This
article will seek examine the impact of the Putney Debates of 1647 on the
thinking and actions of Oliver Cromwell. How did Cromwell defeat his
Presbyterian enemies before Putney and Leveller opponents after Putney?
Why were the revolutionaries in the Leveller Movement
not a sufficient enough political force to challenge Cromwell for power and
therefore change the course of the revolution? It will also examine some
revisionist attitudes to Putney. Originally published in draft form in 2010
Introduction
The Putney debates started on 28 October 1647. A Meeting of
the army’s General Council of the Parliament’s New Model Army met to discuss the
state of the revolution and more specifically The Levellers document The
Agreement of the People and the more conservative document The Heads of
Proposals.
According to Wikipedia the agreement was produced by “civilian
Levellers or agitators and called for regular, two-yearly Parliaments and an
equal distribution of MPs’ seats by number of inhabitants. It guaranteed
freedom of conscience, indemnity for Parliamentarian soldiers and equality
before the law”.
A Counter document the
Heads of Proposals was issued by the Grandees. A much more moderate document. "Heads
of Proposals" was the document to be adopted later on by the Cromwell’s government.
It recommended a written constitution and led to Cromwell being given powers
that bordered on a dictatorship.
Oliver Cromwell came to the Putney debates in 1647 from a
position of considerable political and military strength. Although the fact
that he still needed to invite radical elements within the army to the Putney
Debates meant that he and his general’s position of power had been far from
consolidated.
Cromwell was well aware that the invitation of civilian
Levellers meant that the discussion held at Putney would have a resonance far beyond
the walls of Putney church. How much Cromwell was aware of the growing
radicalisation of his army is open to conjecture. To what extent Cromwell read
the volumes of letters sent to him from the various radical groups is again
hard to fathom.
But even this conservative of men would have least noted with
alarm the growing influence of radical groups such as the Levellers and Fifth Monarchists.
After all one of his top general’s Thomas Harrison was a Fifth Monarchist
supporter and shared similar religious and political positions. Cromwell also
up until Putney had a reasonably close social and political relationship with
one of the Leaders of the Leveller’s John Lilburne.
In the months leading up to Putney Cromwell and his generals
faced a growing threat to their leadership. They faced a two pronged attack
from the Presbyterians and the radical groups.
One of the most important radical tracts printed by 29 October
was called A Call to all soldiers of the Army by the Free People of England
which was a defence of the radical regiments and demanded a purge of Parliament
amidst a call for the agitators to meet as an ‘exact council’ and to act with
the ‘truest lovers of the people you could find’. One of the main aims of the
document was to expose the “hypocrisy” and “deceit” of Cromwell and Ireton.
It must have been with extreme reluctance that Cromwell invited
the agitators to Putney. In doing so his aim was to defeat these forces
politically at Putney and then militarily later on.
Politically Cromwell was to the right of the English bourgeois
revolution. In many ways his actions at Putney were largely opportunistic, he
promised the Levellers to look into their demands but in reality he had no intention
of adopting the Agreement.
He read very little outside of the bible and had only a
superficial understanding of the radical tracts produced during the early
period of the revolution. An interesting PhD dissertation topic would be to
examine what was in his library at the time of his death.
It is clear that Cromwell at Putney completely underestimated
his political opponents in the army. The documents presented by Leveller
supporters in the army clearly shocked and dismayed this conservative of
gentleman.
The debates brought to the surface deep seated ideas regarding
property, democracy and the future course of the revolution. Political
divisions were becoming sharper in the run up to the Putney Debates. Even
deeper divisions among historians have meant that there is no agreement as to
how radical the army was or when it started. This radicalisation for me did not
fall from the sky. The ideas that came to fore at Putney were not only exacerbated
by war , may have started as grievances over pay and condition, the fact of the
matter is that these developed into broader political demands is because they were
the product of a longer gestation.
As I said earlier there is little of no agreement among
historians as to whether the radicalisation if it happened at all took place
before or after 1647. A leading revisionist historian Mark Kishlansky classified
has the period as marked by its “vaunted peace and harmony,”
The radicalisation brought about heated attacks on the army. Provoking
one writer to say “it is objected to us, that we would have a toleration of all
sectaries, schismatiques, heretiques, blasphemies, errours, licentiousnesse,
and wickednesses.”
This hostility to the radicalisation of the soldiers was given
further political expression by the Presbyterian faction in parliament when it
published its ‘Declaration of Dislike’ in the House of Commons. The document
provocatively called the soldiers “enemies to the State and disturbers of the
public peace”
The document represented a declaration of war against both independent
and radicals alike. It was an expression growing class differences contained
within and outside of parliament. As Austin Woolrych commented, “seldom can ten
words have done more mischief than Holles’s ‘enemies of the state and disturbers
of the public peace.’”
There existed a growing nerviness inside the Presbyterian
party within parliament that was caused by the growing calls inside the army
for more democracy, protests against social inequality and an end to property.
The statement that “We 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. Would have sent shockwaves
through the Presbyterian Party.
After all the Presbyterian alongside the Independents had a
lot to lose if Lilburne and his revolutionaries had their way. A large number
of MP’s had grown rich out of the civil war and intended to keep their new
found wealth come what may.
Many in Parliament had grown rich from the change of relations
of land ownership, although the enclosure and the sequestration church holdings
had begun before the civil war it was continued with during the first
revolution with fresh impetus. The Long Parliament had got rid of the
Episcopate and to administer its interests it organised a committee for the
sale of church lands.
Often the officers and soldiers of the New Model Army were given
permission to buy land cheap. Sometimes exchange for their unpaid salary and at
half price. Fifth Monarchist’s like Lieutenant colonel Thomas Harrison became
very rich out this process.
According to Evgeny Pashukanis “The Civil War between
Parliament and the Crown thus had as a result the mass transfer of property
(which was partly annulled upon the Restoration). Not less than half of all the
movable property and half of the lands, rents and incomes of the noblemen who fought
on the side of the Crown fell under sequestration. In order to raise the
sequestration it was necessary to pay a composition in the amount of
approximately one-fifth of the total value. Such an operation was conducted in
1644 on not less than 3,000 “gentlemen”. The direct profit from this measure
was received by the Presbyterian party which then held sway in Parliament, a
party whose members became rich buying land cheaply, squeezing out the
Royalists who had fallen under sequestration, with money at usurious interest,
and finally, releasing sequestration for a bribe. The corruption which
developed gave one of the major trump cards to the Independents and their
struggle against the parliamentary majority. In the interest of justice it
should be noted that after this, when Cromwell’s army triumphed over
Parliament, the Independent majority of the “Rump” began to engage in the same
dirty business.
Events
Leading to Putney
It is extremely difficult to find in Cromwell’s early life an
understanding of his actions at Putney. The Oliver Cromwell who was to occupy
centre stage at Putney it can be said was not the same man who in early life
would have followed under different circumstance a very pedestrian life.
He was born in Huntingdon, near Cambridge on April 25th 1599,
four years before the end of Queen Elizabeth 1st reign. He was one of ten
children only seven survived childhood and he was the only one to survive into
adulthood. His mother Elizabeth had been widowed before she married Oliver’s
father. She came from a respectable Norfolk family and had a small inheritance
from her first marriage. Her family farmed lands near Ely cathedral.
Cromwell’s father, Robert was the second son of a knight and
occupied a ‘median position in society’. In Cromwell’s own words ‘I was by
birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in
obscurity’. Little
is known about his early life although one suspect tale had him bloodying the
nose of Charles Stuart Later to become King Charles 1. It would be feasible to
argue that when he attended grammar school he would have come under the
influence of the master Dr. Thomas Beard, who was a Cambridge graduate and a
clergyman.
Beard had written on the question of the English church. He
preached a puritan faith which put forward that mans rewards were to be found
not solely in heaven but on earth as well. Beard wrote of kings and rulers that
they were not only’ more hardened and bold to sin’ but were also want to ‘
boldly exempt themselves from all corrections and punishments due unto them’.
Much of Beards strongly Calvinist and anti Catholic teachings would impact on
Cromwell in later life.
From 1617-20 Cromwell studied law in London (this is hotly
contested by some historians) where he may well of made acquaintances with many
of the people who would later play an important role in the civil war. Of all
the MPs between 1640-42 over 300 had been to one of the Inns of Court, one being
Sir Thomas Fairfax who was a leading military figure. In 1621 he went back to
Huntingdon where he concentrated on farming the family lands. At the age of 29
he became MP when he was elected as one of the two burgesses of Huntingdon.
When Cromwell took his seat parliament was already in a state of flux over the
question of the king’s prerogative and of parliament’s role in society.
Previously six of Cromwell’s relatives had been imprisoned for refusing to pay
the enforced loan demanded by Charles 1.
Antonia Fraser writes of this time quite perceptively ‘For him
there were already in practice two divergent points of view-one basically royal
and one critical of it- which may for convenience sake be termed
parliamentary’. In 1640 he became MP for Cambridge and entered the short
parliament, which was followed, by the Long parliament in the same year. He
quickly became an important figure within parliament. He sat on 18 committees
and moved the second reading of a bill calling for annual parliaments.
Cromwell’s reading at this time was limited to the bible; the only other book
he told people to read was Raleigh’s History of the World.
It is not disputed that Oliver Cromwell was a powerful figure
in 17th Century England. History imparted Cromwell with an extraordinary power
and authority. He carried with him the hopes and aspirations of a new social
class. Many historians have sought to obscure the inner social struggle that
underpinned the ‘great drama of the seventeenth Century’. The 1640s began with
a parliament that although saw itself as the main representing vehicle of the
people it was based on a very narrow franchise. Its Lower House was three times
as rich as the House of Lords. Yet it was still under the control of the King
who could call it and close it as he choose.
Parliament began increasingly to need a defence against the
king and began to create its own army. This army was at the beginning never
seen as a threat or replacement to parliament. But it soon took on a life of
its own and began to recruit into it the most courageous and resolute members
of society. It is this reason that it was to become the most resolute
prosecutor of the war against Charles 1.
It is not the fashion in today’s historiography to write about
a religious outlook alongside a class one but it is high time this method was
restored. Charles and his court were representatives of the Episcopal or
Anglican religious order, alongside the Nobility and higher clergy. The
Presbyterians were the party of the high middle class today, while the
Independents were the party of the lower middle class. In a simple sense the
Presbyterian stood for a limited monarchy, the Independents stood for a
republic. “The contradictory position of the Presbyterians was a mirror of the
contradictory position of the middle class in the fact that it oscillated
between the nobility and the plebeians”.
Much of the time even overtly political and economic events were
shrouded in religious language. Both sides believed they were acting
legitimately and according to Gods will.
The
French historian Guizot perceptively writes ” “Then commenced between the
Parliament and the King, a conflict previously unexampled in Europe ...
Negotiations were still continued, but neither party expected any result from
them, or even had any intention to treat. It was no longer to one another that
they addressed their declarations and messages; both appealed to the whole
nation, to public opinion; to this new power both seemed to look for strength
and success. The origin and extent of the royal authority, the privileges of
the Houses of Parliament, the limits of the obligations due from subjects, the
militia, the petitions for the redress of grievances, and the distribution of
public employments, became the subjects of an official controversy, in which
the general principles of social order, the various nature of governments, the
primitive rights of liberty, history, laws, and customs of England, were
alternately quoted, explained and commented upon.
In the interval between the
dispute of the two parties in parliament and their armed encounter on the field
of battle, reason and learning interposed, as it were, for several months, to
suspend the course of events, and to put forth their ablest efforts to obtain
the free concurrence of the people, by stamping either cause with the impress
of legitimacy. When the time came for drawing the sword, all were astonished
and deeply moved ... Now, however, both parties mutually accused each other of
illegality and innovation, and both were justified in making the charge: for
the one had violated the ancient rights of the country, and had not abjured the
maxims of tyranny; and the other demanded, in the name of principles still
confused and chaotic, liberties and a power which had until then been unknown. When
the time came for drawing the sword, all were astonished and deeply moved, now
however, both parties mutually accused each other of illegality and innovation,
and both were justified in making the charge: for the one had violated. The
ancient rights of the country, and had no adjured the maxims of tyranny, and
the other demanded, in the name of principles still confused and chaotic,
liberties and a power which had until then been unknown”
It is clear that Cromwell built not merely an army but also an
armed party. In 1644 Cromwell's “holy” squadrons was given the nickname of
“Ironsides.” Which was playing an independent political and military role in
the English revolution.
The observations on the Puritans' army made by the historian
Macaulay are here not without interest “A force thus composed might, without
injury to its efficiency, be indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to
any other troops, would have proved subversive of all discipline. In general,
soldiers who should form themselves into political clubs, elect delegates, and
pass resolutions on high questions of state, would soon break loose from all
control, would cease to form an army, and would become the worst and most
dangerous of mobs. Nor would it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any
regiment religious meetings at which a corporal versed in scripture should lead
the devotions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a back-sliding major.
But such was the intelligence, the gravity, and the self-Command of the
warriors whom Cromwell had trained that in their camp a political organization
and a religious organization could exist without destroying military
organization. The same men who, off duty, were noted as demagogues and field
preachers, were distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by
prompt obedience on watch, on will and on the field of battle.”
Cromwell,
and his Grandees at Putney.
The General Council of the new Model army resided in Putney
church essentially to discuss the Levellers Agreement of the People from 28th
October to 11 November1647. According to H N Brailsford ‘When one compares
these debates with those of its sittings at Reading in July, it is clear that
in three months the temper and outlook of the army were changed. At Putney the
mood was sultry and tense’. While it true that the grandees and the agitators
were moving roughly in the same direction in July by October a huge chasm was
to open up between them “.
It is clear from the Clark papers or transcripts that Cromwell
was no great theoretician, He was ambitious and with his class outlook had a
tendency to develop his thinking and conduct on the spur of the moment. Cromwell
at Putney had a significant amount of prestige amongst his men. Through a
combination of persuasion and promises Cromwell had led his men to crush
Royalist forces and his Presbyterian enemies. In doing this he was able to
enlist the help of the Levellers who “were the first among the people and the
simple soldier agitators in the army to understand the necessity of energetic
opposition for the counter-revolutionary elements of Parliament.”
It is ironic that the very organisation created by Cromwell the
Council of the Army, where the agitators sat next to the officers and the
generals gave him the most political trouble.
It is unclear how much Cromwell acted in a fully conscious
matter in the political sense of word but according Pashukanis “One can have
doubts about the degree to which Cromwell and the other leaders of the
Independents truly wished to remain loyal to the Presbyterian majority in
Parliament. But there is no doubt that the soldiers’ organizations never
entered into their calculations for the purpose of their struggle with
Parliament. It is one thing to put pressure on Parliament by relying upon a
disciplined armed force subordinate to oneself, but entirely another thing to
create an illegal organization embracing the mass of soldiers and awakening
their independent activity, an organization which immediately and inevitably
had to bring forth socio-political demands extending far beyond the ideas of
the moderate Independents”.
He continues “In the English revolutionary movement of the
seventeenth century we observed the struggle of these two movements, a struggle
the fiercer because of the high degree of consciousness and political activity
among the soldiers of Cromwell’s army. To transform them into submissive
weapons of his moderate gentry-bourgeois policy was not an easy task. It is
necessary to add still another fact to this. The officer corps of Cromwell’s
army included a certain number of democratic elements (Pride, a former
horse-cab driver; Rainborough, barge captain; Colonel Joyce, a former tailor
etc.); moreover, many of them were convinced supporters of the extreme left
movements”
As Pashkunis states before Putney Cromwell had no intention of
taking on both the radicals within army and the Presbyterians. In fact there
are significant indicators at the time that Cromwell in the spring of 1647 was
thinking of leaving England to travel to the Europe to spread the protestant
cause.
It was only when he realized that on May 25th and 27th both
Houses adopted resolutions to stand down the army in Britain and send other
parts of it to Ireland that he sensed
that the Presbyterian party was seeking to establish its control over both the
army and parliament that Cromwell. He soon came to his senses. It was only his decisive intervention with the
support of the agitators and Levellers that the Presbyterians were defeated.
Had it not been for this resistance the subsequent course of events would have
been very different. And may well have changed the course of the English revolution.
After the Presbyterian party had been defeated That Cromwell turned
to Putney and the appearance of two platforms – the conservative Heads of the
Proposals, and the radical, expressed in two documents Case for Truly Standing
Army and Agreement of the People.
It should be noted that the participation in the Council of
the Army by “civilians”, i.e. of representatives of the London Levellers –
Wildman and Petty could be seen as the first move towards the transformation of
the army council into a revolutionary party and a party brisling with arms at
that.
In order to prevent this Cromwell alongside Ireton and other
Grandees. decided to divide the army and limit the influence of the Levellers.
He decided to call three separate meetings. He continually
kept calling prayer meetings to dissipate the anger of the Radicals.
Cromwell’s’ manoeuvring could only go so far. Why were the
Levellers unable to defeat Cromwell at Putney? As Pashukanis points out “The
Levellers found their support among the peasants, small rentiers, craftsmen and
workers. It is enough to recall the influence which they enjoyed in the London
suburbs, in particular in Southwark, which was populated by weavers. However,
their main support was the army. Here we encounter a fact imposing a
characteristic imprint on the whole course of the first English Revolution: it
was not accompanied by any significant agrarian movement. Proceeding from the
Levellers, the attempt to transform the political structure of England of that
day into a consistent bourgeois democratic condition was never supported by a
massive peasant uprising”.
The Levellers undoubtedly were a petit bourgeois party. While
some historians protest that capitalist relations were not that developed to describe
them as such I believe that there was sufficient bourgeois-capitalist
relationships, at the 1640s to warrant
such a claim.
It is true that capitalist relations had not developed to a
large extent into the English countryside, to such an extent demands could not
enter into their programme for a general division of land, “an agrarian law”.
When Cromwell saw for the first time the Leveller tracts he
knew what was at stake was not just a mere debate but who was to have power and
what class would control it. He wasn’t the only one to recognise that Putney
was a battle of contending social forces, Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in a little
known passage from the Clarke Diary’s cited ‘Sir, I see that it is impossible to
have liberty but all property must be taken away. If you say it, it must be so.
But I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath
fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to
make him perpetual slave. We do find in all presses that go forth none must be
pressed that are freehold men. When these gentlemen fall out among themselves,
they shall press the poor scrubs to come and kill one another for them’. Do
these comments represent an individual or did his words echo a much wider yet
unconscious expression that Putney represented not just the people that took
part but had a broader significance in the army and within the country itself
While it took Cromwell a little while to understand what was
going on at Putney when he saw the Levellers Pamphlet The Agreement of the
People he reacted in this way on October 28th “These things that you have now
offered, they are new to us: they are things that we have not at all (at least
in this method and thus circumstantially) had any opportunity to consider of,
because they came to us but thus, as you see; this is the first time we had a
view of them. Truly this paper does contain in it very great alterations of the
very government of the kingdom, alterations from that government that it hath
been under, I believe I may almost say, since it was a nation –I say, I think I
may almost say so. And what the consequences of such an alteration as this
would be, if there were nothing else to be considered, wise men and godly men
ought to consider. I say, if there were nothing else to be considered but the
very weight and nature of the things contained in this paper. Therefore,
although the pretensions in it, and the expressions in it, are very plausible,
and if we could leap out of one condition into another that had so specious
things in it as this hath, I suppose there would not be much dispute – though
perhaps some of these things may be very well disputed. How do we know if,
whilst we are disputing these things, another company of men shall not gather
together, and put out papers plausible perhaps as this? I do not know why it
might not be done by that time you have agreed upon this, or got hands to it if
that be the way. And not only another, and another, but many of this kind. And
if so, what do you think the consequence of that would be? Would it not be
confusion? Would it not be utter confusion? Would it not make England like the
Switzerland country, one canton of the Swiss against another and one county against
another to go on along with it, and whether those great difficulties that lie
in our way are in a likelihood to be either overcome or removed”.?
What was Cromwell’s aim at Putney? According to B Coward Putney began ‘as an
attempt by Cromwell to defend the strategy for a settlement he had followed
ever since the end of the war and to defuse the recent Leveller attack on it.
His main aim at Putney was to maintain the unity of the army behind a
settlement programme based on the Heads of Proposals and his speeches at Putney
are peppered with pleas to this effect “I shall speak to nothing but that, as
before the Lord, I am persuaded in my heart tends to uniting us”. Cromwell
throughout Putney sought that the army was pledged to keep the “engagements”
that had bound the army since June. He had hoped that by debating with the
Levellers that a common ground could be made between the heads of proposals and
the Leveller’s statement the agreement of the people’.
The Levellers had other ideas and their disagreement with
Cromwell stemmed from their social position rather than in any tactical
nuances. In that sense it is important to view the Levellers in the context of
the period. It is clear that much of what the Levellers fought for radical if
not revolutionary for the time.
The Levellers appeared and were in fact organised as a
political party in the years 1645-46. They were responsible for many of modern
day political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions,
leafleting and the lobby of MPs. Their strength mainly lay in London and other
towns and had quite considerable support in the army. The movement was an
extremely disparate group containing groups such as the Diggers or as they have
called the True Levellers and Ranters who were on the extreme left wing of the
Leveller movement.
The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a democratic
republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than the House
of Lords. A Leveller would have wanted redistribution and extension of the
franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property,
artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layer which made up the
Levellers themselves.
Levellers also wished to democratise the gilds and the City of
London, a decentralisation of justice and the election of local governors and
stability of tenure for copyholders. While the Levellers were sympathetic to
the poor, which stemmed from their religion which essentially was not different
from that of Cromwell. They had no programme to bring about social change; they
never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that
being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the
Levellers constitute a mass movement.
This contradiction caused some tension between their concern
for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property
owners. They had no opposition to private property and therefore they accepted
that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the
poor to be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained ‘I am
no advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for
them, without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the
poore make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient’. Knowing that they
could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate the
Levellers attempted to find constitutional ways of getting round it.
The limitations of the Leveller program was cruelly exposed in
a very famous exchange between Colonel Rainborowe, leader of the Levellers in
parliament and H. Ireton, Cromwell’s son in law. Rainborowe stated that ‘The
poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he and
therefore every man that is to live under a government ought, first, by his own
consent. To put himself under the government’.
This seemed all very democratic but ‘freeborn Englishmen’
excluded servants and the poorer sections that did not constitute ‘the people’.
Christopher Hill argued that ‘The Leveller conception of free Englishmen, was
thus restricted, even if much wider, than that embodied in the existing
franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of men
entitled to vote. But manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals,
generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more
democratic than they were’.
To put it more simply the generals deliberately exaggerated
the radicalism of the Levellers in order to label them extremists and to
mobilise their own supporters against them. Cromwell correctly recognised that
if the franchise was widened it would threaten his majority in parliament.
Again Hill explains ‘Defending the existing franchise Henry Ireton rejected the
doctrine “that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power
that shall dispose of the lands here and of all things here”. The vote was
rightly restricted to those who “had a permanent fixed interest in this
kingdom”. Namely, the persons in whom all lands lies and those incorporation’s
in whom all trading lies’
Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented them
and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded for all free Englishmen.
If by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should be free.
Who could freely dispose of their own labour? Then Ireton could see no reason
why men had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on to
point out that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in
parliament and they will give equal property rights to everybody. This argument completely confused
Rainsborough and undermined his argument.
Cromwell was acutely aware that the ideas of the levellers and
other smaller groups such as the Diggers were becoming a dangerous business.
Cromwell said of what he call the “lunatics”, “you must break these men or they
will break you”
Revisionism
The view that Cromwell’s role at Putney could be understood
better within the context of contending social forces as been attacked by a
growing number of revisionist historians. As early as the 1970s. The main
purpose of this group has been to attack any conception that historical events
can be best understood within the context of a socio-economic or even Marxist
viewpoint.
One such revisionist historian who has challenged the above
premise is Conrad Russell who in his Origins of the English Civil War sought to
explain the civil war from the standpoint of the Nobility not from any socio
economic changes. Jim Holstun described Russell’s book as a “manifesto for
historical revisionism”. Holstun went on to point out that Russell sought
another way to explain the social changes that were taking place in the English
revolution. That historians should concentrate on the upper yeomanry, the
middling sort of people. Russell would often make the remark that he was not
conversant with the terms feudalism and capitalism.
Woolrych says “we should be very cautious about treating the
Putney debates, wonderful as they are as the typical voice of the army”. While it is true that the ordinary soldiers
were thin on the ground the politics that were debated at Putney had a deep
resonance inside the army. Even Woolrych is forced to describe such incidents
where ‘open incitements to mutiny, and were already bearing poisoned fruit.
Fairfax had lately ordered Colonel Robert Lilburn’s foot regiment to Newcastle,
for sound military reasons but a party of new agents bearing copies of the Case
of the Armie overtook it and urged it not to let the army be divided. Thereupon
its soldiers turned back, held an unauthorised rendezvous and refused to obey
their officers. Other regiments were in a state of incipient mutiny before the
debates at Putney were would up’.
Mark Kishlansky writes ‘Much has been written about ideology
of the army, but most of it misconceived. A principle reason for this has been
historians have assumed that the lowly social origins of many of the officers created
a commitment to radical ideology. This is false on both factual and logical
grounds. There were men of low birth among the new Model’s officers, and much
has been made of Pride the drayman and Hewson the cobbler more still might be
made of obscure officers like Sponger and Creamer whose surnames suggest
backgrounds in trades and service. The army also contained a Cecil, a
Sheffield, and three colonels who were knights. Yet careful study of the armies
social origin, which lends support to the view that they were more traditional
in nature (of solid status in rural and urban structures) still does not meet
the real objection to existing interpretation- the fallacy of social
determinism’.
In conclusion hindsight is always a great general after the
events. At Putney Cromwell moved decisively against his main enemy at the time the
Levellers. Cromwell’s individual
qualities came to the fore in this time it is undoubtedly true.
The debates at Putney if nothing else gave us proof that the
ideas that were discussed there highlighted the actions of different class forces
each seeking to control the revolution. Clark gave us a documentary proof that
contrary to the revisionists the main motor force in history is the struggle of
contending class forces.
Or put another way “The suppression of the May uprising of
1649 rendered the final blow to the Leveller movement. In Cromwell’s army was
concentrated the most active and politically conscious part of both the
peasantry, urban craftsmen and workers. There the Levellers had the basic mass
of their adherents. The destruction of the Levellers in the army, therefore,
signified the destruction of radical elements in the entire country. After this
the revolutionary energy of the democratic strata was not directed along the lines
of mass political struggle. It found its outlet partly in attempts at terrorist
struggle in which, among others, Edward Sexby, one of the first agitators, was
beheaded; partly in the religious movement of the Quakers among whom the
Levellers’ leader John Lilburne ended his life. But neither of these directions
presented any danger for the rich and the powerful. (Evgeny Pashukanis revolutionary
Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927)
