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By Root 1238 0

place. There followed some confused moments, in which a number of people spoke over one another, but Maximilian Petty made himself heard: ‘We judge that all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections’. It is Thomas Rainborough’s interjection which has resonated more loudly, however: ‘really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath 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’. Ireton’s response is equally famous: ‘I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here - no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom’. In other words, those in whose hands lay the land and trade of the nation were those who had an interest in the government.22

These few minutes of discussion have been central to much controversy about the political theory of the civil war and revolution. It seems that the subsequent debate concluded that only foreigners and those too dependent to make a free choice – beggars and servants – should be excluded from the vote. The significance of these exchanges is not diminished by an appreciation of the context they were uttered in – here was a confrontation over fundamentals of political society, a debate cut loose from the moorings of the controversies of 1642. Who were the people and how were they to be represented? Did this discussion affect women? Issues lurking at the edges, or below the surface, of the paper war in 1642 were here being discussed in the governing council of one of the most important power brokers of the post-war settlement.23

Concentration on this issue took attention away from potentially shared ground, and may have reflected the fact that the debate was sprung on Cromwell and Ireton – had they had more leisure they might have started discussion at another point. Meanwhile, in a manner now familiar, partisans launched into print as Leveller sympathizers published denunciations of the leadership. A Call to All the Soldiers of the Army by the Free People of England, almost certainly the work of Wildman, was circulating among the regiments on 29 October. It called on the army to act to establish a free parliament and to throw out the usurpers.24 This may well have captured the mood of the army more completely than the more moderate line of the officers.

On 30 October a committee met to discuss the June proposals and the Agreement. What emerged owed much to the Heads of Proposals. After a day of prayer the council met again on 1 November, in the last meeting recorded by Clarke. Cromwell, again in the chair, asked those present what answers God had vouchsafed to them in their prayers. Some of the answers were disturbing, or exhilarating. Goffe, for example, claimed that the voice of heaven had spoken against ‘tampering’ with God’s enemies. Captain Bishop, ‘after many enquiries in’ his ‘spirit’, concluded that the root of their sufferings was ‘a compliance to preserve that man of blood, and those principles of tyranny which God from heaven, by His many successes, hath manifestly declared against’. This was dangerous language – that the blood on the King’s hands made him as culpable as any other man. It implied that justice should be sought against a man of blood if further judgements from God were to be avoided. This Old Testament view had been expressed in the aftermath of Edgehill amidst fears of a peace no better than capitulation, but gathered force through the war. One preacher was later remembered to have argued during 1645 that ‘the King was a man of blood, and that it was a vain thing to hope for the blessing of God upon any peace to be made with him, till satisfaction should be made for the blood that had been shed’.25

In the face of these inflammatory arguments Cromwell and others questioned