Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

The price paid for selecting so many ‘unrevolutionary’ councillors was that

many of them were little more inclined to give their time to the Common-

wealth’s business than the counterparts in the House itself. The council’s

attendance averaged barely ﬁfteen in its ﬁrst three months, and later in the

year it sometimes had difﬁculty in assembling a quorum of nine. The average

attendance in the four subsequent councils never rose to half their nominal

strength.

The manner in which the composition of the Rump and its Council of State

evolved goes a long way to explain why the early fears of radical change in

political, legal, and social institutions—far beyond the abolition of the mon-

archy and the Lords—proved to be unfounded. Conservative spirits had been

equally apprehensive about the inﬂuence of the army, and speciﬁcally about

its leaders’ collaboration with Lilburne and other Levellers in framing a new

Agreement of the People as a basis for constitutional settlement. This Agree-

ment was to sink into limbo, but this was not a foregone conclusion, and if its

promoters had handled it more adroitly it might conceivably have given the

Commonwealth quite a different political cast from the one it actually

assumed. It will be remembered that the drafting committee of sixteen, which

included Ireton, Lilburne, Marten, and Tichborne, completed its work on

10 December, but that to the outrage of the Leveller leaders the General

Council of Ofﬁcers proceeded to scrutinize and modify it extensively in the

so-called Whitehall debates before presenting it to parliament on 10 January.

Lilburne and his chief associates denounced their tampering with it on 28

December, but surely they were naive to expect the ofﬁcers to adopt it

without question or discussion, especially since the title-page of the printed

edition, which was on sale before mid-December, described it as ‘tendered to

the consideration of the General Council of the Army’.

They too readily

assumed, as many historians have done since, that Ireton was merely keeping

them in play so that the army leaders could pursue their own quest for power

without being troubled by Leveller unrest in the ranks. But it has been well

asked why, if this was so, the Council of Ofﬁcers debated the Agreement in

such detail, and with such obvious seriousness.

Since it was presented to the

Rump as the army’s considered and agreed recommendations for the con-

stitution of the Commonwealth, it deserves consideration as one of the most

interesting might-have-beens of the Interregnum.

It was of course a compromise document from the start, since the Levellers

were only one party to its composition. Nevertheless it began by repeating

438 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, p. 293; emphasis added. Most of the December text is also

printed in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 356–67, with the alterations made by the

Council of Ofﬁcers in footnotes. The text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents,

pp. 359–71, is that presented to the Rump by the army.

See above, pp. 423–4, 429, and the articles by Barbara Taft cited there. I have beneﬁted

much from discussing the Agreement with Dr Taft.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 438

almost verbatim the preamble to the original Agreement of 1647, which had

been debated at Putney. That had been a manifesto, dealing mainly with gen-

eral principles; this was a more detailed prescription for the actual conduct of

government, and was accordingly six times as long. Perhaps the most inter-

esting questions are whether it was a practicable prescription, and whether the

ofﬁcers’ modiﬁcations seriously compromised the proposals of the drafting

committee, as the Levellers alleged. Both the committee’s and the ofﬁcers’

versions agreed that the present parliament should be dissolved on or before

30 April next, and that parliaments should thereafter be elected by all male

householders of twenty-one and over, provided they paid poor relief and

were not servants or wage-earners dependent on any particular person. Par-

liamentary seats were to be radically redistributed, eliminating rotten bor-

oughs and greatly enlarging the proportion of county constituencies. The

committee proposed a total of 300 members, which would have been a severe

drop from the existing 507; the ofﬁcers raised it to 400, which like the reap-

portionment of constituencies would be followed both in the Rump’s own bill

governing future elections and in the Instrument of Government which

deﬁned the constitution of the Protectorate. By an obvious oversight the com-

mittee omitted to specify the frequency of elections or the maximum duration

of parliaments. The ofﬁcers followed both the Heads of the Proposals and the

1647 Agreement in appointing biennial parliaments, to sit no longer than

six months (very much as in the ﬁrst Agreement; the Proposals set a limit of

240 days). The ofﬁcers cut out a requirement that all electors should sub-

scribe the Agreement before being admitted to vote, which was a liberal

amendment, since subscription would have been a stumbling-block to many,

and insistence upon it would have made the Commonwealth a distant ances-

tor of the one-party state. Nevertheless the Agreement was to be publicly read

at all elections, and the members elected were to pledge themselves to act

according to its terms.

In the eighteen-month intervals between parliaments government was to be

entrusted to a council of state, elected by the outgoing House and resigning

when the next one met. It says something for the altruism of the ofﬁcers that

they accepted, without recorded protest, the disqualiﬁcation of military

(though not naval) ofﬁcers from standing for parliament, along with treasur-

ers and receivers of public money. Lawyers, if elected, were to be debarred

from practising during their membership. More surprisingly—and to modern

eyes this and the short duration of parliaments probably seem the biggest

impediments to the workability of the whole scheme—serving councillors

were also disqualiﬁed from being elected (or re-elected) to parliament. This

looks like a recipe for friction between legislature and executive, and a denial

of the value of political experience. But the whole document breathes a

distrust of long-serving politicians, and a suspicion that new parliament-man

Quest for a Settlement 439

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 439

could be old courtier writ large: in the business for what he could get out of it.

On the constructive side it preserved one of the most forward-looking con-

cepts in the original Agreement, the reservation of certain indefeasible natur-

al rights from encroachment by even the people’s representatives. These

included liberty of conscience in religion, total equality before the law, the

independence of the judiciary, and freedom from conscription (though the

ofﬁcers entered a sensible proviso to secure the continuance of county militias

for purely local defence). Further, to reassure any who believed the propa-

gandists who accused the Levellers of undermining property itself, no parlia-

ment was to abrogate ‘any of the foundations of common right, liberty and

safety contained in this Agreement, nor level men’s estates, destroy property,

or make all things common’. This was not a repudiation of the Diggers,

whose experiment in communism still lay in the future, but a rebuttal of the

unfair charge of aiming to undermine property that had haunted the Levellers

since they ﬁrst emerged.

The longest recorded debates at Whitehall were over religion, and the pas-

sionate intensity with which many ofﬁcers, Ireton included, opposed the pos-

ition taken by the sectaries and radical Independents is surely evidence that

they thought the Agreement might really become the basis of England’s gov-

ernment. The Agreement, as drafted by the committee, denied parliament any

power to impose in matters of faith or worship through laws, oaths, or

covenants, or to restrain people from worshipping and professing their faith

according to their consciences; but it granted the people’s representatives dis-

cretion to provide for ‘the instruction or directing of the nation in a public

way, for matters of faith, worship or discipline (so it be not compulsive, or

express popery)’. That might seem moderate enough, and there was no dis-

agreement over permitting a wide freedom of worship and belief. But the art-

icle concerning religion that emerged from the Whitehall debates, completely

rewritten, envisaged that parliament would underwrite a public (though not

compulsory) profession of the Christian faith, and that this should be taught

by ministers maintained ‘out of a public treasury’, though not by tithes. The

difference between the two schemes in actual operation might not have been

large, but the ofﬁcers wanted to maintain a more visible national church,

more positively linked to the state, and with a publicly maintained parochial

ministry. There can be no doubt that their version would have had wider pub-

lic support, and indeed all their amendments to the Agreement were designed

not to emasculate it but to make it more workable and acceptable.

What incensed the Levellers, however, was not just the ofﬁcers’ leisurely

emendation of a text that they thought had been ﬁnalized, but the manner

in which the army put the Agreement before parliament. It was presented on

the very day the king’s trial began, and Veronica Wedgwood has speculated

that ‘the lethal timing . . . could have been a ﬁnal twist of Ireton’s cold

440 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 440

ingenuity’.

But that seems an unduly harsh reading of Ireton’s character, and

she grants that the coincidence may have been an accident. That is likelier, for

the completed text had only received the ofﬁcers’ ﬁnal approval earlier that

week, on 15 January. A Machiavellian Ireton, supposing him to want to

scupper the Agreement, might have postponed its presentation until after the

king’s head had fallen, and when the rapid inﬂux of February dissenters was

making the Rump’s temper more anti-radical day by day. But it was not the

timing that the Levellers resented so much as the tone in which the army’s

spokesmen tendered the Agreement to parliament. Instead of pressing it as a

ﬁrmly agreed prescription for a settlement, to be endorsed intact by the mass

subscriptions of the people, they humbly asked the parliament to take it into

consideration and to commend as much of it as they thought ﬁt to the public,

with a request to the well-affected to signify their acceptance of it with their

signatures. One can understand the Levellers’ sense of betrayal, but Fairfax

was still Lord General, and there was never a chance that he (or Cromwell)

would present it in the manner they desired while the outcome of the king’s

trial was yet unknown. Still less likely was it that the army commanders

would (as they had hoped) circulate it for mass signatures before putting it to

parliament. It is no wonder, in the circumstances, that the Commons’ only

answer was that they would take it into consideration as soon as ‘the neces-

sity of the present weighty and urgent affairs would permit’.

It may be argued that if Fairfax, Cromwell, and Ireton were lukewarm

about the Agreement it was bound to be a lost cause. But the Levellers still had

a considerable following among the junior ofﬁcers and the politically con-

scious rank and ﬁle, especially in the cavalry, and Ireton tacitly acknow-

ledged their inﬂuence when he entered into negotiation with them. If they,

Lilburne especially, had not taken such umbrage at the ofﬁcers’ scrutiny of

the Agreement, if they had joined in the debates at Whitehall, defended their

position there, and had been prepared to accept a few compromises, they

would have remained a force to be reckoned with. In face of their angry non-

cooperation, the surprising thing is not that the ofﬁcers made some modiﬁca-

tions in the Agreement but that they accepted all its essentials (with the

partial exception of the article on religion). If the Levellers had gone on

behaving as allies, Ireton could not easily have abandoned a set of proposals

which he had helped to draft, and to which by mid-January the General

Council of Ofﬁcers stood publicly committed. Unhappily it was the Levellers

themselves who gave the army’s commanders cause to wash their hands of the

Agreement. They virtually gave up on it themselves, before the Council of

Ofﬁcers were half way through their debates on it. In an angry pamphlet

Quest for a Settlement 441

Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 120.

Gardiner, Great Civil War (1891), pp. 567–8.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 441

published on 28 December, Lilburne and ﬁfteen fellow-Levellers denounced

them for contesting its contents, ‘and that in things so essential unto our free-

dom, as without which we account the Agreement of no value!’

On top of

this extravagant accusation, they demanded that strict rules should be ﬁxed

for the composition and procedure of the General Council of Ofﬁcers, for

instance that it should include at least the greater part of the ofﬁcers within

reach of headquarters, that its decisions should be subject to no veto or check

by any senior ofﬁcer, that there should be an agreed limit to how many times

any member might speak to a question (clearly a hit at Ireton), that there

should be no disbandments without its consent, and that it should in future

regulate the enlistment of soldiers in the horse and foot. They further called

for a wholesale revision of the present articles of martial law. The obvious

intent was to take the formulation and control of army policy out of the

senior commanders’ hands, and it is no wonder that the latter, faced with

such demands, presented the Agreement to parliament with something less

than enthusiasm. If the army–Leveller entente that produced it had still held,

they might have pressed it much more strongly, and the Rump might have

found it less easy to shelve if the Leveller tail had not so obviously been trying

to wag the army dog.

Before the Levellers ﬁred their next salvo, Prince Rupert, now formally in

command of the royal ﬂeet, appeared off the Irish coast with ten warships and

took station at Kinsale. Shortly after, on 5 February, the Scots proclaimed

Charles II King of Great Britain. On the 22nd the new king appointed Mon-

trose as his Lieutenant-Governor of Scotland and Captain-General of all the

forces that could be assembled there. The only question was which spring-

board he would choose for his attempt to recover his English throne. The

Rump could fairly claim that this was not the time for elections to a new par-

liament or debates on the long-term constitutional future. Still less was it a

time for sowing strife between parliament and army. Yet on 26 February Lil-

burne and his associates presented the House with a bitter remonstrance

under the guise of a petition, which they published under the title of England’s

New Chains Discovered.

These chains had been forged, they alleged,

through an unholy alliance between the army grandees and the oligarchs at

Westminster, who had joined in muzzling the press, discouraging petitioners,

and seeking draconian powers to suppress the Levellers’ current attempt to

resuscitate the agitator organization in the army. The tract made a special

grievance of the Council of State, which had existed for less than a fortnight

when it was presented, and its main demand was that the Rump should dis-

solve it and transfer its functions to strictly accountable committees of short

442 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

John Lilburne (and ﬁfteen others named), A Plea for Common-Right and Freedom (1648);

excerpts in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 472–4.

Substantial excerpts in Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 142–8.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 442

duration. This of course was wildly unrealistic, and its further suggestion of

a change in the highest commands in the army was equally irresponsible in

face of the Commonwealth’s urgent need to defend itself. Going back on

the Agreement’s demand for an early terminal date to the present parliament,

this ‘petition’ urged the Rump to refuse to dissolve itself until a new repre-

sentative of the people had been elected and could take its place the next day.

The Levellers stepped up their campaign against the generals and the Coun-

cil of State during March. They were behind a petitioning movement among

the rank and ﬁle to revive the full General Council of the Army of 1647, and

to give its soldier-agitators an equal right with ofﬁcers in determining army

policy. When ﬁve troopers were cashiered for promoting a petition which

supported England’s New Chains and asserted the right of soldiers to address

parliament directly, regardless of any possible objections by their ofﬁcers,

their Leveller friends drove them away in coaches and lavishly feasted them.

On 21 March an angry pamphlet was published over their names, though it

was probably written by Richard Overton, entitled The Hunting of the Foxes

from Newmarket and Triploe Heaths to Whitehall, By Five Small Beagles

(Late of the Army).

Its sub-title was ‘The grandee-deceivers unmasked (that

you may know them)’, and much of it was a venomous attack on Cromwell

and Ireton, charging them with ruthless self-advancement, tyranny,

hypocrisy, and a systematic betrayal of the soldiers’ interests. The clear impli-

cation was that the men were no longer bound to obey such commanders.

Three days later Lilburne assailed the grandees in general and Cromwell in

particular even more intemperately in The Second Part of England’s New

Chains Discovered. He appealed now to a new parliament, since the Rump

had become a mere channel through which the decrees of a military junto

were given effect. The accusation was absurd as well as offensive, and the

House responded predictably. After three hours’ debate it voted that the tract

was ‘false, scandalous, and . . . highly seditious, and tends to division and

mutiny in the army, and the raising of a new war’. It ordered that its authors

should be prosecuted as traitors, and as a consequence Lilburne, Overton,

Thomas Prince, and (less justly) Walwyn were imprisoned in the Tower,

where they were held until 8 November. After being interrogated by the

Council of State, Lilburne claimed to have heard Cromwell thump the table

and say ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to

break them, or they will break you’.

We have only Lilburne’s word for what

he overheard from an adjoining room, but it has the ring of truth, and what

Cromwell said was not unjustiﬁed.

Quest for a Settlement 443

Full text in Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, pp. 358–83.

Gardiner, Great Civil War, III, 37–40, quoting J. Lilburne et al., The Picture of the Coun-

cil of State.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 443

Happily not all the Levellers were as confrontational as Lilburne and his

main associates. Walwyn, who had not attended their meetings for months

and seems to have had no part in inciting the army to disobedience, wrote a

sober and moving vindication in A Manifestation, to which all four prisoners

in the Tower put their names on 14 April. He pleaded that the Commonwealth

should not let slip ‘an opportunity which these 600 years has been desired, but

could never be attained, of making this a truly happy and wholly free nation’.

He and his fellows did not seek power for themselves, or look to force to attain

their objectives, ‘but solely upon that inbred and persuasive power that is in all

good and just things, to make their own way in the hearts of men, and so to

procure their own establishment’.

If only that had been true of all the Leveller

leadership! The others were weakening their own movement, not only by

engaging in sedition and alienating most of the army, including now such old

supporters as Major Francis White and Colonel (formerly Captain) John

Reynolds, but by antagonizing the gathered churches. Radical Independents

and sectaries understandably saw a better future for themselves under the

new Commonwealth, for all its imperfections, than under the unpurged

Presbyterian-dominated Long Parliament. On 2 April William Kifﬁn headed a

deputation of Baptist ministers which presented a petition to the Rump, disso-

ciating themselves from The Second Part of England’s New Chains and dis-

avowing any intent to ‘intermeddle with the ordering or altering civil

government’. The Leveller organization had been so strongly linked to that of

the General Baptists that the latter’s withdrawal of support seriously weak-

ened the movement. More unpleasantly, a group of separatist pastors pub-

lished a pamphlet later in the month under the title of Walwyn’s Wiles, which

quite unjustly accused him of immorality, irreligion, and seeking to make all

things common. It was mainly—perhaps wholly—written by a lay preacher of

John Goodwin’s church called John Price, but his co-signatories included

Kifﬁn and Edmund Rosier, the pastor of the congregation to which Lilburne

had belonged, and perhaps still did. Walwyn could and did answer their base-

less slanders, but if he tried to check his fellow-Levellers’ sowing of disaffec-

tion in the army he did not succeed. The climax of their second attempt to

wrest control over the soldiery from their ofﬁcers—the ﬁrst had been in the

autumn of 1647—was imminent, and it was to prove fatal to the future of the

movement. For clarity’s sake its brief story will be told here before returning to

the Rump’s attempt to tackle the problems of settlement and defence.

Women played a conspicuous part in the Levellers’ spring campaign. Ten

thousand of them are said to have signed a petition for the release of the

prisoners in the Tower, and for three days on and off, from 23 to 25 April,

444 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

A Manifestation is printed in McMichael and Taft (eds.), Writings of William Walwyn

(passages quoted at pp. 336, 341) and in Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, pp. 387–96.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 444

several hundred demonstrated clamorously at the doors of the parliament-

house. While they were doing so, there was a minor mutiny in Colonel Whal-

ley’s London-based regiment of horse, arising from a combination of Leveller

agitation, lack of pay, and the soldiers’ reluctance to serve in the forthcoming

Irish expeditionary force. Fifteen troopers who publicly deﬁed Whalley’s per-

sonal orders to march were court-martialled, and six were sentenced to death.

They made a humble submission, and Cromwell was for pardoning them, but

Fairfax insisted that an example must be made of the one judged most culp-

able. Accordingly, Trooper Robert Lockyer was shot next day in St Paul’s

Churchyard. Fairfax, needless to say, was not deterred by the appearance in

print of a menacing letter from Lilburne and Overton, accusing him and his

court of treason and murder, and threatening a popular uprising if the sen-

tence was carried out. Lockyer died bravely and deﬁantly, and the Levellers

made of his funeral an even more spectacular demonstration than they had of

Rainborough’s. About 4,000 followed his cofﬁn, including large numbers of

women, and many of the mourners wore green ribbons, green having been

Rainborough’s colour. It was henceforth that of the Leveller movement.

Worryingly for the army’s commanders and for the government, hundreds of

soldiers joined in the funeral procession.

Leveller agents were active now not only in the regiments near London but

in many far aﬁeld, and their aim was to get agitators elected in every one of

them. They were given a ﬁllip when the units destined for Ireland were

chosen on 20 April, and in playing on the men’s understandable reluctance to

serve there they manifested a hitherto unsuspected sympathy with the mis-

fortunes of the Irish people. Discontent verging on open disobedience was

appearing by the end of April in the cavalry regiments under orders for Ire-

land (Scrope’s, Ireton’s, and Horton’s), and also in Harrison’s, which had

been prominent in the Ware mutiny. By 1 May the Levellers felt ready to raise

a far larger mutiny, indeed a general one, and that day the four prisoners in

the Tower published a new Agreement of the People to serve as a manifesto

for it. It is interesting as revealing (as they put it) ‘the ultimate end and full

scope of all our desires and intentions concerning the government of this

nation’, free now from any pressure to make compromises.

It opted for

annual parliaments, sitting for at least four months, and it expressly forbade

them to erect a Council of State. Servants and recipients of alms were excluded

from the franchise—so much for ‘the poorest he that is in England’. Not only

Quest for a Settlement 445

On the Lockyer affair see Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 326–9; Woolrych, Soldiers and

Statesmen, pp. 289, 342–3. It was claimed that Lockyer had championed the Agreement of the

People on Corkbush Field in 1647, but it is most unlikely that he was there. His regiment (Whal-

ley’s) was not, and it was enthusiastically loyal to Fairfax at the rendezvous which it did attend.

I am indebted to Phil Baker, who has made a close study of the agitators, for conﬁrming my

impression that Lockyer never ﬁgures in the strictly contemporary accounts of the Ware mutiny.

Full text in Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, pp. 400–10.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 445

excise but the customs were to be abolished; the sole tax was to consist of a

pound rate on real or personal estate. As for defence, parliament was to

appoint the commander-in-chief and other general ofﬁcers, but the land

forces were to consist solely of regiments and companies allocated to particu-

lar counties and towns. The same male electorate that chose MPs was to elect

all civil magistrates and ofﬁcials in counties, hundreds, and towns, all military

ofﬁcers below general rank, and all parish clergy, the latter on a contractual

basis. By the criteria of practicability and acceptability, this Agreement was

inferior in almost every way to the second one, whether in its original version

or as modiﬁed by the ofﬁcers. Curiously, it made no mention of monarchy.

Can this omission have been intended to leave the way open for the dubious

trafﬁc with the exiled royal court in which some leading Levellers were to

engage in the coming years?

It is impossible to put an exact date on the start of the mutiny, but its active

phase and its suppression occupy the ﬁrst half of May. It was more serious

than the scale of the actual confrontations between mutineers and loyal forces

might suggest, because some regiments which would almost certainly have

joined it if they could were not given the chance. At one stage or another at

least 2,500 men were in active mutiny or on the brink of it, and this does not

include some outlying regiments whose temper was uncertain; they were

awaiting the outcome before declaring themselves. Nearly all the mutineers

were cavalrymen, and the loyalty of the great majority of the infantry was one

factor that doomed the movement to defeat. The others were the wide scat-

tering of the disaffected regiments, and above all the swiftness and determin-

ation with which Fairfax and Cromwell moved against them. Before they

brought their forces to bear, however, one colourful character played a dis-

proportionate part in stoking up subversion. William Thompson had been a

corporal in Whalley’s regiment, but on a drinking and gambling spree in Sep-

tember 1647 he committed such outrageous violence in a tavern brawl that he

was cashiered. He still hung around army quarters, however, inciting his old

comrades to defy their ofﬁcers, and after the Ware mutiny he was one of the

ringleaders condemned to death. He was reprieved, but he was in trouble for

further crimes in the ensuing year, including stabbing a man to death. Lil-

burne, however, got him out of prison by paying his bail, so freeing him for

his ﬁnal adventure. Posing as a captain, he mustered a private army of about

300 men in the spring of 1649, and on 6 May published a full-throated attack

on the Rump and the army commanders, demanding the release of the Lev-

eller leaders and calling on all and sundry to join him ‘for a new parliament

by Agreement of the People’.

He drew in half the men whom Colonel

446 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

For Thompson’s exploits see Firth and Rait, Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army, I,

221–3, and Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 229, 316–17, 331–3.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 446

Reynolds had recruited for his new regiment, as well as a whole troop of

Ireton’s regiment, and he could have become really dangerous if he had suc-

ceeded in his aim of joining up with the units in the Bristol area which were at

the main storm-centre of the mutiny. Ironically it was Reynolds, who had

been so prominent in the original agitator movement two years earlier, who

engaged Thompson’s force with his three loyal troops and routed them near

Banbury. Thompson himself got away, but died later in the month in a shoot-

out with his pursuers.

What really broke the mutiny was the resolution with which Fairfax and

Cromwell in person led a force of nearly 4,000 so far loyal troops against its

focal area in Bristol. On 12 May, when they were marching through Hamp-

shire, a shrewdly calculated declaration was published in Fairfax’s name. It

assured the whole army that no one would be compelled to serve in Ireland

against his wishes and that the mutineers’ grievances were being heeded. It

claimed (with little justiﬁcation) that the implementation of the Agreement

was in hand, meaning of course the one presented to the Rump by the army,

including provisions for the election of a new and equal parliament. It offered

pardon to the mutinous regiments if they returned to obedience immediately,

but if they did not they would be reduced by force. By this time the mutineers

were becoming worried by their failure to mobilize more supporters, and

their resistance began to crumble. The outcome was still uncertain, however,

since a trickle of recruits was still coming in to them and the generals could

not be wholly sure that their men would ﬁght against their old comrades.

Fairfax sent a delegation to parley with representatives of the mutineers, and

trustingly appointed Major White, the former Leveller, to head it; but though

White performed his mission bravely and faithfully the attempt at negotiation

broke down. There followed a mini-campaign, at the end of which nine hun-

dred or so mutineers who were still under arms were put to rout in a skirmish

at Burford on the night of 14/15 May. There was little ﬁghting; 340 were

taken prisoner, and the rest made their escape in the darkness. With typical

moderation only ﬁve ringleaders (three ofﬁcers and two corporals) were

court-martialled, and only three were shot. The other prisoners were not only

released, but given debentures for their arrears of pay.

Thereafter the Levellers rapidly lost coherence as a political movement,

and their organization sank into terminal decline. The voices of some of them

would be heard again at intervals in the 1650s, but they were never again seri-

ous contenders for power. A generation or two ago historians were apt to give

them excessive prominence, but there is now perhaps a tendency to under-

estimate them. It will not do to ascribe their failure to their programme being

‘ahead of its time’, unless one particularizes as to what that glib phrase is

Quest for a Settlement 447

Gentles gives an excellent account of the army mutinies in New Model Army, pp. 329–49.

ch14.y8 27/9/02 11:34 AM Page 447