The Putney Debates – A founding moment of British democracy

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		St. Mary’s Church in Putney was the site of some of the most extraordinary political discussions to ever take place in this country. Between the 28 October and the 8 November 1647, army commanders, representatives of the rank and file known as ‘agitators’ and civilian radicals later called ‘Levellers’ met to discuss proposals for settling the kingdom in the aftermath of England’s blood civil war. The Putney Debates, as they have become known, provide us with a rare opportunity to hear ordinary soldiers arguing for their political rights. The discussions were stimulated by a radical new plan for settling the country after the war, the ‘Agreement of the People’. The ‘Agreement’ proposed extensive constitutional changes, including the acknowledgement of a set of rights, including freedom of conscience, that could not be infringed by either Parliament or the political executive. Putney is best remembered, however, for the debate over the franchise between advocates of manhood suffrage and those who contended that the vote should only be exercised by men of property. Yet the debates were also significant for others reasons. At these discussions, officers and agitators argued over what should be done with the king. A number of participants described Charles I as a ‘man of blood’, responsible for the death and destruction of the civil war. Some argued that the king must be brought to justice to account for the bloodshed. While Putney has been seen as placing England on the path to democracy, in the short term, it really put the kingdom on the road to regicide. ‘for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sire, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to putt himself under that Government’ These words, spoken by Colonel Thomas Rainsborowe, represent the most celebrated statements made at the Putney Debates of October and November 1647. Today, they are emblazoned on the walls of St. Mary’s Church, Putney, as a permanent memorial to the remarkable discussions that took place there. The debates have been seen as a foundational moment in the development of democratic ideals. Consequently, popular representations of the discussions at Putney have focused heavily on the dispute over the franchise. Here, advocates of manhood suffrage such as Rainsborowe, were opposed by others, most notably Commissary-General Henry Ireton, who argued that the vote should only be exercised by property holders. The discussions at Putney, however, ranged much more widely than simply considering the qualifications for voting. First and foremost, the debates were an attempt to work out differences between the army leadership – those senior officers known as the ‘Grandees’ – and representatives of ordinary soldiers – the so-called ‘agitators’. These divisions centred on the army leadership’s negotiating terms with King Charles I, the ‘Heads of Proposals’. The discussions, therefore, were also concerned with the basis on which a new settlement could be considered, the respective power of the Crown, Lords, and Commons in any such settlement and, most sensitively, what was to be done with the king. As we will see, the debates ended abruptly and inconclusively. Nonetheless, they had a number of important consequences, not least in moving the army leadership away from the idea of pursuing a negotiated settlement with Charles Stuart. This, in itself, was testimony to a broadly democratic impulse, the power of rank-and-file soldiers to sway their superiors through often startlingly frank debate. The immediate trigger for the debates was the publication of a pamphlet entitled The Case of the Armie Truly Stated in October 1647, directed at the Commander-in-Chief of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax. The Case was delivered by the new ‘agents’ or ‘agitators’ of five cavalry regiments and combined staunch criticism of the army leadership with demands to meet what it represented as the material and political concerns of the rank and file. The agents went further, however, presenting their pamphlet as an urgent intervention at a moment of national crisis: “we behold the Great Mansion house of this Common wealth, and of this Army (wherein all the families of the Nation are contained) on fire, all ready to be devoured with slavery, confusion and ruin, and their national native freedom (the price of their treasure and blood) wrested out of their hands” At Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell’s suggestion, it was decided that these ‘new agents’ should be invited to discuss their demands at the General Council of the Army, which was then based at Putney. The General Council encapsulated the political transformation of the army following the end of the first civil war. The General Council has been described by the historian Ian Gentles as ‘the first experiment in military representative government.’, bringing together the army’s ‘top brass’ and authorised representatives of ordinary soldiers. The creation of this body gave prominence to men of humble backgrounds, such as the Trooper William Allen, a Southwark felt-maker, who was chosen as one of the ‘agitators’ for Oliver Cromwell’s regiment. Well before the matter of giving the vote to all men was debated at Putney, therefore, authority within the Parliamentarian army was now being grounded in popular election as well as rank. The trigger for this organisational innovation was the growing hostility between the New Model Army and more conservative members of Parliament. These ‘Presbyterian’ MPs, so called because of their support for a more restrictive church settlement, wanted the king restored to power on moderate terms and the army disbanded. Historians have debated the degree to which the New Model Army was, from its creation in 1645, a radical religious and political hotbed. However, there can be no doubt that the hostility of Presbyterian MPs led by Denzil Holles had a dramatic impact on the ideological outlook of the army. Soldiers were disgusted that Parliament had not only ordered the suppression of a petition issued in March, listing army demands, but had also labelled any that persisted in circulating the petition as ‘enemies to the state.’ The rank and file were also concerned that the imminent recruitment for the military campaign in Ireland was being used to divide the army and to replace its current commanders with those more in line with the Presbyterian faction at Westminster. By April 1647, the army was worried that under Holles’ leadership, Parliament was now intent on a coup to regain control of both the capital and the military. By May, these concerns had pushed the officer corps and the rank and file into even closer cooperation, with the emergence of the ‘agitators’ or ‘agents’. Soon, most regiments had a compliment of two agitators for each troop or company. Facilitated by the London connections of some of these agitators, representatives of the rank and file were also cooperating with city radicals such as the former army officer, pamphleteer and polemicist John Lilburne. Lilburne and other figures who would be associated with the radical democratic ‘Leveller’ movement, such as William Walwyn, Maximilian Petty and John Wildman would be involved in army meetings over the course of the summer of 1647. Petitions and pamphlets produced by the agitators would also make use of the same print networks, notably the press of Jane and Andrew Coe, that was used by Lilburne and other so-called ‘Levellers’. The attempt by the Presbyterian leadership to put their plans for a coup into effect, beginning with an order on 25 May for the immediate disbandment of the New Model Army infantry, was the catalyst for this alliance of officers, agitators and political radicals to swing into action. The army defied Parliament’s order to disband and instead decided to seize the initiative from Parliament by taking the king into its custody. The plan was hatched in the garden of Oliver Cromwell’s house on Drury Lane on 31 May, although at this stage the intent was only to replace Charles’ guards with men of known loyalty to the New Model Army. However, the junior officer who undertook this mission, Cornet George Joyce, went further. On the evening of 3 June, he burst into the king’s bedchamber, informing Charles that he was to be taken away. It was a moment that was telling of the dramatic political transformation that had already occurred within the army. Charles demanded to see a commission in writing authorising Joyce’s actions. The cornet instead pointed to the soldiers behind him and said ‘here is my commission’. As Joyce later explained to Parliament, his response was not a show of brute force but an enactment of the decision-making authority that he believed the ordinary soldier now had within the army. As Joyce put it in a letter shortly afterwards, he had done ‘nothing in our owne name, but what wee have done hath been in the name of the whole Army’. Joyce’s vision of an army acting as one unified political entity was embodied soon after in the Solemn Engagement agreed at the rendezvous at Newmarket on 5 June. Through this engagement, the officers and soldiers of the New Model Army entered into a covenant with each other not to be disbanded until their grievances were addressed. These grievances again centred on the issue of indemnity. Yet, the army and its leadership clearly now identified itself as a body with a political mission. As a rousing declaration issued by Fairfax and the Council of War proclaimed on 14 June, they ‘were 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.’ Yet, while Parliament had given the New Model Army life, the Declaration was clear that it was now a corrupted institution which must be purged of its ‘delinquent’ (meaning crypto-Royalist) members. These were impressive statements of army unity, endorsed by the appointment of Fairfax as commander in chief of all land forces on 16 July. However, critical divisions were clearly emerging between the Grandees and the agitators over both dealing with their Presbyterian opponents in Westminster and, most importantly, over the army’s negotiating terms with the king. These terms, known as the ‘Heads of Proposals’ were the work of Henry Ireton. In a number of respects, they showed the influence of the radical political ideas proposed by the agitators and their civilian associates such as Petty and Wildman. Under these proposals, Parliaments were to be biennial, and constituencies redistributed according to the proportion of taxation they contributed, taking away seats from ‘poor, decayed or inconsiderable Towns’. The people’s right to petition was affirmed, as was their freedom from self-incrimination in trials. While the Church of England, its bishops and the Book of Common Prayer would remain intact, they would no longer be supported by compulsory tithes and broad liberty of conscience was to be given to Protestants. (The army’s vision of tolerance did not extend to Catholics, who would continue to be legally penalised.) In other respects, the ‘Heads’ were much more moderate, giving Parliament only temporary control over powers of appointment and limiting its authority over the militia to ten years. These were more generous terms than Charles had received from Parliament in its ‘Newcastle Propositions’. Critically, although they envisaged the creation of ‘Council of State’ which would replace the Privy Council, the ‘Heads’ also promised there would be no general limitation to the king’s ‘Regal Power’. These proposals had been the product of discussions between the army leadership, the agitators and city radicals. The problem, however, from the agitators and the radicals’ perspective was that, over the summer, the army leadership had seemed to expend much more energy in addressing the king’s concerns than the army’s grievances. Moreover, they had been slow to address the Presbyterian threat in Parliament, only finally marching on London, following the invasion of the Commons on 26 July by a pro-Presbyterian mob, whipped up by the army’s leading opponents. While the Presbyterian coup attempt had finally been snuffed out, the agitators were also enraged by the delay in dealing with Holles’ faction in the Commons, most of whom had been allowed to slink away into exile rather than face punishment. City radicals, such as John Lilburne encouraged rank and file discontent with the Grandees, Lilburne urging the soldiers not to trust their commanders further than they could throw an ox. Unhappiness at the actions of the Grandees also led to the appearance of so-called ‘new agents’, agitators who had not been officially recognised as part of the army’s General Council. It was these ‘new agents’ who produced the Case of the Armie. The pamphlet began with a lengthy list of army grievances that remained unaddressed, from support for the wounded and for veterans’ families to the demand that Parliament be purged of ‘delinquents’. Instead of addressing these concerns, the Grandees had gone against the Solemn Engagement by allowing the army to be divided into ‘distant quarters’. The stirring words of the Declaration of 14 June had, it said, been ‘forgotten, and the faith of the Army…broken’. The Case of the Armie insisted that radical political action was required: the present Parliament should be purged of its delinquent members and dissolved. The Case of the Armie departed clearly from the terms of the ‘Heads of Proposals’ and insisted not only on biennial Parliaments but also that these Parliaments should be elected by ‘all the freeborn at the age of 21 years and upwards.’ Manhood suffrage was the electoral logic of the Case of the Armie’s endorsement of popular sovereignty, that ‘all power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this Nation’. Anger at Charles, as well as the Grandees, was increasingly evident, the pamphlet noting that the ‘King hath his Court and lives in honour’ while the people remained ‘under much oppression and misery.’ Alongside long-standing army demands for pay and indemnity sat much broader calls for the reform of the law and the restoration of common lands to support the poor. It was this heady, if disorganised, set of demands that brought the General Council of the Army together on 28 October. Perhaps a hundred or more officers, soldiers and civilians attended the debates which continued until the 9 November. Most of these discussions took place in St Mary’s Church, though some sessions were held in the house of Thomas Grosvenor, the army’s quartermaster-general of foot. A record of the proceedings was kept by the army’s secretary William Clarke and his team of stenographers, though the transcription of the discussions became notably patchier after the 1 November. Clarke’s record of the discussions lists a total of thirty-six speakers, though the debate was dominated by four figures: the ‘Grandees’ Cromwell and Ireton, the highest ranking military radical Colonel Thomas Rainsborowe, and the civilian John Wildman. The debates opened with Cromwell in the chair as Fairfax was ill. If the Grandees had any doubts about the strength of rank-and-file feeling, these would soon have been dispelled by the first substantive intervention in the debates, by the agitator Edward Sexby, who likely authored The Case of the Armie. Sexby identified the root of the army’s discontent as lying in two things: ‘We have laboured to please a King, and I think, except wee go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him; and we have gone to support a house which will prove rotten studs, I mean the Parliament which consists of a Company of rotten Members.’ However, it was not only the King and Parliament who were the subjects of Sexby’s ire. Addressing Cromwell and Ireton directly, he informed them that their ‘creditts and reputation hath bin much blasted upon these two considerations.’ It was a remarkable opening salvo, capturing the agitators’ frustration with the lack of progress in addressing the army’s grievance. However, it was also another reflection of the growing confidence of the rank and file in asserting their own authority: a mere ‘agitator’ berating not only his own commanders but also Parliament and the King. The style as well as the substance of debate at Putney spoke of the increasing democratisation of the army. However, the Case of the Armie would be replaced as the focus of discussion by another document, An Agreement of the People, which was presented to the General Council of Officers on the opening day of the debates. The Agreement was presented in the name of the new agents but it represented a step change from the Case of the Armie and was most probably authored by the civilian John Wildman. Instead of modifying the ‘Heads of Proposals’, the Agreement offered a completely new plan of settlement, one which notably did not involve the king. Instead, the Agreement proposed radical changes to the English constitution. Like the ‘Heads’, it advocated biennial Parliaments. Departing from the arrangements of both the ‘Heads’ and the Case of the Armie, however, the Agreement proposed re-organising Parliamentary constituencies on the basis of the distribution of population. It affirmed that the power of this new representative would only be inferior to the sovereign people they represented. The Agreement’s greatest innovation, however, was in envisaging a set of rights which even the supreme legislature could not repeal or annul. These ‘reserves’ included liberty of conscience; freedom from conscription; indemnity; and equality before the law. For the first time, something like a set of protected human rights was being enumerated. These innovations, the Agreement made clear, were driven by present circumstances: ‘by our own woeful experience, who having long expected and dearly earned the establishment of these certain rules of government, are yet made to depend for the settlement of our peace and freedom upon him that intended our bondage and brought a cruel war upon us.’ In this vein, the Agreement extended the criticism of the king which had been evident in a more subdued fashion in the Case of the Armie. The Agreement raised the stakes considerably. No longer were the debates an opportunity to merely air rank and file grievances. The Agreement now called for a fundamental shift in the army’s negotiating strategy, that it abandon discussions with the king and instead take forward alternative peace proposals grounded on radical constitutional change. Given its content, the debate that immediately followed can appear obscure to modern readers. Rather than getting down to discussing these proposals, the participants instead turned their attention to considering whether they could even consider the Agreement given the army’s previous commitments. This debate about having a debate, however, was not a mere stalling tactic on behalf of the Grandees. In the early modern period, oaths, covenants and engagements were understood as promises before God. The army’s Solemn Engagement was understood as just such a covenant, binding upon all soldiers. Indeed, Sexby stated in the debate that the obligations the Solemn Engagement placed upon him were such, that he would be ‘covenant-breaker’ if he did not speak at the meeting. Ultimately, this debate over whether the Agreement could be considered in light of previous engagements was delegated to a committee for resolution. On the suggestion of Lieutenant-Colonel William Goffe, the participants were also encouraged to seek heavenly guidance, with a prayer meeting scheduled for the following morning. Goffe had dwelt on the Book of Revelation during this period of spiritual meditation, in particular its prophecy that the ‘kinges of the earth should give uppe their power unto the Beast’. In England, it was true, Goffe said, that kings had thrown of the authority of the Pope, but they had only done this to ‘putt themselves into the same state’ and proclaim themselves ‘Defender of the Faith’. Goffe mused whether the army was that ‘companie of Saints’ that was to assist Jesus Christ in destroying ‘this mistery of iniquity’, the service of earthly kings to the papal Antichrist. Goffe’s apocalyptic ruminations closed with an appeal for unity, beseeching his fellow soldiers to wait on the direction of God’s providence, rather than fall into divisions on the right course of action. This was another alarming indication that opinion within the army, from agitators to more senior officers, was turning against the king. The appeal for unity nonetheless seemed to be effective in permitting the debate to move forward, with Ireton agreeing that they now should turn to consider the contents of the Agreement of the People. The reading of the text was the prelude to the most famous and most studied portion of the debates, that concerning the franchise. Ireton picked up on the first article of the Agreements intention to redistribute seats according to the number of inhabitants. He queried whether this meant that *‘every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered, and to have an equal voice in the election of the representors’.* The Agreement, as we have noted, in fact said nothing specific about the franchise, but Ireton’s inference may have been drawn both from the wording of the first article and its reference to ‘inhabitants’ and to the explicit demand for manhood suffrage in the Case of the Armie. Ireton’s intervention inspired Rainsborowe’s celebrated speech noted earlier, that ‘the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee’. Other debaters too argued for giving votes to all men. Maximilian Petty asserted that ‘all inhabitants that have nott lost their birthright should have an equall voice in Elections’. Having had his worst suspicions confirmed, Ireton strongly refuted the idea of ‘one man one vote’. ‘I think ‘that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing or determining of the affairs of the Kingdome, and in choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall bee ruled by here, no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this Kingdom’. By ‘permanent fixed interest’, Ireton meant ownership of freehold property in land. For Ireton, this system ensured the stability of government, preserving the sanctity of private property. Grounding political rights in nature, as Ireton saw his opponents as doing, on the other hand, threatened anarchy: ‘by the same right of nature’, he said, any man had ‘an equal right in any goodes hee sees: meate, drinke, cloathes, to take and use them for his sustenance.’ While this may appear to be a piece of gross rhetorical exaggeration on Ireton’s part, it is important to remember that all sorts of relations in the early modern period, including marriage, were underpinned by property relations. Proposals which appeared to threaten property rights were often seen as corrosive of the whole social order. Ireton’s position was consistent with that outlined in the ‘Heads of Proposals’ and it was supported by Cromwell and Colonel Nathaniel Rich. It was, however, the minority position at the debates. Besides Rainsborowe and Petty, John Wildman, Edward Sexby and five other officers broadly spoke in favour of manhood suffrage. As historians have recently pointed out, the support for giving the vote to adult males expressed at Putney may have been a product of the connection of many of the debaters with London and their experiences of the broad householder franchises that operated in some city wards. So, what has often been characterised as the ‘radical’ position at the Putney Debates, was not far out of step with electoral reality in some parts of London. Even Rainsborowe’s famous words had a ring of familiarity about them. His speech echoed statements that had been made in a pamphlet by John Lilburne, The Charters of London, published in December 1646, which urged democratizing elections for the Lord Mayor: ‘because the only and sole legislative Law-making power, is originally inherent in the people and derivatively in their Commissions chosen by themselves by common consent, and no other. In which the poorest that lives, hath as true a right to give a vote, as well as the richest and greatest.’ This borrowing of Lilburne’s words also throws light on another important aspect of the debates, the way in which they absorbed phrases and ideas from pamphlets generated through shared radical print networks. As we will see, this would again be evident in discussions surrounding the fate of the king. Importantly, however, the advocates of manhood suffrage never made this an absolute right. The Case of the Armie, for example, had excluded ‘delinquents’ from voting. During the debates, Petty had also spoken of those who had ‘lost’ this ‘birthright’ and later on, he would agree to a revised position whereby apprentices, servants and those in receipt of alms would also be excluded from the vote. Although it was not recorded in Clarke’s transcription of the debates, other sources confirm that the meeting ultimately agreed that the vote should be given to ‘all soldiers and others if they be not servants or beggars.’ Often presented as a dispute between two irreconcilable positions represented respectively by Ireton and Rainsborowe, the franchise actually appeared to be one area in which it was possible to achieve a consensus among participants. The debates, however, turned to a far more sensitive and contentious subject, the power of the king. The city radicals, Petty and Wildman, expressed their concerns that the ‘Heads’ left untouched the power of both the king and the Lords to veto legislation. Ominously, Petty made clear that he viewed these powers as ‘ever a branch of Tyranny, and if ever a people shall free themselves from Tyranny, certainly itt is after 7 yeares warre and fighting for their libertie.’ Wildman stated that the intent of the Agreement was to provide a form of settlement that would not leave soldiers at the mercy of the king, whereas the ‘Heads’ had envisaged that soldiers ‘should goe to the Kinge for an act of indemnity, and thus the Kinge might command his Judges to hange them uppe for what they did in the warres’. This was a restatement of the position in the Agreement itself which explained that ‘if any shall inquire why we should desire to join in an agreement with the people to declare these to be our native rights – and not rather petition to the parliament for them – the reason is evident. No Act of parliament is or can be unalterable, and so cannot be sufficient security to save you or us harmless from what another parliament may determine if it should be corrupted.’ Ireton again was the main opponent of these views. He rejected the criticism launched by Sexby and others at the outset that the Grandees had focused on pleasing the king above addressing the army’s grievances. Rather, he said, their primary objective had been to secure a lasting peace and they had viewed all other demands as subservient to that goal. Moreover, Ireton contended, placing faith in an agreement to offer better protection than an act of Parliament was a pipe dream. Statutes at least had a legal standing. The agreement could carry no weight unless all men subscribed to it, otherwise it was ‘noe more than our saying our selves wee will bee indemnified.’ In the debate that took place on 1 November, it became clear that a number of participants wanted to do more than limit the king’s prerogative powers. Lieutenant Colonel John Jubbes made a prescient intervention. If Parliament could be purged of those who had supported the coup, would this not open up a way to ‘satisfie our just desires, and declare the Kinge guilty of all the bloodshed, vast expence of treasure, and ruine that hath bin occasioned by all the warres’. Sexby returned to the apocalyptic vision outlined by Goffe a few days’ earlier. *‘I think wee are going about to set up the power which God will destroy. We are going about to set up the power of Kings, some part of it, which God will destroy’.* Captain George Bishop blamed the divisions in the General Council on a *‘compliance to preserve that Man of Blood, and those principles of tyranny which God from Heaven by his many successes hath manifestly declared against.’* The discussion of the power of the king had clearly moved on to debating the fate of Charles Stuart. Even Cromwell acknowledged that they all ‘apprehend danger from the person of the Kinge’, though he was not yet ready to identify what the remedy to this danger might be. The debate on 1 November articulated positions and used phrases that had also been deployed in pamphlets linked to participants at Putney. A Cal to all the Souldiers of the Armie, published in October 1647 and often attributed to John Wildman, referred to the king as a man of blood, ‘over head and eares’ it said ‘in the blood of your dearest friends and fellow Commoners’. Early in November, the Agreement of the People was printed and distributed to the public. Clearly, the campaign for a more radical settlement was now being fought outside the walls of St Mary’s church as well as inside. The Grandees were increasingly concerned about the assertiveness of the agitators and reports of indiscipline among army regiments. Though the debates continued for several days, Clarke’s records of the discussions became increasingly sparse. On 8 November, Cromwell put forward a motion that the officers and agitators should return to their quarters. With Fairfax once again the chair, the motion passed, seemingly unopposed. The Putney Debates had ended suddenly and inconclusively. Nonetheless, they had important consequences. First, reports of the discussions at Putney, received through the Royalist prisoner Sir Lewis Dyve via his fellow inmate John Lilburne, probably played a significant role in encouraging the king to escape from his army captors on 11 November. On that same day, at a meeting of the Committee of Officers, Colonel Thomas Harrison referred to the king as ‘man of blood’ who should be prosecuted. As the historians Phil Baker and John Morrill have shown, Cromwell’s response to Harrison was revealing. Rather than disputing the description of the king, he used the Biblical example of King David’s staying the execution of Joab for killing Abner, to imply not that prosecuting Charles I was wrong but that the moment was not yet right to undertake this work, as the king’s supporters were still too powerful. Putney, therefore, seems to have been significant in shifting the attitude of the army leadership away from a negotiated settlement with Charles and towards the possibility at least of a trial, if not regicide. Second, the debates also moved the Grandees ultimately into making concessions towards the demands of the rank and file soldiers. Attention is often given to the army leadership’s suppression of discontent by force. At the rendezvous at Ware, Hertfordshire on 15 November, mutinous regiments expressing sympathy with the platform embodied in the Agreement of the People were disciplined, ending with the execution by firing squad of one the mutineers, Private Richard Arnold. Yet, the Grandees’ approach to restoring order was a combination of carrot and stick. The Remonstrance Fairfax read to the soldiers at Ware, while blaming the new agents for stirring up trouble, assured soldiers of regular pay, indemnity, support for the wounded and their families and freedom from conscription. This offer also recognised that the soldiers’ political demands needed to be addressed too, promising regular, fixed-term Parliaments, with MPs selected on the basis of free and fair elections. Third, the Debates fundamentally created both something we now recognise as a ‘Leveller programme’ and, indeed, the label of ‘Leveller’ itself. Across the later 1640s and 1650s, various iterations of the ‘Agreement of the People’ would be produced and the ideas contained within the Agreements would inform England’s first written constitution, The Instrument of Government, establishing Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. ‘Leveller’ itself was pejorative term, meant to connect this agenda with social levelling and threats to private property. We can see this line of attack developing in embryonic form in Ireton’s disputes with Rainsborowe and Wildman at Putney. For their part, Lilburne, Walwyn, and Wildman repeatedly disclaimed any attempt to ‘level men’s estates’. The label has nonetheless stuck and remains the main way historians refer to this coalition of soldiers and city radicals. What of the longer-term legacy of these debates? Clarke’s transcription of the proceedings was not discovered until the late nineteenth-century and there was limited contemporary reporting of the goings on at Putney. It was only really in the twentieth-century that historians and writers alighted on the debates as a founding moment in the history of democracy. There’s no doubt that they are important in this respect, though, as we have seen, the positions adopted on the franchise were less radical than used to be thought. Perhaps more remarkable was the transformation in the army over the course of 1647 which had made the debate at Putney possible. It is hard without this to conceive of a situation in which men as lowly as William Allen would be permitted to give their thoughts on how the kingdom should be settled, or in which mere agitators such as Edward Sexby would be allowed to berate not only their own commanders but the King and Parliament. It is arguably in this rough, egalitarian spirit of debate that the true democracy of Putney resides.

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St. Mary’s Church in Putney was the site of some of the most extraordinary political discussions to ever take place in this country. Between the 28 October and the 8 November 1647, army commanders, representatives of the rank and file known as ‘agitators’ and civilian radicals later called ‘Levellers’ met to discuss proposals for settling the kingdom in the aftermath of England’s blood civil war. The Putney Debates, as they have become known, provide us with a rare opportunity to hear ordinary soldiers arguing for their political rights. The discussions were stimulated by a radical new plan for settling the country after the war, the ‘Agreement of the People’. The ‘Agreement’ proposed extensive constitutional changes, including the acknowledgement of a set of rights, including freedom of conscience, that could not be infringed by either Parliament or the political executive. Putney is best remembered, however, for the debate over the franchise between advocates of manhood suffrage and those who contended that the vote should only be exercised by men of property. Yet the debates were also significant for others reasons. At these discussions, officers and agitators argued over what should be done with the king. A number of participants described Charles I as a ‘man of blood’, responsible for the death and destruction of the civil war. Some argued that the king must be brought to justice to account for the bloodshed. While Putney has been seen as placing England on the path to democracy, in the short term, it really put the kingdom on the road to regicide.

‘for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sire, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to putt himself under that Government’

These words, spoken by Colonel Thomas Rainsborowe, represent the most celebrated statements made at the Putney Debates of October and November 1647. Today, they are emblazoned on the walls of St. Mary’s Church, Putney, as a permanent memorial to the remarkable discussions that took place there.

The debates have been seen as a foundational moment in the development of democratic ideals. Consequently, popular representations of the discussions at Putney have focused heavily on the dispute over the franchise. Here, advocates of manhood suffrage such as Rainsborowe, were opposed by others, most notably Commissary-General Henry Ireton, who argued that the vote should only be exercised by property holders. The discussions at Putney, however, ranged much more widely than simply considering the qualifications for voting. First and foremost, the debates were an attempt to work out differences between the army leadership – those senior officers known as the ‘Grandees’ – and representatives of ordinary soldiers – the so-called ‘agitators’. These divisions centred on the army leadership’s negotiating terms with King Charles I, the ‘Heads of Proposals’. The discussions, therefore, were also concerned with the basis on which a new settlement could be considered, the respective power of the Crown, Lords, and Commons in any such settlement and, most sensitively, what was to be done with the king. As we will see, the debates ended abruptly and inconclusively. Nonetheless, they had a number of important consequences, not least in moving the army leadership away from the idea of pursuing a negotiated settlement with Charles Stuart. This, in itself, was testimony to a broadly democratic impulse, the power of rank-and-file soldiers to sway their superiors through often startlingly frank debate.

The immediate trigger for the debates was the publication of a pamphlet entitled The Case of the Armie Truly Stated in October 1647, directed at the Commander-in-Chief of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax. The Case was delivered by the new ‘agents’ or ‘agitators’ of five cavalry regiments and combined staunch criticism of the army leadership with demands to meet what it represented as the material and political concerns of the rank and file. The agents went further, however, presenting their pamphlet as an urgent intervention at a moment of national crisis:

“we behold the Great Mansion house of this Common wealth, and of this Army (wherein all the families of the Nation are contained) on fire, all ready to be devoured with slavery, confusion and ruin, and their national native freedom (the price of their treasure and blood) wrested out of their hands”

At Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell’s suggestion, it was decided that these ‘new agents’ should be invited to discuss their demands at the General Council of the Army, which was then based at Putney.

The General Council encapsulated the political transformation of the army following the end of the first civil war. The General Council has been described by the historian Ian Gentles as ‘the first experiment in military representative government.’, bringing together the army’s ‘top brass’ and authorised representatives of ordinary soldiers. The creation of this body gave prominence to men of humble backgrounds, such as the Trooper William Allen, a Southwark felt-maker, who was chosen as one of the ‘agitators’ for Oliver Cromwell’s regiment. Well before the matter of giving the vote to all men was debated at Putney, therefore, authority within the Parliamentarian army was now being grounded in popular election as well as rank.

The trigger for this organisational innovation was the growing hostility between the New Model Army and more conservative members of Parliament. These ‘Presbyterian’ MPs, so called because of their support for a more restrictive church settlement, wanted the king restored to power on moderate terms and the army disbanded. Historians have debated the degree to which the New Model Army was, from its creation in 1645, a radical religious and political hotbed. However, there can be no doubt that the hostility of Presbyterian MPs led by Denzil Holles had a dramatic impact on the ideological outlook of the army. Soldiers were disgusted that Parliament had not only ordered the suppression of a petition issued in March, listing army demands, but had also labelled any that persisted in circulating the petition as ‘enemies to the state.’ The rank and file were also concerned that the imminent recruitment for the military campaign in Ireland was being used to divide the army and to replace its current commanders with those more in line with the Presbyterian faction at Westminster.

By April 1647, the army was worried that under Holles’ leadership, Parliament was now intent on a coup to regain control of both the capital and the military. By May, these concerns had pushed the officer corps and the rank and file into even closer cooperation, with the emergence of the ‘agitators’ or ‘agents’. Soon, most regiments had a compliment of two agitators for each troop or company. Facilitated by the London connections of some of these agitators, representatives of the rank and file were also cooperating with city radicals such as the former army officer, pamphleteer and polemicist John Lilburne.

Lilburne and other figures who would be associated with the radical democratic ‘Leveller’ movement, such as William Walwyn, Maximilian Petty and John Wildman would be involved in army meetings over the course of the summer of 1647. Petitions and pamphlets produced by the agitators would also make use of the same print networks, notably the press of Jane and Andrew Coe, that was used by Lilburne and other so-called ‘Levellers’.

The attempt by the Presbyterian leadership to put their plans for a coup into effect, beginning with an order on 25 May for the immediate disbandment of the New Model Army infantry, was the catalyst for this alliance of officers, agitators and political radicals to swing into action. The army defied Parliament’s order to disband and instead decided to seize the initiative from Parliament by taking the king into its custody. The plan was hatched in the garden of Oliver Cromwell’s house on Drury Lane on 31 May, although at this stage the intent was only to replace Charles’ guards with men of known loyalty to the New Model Army. However, the junior officer who undertook this mission, Cornet George Joyce, went further. On the evening of 3 June, he burst into the king’s bedchamber, informing Charles that he was to be taken away. It was a moment that was telling of the dramatic political transformation that had already occurred within the army. Charles demanded to see a commission in writing authorising Joyce’s actions. The cornet instead pointed to the soldiers behind him and said ‘here is my commission’. As Joyce later explained to Parliament, his response was not a show of brute force but an enactment of the decision-making authority that he believed the ordinary soldier now had within the army. As Joyce put it in a letter shortly afterwards, he had done ‘nothing in our owne name, but what wee have done hath been in the name of the whole Army’.

Joyce’s vision of an army acting as one unified political entity was embodied soon after in the Solemn Engagement agreed at the rendezvous at Newmarket on 5 June. Through this engagement, the officers and soldiers of the New Model Army entered into a covenant with each other not to be disbanded until their grievances were addressed. These grievances again centred on the issue of indemnity. Yet, the army and its leadership clearly now identified itself as a body with a political mission. As a rousing declaration issued by Fairfax and the Council of War proclaimed on 14 June, they

‘were 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.’

Yet, while Parliament had given the New Model Army life, the Declaration was clear that it was now a corrupted institution which must be purged of its ‘delinquent’ (meaning crypto-Royalist) members.

These were impressive statements of army unity, endorsed by the appointment of Fairfax as commander in chief of all land forces on 16 July. However, critical divisions were clearly emerging between the Grandees and the agitators over both dealing with their Presbyterian opponents in Westminster and, most importantly, over the army’s negotiating terms with the king. These terms, known as the ‘Heads of Proposals’ were the work of Henry Ireton. In a number of respects, they showed the influence of the radical political ideas proposed by the agitators and their civilian associates such as Petty and Wildman. Under these proposals, Parliaments were to be biennial, and constituencies redistributed according to the proportion of taxation they contributed, taking away seats from ‘poor, decayed or inconsiderable Towns’. The people’s right to petition was affirmed, as was their freedom from self-incrimination in trials. While the Church of England, its bishops and the Book of Common Prayer would remain intact, they would no longer be supported by compulsory tithes and broad liberty of conscience was to be given to Protestants. (The army’s vision of tolerance did not extend to Catholics, who would continue to be legally penalised.) In other respects, the ‘Heads’ were much more moderate, giving Parliament only temporary control over powers of appointment and limiting its authority over the militia to ten years. These were more generous terms than Charles had received from Parliament in its ‘Newcastle Propositions’. Critically, although they envisaged the creation of ‘Council of State’ which would replace the Privy Council, the ‘Heads’ also promised there would be no general limitation to the king’s ‘Regal Power’.

These proposals had been the product of discussions between the army leadership, the agitators and city radicals. The problem, however, from the agitators and the radicals’ perspective was that, over the summer, the army leadership had seemed to expend much more energy in addressing the king’s concerns than the army’s grievances. Moreover, they had been slow to address the Presbyterian threat in Parliament, only finally marching on London, following the invasion of the Commons on 26 July by a pro-Presbyterian mob, whipped up by the army’s leading opponents. While the Presbyterian coup attempt had finally been snuffed out, the agitators were also enraged by the delay in dealing with Holles’ faction in the Commons, most of whom had been allowed to slink away into exile rather than face punishment. City radicals, such as John Lilburne encouraged rank and file discontent with the Grandees, Lilburne urging the soldiers not to trust their commanders further than they could throw an ox. Unhappiness at the actions of the Grandees also led to the appearance of so-called ‘new agents’, agitators who had not been officially recognised as part of the army’s General Council.

It was these ‘new agents’ who produced the Case of the Armie. The pamphlet began with a lengthy list of army grievances that remained unaddressed, from support for the wounded and for veterans’ families to the demand that Parliament be purged of ‘delinquents’. Instead of addressing these concerns, the Grandees had gone against the Solemn Engagement by allowing the army to be divided into ‘distant quarters’. The stirring words of the Declaration of 14 June had, it said, been ‘forgotten, and the faith of the Army…broken’. The Case of the Armie insisted that radical political action was required: the present Parliament should be purged of its delinquent members and dissolved. The Case of the Armie departed clearly from the terms of the ‘Heads of Proposals’ and insisted not only on biennial Parliaments but also that these Parliaments should be elected by ‘all the freeborn at the age of 21 years and upwards.’ Manhood suffrage was the electoral logic of the Case of the Armie’s endorsement of popular sovereignty, that ‘all power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this Nation’. Anger at Charles, as well as the Grandees, was increasingly evident, the pamphlet noting that the ‘King hath his Court and lives in honour’ while the people remained ‘under much oppression and misery.’ Alongside long-standing army demands for pay and indemnity sat much broader calls for the reform of the law and the restoration of common lands to support the poor.

It was this heady, if disorganised, set of demands that brought the General Council of the Army together on 28 October. Perhaps a hundred or more officers, soldiers and civilians attended the debates which continued until the 9 November. Most of these discussions took place in St Mary’s Church, though some sessions were held in the house of Thomas Grosvenor, the army’s quartermaster-general of foot. A record of the proceedings was kept by the army’s secretary William Clarke and his team of stenographers, though the transcription of the discussions became notably patchier after the 1 November. Clarke’s record of the discussions lists a total of thirty-six speakers, though the debate was dominated by four figures: the ‘Grandees’ Cromwell and Ireton, the highest ranking military radical Colonel Thomas Rainsborowe, and the civilian John Wildman. The debates opened with Cromwell in the chair as Fairfax was ill. If the Grandees had any doubts about the strength of rank-and-file feeling, these would soon have been dispelled by the first substantive intervention in the debates, by the agitator Edward Sexby, who likely authored The Case of the Armie. Sexby identified the root of the army’s discontent as lying in two things:

‘We have laboured to please a King, and I think, except wee go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him; and we have gone to support a house which will prove rotten studs, I mean the Parliament which consists of a Company of rotten Members.’

However, it was not only the King and Parliament who were the subjects of Sexby’s ire. Addressing Cromwell and Ireton directly, he informed them that their ‘creditts and reputation hath bin much blasted upon these two considerations.’ It was a remarkable opening salvo, capturing the agitators’ frustration with the lack of progress in addressing the army’s grievance. However, it was also another reflection of the growing confidence of the rank and file in asserting their own authority: a mere ‘agitator’ berating not only his own commanders but also Parliament and the King. The style as well as the substance of debate at Putney spoke of the increasing democratisation of the army.

However, the Case of the Armie would be replaced as the focus of discussion by another document, An Agreement of the People, which was presented to the General Council of Officers on the opening day of the debates. The Agreement was presented in the name of the new agents but it represented a step change from the Case of the Armie and was most probably authored by the civilian John Wildman. Instead of modifying the ‘Heads of Proposals’, the Agreement offered a completely new plan of settlement, one which notably did not involve the king. Instead, the Agreement proposed radical changes to the English constitution. Like the ‘Heads’, it advocated biennial Parliaments. Departing from the arrangements of both the ‘Heads’ and the Case of the Armie, however, the Agreement proposed re-organising Parliamentary constituencies on the basis of the distribution of population. It affirmed that the power of this new representative would only be inferior to the sovereign people they represented. The Agreement’s greatest innovation, however, was in envisaging a set of rights which even the supreme legislature could not repeal or annul. These ‘reserves’ included liberty of conscience; freedom from conscription; indemnity; and equality before the law. For the first time, something like a set of protected human rights was being enumerated. These innovations, the Agreement made clear, were driven by present circumstances:

‘by our own woeful experience, who having long expected and dearly earned the establishment of these certain rules of government, are yet made to depend for the settlement of our peace and freedom upon him that intended our bondage and brought a cruel war upon us.’

In this vein, the Agreement extended the criticism of the king which had been evident in a more subdued fashion in the Case of the Armie.

The Agreement raised the stakes considerably. No longer were the debates an opportunity to merely air rank and file grievances. The Agreement now called for a fundamental shift in the army’s negotiating strategy, that it abandon discussions with the king and instead take forward alternative peace proposals grounded on radical constitutional change. Given its content, the debate that immediately followed can appear obscure to modern readers. Rather than getting down to discussing these proposals, the participants instead turned their attention to considering whether they could even consider the Agreement given the army’s previous commitments. This debate about having a debate, however, was not a mere stalling tactic on behalf of the Grandees. In the early modern period, oaths, covenants and engagements were understood as promises before God. The army’s Solemn Engagement was understood as just such a covenant, binding upon all soldiers. Indeed, Sexby stated in the debate that the obligations the Solemn Engagement placed upon him

were such, that he would be ‘covenant-breaker’ if he did not speak at the meeting. Ultimately, this debate over whether the Agreement could be considered in light of previous engagements was delegated to a committee for resolution. On the suggestion of Lieutenant-Colonel William Goffe, the participants were also encouraged to seek heavenly guidance, with a prayer meeting scheduled for the following morning.

Goffe had dwelt on the Book of Revelation during this period of spiritual meditation, in particular its prophecy that the ‘kinges of the earth should give uppe their power unto the Beast’. In England, it was true, Goffe said, that kings had thrown of the authority of the Pope, but they had only done this to ‘putt themselves into the same state’ and proclaim themselves ‘Defender of the Faith’. Goffe mused whether the army was that ‘companie of Saints’ that was to assist Jesus Christ in destroying ‘this mistery of iniquity’, the service of earthly kings to the papal Antichrist. Goffe’s apocalyptic ruminations closed with an appeal for unity, beseeching his fellow soldiers to wait on the direction of God’s providence, rather than fall into divisions on the right course of action. This was another alarming indication that opinion within the army, from agitators to more senior officers, was turning against the king. The appeal for unity nonetheless seemed to be effective in permitting the debate to move forward, with Ireton agreeing that they now should turn to consider the contents of the Agreement of the People.

The reading of the text was the prelude to the most famous and most studied portion of the debates, that concerning the franchise. Ireton picked up on the first article of the Agreements intention to redistribute seats according to the number of inhabitants. He queried whether this meant that

‘every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered, and to have an equal voice in the election of the representors’.

The Agreement, as we have noted, in fact said nothing specific about the franchise, but Ireton’s inference may have been drawn both from the wording of the first article and its reference to ‘inhabitants’ and to the explicit demand for manhood suffrage in the Case of the Armie.

Ireton’s intervention inspired Rainsborowe’s celebrated speech noted earlier, that ‘the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee’. Other debaters too argued for giving votes to all men. Maximilian Petty asserted that ‘all inhabitants that have nott lost their birthright should have an equall voice in Elections’. Having had his worst suspicions confirmed, Ireton strongly refuted the idea of ‘one man one vote’.

‘I think ‘that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing or determining of the affairs of the Kingdome, and in choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall bee ruled by here, no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this Kingdom’.

By ‘permanent fixed interest’, Ireton meant ownership of freehold property in land. For Ireton, this system ensured the stability of government, preserving the sanctity of private property. Grounding political rights in nature, as Ireton saw his opponents as doing, on the other hand, threatened anarchy: ‘by the same right of nature’, he said, any man had ‘an equal right in any goodes hee sees: meate, drinke, cloathes, to take and use them for his sustenance.’ While this may appear to be a piece of gross rhetorical exaggeration on Ireton’s part, it is important to remember that all sorts of relations in the early modern period, including marriage, were underpinned by property relations. Proposals which appeared to threaten property rights were often seen as corrosive of the whole social order.

Ireton’s position was consistent with that outlined in the ‘Heads of Proposals’ and it was supported by Cromwell and Colonel Nathaniel Rich. It was, however, the minority position at the debates. Besides Rainsborowe and Petty, John Wildman, Edward Sexby and five other officers broadly spoke in favour of manhood suffrage. As historians have recently pointed out, the support for giving the vote to adult males expressed at Putney may have been a product of the connection of many of the debaters with London and their experiences of the broad householder franchises that operated in some city wards. So, what has often been characterised as the ‘radical’ position at the Putney Debates, was not far out of step with electoral reality in some parts of London. Even Rainsborowe’s famous words had a ring of familiarity about them. His speech echoed statements that had been made in a pamphlet by John Lilburne, The Charters of London, published in December 1646, which urged democratizing elections for the Lord Mayor:

‘because the only and sole legislative Law-making power, is originally inherent in the people and derivatively in their Commissions chosen by themselves by common consent, and no other. In which the poorest that lives, hath as true a right to give a vote, as well as the richest and greatest.’

This borrowing of Lilburne’s words also throws light on another important aspect of the debates, the way in which they absorbed phrases and ideas from pamphlets generated through shared radical print networks. As we will see, this would again be evident in discussions surrounding the fate of the king.

Importantly, however, the advocates of manhood suffrage never made this an absolute right. The Case of the Armie, for example, had excluded ‘delinquents’ from voting. During the debates, Petty had also spoken of those who had ‘lost’ this ‘birthright’ and later on, he would agree to a revised position whereby apprentices, servants and those in receipt of alms would also be excluded from the vote. Although it was not recorded in Clarke’s transcription of the debates, other sources confirm that the meeting ultimately agreed that the vote should be given to ‘all soldiers and others if they be not servants or beggars.’ Often presented as a dispute between two irreconcilable positions represented respectively by Ireton and Rainsborowe, the franchise actually appeared to be one area in which it was possible to achieve a consensus among participants.

The debates, however, turned to a far more sensitive and contentious subject, the power of the king. The city radicals, Petty and Wildman, expressed their concerns that the ‘Heads’ left untouched the power of both the king and the Lords to veto legislation. Ominously, Petty made clear that he viewed these powers as ‘ever a branch of Tyranny, and if ever a people shall free themselves from Tyranny, certainly itt is after 7 yeares warre and fighting for their libertie.’ Wildman stated that the intent of the Agreement was to provide a form of settlement that would not leave soldiers at the mercy of the king, whereas the ‘Heads’ had envisaged that soldiers ‘should goe to the Kinge for an act of indemnity, and thus the Kinge might command his Judges to hange them uppe for what they did in the warres’. This was a restatement of the position in the Agreement itself which explained that

‘if any shall inquire why we should desire to join in an agreement with the people to declare these to be our native rights – and not rather petition to the parliament for them – the reason is evident. No Act of parliament is or can be unalterable, and so cannot be sufficient security to save you or us harmless from what another parliament may determine if it should be corrupted.’

Ireton again was the main opponent of these views. He rejected the criticism launched by Sexby and others at the outset that the Grandees had focused on pleasing the king above addressing the army’s grievances. Rather, he said, their primary objective had been to secure a lasting peace and they had viewed all other demands as subservient to that goal. Moreover, Ireton contended, placing faith in an agreement to offer better protection than an act of Parliament was a pipe dream. Statutes at least had a legal standing. The agreement could carry no weight unless all men subscribed to it, otherwise it was ‘noe more than our saying our selves wee will bee indemnified.’

In the debate that took place on 1 November, it became clear that a number of participants wanted to do more than limit the king’s prerogative powers. Lieutenant Colonel John Jubbes made a prescient intervention. If Parliament could be purged of those who had supported the coup, would this not open up a way to ‘satisfie our just desires, and declare the Kinge guilty of all the bloodshed, vast expence of treasure, and ruine that hath bin occasioned by all the warres’. Sexby returned to the apocalyptic vision outlined by Goffe a few days’ earlier.

‘I think wee are going about to set up the power which God will destroy. We are going about to set up the power of Kings, some part of it, which God will destroy’.

Captain George Bishop blamed the divisions in the General Council on a

‘compliance to preserve that Man of Blood, and those principles of tyranny which God from Heaven by his many successes hath manifestly declared against.’

The discussion of the power of the king had clearly moved on to debating the fate of Charles Stuart. Even Cromwell acknowledged that they all ‘apprehend danger from the person of the Kinge’, though he was not yet ready to identify what the remedy to this danger might be.

The debate on 1 November articulated positions and used phrases that had also been deployed in pamphlets linked to participants at Putney. A Cal to all the Souldiers of the Armie, published in October 1647 and often attributed to John Wildman, referred to the king as a man of blood, ‘over head and eares’ it said ‘in the blood of your dearest friends and fellow Commoners’. Early in November, the Agreement of the People was printed and distributed to the public. Clearly, the campaign for a more radical settlement was now being fought outside the walls of St Mary’s church as well as inside. The Grandees were increasingly concerned about the assertiveness of the agitators and reports of indiscipline among army regiments. Though the debates continued for several days, Clarke’s records of the discussions became increasingly sparse. On 8 November, Cromwell put forward a motion that the officers and agitators should return to their quarters. With Fairfax once again the chair, the motion passed, seemingly unopposed.

The Putney Debates had ended suddenly and inconclusively. Nonetheless, they had important consequences. First, reports of the discussions at Putney, received through the Royalist prisoner Sir Lewis Dyve via his fellow inmate John Lilburne, probably played a significant role in encouraging the king to escape from his army captors on 11 November. On that same day, at a meeting of the Committee of Officers, Colonel Thomas Harrison referred to the king as ‘man of blood’ who should be prosecuted. As the historians Phil Baker and John Morrill have shown, Cromwell’s response to Harrison was revealing. Rather than disputing the description of the king, he used the Biblical example of King David’s staying the execution of Joab for killing Abner, to imply not that prosecuting Charles I was wrong but that the moment was not yet right to undertake this work, as the king’s supporters were still too powerful. Putney, therefore, seems to have been significant in shifting the attitude of the army leadership away from a negotiated settlement with Charles and towards the possibility at least of a trial, if not regicide.

Second, the debates also moved the Grandees ultimately into making concessions towards the demands of the rank and file soldiers. Attention is often given to the army leadership’s suppression of discontent by force. At the rendezvous at Ware, Hertfordshire on 15 November, mutinous regiments expressing sympathy with the platform embodied in the Agreement of the People were disciplined, ending with the execution by firing squad of one the mutineers, Private Richard Arnold. Yet, the Grandees’ approach to restoring order was a combination of carrot and stick. The Remonstrance Fairfax read to the soldiers at Ware, while blaming the new agents for stirring up trouble, assured soldiers of regular pay, indemnity, support for the wounded and their families and freedom from conscription. This offer also recognised that the soldiers’ political demands needed to be addressed too, promising regular, fixed-term Parliaments, with MPs selected on the basis of free and fair elections.

Third, the Debates fundamentally created both something we now recognise as a ‘Leveller programme’ and, indeed, the label of ‘Leveller’ itself. Across the later 1640s and 1650s, various iterations of the ‘Agreement of the People’ would be produced and the ideas contained within the Agreements would inform England’s first written constitution, The Instrument of Government, establishing Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. ‘Leveller’ itself was pejorative term, meant to connect this agenda with social levelling and threats to private property. We can see this line of attack developing in embryonic form in Ireton’s disputes with Rainsborowe and Wildman at Putney. For their part, Lilburne, Walwyn, and Wildman repeatedly disclaimed any attempt to ‘level men’s estates’. The label has nonetheless stuck and remains the main way historians refer to this coalition of soldiers and city radicals.

What of the longer-term legacy of these debates? Clarke’s transcription of the proceedings was not discovered until the late nineteenth-century and there was limited contemporary reporting of the goings on at Putney. It was only really in the twentieth-century that historians and writers alighted on the debates as a founding moment in the history of democracy. There’s no doubt that they are important in this respect, though, as we have seen, the positions adopted on the franchise were less radical than used to be thought. Perhaps more remarkable was the transformation in the army over the course of 1647 which had made the debate at Putney possible. It is hard without this to conceive of a situation in which men as lowly as William Allen would be permitted to give their thoughts on how the kingdom should be settled, or in which mere agitators such as Edward Sexby would be allowed to berate not only their own commanders but the King and Parliament. It is arguably in this rough, egalitarian spirit of debate that the true democracy of Putney resides.