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By Root 1297 0

a contrast with the view that only complete military dominance would secure a respectable peace. The best hope for this more moderate position was to get the King to agree to parliamentary control of the militia for twenty years and appointments of officers of state and the abolition of episcopacy in favour of Presbyterianism for at least three years.6 This was familiar territory, of course. Nothing had changed since the exasperated Vote of No Addresses except that Charles had started, and lost, another war. We can presume it was the losing rather than the starting that mattered; Charles was no more worth dealing with but was, perhaps, closer to being backed against a wall.

But perhaps not. Division and disarray continued to characterize his opponents (or potential allies). Defeat for the Engagers” army in England led to their political eclipse in Scotland, as kirk and Covenant risings in the west of Scotland, and the Whiggamore raid (a march on Edinburgh of several thousand supporters of the Covenant from south-west Scotland), drove them out of the centres of power.7 But these groups had little in common with the army and Independents in England beyond their mutual hostility to the Engagers. Scotland was not ripe for further military intervention in England, but it was not lined up behind the New Model, either. The decision to reopen negotiations with the King was contentious in army circles and there was more Leveller activity, calling for the long-delayed harvest of the fruits of the people’s sacrifice. The Humble Petition of Thousands of Well-Affected Persons was presented to Parliament on 11 September, urging settlement on the basis of the Agreement of the People, and an end to the Negative Voice of the King and the Lords. Two days of silence followed, prompting the presentation of another petition saying the same thing. Amidst the ensuing disturbance demonstrators were heard to say ‘that they knew no use of a King or Lords any longer; and that such distinctions were the devices of men, God having made all alike’. Some members commended the message: ‘the House must yield to them, or else it might be too hot to hold such as opposed it’. For others, like Sir Roger Burgoyne, this radicalism was a reason to persist in negotiation, demonstrating ‘what we are to look for from such a kind of men… if the Treaty should not proceed’.8

Belief in the guilt of those who had prompted another war also led militants to demand an end to negotiation. According to his later, and possibly self-serving, recollections, Edmund Ludlow had met Fairfax earlier in September, hoping to get him to halt negotiations. Frustrated he went on to see Ireton, who agreed that the only peace likely to emerge would be a betrayal of the cause, but did not agree that now was the moment to intervene.9 From mid-September onwards such militants were mobilizing petitions. On 10 October the Commons received petitions against the treaty from Oxfordshire (a Leveller petition), Newcastle, Yorkshire and Somerset. That from Somerset had, in the now customary manner, been organized at the assizes, courtesy of a packed Grand Jury: it argued that the treaty would be the ‘ruin of God’s people’. Those in favour of negotiation, although slower off the mark to get petitions going, were more influential in Parliament.10

Against the background of these divisions formal negotiations opened at Newport on 18 September. Charles had declared the impending negotiation a ‘mock-treaty’ on 2 August, and his only purpose in entertaining the proposals was to buy time. For example, on 9 October a breakthrough was apparently made – Charles agreed to hand control of the militia to Parliament for twenty years. He wrote the same day to a confidant: ‘The great concession I made this day, was merely in order to my escape,… for my only hope is, that now they believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less careful of their guards’.11

These doomed discussions were initially limited to forty days, but the deadline was allowed to pass as a settlement was sought. Charles had insisted on a stipulation