In part 3 of the Great Revolutions series, Dominic Alexander explains how the rank and file of the army forced Cromwell and the grandees to bring the revolution to a conclusion

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 2: The English Revolution: the first civil war

Cornet Joyce

When parliament first announced that the army was to be disbanded, the rank and file reacted furiously and with an unprecedented revolutionary action. They refused to disband and instead elected ‘agitators’ (the word, also spelled adjutator, meant agent or representative at the time). These elections spread from the more politicised cavalry to the infantry, hostile officers were chased out, and the agitators rapidly developed an impressive scale of organisation, able to co-ordinate across swathes of the New Model Army. In the events that followed, the leading officers struggled to regain any semblance of control over their troops, particularly as many officers sympathised with the rank and file’s actions.

The Agitators insisted that the army should rendezvous at Newmarket. When officers asked upon whose orders the troops were marching, the reply was that the troops had ‘received orders from the Agitators’.^[1] At the same time as the army was in uproar, the Levellers were stepping up their activity, and extensive contacts developed between these military and civilian spheres, such that many rank-and-file Army publications in the months ahead would bear the distinct mark of Leveller political ideas and language. The swelling tide of radicalism persuaded Cromwell that if he had any chance of regaining control of the army and the political situation, he needed to cooperate with the radicals, at least for the time being.

Thus it was certainly with Cromwell’s knowledge that a cavalry troop led by an Agitator, Cornet George Joyce, (cornet being the lowest commissioned-officer rank in the cavalry) went on 3 June 1647 to seize the king who was being held at Holmby House in Northamptonshire. This action was in order to forestall the Presbyterians’ own open plan to send the king to Scotland, so that he could bring an army back to England to support their coup. However, the troops at Holmby welcomed Joyce, refusing to offer any resistance, leaving the Presbyterian Colonel Graves and parliament’s commissioners to confront Joyce and his troops.

After some exchanges in which the troops’ discontent with parliament’s existing stance was made evident, Graves and the commissioners fled, leaving Joyce to decide to take the king elsewhere, lest the former return with more force. The king himself tried to prevaricate, asking Joyce what his authority was to take him away. Joyce responded by pointing towards his troop, indicating that his authority came from being elected by the soldiery.^[2] This was one of the great moments that encapsulated the English Revolution, on a par with the storming of the Bastille in France, or of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917. The king was being taken prisoner by a very junior officer on the democratic authority of a revolutionary army.

Joyce and his troop took the king to Newmarket under the close custody of the rest of the army. This provoked a political crisis in London. Cromwell finally had to decide definitively where he stood, and left London for fear of arrest by the Presbyterians, re-joining the army at Newmarket. There, he and Fairfax were confronted with army petitions detailing the soldiers’ grievances, insisting on the right to petition, and complaining over the imprisonment of Levellers such as Lilburne and Overton. The soldiers also asked for a Council of the Army to be instituted, consisting of both senior officers and private soldiers elected from the ranks.  Finally, the troops demanded the arrest of eleven MPs at the core of the Presbyterian party: the army’s declaration was that ‘We were no mere mercinary Army, hired to serve any Arbitrary power of a State; but called forth and conjured, by the several Declarations of Parliament to the defence of our owne and the peoples just rights and liberties.’^[3]

Revolution advances and stalls

The Agitators also had a firm sense of the balance of power in the situation, and sent agents to make contact with the rank and file of the Northern army. This action bore fruit, as the senior officers there began to lose control, depriving the Presbyterians of one of their potential weapons, and the mutinous mood spread nationwide. However, London was key to how events would play out, and here the Presbyterians did have significant popular support, with aggressive demonstrations supporting them, causing 58 Independent MPs to flee to the protection of the army. Nonetheless, this popular support did not have organisational or ideological coherence compared to that supporting the Levellers and radicals. Against Cromwell’s opposition, the Agitators’ insistence that army march on London prevailed. This it did in August.

The people of Southwark held the bridge against the City, only opening it when the army came through from the south.^[4] The Presbyterian grip on London collapsed immediately, with eleven key Presbyterian MPs fleeing the country. The revolution had been rescued through the power of Leveller organisation and its influence on the army rank and file. The common soldiers’ consciousness of the purpose of the civil war was thus sharpened into a weapon capable of dictating events.

However, Fairfax, Cromwell and their allies in parliament returned to a mood of caution after the Independent victory, and further, as noted by a royalist observer, they were ‘as eagerly bent to destroy the agitators as to supresse their greatest adversarys, the Presbyterian faction, which I am perswaded they will hardly be able to effect without dangerous distempers in the army.’^[5] Thus, the Army leadership, the ‘Grandees’, returned to negotiating with the king, while Lilburne and Overton remained imprisoned in the Tower. New, more radical, Agitators were elected in some regiments, and these met with radicals in the City, all under the influence of Lilburne.^[6] A new wave of unrest swept the army and the document The Case of the Army Truly Stated, partly written by the Leveller John Wildman, was printed and presented to Fairfax in October 1647.

The Levellers also distributed the first version of their proposal for a democratic constitution based on the sovereignty of the people and religious toleration, the Agreement of the People, which asserted that ‘when our common rights and liberties shall be cleared, their endeavours will be disappointed that seek to make themselves our masters’, but which was carefully vague about who precisely should have the right to vote.^[7] The Levellers understood they needed to be able to negotiate with the army leaders over establishing a constitution founded on the sovereignty of the people. At the same time, Cromwell was extolling the benefits of monarchy to parliament.

Putney debates

Thus the stage was set for the unprecedented meeting at Putney between the Army Grandees, a collection of officers, including Leveller allies like Thomas Rainsborough, Agitators and civilian Levellers. The debates concerned what to do with the defeated king, and the nature of the constitution to be settled on the realm. It is important to realise that the debates were conducted in a general atmosphere of uncertainty and even fear. One participant thought the discussions should be concluded quickly lest ‘every man dispute till wee have our throats cut.’^[8]

Throughout, Cromwell and his son-in-law, Colonel Henry Ireton, and the other grandees defended the principle that only those with substantial property should be able to participate in the political system. The radical view that there should be a wide extension of the franchise, including male heads of household, but excluding servants and former royalists, was ultimately the view that convinced the council. The Leveller side did, however, make some forthright defences of full democracy. Probably one of the most famous statements from the whole civil war comes from Thomas Rainsborough’s defence of the democratic principle:

‘I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sir, I thinke itt’s cleare, that every man that is to live under a Governement ought first by his owne consent to putt himself under that Governement; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.’^[9]

Lilburne and others had expressed arguments such as this well beforehand, and it does reflect the essentially democratic basis of Leveller thinking.

Cromwell and Ireton were entirely opposed to accepting the Leveller constitution, and the Commons voted to reject the Agreement of the People as being ‘destructive to the Being of Parliaments, and to the fundamental Government of the Kingdom.’^[10] To get round the democratic conclusion of the debates at Putney, the Grandees called for three separate army gatherings, the first of which was at Corkbush Field near Ware. Meanwhile, the Agreement had been spread about the army across the country, and was gaining widespread support.

Soldiers, suspicious of what the Grandees intended, began to mutiny, and Leveller influence succeeded in ensuring that the mutiny at Ware was expressed in political terms, as support for the Agreement. With some emollient terms, particularly over arrears of pay, the Grandees managed to regain control, and had one leading mutineer, private Richard Arnold, shot. This was a defeat for the Levellers, but equally, the Grandees could not be rid of the radicals while it was still possible that the king could be restored.

In the months that followed, the contest between the Grandees and the Levellers continued, with mass petitioning by the latter, and attempts by the Commons to have Lilburne and others arrested and charged with treason. Popular support for Lilburne made this difficult to accomplish, and in early 1648, it was the continuing mass petitioning of the Levellers that became a key tool in facing down the rise of popular royalism. This had arisen amongst the poorer ranks, suffering from the economic hardships caused by the war. Many had become disillusioned with parliament and its apparent inability to bring about a final settlement with a restoration of peace and stability.

Second civil war

In November, Charles escaped from his imprisonment at Hampton Court and fled to the Isle of Wight expecting to find an ally there, but after a brief time, the parliamentary governor had him seized once more. Nevertheless, the king was able to negotiate in secret, and made a treaty with the Scots that they would invade England to restore him to the throne, on the condition that a Presbyterian church would be established in England. In March 1648, led by one Colonel Poyer, parliamentary troops rose in rebellion for the king, as the Scots prepared to invade. There were also royalist riots in London, and unrest elsewhere, for example, in Kent and Essex. Although the risings in the south-east were quelled fairly rapidly, this was the beginning of the second Civil War.

Leveller activity did not cease in this period, and indeed, the need to raise fresh troops meant that disbanded radicals re-joined the army, and the radical MP Henry Marten even raised a force, in defiance of the Commons, known as the ‘Leveller regiment’. Marten also advised tenants in Berkshire to cease paying homage to their lord since this was ‘slavery’, invoking the idea of the ‘Norman yoke’: that the Conquest of 1066 had illegitimately imposed lordship on the people. Marten may have been the author of a pamphlet addressed to ‘the plaine-men of England against the rich and mightie’.^[11] This pamphlet, like earlier Leveller ones, argued that the counterrevolution was the result of disappointment with parliament’s failure to deal with the king, and the economic hardships of the war.

It was thus necessary to rid parliament of the ‘many wolves and foxes in sheeps cloathing’ within it. The pamphlet further called for an end to the payment of rents, debts and interest, and of enclosures of fens and commons. This was advocating class war, and Marten’s force appeared to be carrying out its advice, with popular support. There were some efforts to suppress Marten’s regiment, but it was eventually folded into the New Model Army in 1649, and it went on to join the Leveller-inspired mutiny at Burford that year.

Still, in the course of 1648, parliament’s cause once again hung in the balance, and in these circumstances, another Leveller petition to free Lilburne from the Tower succeeded, with the Presbyterians in parliament hoping that Lilburne would work against Cromwell to their advantage. Lilburne understood what was at stake, and refused to comply. Instead, another period of cautious cooperation between the Levellers and the Independents began. The New Model Army defeated the Royalists and Scots at Preston in mid-August, effectively assuring parliament’s eventual overall victory. As before, military victory meant that a new struggle to shape the peace began.

The Levellers insisted that there should be no treaty with the king, and that there should be a ‘democraticall’ settlement, backing their demand on 13 September with a petition of as many as 40,000 signatures, and a mass demonstration at parliament to deliver it. As well as constitutional demands, there were demands reflecting the concerns of the labouring poor, for example, an end to tithes and enclosures.

Parliament was nevertheless still engaged in negotiations with the king, even as unrest about the situation grew in the army and Agitators reappeared demanding the recall of the Council of the Army. Leveller activity reached new heights, with growing support across the country, and a Leveller-supporting Army paper, Mercurius Militaris, appeared, which was fierce in its demand for an end to the monarchy. The royalist assassination of Colonel Rainsborough on 29 October 1648 outraged the army, particularly as a remarkably half-hearted parliamentary commander was seen as at least partly responsible for the debacle. Calls for the execution of the king appeared in Mercurius Militaris and elsewhere, in the context of a wave of, not unwarranted, fears about a royalist resurgence.

Pride’s Purge

Rainsborough’s funeral became a Leveller mass demonstration against any treaty with the king, as opponents noted with disdain its composition of the lower classes, and the prominence of women within it.^[12] Rainsborough’s own regiment petitioned parliament for ‘impartial justice to be done upon the eminent undertakers of this second war’, and was followed by other army and civilian petitions making similar demands.^[13] By the end of 1648, Ireton had received two dozen petitions from over a dozen regiments, many garrisons and other forces, often expressing support for the Leveller’s Large Petition of September.

With parliament still attempting to reach an agreement with the king, Ireton in particular, moved towards allying with the Levellers once again, and a new Remonstrance to parliament was composed and agreed at a series of meetings between the two sides, with major concessions to the Leveller Agreement of the People. On 20 November, it was presented to parliament, which appeared to be on the verge of signing a treaty with the king. Cromwell was still in the north and apparently sitting on the fence.^[14]

Ireton, however, was willing to move, and key places in London were occupied by the army. On 6 December 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride took troops to parliament, and prevented the entry of 140 MPs, arresting 45 of them, and excluding all the 129 who had voted to settle with the king the previous day. This coup destroyed the Presbyterian majority, leaving the ‘Rump Parliament’. This was in some ways a defeat also for the Levellers who had wanted the Agreement of the People instituted, rather than just leaving a ‘mock parliament’ and the likelihood of direct army rule. Negotiations continued in meetings at Whitehall between a representative array of Levellers, Independents, officers and civilians, and an Agreement was presented to parliament on 20 January 1649, also the first day of the king’s trial.

This trial was certainly a momentous and unprecedented event, which asserted the sovereignty of parliament and that a king could be held guilty of treason, as he was also subject to the law. It was a point of no return for Cromwell’s party and the army in general, and meant there could be no reconciliation with the royalists. Ultimately, however, the trial and execution of the king overshadowed and sidelined the question of a democratic constitution.^[15] The House of Lords was soon abolished, as they had refused pass the Bill condemning the King. England was now a republic, but, from the Grandees’ perspective, the radicals were no longer needed.

The rift opened rapidly, with a radical regiment ordered to disband, and Lilburne publishing Englands New Chaines Discovered at the end of February 1649. Soon Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince and Richard Overton were all arrested. Cromwell was overheard exclaiming to the Council of State that ‘you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces! … if you do not break them, they will break you.’^[16] The support the Levellers had previously had from some of the gathered churches dissipated now that toleration appeared guaranteed under the Independents’ republic. The Levellers did, however, still have the ability to mobilise thousands of supporters, which they did in a series of petitions, including a protest of hundreds of women in Leveller green at Westminster, claiming ‘an equal share and interest with the men in the Common-wealth’, and demanding the release of the Leveller leaders. Apprentices and others were also mobilised in the thousands.

However, the fate of the revolution was to be decided in the army. Here the issue of Ireland was used against the radicals, as a means of dividing them and disbanding the army, so that troops could be sent over to crush the rebellion there. Henry Marten and various Leveller publications argued against the use of force against the Irish on a principled basis.^[17] The first army mutiny occurred on 24 April 1649 at Bishopsgate, which ended in the execution of one mutineer. This was followed in May by a series of mutinies in the West Country, with soldiers wearing Leveller colours and emblems, and with further demonstrations of Leveller support shown elsewhere.

The revolt reached a climax at Burford, Oxfordshire, where William Thompson proclaimed a manifesto Englands Standard Advanced, which viewed to ‘redeem ourselves and the land of our nativity from slavery and oppression’, demanding justice for mutineers executed at Ware and elsewhere, the release of Leveller leaders, the halt of all ‘taxes or assessments … excise, tithes …’ and a new parliament.^[18] On 13 May, Cromwell attacked the regiment at night, killing some, but Thompson escaped only to be killed some days later. The suppression of the mutiny may appear straightforward in the summary, but overall this was a dicey situation for the Grandees.^[19] September saw the last mutiny in favour of the Leveller’s Agreement. Even at this point of defeat, the Levellers were able to mobilise considerable and widespread support, and Lilburne himself was acquitted of treason by a jury in the autumn. He was, nevertheless, sent back to prison, but was accompanied by cheering crowds.

The radicals’ revolution

Cromwell’s regime was a military dictatorship, resting upon narrow foundations, even as he was awarded the title of Lord Protector in 1653. Without the role of the plebian ‘middling sort’ and the poorer classes, especially in London, it is deeply unlikely that the gentry, who initially led resistance to Charles I, would have pushed events to the point of revolution. It was the commitment of the mass of the middling sort that made the New Model Army an effective force, and who were also the base for the Levellers. The Levellers’ pioneering methods of popular organisation and mobilisation were the final element that was able to push for a final victory against the monarchy. The defeat of the Levellers can be considered from a few angles. Certainly, although they had gained considerable support within the army, in the end it was not quite enough to overthrow the Independent Grandees.

One unusual element of the English Revolution compared to later great revolutions is the relative absence of the great mass of the poor from events. Of all the factions on the parliamentary side, the Levellers were closest to the labouring poor, but they remained in essence a movement of the middling sort. Nonetheless, there were points in which the Levellers did reach towards the concerns of the poor, particularly when they objected to tithes, and the enclosure of fens and common land. The manifesto of the Buckinghamshire Levellers argued that one who works should not have to pay ‘tribute out of his labour’ in rents and dues to landlords who do not work.^[20]

Ideologically, the most radical group to emerge from the revolution was the Diggers, or as they called themselves, the True Levellers. A group such as them could not have emerged in this period of history except in the ferment and flux of unprecedented revolutionary events. As noted before, previously unthinkable thoughts were openly debated during this time. Gerard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, was among a number of religious radicals advocating co-operative egalitarianism of various kinds, and his ideas continue to inspire. He has been hailed as a forerunner of later revolutionary socialists.

The Digger movement however came at the period when radical hopes were being dashed by the defeat of the Levellers, and their attempt to establish an egalitarian community on common land on St George’s Hill, in April 1649, was easily quashed. Their inspirations may have been religious, but Winstanley’s thinking developed a secular dimension in class struggle. To achieve his communist society, he envisaged a kind of mass strike of labourers and tenants, refusing to pay rents or work for landowners.^[21]

The defeats of 1649 and the consolidation of Cromwell’s regime, however, drove radicals back underground, and radical thinking regressed accordingly, with Winstanley retreating back towards the mystical sphere afterwards. Even Lilburne became a Quaker, who were, nonetheless, radical egalitarians at this point. The last gasp of the radicals was the small but initially influential sect of millenarian Fifth Monarchy Men, who opposed the Protectorate as preventing the arrival of Christ’s Fifth Monarchy. Some planned an insurrection in 1657, but were arrested before it could begin.

Cromwell’s death in 1659 rapidly led to the restoration under Charles II in 1660, but although the monarchy had been restored, it was not at all the same power as before 1640. England had been made a safe place for capitalism to develop and thrive. The remembrance of a more democratic and egalitarian version of the revolution, the Good Old Cause, persisted, however, to inspire radicals in England long after.

The English Revolution did not immediately spark an international wave of social upheaval like the French and Russian Revolutions would later, but it did produce the idea ‘that political remedies could be found for social and economic discontent’ which would not go away.^[22] The legacy of the radical ideas of the period, particularly the Levellers’ affirmation of the sovereignty of the people, remained influential, even if often underground, among eighteenth-century radicals through to the 1790s, from the Wilkesites of the 1760s to the English Jacobins of the 1790s, and onto the Chartists in the nineteenth century. The influence of the English Revolution and the Levellers can also be traced into the American Revolution of the 1770s.^[23] Finally, English precedents in part informed opposition to the French absolutist state in the years before that revolution.

[1] Rees, Leveller Revolution, p.183.

[2] ibid. p.185.

[3] ibid. p.187.

[4] ibid. p.192.

[5] ibid. p.199.

[6] ibid. p.203

[7] Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660 (Clarendon Press: Oxford 1889), pp.333-5.

[8] Rees, Leveller Revolution, p.211.

[9] ibid., pp.209-10.

[10] ibid. p.213.

[11] ibid. pp.239-40

[12] ibid. p.267.

[13] ibid. pp.21-7

[14] Hill, God’s Englishman, p.96.

[15] Rees, Leveller Revolution, p.285.

[16] ibid. p.289.

[17] ibid. pp.292-3

[18] Brian Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution (Bookmarks: London 1999), pp.94-5.

[19] Rees, Leveller Revolution. p.299.

[20] Brian Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution, p.17.

[21] Ibid. p.63.

[22] Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Penguin Books: London1972), p.383.

[23] See John Rees, Marxism and the English Revolution, ch. 6, forthcoming from Whalebone Press.