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Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates 1647-9 from the Clarke Manuscripts With Supplementary Documents
First published in England in 1938, Puritanism and Liberty has won wide recognition in its field. Centering on the Debates regarding the Constitution in the years 1647-49, it exhibits many of the main principles involved in the Puritan revolution, and especially those springing from Puritan religious thought, sentiment, and experience.
The book contains a new editing of the famous Putney Debates in the Council of the Army in 1647, whose subject is political liberty, and of the Whitehall Debates in the Council of Officers in 1648-49, one of whose principal subjects is religious tolerance. Careful editing has produced a text at once completely faithful to the manuscript and readily understandable by the general reader.
In the Debates we have the actual words of Cromwell and Ireton, of officers and common soldiers, of Puritan divines, and of leaders of the Levellers (Lilburne, Overton, and Wildman) as they were uttered in heated argument.
The Debates are followed by selections from over fifty pamphlets and other contemporary documents which present the historical context of the discussions or elucidate their leading principles.
In the Supplementary Documents we can peruse the relevant principles of Calvin and Luther (in the form in which the Puritans read them), of Milton and Roger Williams, of John Goodwin, William Dell and other Puritan ministers, of Overton and the Levellers, and Winstanley and the Diggers. All this amounts to a comprehensive and fascinating exhibition of the Puritan mind in action.
The book contains a new editing of the famous Putney Debates in the Council of the Army in 1647, whose subject is political liberty, and of the Whitehall Debates in the Council of Officers in 1648-49, one of whose principal subjects is religious tolerance. Careful editing has produced a text at once completely faithful to the manuscript and readily understandable by the general reader.
In the Debates we have the actual words of Cromwell and Ireton, of officers and common soldiers, of Puritan divines, and of leaders of the Levellers (Lilburne, Overton, and Wildman) as they were uttered in heated argument.
The Debates are followed by selections from over fifty pamphlets and other contemporary documents which present the historical context of the discussions or elucidate their leading principles.
In the Supplementary Documents we can peruse the relevant principles of Calvin and Luther (in the form in which the Puritans read them), of Milton and Roger Williams, of John Goodwin, William Dell and other Puritan ministers, of Overton and the Levellers, and Winstanley and the Diggers. All this amounts to a comprehensive and fascinating exhibition of the Puritan mind in action.
- GenresHistory
624 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1938
About the author
A.S.P. Woodhouse
4 books1 followerArthur Sutherland Pigott Woodhouse, academic specialising in seventeenth-century England. Professor at the University of Toronto.
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February 4, 2020I bought this book second-hand as a student, possibly I was thinking of taking a course on the English Revolution, but it sat unread on shelf unread until this very day.
Built around the themes of Puritanism and Liberty this is a selection of documents from the seventeenth century that emerged in the turbulent religious atmosphere and revolutionary politics of the middle of that century.
The first section of the book is made up of the Putney and Whitehall debates between the General Army Council and representatives of the soldiers which took place at the end of the English civil war of the Seventeenth century.
While Parliament was trying to make a settlement with the King, the soldiers had been radicalised by the years of war. Having seen their friends dying face down in the mud at Marston Moor, Newbury and Naseby they didn't want to see the King having any power in a constitutional settlement, they wanted to throw off the Norman Yoke and to have the vote. They were no mercenary army as their speakers insist. They fought not for money (although that their pay was considerably in arrears was an issue!) but as politically engaged men, they fought and bled for a cause they believed in and for them their sacrifice had earned them the vote.
It was these issues that were discussed at the Putney Debates took place over several days at the end of October and beginning of November 1647, so about fourteen months (and another civil war) before Charles Stewart, that man of blood, shuffled off this mortal coil on a scaffold at Whitehall.
The discussions were recorded in shorthand and have been reconstructed in this volume. Interruptions and interjections are recorded. Careful apologies show you when someone took offence at the tone of another's voice. It comes across like a play (I have the nagging feeling that I have heard it on the radio), perhaps it was a play. One of the participants was warned before leaving his regiment that the officers would string out the discussions to avoid reaching the conclusion that men wanted.
The soldiers representatives want the vote, the officers claim this would overturn the traditional constitution and require a natural rights theory which would end all rights to property. The soldiers turn to history and claim that they just want to return to the condition of country before the Norman Conquest - it is a strange myth but one that has had a long life that England under the Kings of Wessex was proto-democratic and a better argument (but strangely underdeveloped, maybe Corpus Christi was too Catholic for them) that the Ten Commandments would protect property rights. What strikes me here is the radicals' conception of the people's political rights comes from the past and not from a notion that sovereignty comes from the people. We had these rights, they claim, but have been denied them by the Norman Conquest.
Property of course is the big issue. Property for Ireton, gives you a stake in the country. An interest in stability and a desire for order. In Britain the requirement to have property (owned or rented real estate) was not going to be separated from voting rights until the twentieth century.
A year and another civil war later and a bit further downstream we come to the Whitehall Debates. Although they have no agenda, they have a set question to discuss and an order of discussion which is promptly ignored. Ireton again does most of the heavy lifting against more radical views but he has also become more radical. He falls back on the ultra-conservative view that any change will inevitably bring about worse problems than the nuisance that the change was attempting to correct . Ireton again emerges as a cogent and effective speaker (assuming that he was actually responding on the spot).
The next section of the book is a selection from printed works dealing with issues of liberty, toleration, democracy and eventually social reform.
Liberty presents difficulties because of the difficulty of dealing with civil authority as it comes down through the Bible both divinely mandated and unjust, or superseded by the New Testament by turns, but the writers aren't too keen to throw the Old Testament out with the bath water because they still need the ten commandments to provide a moral basis to law. Toleration almost emerges as a last resort. If God will sort the sinners from the saved after death then Protestant worship doesn't have to be policed among the quick, God will deal with it, in the divinity's own time.
On democracy and social reform there is the odd sense that the middle decades of the seventeenth century were the most politically radical in English history. You can run through lists of demands and see ideas like universal male suffrage that will not come to fruition for at least another two hundred and fifty years, others like the reform of the Public schools and charitable endowments or the removal of the House of Lords that still in contention. (Aye, we were radical once, 'twas in 1649...)
There is also the sense, common to Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, that the more politically radical had been outmanoeuvred by Cromwell and his son-in-law Ireton. We were cozened, they say down the ages.
I am not sure if it is legitimate to write of an English tradition of political radicalism but many of the basic ideas of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom as democratic, the Norman Yoke, England as Israel, will be taken up again by the Chartists and other British political reformers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since the papers in the Clarke manuscripts were not published until the twentieth century the ideas discussed presumably were generally current in army and more widely in society - itself politicised by the long struggle between Parliament and the King publicised by the pamphlet war that raged out of the printing presses.
The confluence of England as Israel burdened by the Norman Yoke is nicely shown in this passage from The True Levellers' Standard Advanced: "And the last enslaving conquest which the enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England. And from that time kings, lords, judges, justices, bailiffs, and the violent bitter people that are freeholders, are and have been successively: the Norman bastard William himself, his colonels, captains, inferior officers, and common soldiers, who still are from that time to this day in pursuit of that victory, imprisoning, robbing, and killing the poor enslaved English Israelites." (The piece continues for another six hundred years in a similar vein until the fetters on the Newgate prisoners become analogous with the subjection of Jacob). That idea of England as an Israel, where one day a Jerusalem could be built on England's pleasant pastures will itself reoccur for centuries.
The sense of injustice after the radicalising effects of the civil war is powerful despite the hyperbole. Were the common soldiers just mercenaries tricked into fighting a rich man's war is one of the issues alive in the Putney debates, were they not fighting against arbitrary rule and the impositions of King and the wealthy alike?
The final pieces in the book are from the True Levellers, or Diggers, who occupied St Georges hill in Surrey intending to farm the area communally. They were driven off, today a golf course covers the site. So perishes political idealism!
The variety of voices in this book make it a nice companion piece to any book on the English Civil War and it's aftermath, not just those like The World Turned Upside Down which are given over entirely to the radicals.
Built around the themes of Puritanism and Liberty this is a selection of documents from the seventeenth century that emerged in the turbulent religious atmosphere and revolutionary politics of the middle of that century.
The first section of the book is made up of the Putney and Whitehall debates between the General Army Council and representatives of the soldiers which took place at the end of the English civil war of the Seventeenth century.
While Parliament was trying to make a settlement with the King, the soldiers had been radicalised by the years of war. Having seen their friends dying face down in the mud at Marston Moor, Newbury and Naseby they didn't want to see the King having any power in a constitutional settlement, they wanted to throw off the Norman Yoke and to have the vote. They were no mercenary army as their speakers insist. They fought not for money (although that their pay was considerably in arrears was an issue!) but as politically engaged men, they fought and bled for a cause they believed in and for them their sacrifice had earned them the vote.
It was these issues that were discussed at the Putney Debates took place over several days at the end of October and beginning of November 1647, so about fourteen months (and another civil war) before Charles Stewart, that man of blood, shuffled off this mortal coil on a scaffold at Whitehall.
The discussions were recorded in shorthand and have been reconstructed in this volume. Interruptions and interjections are recorded. Careful apologies show you when someone took offence at the tone of another's voice. It comes across like a play (I have the nagging feeling that I have heard it on the radio), perhaps it was a play. One of the participants was warned before leaving his regiment that the officers would string out the discussions to avoid reaching the conclusion that men wanted.
The soldiers representatives want the vote, the officers claim this would overturn the traditional constitution and require a natural rights theory which would end all rights to property. The soldiers turn to history and claim that they just want to return to the condition of country before the Norman Conquest - it is a strange myth but one that has had a long life that England under the Kings of Wessex was proto-democratic and a better argument (but strangely underdeveloped, maybe Corpus Christi was too Catholic for them) that the Ten Commandments would protect property rights. What strikes me here is the radicals' conception of the people's political rights comes from the past and not from a notion that sovereignty comes from the people. We had these rights, they claim, but have been denied them by the Norman Conquest.
Property of course is the big issue. Property for Ireton, gives you a stake in the country. An interest in stability and a desire for order. In Britain the requirement to have property (owned or rented real estate) was not going to be separated from voting rights until the twentieth century.
A year and another civil war later and a bit further downstream we come to the Whitehall Debates. Although they have no agenda, they have a set question to discuss and an order of discussion which is promptly ignored. Ireton again does most of the heavy lifting against more radical views but he has also become more radical. He falls back on the ultra-conservative view that any change will inevitably bring about worse problems than the nuisance that the change was attempting to correct . Ireton again emerges as a cogent and effective speaker (assuming that he was actually responding on the spot).
The next section of the book is a selection from printed works dealing with issues of liberty, toleration, democracy and eventually social reform.
Liberty presents difficulties because of the difficulty of dealing with civil authority as it comes down through the Bible both divinely mandated and unjust, or superseded by the New Testament by turns, but the writers aren't too keen to throw the Old Testament out with the bath water because they still need the ten commandments to provide a moral basis to law. Toleration almost emerges as a last resort. If God will sort the sinners from the saved after death then Protestant worship doesn't have to be policed among the quick, God will deal with it, in the divinity's own time.
On democracy and social reform there is the odd sense that the middle decades of the seventeenth century were the most politically radical in English history. You can run through lists of demands and see ideas like universal male suffrage that will not come to fruition for at least another two hundred and fifty years, others like the reform of the Public schools and charitable endowments or the removal of the House of Lords that still in contention. (Aye, we were radical once, 'twas in 1649...)
There is also the sense, common to Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, that the more politically radical had been outmanoeuvred by Cromwell and his son-in-law Ireton. We were cozened, they say down the ages.
I am not sure if it is legitimate to write of an English tradition of political radicalism but many of the basic ideas of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom as democratic, the Norman Yoke, England as Israel, will be taken up again by the Chartists and other British political reformers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since the papers in the Clarke manuscripts were not published until the twentieth century the ideas discussed presumably were generally current in army and more widely in society - itself politicised by the long struggle between Parliament and the King publicised by the pamphlet war that raged out of the printing presses.
The confluence of England as Israel burdened by the Norman Yoke is nicely shown in this passage from The True Levellers' Standard Advanced: "And the last enslaving conquest which the enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England. And from that time kings, lords, judges, justices, bailiffs, and the violent bitter people that are freeholders, are and have been successively: the Norman bastard William himself, his colonels, captains, inferior officers, and common soldiers, who still are from that time to this day in pursuit of that victory, imprisoning, robbing, and killing the poor enslaved English Israelites." (The piece continues for another six hundred years in a similar vein until the fetters on the Newgate prisoners become analogous with the subjection of Jacob). That idea of England as an Israel, where one day a Jerusalem could be built on England's pleasant pastures will itself reoccur for centuries.
The sense of injustice after the radicalising effects of the civil war is powerful despite the hyperbole. Were the common soldiers just mercenaries tricked into fighting a rich man's war is one of the issues alive in the Putney debates, were they not fighting against arbitrary rule and the impositions of King and the wealthy alike?
The final pieces in the book are from the True Levellers, or Diggers, who occupied St Georges hill in Surrey intending to farm the area communally. They were driven off, today a golf course covers the site. So perishes political idealism!
The variety of voices in this book make it a nice companion piece to any book on the English Civil War and it's aftermath, not just those like The World Turned Upside Down which are given over entirely to the radicals.
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December 27, 2012SourcE: Alhambra Books
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December 8, 2011Excellent 17th Century discussion on freedom between allies of Cromwell and early socialists during English Civil War
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November 11, 2016diggers rule, ireton sucks.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews