On 28 October 1647, a delegation of two soldiers and two civilians arrived at St Mary's church, Putney, to attend a meeting of the general council of the New Model Army. They had been invited by the army's generals to explain the intentions behind a recently published pamphlet, The case of the armie truly stated, which criticized the New Model's drift towards a settlement rooted in direct negotiations with Charles I and stridently called on the army to honour its first engagements.Footnote 1 Unbeknown to the generals, however, the men came not to discuss this pamphlet, but a newly drafted paper which outlined an alternative settlement for the nation and one that represented a fundamental challenge to existing constitutional arrangements. That paper was the first Agreement of the people.Footnote 2
Less than a thousand words in length, the Agreement consisted of two sections of numbered clauses, together with brief introductory and concluding statements. The first section, concerning parliaments, called for the dissolution of the Long Parliament; a redistribution of seats ‘according to the number of the Inhabitants’; and for biennial meetings of parliament, affirming that the power of the representative ‘is inferiour only to theirs who chuse them’. Regarding this final point, the second section consisted of a list of ‘reserved powers’ which the people retained to themselves: freedom of conscience in matters of religion; freedom from impressment; legal equality before the law; and indemnity for anything said or done during the Civil War. The legitimacy of these provisions was to be secured through a nationwide subscription campaign, in a literal re-formulation of the social contract.Footnote 3
Ever since its scholarly rediscovery in the nineteenth century,Footnote 4 the Agreement of the people has been acclaimed as one of the most important documents of the English Revolution. As the earliest approximation in England to a written constitution, it continues to hold a certain romantic position in the history of liberal democracy, with commentators eager to cite its impact on the American Revolution and movements like the Chartists.Footnote 5 As the most famous proponents of the concept of an ‘agreement of the people’, the Levellers form part of the same legacy and are inexorably linked to the document.Footnote 6 Indeed, for an older generation of historians, the first Agreement's appearance at Putney was a result of close links between the Levellers and the army's regimental representatives, or agitators, which had enabled the Levellers, and especially John Lilburne, to exert a considerable influence over the New Model's actions and thinking during the spring and summer of 1647.Footnote 7 This interpretation was subjected to a major challenge, however, by revisionist scholars writing in the 1970s. Mark Kishlansky argued that army politicization was a consequence not of Leveller ideology but of the New Model's demands that parliament redress material grievances concerning its arrears of pay and indemnity for acts committed during the war, and from a desire to vindicate its honour vis-à-vis its treatment by parliament. Meanwhile John Morrill emphasized that Leveller demands for an end to wartime taxation and a decentralization of government were fundamentally opposed to a standing army. Most provocatively, Kishlansky questioned whether a Leveller movement existed at all outside of its leading figures and preferred to see a loose and wider coalition of groups of city radicals.Footnote 8 More recently, Morrill and Philip Baker have offered a further challenge to the level of civilian influence over the New Model by arguing that internal army discontent, rather than the machinations of Lilburne and Richard Overton, was behind the appearance of so-called ‘new agents’ – unofficial agitators of at least five horse regiments – and The case of the armie.Footnote 9
The contentions of this body of work are not universally accepted, however, and scholars like Ian Gentles, Barbara Taft, and Austin Woolrych have continued to see the Levellers as a more cogent group who played an important role in the process of army politicization.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, there is a common tradition of interpretation with regard to the first Agreement of the people, which sees the document drawing on ideas in the most recent writings of Lilburne and Overton. Although it appeared under the names of the new agents, it was actually drafted, it is held, by the Levellers and was therefore a document that originated among London radical circles.Footnote 11 Yet the authorship of the Agreement has always been uncertain and this article maintains that it is difficult to see it as a straight forward Leveller or even civilian manifesto. Indeed, it argues that the Agreement drew more readily on the declarations and engagements of the New Model Army than the pamphlets of radical civilians in London, and that it represented the minimal demands of a broader group of civilians and soldiers for resolving the protracted constitutional crisis of the late 1640s. This group is revealed to be former members of what Jason Peacey has termed the ‘Independent alliance’ of the 1640s,Footnote 12 and it is suggested that the emergence of the Agreement was a direct consequence of the gradual disintegration of that alliance. Finally, through its ability to unite those behind the document with other estranged members of the Independent alliance, the article contends it was the campaign behind the first Agreement of the people that ultimately led to the creation of the Levellers.
I
The question why two, at the time, relatively unknown civilians, John Wildman and Maximilian Petty, accompanied the first Agreement to Putney church has long intrigued historians. Although the view lingers in the historiography that both they and the new agents were in league with Lilburne and the Levellers,Footnote 13 this has been seriously questioned by Morrill and Baker, and several of their arguments can be further developed.Footnote 14 As will be seen, in the period before the Putney debates – and in spite of efforts by Samuel Glover and others – personal links between Wildman and Petty and the (imprisoned) Lilburne and Overton have never been established with certainty.Footnote 15 Moreover, although Lilburne was totemic amongst the soldiery, his account of his close links to the new agents and their allies in the autumn of 1647 is almost certainly unreliable. Despite boasting to fellow prisoner, Sir Lewis Dyve, that he had ‘great influence upon’, and knowledge of, their leaders and organization, he was patently unaware of the extent of their hostility towards the king. His opinion that a personal meeting with Charles I could attract men such as the leading agitator Edward Sexby into the royalist fold appears unfounded in the light of Sexby's polemical words at Putney regarding ‘the power of kings, some part of it, which God will destroy’.Footnote 16 It also seems significant that Lilburne only mentioned soldiers such as Sexby, Major Francis White, and Captain John Reynolds in conversations with Dyve.Footnote 17 There is no evidence that Lilburne had any contact with, or knowledge of, new agents such as Edmond Bear, Robert Everard, or Matthew Wealey, who subscribed documents such as The case of the armie, the Two letters from the agents of the five regiments of horse,Footnote 18 or, indeed, the Agreement of the people. As will be seen, much nearer the mark was Oliver Cromwell's alleged view that the ‘external’ influence behind the new agent organization derived from those in the House of Commons who opposed the projected settlement with the king, rather than the imprisoned Levellers.Footnote 19
Moreover, the very concept of ‘the Levellers’, in the sense of a political group which, in Taft's opinion, existed from mid-1646 ‘as a distinct party with a programme and an organization to advance it’, is problematic in itself.Footnote 20 As is now well documented, at the level of nomenclature, any talk of ‘the Levellers’ before the Putney debates is a terminological anachronism, for although the word had been used to describe enclosure rioters earlier in the century, it was not first used as a proper noun until 1 November 1647.Footnote 21 Naturally, the absence of a name does not preclude the existence of such a grouping, and a small number of individuals, including Overton and William Walwyn, evidently came together in the mid-1640s through their involvement in a petitioning campaign in support of Lilburne and their common belief in religious toleration.Footnote 22 For both Gentles and David Como, the triumvirate of Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn were sufficiently interconnected by 1645 or 1646 to constitute the leadership of an identifiable group with their own distinctive political agenda.Footnote 23 Yet, and in common with Kishlansky,Footnote 24 we maintain it remains difficult to distinguish members of this group from the much larger alliance of political and religious Independents, sectaries, and self-styled ‘well-affected’ Londoners who banded together at the same time through their support for the New Model Army and common hostility to Presbyterianism.
The latter point is exemplified by the associates and activities of Walwyn from the earliest days of the Civil War. He was a member of key city committees that militated for a more effective organization of the parliamentarian war effort, and also appears to have been connected to the committee for the general rising, on which the republican parliament-man Henry Marten was an influential figure.Footnote 25 According to his own account, Walwyn did not first meet Lilburne until ‘just before the New Model’ (i.e. late 1644 or early 1645), when he ‘held daily meetings, and intimate Discourse with Mr John Goodwin, Mr Henry Burton, Mr [Hugh] Peters, Mr [Mark] Hil[de]sly, Mr Lilburn, and others’Footnote 26 – which is hardly a roll-call of future Levellers. In July 1645, Walwyn and Lilburne were both involved in an accusation that the Speaker of the Commons had intrigued with royalists. But although Walwyn was a member of the Salters' Hall subcommittee that attempted to present evidence of the charge, Lilburne's involvement was apparently coincidental, having been in Westminster Hall on separate business at the same time.Footnote 27 An anonymous pamphlet of the same year, which Como has recently attributed to Walwyn, had appended to it the final paragraphs of Cromwell's famous letter written after the storming of Bristol. Although those paragraphs were suppressed from parliament's authorized printing of the letter, they appeared as a separate broadside, possibly at the instigation of leading Independents in the Lords, and the same print operation was seemingly responsible for Walwyn's tract.Footnote 28 Here the nexus of Walwyn, Lilburne, Cromwell,Footnote 29 and others reminds us that Walwyn was, first and foremost, an activist of the war party within London.
Walwyn's connections with city and army militants allowed him to organize in support of the imprisoned Lilburne and, with Overton, to develop and advance a progressively radical agenda that demanded liberty of conscience and the supremacy of the House of Commons through the curtailment of the arbitrary powers of the king and Lords.Footnote 30 While this undoubtedly sowed the seeds of the future Leveller movement, Gerald Aylmer and Keith Lindley have rightly cautioned against equating the campaign of London's godly ‘well-affected’ with ‘Leveller’ activity.Footnote 31 The broad Independent alliance described by Walwyn was a complex and shifting set of political and religious connections that sought to abate the threat of a Presbyterian covenanted settlement, and the group inevitably looked to the army to provide political leverage against the twin forces of Presbyterianism in the Commons and London's municipal government.
The Independent alliance was still in existence in 1647 and its membership and activities are particularly instructive in explaining the civilian presence at the Putney debates. In early July that year, John Wildman made his first appearance on the political stage when he arrived at army headquarters at Reading and presented a paper from the ‘well-affected of London’ calling for control of the city's militia committee to be restored into Independent hands.Footnote 32 The authors of this paper may also have been behind the earlier so-called ‘Sharp petition’ of 2 June, which was planned at Cromwell's house in Drury Lane and whose authors included Walwyn and the lay preacher John Price – later a trenchant enemy of the Levellers.Footnote 33 This allows us to place Wildman within a political orbit that included the army, the ‘generality of the congregations’, and prominent city and national Independent politicians. Indeed, a cipher-key belonging to Henry Marten, and possibly dating to the time of the Putney debates, lists ciphers for Marten, Wildman, Walwyn, Petty, Colonel Thomas Rainborough, and specific army regiments. The names of Lilburne and Overton are conspicuously absent.Footnote 34
The constellation of Cromwell, Walwyn, Price, and Marten thus indicates that Wildman and Petty were operating within a much broader alliance than has traditionally been thought. As Peacey has shown, although Lilburne initially was also associated with this alliance, in mid-1646 he fell out with Cromwell and other leading Independent politicians, and turned against Marten by June 1647.Footnote 35 It is evident, however, that Wildman, Petty, and Walwyn – all prominent future Levellers – did not follow Lilburne's lead at this time and break with Cromwell and the Independents. This offers a very different reading from even the most understated account of Lilburne's significance during the summer and autumn of 1647. Far from being, as Kishlansky argues, the individual whose arbitrary treatment by the Lords became the symbol for a movement,Footnote 36 Lilburne appears instead as a largely ostracized figure. Both he and Overton were imprisoned until the autumn of 1647, and this must have hampered their ability to influence army–civilian relations to a greater extent than older accounts – with their description of Lilburne as ‘seducer of the army’ and ‘agitator-in-chief’Footnote 37 – allow. While Lilburne and Overton were thus reduced to firing paper arrows at Cromwell from their cells, Walwyn, Wildman, and Petty, together with other civilians such as Price, remained engaged at the core of the Independent alliance. In July, Walwyn was invited ‘by very eminent persons of the Army’ to attend the New Model's headquarters at Reading, and it was there in the same month that Wildman and Petty participated in discussions over the newly drafted settlement terms, The heads of the proposals.Footnote 38
This demonstrates that the New Model was receptive to external advice and opinion, and evidence of a desire among army members – including common soldiers and, perhaps, as Norris has recently argued, ‘grandee’ officersFootnote 39 – for close collaboration with civilians is readily apparent. In May 1647, for example, the author of a list of proposals for managing the counsels of the army clearly had civilians in mind when he advised to ‘Keep a party of able pen-men at Oxford and the Army’ and to ‘Hold correspondence with … well-affected friends in the several counties of the kingdom.’Footnote 40 Similarly, a draft letter of July called on the well-affected of each county to send two or more representatives to army headquarters to discuss the public good with the general council and to communicate ‘all things’ back to the counties.Footnote 41 By the end of the following month, army accounts show the New Model had purchased its own printing press, which provided a formal means of communicating with potential allies.Footnote 42 Moreover, army grandees still were displaying favour toward civilian advisers in the autumn of 1647. Although Walwyn became unwelcome at the New Model's headquarters after falling out with its leaders in August over the issue of the control of the Tower of London, Wildman was recommended for appointment as governor of Poole and Brownsea by the general committee of officers in September.Footnote 43 Wildman may indeed have formerly been a soldier connected to Eastern Association forces, as a John Wildman was acting as a messenger for Captain Moody's troop in Huntingdonshire in March 1645.Footnote 44
This account helps to explain the presence of Wildman and Petty at the Putney debates. They were there not as civilian ‘Levellers’, in the sense of representatives of a political organization led by Lilburne. Rather, as members of an Independent alliance that consisted of the politically and religiously ‘well-affected’ of the City of London and their parliamentary allies, they were fulfilling the role that they had performed at the New Model's headquarters since at least July: that of the army's regular civilian counsel.
II
By the time of the Putney debates, however, the unity of the Independent alliance was increasingly strained. During the late summer and autumn of 1647, moves to settle the kingdom became the cause of increasing anxiety amongst a minority of both the soldiery and their civilian allies, who regarded The heads of the proposals as a retreat from what were often referred to as ‘the just ends of the war’. These were held to be articulated in the New Model's most important statements since its entry into the political sphere, which were brought together and published in late September 1647 as the so-called Army book of declarations.Footnote 45 From among the New Model's various papers, however, it was the Declaration, or representation of 14 June 1647 to which critics of the proposed terms for settlement turned as the embodiment of the army's will.Footnote 46
The Declaration was seemingly the work of the council of war – that is, of the officers alone rather than the full general council, which also included the rank-and-file agitators – and Henry Ireton is frequently identified as its main author.Footnote 47 In one of its most striking passages, the pamphlet affirmed that the New Model had taken up arms and paid the price of blood so that the ‘fundamentall Rights and Liberties’ of the army and ‘Freeborne people’ were no longer at the mercy of ‘men ruling meerly acording to will and power’.Footnote 48 Few historians now accept the view that such phrases in this and other contemporaneous army papers were examples of ‘Leveller language’, betraying the ideological influence of Lilburne on the New Model at this juncture. Lilburne was, indeed, an unlikely source of such rhetoric, since he had fallen out with Cromwell and the grandees in the previous year. Moreover, the language of the Declaration can readily be located within a more general parliamentarian rhetoric – as against its more radicalized Leveller formFootnote 49 – that was, in turn, part of wider constitutionalist thought. The document explicitly alludes, for example, to early justifications for the Civil War in its argument that the people needed no authority to act in the ‘vindication or defence’ of their just rights and liberties. It also boldly states its immediate contemporary influences: precedents set by the Scots' Covenanters, and the Dutch and Portuguese rebellions, all ‘having no visible form, either of Parliament or King to countenance them’.Footnote 50
The Declaration's main demand was for a purge of Presbyterian parliament-men. This alone, however, would not ‘secure our own and the Kingdoms rights, liberties, and safety, either for the present age or posterity’. Consequently, its authors called for political authority to be established in parliaments ‘rightly constituted, that is, freely, equally and successively chosen’.Footnote 51 Indeed, they argued that it was ‘essentiall and fundamentall to [the people's] freedome’ to ‘have a right to new and successive Elections unto that great and supreme trust’.Footnote 52
In support of this aim, the Declaration called for regular parliaments according to the Triennial Act, and that ‘secure provisions’ be made to ensure that kings could not henceforth adjourn or dissolve parliaments without consent. Its authors thereby hoped that ‘a firme foundation [will be] laid in the authority and constitution of Parliaments … for common and equall right and freedome to our selves and all the free-born people of this land’. Perhaps the most important statement in the Declaration, however, was that the army would not even agree to consider the case of the king and the settlement of the monarchy until the political objectives set out in the Declaration had been achieved and secured beyond all doubt.Footnote 53
In the period leading up to the Putney debates and the appearance of the first Agreement of the people, those who feared the imminent betrayal of the New Model's objectives expressed their anxiety in various ways. At Westminster in late September, Marten and his allies in the Commons – who included Rainborough and Lord Grey of Groby – unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the House from discussing the issue of the king, with Rainborough and Cromwell acting as tellers on the opposing sides. The same group also lost a subsequent vote which attempted to block the House from making a direct address to Charles I.Footnote 54 Rumours soon circulated that Marten had become so incensed that he resolved to assassinate Cromwell, only to be locked in a room by a fellow parliament-man until he saw sense.Footnote 55
Within the New Model, the concerns of some soldiers led to the emergence of the new agents, who utilized the army's recently acquired press, rather than those favoured by Lilburne and the Levellers, to print their early pamphlets.Footnote 56 These cited the Declaration of 14 June as setting out the just ends of the war,Footnote 57 and revealed a growing distrust not only of the proposed terms for settlement, but also of the army grandees and the existing institutions of political authority. For example, The case of the armie bemoaned the fact that whilst ‘the King hath his Court and lives in honour’, the army's demands remained unresolved.Footnote 58 With Charles now permitted his former ‘evill Councellors’, they were ‘restored to a capacitie of plotting and designing mischeife against the Army and kingdome’ – activities which Cromwell and Ireton were seen to countenance.Footnote 59 Distrust of the king's motives became more overt around the time of the Putney debates among the agents' civilian allies. The anonymous Cal to all the souldiers, which appeared on the first day of the debates and was possibly by Wildman, was overtly republican: monarchy was ‘but the gilded name for Tyranny’, and Charles I ‘a man of blood’, the ‘chiefe author of our miseries’ who should be punished for fighting a war against the people.Footnote 60 In similar vein, Petty openly declared at Putney that he considered the king's power ‘was ever a branch of tyranny’ and would be content when he saw God throwing it down.Footnote 61
This current of political disenchantment went further, however, and also encompassed the House of Commons. The catalogue of grievances that had amassed over the course of 1647 – the anti-army ‘Declaration of dislike’; the bullishness of political Presbyterianism; the failure to purge those members who had sat in the so-called ‘Pelham's Parliament’ after the flight of many Independent parliament-men to the army – had unravelled the bond of trust between the people and their representative. There was now ‘no end of reckoning up the innumerable treacheries, and mischieveous practices’ of parliament, whose ‘Committees and Courts’ were but ‘forges of oppression and injustice’.Footnote 62
This contemporary perception of an unsympathetic, and even hostile, representative was made only more acute by delays in addressing what the army regarded as its legitimate material demands. The case complained that the New Model had received ‘no publique vindication … No provision for Apprentizes, Widowes, Orphans, or mamed Souldiers … No such Indempnitie, as provideth security … no kind or degree of satisfaction [is] given.’Footnote 63 Both the soldiery and the people had ‘pined away … feeding upon empty words and fayre promises’.Footnote 64 In fact, the new agents and their allies suspected that parliament's delay was a tactical response designed to induce political fatigue in the army and people in order that a lenient settlement might be reached with the king. This was deemed all the more unforgivable as the delay in resolving the constitutional crisis had merely contributed to fears of royalist plotting. As the new agents complained, ‘[h]ath not the King [put] his Agents in all our Quarters, to kindle and blow up the coales of heart-burnings & divisions?’.Footnote 65
The main impetus for concern, however, was the projected settlement with the king under The heads of the proposals. The Declaration of 14 June – the anniversary of the New Model's triumph at Naseby – had explicitly demanded that the army's demands for indemnity and liberty be settled and constitutionally entrenched before the question of the king was entertained.Footnote 66 In direct contradiction, The heads put the cart before the horse, a point its critics never tired of arguing.Footnote 67 Moreover, the restitution of the king's negative voice would leave him at liberty to reject the package of social demands appended to The heads as a sop to the army's civilian allies in London.Footnote 68 Behind the repetitious calls to establish the ‘security’ of the twin demands of indemnity and liberty thus lurked a persistent fear that all would be lost unless the army's concerns were guaranteed before any settlement with the king.
This criticism of The heads also extended to Cromwell and Ireton, its chief supporters in the army. As might be expected of a publication that was essentially an internal army document, however, The case only implicitly attacked the grandees: the New Model was guilty of ‘declension’, of ‘declining [its] first principles’, of ‘back-sliding’.Footnote 69 By implication, the fault lay with those officers who had reneged on the army's engagements in their desperation to reach a settlement with the king. Nevertheless, within the less public forum of the general council there was more explicit criticism. At the opening of the Putney debates, Sexby – who has plausibly been identified as the principal author or co-ordinator of The case of the armie Footnote 70 – revealed that the credit and reputations of Cromwell and Ireton had ‘been much blasted’ in relation to their dealings with the king, finding support for his arguments from Rainborough.Footnote 71 Those outside the chain-of-command were even more damning. The Cal to all the souldiers accused the lieutenant-general and his son-in-law of having been so seduced by Charles that now ‘all their care is to please him’, to ‘kneele, and kisse, and fawne upon him’, endeavouring ‘to bring in the King, upon most unjust, unsafe, and unconscionable tearmes’.Footnote 72
By the time of the Putney debates, then, a minority of parliament-men, civilians, and army officers and soldiers were vehemently opposed to the type of settlement envisaged in The heads of the proposals, which would have established a constitutional monarchy with a strong executive and preserved the negative voices of the king and the Lords. It is now time to consider the ideas and origins of the most radical alternative to The heads, the first Agreement of the people.
III
The concept of an entrenched constitution founded in the sovereignty of the people is at the heart of the Agreement. Although the document is clearly linked to older ideas and practices of association and covenant in earlier periods of British and Continental European history, its form was novel in the Civil War.Footnote 73 The device of an entrenched constitutional provision as a solution to the problems of indemnity and liberty seems to have found its first expression in The case of the armie. Noting that ‘the people have been prevented of Parliaments’, it stated that:
it be possitively and resolvedly insisted upon, that a law peramount be made, enacting it, to be unalterable by Parliaments that the people shall of course meet without any warrants or writs once in every two yeares upon an appointed day … for the election of the representors in Parliament, and that all the freeborn at the age of 21. yeares and upwards, be the electors … and that the Parliament so elected and called, may have a certaine period of time set, wherein they shall of course determine, and that before the same period they may not be adjurnable and disolvable by the King, or any other except themselves.Footnote 74
This demand appears as a blue-print for much of the first section of the Agreement – which aimed to remedy the problem of an unrepresentative Long Parliament seemingly intent on sitting in perpetuity – and the call for a law paramount clearly exceeds anything in The heads of the proposals. Indeed, in contrasting The heads with the Agreement, it is evident that the Agreement is an implicit rejection not only of the terms of The heads' projected settlement, but also of the very mechanism of that settlement. At a time when the grandees' political allies were devoting their energies to gaining parliamentary approval for the final terms to be offered to the king,Footnote 75 the Agreement sought to deny parliament an active role in any settlement; indeed, the army would evidently impose the Agreement upon the nation following its forceful dissolution of the Long Parliament.Footnote 76
A possible source for such ideas was Overton's tract of July 1647, An appeale from the degenerate representative body the Commons of England. It is clear that Overton, in direct references to the Covenanters and Dutch revolt, drew on previous parliamentarian and army publications, including the Declaration of 14 June, as a source for his theories. Referring to his personal predicament, he stressed that necessity permitted an appeal (in the sense of an appeal from an inferior to a higher court) to the people as the source of power.Footnote 77 His solution to the current constitutional crisis, however, was to call for an uprising to create a ‘new deputation’ in order to remove ‘those dead, corrupt, putrefied Members from the seat and name of their Formall Authority’,Footnote 78 to be followed by a decentralization of parliamentary power. The latter demand – a feature of the second and third Agreements but, significantly, not of the first – was reflected in a series of articles for settlement appended to the tract, which followed earlier ‘Leveller’ concerns in works such as the Remonstrance of many thousand citizens (1646) and the ‘Large petition’ (1647).Footnote 79 Rachel Foxley has pointed out that the wording of the first reservation on liberty of conscience in the Agreement follows that of the Remonstrance.Footnote 80 The Agreement may have been influenced by these ‘Leveller’ tracts, yet, if so, it is striking how substantially different the Agreement is from them: their long lists of demands both extend further than the Agreement in scope, and yet not so far as to appeal for a foundational constitution to re-establish the basis of political administration.
The radical transformation in the Agreement – what distinguishes it from The heads and, indeed, The case and Overton's Appeale – is the recognition that the existing institutions of king, Lords, and Commons cannot provide a secure settlement of the soldiers' material and political demands of indemnityFootnote 81 and liberty. This was clarified in the letter to the ‘Free-Born People’ that accompanied the Agreement:
But if any shall enquire why we should desire to joyn in an Agreement with the people … & not rather petition to the Parliament … the reason is evident: No Act of Parliament is or can be unalterable, and so cannot be sufficient security to save you or us harmlesse.Footnote 82
The second accompanying letter continued the point:
we judge that no Act of Indempnity can sufficiently provide for your quiet, ease, and safety; because, as it hath formerly been, a corrupt Party … may possibly suprize the house, and make any Act of Indemnity null, seeing they cannot faile of the Kings Assistance and concurrnece, in any such actings against you, that conquered him.Footnote 83
Ultimately, disenchantment with existing political institutions, and especially the projected settlement with the king, led the authors of the Agreement to the realization that any settlement of the constitutional crisis had to circumvent those institutions permanently and entrench the constitution of any future administration in the people.
The Agreement also advanced a secular, and inherently republican, concept of settlement: it is devoid of the providentialism evident in earlier parliamentarian oaths, such as the Solemn League and Covenant, which later dominated the thinking in army-Cromwellian circles. Despite its apparent republicanism, it is nevertheless difficult to see an overt classical influence in the document. The republic proposed by the Agreement is buried in implication and never made explicit (indeed its authors may have been hedging their bets with regard to the monarchy). Despite containing a civic republicanism that advances a doctrine of liberty defined by non-interference by non-representative agencies such as the monarch or Lords,Footnote 84 neither the Agreement, nor its accompanying letters, include any discourse on virtue or other hallmark ideas of classical republicanism.Footnote 85
If the ideas in the first Agreement of the people did not obviously draw on civilian Leveller writings or classical influences, from where did they originate? The concept of a foundational charter that would re-establish the source and quality of political power clearly locates the document in the ancient constitutionalist tradition of English political thought. The notion of resolving the crisis of political institutions by radically rebuilding the constitution from its source – the people – can be traced back to early parliamentarian writing such as William Prynne's 1643 work, The soveraign power of parliaments and kingdomes.Footnote 86 Other pamphlets that appeared in 1642 to 1643, some of them authored by the leading war party theorist, Henry Parker, had discussed the right of the people to resist and even resume the powers of parliament if the king or parliament turned malignant.Footnote 87 Significantly, it was ‘the defence of that power, and right of the people, in their Representatives’ which the postscript to the Agreement regarded as the ‘foundations of freedom’ and the minimal contract to settle those things on which parliament ‘first ingaged [a]gainst the King’. Once this issue was established, ‘all the Grievances of the Army and people would be redressed immediatly, and all things propounded in your Case truly stated … would be forthwith granted’.Footnote 88
The Agreement's declaration of the people's sovereignty through the Commons was, therefore, a radical redeployment of the earlier parliamentarian and common law arguments of Parker and Prynne – and indeed of Lilburne.Footnote 89 The result was a constitution based on a popular unicameral model of a free state.Footnote 90 Clause IV of the Agreement stated that the power of the representative ‘doth extend, without the consent or concurrence of any other person or persons’ and listed the marks of sovereignty drawn from works such as Bodin's Six bookes of a common-weale: ‘enacting, altering, and repealing of Lawes; to the erecting and abolishing of Offices and Courts; to the appointing, removing, and calling to account Magistrates, and Officers of all degrees; to the making War and peace, to the treating with forraigne States’.Footnote 91 In listing the marks of sovereignty in the constitutional settlement, the Agreement confirmed that the people's representative would forever remain the supreme and sole political authority in England.
The representative was, however, subject to a number of reservations. Historians of political thought have commented that the doctrine of ‘reserved powers’, an element that would find its apotheosis in the American Constitution, is a novel idea originating in the first Agreement.Footnote 92 Yet it is possible that contemporaries would not have regarded the reservations as innovative, as the concept of reservations was well known within the legal practice of drafting charters or property deeds. When drafting a charter or a grant concerning land tenure, such as a lease or trust deed, a legal draftsman would set out in the reddendum clause of the legal instrument those items specifically reserved from the grant and retained by the grantor or landlord.Footnote 93 The Agreement thus alludes in form to civic charters or property deeds, and sets out the extent of political power that the people agree to entrust to those in political authority.
Finally – and in an inversion of existing interpretations of army–civilian relations – what has not previously been recognized is that the New Model's Declaration of 14 June is also clearly a direct source for the first Agreement of the people. Using the example of the Scots Covenanters, the Declaration developed the view that the law of ‘Nature and Nations’ permitted individuals to associate and recreate their representative body without the authority of established political institutions in order to re-establish the principles of ‘right and freedome’.Footnote 94 In part, it explained that this included the people's ‘right to new and successive Elections unto that great and supreme trust, at certaine periods of time, which is so essentiall and fundamentall to their freedome, as it cannot … be denied them’. Furthermore, it declared that where this fundamental freedom had been perverted, God's will required men to ‘carry on a Testimony against the … miscarriage of Governments, when corrupted or declining from their Primitive and Originall glory’.Footnote 95
The relationship between the Declaration and the Agreement is plainly revealed in the letters that accompanied the published Agreement. The new agents' letter ‘to the Free-born People’ – appended to the first printed copies of the Agreement – quoted directly from the Declaration (but without citation) in its argument that the Agreement would put parliament-men ‘in a capacity to tast[e] of subjection, as well as rule’.Footnote 96 To reinforce the point, the postscript to the Agreement declared ‘that the summe of all the Agreement … is but in order to the fulfilling of our Declaration of Iune the 14. wherein we promised to the people, that we would with our lives vindicate and cleare their right and power in their Parliaments’.Footnote 97 In a speech at Putney, it is Wildman, however, who most emphatically stated the correlation between the Agreement and the Declaration: ‘[I would know] whether the chief thing in the Agreement, the intent of it, be not this, to secure the rights of the people in their Parliaments, which was declared by this Army, in the declaration of the fourteenth of June, to be absolutely insisted on.’Footnote 98
IV
Having established the status of Wildman and Petty at army headquarters and the relationship between the Agreement and the Declaration, we can finally return to the Putney debates and view them in a new light. The obvious support the Agreement received within the general council no longer need revolve around the infiltration of the Levellers or of Leveller ideas. Given that the Agreement drew on the army's own pronouncements, it is unsurprising that, as Captain John Merriman put it, ‘this Agreement … is the desire of most of this Council’. Colonel William Goffe concurred, expressing the opinion that the Agreement was ‘well accepted by most of us’.Footnote 99 Even Ireton acknowledged that ‘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 should rejoice to see obtained.’Footnote 100 On 30 October, a committee that included Ireton and Cromwell as well as Sexby and ‘Agent Walley’, and which had compared the Agreement with the army's declarations, produced a series of proposals for settling the nation which substantially correspond to the content (if not the form) of the Agreement.Footnote 101 Perhaps Wildman and the new agents never expected such support for the document, as they initially opposed the setting up of this committee.Footnote 102 But its proposals only reinforce the extent to which the Agreement clearly drew on the New Model's earlier public statements.
One puzzle remains to be resolved, however: the identity of the group behind the first Agreement of the people. To address this issue, we must first begin with Wildman's own account of the immediate origins of the Agreement. This comes from the debate on 28 October, when Wildman revealed that on the previous day he attended a meeting:
where divers country gentlemen and soldiers and others were, and amongst the rest the Agents of the five regiments, and having weighed their papers, I must freely confess I did declare my agreement with them. Upon that, they were pleased to declare their sense in most particulars of their proceedings, to me, and desired me that I would be their mouth, and in their names represent their sense unto you.Footnote 103
As seen, such an assembly of soldiers and civilians was far from unusual. It is likely, however, that this particular meeting was a fraught affair, given that at the previous week's general council Cromwell and Ireton allegedly attacked The case of the armie as a document of ‘Faction, dividing principles, [and] Anarchy’, threatening its promoters with ‘hanging [and] punishing’.Footnote 104 From Wildman's account we can deduce that, as a counter-assault to the grandees and having conferred with the new agents and their allies, he is likely to have drafted, or at least collated, the Agreement of the people in preparation for acting as their spokesman.
Wildman's direct involvement in the Agreement is reinforced by the comments in his pamphlet of December 1647, Putney proiects. In this, he referred to the Declaration of 14 June as the ‘choicest’ of all the army's pronouncements and stated, in a significant passage, that ‘no authority … hath an image of justice upon it, which is not derived from the People, either immediately by their personall consent, or agreement, or mediately by the mutuall consent of those, who are elected by the People to represent them’.Footnote 105 Moreover, and in placing The heads of the proposals in a neat counterpoint with the Agreement – which represented the ‘foundations of freedom’ – Wildman declared that the desire to make The heads acceptable to Charles had seen the admission of ‘that foundation of tyranny, the Kings first enslaving principle … that all power and authority in this nation, is fundamentally seated in the Kings will’.Footnote 106 Wildman was also evidently familiar with Prynne's Soveraign power of parliaments, which was the source of many of the common law and classical quotations in his works,Footnote 107 and his comment at Putney that ‘we cannot find anything in the word of God [of] what is fit to be done in civil matters’ is in keeping with the inherent secularism of the Agreement.Footnote 108
In identifying the individuals with whom Wildman and the new agents were in consort, it is revealing that it was Sexby who, on the first day of the Putney debates, introduced Wildman, Petty, and the new agent delegates, and that Rainborough was famously outspoken in support of elements of the Agreement.Footnote 109 Significantly, all these men can be linked to Henry Marten. As seen, Rainborough, Petty, and Wildman were all listed in Marten's cipher-key, and Wildman and Marten were close confederates from the late 1640s until the end of Marten's life, using their respective ciphers, ‘A’ and ‘O’, in their correspondence into the 1650s. Correspondence between Marten and Sexby from the early 1650s also suggests that the two men knew each other from the late 1640s. Petty was Sexby's contemporary as an apprentice grocer in London, and he would later find employment in the 1650s administrating Marten's estates. Rainborough, alongside Grey of Groby, was among Marten's chief allies in the Commons.Footnote 110 As demonstrated, all these men shared a common hostility to The heads of the proposals, the army grandees' dealings with the king, and perhaps even towards the king himself. This and their activities suggest that, by the autumn of 1647, they formed an identifiable group alongside the new agents. Moreover, and in tandem with Marten's break with the ‘Royal Independents’ in that year,Footnote 111 the group's actions clearly point to the fragmentation of the Independent alliance.
Lilburne and Overton were also prominent critics of the grandees in the autumn of 1647 and undoubtedly shared many of the political and constitutional concerns of the group around Marten. Yet in distinguishing the latter group from the Levellers, it is revealing that in 1649 Overton linked together Marten, Wildman, and Grey of Groby as deserters of the Levellers' cause.Footnote 112 In the same year, the Levellers acknowledged that the first Agreement originated within army circles, stating that ‘the Agents[,] finding all former engagements, promises, and declarations broken, and utterly neglected, and the Common wealth in danger of utter dissolution, produce[d] an Agreement of the People … for uniting of all unprejudiced people therein’.Footnote 113 Furthermore, the staunch republicanism of the Marten group is starkly at odds with Lilburne's politicking with the royalists Sir Lewis Dyve and Judge David Jenkins and his ambivalent attitude towards the monarchy over subsequent years.Footnote 114 In October 1647, the month in which Marten allegedly branded Cromwell as ‘king-ridden’ and the Cal to all the souldiers damned Charles I ‘a man of blood’, Dyve relayed Lilburne's instructions as to how the king could secure the army's devotion within a matter of weeks.Footnote 115 No doubt Lilburne's printed works, with their attacks on the grandees and the Long Parliament, continued to find an audience among the soldiery and elsewhere.Footnote 116 Perhaps it was to Lilburne and Overton that Petty referred at Putney as that ‘company of men that do stand up for the power of the House of Commons’. Yet while he admitted to joining them in judgement, he confessed ‘For my part I was much unknown to any of them.’Footnote 117 All this only reinforces the contention that it is to the republican group around Marten – a group that united the high politics of parliament with the street politics of the well-affected and rank-and-file soldiery – which we must look to uncover the figures behind the first Agreement of the people.
Events following the initial appearance of the paper at Putney reinforce this thesis and emphasize that the practical role of the soldiery should not be discounted. As with other new agent publications, distinctive letters in the printing set used to print the Agreement can be traced to the press originally owned by the London printers Jane and Andrew Coe. From army accounts, we know that on 30 August 1647 the agitator Edmund Chillenden received a payment of £78 17s for purchasing ‘Mris Coes printing press’ on the New Model's behalf. The press was eventually taken over by John Clowes, and the Coes and Clowes were printers used by the leading army publisher George Whittington between 1647 and 1648.Footnote 118 In printing the Agreement, therefore, the new agents utilized the army's own recently acquired press, rather than those favoured by Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, or even Wildman. The new agents may also have played a key role in distributing the pamphlet. From late September 1647, there were reports that they and the well-affected of London held daily meetings,Footnote 119 and this body seemingly became the nerve-centre of army–civilian organization around the time of the Putney debates. For example, a new agent pamphlet reveals that by early November, ‘the Convention of Agents residing at London’ was using both civilians and soldiers to organize support for The case of the armie and the Agreement in various provincial cities.Footnote 120 Finally, and in a further illustration of the Agreement's linking of elite and popular politics, it was Lord Grey of Groby who presented the Commons with the new agents' petition of 9 November in support of the Agreement.Footnote 121
V
This article has argued that the first Agreement of the people was the product of an army–civilian alliance that came together in opposition to the projected settlement of 1647. Although presented as an army document, the new agents' civilian advisers seemingly played a leading role in its composition. However, those advisers were not, as traditionally thought, John Lilburne and Richard Overton, and we must look to Henry Marten and his associates at army headquarters, John Wildman and Maximilian Petty, for the external stimulus behind the Agreement. Similarly, whilst Leveller writings may have influenced the document, the Agreement was not an obvious summary of current Leveller demands and drew more readily on key aspects of parliamentarian theory and the engagements of the New Model Army, most notably the Declaration of 14 June. This suggests the existence of a thoroughly politicized army that was capable of thinking for itself, and warns against regarding the union of soldiers and civilians as a one-way ideological relationship.
This reading has major consequences for our understanding of the condition of the Independent alliance in the second half of 1647. Over the late summer and autumn of that year, opposition to The heads of the proposals from within parliament, the City of London, and the New Model Army led to the desire for an alternative form of settlement and the eventual disintegration of the Independent alliance. Indeed, through their rejection of the mechanism of the projected settlement with the king, which would ultimately rest on Charles's acceptance of bills ratified by parliament, the Marten group essentially cut itself off from the army and Independent grandees, who remained committed to a negotiated treaty with the king. By contrast, the Agreement sought to solve the constitutional crisis paralysing England by going directly to the people as the root of power. Using the rhetoric of corruption and delay allowed its authors to jettison any reliance on the ability of existing political institutions to grant the army and the people the just ends of the war: indemnity and liberty. In so doing, however, the Agreement presented a fully constitutional, if perhaps somewhat politically naive, mechanism of settlement. The idea that the army should ‘join’ with the people in establishing a secular constitutional settlement founded in a ‘law paramount’ denied both the arguments of providence and the rightness of might.
Nevertheless, the Agreement was a document around which disaffected soldiers, civilians, and parliament-men were to unite in the aftermath of the Putney debates. Moreover, and aided by an earlier partial rapprochement between Marten and Lilburne,Footnote 122 it was capable of (re)uniting other erstwhile members of the Independent alliance under its banner. For it is only after the debates, and through the attempt to organize a campaign in support of the Agreement in the army, London, and eventually nationwide, that the coming together of Lilburne, the new agents, and their civilian advisers can be seen. It is from this movement that the Levellers as a distinct group emerged.
VI
On 31 October 1647, Colonel Thomas Rainborough visited John Lilburne in the Tower of London in what may have been the first meeting of the two men. The details of their two-hour conversation are largely unknown, but Rainborough is likely to have attempted to secure Lilburne's endorsement of the plan for a general army rendezvous in support of the Agreement of the people. As an officer close to the radicalized soldiery, Rainborough fully understood the symbolic importance of Lilburne to building a united army–civilian movement behind the Agreement. Rainborough perhaps also recognized the possibility that Lilburne's old friend, Cromwell, might reach him first with the promise of liberty and a pension.Footnote 123 On 9 November, Lilburne was finally granted day release from the Tower, where he had been incarcerated since August of the previous year. The very next day, it was reported that he and Overton met the agitator, Tobias Box, the topic of their conversation rumoured to have been civilian–agitator relations and the future of the king.Footnote 124 Within a matter of months, Lilburne would join John Wildman and Henry Marten to become the pivotal figures in the campaign to establish a radical settlement of the English constitution through the first Agreement of the people.Footnote 125 In its calls for sovereignty established by popular consent and electoral and legal equality, that campaign bequeathed a new and lasting proper noun to the language of English politics: that of Leveller.
