The Army Council decided they would negotiate directly with the King, instead of Parliament. Scottish lords were visiting Charles at Hampton Court, promising to help him regain his throne and urging him to escape. In Parliament, Oliver Cromwell made a speech in which he dissociated the army leadership from Leveller principles and advocated keeping the monarchy. But only eight days later, Cromwell was in the chair when the Council of the Army met at Putney for what was to become a debate not simply about the position of the soldiers who had won the civil war, but about much wider constitutional issues and the liberty of the individual.
Gideon Jukes was not a regimental Agitator but in the way that had become his trademark he turned up anyway, looking as if he had an invitation. On several days he managed to be present.
Chapter Forty-Three — The Putney Debates: 1647
Putney lay five miles outside London, on the south bank of the Thames. There was no bridge, though ferries carried people over the water. It was a pleasant, countrified outlying suburb full of market gardens, through which travellers and traders from many parts of the country passed on their journey to the capital. In the last days of October and the beginning of November 1647 it was chilly, though not too exposed.
The debates took place in St Mary's Church. A large medieval parish church with a square bell tower, it had a lofty chancel, which was borrowed for these unprecedented meetings. Several times consensus seemed so difficult to achieve that before afternoon debates the Army Council held morning prayer meetings to seek divine guidance. At Ireton's urging, those took place in private houses. His brother hosted one. The council might discuss civil issues in a 'steeple house' for convenience, but God would make his will felt in men's hearts.
The church was packed. Gideon Jukes stood, bare-headed, among the soldier Agitators while the officers sat down around a large table and kept on their hats. The distinctions struck him. As he waited for the first debate to start, Gideon even mused whether to put back his own hat defiantly. Rebel though he was, he would have felt too uncomfortable. He had grown up in a society that was riven by grades and privilege. Kings took precedence over princes and barons over earls. Scholars must not look or behave like gentlemen of leisure. Women must not dress too sumptuously. Artisans should never walk abroad without signs of their trade; apprentices must be marked by their aprons and short hair. But these rules were coming under scrutiny.
Gideon remembered hearing of a strange, tense meeting that had taken place in a garden in Cambridge. Fairfax and his senior officers had met the King, now their prisoner, for an all-day discussion. One peculiarity was that they produced Cornet Joyce to exonerate Fairfax from involvement in the Holdenby abduction. Joyce was an extremely junior officer, yet when he was let loose to explain himself he argued with his sovereign fearlessly. Another issue that aroused much comment was that when Fairfax and Cromwell came into the King's presence, neither knelt.
The council met for almost a fortnight. Fairfax was absent, ill, for the first week. As well as much physical damage caused by battle-wounds, he had a history of painful gout and kidney stones. It was not suggested he ducked out of the debates. There were two points on which Thomas Fairfax was resolute: he deplored the autocratic behaviour of King Charles and he demanded justice for his soldiers. Ultimately, it was Fairfax who summoned this council.
Cromwell took the chair instead. It was a forum to discuss the fate of the whole kingdom, so several civilian Levellers, foremost among them John Wildman, were allowed to join the meeting. Any officers who wished to do so could attend, together with the four Agitators from each regiment. Almost 150 men had congregated. Many did not speak, but all heard the discussions.
Pressed in behind several rows of spectators, Gideon could see mainly the backs of men's heads and only part of the conference table; the faces of those seated were often hidden from him by the high crowns and sweeping brims of their hats. How many great oak tables, he wondered, had army officers sat around gravely in conference? How many battered inn-boards had hosted radical leaders as they midwived revolutionary ideas? He was impressed by the lack of subservience here. The future of England had already been argued, chewed, wrested from tradition and superstition by countless groups of thoughtful people. He found it striking how many at this council spoke fearlessly as individuals and how genuinely those of all ranks struggled to find answers. Soldiers spoke for themselves, not cowed by even their most senior officers.
After three-hour prayer-meetings, the debates were long and intense, continuing into the night. Sometimes Gideon squeezed from the room to seek natural relief. Outside, he shook his long legs and stretched his back while he tried to clear his head. Other men smoked, though not many; that was a filthy cavalier habit. Nobody stayed out long. Everyone was eager not to miss anything important. Hardly anyone left Putney. Only once did Thomas Rainborough disappear, explaining the next afternoon that he had been ill and so had ridden to London overnight to see his doctor. It was thought he had really been consulting radical civilians.
Most members of the council came with fixed opinions, though they were willing to hear other points of view; occasionally someone retracted. The language was plain, but speakers thought on their feet and syntax sometimes suffered. They responded to what they heard. They struggled to develop their own ideas. There were quarrels and rebukes; there were brief apologies. Men spoke from their hearts. They grappled with concepts that went far beyond their original grievances. Their agenda was to decide what they had been fighting for and how they wanted to live in peacetime. That took them into fundamental questions about the rights of man.
Although Cromwell and Ireton tried to confine discussion to the points raised in The Declaration of the Army (which Ireton wrote), they were soon pressurised by Wildman and others into having The Agreement of the People (which Wildman wrote) read out and discussed. The Agreement was, by seventeenth-century standards, a terse paper, claiming in a few short clauses 'that as the laws ought to be equal, so they must be good, and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people'. It ringingly concluded with 'These things we declare to be our native rights': the rights and rules for government for which the soldiers had fought, but which endless negotiation with the King threatened to deny them.
Henry Ireton thought the agreement's fundamental proposals were unrealistic, although he said so only carefully: 'I confess, there are plausible things in it, and there are things really good in it. There are those things that I do with my heart desire; and there are those things I would not oppose, that I should rejoice to see obtained.'
This was the first time Gideon had encountered Ireton and he took against him. He did not care for his neat-featured, cat-like face, his secretive temperament or his cool, clever, untrustworthy intellect. Ireton was Oxford-educated and a former lawyer at the Middle Temple, a man who worked so hard to create a workable constitution that he often wrote late into the night and forgot to eat. Every time Ireton twitched his whiskers and pronounced what his conscience would or would not accept, Gideon Jukes's hackles rose. This was despite Ireton's Puritanism and Gideon's approval of how Ireton had worked tirelessly as the army's theoretical pen-man.
Edward Sexby was there. Gideon exchanged no words with him. Sexby was too busy, demanding to widen the agenda. On the very first day he summed up the soldiers' dilemma. 'We sought to satisfy all men, and it was well; but in going about to do it, we have dissatisfied all men. We have laboured to please a king and I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him..'