The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  By early 1647 political England was effectively divided into four factions. The severe divide between Parliament/Presbyterians and New Model Army/Independents remained, with Charles I hovering in the wings, intriguing and hoping to turn this split to his advantage. But a new feature on the landscape was the factionalism within the army itself, between conservative elements led by Cromwell and Fairfax and the radical wing represented by the Levellers. By 1647 the Levellers were already a force to reckon with: all the most original ideas were theirs and they had built up an impressive organisation in London, complete with a central committee of twelve and elected treasurer, weekly subscriptions from members and regular public meetings.92 The Levellers even had tendrils in Parliament, since Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne had close links with radical MPs such as Thomas Rainsborough and Henry Marten.93 It was true that both Lilburne and Overton were in the Tower early in the year, but the repression connoted by this seemed heavy handed and likely to backfire. A significant moment came in March when Lilburne told Cromwell explicitly that he no longer reposed any confidence in him and looked for no good from him; as the year progressed, Lilburne’s distaste for ‘Noll’ hardened to extreme dislike and then outright hatred. Lilburne was feeling particularly outraged that, when he asserted the simple principle of parliamentary sovereignty in his March pamphlet The Earnest Petition of Many Freeborn People of this Nation, the very Parliament to whom he was ascribing the sovereignty voted (by 94 votes to 86) that the pamphlet should be burnt by the common executioner. Cromwell tried negotiating with ‘Freeborn John’ throughout the year, hoping for a compromise, and visited him in the Tower on many occasions, but Lilburne remained uncompromising and obdurate.94 Lilburne’s sticking point was that the Presbyterians in Parliament were secretly negotiating with Charles I to patch up a pact which would simply slap the king on the wrist and accept that the entire Civil War was just a case of royalist ‘boys will be boys’; Cromwell meanwhile seemed to connive at this and appear as a complaisant partner. The bad faith of the army was anyway soon apparent when it tried to disband the New Model Army without settling its back pay and without issuing a blanket amnesty for actions committed during the war; even worse, the spectre arose of a long war in Ireland for which men would be drafted.95 This was the genesis of the election, in April 1647, of representatives of the army rank and file known as ‘Agitators’ – a confusing term because of the freight of later, anachronistic associations. However, it is not anachronistic to remark that the appearance of the Agitators marked a definite leftward shift in the army, since nothing like them would be seen again until the workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Russia after October 1917.96 When the Agitators threatened mutiny, Cromwell and Fairfax called a meeting of the entire army on Newmarket Heath. The rank and file vociferously defied Parliament and vowed they would not disband until their just demands were met. A General Council of the Army was formed, with Cromwell and senior officers (the so-called ‘Grandees’) serving alongside the Agitators. This hastily improvised council held a second meeting on Triploe Heath, Cambridgeshire, and agreed to formal elections in September. Meanwhile, as a sop to the Levellers, Cromwell persuaded the Council to agree to some of Lilburne’s ideas.97

  While this intense struggle was going on inside the army, the other two main actors had not been idle. Charles I’s intrigues with Parliament for a restored monarchy and a State religion of Scottish Presbyterianism so alarmed Cromwell that he considered a number of countermeasures. Whether he directly instigated the seizure of the king in June 1647 cannot be proved by the standards of evidence required in a court of law, but two matters are salient: on 31 May he met Cornet George Joyce of the parliamentary cavalry, and a few days later Joyce and a troop of cavalry snatched Charles I away from Holmby House and brought him to Newmarket, where the army was convened.98 This coup was expressly aimed at preventing the king from striking a separate deal with Parliament. The Presbyterians struck back with fury. In July they managed to whip up the London mob, which invaded Parliament and forced members to pass motions taking control of the London militia and inviting the king for talks. The Presbyterians were now confident that their trained bands (20,000 strong) could see off any military threat from the army, but they underrated Cromwell. Whatever his dithering and indecision on political matters, militarily he always acted with crisp decisiveness, as he would prove over and over again. On 7 August Fairfax and the army entered the capital without bloodshed or opposition. Parliament immediately rescinded the motions that had so offended Cromwell.99 With the struggle between Parliament and the army clearly resolved in favour of the latter, the Grandees now had to deal with the Levellers, who went from strength to strength. In September Overton was released from imprisonment and added his voice to the clamour for reform. A particular cause of Leveller discontent was the Grandee manifesto, possibly written by Henry Ireton, The Heads of the Proposals.100 This document, often considered more liberal than the ‘settlement’ in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was remarkably lenient to Charles I. It agreed to restore him as monarch and granted an amnesty to royalist officers, on the sole condition that they were banned from public life for five years. The king would be required to summon a parliament every two years, and there would be no royal control of the armed forces for a decade.101 The Heads, in effect Cromwell’s personal charter, clearly revealed him as a highly conservative figure. He had no principled objection to monarchy or the House of Lords, both of which stuck in Leveller throats, but its assessment of the devious Charles I was amazingly naive; the Levellers could always see through the king’s duplicity whereas Cromwell struggled to absorb his perfidy.102 Charles, who like the Bourbons in France after 1815 had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, predictably tried to use The Heads as an entering wedge and to play Parliament and the army off against each other.103 More ominous for the Levellers was the revelation that Cromwell was a man of the past, who believed in the sanctity of property and the efficacy of the old system, provided it was given a few tweaks.

  The Levellers’ response to The Heads was outrage. Indignant statements, not just whispered, but openly delivered, expressed the widely held view in radical circles that things were worse now, in 1647, than they had been in 1642 when Charles I’s tyranny provoked armed opposition: better Ship Money than the Excise was one watchword.104 The Levellers reponded to Cromwell and Ireton with The Case of the Army Truly Stated, which repudiated all deals with the king, accused Cromwell and Henry Ireton of negotiating with Charles I behind everybody’s back, demanded the abolition of the Long Parliament, its replacement by a representative body and called for universal suffrage to the new parliament for all males over twenty-one (with ex-royalists excluded). Other demands included biennial elections and the abolition of all monopolies – many of the demands being almost word-for-word repetitions of the Large Petition.105 It is thought that the Case of the Army was the work of a new and rising star in the Leveller movement, Edward Sexby, another meritocrat in his early thirties who had risen from the ranks to become a colonel in the army. Something of a hothead, Sexby has been aptly described as ‘brilliant but unstable’.106 Already by 1646 he was working as Lilburne’s agent while Freeborn John languished in jail. The Levellers followed up the Sexby manifesto with An Agreement of the People (October 1647), the work of Walwyn and John Wildman, which stressed political, religious and legal aspects of the settlement they hoped for in the future. Common law, Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta were all to be enshrined in a written constitution. Developing the motif of biennial parliaments, they stressed that the electoral districts should not be unfairly weighted and should all contain roughly the same number of inhabitants; in short, rotten boroughs were to be extirpated. There should be no conscription but strict equality before the law and total religious freedom, with a provision written into the constitution that Parliament could never violate it. The negotiations with the king were again denounced as the soldiers being ‘made to depend for settlement of our peace and freedom upon him who int
ended our bondage and brought cruel war upon us’.107 In contrast to the fire-eating Case of the Army, the Agreement was a very conciliatory document. It barely mentioned the House of Lords and other controversial matters and was really a sketch for a draft constitution; some say that it anticipated the Glorious Revolution settlement of 1689 and the constitutional convention at Philadelphia in 1787, which framed the US Constitution. The two documents together show both the evolution and the tension in Leveller doctrines. In philosophical terms the Levellers could never quite agree whether their claims for freedom rested on an appeal to history or to natural rights. Political liberty was the cornerstone of Leveller thought, to the point where some commentators have referred to them as the ‘Arminians of the Left’ – exponents of an essentially practical Christianity expressing social concern and social action – perhaps a forerunner of what we might nowadays term ‘liberation theology’.108

  Cromwell decided that the differences between the Grandees and the Levellers should be thrashed out in public meetings. The venue chosen for the historic clash of Roundhead ideologies was St Mary’s church, Putney, where for two weeks from the end of October 1647 a titanic dialectical struggle was fought. Much of the defence of the Grandees was conducted by Cromwell himself and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, one of Noll’s particular favourites, and a man to whose intellectual prowess he usually deferred. Clever yet arrogant, Ireton had distinguished himself in the Civil War and married Cromwell’s daughter Bridget in June 1646. He particularly rankled with the Levellers, who (Lilburne excepted) still had a soft spot for Cromwell but could not abide the imperious ‘Prince Ireton’.109 It is a curiosity of the Putney Debates that none of the ‘big three’ Levellers was present: Lilburne was still in jail, Overton had just been released and Walwyn kept away out of natural timidity. Yet the Levellers still fielded a formidable team. Among the Agitators they featured Edward Sexby and William Allen as their principal speakers, while their civilian representatives were John Wildman and Maximilian Petty. Wildman, at Putney aged only twenty-six, was a born politician and intriguer, who would plot successively against Cromwell, Charles II and James II and end a long life as William III’s postmaster-general in the 1690s.110 It is possible that he was at root no more than an inveterate plotter, and Disraeli, in Sybil, certainly seems to have overrated him by calling him ‘the soul of English politics’ during the 1640s.111 Intellectually gifted and with a taste for anagrams – he liked to refer to himself as John Lawmind – Wildman had a fluent tongue and pen and had collaborated with Walwyn in polemical pamphleteering, but in certain radical circles there was a suspicion that he was not quite sound. Overton particularly disliked him as a political trimmer, prepared to cut his conscience to the prevailing fashion and to ‘sell out’ his radical comrades if he was offered pensions and places.112 The joker in the Leveller pack turned out to be Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, perhaps the ablest officer in the New Model Army and the only Leveller among the field officers. A member of parliament since 1646, famous for his courage and recently appointed head of the parliamentary navy – a move, some thought, designed to steer him away from political ‘meddling’ – Rainsborough lacked the polished classical learning of some of his contemporaries, but made up for that with plain, economical and lucid English, pointedly refusing to quote classical literature.113 Some maintain that he was not Ireton’s equal in the dialectical passage of arms, but such a view is not borne out by the verbatim transcripts of the Putney meetings made by Secretary Clarke.114

  The great debate began on 28 October 1647. Cromwell announced that the meeting would not be tied down with procedural details but that the floor would be offered to anyone willing to speak. Edward Sexby was first on his feet, denouncing The Heads as a humiliating peace treaty with Charles I and adding that the leadership seemed to be serving everyone’s interest except the army’s; facing Cromwell and Ireton squarely, he told them that their ‘credits and reputations had been much blasted’. As for Charles I, negotiating with him was a waste of time: ‘except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him’. Parliament, too, was a nest of knaves, ‘a company of rotten members’.115 Cromwell replied that he was prepared to give further consideration to both The Case of the Army and the Agreement. However, when the latter manifesto was read out, Cromwell described it as ‘specious’ and said he would need time to consider its detailed arguments. He entered the interim judgement that to adopt the Agreement would make England another Switzerland, with cantons competing against each other. When he went on to mention a number of unspecified ‘difficulties’, Rainsborough, who was always quick-tempered, remarked with heavy irony: ‘Oh unhappy men are we that ever began this war! If ever we had looked upon the difficulties, I do not know that ever we should have looked the enemy in the face.’116 Cromwell then opened a second front in his defence, claiming that both The Case of the Army and the Agreement were in conflict with commitments the army had already entered into at Newmarket, to support the existing king and Parliament. This was the point where Wildman entered the fray. Correctly intuiting that Cromwell was stalling, he made the irrefutable point that no agreement is meant to be eternal, that all accords can be modified or supplanted by later, juster ones. Wildman and Ireton then got bogged down in a somewhat abstract discussion about whether one is morally committed to observe unjust agreements, with Wildman answering categorically in the negative while Ireton took the classical legalistic ‘a contract is a contract’ line.117 A douche of common sense was added by one identified only in the transcripts as ‘a Bedfordshire man’ but thought to be trooper Matthew Weale, one of the signatories of The Case of the Army. He made the point that one definition of ‘unjust’ would be if the army had already promised Charles I, ‘that man of blood’, what rightly belonged to the people.118

  Just when the debate seemed to have ground to a halt in a spectacular display of logic-chopping and prevarication from Cromwell and Ireton, to the Grandees’ evident relief an Anabaptist colonel named William Goffe intervened to say that in all the sound and fury the central issue of God was being lost sight of; it would therefore be better if all present prayed for guidance. A long prayer meeting followed, which was prorogued until the following morning and then continued. This was especially irritating to Wildman, who thought that reason rather than biblical quotations was the key to political reform and objected to the Grandees’ attempt to bring religion into everything.119 The first day’s discussions had revealed the strengths and weaknesses of all the dialectical combatants. On the Leveller side Sexby was revealed as intemperate, Wildman silky and serpentine and Rainsborough crossgrained and irascible.120 To add to the sequence of fleas biting each other ad infinitum, incredibly a split manifested itself even within the Leveller ranks. While Wildman and Sexby were foaming-mouthed anti-royalists, baying for the blood of Charles I, Rainsborough felt that this concentration on the monarch was playing Cromwell’s game for him, allowing him to obfuscate the truly important issues of religious freedom, universal suffrage and social equality. In a break in proceedings on 31 October Rainsborough visited Lilburne in the Tower and complained about the conduct of Wildman and Sexby, who, he thought, were distorting things with their rabid republicanism.121 Rainsborough was agnostic on the subject of the king and Lilburne agreed with him: in jail he had made friends with royalist prisoners and was at the point where he would almost have preferred the ‘old tyranny’ of Charles I to the new variety of Cromwell. The striking thing about the debates is how they were dominated on the radical side by a few outstanding individuals. Occasionally Clarke and his stenographers mention the odd interjection, as by the ‘Bedfordshire man’ or the individual identified as ‘Buff Coat’, who turns out to have been Robert Everard, soldier and religious controversialist.122

  Meanwhile for the Grandees Ireton had not lived up to his reputation as an intellectual jouster and had been worsted in debate by Rainsborough. He had also made a poor impression on army rankers with his cold, desiccated, dispassionate demeanour.
Cromwell still retained the affections of the rank and file. He tended to reply to personal criticisms with dignity and calm, but the jibes clearly rankled, for as the days wore on he would more and more assail the Agitators with heavy sarcasm.123 It is interesting to observe the differential attitudes of Cromwell and Ireton towards their opponents. They seem to have genuinely detested Sexby and Wildman but been tolerant and accommodating with Rainsborough. Cromwell could ride out Rainsborough’s abstract arguments, but he found Sexby’s venom hard to take. The taunt that particularly nettled him was when Sexby later said that Roundhead soldiers had fought a great war for an illusion, as it now transpired that the ordinary soldiers had no rights in the kingdom and were no better than mercenaries.124 Despotic, theocratic, with no patience for notions like egalitarianism, popular or even parliamentary sovereignty, Cromwell was ill at ease throughout the Putney Debates. He refrained from telling the assembled troopers that he did not believe in a free press and would accept only ‘guided’ democracy (he was always a great one for telling people only what they wanted to hear). Impatient with political theory, he took the attitude summed up a century later by Alexander Pope: ‘For forms of government let fools contest, whate’er is best administered is best.’125 He had no problems with limited monarchy or the House of Lords, secure as he was in his belief that if there was dysfunction in the political system God would intervene. Uncomfortable with the set-up of the Putney Debates, Cromwell may have felt seriously out of his depth, perhaps exhibiting what one commentator has termed an ‘inferiority complex’.126 Yet for the most part he reined in his despotic impulses. Only occasionally did the theocracy seep out, as when he blurted out that he rejected all ‘temporal things’ as ‘but dross and dung in comparison of Christ’.127 What we most of all discern in Cromwell is that hesitancy and seeming irresolution he seemed always to display off the battlefield; whenever the prospect of real change threatened, Cromwell would usually react initially in a pusillanimous way and later, under pressure, turn seriously reactionary.