Chapter 7. Regicide and Defeat

Although Charles was still the nominal head of the Church of England, he opportunistically agreed to accept the Presbyterian faith in exchange for Scottish support and was once again able to lead a military force into battle against the New Model Army. The persistent treachery of this “man of blood,” as he was called by the Puritans, had put an end to all patience on the part of the New Model Army—and early in 1648, the Second Civil War erupted in England.

Unlike the first, it lasted for only a few months. Yet despite its brevity, the Second Civil War often demanded more military prowess and even greater ruthlessness from Cromwell’s forces than the first. The New Model Army was now obliged to defeat an invading Scottish army that was substantially larger than itself. Indeed, much of England expected that this time the royalists would prevail. Yet within a matter of months, the zeal of the New Model troops and the exceptional abilities of Cromwell and his commanders gave their Army its ultimate victory over the renewed royalist onslaught. At Preston in August 1648, Cromwell decisively defeated a force of Scots and Cavaliers twice the size of his own, and after mop-up operations against royalist holdouts during the rest of the summer, the New Model finally put an end to the renewed hopes of the monarchical cause.

The definitive victory of the revolutionary Army did not have the full support of the English people, nor did it gain the sympathy of the squirearchy and the merchant class, which had rallied to the House of Commons in the opening years of the revolution. By 1648, the radicals had frightened off most of the wellto-do classes and their dependents, sharply polarizing much of the country. As a whole, the English people—nobles, gentry, and plebeians—were not antiroyalist; they were merely outraged by the particularly noxious behavior of Charles. But the radicalism of the Army engendered fears of social instability that unsettled all the greater and lesser privileged strata of the country. When Army Agitators and the civilian Levelers who worked closely with them prepared Agreements of the People and demanded a democratic Army, the middle classes and landed gentry united in opposition to the radicals, bringing their tenants and many dependents along with them.

In some areas of England the rural tenant population, in fact, took up arms against the revolutionary Roundheads, often on behalf of their own landlord. South Wales, Kent, and Essex in particular became sites of widespread royalist insurrections that Cromwell was obliged to subdue by military force. In these restive regions, the peasantry passively adopted the loyalties of their local lords, most of whom supported the king.

THE LEVELERS AND THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

The setbacks that the Levelers encountered in the Army—the defeat of their Agreement, the murder at Ware, and the restored unity between the soldiers and their general officers in the Second Civil War against the king—shifted the focus of their political efforts to civilians, especially to London, where they probably became the earliest democratically organized political party in the modern era.[79] They recruited members from signatories to various manifestos and petitions and drew their finances from regular dues, which were collected in direct proportion to a member’s income. These funds were used to print pamphlets and newsletters, and probably even to send organizers to various parts of the country to spread Leveler views and form new groups associated with those in the capital. No such organization had existed before, and given the times it had a significant impact on a Revolution that might have easily run adrift in many different and diffuse directions in its absence.

The London Leveler organization, the one on which we have the most detailed information, was clearly structured on a civic basis around ward groups in the city, which met regularly in local taverns sympathetic to the Leveler cause. Each ward group, in turn, sent representatives to a parish committee that embraced several wards, and, on a still higher level, elected “commissioners” or “agents” (the word was borrowed from the name that radicals used in the New Model Army) who constituted the Executive Committee of the Greater London area. This citywide executive made decisions of a tactical nature for the capital as a whole. Some three Executive Committee meetings were held every week, rotating from one tavern and ward to another. Depending upon the size of a given community, a similar form of organization existed outside London and its suburbs. Indeed, the structure, which doubtless varied from place to place, encompassed the “many thousands” that Leveler accounts loosely claim for the movement outside of London. Actually, it is likely that wherever parliamentary troops were stationed in any sizable numbers, they helped to create some kind of Leveler organization in their locality, a phenomenon of a kind we shall encounter in some of the revolutions of a later time.

Leveler forms of organization, far from inhibiting democracy within the movement, actually gave it a nearly libertarian form, partly by rotating office and meeting places. In the taverns where the Leveler movement found its local home, political life was very much part of the neighborhood in which a group was located, knit together by personal friendships and local agitation. The Leveler weekly. The Monitor , was widely read in London, both by civilians and soldiers, and Levelers generally “debated their grievance over a tankard of ale or a glass of sack and enjoyed all three,” observes Brailsford, which helped loosen many tongues and make for lively arguments. Indeed, far from being limited to the New Model Army, the Levelers were in every sense a community movement with deep-seated, local roots among the ordinary people.

Nor did Leveler activity within the Army come to an end after Ware. While the Second Civil War was still in progress, the Levelers were deeply involved in nurturing radical sentiments in the Army, to which even the “Grandees” were obliged to yield. On the first day of the decisive Battle of Preston (August 17, 1648), a pamphlet apparently written by Henry Marten, one of the most radical of the Levelers, furiously attacked the “rich and mighty” in the name of the “plain men of England.” All the troubles that beset the country, Marten’s pamphlet argued, had been caused by “a confederacy among the rich and mighty to impoverish and so enthralled all the plain and mean people throughout the land.” Addressing this privileged and wealthy stratum of society, he made the accusation that

by corruption in government, by unjust and unequal laws, by fraud, cosenage, tyranny and oppression (men of property have gotten] most of the land of this distressed and enslaved nation into your ravenous claws. Ye have by monopolies, usurers and combinations engrossed all the wealth, monies and houses into your possessions; yea and enclosed our commons in most counties.[80]

Such attacks on the wealthy—and on wealth as such—occurred throughout the Second Civil War, reaching deeply into the Army, which still had the force to back up such demands.

The summer and autumn of 1648 were to mark a high point in Leveler influence—within the Army, among the lower classes of London, and in farflung districts of the countryside. Ironically, even the Presbyterian Commons and the so-called “silken Independents,” as the more well-to-do and conservative elements of the Independent movement were called, tried to court the Levelers in the hope of using them against Cromwell. In late August 1648, the Commons went so far as to release “Honest John” Lilburne from another of his prison terms in the Tower and even vote him £3,000 in recompense for his suffering at the hands of the Star Chamber in the 1630s.

But far from forming a faction against Cromwell, Lilburne, upon his release, immediately established contact with the Lieutenant-General in order to forge a common front against the king and the danger of a restoration of royal rule. The Leveler leader proposed that the parliamentary Independents, the Army, and the Levelers all send representatives to a meeting to draw up a final Agreement of the People. Lilburne, whose personal loyalty to Cromwell reached guileless, even obsessive, levels, naively closed his message with the pledge, “Yours to the last drop of my heart’s blood.” And in fact this pledge laid the foundation for an alliance between the Levelers and the Cromwellian Independents, one that both parties needed at the time, despite the basic antagonisms that still existed between them. The Presbyterian Parliament once again began to move provocatively toward disbanding the Army, or at least removing its commander, while, on the other side, Cromwell’s own troops, many of whom were under Leveler influence, were forcing him to act decisively against the Presbyterians and especially against the king.

Although Cromwell was consistently contemptuous of the Levelers, he was necessarily obliged to come to a temporary compromise with them. In a series of conferences “Grandee” and Leveler representatives wrangled as always over drafts of their respective visions of England’s future, often coming to verbal blows until it seemed that any reconciliation was impossible. In November, Fairfax called a meeting of the Army General Council that actually consisted only of the officers; the Agitators or Agents were not summoned. It issued the draft of a Remonstrance drawn up by Ireton that tried to offer the Levelers conciliatory positions on questions of religious toleration and the future of the king. But the Levelers, (Agitators or Agents), and rank and file troops were not taken in. They firmly demanded that the council issue a more strident Remonstrance, one that clearly advocated that the “man of blood” (Charles) be brought to justice and that the peerage be completely abolished. Like it or not, Cromwell desperately needed the Levelers at this point, and Ireton rewrote the tepid passages on the king, openly calling for his execution. Moreover, the document urged, any future king would have to be an elected one and would have to accept an Agreement of the People —a term that by now was becoming synonymous with a constitution or a fundamental law—according to which an elected Parliament would exercise power in the name of the people’s wishes.

The Levelers, in fact, demanded substantially more. Unlike Ireton’s Remonstrance, they wanted neither oligarchical parliamentarians nor Army officers to frame this fundamental law. Rather, they demanded that the great majority of Englishmen should elect what we would now call a constitutional convention to draw up an Agreement —that is, to state explicitly the power of the people’s deputies and to draft and ratify a constitution.

THE RUMP PARLIAMENT

As usual, the Presbyterian Parliament remained ambivalent about the king. It wanted his return to power to ensure that Presbyterianism would be England’s state religion, and it regarded the monarch as the only bulwark against a republic—or possibly, to its horror, even a democracy. Its commitment to the second war against the king had been as equivocal as its behavior during the first conflict. If anything, the Presbyterian Parliament was often overtly hostile to the New Model Army. “The Presbyterians, the majority in the House of Commons, had never wished for too decisive a victory for either side,” observes Christopher Hill in his biography of Cromwell.

They still hoped the King would save them from the “heretical democracy”— freedom of discussion and organization for the lower classes—which the Army advocated. In May, 1648, they had passed a savage act against heresy and blasphemy. They resumed the weary negotiations with the King while Cromwell pursued the defeated royalists into Scotland at the beginning of October.[81]

Indeed, such behavior by the middle class and liberal political center was not unique to the English Revolution, as we shall see; it was to recur in every major revolution in the centuries that followed.

For its part, the Army had exhausted every possibility of coming to terms with the Presbyterian Parliament and the Crown, and after its victory over Charles’s forces, Brailsford observes, “the Army felt entitled to impose its will—God’s will—on the defeated majority.”[82] The Revolution seemed to enter an entirely new, more radical phase of its development. On December 6, 1648, trudging back to London after its victories in the north, the New Model Army again occupied the capital, and Colonel Thomas Pride, backed by troops and acting in accordance with the whole range of opinion within the Army from Cromwell to the radicals, surrounded and invaded the Commons. But Pride was a “Grandee.” He did not dissolve the existing Parliament and replace it, as the Levelers demanded, by a popular convention that would choose a new House; rather, he created a one-party Parliament from the remaining 250-member Long Parliament, driving out its royalist and Presbyterian members. The few who still occupied their seats—only sixty-eight, principally Independents, whom Pride considered the “honest” or godly members—became the short-lived Rump Parliament, which subserviently followed the demands of the Army officers. A day after Pride’s Purge, as it was called, Cromwell himself entered London, piously disclaiming any advance knowledge of the coup, which is hardly credible, but dutifully declaring his support for it.

The Rump Parliament, guided by its Cromwellian Independents, proceeded to construct a republican state, the “Commonwealth”, and half-heartedly coopted many of the demands that had long been raised by the Levelers. By January 1649, the House passed three major resolutions to the effect that all state power ostensibly had its source in the people, specifically designating the House of Commons alone as their representatives. Enactments of the Commons alone had the force of law, requiring consent neither from the king nor from the House of Lords. Theoretically at least, England was now a republic, and after the monarchy was formally abolished on January 30 and the House of Lords on February 7, it seemed to become one in reality.

But in fact, no new elections were held. The Rump remained the sole legislative body of the nation in lieu of a more representative one prescribed by its own resolutions. Voting, when it occurred, was still based on a limited franchise, and state power was shared by the Rump, by a very powerful Council of State chaired by the Lieutenant-General, and by a High Court of Justice, or revolutionary tribunal. Moreover, the source of the Rump’s power clearly was not the people but the Army; more precisely, its general officers. Although this Parliament was to form the country’s supreme legislature for five years, the “Grandees” formed the de facto institutional basis for state power. Indeed, by its arbitrary proclamations the Rump approximated a collective tyranny, which troubled even Cromwell, a latent royalist sympathizer, who had never quite abandoned the idea of a settlement “with somewhat of monarchical powers in it.” As time was to show, he may very well have aspired to precisely that status for himself.[83]

To Lilbume’s lasting credit, the Leveler denounced Pride’s Purge as the arbitrary foisting of a one-party rubber-stamp legislature on the country; indeed, the Rump essentially diluted and neutralized the Leveler vision of a popular convention. Instead of calling a constitutional convention to create an Agreement of the People, as the Levelers demanded, the Rump created a sixteenman committee to draw up an Agreement, a term that had been coopted and its meaning cheapened by the “Grandees.” After the committee members—who included both “Grandees” such as Ireton and even Levelers such as Lilburne— hammered out some generalities concerning their areas of political agreement, the committee fell apart over the issue of religious toleration: the Levelers insisted on complete religious freedom, including freedom for Catholics, Jews, and atheists, while the officers adamantly opposed it, maintaining that only selected “saints” should govern and hence that dissent should not be tolerated.

It is entirely possible that this quarrel was staged to drive the Levelers out of the committee. In any case, after a vehement quarrel, Lilburne withdrew in outrage at the committee officers and, with all the rhetorical powers at his command, warned of the dangers of outright military rule. On January 20, the remaining committee members submitted their own version of the Agreement, drafted largely by the “Grandees,” to the Rump—which simply let it drift into oblivion, producing a constitutional stasis that the committee’s officers did not find in the least objectionable. Any Leveler agitation for a fundamental law thus was dissipated by the sheer inertia of the Rump and the “Grandees”; nor was it to be picked up for more than a century, notably in England’s North American colonies. Finally, on January 27, the Rump condemned the king to death, fulfilling another aim for which the Levelers had long pressed. But the Levelers, again true to their principles, had always intended that this task should be undertaken by a truly representative House of Commons, not the illegitimate Rump, and Lilbume denounced the trial of Charles—whom he detested no less than the most radical of Independents—as an illegal and arbitrary act.

Charles’s execution three days after his trial marked the first time in the modern era—perhaps ever—that a popular movement had committed regicide, a privilege that was formerly reserved only for members of the upper classes. By this behavior, the English Revolution thus attained a degree of radicality unprecedented in revolutionary movements in the past. Not even the English Peasant Revolt of the late fourteenth century had threatened the life of the monarch or challenged the sovereignty of the throne. In fact, for a brief period after the regicide, the English Revolution veered sharply to the left, relying partly on a measure of increasingly critical Leveler support, but above all on the growing radicalism of the New Model.

Yet needless to say, all did not sit well with the increasingly distrustful radicals. Sporadic outbreaks, even virtual mutinies, against the rule of the “Grandees” broke out in a number of radical Army contingents, which the regime quickly put down. Soldiers and officers who openly challenged the authority of the “Grandees” were arrested, and the Rump even tried to suppress dissenting opinions throughout the country. But dissent was ubiquitous. By April 1649, harsh Leveler attacks on the new regime and on Cromwell in particular appeared in print, notably John Lilburne’s The Second Part of England’s New Chains Discovered, in which the Leveler leader called for a restoration of the General Council of the Army with the inclusion of Agitators and the formation of a new Parliament elected on the basis of the Leveler Agreement of the People. Richard Overton’s scathing Hunting of the Foxes blamed the officers’ obstruction, opportunism, and hypocrisy for the Army’s failure to impose a constitutional settlement along Leveler lines at a time when it could easily have done so.[84]

The new regime no longer regarded these pamphlets as dissent but as outright sedition, and four prominent Levelers—Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton, and Thomas Prince—were peremptorily arrested on charges of treason and thrown into the Tower. While he was awaiting trial, Lilburne, from behind closed doors outside the Council of State, overheard Cromwell tell the Council’s president: “I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces” or

they will break you; yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders; and frustrate and make void all that work, that with so many years industry, toil and pains, you have done.[85]

Popular clamor for the Levelers’ release brought thousands of Londoners in demonstrations before the court where they were being tried, just as, a little over a year earlier, huge Leveler street demonstrations had followed the coffin of Colonel Rainborough to its interment. Cowed by these mass actions, the “Grandees,” in the end, had no choice but to acquit “Honest John” and the other Levelers, but the situation in the capital and elsewhere remained as heated as ever.

THE DEFEAT OF THE LEVELERS

The execution of Charles sparked royalists in parts of Ireland and Scotland to proclaim the late king’s son, also named Charles, as his successor, and, incongruously, the young Charles was obliged to raise his royalist armies in Catholic Ireland as well as Presbyterian Scotland, against Anglican and Puritan England, where English supporters of the king had nearly all been subdued. In the course of crushing this uprising, the Commonwealth took the opportunity to rid itself of troublesome radical military regiments as well by dispatching them to Ireland, thereby diminishing the impact they might have had on the domestic political situation—an obvious ploy that only heightened rank-andfile unrest in the Army.

In May 1649, this unrest finally came to a head. In Salisbury, Colonel Scroop’s cavalry regiment, which was scheduled to go to Ireland, called a new Council of the Army for the ostensible purpose of discussing arrears in pay. In fact, the council was actually convened to coordinate the resistance of regiments who were being sent to Ireland without their consent. The same crisis that had led to the confrontation at Ware was now being replayed, this time possibly with greater success. Over a twelve-day period Scroop’s and five other disgruntled regiments elected Agitators to represent them, and at the same time, troopers and civilian Levelers at Oxfordshire gathered into supportive formations of their own. Had these scattered dissenters acted entirely on their own, none of them would have posed a serious threat to the authority of Cromwell and the “Grandees.” But if the various mutinous regiments could assemble together from their separate locations into a single military force, the regime had every reason to regard them as a major revolutionary challenge. And this was precisely the plan that the Levelers had in mind. On the evening of May 14, some twelve cavalry troops, largely under Leveler influence, gathered at the village of Burford, near Oxford, waiting for sympathetic forces from other parts of the country to join them. But they did not come in time. Cromwell, apprized of the Leveler troop movements, furiously raced some forty miles to the Burford encampment, reaching it at midnight and taking the mutineers completely by surprise. He easily crushed the fragmented revolt in a nearly bloodless victory. Although three men were shot for their role in the mutiny, the remainder were either cashiered from the Army or pardoned.

The defeat of the troops at Burford essentially marked the end of the radicals’ influence in the Revolution, although they were to participate in or initiate aborted insurrections for years to come. In another manifesto, issued by the Levelers in September 1649, The Remonstrance of Many Thousands of the Free People of England , which Brailsford “ranks among all their utterances as the most reckless and the most revolutionary,” they hurled

a declaration of war ... at “all those tyrants and usurpers now sitting at Westminster.” “Our burdens,” it declares, “become so insupportable, that we are ... compelled to make use of that means nature teacheth us for our own preservation.” It calls for disobedience to all acts and orders of these usurpers, especially for a refusal to pay all taxes, assessments and tithes.

The manifesto openly threatened to avenge the Levelers who had been shot at Ware, Burford, and elsewhere; to gain debentures for the soldiers; to confiscate the wealth and estates that Members of Parliament had obtained as a result of the revolution; to enact the 1648 Agreement of the People; and most strikingly, to guarantee “every free commoner” the means of life. This last guarantee was an explicit threat to all the propertied classes of England. “For the attainment of all these ends,” the manifesto concluded, “we have drawn our swords and are resolved not to put them up again till we have obtained the things before specified, not doubting of the aid and assistance of all honest and well-meaning men.”[86] Approximately 100,000 people signed this challenging manifesto, nearly ten times the number who normally signed earlier Leveler petitions, and panic swept the ever-uneasy propertied classes. But no swords were drawn. The “Grandees” thoroughly purged the regiments on which the Levelers relied most, while other troops were by now thoroughly exhausted and largely demoralized. Nor is it likely that many civilians had the means or the stomach to do battle against an Army that had earned, and still retained, their deepest respect.

Thereafter, the Leveler movement fell apart, or dissolved into often pitiful conspiracies against Cromwell. The Burford defeat had produced a social vacuum, followed by defeats that left the radicals in despair. Individual Levelers each followed separate and surprisingly odd destinies. Sexby, the former soldier, came to detest Cromwell so much that he even joined with royalists in conspiracies against him and his regime. Many Leveler officers who had not been cashiered by the “Grandees” rose in the ranks to become professional soldiers, while still others retired to private life. A few, like Lilbume, became Quakers, turning to nonviolence as a credo. The third revolution, which had seemed so close to success at Ware and at Burford, came to its tragic end in England. The new historical course on which the country embarked favored more enclosures of common fields, the dispossession of the peasantry and even the yeomanry from their land, and eventually the rise of industrial capitalism.