At times more than 20,000 people were working without pay on the construction of the forts and earthworks. The lines of defence transformed the look of the city, and the diarist John Evelyn travelled to London to view them. Streets in the modern capital commemorate them – Mount Street in Whitechapel, for instance, where the giant Civil War earthwork wasn’t demolished until the early nineteenth century. The efforts of Londoners were not in vain: the capital was never seriously threatened with invasion again. Indeed, the main threat to the revolution in its birthplace was from counterrevolution within, not military force from the outside.
REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION
The Parliamentary camp always contained some who saw the war as a militarized form of negotiation with the king, designed to get him to accept a compromise that he was unwilling to accede to in peaceful discussion. Others reckoned that the king would have to suffer an outright military defeat before he could be brought to accept the ascendancy of Parliamentary rule. Others, still more radical, came to believe that the whole system of government needed to be refounded on the basis of popular sovereignty.
At different points during the revolution, this division expressed itself over different issues. In one critical phase it was fought out over the creation of the New Model Army, with Cromwell leading the ‘win the war’ party against the compromisers. Between the First and Second Civil War the division lay between Cromwell with his son-in-law Henry Ireton and the more moderate forces who were trying to negotiate with the king, on the one hand, and the Levellers on the other. After the Second Civil War it lay between the moderates who wished to return the king to his former powers and Cromwell, Ireton and the Levellers, now in alliance, who had concluded that the king could not be trusted.
THE LEVELLERS AND THE CITY
The political conflicts of the revolution could not help but be reflected in the City of London government. The revolution exploded the quasi-democratic but fundamentally oligarchic structure of livery companies and the Common Council, nominally the representative foundation of City government. The struggle focused on the rights of the commonalty to elect its own officers and leaders: Lilburne and fellow Leveller John Wildman were campaigning for the right of citizens to elect the mayor, sheriffs and burgesses. They also wanted an end to the veto that the mayor and aldermen claimed over decisions of the Common Council. In England’s Birth-right Justified (October 1645) and in two pamphlets written while he was imprisoned in the Tower the following year – London’s Liberty in Chains and The Charters of London – Lilburne demanded reform of the City government. This was not simply a democratic issue, since the same party of compromise that dominated Parliament was also in power in the City. The Common Council was controlled by a group of traders and merchants allied with their Parliamentary co-thinkers.19
Lilburne’s approach was, as ever, both highly polemical and highly legalistic. His argument was that the rights granted by King John to the City of London were being usurped by the current oligarchy. The fundamentals of the Leveller approach are visible in these writings. In Lilburne’s view, ‘the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, for anything I can perceive . . . lay no claim to their pretended power of voting to make laws in the Common Councell but the authority of the Charter of Edward III which in such case is not worth a button.’ For Lilburne,
the only and sole legislative law making power is originally inherent in the people . . . in which the poorest that lives hath as true a right to give vote, as well as the richest and greatest; and I say that the people by themselves, or their legal Commissions chosen by them for that end, may make a law or laws to govern themselves, and to rule, regulate and guide all their magistrates (whomsoever), officers, ministers, or servants.20
These views are strikingly similar, as we shall see, to those expressed the following year when the Leveller programme, the ‘Agreement of the People’, was presented at Putney Church. Lilburne’s struggle against the Presbyterians in the City was part of a wider, tripartite struggle for power that had begun with the end of the First Civil War in 1645. Charles I was intent on regaining as much of his previous power as he could, mainly by playing upon divisions among his enemies. The moderates among the Parliamentarians were willing to restore Charles, as long as he would guarantee a Presbyterian form of national church. The Independents, who did not believe in a nationally enforced form of church worship, were strongest in the officer corps of the New Model Army. The Presbyterians understood that the New Model Army was the obstacle which stood between them and a deal with Charles. So they moved to disband the army, without payment of arrears, and to send some of its regiments to Ireland to suppress Catholic rebels.
The army revolted and the regiments began to elect ‘agitators’ (the then meaning of the term being the same as ‘agent’) to address their concerns. A series of increasingly political manifestos, drafted with the help of those soon to be known as Levellers, began to flow from the presses. In June 1647 the king was seized by a mere junior officer, Cornet George Joyce, who rode to Holmby House in Northamptonshire and took him into the army’s custody.
The Presbyterian ascendancy in Parliament began to raise their own military force. Pro-Presbyterian apprentices rioted, and forced fifty-eight Independent MPs to flee to the army for safety. In response the New Model Army broke camp in August and occupied London. Colonel Thomas Rainsborough’s regiment was the first to gain access to the City from Southwark. Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell and Commissary General Henry Ireton began their own negotiations with the king, now held at Hampton Court and already being urged by some supporters to escape. Leveller Edward Sexby says that these negotiations with the king had left Cromwell’s reputation ‘much blasted’. The New Model Army was now divided between the Grandees, or the Silken Independents as Cromwell and his followers were known, and the agitators and their Leveller allies.
THE LEVELLERS AND LONDON
On 28 October 1647 these forces assembled in Putney Church, then west of London. And it is from this location that the debates held in the church, and on subsequent days in the nearby Quartermaster General’s lodging, take their name. William Clarke, secretary to the New Model Army, took down the Putney debates in his own shorthand. The most remarkable presences are those of ordinary and elected soldiers, debating with the highest officers in the army. ‘Buffcoat’ is all the name Clarke gives one participant. The Levellers and agitators presented the ‘Agreement of the People’, their plan for a more far-reaching and democratic settlement of the nation than anything Cromwell and Ireton had in mind.
Thomas Rainsborough and Henry Ireton were the key protagonists, and it is their formulations which most fully express the opposed positions in debate. The content of the debate addressed the nature of the written constitution itself, but its significance for the participants bore upon what would happen to the revolution in the future. Would it stall? Who would benefit? The Levellers were seeking to detach the radical forces of the revolution from their affiliation with the Grandees, and get them to force through the radical vision of a new England.
One of the most famous exchanges in English political history took place between Rainsborough and Ireton as they discussed the right of the poor to vote for a government – or was this to be the preserve of property-owners? As soon as the ‘Agreement of the People’ was read to the meeting, Ireton objected that it seemed to argue that ‘every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered’.21 Rainsborough’s reply is justly celebrated:
For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it is 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