Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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members the army would shortly march into the capital to restore parliament
to its freedom. The king, who was at Woburn when he heard of the tumults
in London, reacted by sending to Fairfax and Cromwell and offering to treat
on the basis of the Heads of the Proposals, which had been shown to him a
few days earlier. Fairfax, before setting off, authorized Ireton, in company
with Colonels Rainborough, Hammond, and Rich, to visit him and bring him
to agreement if they could. The result was one of the crucial confrontations of
the decade. The four spent three hours in discussion with the king, and in their
eagerness to reach a quick and binding pact with him they made some sub-
stantial concessions. Berkeley’s earnest advice had been that they represented
the best terms that he could hope for, but Charles treated them as one more
opportunity to play off one party of his quarrelling enemies against the other.
The eagerness of many presbyterians to bring him to London made him con-
fident that he could make the independents improve their offers further, and
he was pretty clearly waiting to see whether the London counter-revolution-
aries might do his business for him at an even lower rate. He took a very high
tone with Ireton and his three companions, believing quite mistakenly that
they needed him more than he needed the army. ‘You cannot be without me’,
he kept saying; ‘you will fall to ruin if I do not sustain you’.
8
He had been
given much bad advice, counterbalancing Berkeley’s good counsel: from
Lauderdale, who gave him false hopes that the Scots and presbyterians were
ready to fight for him; from Sir Lewis Dyve, his former major-general of
Dorset, now a prisoner in the Tower, who grossly overestimated the fighting
potential of the forces lately raised in the City; and by the presbyterian
Colonel Joseph Bamfield, who poisoned his mind against Cromwell and
Ireton.
Consequently he failed to appreciate that he was being offered a unique
and fleeting opportunity. If he had grasped it, by pledging himself there and
then to accept the proposals that Ireton and his colleagues offered in the name
of the army, Fairfax would have escorted not only the Speakers and the inde-
pendent peers and members back to London but the king himself. But what,
it will be asked, if parliament declined to accept those terms as a basis of set-
tlement? Berkeley sought a meeting with Ireton and his fellow-emissaries in
order to put that very question. He was given to understand that the army
would if necessary force parliament to endorse them, presumably by exclud-
ing enough presbyterians to secure a majority. The army did indeed purge a
parliament sixteen months later, with unhappy and deeply unpopular results.
But whereas the purpose of Pride’s Purge was to prevent the conclusion of a
treaty that would restore the king, that of a purge in August 1647 would have
378 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649
8
Quoted from Berkeley’s Memoirs in Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, III, 172;
cf. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 175–8.
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 378
been to effect his restoration. It need not have been on nearly so large a scale
as Colonel Pride’s operation, and it would surely have been widely popular.
Since the first Head of the Proposals was for an early dissolution, followed by
a general election, the probable result would have been a landslide in favour of
a settlement which already had the support of the army, the ‘royal independ-
ents’, and the king himself.
But of course Charles did not assent to the Proposals. Deeply disappointed,
Cromwell, Ireton, and other officers asked him urgently to write ‘ a kind
letter to the army’, giving it his blessing in restoring order and disowning the
actions of the mob. What he wrote was too little and too late; it was much less
supportive than what they asked for, and he delayed it until it was quite clear
that London’s resistance was collapsing; indeed the City formally submitted
before it appeared in print. In one crucial week he threw away not only his
best chance of regaining his throne but the goodwill of a great part of the
army.
The New Model’s entry into London was a well staged demonstration of
its strength and discipline. Fairfax did not hasten it, for he wanted no blood-
shed. He drew up his 15,000 men on Hounslow Health on 3 August—their
ranks stretched for a mile and a half—and escorted the two Speakers, four-
teen peers, and about a hundred MPs in a review of them. Not a shot was fired
nor a sword drawn when his regiments encircled the City next day, and when
he escorted the returning members to the Palace of Westminster on the 5th
his men wore laurel leaves in their hats and the church bells pealed. To com-
plete the triumph, all his twenty regiments paraded in Hyde Park on the 7th, a
Saturday, before marching to Cheapside with colours flying, trumpets
playing, and drums beating. From that artery of the old City they spread out
and moved through all its streets, to be greeted not sullenly but with enthusi-
astic plaudits. Their orderliness impressed everybody; they took not so much
as an apple, it was said, and the contrast with the recent behaviour of the
reformadoes was taken to heart. What would it have been like, one wonders,
if they had been able to bring back the king!
But ceremonies do not resolve serious political crises, and the army still
faced difficult relations with the parliament and (quite soon) growing dissen-
sions in its own ranks. Saye and most of the other active peers were friendly,
but although Holles, Stepleton, and three others of the impeached MPs went
into exile during August the co-operation of the Commons was much less
certain. It needed the concerted pressure of Cromwell, Ireton, and the other
officer-MPs to goad them into annulling the proceedings of the members who
had sat in the absence of Speaker Lenthall after the July tumults. This same
pressure induced the House to impeach the Lord Mayor and three prominent
aldermen for high treason, while others who were identified as leaders of
the violence against the parliament, including City officials, militia officers,
Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 379
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 379
ministers, apprentices, and other citizens, were indicted for treason before
King’s Bench. Fairfax was made Constable of the Tower, and he appointed
the radical independent Colonel Robert Tichborne as its new Lieutenant.
London’s new Lord Mayor was also the army’s choice. In mid-August Fair-
fax set up his headquarters at Kingston, so the military presence remained
close, though apart from one regiment temporarily guarding the Tower he
quartered his troops well outside the capital. The City’s Militia Committee
was made to restore its independent members, and the militias of Southwark
and Westminster were freed from their subjection to it. But the army’s great-
est triumph over the City was its success in securing that all London’s Civil
War fortifications, the so-called lines of communication, eleven miles in com-
pass, were demolished. This of course was meant to prevent the presbyterian
City fathers from ever again deploying their military resources as they had
tried to do in June and July, but it is an interesting indication of how little
either the army or the parliament foresaw that there would be a new civil war
in less than a year’s time. The one thing the army could not do was to make
the City pay its taxes, which remained scandalously in arrears, to the detri-
ment of the soldiers’ pockets. The men did receive a month’s pay on account
in August, but nothing at all in September.
Despite Charles’s treatment of them during the recent crisis, the army com-
manders still had a common interest with the parliamentary independents,
who now dominated the Lords, in bringing him to accept the Heads of the
Proposals as the basis of a settlement. The Commons, however, were anxious
to keep on the right side of the Scottish Covenanters and merely rehashed the
Propositions of Newcastle with a few amendments. These were sent to
Charles early in September, but he in collusion with Cromwell and Ireton
replied on the 9th that he preferred the Heads of the Proposals, which he
asked parliament to take into consideration, as a prelude to admitting him to
a personal treaty. But he bound himself to nothing, and Cromwell and Ireton
lost credit with the more radical spirits in the army for persisting in seeking
agreement with him.
Fairfax was having difficulty in holding its discordant elements together.
At the only meeting of its General Council during August, at Kingston on the
18th, a carefully worded Remonstrance was approved, and was subsequent-
ly read at the head of each regiment. It declared that ‘we shall rejoice as much
as any to see the king brought back to his parliament . . . on such sound terms
as may render the kingdom safe, quiet and happy’.
9
It asked parliament to
take the Heads of the Proposals into speedy consideration, and to exclude all
the members who had sat on during the recent absence of the Speakers, until
380 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649
9
Quoted in Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, p. 186; full text in The Parliamentary or
Constitutional History of England (1751–66), XVI, 251–73.
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 380
they had expressly disavowed the votes that had been passed under pressure
from the mob. The Lords immediately approved the Remonstrance and
returned their thanks to Fairfax, but the Commons took no action on its main
requests. It did not satisfy a growing section of the agitators, who had been
clamouring (and continued to clamour) for the total expulsion of the mem-
bers who had sat on in Lenthall’s absence. Since over a hundred MPs had
done so on one day or another, that would probably have united the parlia-
ment and most of the public against the army and wrecked its leaders’ plans
for a settlement.
Fairfax moved his headquarters to Putney early in September, and there he
instituted regular weekly meetings of the General Council, on Thursdays in
the parish church. The Heads of the Proposals were further debated in three
consecutive sessions; that on the 9th specifically considered the rights of the
king and his heirs. Major Francis White, the senior officer-representative of
Fairfax’s own foot regiment and a committed Leveller, spoke against restor-
ing him on any such terms as those proposed, declaring that there was now no
visible authority in the kingdom but the power of the sword. He was prompt-
ly expelled from the General Council without a dissentient voice, and in
publicly announcing the fact Fairfax reaffirmed that the army upheld the
fundamental authority and government of the kingdom. Soon afterwards the
army’s printer put out a new edition of the Heads of the Proposals, with some
modifications approved at the General Council’s meeting on the 16th.
The Levellers were stepping up their efforts to indoctrinate the agitators
and the soldiery generally, but they were making only limited progress in face
of the respect in which the generals were held and the common desire to pre-
serve the army’s solidarity. They had the active support of a number of offi-
cers, including (despite White’s expulsion) some on the General Council, such
as Commissary Cowling, Lieutenant Chillenden, Captain Edmond Rolfe , and
Major William Rainborough, whose brother Colonel Thomas Rainborough
was also strongly sympathetic. The army being so close to London, it was
from there that it recruited to vacancies in its ranks during the late summer
and autumn, and a fair number of active Levellers enlisted with the purpose
of spreading the word in it. The Leveller leaders were thoroughly disillu-
sioned by now with the present parliament, and bent on an altogether more
radical programme of reform than the Heads of the Poposals offered; Richard
Overton had given a taste of it in July in a tract which he significantly called
An Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body, the Commons at West-
minster, to the Free People in General. Lilburne nursed a grudge against
Cromwell for not having secured his release from the Tower, though now
that the sympathetic Tichborne was its Lieutenant he was allowed to go
about London by day almost as he pleased. He rightly regarded the Lords,
whom his attacks had deeply offended, as the main obstacle to his release, and
Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 381
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 381
he viewed Cromwell’s and Ireton’s close rapport with Saye and Wharton and
their allies with strong suspicion and resentment. Early in September he asked
to see Cromwell, who readily visited him and urged him in as cordial a way as
he could to drop his attacks on the parliament. If he would just be patient,
Cromwell promised, he would receive satisfaction for the wrongs that he had
suffered and honourable employment in the army; but if he was released,
would he promise to be quiet? Lilburne utterly rejected such a condition. He
wanted not just his freedom but a public vindication, and reparations for his
sufferings.
Very soon after seeing Cromwell, Lilburne wrote a widely publicized open
letter to the soldiers of the army, advising them not to entrust the same men
as agitators for too long, since their hopes of gaining promotion were making
them too compliant. But he urged them above all ‘not to trust your great offi-
cers at the general’s quarters no further than you can throw an ox’, for by
their cunning they had ‘most unjustly stolen the power both from your
honest general, and your too flexible agitators’.
10
Ireton was Lilburne’s and
the Levellers’ bête noire; they held him responsible for perverting Cromwell.
They went on to develop a theory that the army, by means of its Solemn
Engagement in June, had sealed a mutual compact which had turned it into a
corporation independent of the state and vested ultimate power over it in its
representative General Council. Consequently its officers, ‘being only admit-
ted by mutual consent . . . would have no power but what was betrusted to
them by the soldiers’.
11
These were notions that the army commanders would not possibly counten-
ance. During September and most of October the General Council served to
contain the discontent in the army’s ranks and to provide a forum for its
material grievances, though from the meagre news of its debates that leaked
out it seems that the agitators were showing increasing opposition to the
senior officers’ dealings with the king. In the Commons on 22 September
Marten and Colonel Rainborough moved that no further addresses should be
made to him, but Cromwell, Ireton, Vane, St John, and Nathaniel Fiennes
strongly opposed them, and the motion was defeated by 84 votes to 34. In
practical terms the army had more to lose than to gain by quarrelling with
the parliament, which in the course of September approved a new establish-
ment for the home forces under Fairfax’s command. They were to total
26,400, which was an advance of 20,000 on what parliament had proposed
only six months earlier. In October the soldiers even got another month’s pay.
For all their professions the Levellers were doubtful friends to the army, for
382 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649
10
J. Lilburne, The Jugglers Discovered (1647), pp. 10, 12, quoted in Woolrych, Soldiers and
Statesmen, p. 192.
11
England’s Freedom, Soldiers’s Rights (1647), reprinted in D. M. Wolfe (ed.), Leveller
Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York and London, 1944), pp. 243–7.
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 382
their demands regarding taxation were utterly inconsistent with its financial
needs. When they came to publish their comprehensive plan for a democrat-
ic commonwealth it would (as we shall see) find no place for a standing army
at all.
These considerations were not lost on the greater part of the army, and Lil-
burne and his associates were so disappointed with the performance of the
existing agitators that towards the end of September they set about engineer-
ing the emergence of new ones. These appeared in five cavalry regiments, to
which Fairfax’s horse should probably be added since Edward Sexby was its
senior agitator. For more than a month they spread no further, and it is not
clear whether they were actually elected by the men they claimed to represent.
In two or three regiments they probably received some form of assent,
12
but
they did not displace their original agitators or gain a place on the General
Council. They were commonly referred to as ‘the agents of the five regiments’
or ‘the London agents’, and it was in London that they regularly met—daily
in the early stages. They were essentially proselytizers for the Leveller move-
ment, and they seem to have been organized mainly by Lilburne’s young
friend John Wildman, a man of radical temperament and gentry background
who had some knowledge of the law. They were probably acting already as a
caucus before they sought any mandate from their fellow-soldiers.
From this source there came a challenge that shook the army to its roots
and threatened to give a revolutionary turn to national politics. It was a paper
called The Case of the Army Truly Stated, which was signed by the agents of
the five regiments (and nobody else) and presented to Fairfax by two of them
on 18 October. Its main author was almost certainly Wildman, though Sexby
may well have had a hand in it, and the other agents probably added passages
here and there. It alleged, with much rhetoric but little truth, that the army
was in a worse situation than when it had gathered at Newmarket in June,
and that its senior officers had been perverting the whole intention of its
Solemn Engagement by their sinister manipulation of its General Council.
They had, it claimed, frequently discouraged the agitators from consulting
over the means of redressing the people’s grievances and warned them not to
meddle with matters that did not concern them. They had not pressed for the
reforms and the redress of grievances that the army’s declarations had called
for, and they had failed to insist on the expulsion of the members who had sat
on in early August; nor had they secured an early date for a dissolution and
the abolition of monopolies, tithes, and the excise (there was no mention of
the monthly assessment, on which the army’s pay mainly depended). They
were proposing to restore the king with his royal veto intact, and allowing his
Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 383
12
Gentles, in New Model Army, pp. 199–200, persuades me to modify the scepticism that
I expressed in Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 203–6.
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 383
evil councillors free access to him (though that in fact was put a stop to in
mid-October).
The positive demands of The Case of the Army were based on the principle
that all power rested originally in the whole body of the people, and that
supreme authority, both legislative and executive, lay in their elected repre-
sentatives. It called for an immediate and drastic purge of the present parlia-
ment, a dissolution within nine or ten months, and thereafter biennial
elections at an appointed date in which ‘all the freeborn’ aged twenty-one or
over should have the vote unless they had forfeited their freedom through
delinquency, which in the context meant royalism. It did not need saying that
the freeborn were exclusively male. Liberty of conscience and freedom from
conscription were to be guaranteed, and a range of radical reforms was pro-
posed, including the codification of the entire law of England in one compact
volume, written in plain English. The lands of deans and chapters should be
sold to meet the army’s arrears (they would in fact have met only a third of
them), and its current pay should be found from the allegedly vast sums that
had gone to court parasites and the millions lying frozen in the ‘dead stocks’
of City companies. This was hogwash; as Ian Gentles has written, ‘The notion
of paying the army £45,000 a month out of sinecurists’ salaries and the hid-
den capital of City companies is akin to the belief that the modern welfare
state can be financed merely by soaking the rich’.
13
The Case of the Army is
remembered chiefly for the memorable debate on manhood suffrage which it
prompted, but its main purpose when it was written was to challenge the
political direction that Cromwell and Ireton were giving to the army, particu-
larly in their pursuit of a treaty with the king, and to renew the bid to control
army politics from the bottom up. Leveller elements were already present
among its demands, and its signatories, the new agents, would very soon be
part of a Leveller campaign to weld the army into an instrument of revolu-
tionary action.
Fairfax, sensing the danger of the document, put it before the next weekly
meeting of the General Council, on 21 October. The day before, Cromwell
made a very long speech in the Commons, totally dissociating himself and
Fairfax from the proposals in The Case of the Army, which was already on
the bookstalls, and reaffirming his commitment to the historic monarchy and
to the reinstatement of the present king. The General Council gave the mani-
festo a cool reception, not relishing its allegations that it had been merely the
generals’ poodle and that the army was rent by faction. The regular agitators
of the five regiments for which it claimed to speak repudiated it. It was
referred to a committee with a view to disciplinary action against its authors
or instigators, but probably because of the presence on it of Sexby, Lockyer,
384 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649
13
Gentles, New Model Army, p. 201.
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 384
and Allen the committee took a softer line and sent these three to the new
agents’ meeting with a cordial invitation to send representatives to explain
their position to the next Thursday General Council.
It was not a time for the army to weaken itself by internal discussion. In
Scotland the convention of estates had just voted to keep its army afoot until
at least March 1648, and Hamilton’s party was now in almost even balance
with Argyll’s. Hamilton’s brother Lanark travelled south with Loudoun to
see the king; they visited him at Hampton Court on 22 October and raised his
hopes of getting armed support from Scotland without having to take the
Covenant himself. A day or two later they reappeared with fifty armed horse-
men and urged him to escape with them then and there. He was not quite
ready for that yet, but the option made him less responsive to any propos-
itions that either the parliament or the army might have to offer. In the Com-
mons it was getting harder for Cromwell and the royal independents to keep
their peace process afloat in face of the growing minority who already re-
garded Charles as unfit to treat with.
Such was the background to the most famous non-parliamentary debates
in British history, those held at Putney from late October into early Novem-
ber. They took a very different course from what the senior officers expected.
Fairfax, Cromwell, and Ireton had hoped that the General Council would
reject the accusations in The Case of the Army, reaffirm the army’s essential
unity of purpose, and get on with the business of agreeing a set of terms that
could be put to the king in its name. What Trooper Robert Everard, a new
agent of Cromwell’s own regiment, brought to headquarters on the day
before the General Council’s next meeting, however, was no mere reply to its
committee’s written objections to The Case of the Army but an entirely new
document styled An Agreement of the People. It had been approved that very
day by a meeting of the agents of the five regiments, together with other
soldiers and some civilian Levellers, including Wildman, who was deputed to
speak for it before the General Council. It seems to have been swiftly put
together in order to grasp the opportunity to air the Levellers’ larger aims
before the army’s representative body. Wildman almost certainly had a hand in
drafting it, but its style, so concise and lapidary compared with the sprawl of
The Case of the Army, suggests that its main another was William Walwyn.
14
When Cromwell read it he perceived at once that there were ‘new designs a-
driving’ and that the General Council would have to thrash them out.
Whereas The Case of the Army set forth a programme for action in the spe-
cific political circumstances of October 1647, the Agreement of the People
dealt in first principles. That very fact widened the differences between its
Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 385
14
See Barbara Taft’s introduction to The Writings of William Walwyn, edited by J. R.
McMichael and herself (Athens, Ga., 1989), p. 31. Text of An Agreement of the People in
Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 333–5.
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 385
authors and the army leaders. The latter were still seeking a settlement based
on the ancient constitution and the fundamental laws of England, boldly
though they proposed to modify them, and they still hoped to have it valid-
ated by the traditionally binding assent of King, Lords, and Commons. The
Levellers by contrast had come to regard the present laws as largely a relic of
‘the Norman Yoke’, and now that the people had defeated the last of the Con-
queror’s successors they held the constitution to be a tabula rasa. Only the
individual assents of the free people could legitimate a new and valid consti-
tution, and to that end the Agreement was offered for their subscription—
offered as something altogether higher than a statute, which future
parliaments could repeal or modify, indeed as nothing less than an unalter-
able declaration of the principles upon which future parliaments must oper-
ate. The people’s representatives in parliament, it affirmed, had full power,
‘without the consent or concurrence of any other person or persons’, to make
laws, appoint officers of state and magistrates of every degree, declare war,
make peace—indeed to do everything that the sovereign people did not
reserve to themselves. Their power was ‘inferior only to theirs who choose
them’, but some rights were so ineradicably planted in the people by nature
that a paramount law must prevent even their chosen representatives from
infringing them. Those affirmed in the Agreement included freedom of reli-
gion, immunity from conscription, and total equality before the law, regard-
less of birth, rank, or tenure. Parliament itself should be reformed by
reapportioning constituencies according to the number of their inhabitants,
not their contribution to taxation (as suggested in the Heads of the Propos-
als). That was consistent with manhood suffrage, but the Agreement said
nothing about the franchise; nor did it specifically mention either the king or
the Lords, or even suggest who was to govern in the eighteen-month intervals
between parliaments, which were to sit no longer than six months. It is a
document as remarkable for its silences, which were doubtless deliberate, as
for its prescriptions.
The fact that Cromwell (who presided, Fairfax being unwell again) caused
the debates engendered by the Agreement to be taken down almost verbatim
shows that he and Ireton were aware of how much hung on their outcome.
We owe their record to William Clarke, a Londoner of humble origin in his
mid-twenties who had risen under John Rushworth in the army’s secretariat
and was now secretary to its General Council.
15
He was master of an early
386 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649
15
The text of the Putney debates is available in two editions: by C. H. Firth in Clarke Papers,
I, 226–406, and by A. S. P. Woodhouse in Puritanism and Liberty (1938; 2nd ed. 1950)
pp. 1–124. Firth provides an exact transcript of Clarke’s text apart from an occasional transpos-
ition of phrases or sentences; Woodhouse judiciously edits it and modernizes the spelling, mak-
ing it more accessible to the general reader. In quotations I have used Firth’s text, but modernized
the spelling; I have not thought it necessary to give page references for each one.
ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 386
form of shorthand, which he later transcribed himself. His loyalty and intel-
ligence won him new responsibilities under General Monck in the 1650s, and
in 1661 he became Charles II’s Secretary at War and a knight. Sadly, he was
mortally wounded on Monck’s flagship five years later, in a battle with the
Dutch.
At the General Council on 28 October Sexby introduced the delegates from
the new agents’ organization: two soldiers, Everard being one, and the civil-
ians John Wildman and Maximilian Petty. He then told Cromwell and Ireton
to their faces that their ‘credits and reputation hath been much blasted’ by
their striving to please the king and their support of a parliament of rotten
members. Very soon the fundamental difference of purpose between the army
commanders and the Leveller group stood revealed. The former held them-
selves bound by their pledges to respect the authority of parliament and to
seek a settlement sealed by its authority, or (if not) by that of a new parlia-
ment following upon the self-dissolution of the present one. The Levellers on
the other hand wanted the army to reoccupy London, break the parliament,
and inaugurate a new and revolutionary constitution, which could only be
done by force. The prospects of the Agreement gaining enough subscriptions
to give it any kind of democratic validity, if it was imposed by a military dic-
tatorship upon a nation yearning for peace and still devoted to its monarchy,
were non-existent. No wonder the feelings of the General Council were
divided. Many of those present, officers and soldiers alike, must have felt torn
between on the one hand the powerful attraction of such ideals as equal polit-
ical and legal rights and total liberty of conscience, and on the other a deep
reluctance to divide the army and engage in political violence in defiance of its
trusted general and lieutenant-general. Strong ties bound those who had
marched and fought together, and who knew when they might have to do so
again? We lack evidence, however, about the sentiments of the rank and file,
for the only soldiers recorded as having spoken during the three days’ debate
at Putney (apart from one brief anonymous interjection) were Sexby, Allen,
Lockyer, Everard, and the unnamed new agent who came with him, all com-
mitted Levellers or fellow-travellers, though Allen would not stay with them
for long.
Although the Agreement was read to the General Council on the 28th, there
was no debate that day of its specific contents. Cromwell and Ireton success-
fully insisted that the first thing to decide was whether the council was free to
consider such radical changes at all. They argued that the army was bound by
its public declarations from June onward, in which it had promised obedience
to parliament if its legitimate demands were met, and that it remained moral-
ly committed to pursue the path of negotiation which it had opened up with
the Heads of the Proposals, at least until they had been fully considered by
king and parliament. The Leveller spokesmen, however, contended that
Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 387
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