Putney needs to be set in the context of previous army proceedings and the continuing desire of the soldiers to maintain unity. Woolrych warned us to ‘be very cautious about treating the Putney debates, wonderful as they are, as the typical voice of the army’. Evans argues that ‘the Debates were essentially concerned with the search for, and definition of, practical answers to the pressing “strategic” problems’. Reece cautions that the ‘rhetoric of Putney should not blind us to the fact that the vast majority of the rank and file and junior officers united behind their leaders in pursuance of settlement of the army's non-political grievances’. Indeed Tuck made the point that Clarke's ‘record may have been designed as a safeguard against the Levellers’ in providing an account of policy that should be kept to. Ireton's comments also need to be treated with care when considering the atmosphere at Putney. Too often his stubborn and legalistic mind led him off into areas where only a few others, like Wildman and Rainsborough, were prepared to follow. The comments of Wildman and Rainsborough differed in perspective from those of the army officers present. Wildman, a Leveller outsider, and Rainsborough, a bitter and frustrated man, did not even have the right to attend the debates. Reading of the Putney debates has too often been shaped by an understandable, if exaggerated, focus on political theory to the detriment of how the participants' religious thinking and army mentality structured their statements at Putney.