The Putney Debates

by The Levellers, Philip Baker (Editor), Geoffrey Robertson (Introduction)

In a series of debates with Oliver Cromwell in Civil War England of 1647, the Levellers argued for democracy for the first time in British history. Evolving from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model army in Parliament’s struggle against King Charles I, the Levellers pushed for the removal of corruption in parliament, universal voting rights and religious toleration. This came to a head with the famous debates between the Levellers and Cromwell at St Mary’s church in Putney, London. Renowned human-rights lawyer and author Geoffrey Robertson argues for the relevance of the Levellers’ stand today, showing how they were the first Western radical democrats.

Genres: History, Politics, English Civil War

176 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 20, 2018

Reviews

[Farah Mendlesohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely polemical opening essay (yes it really is a scandal how poorly the 17th century is taught in all four of the nations of this country, and in Ireland; anyone would think it might give us ideas!).

And a good selection of basic documents.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

For really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.
- Thomas Rainborough

The English Revolution is a period of British history very deliberately wiped from our culture's collective memory. The fact that we usually refer to it (if we refer to it at all) as the 'Interregnum', rather than 'The Republic', 'The Commonwealth' or, later, 'The Protectorate', demonstrates just how successful the Royalists were in framing British history on their terms. The Revolution (it implies) was not a triumphant culmination of any noticeable trends in British philosophy and popular politics. The radicalism of those days does not have any bearing on us now. It was just a blip. A brief accident. Move on, subjects, nothing to see here...

But of course, history is never so simple. Even when something is suppressed from the official histories (One of Charles II's first acts on coming to power was to pass the Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660, which declared that the 'Interregnum' period was to be legally forgotten) those events still happened, and that reality haunts the days to come. Though there were hopes that Charles' return would signal a return to the old ways, absolute monarchy was on its last legs, and it is fascinating to note how John Locke, in defending the Glorious Revolution of 1690, drew on many of the ideas debated at Putney. Though the manuscript of those meetings was lost until the 1890s, something of their spirit nevertheless lived on. As the magnificent radical, Lilburne, observed even as the Levellers were being purged by Cromwell's government, "posterity we doubt not shall reap the benefit of our endeavours whatever shall become of us."

Like any good revolution, the English Civil War involved a cacophony of extremely vocal factions with vastly different ideals and aspirations all thrown together against the establishment. With Charles defeated for the first time, these divisions had an opportunity to rear their head as soldiers of the war found themselves horrified at the deals being struck with the captured king they had shed so much blood to constrain. Many found themselves wondering why they had suffered so much, and no doubt there is an element of idealistic fervour in this period that was written retrospectively into their previous actions. If one interprets the civil war as cynical class conflict between aristocratic royalists and capitalistic parliamentarians that the British people were sucked into as cannon fodder, the fact remains that those men needed a justification for what they had been through, and a dangerous conclusion that many started coming to was that the civil war had been a revolution fought against tyranny on principle. With Parliament striking a deal that would put the king back on the throne, one can imagine the sense of looming horror some of those MPs must have felt on realising the powder keg their own rhetoric had lit beneath their feet.

It was in this chaos that radical democratic agitators in the New Model Army (pejoratively labelled 'The Levellers') managed to stir up enough trouble in the population that Cromwell and co felt compelled to debate their ideas openly. What followed from the 28th October to 11th November 1647 was an extraordinary series of discussions in which the radical and conservative wings of the parliamentary cause laid out their cases for what kind of government they had in mind whilst a court stenographer dutifully recorded their words.

Suffice to say, the conservatives were not happy at what they heard. The Levellers demanded (amongst other things) a universal vote (except woman, of course, and servants and apprentices, who might have had their votes coerced by their masters - the notion of a secret ballot having apparently not occurred to anyone). The elimination, or curtailment, of property qualification on the basis that any man's vote might be worth the same as a rich one's was a difficult notion for the wealthier rebels to stomach. The conservative's chief spokesman, Cromwell's son in law, Henry Ireton, frequently attempted to rebut this demand by claiming that only those with property could be trusted to vote maturely, since they alone had "interest" in the nation, thereby proving that democracy was incompatible with the existence of property.

The radicals were not impressed.

[Sexby:] We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen [...] But it seems now, except a man has a fixed estate in this kingdom, he has no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived. If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers.

As Sexby points out, Ireton's argument is nonsensical because, if the poor did not have an 'interest' in the kingdom, then they would have had no reason to fight in the war except for payment which - as as an aside - many had not yet received.

[Sexby:] All here, both great and small, do think that we fought for something. I confess, many of us fought for those ends which, we since saw, were not those which caused us to go through difficulties and straits and to venture all in the ship with you; it had been good in you to have advertised us of it, and I believe you would have had fewer under your command to have commanded.

Nevertheless, Ireton continued to clutch pearls at the thought of losing his property, constantly reiterating the danger of populist property confiscation as his one argument against democracy. Occasionally he granted that "we should not seclude them out of England, that we should not refuse to give them air and place and ground, and the freedom of the highways and other things, to live among us," but this generous allowance of the right to breathe air was as close as he could get to a compromise with the poor. How gracious of the man to allow each radical the opportunity to step up and spit on him.

[Thomas Rainborough:] Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away. If it be laid down for a rule, and if you will say it, it must be so. But I would fain known what the soldier has fought for all this while? He has fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a 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.

This prescient echo of Sartre's grim remark, "When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die," highlights that one of the chief pleasures of this book (aside from the delightfully brave free thinking of these radicals) is in the pre-emptive echoes of later history found in their words. Locke is often praised for his formulation of government as deriving its power from the consent of the governed, yet his social contract formulations were already present forty years earlier. 'The Large Petition' of 1647 opens with the declaration that "the end of all government is the safety and freedom of the governed" whilst the 1646 'A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens' declares that Parliament's authority is "only of us but a power of trust (which is ever revocable, and cannot be otherwise) and to be employed to no end but our own well-being." This latter text also contains a further prophecy of Thomas Paine's beautiful assertion that "Man has no property in man":

For whatever our forefathers were, or whatever they did or suffered or were enforced to yield unto, we are the men of the present age and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitances, molestations or arbitrary power.

This is a cornucopia of political treasures, containing extracts from the Putney Debates themselves as well as plenty of other delightful propaganda pamphlets from the period leading up to them. Geoffrey Roberts' fantastic introduction also does a wonderful job of giving a concise, entertaining and readable summary of the period, giving space for the amusing characters and iconic moments of the Leveller mythology whilst also offering a cogent analysis of their invisible impact on British politics in the long-term.

Of course, reading through these texts, it is at first horrifying to realise that these debates were almost lost to history. The stenographer's records disappeared until their rediscovery in the library of Worcester College, Oxford, in the 1890s. Yet I cannot help feeling a spark of hope at the thought that there must be other monuments of radical glory still waiting to be found in similar archives around the world. Yes, history is written by the victors, but that is no reason to think their pages are the only ones to have been inked. A necessary battleground in the fight against oppression is a constant reclamation and retelling of the stories of our predecessors, of the radical fools defeated in their own time before being vindicated by the philosophies of later cultures. So yes, history is written by the victors, but one day (if progress really does exist) the people will be triumphant, and they will have a magnificent story to tell.

For now, however, the Levellers are not mentioned in the history curriculum of English schools. It is not difficult to understand why. Every nation's history is a narrative of power built on violence, oppressive structures stuck together by the blood of the defeated, and horrid silences where the lives of the multitude go unrecorded in favour of giddy tales about some psychopathic murderer's successful dynasty. Though often fascinating, the grisly charm of these stories is usually enabled by the fact that the tales of their victims are not mentioned alongside them. The power squabbles of aristocratic elites are tutted over and celebrated when we learn that damn jingle about Henry VIII's wives, but the mass executions that king wreaked on the protesting population go unmentioned. Elizabeth gets to dominate the courtiers of her day and make grand speeches against a foreign armada, but the public mutilation of dissidents and vicious colonisation of Ireland gets swept under the rug. Likewise, Cromwell's reform of the New Model Army offers kids a great man to write essays on, but his more complex machinations with and against the radical forces of his day are passed over.

And yet, amidst that shame, there is one moment in British history that stands out to me as worthy of unapologetic pride. For all our faults, we once rose up against a tyrant, and cut off our king's head. It is a great irony that this magnificent moment is something that our nationalists are so incapable of celebrating.

[Rudy Herrera · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, and if we’re being serious here, this book is dated in all ways. The language is confusing, and the ideas contained within it aren’t necessarily revolutionary by modern standards. Literally the debates are centered around whether poor people can vote. The biggest takeaway is the fervor that existed within these people, and the idea that the poor should live well lives. The most revolutionary idea is that all of those who live under the law of a nation should be able to vote within it. Fascinating how this is a bad word in the modern political arena, but these folks wanted nothing more.

Overall, hard to read, boring snoring, but I feel for the levelers and I wish to succeed in completing the revolution that they started so long ago one day.

[Stephen Ede-Borrett · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only thing that makes this book even ONE star is the excellent introduction by Geoffrey Robinson - although as this is a quarter of the book I am not sure 'Introduction' is really the correct term.

I bought this book on line and had I seen IRL beforehand I would have avoided it - It is EVERYTHING that is wrong with this type of book, perhaps exemplified by the back cover text of:
"Evolving from Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army .... the Levellers fought political corruption and sought universal voting rights"
The massive errors in that statement alone sum up the book.

The texts presented have been edited, spelling 'corrected' to modern usage, and modern punctuation added - all of which cannot avoid frequently changing the meaning to what the editor BELIEVES was intended. He may be right, of course, but he also could just as easily be wrong. To compound this problem, the editor readily admits that
"minor alterations and additions have been silently made in order to make the text more accessible"
So what you are presented with is the editor VERSION of what was said with the editor’s interpretation inserted and added without any indication where or what - i.e. this is NOT what was originally written/published.
To make this worse the entry for the actual Putney Debates themselves (which are only a small portion of the book despite its subtitle) have been taken from the published and edited edition and not the original manuscript. Thus we are presented with an edited version of an edited version of an original.

As an history book this serves little use beyond that of an introduction to the subject which you need to check anything interesting against the original because you don't know how accurate it is.

Not a book I could recommend on any level.

[Steven R · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of leveller pamphlets and minutes of the Putney Debates. 2 good takeaways.
1) already the capitalists are arguing that true democracy is incompatible with private property.
2) wide range of democratic rights demanded, some still unfulfilled.

[Georgia]

read a ton of excerpts. tough one but cool when you get into the weeds of it

[Jaime · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf at 36% as I couldn't understand most of what was said.