Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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parliament decided to disband Massey’s force and to keep the New Model

intact for a further six months. While the king was still in Scottish hands and

known to be angling for armed assistance from abroad, it was the only sane

decision.

It also showed that in such a crucial vote the independents could still com-

mand a majority. One reason was that from August 1645 onwards the Com-

mons had been holding elections to the many seats made vacant in recent

years by death or by the exclusion of active royalists. Nearly 270 new mem-

bers were elected to the House between then and Pride’s Purge, the great

majority before the end of 1646. Most were chosen in the time-honoured

way, in accordance with the candidates’ standing in their county or other

local communities, but a signiﬁcant number of seats were contested on party

lines. The net effect was to increase the strength of the independents and to

add substantially to their radical wing. Among the recruiters, as they were

called, were Cromwell’s close associates Charles Fleetwood and Henry Ireton

(who married his daughter Bridget in June 1646), the future republicans

Edmund Ludlow and James and Thomas Chaloner, and the future Fifth

Monarchists John Carew and Thomas Harrison. Henry Marten was readmit-

ted to membership in January 1646, and though hardly anyone besides him

was yet seriously contemplating the deposition of the king, the majority of the

forty-three MPs who were to sign his death warrant were recruiters.

The presbyterians were further weakened when Essex died in September

1646, following a stroke. He was genuinely mourned, and not only by his

own party. Parliament voted £5,000 for the expenses of his funeral, which

was the most magniﬁcent since that of James I. He was buried in Westminster

Abbey, whose chancel was draped in black from ﬂoor to roof for the occa-

sion. Before the site of the then dismantled high altar, his funeral efﬁgy,

dressed in a military buff-coat and scarlet breeches beneath the parliamentary

robes of an earl, was left standing after the ceremony, beneath a splendid

catafalque designed by Inigo Jones. Five weeks later both efﬁgy and

catafalque were hacked to pieces in the night by a poor farmer from Dorset,

who claimed that an angel had so commanded him, since Christ was dishon-

oured by the bringing of the image of a man into the house of God.

With the passing of Essex, the baronial element in the parliamentary cause

became more fragmented, and the thinly attended House of Lords had a

diminished role in national politics. Saye, Northumberland, and Wharton still

had a signiﬁcant part to play, as leading independents. Manchester remained

a presbyterian, though with a diminishing zest for public life; so too for the

present did Warwick, though he was to side with the army in 1647. War-

wick’s vacillating brother Holland was entering his ﬁnal royalist phase,

348 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Gardiner, Great Civil War, II, 533; Snow, Essex the Rebel, pp. 489–95.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 348

which would cost him his life, whereas his one-time fellow-courtier Pem-

broke travelled the other way and was to ﬁnish up on the Council of State of

the Commonwealth.

Despite some strengthening of the independents, parliament was so far

committed to the religious settlement that the Westminster Assembly was

working out that it continued to embody it in legislation, step by slow step. A

Blasphemy Ordinance, imposing the death penalty for denying the Trinity,

the Incarnation, and other central doctrines, and life imprisonment for reject-

ing infant baptism (among other disputed tenets), began its slow course

through the two Houses in October. Presbyterians, Independents, and sec-

taries could at least agree in condemning episcopacy, whose formal abolition

was effected when the Lords ﬁnally passed the necessary ordinance on

9 October. The main object now was to vest the hugely valuable episcopal

lands in trustees so that they could be sold, for it was now becoming clear that

a down payment of £200,000 would sufﬁce to persuade the Scots to with-

draw their army from England and hand over the king. The bishops’ lands

were immediately pledged for the raising of this sum. The Scots rather ambi-

tiously reckoned England’s total debt to them at £1,300,000, but they were

prepared to accept £500,000, and further bargaining drove the sum down to

£400,000. The Scottish commissioners obtained clearance from the commit-

tee of estates and the Scottish privy council in September to accept £200,000

on account as the price of withdrawing Leven’s army. The decision was chal-

lenged, however, when the Scottish parliament met in November, and during

December Hamilton, Lanark, and their party contended long and at ﬁrst (it

seemed) successfully that the army should be kept in England and the king

granted his wish to go freely to London. But with busy support from the Kirk,

Argyll and the majority ﬁnally carried it that unless Charles accepted the

Propositions of Newcastle he should be delivered to the custody of the Eng-

lish parliament, and the army should come home. The Scottish parliament

obtained face-saving assurances from Westminster that no peace would be

concluded without the consent of both kingdoms, and that meanwhile the

form of government in England would not be changed.

The Scots were pre-

dictably accused of selling their king, not least by Charles himself, and paral-

lels with Judas were drawn from the day they handed him over. The strictures

were unjust. The transaction may be unappealing, but the Scots had gone to

war for the Covenant, and in face of his persistent rejection of it they were

entitled to say ‘no Covenant, no pikes and muskets’.

So he passed into the hands of the English parliament’s commissioners, and

the last of Leven’s army left England on 3 February 1647. The place of his

next imprisonment had been contested, and was a political decision. The

Between Two Wars 349

Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, pp. 75–81.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 349

Lords had voted to bring him to Newmarket, a favourite Stuart stamping-

ground in country where political presbyterians and outright royalists were

thick on the ground. But the Commons had their way and lodged him in

Holmby (or Holdenby) House in puritan Northamptonshire, where he could

be held more securely. It was the largest private house in England, built by

Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton. Puritans or not,

the gentry of the county turned out in force to greet him, and the regiments

that guarded him were chosen for their presbyterian commanders. In overall

command of them was Major-General Richard Browne, who had never

fought in the New Model and would soon be openly defying it. Charles was

given a large household and a lavish royal table, and the military presence was

relaxed enough to allow him to ride over to neighbouring country houses,

including Lord Spencer’s Althorp, to play bowls. What he continued to miss

most were the ministrations of his Anglican chaplains, and considering how

much most of his captors wanted to come to terms with him the denial was as

impolitic as it was ungenerous.

Once the Scots had gone home and the king was in English hands, the pres-

sure for a massive reduction of the military forces was stepped up and the

independents found themselves no longer strong enough to resist it. One of

the New Model’s most formidable assailants was Thomas Edwards, an intoler-

ant and intemperate Presbyterian divine, who in the course of 1646 ham-

mered the Independents and sectaries in the three massive parts of his

Gangræna. The gangrene lay in the heresies with which they were infecting

the body politic, and the third part, published late in December, particularly

targeted the army. Bigoted though he was, Edwards did reckon that not more

than a quarter of the New Model consisted of Independents and separatists,

but he found this minority dangerous on secular as well as religious grounds.

Besides the usual accusations that ofﬁcers and soldiers preached in public,

spread false doctrine, disturbed church services, and deﬁed the parliament’s

ordinances regarding worship and church government, he charged them with

harbouring subversively radical political beliefs, in particular that supreme

authority rightly belonged only to the Commons, as the representatives of the

people. He admitted, however, that he had found very little anti-monarchical

feeling in the army.

There was indeed very little as yet, and no political activ-

ity as such, but many ofﬁcers and men resented the overt hostility of the City

and the Scots and cordially reciprocated it. They already feared that their en-

emies inside and outside parliament would combine together to impose a per-

ﬁdious peace, probably after getting most of the army out of the way by

sending it to Ireland.

350 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

T. Edwards, The Third Part of Gangræna (1646); A. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen:

The General Council of the Army and its Debates 1647–1648 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 21–3.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 350

Their apprehensions were justiﬁed. As soon as the Scottish army departed,

the Commons’ chamber was resounding with complaints against preaching

ofﬁcers and soldiers, causing Bulstrode Whitelocke to remark that ‘those who

were so lately in their highest esteem and respect, as freers of their county

from servitude and oppression, are now by the same people looked upon as

sectaries and oppressors themselves’.

Cromwell was not present in the

House to stand up for the army, since he fell seriously ill late in January and

remained incapacitated until well into March. Just a fortnight after the last

Scottish soldier left English soil, the Commons began to debate whether the

axe should fall ﬁrst on the New Model or on the various provincial forces, such

as Poyntz’s Northern Association army. It might have been supposed that on

grounds of military effectiveness and natural justice the victorious regiments

of Fairfax and Cromwell had an overwhelming claim to furnish the nucleus

of whatever standing force was kept afoot, and so the independents urged,

but they were narrowly defeated. Two days after that vote the Commons

decided that the army in England should consist of just 5,400 cavalry and

1,000 dragoons, with no regular infantry beyond the complement of a few

scattered garrisons. Even without our knowledge that a new civil war was

little more than a year away, it should have been obvious that this provision

was utterly inadequate, at least until the king and the Scots had been brought

to binding peace terms.

Early in March the Commons voted that the army for Ireland should con-

sist of 4,200 horse and dragoons, and that all of it was to be drawn from Fair-

fax’s army. The aim to destroy the New Model as an entity was now blatantly

obvious. Before deciding whether to incorporate any part of it in the home

army of 6,400, the Commons voted to keep up the regiments of Poyntz and

two other presbyterians in his northern forces. There was even an attempt to

take the home command from Fairfax and give it to the presbyterian Richard

Graves, who had been lieutenant-colonel of Essex’s own regiment of horse

and had fought at neither Naseby nor Bristol. This was defeated only by 159

votes to 147, but other motions equally hostile to the New Model, and to

Cromwell in particular, were actually carried: for instance that no ofﬁcer

under Fairfax should rank higher than colonel, that none should be exempt

from taking the Covenant and conforming to the Presbyterian ecclesiastical

establishment, and that no MPs should hold military commands in Eng-

land. That would have prevented Fairfax from standing again for parliament,

as he had recently done, and would have forced Cromwell, Ireton, and

several other old Ironsides to choose between resigning their seats or their

commands.

Between Two Wars 351

B. Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1682), p. 240, and cf. p. 238; Gentles,

New Model Army, p. 147.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 351

It may well be wondered how so many provocative and ill-willed pro-

posals were approved by a House in which a majority had supported the New

Model from its inception to the end of the war. One answer is that not all who

had accepted the need for the army loved it, especially when Cromwell and

many of his fellow-ofﬁcers had manifested opposition to the parliamentary

religious settlement. The independents at Westminster were not so much a

political party as a loose coalition of members, bound together mainly by a

common dedication to outright military victory. Once victory was achieved,

many of their more pragmatical adherents fell away. The concerted anti-

military pressure of the City corporation, whose ﬁnancial co-operation with

parliament gave it a powerful lever, played its part. The presbyterians at this

stage displayed rather more of the characteristics of a party, with a leadership

that paid close attention to political management and pursued its ends with

considerable short-term tactical skill. Holles and Stapleton, who had been

Essex’s closest friends and allies in the Commons, acted countless times as

tellers in crucial votes, and they headed a tightly knit group of fellow-

activists. They probably had no illusions about the possibility of forcing the

Newcastle Propositions upon the king, but when the time should become ripe

for compromise they wanted to set the terms and share out the spoils of ofﬁce.

They rightly saw the army as a potential obstacle to any such design, and they

set about getting rid of it. But they could not rely solely on the uncertain votes

of a now almost evenly balanced House of Commons; they needed an execu-

tive instrument, and they forged one.

With the end of the war, and still more with the departure of the Scottish

army, the Committee of Both Kingdoms became less appropriate as a nation-

al executive, and in October 1646 parliament set up a new Committee for

Irish Affairs, consisting of the older committee’s still active members with the

addition of Holles, his ally Sir John Clotworthy, and ﬁve others. From its place

of meeting it came to be called the Derby House Committee. The newcomers

gave it a heavily presbyterian bias, and since the recovery of Ireland and the

necessary military and ﬁnancial provision for it were matters of urgency, it

gradually assumed most of the general executive role of its parent body, the

Committee of Both Kingdoms. It was speciﬁcally entrusted with framing pro-

posals for a general reorganization of the military establishment, as well as

for an expeditionary force to Ireland. All the moves that drove the army into

revolt were planned and managed from Derby House. Cromwell’s illness

kept him away during a crucial period, and the army’s other friends on the

older committee, outnumbered now and reluctant to be seen as parties to

decisions they deplored, mostly stopped attending. The Lords showed some

jealousy of the power that the Derby House Committee was assuming, but

Holles and Stapleton squared them by securing a vote in April 1647 to add six

more peers to it, along with ﬁve more MPs. Since the Lords’ nominees were

352 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 352

solidly conservative and the Commons’ included Massey and others of like

mind, the independents were left for a time with no answer to the presbyter-

ians’ political machine.

‘There want not in all places men who have so much malice against the

army as besots them’, wrote the convalescent Cromwell to Fairfax on

11 March; ‘never were the spirits of men more embittered than now.’

That

same day the Commons received a particularly venomous petition against it

from Essex, where it had its headquarters at Saffron Walden, and within a

week yet another from the corporation of London, calling again for its dis-

bandment. But by then a very different petition was beginning to circulate

within the army. It arose spontaneously among the troopers of the cavalry,

who were reacting to the orchestrated public hostility to which the army was

being subjected and to the treatment with which it was threatened. The men

were chieﬂy concerned about three things: the threat of being disbanded with-

out their full arrears of pay, which ran to forty-three weeks in the cavalry;

their liability, when disbanded, to be prosecuted for acts committed in war;

and the conditions of service that they faced if they were sent to Ireland.

Including as they did many of the longest-serving soldiers in the parliament’s

service, and most of them having enlisted as volunteers, they did not see why

they should be compelled to go to Ireland when shorter-serving conscripts

were being paid off, and if they did go they wanted to ﬁght alongside their old

comrades, under the regimental ofﬁcers and the general whom they knew.

Parliament ﬁrst became aware of this petitioning movement after Waller,

Clotworthy, and another MP visited Fairfax’s headquarters on 21–2 March,

as delegates from the Derby House Committee, to discuss with him the for-

mation and dispatch of an army for Ireland. Apparently they were hoping to

ﬁnd enough ofﬁcers ready to engage themselves and their men to constitute

then and there the full force of 12,600 that had been voted, but Fairfax knew

of his men’s grievances and sympathized with them. To meet the commis-

sioners he summoned an unusually large council of war—forty-three ofﬁcers

besides himself—and not one of them would undertake to serve in Ireland

until they were satisﬁed on certain points. Severally, they raised four ques-

tions. What regiments were to be kept up in England? Who was to command

those who went to Ireland? What assurances of regular pay and support

could be given to those who enlisted? And how was parliament going to pro-

vide for the army’s arrears of pay and its members’ indemnity for acts com-

mitted in war? Somewhat taken aback, the commissioners probed the

ofﬁcers’ solidarity by pressing each one individually on all four questions. All

Between Two Wars 353

On the Derby House Committee and its treatment of the army see M. Kishlansky, The Rise

of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), passim. Kishlansky puts a kinder construction on

the presbyterians’ proceedings than I do.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 430.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 353

present held ﬁrm on the last two, but ﬁve dissociated themselves from the ﬁrst

and twelve from the second. It was the beginning of a rift between a minority

of ofﬁcers whose political sympathies were presbyterian, or who wanted to

pursue their careers in Ireland, and the majority who sought to maintain the

solidarity of all ranks in the army and distrusted the presbyterian politicians’

intentions. The commissioners made what capital they could of this disagree-

ment before leaving headquarters, and parliament was to play on it in the

coming months.

More than one petition was circulating among the soldiery by this time,

and it seems that sympathetic ofﬁcers, of whom there were many, consoli-

dated the men’s grievances into a single document, persuaded them to address

it to Fairfax, their general, rather than to parliament, and pruned away pas-

sages that strayed into political territory. It emerged as ‘The petition of the

ofﬁcers and soldiers of the army’, and it asked for just ﬁve things: a parlia-

mentary ordinance to guarantee their indemnity, security for the payment of

their arrears before they were disbanded, regular pay while still in service, no

compulsion on those who had enlisted voluntarily to serve outside the king-

dom and no conscription of cavalrymen into the infantry, and ﬁnally some

provision for maimed ex-soldiers and for the widows and children of the

fallen. These were all fair requests, respectfully expressed, and conﬁned to the

soldiers’ interests as soldiers. The petition was not published until after par-

liament itself made it notorious by exploding in anger over it. The three com-

missioners somehow got hold of a copy while they were at headquarters, and

Clotworthy produced it when he reported to the Commons on their mission

on 27 March. The House immediately ordered Fairfax to suppress it, but

though he tried to stop it going any further the petitioning movement had

taken on a momentum of its own. When the Commons listened to letters of

intelligence two days later, alleging (whether with any truth we do not know)

that the campaign was being directed by a group of senior ofﬁcers, Ireton

among them, and that signatures to the petition were still being collected

under threat of cashiering, they boiled over. They instructed the Derby House

Committee to segregate all the ofﬁcers and men who were willing to serve in

Ireland and to disband the rest of the New Model Army at once. Not trusting

Fairfax, who had given no cause for distrust, they summoned Skippon from

Newcastle, where he was governor, to see to the recruitment for Ireland and

the suppression of the petition. Holles, who with three other MPs had been

entrusted with formulating a reply to the petition (which of course had not

even been presented to parliament), left the House to draft it at about 9 p.m.,

when many independents had gone home. He brought his draft back shortly;

the members still present approved it without a division, and the Lords passed

it next day. It intemperately expressed parliament’s ‘high dislike’ of the

petition, and gave warning that all who went on promoting it would be

354 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 354

‘looked upon and proceeded against as enemies of the state and disturbers of

the public peace’.

‘Enemies of the state’: those words were to be repeated in declaration after

declaration from the army in the coming months, with justiﬁed indignation.

To understand how otherwise sane (if mediocre) politicians could put forth a

statement so wantonly provocative as this ‘Declaration of Dislike’, one must

appreciate that their reaction to the army petition was coloured by the shock

that they had received from another and altogether more revolutionary peti-

tion little more than a week earlier. This too had been intercepted before it

was presented, and was treated as deeply subversive. It contained the fullest

statement so far of the aims of a body of men who were soon to become

known as the Levellers. They were at this time an essentially civilian move-

ment, London-based, and consisting mainly of small traders, craftsmen, and

apprentices, though of their leaders John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Max-

imilian Petty, and John Wildman came of minor gentry stock. Richard

Overton, who was in some ways the most radical of them, had a humbler

background; he had been in voluntary exile as a Baptist before the war and

had since run an unlicensed printing-press. Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn

had long been proliﬁc pamphleteers, and the ﬁrst two had been in the Tower

since the summer of 1646 for casting scandal upon the peerage. There were

already a few links between the Levellers and the army; Lilburne, as we have

seen, had been a lieutenant-colonel of dragoons in pre-New Model days, and

Overton’s brother Robert was a recently appointed colonel of foot. Edward

Sexby, who was soon to be one of the most prominent army agitators, had

visited Lilburne in the Tower, though his closeness to the Leveller leader at

this time has been much exaggerated. A Major Tulidah, who had come to

parliament to defend the Leveller petition, and had been personally assaulted

by Stapleton for his pains and imprisoned without a hearing, was not at the

time a member of the New Model.

There is no evidence that the Levellers instigated the petitioning movement

in the army, and every indication that it arose spontaneously from the sol-

diers’ sense of grievance. Their petition was wholly concerned with parlia-

ment’s threatened treatment of them as soldiers, whereas the Levellers’

March Petition was a highly political document. It was provocatively

addressed to the Commons as ‘the supreme authority of this nation’, and its

ﬁrst demand was that neither the king nor the Lords should have any veto

over what the people’s representatives determined; nor should the peers have

any jurisdiction over commoners. It called for the repeal of all oaths and

covenants (the Solemn League and Covenant obviously included) that could

lead to the persecution of law-abiding people for nonconformity in religion,

Between Two Wars 355

Commons Journal, V, 129.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 355

and demanded that no one should be punished for preaching or publishing his

religious opinions in a peaceable way—a clear condemnation of the Blas-

phemy Ordinance then in course of enactment. It further called for the aboli-

tion of tithes, desiring that henceforth ‘all ministers may be paid only by those

who voluntarily choose them’. It pressed for a radical reform of the law and

of legal proceedings, which (it demanded) should be conducted solely in Eng-

lish. It condemned the current prison system, run as it was for the private

proﬁt of prison-keepers, and with it the indeﬁnite incarceration of insolvent

debtors. Not least it looked to the Commons to ‘provide some powerful

means to keep men, women and children from begging’.

This was the most

comprehensive formulation of the Levellers’ programme so far, though some

important parts of it, notably their proposals for parliamentary reform and

indefeasible natural rights, were still to come. Even without them, however,

the Leveller petition was sufﬁciently shocking to make conservative polit-

icians overreact when they were faced with that of the army less than ten days

later. The Levellers’ petition itself they shufﬂed off to a committee until

20 May, when they responded to further popular pressure in support of it by

ordering it to be burnt by the common hangman. The independents chal-

lenged the decision in a division, but mustered only eighty-six votes against

ninety-four.

In the army, Fairfax obediently ordered that the soldiers’ petition should

circulate no further and that the Declaration of Dislike should be read at the

head of each regiment. For two weeks there was scarcely a hint of the resist-

ance to come, even in face of the Derby House Committee’s ﬁnal plans for the

standing force to be maintained in England, which parliament approved

on 8 April. From the New Model only Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s own regi-

ments and three others were chosen, the latter for their supposedly ‘safe’ com-

manders, though Colonel Graves was to go over to the king within two years.

That meant that six regiments of horse and all twelve of foot faced immedi-

ate disbandment unless their members took service in Ireland, and if they did

that there was no undertaking that they would stay together as units, under

their old commanders.

On 15 April another parliamentary delegation came to Fairfax’s head-

quarters, still hoping to enlist the required number of ofﬁcers and men for Ire-

land before disbanding the rest. It did not help that the Commons were

represented by Waller, Massey, and Clotworthy, though Warwick was a more

acceptable spokesman for the Lords. To meet them, Fairfax summoned not

only the ﬁeld ofﬁcers of all the regiments within reach but the captains and

lieutenants of every troop and company—nearly two hundred ofﬁcers in all.

356 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Full text (with slight differences) in D. M. Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan

Revolution (New York and London, 1944), pp. 135–41, and G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Levellers

in the English Revolution (1975), pp. 76–81.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 356

They all conferred about their responses before they heard the commission-

ers, and they chose ﬁve strongly independent ofﬁcers to speak for them:

Lieutenant-General Thomas Hammond, the commander of the artillery, and

Colonels Lambert, Lilburne, Rich, and Hewson. Warwick pressed the

urgency of recovering Ireland and Fairfax seconded him, but Lambert then

asked on behalf of all present what parliament was doing about the four ques-

tions that had been put to the previous commissioners in March. In particu-

lar, who was to command those who went to Ireland? Skippon, they were

told, with Massey in command of the cavalry. Skippon commanded every-

one’s respect, but he had never had independent charge of an army, and he

was old for a service that would call for long marches and swift initiatives.

Moreover he was still inﬁrm after his serious wound at Naseby, and he had

accepted the appointment only under pressure, after Waller had declined it.

As for Massey as a substitute for Cromwell, the contempt can be imagined.

The presbyterians had again overreached themselves, and the mood of the

meeting became hostile; some shouted ‘Fairfax and Cromwell, and we all

go!’.

Afterwards, those present asked their ﬁve spokesmen to draw up a

statement of their case to parliament, and 151 of them signed the resultant

Vindication of the Ofﬁcers of the Army. It powerfully afﬁrmed that the ofﬁ-

cers stood four-square with their men, not only in respect of their grievances

as soldiers but in a shared concern for their country’s future, and it justiﬁed

their right to petition their representatives in parliament. ‘We hope, by being

soldiers, we have not lost the capacity of subjects,’ they said, ‘nor . . . that in

purchasing the freedoms of our brethren we have not lost our own.’

The army’s solidarity was not complete, however, since a minority of ofﬁ-

cers really did want to continue their military careers in Ireland. These the

parliamentary commissioners segregated from the rest and encouraged with

every kind of preferential treatment. They reported to parliament that 115 of

them were willing to serve on the terms proposed, though they were nearly all

infantrymen and mostly of junior rank. There was no certainty that their men

would enlist with them, and some ofﬁcers used dishonest or oppressive means

to induce them to do so. At most 1,000 soldiers, almost all foot, engaged

themselves for Ireland, and many of them returned to the New Model when

its resistance to disbandment got under way. Holles and Stapleton’s party had

succeeded in creating a rift in the army, but had failed to raise a viable force

for the recovery of Ireland. Moreover the split affected only some sections of

the New Model, for in the greater part of it the politicians’ machinations had

positively strengthened the solidarity that knit all ranks together. This

was ﬁrmest of all in the cavalry. The presbyterian-dominated Commons

Between Two Wars 357

Clarke Papers, 7; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 44–7.

Rushworth, Historical Collections, VI, 468–70.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 357