vote? For the Levelers, all Englishmen possessed this right by virtue of their birth. Thus Rainborough called for the widest possible adult manhood suffrage, regardless of property ownership, arguing

that every man born in England cannot, ought not, neither by the law of God nor the law of nature, be exempted from those who are to make laws, for him to live under, and for him, for aught 1 know, to lose his life under.[63]

Sexby, in turn, affirmed, “I am resolved to give my birthright to none.”[64] If the franchise was to be denied to those who had taken up arms to fight for Parliament, Sexby continued, they should have been informed beforehand, for otherwise what had they fought for?

In his response Ireton argued that the basis for any social order is property, a social institution as distinguished from a natural right: “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,” he declared firmly. “I have as much right to take hold of anything that is for my sustenance, [to] take hold of anything that 1 have a desire to for my satisfaction, as you.”[65] The natural political rights for which the Levelers argued, he maintained, would inevitably lead to the end of property. “No person,” Ireton emphasized,

has a right to an interest or share in the disposing or determining of the affairs of the kingdom, and in choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here, no person has a right to this, that has not a permanent fixed interest [i.e. property] in this kingdom; and those persons together are properly the represented of this kingdom and consequently are to make up the representers of this kingdom, who taken together do comprehend whatsoever is of real or permanent interest in the kingdom.[66]

In short, it was property that counted in sorting out “the rights of the English,” not natural right or virtue or personal excellence; neither the franchise nor property was a birthright of Englishmen. To constitute society according to a “law of nature” rather than a “social contract” that allows heirs to stake out their unchallengeable claim to property would be to jeopardize the very existence of the civil interest that property confers. Or as Ireton put it:

If we shall go to take away this fundamental part of the civil constitution, we shall plainly go to take away all property and interest that any man has, either in land by inheritance, or in estate by possession, or anything else.[67]

Indeed, as he later declared:

All the main thing I speak for is because I would have an eye to property. I hope we do not come to contend for victory, but let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the case of the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kingdom, which if you take away, you take away all by that.[68]

And challenging the natural law position of the Levelers, Ireton went on to say:

Is it by the right of nature [that the Levelers found social life]? If you will hold forth that as your ground, then I think you must deny all property too, and this is my reason. For thus: by that same right of nature, whatever it be that you pretend, by which you can say, “one man has an equal right with another to the choosing of him that shall govern him”—by the same right of nature, he has an equal right to any goods he sees: meat, drink, clothes, to take and use them for his sustenance. He has a freedom to the land, [to take] the ground, to exercise it, till it; he has the [same] freedom to anything that anyone accounts himself to have any property in.[69]

This view on the “state of nature” and the “rights” it confers is redolent of very traditional arguments not only for private property and parliamentarism but for oligarchy and monarchy.

The most dramatic counterposition of Leveler and “Grandee” positions occurred during the second day of the debates. Rainborough, by affirming that all Englishmen had the right to actively decide their own political fate irrespective of their station in life, voiced a statement that has echoed over generations as one of the great declarations of radical democracy:

the poorest he that is in England has 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 has not had a voice to put himself under;... I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no, that should doubt of these things.[70]

These words, apparently spoken in some heat, were not to be translated into political fact until three centuries or so later; nor did “the poorest he” find his clearest voice against the “greatest” until the emergence of modern socialism.

Although the Levelers repeatedly declared that they had no intention of “leveling men’s estates,” they were nonetheless intent on ending every form of legal or political privilege. The “Grandee” debaters were equally emphatic in their assertion that this view implicitly challenged the legitimacy of private property. Indeed, the views of the more extreme Levelers implied a relatively equitable distribution of wealth, with a reasonable material competence for artisans and land-hungry farmers, and possibly even a communitarian kind of society in the distribution of goods and resources.

Cromwell himself accused the Levelers of advancing a politics of Swiss-like cantonalism—or confederalism, as we might call it—charging Rainborough, Sexby, Wildman, and the Agitators with views leading to anarchy. “No man says that you have a mind to anarchy,” he sternly declared,

but the consequence of this rule tends to anarchy, must end in anarchy; for where is there any bound or limit set, if you take away this [limit], that men that have no interest but the interest of breathing [shall have no voices in elections]?[71]

The word anarchy was patently pejorative and in no way reflected the actual views of the Levelers. Rainborough and Petty, in fact, strongly denied the charge. But Rainborough qualified his reply and struck an egalitarian note nonetheless by asking “how it comes about that there is such a property” of some men, not of others.[72] Indeed, he continued, in stronger language.

So one on the other side said, that if otherwise, then rich men shall be chosen (there would be no property]. Then I say the one part shall make hewers of wood and drawers of water of the other five, and so the greatest part of the nation be enslaved. Truly I think we are still where we were; and I do not hear any argument given but only that it is the present law of the kingdom.[73]

Given its time, this statement was nothing less than extraordinary. It implied the need for economic as well as political democracy. Rainborough essentially tore off the political veil that Presbyterian and Independent alike had placed over the material conditions that continued unchanged even after the people had taken up arms against the arbitrary power of the king. Nothing had improved for them, and, as Rainborough concluded, “They have now nothing to say for themselves.”[74]

The various statements of Rainborough, Sexby, Wildman, and other Levelers were to be evoked time and again in the centuries that followed. At Putney, these men created a radical tradition without ever knowing that they had done so.

On November 4, having heard both sides, the Council of the Army finally voted to accept a resolution affirming the basic positions of the Heads of the Proposals. The monarchy and the House of Lords would be preserved. The only positive accomplishment that the Levelers won was a franchise that was broadened to include all freeborn males who had served in the war or contributed materially to it, regardless of property qualification, “if they be not servants or beggars.” The Agitators were clearly disappointed by this last limitation, declaring that in the adopted proposals “the King’s corrupt interest was so intermixed that in a short time, if he should so come in, he would be in a capacity to destroy... the people.”[75]

Cromwell and Ireton remained steadfastly opposed to the broad franchise demands of the Agitators and their Leveler supporters. He and the other “Grandees” saw to it that the Agitators were dispatched back to their regiments, and once they were gone a committee of fairly conservative officers took advantage of their absence to close the debates. This move not only ended the Agitators’ public forum but essentially dissolved them as a group.

THE RENDEZVOUS

Before the Putney Debates began, it had been agreed that the Army would hold a general rendezvous of all the regiments in the Southeast to adopt the Leveler Agreement , but the “Grandee” committee parceled this general rendezvous into three separate meetings, cannily fracturing the Army and isolating its more militant regiments. At a single rendezvous, the united Army might very well have adopted the Leveler program, and indeed, the Agitators had hopes that the resolution could be overturned in a general gathering of the soldiers.

The authority of the “Grandees” in the Army was soon put to a dramatic and decisive test. During the first of the three rendezvous, some eight regiments met at Corkbush Field, near Ware. Two of the more militant regiments, the cavalry of Major-General Thomas Harrison and the infantry of Colonel Robert Lilbume (a brother of John Lilbume who strongly sympathized with the Leveler cause and commanded “the most mutinous regiment in the army”[76]), bitterly resented the outcome of the debates. Although these two regiments were not among those that were supposed to attend the Ware rendezvous, they suddenly appeared, flagrantly wearing copies of the Agreement of the People in their hats together with the motto “England’s Freedom and Soldiers’ Rights,” and wearing green sprigs, the color of the Leveler party. Colonel Rainborough also came unscheduled, without his regiment, as did John Lilburne, who had just been released from prison. Clearly, Cromwell now faced a near-mutiny against his authority.

Fairfax’s officers managed to cow Harrison’s men by tearing the Agreement from their hats and arresting nine of the most militant soldiers, three of whom were tried on the spot by a military court-martial and sentenced to death. The three men were then told to throw dice for their lives. The loser, Private Richard Arnold, was shot to death before his regiment— “for promoting and assisting the work of the soldiery in reference to the Solemn Engagement of the Army,” as a later Leveler pamphlet angrily and ironically put it.[77] The Levelers and their supporters would not forget this execution, for blood had finally been drawn between Leveler and “Grandee.” Indeed, as the Leveler “Hunting of the Foxes” pamphlet argued, the ultimate failure of the Army rank and file to fulfill Leveler political goals was the work of these “foxes of the deepest kind.”[78]

What may very well have postponed an Army mutiny was the news, which reached Ware four days before the rendezvous, that Charles had escaped from Hampton Court and taken refuge on the Isle of Wight, raising the likelihood of a second civil war. Cromwell, who had been negotiating with Charles well in advance of the Putney Debates, seems to have planted the notion in the king’s head that Levelers were trying to “assassinate” him, which may have prompted the king, who was loosely guarded, to take flight. In any case, Cromwell knew that Charles had been negotiating with the Scots and with royalists in England to restart the Civil War, and the Lieutenant-General may have even tried to restore the monarchy in the hope of acquiring an earldom for his services. He could hardly have been unaware that the king would try, sooner or later, to escape from Hampton Court, since it was Cromwell’s cousin, Robert Hammond, who, conveniently enough, was holding him under guard.

The “escape’s” timing—precisely when the “Grandees” were dueling with the Levelers—could not have occurred at a better time for the Lieutenant-General: it served to unite the Army with its general officers against the king and his supporters, and it forestalled any plans for a mutiny. It required no effort by the “Grandees” to persuade the soldiers that a divided army would mean a royalist victory, and the men of the New Model had always prided themselves on their strong sense of military discipline. Events now forced them to place their loyalty to their militant and victorious Army above their Leveler aspirations. The Second Civil War that now loomed over them completely overshadowed the sharp political divisions that the Putney Debates had opened within the Army.