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line was also predictable: this should be a lesson not just for those labouring with similar births, but for all people ‘whose outsides though they appear not so horrid to the eye as this misshapen monster, I fear their insides are hung round with all sorts of crying sins’.114 The symbolism and the visual image echoed John Taylor’s famous pamphlet of 1647, The World turn’d upside down.115 While partisans fought for the right to deal with the King, or slugged it out in rural churchyards,116 others looked on in horror. In fact, the line taken on this Scottish birth could have been in print in 1642, as the first edition of The World turn’d upside down had been.

Images of political monstrosity

The confrontation between Presbyterian and Independent seems to have been primarily a difference among activists on one side, seeking with little success to assimilate other issues, and to take control of Parliament and the City. It is not easy to see the Presbyterians as the ‘moderates’ in the parliamentary coalition – they were more a party of religious law and order. Their support for iconoclasm, reform of the calendar and intolerance, their willingness to use force and act beyond the constitution, and their polemical bitterness all speak against the view that they were the voice of common sense. Among the activists, in any case, there was a clear winner: the New Model. Its peace terms turned out to be relatively generous, but Charles still seemed to feel he could do better. He was probably wrong, but the mistake was pardonable in the circumstances.

18

The Army, the People and the Scots

Putney, the Engagement and the Vote of No Addresses

Defeat of the Presbyterian mobilization in 1647 seemed dangerously like a defeat for Parliament. Two extra-parliamentary forces had dominated the politics of the victorious coalition – the Presbyterian alliance of City, Covenanters and London divines on one hand, and a developing alliance between City radicals and the New Model on the other. They had fought for control of the political complexion of Parliament and as the conflict reached crisis point the army had shifted decisively from a body petitioning for redress to a political body seeking a particular form of settlement. A key moment in this transformation was the signing of the Solemn Engagement in early June, which had also established a new consultative body, the General Council of the Army. When the army published its Declaration on 14 June a dangerous political transformation was under way. Within the army there was now a mechanism for political mobilization and the army as a whole was lining up behind the idea that Parliament was no longer the true representative of the people. During the ensuing stand-off, as the army hovered outside London, it had presented a settlement to the King apparently on its own authority: the Heads of Proposals.

By the time of the occupation of London in August there was no escaping the fact that this was a political body, but these developments were not necessarily comfortable for the officers. The role of the agitators was a potential threat to the normal chain of military command – hence, for example, Fairfax’s discomfiture when Charles pitched up at Newmarket in June. Moreover, as the army began openly to pursue a settlement, acting independently, it offered possibilities to Independent activists, who might make it a vehicle for their view of settlement. In particular, the call for a free parliament intersected with a gathering campaign by Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton: a spectrum of opinion from Charles I to John Lilburne and army agitators could now agree that the body sitting in Westminster was not a true parliament. The precise connections between the New Model agitators and these City radicals is unclear; so too that between Walwyn, Lilburne and Overton. These three did not become ‘the Levellers’ until labelled as such by royalists (and perhaps army officers) in November. Before that date five regiments had appointed ‘new agents’, alongside the agitators, who met daily in London in late