Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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to lay siege to Dublin. But Michael Jones stood in his way, holding a good

position on Dungan’s Hill near Trim. Many of Jones’s men had been re-

cruited from the provincial forces lately disbanded in England. Their conduct

and discipline at ﬁrst left much to be desired, but they knew how to ﬁght.

Preston was urged to give battle by civilian advisers who knew that the

Confederates could not keep him supplied during a protracted campaign. He

did so on 8 August, and was utterly routed. That left Leinster so vulnerable

that O’Neill’s dreaded Ulstermen had to be brought in to help protect the

province, which led to a further worsening of relations between the predomi-

nantly Old English moderate party in the Confederation and the clericalist

and Old Irish militants who followed Rinuccini and O’Neill.

Southward in Munster the English parliament still had the powerful support

of Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin. He was that fairly rare bird, a strong-

ly protestant Old Irish aristocrat. He had co-operated with Strafford, and in

the early years of the Irish rebellion he had fought against its perpetrators as

a royalist. But he was alienated by Charles’s readiness to do business with

Confederates and make large concessions to Irish catholics, and he was under-

standably dismayed when the king granted the presidency of Munster, whose

functions he had been exercising and to which he had a strong claim, to the

Earl of Portland. He declared for the English parliament in July 1644 and for

the next four years he fought vigorously for it, not least when he repulsed a

heavy incursion into southern Ireland by the catholic Earl of Castlehaven in

1645. His change of allegiance was not purely opportunist, for he genuinely

had the protestant interest in Ireland at heart, and when he changed sides

again in 1648 it would be because he could no longer bear to serve masters

who threatened the very life of his king. All through 1647, however, he went

on ﬁghting hard against the Confederates. He took Dungarvan in May, so

opening a threat to Waterford, and one castle after another fell to him after

that. His storming of Cashel on 14 September was followed by a slaughter

that preﬁgured the horrors of Drogheda and Wexford, and two months later

he confronted the Confederate army of Munster under Viscount Taaffe in the

battle of Knocknanuss, near Mallow. He virtually annihilated it, at a cost of

only about 150 men killed, while Taaffe reputedly lost two-thirds of his 7,200

troops. By the end of the year Inchiquin was master of southern Ireland.

By then, too, there was nowhere in the whole country that could still pose

a threat that need trouble the contending parties in England before they had

resolved their own differences. Politically the Confederation was in as much

disarray as its armed forces, for when the General Assembly met again in

November its divisions threatened to destroy it. These arose chieﬂy over the

election of a new Supreme Council, and over the choice of envoys to be sent

to Spain, France, and the papacy in a quest for foreign aid. The clerical party

carried a decision, if it came to a last resort, to ask the papacy to assume the

368 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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protectorate of Ireland. Few of the Old English representatives relished this,

and few cared to bow to O’Neill as military supremo in Ireland, which is what

Rinuccini’s plans entailed. The Assembly dissolved itself on Christmas

Eve, and its less sanguine members must have faced the year 1648 with

foreboding.

So it can be seen that when the English army confronted the parliament early

in June 1647 neither party had much to fear in the short term from enemies

outside England, and even less after Michael Jones’s important victory at

Dungan’s Hill. The Commons, however, were so alarmed by the army’s deﬁ-

ance and by its seizure of the king that they sat all through the night of 3–4

June, while the regiments were converging on Kentford Heath, and at two in

the morning they voted to strike the Declaration of Dislike out of their Jour-

nal. Later in the day a lengthy ‘Humble Representation of the Dissatisfactions

of the Army’ was read to each regiment at the rendezvous, signed by most of

their ofﬁcers and men (such as could write), and presented to Fairfax. Much

of it was couched in the typical language of the agitators, and it voiced famil-

iar grievances. It demonstrated the failure of the army’s opponents to drive a

wedge between ofﬁcers and men, or between horse and foot. Fairfax, how-

ever, was anxious to keep deﬁance to a minimum and to maintain military

discipline. In an exhausting day—indeed he did not even get to bed that

night—he personally addressed each regiment in turn, urging it to show mod-

eration and to respect the civil authority. Much the greater part of the army

was present, though a few units were on duty too far aﬁeld to participate. The

cheers that greeted Fairfax everywhere showed what a hero he still was to his

men and how much they appreciated his sympathy and support, but he was

not really a political animal, and now that the army was assuming such a

political role it would need a different talent from his to guide it along con-

structive courses.

Much of the initiative in this ﬁeld was assumed during the next two years

by Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton, the Commissary-General. He had

the keenest and most original political mind in the army, though as a tactician

and debater he had his limitations. He was almost certainly the main author

of The Solemn Engagement of the Army, which was read to all the regiments

on the second day of the rendezvous and assented to by them. It immediately

assumed a much greater importance among the army’s manifestoes than the

agitators’ Humble Representation, though it shows clear signs that agitators

were conferred with in its preparation. It was indeed considerably more than

a manifesto; it was, in that age of covenants, a covenant by the army. All its

members engaged with each other, and with the parliament and kingdom, to

disband cheerfully or to remain in service, as parliament should require, when

they were given satisfaction for their stated grievances and when they received

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 369

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security that when disbanded neither they nor ‘other the freeborn people of

England’ would remain subject to oppression and injury through the continu-

ance in power of the men who had abused parliament in its past proceedings

against the army. This was tantamount to a demand for a purge of the pres-

byterian leadership. Furthermore the redress and security thus requested

must meet with the satisfaction of a startlingly new body which came to be

called the General Council of the Army. It was to include not only the senior

commanders who normally attended the general’s council of war, but two

ofﬁcers and two soldiers elected by each regiment. This General Council was

not to meet until mid-July, but until it was satisﬁed the Solemn Engagement

declared that ‘we shall not willingly disband nor divide, nor suffer ourselves

to be disbanded or divided’.

The solidarity of the army was not complete, because of those ofﬁcers who

had engaged with the parliamentary commissioners to serve in Ireland. They

had been segregated, though a fair number of them changed their minds and

came to Kentford Heath. There were others, however, who did not appear

there because they were presbyterians by conviction and not prepared to defy

the parliament, while yet others who had tried to oppose the rendezvous had

been driven off by their men. The ofﬁcers who left the army in May and June

for one reason or another were a minority, but numerous enough for their

departure to alter its political and social character signiﬁcantly. Their total

number cannot be accurately established, but among the 220-odd senior men

who commanded regiments, companies, or troops—i.e. from colonels down

to captain-lieutenants—57 left the service: almost exactly one in four.

They

included eight colonels, two lieutenants-colonels, and eight majors, and since

most of these were presbyterians their departure meant that the army no

longer exhibited the broad political spectrum that had originally character-

ized it. Moreover since its formation 33 ofﬁcers at or above company com-

mander level had died or been killed and 25 had resigned earlier, so the

turnover in senior ofﬁcers amounted to 57 per cent by the end of June 1647.

The great majority of those who died or departed were replaced by promot-

ing men already within the army, and they were very often of humbler origin.

The social level of the ofﬁcer corps was thus lowered appreciably, though

around half of those in the more senior ranks would probably still have

styled themselves gentlemen. Nevertheless it was from this time that men of

370 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Full text in Rushworth, Historical Collections, VI, 501–2; greater part in A. S. P. Wood-

house (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty (1938), pp. 401–3.

Gentles, New Model Army, p. 168, 487; I. Gentles, ‘The New Model ofﬁcer corps in 1647:

a collective portrait’, Social History XXII (1997), pp. 127–44. In this and the next paragraph

I am deeply indebted to Professor Gentles’s work. In respect of one detail, I would put the total

of more senior ofﬁcers slightly higher, since I see no reason not to count adjutant-generals,

quartermaster-generals, and others attached to the general staff, whom Gentles excludes.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 370

notoriously modest birth like Harrison, Pride, Okey, Goffe, and Tomlinson

achieved a new prominence in the politics of the army.

About the junior ranks of ofﬁcers—lieutenants, cornets, ensigns, and quar-

termasters—much less is known. They brought the total number of com-

missioned ofﬁcers in the New Model to well over 700, while if non-

commissioned ofﬁcers were added the tally came to 2,320.

A pamphlet of

June 1647 claimed to speak for 167 ofﬁcers who had left the service, but it

named none; its authors had a motive for pitching the number high, and some

of those whom it counted may have returned to the army when it closed

ranks. All that can be said with conﬁdence is that proportionally fewer junior

than senior ofﬁcers left it; my estimate would be one in ﬁve at most. The num-

ber of soldiers who did so was only about 800 out of more than 19,000. The

thinning of the ofﬁcers’ ranks in May and June left a virtually united army to

confront the parliament, and the consequent promotions from the ranks nar-

rowed further the social divide between subalterns, NCOs and troopers in the

cavalry. When new divisions began to appear in the army during the autumn,

they were of a quite different nature from those of the spring.

From Newmarket the army set off on a slow advance towards London,

where it caused great consternation. The guards were doubled, the portcul-

lises lowered, the City fathers obtained parliament’s permission to raise their

own cavalry, and Massey drove through the streets in his coach, urging the

citizens to defend themselves. On 10 June Fairfax sent an assurance that the

army sought ‘no alteration of the civil government’, but he allowed some of

his ofﬁcers to draw up articles of impeachment against Holles, Stapleton,

Massey, Waller, Clotworthy, and six other MPs who were held to have been

particularly responsible for the parliamentary campaign against the army,

and he set up his headquarters at St Albans, little more than twenty miles from

London. There on the 14th a summary of the charges against the eleven was

delivered to the parliamentary commissioners with the army. It was of course

quite unconstitutional for anybody but the House of Commons to institute

impeachment proceedings, but that same day the army gave notice that it was

advancing further into political territory. The general and his council of war

approved a document that was shortly published as A Declaration from Sir

Thomas Fairfax and the Army, which purported to be a vindication, as

promised in the Solemn Engagement, clearing the New Model from all the

scandals that had been cast upon it. But it went a good deal further than that,

and again it was essentially the work of Ireton. Through it, the New Model

staked a claim to speak and act for the whole kingdom, proudly asserting

‘that we were not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary

power of a state, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 371

Clarke Papers, I, 19.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 371

parliament to the defence of our own and the people’s just rights and liber-

ties’. It invoked the examples of the Scots, the Dutch, and the Portuguese in

associating by way of covenant to promote the principles of right and free-

dom against governments that denied them. Its ﬁrst demand was that parlia-

ment should be purged of such members as had rendered themselves unﬁt to

sit by abusing their powers. Further, on the grounds that too long a continu-

ance of the same men in power conduced to tyranny, it called for legislation

to set a maximum duration to each parliament’s life, and in order to ‘render

the parliament a more equal representation of the whole’ it requested an

immediate and radical reapportionment of seats that would make the size of

constituencies proportional to what they contributed to national taxation.

These reforms were to be embodied in statutes, and when the king had assent-

ed to them and to whatever else was needed to secure the kingdom’s future

peace, his own rights should be settled,‘so far as may consist with the right

and freedom of the subject’. Finally, the army had no design ‘to overthrow

Presbytery’ or to set up Independency as a national religion; it asked only that

those who dissented from the established forms should suffer no persecution

or civil disabilities.

This advocacy of liberty of conscience and positive parliamentary reform

marked two vital differences between the army’s proposals and any that the

parliament had yet put to the king. Another lay in their relative mildness

towards the beaten royalists, for after a few examples had been made they

desired a general act of oblivion and a burying of ‘distinction of parties’. The

army’s Declaration was a step towards the comprehensive alternative polit-

ical programme that it would take into debate little more than a month later.

The situation remained very tense through most of June. The agitators con-

tinued to hold their own unauthorized meetings, and a number of ofﬁcers

worked hand in glove with them. They kept pressing for a march on London

in order to enforce the arrest of the eleven impeached MPs, which the House

was resisting. Fairfax did indeed advance his headquarters to Uxbridge, only

ﬁfteen miles from Westminister, and stationed some of his regiments even

nearer, in deﬁance of an order from the Commons not to bring the army with-

in forty miles. The City went on organizing what defences it could and the

Lord Mayor called the trained bands to arms, but most of the citizenry

showed a sensible reluctance to engage in heroics against Fairfax’s and

Cromwell’s veterans. Both Houses voted on 15 June to bring the king to West-

minster, but it was an empty gesture. Charles was ﬁrmly in the army’s keep-

ing, and happier with his new custodians than with his old. He appreciated

the courtesy with which the senior ofﬁcers treated him, the ready access

372 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Printed with unimportant cuts in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 403–9 where it

is called (as it often is) ‘A Representation of the Army’. I have used the title given to it on its ﬁrst

publication, by the army’s regular printer.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 372

allowed to his friends, and most of all the ministrations of his favourite chap-

lains, Sheldon, Hammond, and Holdsworth. He spent the middle fortnight of

June at his father’s old hunting lodge at Newmarket, enjoying the chase as of

old, and freely receiving the respects of large numbers of the East Anglian

gentry. After that stay he was moved by comfortable stages to Hampton

Court, and on the way he was reunited with his children James and Elizabeth,

who were allowed to spend two nights with him.

Meanwhile, as June wore on, Fairfax took pains to establish better rela-

tions with London’s Common Council, and when parliament made a number

of conciliatory gestures he responded by drawing his headquarters back to

Reading. But he could not tolerate the continued existence of potential rival

armies, and on 16 July he wrote to the Speaker requesting that all the land

forces in the kingdom should be put under one command. His pretext was

that the Northern Association army had mutinied against Major-General

Poyntz. There was irony here; Stapleton had ordered Poyntz to stand ready

for action against the New Model, but emissaries from the latter’s agitators

had stirred up resistance among Poyntz’s men, who arrested him early in July

and took him to Fairfax’s Reading headquarters as a prisoner. Fairfax

released him on parole, and was promptly appointed by parliament as com-

mander-in-chief of all the forces in England, including whatever part of them

was to be sent to Ireland.

This was a most important gain, but it was going to take more than this to

satisfy some of his agitators. On 16 July he convened at Reading the ﬁrst

meeting of the General Council of the Army, and a formidable new petition

from the agitators kept it in debate until midnight. They called (among other

things) for an immediate march on London, seeing that parliament and the

City had gone back to their old ways since the army drew back; for the expul-

sion of the eleven impeached MPs within four days; for a prohibition by par-

liament on the raising or bringing in of any forces other than Fairfax’s, on

pain of treason; and for the release of John Lilburne and other Leveller pris-

oners, with reparation for their wrongful imprisonment. But Cromwell and

Ireton urged strongly against resorting to force, and ﬁnally persuaded the agi-

tators to drop their pressure for an immediate march. In return the General

Council agreed to put their other main points before parliament, especially

the restoration of the City’s old militia ofﬁcers and the liberation of the

Leveller prisoners.

The army commanders had assembled the General Council for a larger

purpose than the venting of old grievances, and they had good reason for

wanting to allay dissension, both within the army’s own ranks and between it

and the parliament. On the second day of the debates at Reading Ireton read

out the draft of a comprehensive scheme for the settlement of the kingdom

which soon became known as the Heads of the Proposals. His hope and that

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 373

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of his fellow-generals was that they could, when perfected, be put to both king

and parliament as the desires of the whole army, and provide a way out of the

political impasse that had existed since the Propositions of Newcastle had

been presented a year and more earlier. Until recently Ireton has always been

regarded as their author, and there still seems to be no good reason for doubt-

ing that the conception and the formulation of the Heads of Proposals were

essentially his work. But there is now evidence that they were put together in

close consultation with a group of leading independents from both Houses,

including Saye, Wharton, and Northumberland in the Lords and Vane,

St John, William Pierrepont, and Saye’s son Nathaniel Fiennes in the Commons.

For about ten days before the Reading debates began messages passed fre-

quently between this group and Cromwell and Ireton, and Wharton was a

parliamentary commissioner at army headquarters from the end of June

onwards.

What we are witnessing, therefore, is not an attempt by the army

to promulgate peace terms over the heads of the parliament but a collabor-

ation between the generals and the leaders in both Houses of the main party

that had stood against the presbyterians all along. Nor were these the army

chief’s only important contacts, for the queen and her friends had lately sent

over Sir John Berkeley, the one-time royalist commander in Devon, with spe-

ciﬁc directions to promote an agreement between the great ofﬁcers and the

king. Berkeley reached Reading on 12 July and soon established a remarkable

rapport with Cromwell and Ireton, who made no secret of their hopes of ﬁnd-

ing a basis for peace that would be more acceptable to both king and kingdom

than what had been offered so far. Berkeley gained the impression that the

whole army, agitators included, would have been glad to come to terms with

the king. The prospect looked promising; the main rub lay in Charles himself,

who would not accept Berkeley’s reading of the situation. He distrusted the

chief ofﬁcers, he said, because they had asked him for no personal favours or

rewards.

It is a striking testimony to the openness of army politics that Ireton chose,

obviously with Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s approval, to put his draft Proposals

before the General Council, with over a hundred ofﬁcers and the full comple-

ment of agitators present, before communicating them to either the parlia-

ment or the king, or even formally to the parliamentary commissioners at

headquarters. The great difference between his scheme (concerted with the

independents) and that of the presbyterians was that whereas the Propos-

itions of Newcastle were mainly preoccupied with the disposal of power, the

374 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

J. S. A. Adamson, ‘The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647’, Historical

Journal XXX (1987), pp. 571–9, 601. Dr Adamson throws new and valuable light on the role of

Saye and Wharton in the formulation of the Proposals, but I think he goes too far in minimizing

Ireton’s. Cf. Gentles, New Model Army, p. 492n. 317, and Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen,

pp. 151–2, 162–5.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 374

Heads of the Proposals were much more concerned with genuine reform and

with healing old enmities. Parliaments, they proposed, should be elected

biennially, to sit for a minimum of 120 days (unless they agreed to dissolve

earlier) and a maximum of 240. Following perhaps the Scottish example,

each outgoing parliament was to appoint a committee to take care of

parliamentary interests until the next one met. Rotten boroughs should be

disfranchised and the number of county seats increased, with the aim of

giving representation to counties in proportion to their contribution to tax-

ation. Parliament was to appoint the great ofﬁcers of state for the next ten

years, after which, on a vacancy, the two Houses were to present three candi-

dates and the king to make his choice from them. The privy council was to be

replaced by a council of state consisting of ‘persons now to be agreed upon’,

who were to hold ofﬁce for a ﬁxed term not exceeding seven years, and were

to have the overall direction of the county trained bands, though the army

and navy were to be controlled by parliament itself or its nominees for the

next ten years. It is not clear whether the council of state was intended to be a

permanent institution; perhaps it was envisaged as transitional, for nothing

was said as to who should appoint its members in the future. Active royalists

were to be debarred from the next two biennial parliaments, and for the next

ﬁve years they were not to hold public ofﬁce without the consent of parlia-

ment or the council of state. Not more than ﬁve were to be excepted from par-

don; the rest were to compound for their estates according to the degree of

their involvement, as in the Newcastle Propositions, but at much lower rates

and only if worth £200 or more in land or goods. Those, however, who had

shown a sincere disposition towards peace since the end of the war should be

exempted, and terms granted to those who had surrendered were to be hon-

oured. The king was to be restored with no other diminution of his rights than

these proposals speciﬁed.

It was with regard to religion, however, that Ireton’s proposed terms dif-

fered most refreshingly from the parliament’s, and here he is said to have

made some large concessions at a late stage, on the plea of Berkeley or even

the king himself. The use of the Book of Common Prayer was to be permitted

but not imposed, and there should be no penalties for not coming to the

parish church or for attending other meetings for worship. Bishops were to be

allowed to continue, though without coercive power or jurisdiction. No one

was to be forced to take the covenant. The whole parliamentary settlement of

church government and worship was passed over in silence.

Nothing so tol-

erant was to come before parliament again for more than forty years.

The immediate reaction of the General Council to the Proposals was

favourable, if cautious. William Allen probably spoke for most of his

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 375

Text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 316–26.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 375

fellow-agitators when he said that there were ‘things of great weight, having

relation to the settling of a kingdom, which is a great work; truly the work we

all expect to have a share in’. But he acknowledged ‘that we are most of us but

young statesmen’, and would want some time for debate.

There was no

opposition in principle to seeking a settlement on the lines proposed, but a

wide range of grievances was evidently raised during the day’s debate, for a

miscellaneous list of matters for parliament’s early attention, including tithes,

the excise, the general inequality of taxation, and an assortment of legal abuses,

were shortly added to the Heads of the Proposals. These were referred for

further consideration to a committee of twelve ofﬁcers and twelve agitators.

The prospects soon looked fair for a peace on terms that the king could in

honour accept, and would have left Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents,

and even sectaries free to worship according to their consciences. The pro-

posals were reported to parliament on 20 July and taken into debate immedi-

ately by the Lords, where the Saye–Northumberland group dominated the

dozen or so peers who still attended. On the same day the eleven impeached

members, sensing that the game was up, requested and obtained the

Commons’ leave to go overseas, and withdrew. Within the next two days par-

liament restored the control of the City’s trained bands to the old Militia

Committee, ordered the disbandment of the troops whom it had detached

from the New Model Army and embodied in its own counter-force, and

passed the desired declaration against the introduction of any forces from

outside the kingdom.

This apparent surrender to the army, however, triggered a violent reaction

from those in London who saw it as their prime enemy, especially the City

presbyterians and the reformadoes. Many of the latter had lost their military

employment when the New Model was created, and not a few had fought for

the king. On the 21st large numbers of militiamen, reformadoes, apprentices,

watermen, and others gathered in Skinners’ Hall to sign a ‘Solemn Engage-

ment’—perhaps a conscious challenge to the army’s recent one—pledging

their utmost efforts to bring the king to Westminster, in order to restore him

on the terms that he himself had offered. They addressed it not to parliament,

which declared two days later that support for it constituted treason, but to

the corporation of London. Next evening two or three thousand reformadoes

demonstrated in St James’s Field, clamouring for the City to join them in

pressuring parliament to bring the king back to his capital. The Common

Council was divided, but the Commons’ vote to reinstate the old City Militia

Committee temporarily reunited it. It welcomed two mass petitions urging it

not to yield control over its trained bands, and on the 26th it processed in a

body to Westminister to present them to parliament. An angry crowd of citi-

376 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Clarke Papers, I, 213.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 376

zens followed the City fathers, with apprentices noisily prominent, and it was

bent on no mere peaceful demonstration. It was actively encouraged, if not

incited, by some prominent members of the City government, by a number of

Presbyterian clergymen and militia ofﬁcers, and almost certainly by some of

the eleven impeached MPs. This mob ﬁrst invaded the House of Lords, and

bullied the peers into voting to restore the City’s presbyterian militia Com-

mittee and rescinding parliament’s condemnation of its Solemn Engagement.

Then it forced its way into the Commons’ chamber, abusing and insulting the

members—some had excrement thrown in their faces—until they not only

conﬁrmed the Lords’ votes but passed a resolution inviting the king to

London forthwith. While under this intimidation they sent urgently to the

Lord Mayor for some trained bands to protect them and restore order, but he

ignored their request.

Once free of the mob the Speakers of both Houses, with eight peers and

ﬁfty-seven MPs, left Westminster and took refuge with the army. The futility

of this attempt at counter-revolution was soon exposed, because it met with

virtually no response outside London, and London itself quickly discovered

that it had no means of defence. For a week the members remaining at West-

minster made a show of carrying on business under illegitimate replacement

speakers, and forbade the army to come within thirty miles. They tried to acti-

vate a counter-force against it, with Massey in overall command and Waller

in charge of the horse. The City government had the drums beaten to muster

not only the militia but all male citizens of military age; the response was

humiliatingly feeble. Afterwards there were sneers at soft-living townsmen

ﬂinching from the rigours and dangers of the ﬁeld, but they were quite mis-

placed. London’s trained bands had fought bravely in pre-New Model days,

when they had a cause they could believe in, but there was no good reason

why they should take arms against the veterans who had won the Civil War

for parliament, especially under orders of more than doubtful legality. And

strong though the Presbyterians, both religious and political, were in the cap-

ital, their hold over it was by no means complete. London had large numbers of

Independents and sectaries who took heart from the army’s championship of

freedom of conscience, and while many apprentices, ﬁred with civic patri-

otism, had rioted happily on 26 July, many others were drawn to the Leveller

movement and saw the army agitators as a means of promoting its aims. The

army itself had friends in London, which was home to many of its ofﬁcers,

and where several of its regiments had been recruited. The populous suburbs

of Southwark and the Tower Hamlets chafed under the City government’s

attempts to extend its authority over them, and welcomed the army as a

liberator.

Fairfax had authority as well as power on his side when he announced on

the 28th that at the request of both Speakers and the fugitive peers and

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 377

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