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By Root 1482 0

from prosecution for actions taken in the service of Parliament. Indemnity was a serious issue – there is evidence from Yorkshire of a serious effort to bring soldiers to court after the war and that the prosecution rate for soldiers was considerably higher than for civilians. During the war many horses were taken and if this could be prosecuted as theft it might result in the death penalty – horse theft was one of the more serious crimes in rural England, and some of these cases rumbled on for years.60 Fears that indemnity and arrears would not be granted were well-grounded: the Presbyterian desire to disband, and to export, the army was at least in part politically motivated. It was certainly helpful that it achieved so many good things at once.61

Discontent in the army in March 1647 prompted direct political intervention. It is clear that by March there were petitions circulating in the army which linked its material grievances to the political conflict. One even ranked the extirpation of ungodliness and the liberty of the subject above the preservation of the privileges of Parliament. At the same time divisions were emerging in London between the Presbyterian petitioning campaign and one launched by radical Independents – prominent among them Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton. During 1646, in the course of tussles with Colonel King, the Earl of Manchester, the court of Common Pleas and the House of Lords, Lilburne had appealed in print to fundamental principles: he should be tried by his peers; the House of Lords had no jurisdiction over him. This was a form of tyranny and his struggle became, in his own eyes and in the pamphlets of his supporters, the struggle of the English people for their liberties. In pamphlets stuffed with legal citations and precedents he launched an attack on the judicial authority of the House of Lords and appealed to the Commons for protection. He was in prison from August 1646 until the autumn of 1647 by the authority of the Lords, and for much of the time his appeal to the Commons was pending. In July 1646 Overton and Walwyn’s pamphlet A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens had taken up Lilburne’s case as an example of a more general political problem, producing something resembling a political platform. It was in March 1647, however, that this process was completed, with the publication of the Large Petition. This made a strong case for popular sovereignty as a restraint on arbitrary power, the means by which Parliament could be called to account: Parliament ‘having its foundation in the free choice of the People’ and the end of all government being ‘the safety and freedom of the governed’. Contrasting the reforms of 1640–42 with recent threats to liberty, it blamed the latter on the authority of the Lords – a not very coded assertion of which House was the supreme authority. The petition was addressed to the Commons, and called on them to ‘be exceeding careful to preserve your just Authority from all prejudices of a Negative voice in any person or persons whatsoever, that may disable you, from making that happy return to your people which they justly expect’.62

Here were some of the arguments of 1642 – the supremacy of the representative of the people and the refusal to allow a Negative Voice against that representative – taken to a new, and more socially levelling, conclusion. This was not resistance of Parliament to the King, but of citizens to an aristocratic ‘interest’. Similarly, this represented an escalation of the practice of petitioning. During the period 1640–42 pressure had been applied to Parliament by people petitioning on behalf of counties, boroughs or particular interest groups. The Levellers were developing the habit of petitioning on behalf of people of a particular opinion: ‘many thousands, earnestly desiring the glory of God, the freedom of the commonwealth and the peace of all men’. Ultimately, they were to petition on behalf of ‘the people’: a significant, and radical, escalation in the rhetoric of petitions.63

Parliament was extremely hostile to the Large Petition.