Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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parliament’s rottenness was manifest, that the king had forfeited any right to

be further treated with, and that no engagements were binding if they stood in

the way of the rights of the people; if the matters propounded in the

Agreement were the people’s due, they stood self-justiﬁed. The outcome of the

day’s debate was the appointment of a committee to sift the army’s declar-

ations and itemize the commitments contained in them, so as to help the Gen-

eral Council, in a special meeting in a few days’ time, to assess how far the

Agreement’s proposals were compatible with them. This was not, as has some-

times been said, just an obstructive procedural stratagem, for the future polit-

ical role of the army hung on the question. Nor was it a mere delaying tactic,

for the committee was to convene next day, the new agents and their mentors

were invited to come and put their case to it , and the General Council was to

meet again next Monday to consider its ﬁndings. Cromwell’s attitude was con-

ciliatory, not confrontational; he assured the spokesmen for the Agreement

that they would not ﬁnd him and his fellow-ofﬁcers ‘wedded and glued to

forms of government’, and readily acknowledged for his part ‘that the

foundation and supremacy is in the people, radically in them’.

The famous debate on Friday the 29th, in which the Leveller spokesmen

joined issue with Cromwell and Ireton over the very foundations of a free

commonwealth, came about almost by accident. It took place neither in Put-

ney church nor in a session of the General Council. In the Thursday meeting,

before an hour was ﬁxed for its committee to meet, Lieutenant-Colonel Goffe

made an urgent and eloquent plea that they should gather ﬁrst to seek the

Lord’s guidance in prayer. He probably spoke for many when he said that ‘it

hath been our trouble night and day that God hath not been with us as for-

merly’. This did not please Wildman, who spoke more than anybody else at

Putney except Ireton, and was of all the Leveller leaders the one least touched

by religion. But there was wide support for the proposal, and it was agreed

that the next morning should be given to prayer, at an open meeting in the

quartermaster-general’s lodging in one Mr Chamberlain’s house. The com-

mittee was to convene in the afternoon. There was a big attendance at the

prayer meeting, and it was still hearing testimonies as to how God had

worked on the hearts of its participants when representatives of the Leveller

caucus arrived in the early afternoon to confer with the committee. Finding a

large and potentially sympathetic audience before them, they wanted to

launch a general debate on the Agreement there and then. Cromwell under-

standably opposed it, seeing that the General Council had sat until late last

evening, its committee had not yet met, and he and the others present had

already spent several hours together in seeking the Lord.

But several ofﬁcer-representatives supported the plea for an immediate

debate, the most insistent being Colonel Thomas Rainborough, whose con-

tribution to it was to become immortal. His vehement stance may have taken

388 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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his fellow-ofﬁcers by surprise, since until the previous day he had not been

seen in the General Council for over a month, and his right to attend it was

highly questionable, though it was not in fact questioned. He had been a

naval captain before he became colonel of a New Model infantry regiment,

and he had lately been made vice-admiral. Cromwell had opposed his

appointment, which had roused him to fury; not the ﬁrst row between the two

men. He was further incensed when Fairfax gave his regiment to another ofﬁ-

cer, but what did he expect, when he was returning to the navy? He was a

brave, sincere, impetuous man and a genuine radical, but at Putney he did

have a large chip on his shoulder.

Cromwell had to bow to pressure; the Agreement was read out in its entir-

ety again, and then debated clause by clause. If he and Ireton had had time to

think, and been fresher, they might have furthered their most immediate

object, which was to preserve the army’s unity and discipline, by focusing on

those parts of the Agreement which commanded general consensus in it, such

as liberty of conscience, equality before the law, and the superior authority of

the people’s representatives. Instead, Ireton seized on a point on which it was

silent, and asked whether the proposal to equalize constituencies on the basis

of population meant that every male inhabitant had a right to vote. This was

what prompted Rainborough’s memorable afﬁrmation ‘that the poorest he

that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore . . . that

every man that is to live under a government ought ﬁrst by his own consent to

put himself under that government’. Against him, Ireton took his stand on the

constitution of parliament from time immemorial and on the principle that

only those should elect its members who had ‘a permanent ﬁxed interest in

this kingdom, whether as freeholders or as freemen of corporations’, the

latter being mostly substantial traders. This led to a gladiatorial contest with

Rainborough; for at least half an hour no one but these two got a word in, and

both made long speeches after that. Sexby and Wildman also contributed sub-

stantially, and there is no doubt that the Leveller case commanded more sym-

pathy than Ireton’s. Sexby was passionately eloquent on behalf of his

fellow-soldiers in challenging the claim that only those with a ﬁxed estate

should enjoy full political rights. Alluding to the famous declaration in June

that this was no mere mercenary army, he declared that ‘if we had not a right

to the kingdom, we were mercenary soldiers’. He was echoing Rainborough,

who had said he ‘would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all

this while’.

The irony is that Rainborough, who seems to have had little if any person-

al contact with the Levellers up to now, was going further than most of their

leaders at this time in contending for unqualiﬁed manhood suffrage. The Lev-

ellers represented the interests of people of some modest economic independ-

ence, small traders and craftsmen and the like, rather than those of the great

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 389

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 389

mass of the poor. When some of the ofﬁcers present, in dismay at the heat

being generated by Ireton’s and Rainborough’s long wrangle, tied to steer dis-

cussion towards a compromise, such as denying the vote only to foreigners

and to those who were too dependent to make a free choice, Petty responded

positively; he was quite ready to consider excluding servants and apprentices

who lived in their masters’ households, and men who subsisted by alms.

Cromwell was prepared to enfranchise copyholders by inheritance. But just

as the debate seemed set on a constructive course, Rainborough tried to move

that the army should be called to a rendezvous, and its line of action settled

there. He doubtless had in mind the precedent of the June rendezvous and the

mass adoption of the Solemn Engagement, but whereas that occasion had

served to unite the greater part of the army, what he proposed would have

further divided it. The record of the day’s debate breaks off before the end,

but it seems that a straw vote was taken as to whether all but servants and

beggars should have the vote, and (reportedly) only three voices were against

it.

This did not of course betoken a general conversion to the Leveller pro-

gramme as a whole; if the vote had been on whether to march on London and

force the Agreement on parliament we can be sure that it would have gone

very differently. Before the meeting broke up yet another committee was

appointed, to prepare fresh proposals for the General Council’s consider-

ation in the light of the day’s deliberations. As well as Cromwell and Ireton it

included both the Rainboroughs, Chillenden, Sexby, and Allen, and it seri-

ously set about seeking common ground, or compromises, between the

Heads of the Proposals and the Agreement.

The Levellers, however, were rarely all of one mind, and Wildman was

much less interested in compromise than in power. Unlike Lilburne, who as

we shall see was not ill-disposed towards the king, Wildman was at this time

a republican, and he had the kind of temperament that takes positive pleasure

in conﬂict and conspiracy. He almost certainly wrote A Call to All the Soldiers

of the Army by the Free People of England, which was in print and circulating

among the regiments on 29 October, just as the great debate on the Agree-

ment took off. It denounced Cromwell and Ireton in virulent terms, accusing

them of leading the agitators by the nose in the General Council while they

drove on the king’s design in parliament, and of claiming as they did so that

they spoke for the whole army. It called upon the soldiery to withdraw their

obedience from all ofﬁcers who would not go with them along the path blazed

by the Agreement. ‘Ye have men amongst you as ﬁt to govern as others to be

removed. And with a word ye can create new ofﬁcers.’ Let them form ‘an

exact council’ and join hands in it with the ‘truest lovers of the people ye can

390 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

This vote has been variously dated; see Soldiers and Statemen, pp. 243–4 for my reasons for

believing that it was taken at this meeting. It would not be binding, since this was not a session of

the General Council.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 390

ﬁnd to help you . . . Establish a free parliament by expulsion of the usurpers.’

Tens of thousands of supporters, they were assured, were standing ready to

assist them. This of course was an open incitement to mutiny, and it was not

the only one in circulation. New agents were now appearing in other regi-

ments besides the original ﬁve, and the men of Colonel Robert Lilburne’s foot

regiment, which Fairfax had ordered to Newcastle, had already deﬁed their

ofﬁcers and held an unauthorized rendezvous.

On Sunday the 31st Colonel Rainborough took advantage of a break in the

intensive discussions to visit Lilburne in the Tower. It was probably their ﬁrst

meeting. Rainborough professed great friendship towards the Leveller leader,

but deplored the ‘foolish zeal’ which was driving some spokesmen at Putney

to express evil intentions towards the king, which ‘he well knew the greatest

part of the army abhorred to think of’.

This was probably not ill taken, for

Lilburne (unlike Wildman) was not at this time a republican and had no spe-

cial animus against the king. Our informant about Rainborough’s visit is Lil-

burne’s fellow-prisoner and friend Sir Lewis Dyve, who earlier in the month

had transmitted his advice to Charles to send for his six or seven real enemies

in the army, starting with Major White, Captain Reynolds, and Sexby. If

Charles would reassure them about his intentions, Lilburne promised him

that he would have the army at his devotion within six weeks!

If that is really what Lilburne believed he was greatly mistaken, for a tide of

ill-feeling towards the king was rising in the army, and it made itself evident

in the special session of the General Council on Monday 1 November. It

probably owed something to Wildman’s inﬂuence over the new agents and to

his speeches at Putney, but it was partly religious in origin. Cromwell, who

again presided, did not handle the meeting wisely. If he had directed attention

to the common ground that the committee appointed on the Friday was

exploring, it might have gone better. But he began by inviting those present to

speak of any divine guidance they believed they had received in answer to

their prayers, and this was an open invitation to the many, by no means all

Leveller sympathizers, who felt that God had withdrawn his presence from

them because they persisted in trafﬁcking with the king. As Goffe put it, ‘this

hath been a voice from heaven to us, that we have sinned against the Lord in

tampering with his enemies’. God’s answer to Captain Bishop’s prayers was

that they were all distracted in counsel because of their ‘compliance to pre-

serve that man of blood, and those principles of tyranny, which God from

heaven by his many successes [given] hath manifestly declared against’. The

scriptural image of Charles as a man of blood was to gain even more potency

when the second Civil War broke out. But such responses were not what

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 391

Substantial excerpts in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 439–43; italics in original.

‘The Tower of London Letter-Book of Sir Lewis Dyve’, ed. H. G. Tebbutt, in Bedfordshire

Historical Record Society XXXVII (1958), 95–6. See p. 92 for Lilburne’s advice to the king.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 391

Cromwell wanted to hear, and he let himself be drawn into a long altercation

with Goffe as to how far they could expect God to pronounce on very particu-

lar political issues. For once he and Wildman were not far apart when the

latter said ‘we cannot ﬁnd anything in the word of God what is ﬁt to be done

in civil matters’. He allowed a long and increasingly ill-tempered three-sided

wrangle to develop between Ireton, Wildman, and Rainborough, who dif-

fered so far in principle that there was no reconciling their views. Yet despite

this sterile session, the General Council agreed to go on meeting daily until all

the proposals before it had been considered.

But further sittings only generated more division, and the army command-

ers became increasingly concerned about it. They had fresh cause to suspect

the king’s intentions. Charles had been free to see almost whom he pleased at

Hampton Court because he had given his word that he would not try to

escape, but on 30 October he withdrew his parole. The reason was obvious,

as his actions would soon show. His guards were doubled, but in such a build-

ing it was very difﬁcult to foil a determined escape plan without making him

a close prisoner, which was politically unacceptable while he was still for-

mally king and accorded royal honours. Still more worrying was the growing

restlessness within the army. Leveller propaganda was making converts; the

new agents were now claiming to have the support of sixteen regiments,

including seven of foot. But not all the discontent was of their making, for 400

of Colonel Robert Lilburne’s mutinous foot soldiers were reported early in

November to have declared for the king, and his was not the only regiment in

which royalist sympathies surfaced. More typical probably was a rising

resentment against the agitators in perfectly loyal regiments, because of the

divisions they were causing and because (it was said) they were acting as

though they were the soldiers’ masters. Whether such feelings were aroused

by the original agitators or the new agents is not clear, but men who were not

in direct touch with the proceedings at Putney may not have made the dis-

tinction. At any rate Fairfax is reliably reported to have received a petition

from the majority of the regiments, asking him to send their agitators back to

them until he felt a need to summon them again, and undertaking to submit

to him and his council of war according to the old and accustomed discipline

of the army.

Within the General Council the generals’ hold on proceedings was precar-

ious. On 5 November, when Fairfax was well enough to preside again and

Cromwell was probably in the Commons, Rainborough secured the assent of

the meeting to a damaging letter to the Speaker. Alleging that the House had

been induced to make further propositions to the king because it was told that

the army wished it, the General Council declared that any such representation

of the army’s desires was absolutely groundless. This was as good as to accuse

Cromwell and Ireton of misrepresenting the army’s sentiments to the House,

392 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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and Ireton opposed the letter vehemently. When it was nevertheless approved

he stormed out of the meeting, vowing not to return until it was recalled. The

Leveller spokesmen also went on pushing for another general rendezvous,

and on the 6th, a Saturday, they pressed hard for a free debate on whether the

army and the people could safely allow any power at all to remain with the

king. They later claimed that Cromwell promised they should have it at

the General Council’s next meeting.

They came to that meeting, on the 8th, seemingly bent on a crucial con-

frontation, and there was indeed another protracted clash over the franchise.

But Fairfax and Cromwell had evidently decided over the weekend that the

General Council was being made a platform for those who sought to divide

the army and take control of it, and that the long debate must be wound up.

They may also have had intelligence that the king was about to bolt, for it was

during this weekend that Charles ﬁnally made up his mind to it. So when the

talk seemed to have run its course, Cromwell moved that since Fairfax in-

tended to call the army to a rendezvous shortly, and because ‘many distempers

are reported to be in the several regiments’, the General Council should advise

him to send the ofﬁcer-representatives and the agitators back to their regi-

ments until he should see cause to summon them again. There is no record of

any dissent, and Fairfax reported to the Speaker that the regimental repre-

sentatives had unanimously offered to return to their regiments and do all

they could to restore discipline in them. To underline his support for his sol-

diers’ real interests, he accompanied their letter with a request to the Com-

mons for the immediate disbursement of six weeks’ pay, the raising of the

assessment from £60,000 to £100,000 a month, and the appropriation of

dean and chapter lands as well as those of the bishops to the satisfaction of

their arrears.

When the full General Council met next day—as it turned out for the last

time—it approved a letter to the Speaker, explaining that its previous one on

the 5th was not intended to mean (as it palpably did) that the army was

opposed to parliament’s sending any more propositions to the king. The gen-

erals were in control again. It was announced on the same day that the

promised rendezvous of the army was to be spread over three separate dates

and places between 15 and 18 November. The Leveller agents publicly

denounced this as a base device to prevent the army from adopting their

Agreement by general acclamation, and this was doubtless a consideration.

But there were more compelling reasons for appointing three rendezvous,

not least that Fairfax wanted to address each regiment in person, which

could not be done in the course of one short November day. Moreover the

regiments were dispersed over a wide area, and to have suddenly concen-

trated them in one place close to London would have not only set the political

alarm bells ringing but caused much hardship to civilians. The Leveller

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 393

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 393

agents, however, urged them in print to gather in a single rendezvous in

deﬁance of orders.

On 11 November Charles made his escape from Hampton Court. He had

ﬁnally decided upon ﬂight more than a week earlier, and he probably ﬁxed the

date on the 7th, before he had anything he knew of to fear from the army. Yet

he told Sir John Berkeley on the night of the 9th that he was in fear for his life,

for he had received a letter that day warning him that eight or nine agitators

had met the previous night and resolved to kill him. The writer, who signed

himself ‘E.R.’, was almost certainly Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Lilburne,

brother and second-in-command to Colonel Robert, but of a very different

temper from either him or his other brother, John the Leveller; Henry was

quite shortly to declare for the king. How much he really knew, or believed,

about a design on Charles’s life is an unanswerable question, but there is some

evidence of a shadowy plot among some of the Leveller agents to abduct the

king, as Joyce had done in June, though not to kill him. Cromwell himself

heard rumours of an attempt on his person, and wrote at once to his cousin

Colonel Whalley, who commanded the guards at Hampton Court, to take

special care against it, ‘for it would be accounted a most horrid act’.

suited Charles to declare publicly that he ﬂed because he feared for his life, but

he left a cordial personal note for Whalley, assuring him that this was not why

he did so. His main reason, which he kept to himself, was doubtless that he

wanted to be free to negotiate with the Scottish commissioners without mem-

bers of either the army or the parliament looking over his shoulder.

It was not long before Cromwell’s enemies were putting it about that he

had deliberately frightened the king into ﬂeeing, in order to get himself off the

hook of a negotiation that was coming under increasing ﬁre in the army, and

even now the hypothesis gets an occasional airing.

It is altogether implaus-

ible. That Cromwell should have turned Charles loose when the army was as

disturbed as it still was before Fairfax’s three rendezvous is inconceivable.

Nobody, not even Charles himself when he set out from Hampton Court,

knew where he would head for. And Cromwell had not yet given up hopes of

coming to terms with him, for only the day before his escape the Commons

had put the ﬁnishing touches to a new set of peace propositions, based on the

initiative of Cromwell’s independent allies.

It was the second time in seventeen months that Charles had taken to the

road before deciding where he was going. He had told the Scottish commis-

sioners on the 9th that he was ready to make for Berwick, but he evidently

changed his mind, and his companions Berkeley and Ashburnham gave him

394 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

A Letter from Several Agitators to their Regiments (1647), signed by Sexby, Everard, and

thirteen others; mostly reprinted in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 452–4.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 551–2.

Cf. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell Our Chief of Men (1973), pp. 222–3.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 394

conﬂicting advice. He decided in the end to place his hopes in the 26-year-old

Colonel Robert Hammond, who had come to kiss his hand at Hampton

Court. Though he was a cousin of Cromwell, Hammond had become increas-

ingly unhappy about the army’s political role during 1647, and with Fairfax’s

concurrence he had given up his regimental command in favour of what he

hoped would be a quieter life as governor of the Isle of Wight. Charles knew

that he had supporters in the island, and he reckoned that even if Hammond

did not take his part he would be well placed to take ship for the continent.

Hammond was utterly horriﬁed when Berkeley and Ashburnham arrived at

Carisbrooke Castle, his headquarters, and delivered the king into his hands,

but he immediately informed Cromwell, and despite an agonizing conﬂict of

loyalties his sense of honour compelled him to obey parliament’s command

to set a guard on his unwanted guest and prevent his escape. Once again

Charles had exchanged one captivity for another, but for a while at least he

was less subject to surveillance than he had been in the custody of either the

parliament or the army. Two days after his arrival he sent a request to parlia-

ment for a personal negotiation in London, on the basis of a three-year trial

period for Presbyterianism, liberty of worship thereafter for all but papists,

and parliamentary control of the armed forces during his lifetime but not

under his successors. That might have been a starting-point for a treaty eight-

een months earlier, but his dwindling stock of credibility was now near to

running out.

Meanwhile on the 15th Fairfax held the ﬁrst of the three scheduled ren-

dezvous at Corkbush Field near Ware. He brought with him a new Remon-

strance, issued in the name of himself and his council of war, and prepared

with the advice of a committee headed by Cromwell and Ireton but including

several radical ofﬁcers and agitators. It redeﬁned the common objectives of

the army, and it was hoped that by having it read to each regiment, personal-

ly commended by Fairfax, and then subscribed by ofﬁcers and men, unity and

discipline would be restored. But the Levellers had been very busy preparing

to use the occasion for their own purposes, and the generals must have feared

that they would try to turn it into a general rendezvous and get the Agreement

acclaimed instead of Fairfax’s Remonstrance. They did indeed ﬁnd people

distributing the Agreement among the troops, and two former ofﬁcers,

Colonel William Eyre and Major Thomas Scott, haranguing them in support

of it. These were promptly arrested, but as soon as Fairfax appeared on the

ﬁeld he was confronted by a delegation headed by Rainborough, who pre-

sented him with the Agreement and a petition. Rainborough, being no longer

of the army, had no right to be at any rendezvous, and he was moreover a

member of the House of Commons, which six days earlier had condemned

the Agreement as ‘destructive to the being of Parliaments, and to the funda-

mental government of the kingdom’.

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 395

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 395

Seven regiments attended the rendezvous by Fairfax’s command; all greet-

ed him with enthusiasm and readily subscribed his Remonstrance. Two

others, Harrison’s and Lilburne’s, appeared on the ﬁeld without orders and

without their ofﬁcers, except for one Captain-Lieutenant Bray of Lilburne’s.

Many of the men wore copies of the Agreement stuck in their hats, overwrit-

ten with the Leveller slogan ‘England’s freedom and soldiers’ rights’. This was

mutiny, but it swiftly collapsed. The deﬁant soldiers found themselves isolat-

ed, and they were met with uncompromising ﬁrmness. Ofﬁcers of Fairfax’s

staff rode in among them, snatching the papers from their hats. Lilburne’s

men, having marched twenty miles that day, arrived long after Harrison’s had

been dealt with, and when a major tried to remonstrate with them they stoned

and wounded him. Fairfax left them until he had reviewed the seven regi-

ments present by his orders, but they must have heard some of the cheers that

greeted his speeches throughout the day. Encouraged by Bray, a vehement

Leveller, they showed some truculence when he and his staff approached, but

Cromwell and other ofﬁcers charged at them with drawn swords, and they

soon submitted.

The wisdom of holding separate rendezvous, where Fairfax’s personal

charisma could make its full effect, was now apparent. He had an equal suc-

cess at the other two, on Ruislip Heath and at Kingston, and two other regi-

ments which had been in a state of incipient mutiny read the signs and toed

the line. The Remonstrance was well calculated to restore the army’s solidar-

ity. It accused the new agents of acting, without any mandate from their regi-

ments, as a ‘divided party’ from the General Council, under the direction of

non-members of the army. By printing false and scandalous propaganda,

designed to discredit the chief ofﬁcers and the General Council with the sol-

diery and the public, and by labouring to draw the army into engagements

contrary to those by which it was already bound, they had jeopardized its

very honour. Fairfax threatened to resign unless these abuses and disorders

ceased. If he was to remain general, he required a promise from every ofﬁcer

and soldier to obey his superiors in accordance with military discipline, and

to abide by what the General Council determined with respect to public

engagements. In return he pledged himself to ‘live and die with the army’ in

pursuit of its legitimate desires, which (as here set forth) went beyond the

familiar matters of pay, arrears, indemnity, provision for the maimed and

widows and orphans, and so forth. He would further join with it in pressing

for an early dissolution, followed by a due succession of future parliaments at

ﬁxed intervals, ‘and for the freedom and equality of elections thereunto, to

render the House of Commons (as near as may be) an equal representative of

the people that are to elect’.

396 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Text in Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 557–60.

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:25 AM Page 396

This was essentially a reafﬁrmation of what the army had stood for in its

manifestos of the previous June, and all the regiments, including the lately

mutinous ones, gave Fairfax the promises he demanded. Some sent him spon-

taneous loyal addresses, deploring the subversive activities of the new agents.

This powerful reassertion of the army’s unity and discipline did not spell an

end to Leveller inﬂuences within it, but it did mark a widespread revulsion

against recent Leveller tactics. With the king on the loose, the Scots’ inten-

tions highly uncertain, and the Irish rebels still undefeated, the army had need

to close its ranks. Moreover, the Levellers articulated only one strain of popu-

lar idealism that sought expression in the later 1640s, whether in London or

in the army. The radical Independent and sectarian congregations, which

were currently swelling in numbers, nurtured quite another, and they had

many adherents in the army. It was widely believed among them that the vic-

tory that God had granted in the recent war heralded a triumph of the saints

and a major stage in the prophesied overthrow of Antichrist, so that to seek

its fruits in such secular panaceas as those offered by the Agreement savoured

of blasphemy. To such believers, Leveller democracy was a more than doubt-

ful basis for a holy commonwealth. Just after Fairfax ﬁnished reviewing the

army, the gathered churches of London published a declaration which bore

the names of some of the best known Independent and Baptist ministers,

including one who was probably Rainborough’s pastor. A key passage in it

obviously alluded to the Levellers’ policies and their propagation in the army:

Since there is also so much darkness remaining in the minds of men, as to make them

subject to call evil good, and good evil; and so much pride in their hearts as to make

their own wills a law, not unto themselves only but unto others also; it cannot but be

very prejudicial to human society, and the promotion of the good of commonwealths,

cities, armies or families, to admit of a parity, or all to be equal in power.

They declared therefore ‘that the ranging of men into several and subordinate

ranks and degrees, is a thing necessary for the common good of men’.

Considering how serious the threat of mutiny had been in the New Model,

its perpetrators were dealt with remarkably leniently, especially by the stand-

ards of seventeenth-century armies. Only one of them paid the ultimate

penalty. On Corkbush Field eight or nine ringleaders in Lilburne’s regiment

were court-martialled on the spot and sentenced to death, but Fairfax par-

doned all but three, who were then allowed to draw lots for their lives. Only

the unlucky loser was shot, and the Levellers made much of him as a martyr.

Eleven others, including Bray, were taken into custody for future trial, and

the London Levellers campaigned and demonstrated vociferously for their

release, which led to further arrests. Their trials by court-martial were

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 397

A Declaration by Congregational Societies in and about London (1647), p. 9 (misprinted

as 7). See on this whole subject Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge, 1977).

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