The Army and the Levellers: The Roads to Putney

Abstract

The English Revolution began in the summer of 1647. It was a struggle to delimit power and authority which neither the constitutional reforms of 1641 nor the civil war that followed had been able to resolve. Shortly after the fighting ceased in 1646 the House of Lords propounded that ‘things that are to be perpetual might be settled in the old way, by the three estates’. Unexpectedly, however, it was conservative ‘presbyterian’ members of the House of Commons who conducted an experiment in government without the king. In the winter of 1646 Denzil Holies succeeded in obtaining sufficient personal support and institutional power to coordinate and implement a political programme. But the inability of the men at Westminster collectively to secure an accord with the king had encouraged some to question parliament's intentions and others its integrity. Moreover, Charles's defeat, flight to the Scots, and subsequent imprisonment revived the long deferred examination of sovereignty. This now centred on parliament, whose good intentions were, nevertheless, an insufficient justification for its rule. Beginning in the winter of 1646 and building to a climax in the summer of 1647, an assault mounted from both left and right struck at the conduct of Holles and his ‘faction’ and then at the foundation of parliament's role as a conservator of order and authority.