We have heard of the French Revolution (1789) and the American Revolution (1776) and the Russian Revolution (1917). We might be less familiar with the English Revolution (1642), which preceded the three just mentioned and in significant ways prefigured them.
The English Revolution was the upshot of King Charles I’s disputes with Parliament, which culminated in an armed insurrection: Charles was deposed, imprisoned, and ultimately beheaded. These events transpired over the years 1642–51. They are perhaps better known as the English Civil War – likely because the monarchy was restored in 1660, when Charles II agreed to Parliament’s terms and was crowned king. That was the so-called Restoration, and it was followed by a so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 that was not so much a revolution as a change of dynasty, though one conditioned upon a constitutional reform that subordinated the monarchy to Parliament.
As to the real English Revolution, the rebel armies that deposed Charles I were gradually united under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. Many of the rebels were Puritans, who objected to the imposition of the official state religion, that is, the Church of England. Parliament reconvened and directed the army under Cromwell to disband. The army was unhappy with what Parliament had offered the soldiers as compensation and political concessions. J. G. A. Pocock writes:
The Cromwellian Army was a revolutionary force because it was less an army maintained by the state than an army is search of a state which could either maintain it or pay it off. The armies of the day were still hordes wandering on the face of the land, and if they were to become settled political societies the question was whether they would be the military colonists of an emperor, the feudal tenants of a “Gothic” king and nobility, or the armed citizens of a republic.
Its leadership consisted of a Council of the Army, which fell into two factions. One, the “Grandees,” led by Cromwell, favored dickering terms with Charles I with an eye toward his restoration. The “new Agitators” faction was republican and influenced by the so-called Levellers, who pressed a radically egalitarian line. David Hume, in his The History of England, wrote that Cromwell
had encouraged an arrogant spirit among the inferior officers and private men; and the camp … carried more the appearance of civil liberty than of military obedience. The troops themselves were formed into a kind of republic; and the plans of imaginary republics, for the settlement of the state, were, every day, the topics of conversation among these armed legislators.
The more radical of these “armed legislators” agreed not only to abolish the monarchy and nobility but further that “all ranks of men be levelled; and that a universal equality of property, as well as of power, be introduced” (Hume Reference Hume1778, vol. V., 513). Such “imaginary republics” hovered over the so-called Putney Debates of 1647, which turned upon two issues.
The first was whether the soldiers were bound by the terms of a “Declaration of the Army” to Parliament. The Declaration had been issued by a Colonel Ireton, who happened to be Cromwell’s son-in-law. The Declaration did not satisfy the new Agitators, who pressed instead for what they styled “An Agreement of the People.”
The second issue was of a type that revolutions inherently raise: What is to come after? Or rather, who was to have a say in what was to come after? The terms of the Declaration limited the franchise for electors to the House of Commons to owners of real estate worth enough to yield a return of 40 shillings a year, roughly the equivalent of what would hire a skilled tradesman for one month (enough to keep your place up and looking nice, I conjecture).Footnote 1 The Agitators’ “Agreement” demanded universal adult male suffrage.Footnote 2
The two issues were connected, and so the Grandee Ireton can be understood as defending the Declaration on two grounds: a limited franchise had already been agreed to, and a limited franchise was the only term that reasonably could be agreed to.
Covenants Are to Be Kept
The primary ground for the Grandees’ position was that the Army had already agreed to the terms of the Declaration and had proposed it to Parliament. It was therefore binding on the Army. The binding force of the compact was not defeasible by appeals to what Ireton calls natural law. Natural law consists of moral requirements that should be self-evident, that is, evident to common reason (on reflection if not immediately obvious). It is “natural” not only in the sense of being self-evident but also in the sense that its requirements are binding on human persons irrespective of their agreement or consent.
Natural law should be contrasted to divine law, which is law by divine decree and knowable only as revealed by scripture or some special act of God. Natural law is known to natural reason, while divine law is known only to the faithful or to the faithless whom God specially visits with revelation. What John Rawls would later call “the proselytizing zeal of the Christian religion” owed to the urgency of familiarizing heathen peoples with the gospel, whose message was not discoverable by “the light of nature,” that is, by experience and reasoning alone.
There is agreement on all sides at Putney that the natural law contains a right of self-preservation, a duty to keep covenants, and a right of self-ownership. But the Grandee, Henry Ireton, and the chief Agitator, Thomas Rainsborough, are at loggerheads as to whether covenants in derogation of other requirements of natural law are binding.Footnote 3
Ireton’s and the Grandee’s secondary ground of defense of the Declaration is that it alone was consistent with established practice, under which a property qualification for suffrage had always been imposed. The practice he invokes is an unwritten, traditional convention in England, an ancient constitution, a matter of long-standing usage and expectation rather than natural or divine law (see Pocock Reference Pocock1975, 3–30). The Agitators did not challenge Ireton’s account of ancient practice – although they might have – and, again, relied on their understanding of natural law.Footnote 4
Ireton’s argument that the terms of the Declaration foreclose the new demands made in the Agitator’s proposed Agreement boils down to this. The Declaration is an agreed compact, or “engagement,” and it is therefore binding, it is an obligation. To that, the Agitators object that the Declaration is contrary to natural law, and that therefore it was not agreed to and, even if it had been, it is binding only insofar as it is consistent with natural justice.
The Agitators therefore rely entirely on the principle that no binding compact can be, except to the extent that it conforms to natural law. But, Ireton counters, this principle is unacceptable because it has absurd consequences. The absurdity is evident because the institution of property itself rests on compact. All property would be uncertain if it was constantly open to challenge by appeals to natural law and natural justice. Anarchy would reign if property were uncertain. Anarchy is repugnant and intolerable. Therefore, the Agitators’ appeal to natural justice cannot undo the binding force of the Declaration as it was agreed to.
An unnamed Agitator from Bedfordshire interjects a point that goes unanswered. He distinguishes the cases of those who make an engagement for themselves and those who make engagements for others. Those who engage for themselves are bound, regardless of whether they have surrendered to injustice. But those who purport to engage for others have no power to bind them beyond the limit of natural right.Footnote 5
Ireton concedes that no one is bound to keep a promise to do what is sinful. But that is a matter between the promisor and God. Things are different as between one person and another. In that domain, the maxim “Pacta sunt servanda” is fundamental: Pacts are to be honored; covenants freely made are to be kept. Moreover, there are no rights of one person against another that are not grounded in covenant. The only alternative to covenant as the grounding for any “particular right” is an appeal to natural right or “the law of Nature.” But the law of nature supports no claim of particular right to property. In a state of nature – Ireton does not use this term –the only law is one of self-preservation, and all are equally at liberty to help themselves to what they think they need. The only basis for property is a compact among persons to recognize that whatever land a person inherits is his to own as his exclusively. “We are under a contract, we are under an agreement” (Put. 26) – that is to say, all the world agrees to respect the right of inheritance as to landed estates. Apart from this, everyone has an equal right to take whatever he desires. Similarly as to goods:
That which makes it unlawful originally and radically [to take another’s goods] is only this: because that man is in covenant with me to live together in peace one with another, and not to meddle with that which another is possessed of, but that each of us should enjoy, and make use of, and dispose of, that which by the course of law is in his possession, and [another] shall not by violence take it away from him. This is the foundation of all the right any man has to anything but to his own person.
Apart from self-ownership, all property is grounded not in natural right but in a general covenant not to disturb the possessions of others. “This is the general thing: that we must keep covenant one with another when we have contracted one with another” (Put. 27). If it is conceded that property rights exist, and that they can exist only by covenant, then implicit in that covenant is submission to the “general authority” that is necessary to the peaceful security of those rights.
Ireton generalizes his argument: The obligation to keep any covenant whatever cannot be conditional upon that particular covenant’s conformity with natural justice. Why not? His reasoning is surprisingly (post)modern:
[W]hen I hear men speak of laying aside all Engagements to [consider only] that wild or vast notion of what in every man’s conception is just or unjust, I am afraid and do tremble at the boundless and endless consequences of it.
Ireton’s point is hugely important, and it is the key to understanding the social contract idea and tradition. People have different notions of what is just and unjust and, to make matters worse, people are always ready to perceive a destructive injustice whenever their own preferences are set back. The consequence of allowing an “injustice” exception to the general principle that covenants are to be kept is that covenants would constantly be ripped open, and so confusion would reign – undoing the entire point of making engagements in the first place, and putting an end to any hope of peacefully settling differences.
Ireton concludes by adding a positive case for the Declaration:
The Parliament has commanded us. … We have said, no. First [in the Declaration] we have insisted upon [the] fundamental rights of the people. We have said we desire [first] to have the constitution of the supreme authority of this Kingdom reduced to that constitution which is due to the people of this Kingdom, and reducing the authority to this we will submit to it, we will acquiesce, we will cast our share into this common bottom; and if it go ill with us at one time, it will go well at another. The reducing of the supreme authority to that constitution, by success or election as near as may be, we have insisted upon as an essential right of the Kingdom.
Here, Ireton emphasizes that the Declaration of the Army affirms the right of the people to constitutional rather than arbitrary rule. At the same time, he affirms the obligation of the people to submit to the supreme authority. Why? Evidently because, by the Declaration, the Army and the people it represents consent to it. In doing so, the people accept a duty of obedience that is not conditioned on the law always being to their benefit, nor upon its always being just according to their own lights. They do this because they must concede that, over the long run, the burden of injustices will be outweighed by the benefits of peaceable living.
The Franchise
A key issue in dispute is the Agitators’ demand for universal adult male suffrage to elect representatives in Parliament. Only those adult males who have “lost their birthright” – by conviction of a crime, for example – would be excluded from the franchise. Ireton opposes the demand on two grounds. First, he opposes it because the Army gave consent to the authority of a parliament selected by a narrower, propertied class of electors. The Declaration did not insist upon any wider a franchise. Second, Ireton opposes a wider franchise as inconsistent with the right of the propertied to their property. To be secure in their property, the propertied and the propertied alone must rule.
Ireton does not invoke any natural right to property – except as to one’s person. He accepts that property rights in other, outer things rest on compact. But the compact upon which property rights rest includes, by implication, a property qualification for the franchise. Rainsborough, for the Agitators, challenges Ireton in ringing terms:
Really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the richest 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; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he has not had a voice to put him self under; and I am confident that when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, insomuch that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no that should doubt of these things.
Ireton’s answer shrewdly conceded the conventional nature of property rights as a way of casting the Agitators’ demand as an invocation of natural right. Ireton refuses to be drawn into the trap he would land in if he were to assert a natural right to property to counter an asserted natural right to a voice in government. Rainsborough’s claim for a natural right to a say in one’s government would be hard to flatly deny, and many of the Army had been risking their lives, above all, to have a say in how they were to be governed.
The right to vote is reframed by Ireton as an artificial rather than a natural right. This way, Ireton need not challenge the Agitators’ conviction that the poor and the rich stand on a plane of equality as to their natural rights, that is to say, those rights that are evident to the light of reason, a light that even the lowliest soldier in the Army has the use of. But equality of natural rights does not entail equality of property rights – as Rainsborough readily admits. Unlike the “true Levellers” – the so-called Diggers – Rainsborough’s faction does not question the legitimacy of the existing unequal patterns of property ownership. And so, Ireton deftly suggests that political rights align with property rights rather than with natural rights. The right to vote for a legislator is an artificial rather than a natural right, and so a restriction of the franchise to property owners is not a denial of the natural equality of persons. Ireton’s answer on the point of birthright is worth repeating:
Men may justly have by birthright, by their very being born in England, that we should not seclude them out of England, that we should not refuse to give them air, and place, and ground, and the freedom of the highways and other things, to live amongst us … though by his birth there come nothing at all to him that is part of the permanent interest of this Kingdom. That I think is due to a man by birth. But that by a man’s being born here he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here, and of all things here, I do not think it a sufficient ground.
An Englishman’s birthright necessarily includes certain rights. The universal male birthright includes a right to remain in England, a right to breath the air and to be someplace and to travel the highways. The universal male birthright does not necessarily include any right to a portion of landed property, that is, to any “part of the permanent interest of this Kingdom.”
What then is a sufficient ground to have a share of political power? That, Ireton settles by appealing to the original constitution of the country – and by this he is not referring to any document or written constitution (there was and is none) but “the most radical and fundamental” basis of civil society:
[T]hose that choose the Representors for the making of Laws by which this State and Kingdom are to be governed, are the persons who taken together do comprehend the local interest of this Kingdom; that is, the persons in whom all land lies, and those in Corporations in whom all trading lies. This is the most fundamental Constitution of this Kingdom.
In Ireton’s view, political rights are allotted by the original constitution according to ownership of landed or corporate property. Not all Englishmen own landed or corporate property, and therefore not all Englishmen have political rights. The natural law speaks in generalities, and – Ireton does not use this term – only artificial law can make definite the law of property and the law of the franchise. If appeal is made to natural law alone, property and positive law alike are swept away. As he says: “The law of God does not give me property, nor the law of nature, but property is of human Constitution. I have a property and this I shall enjoy. Constitution founds property” (Put. 69). The constitution Ireton invokes can be thought of as England’s social contract. Rainsborough is unpersuaded. He grants that property law and electoral law are both matters of artificial law but insists again upon knowing how any Englishmen can be bound to obey any law that is neither divine nor natural and that he had no say in making or keeping.
Rainsborough also resists Ireton’s charge that invoking a natural right to universal suffrage amounts to abolishing property. His fellow Agitator Pettus joins in to object that Ireton has not shown why universal adult male suffrage should lead to anarchy or – which is the same thing – to the destruction of property. It simply does not follow. “Every man is naturally free,” he says, but he forms governments for the purpose of establishing property (Put. 61). Representative government is accepted only because it is impractical for all Englishmen to convene in an assembly. The presumption is that all should have a voice and, where that is not practicable, all should have a voice in choosing representatives. Why should a government formed for the purpose of securing property destroy it?
Ireton answers with a counterchallenge: Universal adult male suffrage
may come to destroy property thus: you may have such men chosen or at least the major part of them [as have no local and permanent interest.] Why may not those men vote against all property? … Show me what you will stop at, wherein you will fence any man in a property by this rule.
All voices in the debate evidently assumed that the majority of a parliament rules. What would prevent the representatives of the unpropertied many from passing laws that confiscate the property of the relatively few?
The Grandee (ironically named) Rich seconds Ireton’s objection. Political equality could lead to laws redistributing property in equal shares. Rich calls this “an inconveniency” (Put. 63). The word “inconvenience” had a connotation “far less low-keyed in seventeenth century speech,” Pocock tells us (Pocock Reference Pocock1975, 362). (“Mere” inconvenience is a later notion.) Rich points to further worries. The unpropertied might sell their votes if they had them, leading to corruption. The unpropertied voter would not elect the ablest man to represent him but the man most willing and able to pay. A man willing to buy votes is unworthy to govern
Agitator Wildman comes in to insist on framing the issue this way, “whether any person can justly be bound by law, who does not give his consent that such persons shall make laws for him?” (Put. 66). Ireton agrees that that indeed is the question, “whether a man can be bound to any law that he does not consent to?” But he answers, sure, he can. Consider foreigners. They are bound to obey English law when in England, and they had no say in the making of them. The foreigner has a natural right to stay but he must obey the laws whose protection he enjoys, even though he had no say in them. Ireton can be understood to say that the unpropertied, like the foreigner, consent to be governed by laws made by the propertied.
Does merely enjoying the protection of the law constitute consent? Nobody asks about the foreigner who owns property – it is assumed all around that only inhabitants are eligible even to be considered for the franchise. Do all propertied inhabitants automatically consent to obey laws they had no say in? Nobody asks Ireton why the propertied inhabitant should have a say in the laws of England: The propertied already and especially have their protection, and thus they are as bound to obey as any foreigner.
Alright, Ireton! – Rainsborough seems to say: Liberty destroys property. What was it all for that the unpropertied soldiers fought, Rainsborough wants to know. To become enslaved to the propertied? Bear in mind that these men were surely aware that chattel slavery had been instituted with royal approval (in 1619) in Virginia. Their use of the terms “slavery” and “made a perpetual slave” was not mere hyperbole.
Ireton answers: The Army fought to remove a king who sought no interest but his own, and to replace him with the rule of a body holding to the permanent interest of the Kingdom. The right of all the English is to be ruled by those who “have” the interest of the Kingdom. Those soldiers without property fought because
[t]hey thought it was better to be concluded by the common consent of those that were fixed men and settled men that had the interest of this Kingdom [in them], and from that way [said they] I shall know a law and have a certainty … And therefore this man I think had a great deal of reason to build up such a foundation of interest to him self: that is, that the will of one man should not be a law, but that the law of this Kingdom should be a choice of persons to represent, and that choice to be made by the generality of the Kingdom [i.e. by those fixed, settled, propertied, men].
To paraphrase Ireton’s thought here: King Charles’s interest was in having his will done, it was not the interest of the Kingdom. The common soldier was not mistaken to judge that it was better to be ruled by a body representing the whole propertied interest of the Kingdom than to be ruled by a person whose sole interest was in imposing his own will upon the Kingdom. Seeing this, the common soldier fought for his own interest and not merely to serve the interest of the propertied. This was a “right that induced men to fight, and those men that had this interest, though this be not the utmost interest that other men have, yet they had some interest” (Put. 72). Better to be ruled by those collectively having the general interest – presumably identified with the sum of the property of the Kingdom – than by one serving only his own private interest.
Suppose there is a pre-political right to liberty and a constitutional right to property: Ireton charges the Agitators with setting one against another. What is to be gained by doing so? There is no way to construe the right of nature that is not corrosive of rights of property. Property is contrary to the right of nature, which is to do whatever one sees fit to preserve oneself.
Pettus concedes the danger that anarchy would result if the constitution had to conform to the law of nature, for there would be no property. Ireton suddenly reformulates his position. The greatest provision a constitution can make for liberty is to assure that the franchise extends to the class of independent men:
If there be anything at all that is a foundation of liberty it is this, that those who shall choose the law makers shall be men freed from dependance upon others.
The thing about men who have less than 40 shillings a year is that they are dependent upon others. They must for example serve a feudal lord or guild master or (later) hire themselves out for a wage in order to live. They will be tempted by demagogues, since they have nothing to lose to set against what the demagogue promises they will gain.
Those who are assured at least 40 shillings a year are independent, in at least the sense that they have a permanent and local interest that they will want to protect and will therefore choose representatives whom they trust to protect their property. They have skin in the game, something to lose. Which means that they cannot easily be bought off and will not likely be reckless chancers. Ireton implies that a qualified elector is a person who has a reasonable disposition. The property qualification is justifiable as a proxy for, if not a guarantee of, this trait of reasonableness. Even the unreasonable have an interest, whether they recognize it or not, in being under a government chosen by reasonable electors.
Pettus, on the Agitators’ side, seems to accept Ireton’s formula about restricting the franchise to independent men, and so concedes that servants, apprentices, and alms-seekers might be excluded from the franchise along with those who have forfeited their birthright. As it began to yield qualifications to the Grandees’ objections, the Agitators’ initial, bold claim of political equality was effectively tabled.Footnote 6
Summary
There are many things going on in the Putney Debates. Pocock says the soldiers,
declaring a common sense that the arms they had taken up had engaged them to a common end, were declaring a political self-consciousness of a kind unheard of in England before … a case, not simply of minds seeking to regularize a delegitimized and chaotic situation, but of a new level of civic consciousness finding means of becoming articulate.
Elizabeth Anderson says these debates “offer some of the most riveting reading in the history of political thought, at a level of intellectual seriousness vastly exceeding contemporary public discourse” (Anderson Reference Anderson2017, 147 n.9). By “contemporary” she means our own public discourse. The debates tell us of a public political culture that is, however, recognizably the direct ancestor of our own. Amid the diversity of opinions voiced in this excerpt (it is but a sampling) we can discern certain fundamental ideas that we today share with these armed legislators of three and a half centuries ago:
– Natural equality of persons: accepted all around.
– Political equality: urged by the Agitators and rejected by the Grandees. All agreed that the voting franchise should be conditioned upon some degree of economic independence. Ireton suggests that those without property will sell their votes (a secret ballot is not considered, much less the possibility of a distribution of wealth that would assure that all are independent).
– Diversity of belief: on display, and made much of by Cromwell, who warns that there might be even better ideas than those the Agitators propose, “Would it not be utter confusion? … an absolute devastation to the Nation” to consider them all? (Put. 7).
– Government by consent: urged by the Agitators and accepted by all.
– A public or common interest to be served by government.
– Difficulty of a transition to a better constitution: Cromwell warns, “There will be very great mountains in the way of this” (Put. 8). Bedfordshire man warns that maintaining an unjust status quo carries dangers, too: “a well-ordered government for the People’s rights” is stabler once it is installed (Put. 18).
The Putney Debates occurred almost simultaneously with Thomas Hobbes’s composition of his book, Leviathan, “the greatest single work of political thought in the English language” (LHPP 23) according to Rawls. The Debates were not published until the late nineteenth century but, in that era of feverish pamphleteering (soon to feed coffeehouse disputation in Oxford and London), the ideas in them were already in the air.
