The Civil War: radicalism

Title page of Thomas Edwards'
Gangraena
Public domain

The cost of war

The Civil War caused immense suffering. At any given moment in the summers of 1643, 1644 and 1645 between 120,000 and 140,000 adult males (roughly one in eight out of a population of c. five million) were in arms in England. It has been estimated that c. 62,000 died in England and Wales in the First Civil War, either on the battlefield or later.  War-related diseases, such as typhus and dysentery, carried off at least 100,000. 

In England the Midlands and the Welsh borders were the worst affected areas. There was no serious military action east of a line through King’s Lynn, Cambridge, London, and Arundel, though all parts of the country suffered from high taxation. One in ten inhabitants of provincial cities and towns were made homeless. The cultural losses at Lichfield and Ely cathedrals were irreparable. 

Religious radicalism

Between 1643 and 1646 Parliament overturned the existing Church of England, abolished episcopacy, cathedrals, church courts, the prayer book, and Christmas and Easter. These measures coincided with renewed iconoclasm. 

In place of the old Church, Parliament tried to establish a Presbyterian Church modelled on the Scottish kirk. A new service book, the Directory for Public Worship, was established. 


But England was not converted to Presbyterianism and the new settlement was attacked from three quarters. 

1. Scottish Presbyterians complained of English lukewarmness.
2. A growing number of Independents demanded autonomy for congregations and liberty of conscience.
3. Many people simply wanted a return to the Church and Prayer Book services. 

The growing authoritarianism of Parliament was attacked in John Milton's Areopagitica in 1644. You can read the full text here.

Title page of the Areopagitica
the first English defence of free speech

The war years saw the emergence of various religious sects who took advantage of the collapse of ecclesiastical authority and the abolition of the church courts. In the course of 1646 the Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards published three parts of Gangraena, in which he argued that radical sects were infecting and corrupting the pure Presbyterian settlement. 

Dissention and division

With these divisions, how would Parliament be able to reach a settlement with the king? Would he manage to exploit these divisions and return to power?

Holdenby Hall, where Charles 
was imprisoned
until seized by the Army

In January 1647, the Scots delivered the king to parliamentary custody and returned home. Charles was taken to Holdenby (Holmby) House in Northamptonshire, where he was held, the prisoner of Parliament, until June.  

With the king in prison and the Scots departed, divisions opened up between Parliament and the Army. Parliament was dominated by Presbyterians, who wanted to disband the Army and open up negotiations with the king. However, the Army was dominated by Independents (Congregationalists), who believed that each congregation should be self-governing, and they were resolutely opposed to a settlement with the king. There was now considerable hostility in Parliament to the New Model Army, which was seen as a hotbed of religious sedition and subversively radical political beliefs. 


Early in March 1647 the Commons voted to give the remainder of the 22,000-strong New Model Army a straight choice between disbandment and enlistment to serve in Ireland. Those who chose the former were initially offered no guarantees of pay at a time when payment was 43 weeks in arrears for cavalry and 18 weeks for infantry. The rank and file of the New Model Army were enraged. Their pay was in arrears and they did not wish to be sent to Ireland. 

The London Levellers

John Lilburne (1614-57)
'Freeborn John', one of the
leaders of the Levellers

The Army was not the only nursery of radical ideas. In London, a body of men, soon to be known as the Levellers, were producing pamphlets with titles like London’s Liberty in Chains, An Arrow against all Tyrants and England’s Lamentable Slavery. Their leaders were John Lilburne (1614-57), William Walwyn (?1600-81), Maximilian Petty (?1617-?1661), and John Wildman (1622/3-93) (all of minor gentry stock) and Richard Overton (d.1663), who was probably of humbler origin. There were already links between some Levellers and the army. 

The Levellers were demanding that the representatives of the people should be free from the tyranny of the king and the peers, that no-one should be punished for preaching or publishing his religious opinion in a peaceable way, and that the law should be radically reformed. 

The king captured

On 25 May the Commons approved orders for the disbandment of the entire New Model infantry between 1 and 15 June, directing the regiments to widely scattered rendezvous so as to forestall any concerted resistance. This severely tested the loyalties of the army’s commanders.  But on 4 June the political situation was transformed when a junior officer in Fairfax’s life guard, Cornet George Joyce, with a party of 500 horse, seized the king from Holdenby House and brought him to Newmarket where the army was holding a rendezvous. There he met Fairfax and (for the first time) Cromwell. By securing the king’s person, the army had suddenly gained the political initiative.

The Army and the Levellers

Although Fairfax was the commander of the New Model Army, he was no politician and much of the initiative passed to Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton. On 5 June the Army covenanted that they would not disband until they were given satisfaction for their grievances. 

From Newmarket the army set off on a slow advance towards London. On 14 June it published from St Albans a declaration in which it claimed to be speaking for the whole kingdom. It announced that it was 

'not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of  a state, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defence of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties'. 

In early August the army moved nearer to London and 15,000 men camped on Hounslow Heath. Between 6 and 8 August it occupied London in a very orderly fashion.

In early September Fairfax moved his headquarters to Putney.  The Army’s proximity to London laid it open to Leveller influence . Towards the end of September Leveller agitators appeared in the army.  On 18 October they presented to Fairfax 'The Case of the Army Truly Stated'.  It called for 

1. an immediate purge of the present parliament
2. a dissolution within nine months and thereafter biennial elections in which ‘all the freeborn’ should have their vote unless they had forfeited their freedom through ‘delinquency’ (royalism).
3. guarantees for liberty of conscience and freedom from conscription
4. reform of the law
5. the army’s pay arrears to be settled. 

On 21 October Fairfax put the document before the weekly meeting of the General Council. It was resolved to call a meeting of the General Council of Officers, to which the authors of the Case were invited. This is the background to the Putney debates.

The Putney Debates

The surviving manuscript of the debates was rediscovered in the library of Worcester College Oxford. Selections were edited in the 1890s but the term ‘Putney Debates’ was first used in 1938.  They had been recorded in shorthand by William Clarke, the secretary to the General Council. Clarke produced the manuscript, transcribing his shorthand notes of October/November 1647 in the 1660s, destroying the originals as he went. He had difficulties transcribing from his own notes.  The debates have been given a teleological interpretation as a step on the way to democracy, though most historians are now more concerned to place the debates within their own context. You can learn more about them here.

The debates, which began on 28 October, were a series of encounters between the army ‘grandees’ led by Cromwell and his son-in-law, Henry Ireton and the Levellers, both military and civilian. They were held, not in Putney church, but in the lodgings of the quartermaster general. There, the Levellers presented without warning a new document, 'The Agreement of the People', a wide-ranging political document advocating a radically new constitution that would overthrow the ‘Norman yoke’  and restore the liberties of ‘freeborn Englishmen’. This affirmed the sovereignty of the people, freedom of religion, immunity from conscription, and total equality before the law. However the Agreement said nothing about the franchise nor did it specifically mention the king or the Lords.

Because Fairfax was unwell, Cromwell presided over the debates, seconded by Ireton. Very soon the fundamental differences of purpose between the army commanders and the Leveller groups were revealed. 

On the second day of the debates - Friday 29 October - the Leveller spokesmen clashed with Cromwell and Ireton over the very foundations of a free commonwealth. Ireton raised the question of whether the Levellers believed that every male inhabitant had a right to vote. Maximilian Petty argued that 

‘all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections’. 

This raises the question of what he meant by the ‘birthright’ and how it was possible to lose it. Petty’s ‘democracy’ was one of smallholders and craftsmen. Anyone in paid employment was exempt. A much more radical view was put forward by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe: 

'the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he’.  

But in his support for manhood suffrage, Rainborowe was going further than most of the Leveller leaders, who never saw themselves as representing the mass of the poor. This has led to the conjecture that Ireton had cleverly exposed differences in the Leveller ranks. 

In spite of their disagreements the Levellers were united on one matter: the war had not been fought to allow others to lay down the subsequent form of laws and government. Ireton was adamant that that was exactly what the soldiers had fought for: there could be no upsetting of the social hierarchy. But it is a mistake to divorce the Levellers’ idea of liberty from its seventeenth-century context: liberty meant freedom to submit to the will of God.  Neither side acknowledged women’s right to liberty.