Putney lay five miles outside London, on the south bank of the Thames. There was no bridge, though ferries carried people over the water. It was a pleasant, countrified outlying suburb full of market gardens, through which travellers and traders from many parts of the country passed on their journey to the capital. In the last days of October and the beginning of November 1647 it was chilly, though not too exposed.
The debates took place in St Mary’s Church. A large medieval parish church with a square bell tower, it had a lofty chancel, which was borrowed for these unprecendented meetings. Several times consensus seemed so difficult to achieve that before afternoon debates the Army Council held morning prayer meetings to seek divine guidance. At Ireton’s urging, those took place in private houses. His brother hosted one. The council might discuss civil issues in a ‘steeple house’ for convenience, but God would make his will felt in men’s hearts.
The church was packed. Gideon Jukes stood, bare-headed, among the soldier Agitators while the officers sat down around a large table and kept on their hats. The distinctions struck him. As he waited for the first debate to start, Gideon even mused whether to put back his own hat defiantly. Rebel though he was, he would have felt too uncomfortable. He had grown up in a society that was riven by grades and privilege. Kings took precedence over princes and barons over earls. Scholars must not look or behave like gentlemen of leisure. Women must not dress too sumptuously. Artisans should never walk abroad without signs of their trade; apprentices must be marked by their aprons and short hair. But these rules were coming under scrutiny.
Gideon remembered hearing of a strange, tense meeting that had taken place in a garden in Cambridge. Fairfax and his senior officers had met the King, now their prisoner, for an all-day discussion. One peculiarity was that they produced Cornet Joyce to exonerate Fairfax from involvement in the Holdenby abduction. Joyce was an extremely junior officer, yet when he was let loose to explain himself he argued with his sovereign fearlessly. Another issue that aroused much comment was that when Fairfax and Cromwell came into the King’s presence, neither knelt.
The council met for almost a fortnight. Fairfax was absent, ill, for the first week. As well as much physical damage caused by battle-wounds, he had a history of painful gout and kidney stones. It was not suggested he ducked out of the debates. There were two points on which Thomas Fairfax was resolute: he deplored the autocratic behaviour of King Charles and he demanded justice for his soldiers. Ultimately, it was Fairfax who summoned this council.
Cromwell took the chair instead. It was a forum to discuss the fate of the whole kingdom, so several civilian Levellers, foremost among them John Wildman, were allowed to join the meeting. Any officers who wished to do so could attend, together with the four Agitators from each regiment. Almost 150 men had congregated. Many did not speak, but all heard the discussions.
Pressed in behind several rows of spectators, Gideon could see mainly the backs of men’s heads and only part of the conference table; the faces of those seated were often hidden from him by the high crowns and sweeping brims of their hats. How many great oak tables, he wondered, had army officers sat around gravely in conference? How many battered inn-boards had hosted radical leaders as they midwived revolutionary ideas? He was impressed by the lack of subservience here. The future of England had already been argued, chewed, wrested from tradition and superstition by countless groups of thoughtful people. He found it striking how many at this council spoke fearlessly as individuals and how genuinely those of all ranks struggled to find answers. Soldiers spoke for themselves, not cowed by even their most senior officers.
After three-hour prayer-meetings, the debates were long and intense, continuing into the night. Sometimes Gideon squeezed from the room to seek natural relief. Outside, he shook his long legs and stretched his back while he tried to clear his head. Other men smoked, though not many; that was a filthy cavalier habit. Nobody stayed out long. Everyone was eager not to miss anything important. Hardly anyone left Putney. Only once did Thomas Rainborough disappear, explaining the next afternoon that he had been ill and so had ridden to London overnight to see his doctor. It was thought he had really been consulting radical civilians.
Most members of the council came with fixed opinions, though they were willing to hear other points of view; occasionally someone retracted. The language was plain, but speakers thought on their feet and syntax sometimes suffered. They responded to what they heard. They struggled to develop their own ideas. There were quarrels and rebukes; there were brief apologies. Men spoke from their hearts. They grappled with concepts that went far beyond their original grievances. Their agenda was to decide what they had been fighting for and how they wanted to live in peacetime. That took them into fundamental questions about the rights of man.
Although Cromwell and Ireton tried to confine discussion to the points raised in The Declaration of the Army (which Ireton wrote), they were soon pressurised by Wildman and others into having The Agreement of the People (which Wildman wrote) read out and discussed. The Agreement was, by seventeenth-century standards, a terse paper, claiming in a few short clauses ‘that as the laws ought to be equal, so they must be good, and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people’. It ringingly concluded with ‘These things we declare to be our native rights’: the rights and rules for government for which the soldiers had fought, but which endless negotiation with the King threatened to deny them.
Henry Ireton thought the agreement’s fundamental proposals were unrealistic, although he said so only carefully: ‘I confess, there are plausible things in it, and there are things really good in it. There are those things that I do with my heart desire; and there are those things I would not oppose, that I should rejoice to see obtained.’
This was the first time Gideon had encountered Ireton and he took against him. He did not care for his neat-featured, cat-like face, his secretive temperament or his cool, clever, untrustworthy intellect. Ireton was Oxford-educated and a former lawyer at the Middle Temple, a man who worked so hard to create a workable constitution that he often wrote late into the night and forgot to eat. Every time Ireton twitched his whiskers and pronounced what his conscience would or would not accept, Gideon Jukes’s hackles rose. This was despite Ireton’s Puritanism and Gideon’s approval of how Ireton had worked tirelessly as the army’s theoretical pen-man.
Edward Sexby was there. Gideon exchanged no words with him. Sexby was too busy, demanding to widen the agenda. On the very first day he summed up the soldiers’ dilemma. ‘We sought to satisfy all men, and it was well; but in going about to do it, we have dissatisfied all men. We have laboured to please a king and I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him …’
God might be fighting with them, but time was against them. It was said — and was a genuine fear even in that victorious army — that if they delayed too long in discussion, they would lose the initiative so the King would have them all hanged. Many still saw themselves as rebels. Gideon Jukes, for one, ruefully remembered hearing how the Earl of Manchester had grumbled after the second battle of Newbury, The King need not care how oft he fights. If we fight a hundred times and beat him ninety-nine times, he will be King still. But if he beat us once … we shall be hanged; we shall lose our estates; our posterities be undone.’ Even after Naseby, those words had a carrying power. At the time, Cromwell had stormed back, If this be so, why did we take up arms?’ — which remained an active question.
Citing urgency, Colonel Rainborough argued that reaching a settlement for the future was more important than wasting effort trying to decide what engagement’ they had had in the past. But Sexby kept plugging away that a contract had existed when they took up arms: We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen.’
And what are my birthrights and privileges? wondered Gideon Jukes, only a little satirically.
As the Council of the Army deliberated it for him, Ireton clashed seriously with Rainborough and the radicals. What was the Englishman’s birthright? As a lawyer Ireton tried rather clumsily to define it: ‘their very being born in England — that we should not seclude them out of England, that we should not refuse to give them air and place and ground, and the freedom of the highways and other things, to live amongst us.’ He conceded this applied to any man born in England, even though his status at birth gave him nothing of what Ireton called ‘the permanent interest of this kingdom’.
‘Permanent interest’ could only be defined one way by men of Ireton’s class. It really meant property, and that was a divisive area. At the conference, the gap between men of property and men with none became very apparent. To vote, a man had to own a freehold with an annual value of forty shillings. For Ireton, this qualification was essential. To earn the right to make decisions about the country he believed a man should physically own a stake in it: ground, land, buildings, or at the very least membership of a trade guild. To this Colonel Rainborough passionately objected. ‘I do hear nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to have his voice in election.’ Rainborough’s argument was that all Englishmen were subject to English laws, so therefore should have a say in what the law was. He snarled bluntly at Ireton: ‘To the thing itself: property in the franchise: I would fain know how it comes to be the property of some men, and not of others.’
Gideon Jukes restrained a cheer.
There was much discussion of why the franchise had traditionally contained exclusions. It was agreed that servants, apprentices and beggars had been denied the vote because they were dependent on masters or givers of alms, who could exert influence. Nobody doubted the stubborn independence of the British workforce, but in that hierarchical society men in power believed they had the right to specify how people who depended upon them behaved. At the time elections were public; there was no secret ballot.
Ireton eventually won the argument for keeping a distinction, perhaps because even the humblest soldier needed someone to sneer at. Servants and beggars made good targets.
A man called Cowling, whom Gideon presumed to be a younger son, kept hammering at it: ‘Whether the younger son have not as much right to the inheritance as the eldest? … There are men of substance in the country with no voice in elections. There is a tanner in Staines worth three thousand pounds, and another in Reading worth three horse-skins. The second has a voice; the first, none.’
As Henry Ireton bogged himself down trying to answer, Gideon rubbed his chin, stultified by the drone of his voice. With over a hundred men crammed in together, the chancel was extremely warm. Some shifted about, some cleared their throats. The style of the debates was conversational but that had drawbacks. Too many were poor at putting words together, even when their ideas were good. They came from all over the kingdom and all spoke with their local accents, each man distrusting anything that was said in other accents than his own. To a Londoner like Gideon, even other cities — York, Bristol, Warwick, Cambridge, Newcastle — were country huddles, and suspect.
Still a ramrod of self-belief, Ireton dragged to a stirring conclusion: A man ought to be subject to a law, that did not give his consent, but with this reservation, that if this man do think himself unsatisfied to be subject to this law, he may go into another kingdom!’
Many heads nodded. Telling foreigners where to go, thought Gideon, who had encountered his share of overseas traders in London, was sure to revive a sluggish audience. To stand firm against aliens’ duplicity, their encroachments on trade and their unspeakable dress-sense was as much Englishmen’s birthright (Englishmen felt) as air, space, or passage on the highways …
The subject widened to defining liberty. ‘If we can agree where the liberty and freedom of the people lies, that will do all,’ said Rainborough.
Sexby took the cue: ‘There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives. But it seems now, that except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived. If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers.’ A murmur of support rose among the bare-headed soldier Agitators. ‘I shall tell you my resolution: I am resolved to give my birthright to none.’
If there was any point in his knowledge of Edward Sexby when Gideon Jukes admired the man, this was it. There was one thing spoken to this effect: that if the poor and those in low condition were given their birthright, it would be the destruction of this kingdom. I do think the poor and meaner of this kingdom have been the means of the preservation of this kingdom. And now they demand the birthright for which they fought.’
That statement of Sexby’s was reinforced by Thomas Rainborough, the most senior officer to support such ideas. He now made his own defining speech:
‘I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to lead, as the greatest he. And therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government. And I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under’
These were challenging principles, and they were too strong for the army’s leadership. In a military force, which relied on tight discipline, allowing independence to all ranks was doubly dangerous. For the first three days of the debates Gideon, as a printer, had particularly noticed that William Clark, one of the civilian secretaries to Sir Thomas Fairfax, was present in his robe and skullcap, furiously taking down verbatim whatever was said. Subsequently, he took fewer notes and these were only fragmentally published. In the end, news of the debates was censored altogether. Gideon heard that Cromwell had the last transcripts formally destroyed. At the same time, checks were tightened up and since Gideon was not an Agitator, he felt it best to return to his regiment.
After the 5th of November, Fairfax, who had recovered from his illness, took over the chair. A committee was formed to co-ordinate all the papers under discussion, a committee which included both Rainborough brothers, Sexby Cromwell and Ireton. Thomas Rainborough took time out to visit the Leveller John Lilburne in the Tower of London, their first meeting. It supposedly lasted for two hours and led the Royalist spy at the Tower, Sir Lewis Dyve, to inform the King that Rainborough was likely to become head of an army faction that would purge Parliament to further the Levellers’ ideals. Thomas Rainborough began to be seen as a dangerous man.
The committee, though drawn from all sides, produced a report which was practical but made compromises. However, by then it was too late. From the sidelines, anonymously, John Wildman counselled dolefully, ‘Beware, that ye be not frightened by the word anarchy, unto a love of monarchy, which is but the gilded name for tyranny …’ The deep differences between the soldiers and the chief officers of the army had led to the officers being nicknamed ‘Grandees’, a sneering title which implied these select beings had got above themselves. The Agitators were writing sadly to their comrades, complaining that ‘we find many at the Headquarters obstructing and opposing our proceedings’. Fairfax decided that the Agitators were divisive and disorderly. He sent them back to their regiments. The situation was diffused by appointing yet another new committee, to draft a remonstrance which was to be approved by the regiments at an army review.
So the Putney Debates were ended. For Gideon Jukes those discussions were more thorough than he had feared, although they achieved far less than he had hoped. Still, to the end of his days he would remain exhilarated simply to have been there, to have heard ideals of equality so openly and earnestly discussed.
Grandee or not, in a firm personal plea to Parliament, Fairfax repeated his many previous calls to redress the army’s lawful grievances and those of the people. He offered ways in which it could be done. He suggested that church lands be sold to provide the soldiers’ pay Then he threatened that unless discipline was restored, he would give up his command. It was a serious threat, aimed as much at his men as at Parliament. The soldiers were genuinely devoted to Fairfax and Parliament respected him.
With mutiny imminent, for the promised army review, Fairfax and Cromwell insisted that the troops be divided into three manageable groups, instead of the mass rendezvous the Agitators wanted. At Corkbush Field, near Ware, Fairfax brought the first seven regiments together. The Levellers saw this as their moment to co-ordinate the army in support of their cause. The civilians John Wilding and Richard Overton were in Ware town, sweating with anxiety over the outcome. For them it went badly wrong.
At the start, Colonel Rainborough presented Fairfax formally with The Agreement of the People, together with a petition. Rainborough had hoped for a large civilian turn-out, including thousands of Spitalfield weavers. None appeared. Nor was there a mass revolt by the troops. Even his own Leveller colleagues let him down. Neither Sexby nor Rainborough’s brother William lent him any assistance. Stranded, Rainborough became hesitant and was easily waved aside.
Fairfax took charge. Characteristically fearless, he rode around and addressed each regiment in turn. Commanding his men’s loyalty was his special quality. They loved him and they trusted him. Promises from him to live and die with them in prosecution of their just demands were immediately believed. Discipline was restored.
Two further regiments did then appear uninvited, with copies of The Agreement of the People stuck in their hats defiantly. Fairfax soon won around one of these rebellious regiments, leaving only the most radical. This had been the regiment of Colonel Robert Lilburne (brother of the Leveller John), though the men had been in open revolt for several weeks; they had driven away their officers, soldiers had been killed, an officer had lost a hand, and at Ware they stoned an officer of another regiment. Fairfax ordered these rowdies to remove the papers from their hats. They refused. Fairfax and senior officers, including Cromwell, then rode in among them, pulling out the papers. The regiment submitted.
Ringleaders were arrested. Eight soldiers were court-martialled on the spot, five were pardoned, three cast lots to survive and one was shot at the head of the regiment. The remainder were instructed to tear up their copies of The Agreement; they did it meekly, complaining that they had been misled by their officers’. Offending officers were to be court-martialled. Thomas Rainborough was packed off to Westminster to be dealt with by Parliament; he was ordered not to go to sea as vice-admiral until the matter had been investigated.
Two further army reviews, at St Albans and Kingston, passed off peacefully. Parliament thanked Fairfax and promised to uphold his requests for redress of grievances. Some regiments made declarations of loyalty to him, Colonel Okey’s dragoon officers being particularly unctuous.
One reason the army capitulated was that the political situation changed. When the Agitators at Putney demanded to abolish the monarchy, King Charles took fright. Claiming that the Levellers intended to murder him, the King escaped from Hampton Court.