Abstract
In August 1648, William Sedgwick, a former parliamentary army chaplain and religious anti-formalist, issued a damning critique of the various factions that had emerged after parliament’s victory in the first Civil War. For Sedgwick, all parties had turned away from God, and this had led England into a constitutional and religious wilderness. As a corrective, he outlined seven ‘leaves of the Tree of Life’ that would mark England’s return from crisis: peace, constitutional settlement, the honour of the nation, the settling of religion, liberty, an Act of oblivion, and a right understanding between king and parliament.1 Many of Sedgwick’s contemporaries would have agreed that these seven issues represented the necessary elements for the settlement of war-torn England. The tragic difficulty was that each of his headings had become bitterly contested categories, seemingly incapable of resolution. The failure to resolve these factors was to define the constitutional crisis of the later 1640s and, arguably, those also of the later seventeenth century.2
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Notes
William Sedgwick, The Leaves of the Tree of Life (25 August 1648), pp. 108–21 (E.460/40).
For the argument that those crises were a single phenomenon, see Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000).
Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–42 (Basingstoke, 1992);
Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 265–74.
David Wootton, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, EHR, 105 (1990), pp. 654–69.
Philip Baker, ‘Rhetoric, Reality and the Varieties of Civil War Radicalism’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49 (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 202–24.
For a stimulating discussion of the Agreements and Leveller thought in relation to the modern British constitution, see Martin Loughlin, ‘The Constitutional Thought of the Levellers’, Current Legal Problems, 60 (2007), pp. 1–39
and Geoffrey Robertson’s introduction to Philip Baker (ed.), The Putney Debates: The Levellers (2007).
Blair Worden, ‘The Levellers in History and Memory, c.1660–1960’, in Michael Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 256–82.
J.W. Gough, ‘The Agreements of the People, 1647–49’, History, 15 (1930–31), pp. 334–41. See also the more recent account by Ian Gentles, ‘The Agreements of the People and Their Political Contexts, 1647–49’, in Mendle (ed.), Putney Debates, pp. 148—74.
S.R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–49 (4 vols., reprinted 1987), III. 383;
T. C. Pease, The Leveller Movement: A Study in the History and Political Theory of the English Great Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1916), p. 193.
Maurice Ashley, John Wildman: Plotter and Postmaster. A Study of the English Republican Movement in the Seventeenth Century (1947), p. 30; Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, p. 49 n. 2.
Elliot Vernon and Philip Baker, ‘What was the First Agreement of the People?’, HJ, 53 (2010), pp. 39–59.
The idea that the people could reserve certain powers from their Representative had been raised by Charles Herle in 1642 in his debate with Henry Ferne: see David Wootton (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (1986), p. 46.
Vernon and Baker, ‘Agreement of the People’, pp. 57–8; H.R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland From 1641 to 1667 (1907), pp. 47–8, 105.
Philip Baker, ‘A Despicable Contemptible Generation of Men’?: Cromwell and the Levellers’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 104.
H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (2nd ed., Nottingham, 1983), p. 328 n. 6.
See, for example, J.C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Christianity’, in Brian Manning (ed.) Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973), pp. 239–42.
For example, see W. Schenk, The Concern for Social Justice in the Puritan Revolution (1948), p. 172.
Jürgen Diethe, ‘The Moderate: Politics and Allegiances of a Revolutionary Newspaper’, HPT,4 (1983), pp. 247–79.
Foundations of Freedom went through three printings of different typography with essentially the same wording: E.476/26; BL, 103.a.72; Wing, L2110. The first two printings contain no printer information, but the third was printed for ‘R. Smithhurst’. All three printings contain a publisher’s epistle to the reader, signed by ‘AN’, which Lilburne revealed later was himself (John Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England (18 June 1649), p. 35 (E.560/14)). Thomason’s copy of the tract (E.476/26) is annotated ‘Dec: 15’, but in the publisher’s epistle the pamphlet is mistakenly dated Friday 10 December 1648–a printer’s error, because 10 December was a Sunday. This mistake is corrected in the other two printings.
For example, see Barbara Taft, ‘The Council of Officers’ Agreement of the People, 1648/9’, HJ, 28 (1985), pp. 169–85.
John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince and Richard Overton, An Agreement of the Free People of England (1649) (E.552/23); the tract was printed in London by Giles Calvert and received the imprimatur of Gilbert Mabbot.
For example, see Brian Manning, 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution (1992), pp. 209–16.
S.R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–56 (4 vols., 1903), II. 156–7;
Philip A. Knachel, England and the Fronde: The Impact of the English Civil War and Revolution on France (Ithaca, NY, 1967), pp. 198–9; Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, chapter 35.
William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997), p. 247.
James Heath, A Chronicle of the Late Intestine War in the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland (1676), pp. 185–7;
see also, David Lloyd, Memoires of… Our Late Intestine Wars (1668), p. 196 (Wing, L2642).
Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1682), pp. 279–83 (Wing, W1986);
Sir Richard Baker (cont. Edward Phillips), A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1679), pp. 564–5 (Wing, B508A).
[John Wildman or John Humfrey?], ‘Good Advice Before it be Too Late’, in The Eighth Collection of Papers Relating to the Present Juncture of Affairs in England (1689), pp. 19–21 (Wing, E265A). See also, Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94’, HPT,1 (1980), pp. 195—235.
J.S.A. Adamson, ‘Eminent Victorians: S.R. Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero’, HJ, 33 (1990), p. 647; Gardiner, History of the Civil War, III. 388.
Charles Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (1900), p. 473;
G.P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (1898; 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1927), pp. 118–34.
Joseph Frank, The Levellers. A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 138 and 262.
Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes p. 55, Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (1954), pp. 41–2.
Walther Rothschild, Der Gedanke der Geschriebenen Verfassung in der Englischen Revolution (Liepzig, 1903).
For Lindsay, see Graham Maddox, ‘The Christian Democracy of A.D. Lindsay’, Political Studies, 34 (1986), pp. 441–55.
David Wootton, ‘The Levellers’, in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 71–89.
Worden, ‘Levellers in History and Memory’, pp. 275–9; Eduard Bernstein, Kommunistische und Demokratisch-Sozialistische Strömungen Während der Englischen Revolution (Stuttgart 1895)
translated into English, by H.J. Stenning, as Cromwell and Communism (1930; reprinted Nottingham 1980).
David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: A Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (1940), p. 99.
Ibid., pp. 119—20; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972), pp. 91–9.
See also Philip Baker, ‘Radicalism in Civil War and Interregnum England’, History Compass, 8 (2010), p. 153.
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962), chapter 3.
Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976; 2nd edn, 1991), chapter 10.
Norah Carlin, ‘Liberty and Fraternities in the English Revolution: The Politics of London Artisans’ Protests, 1635–59’, International Review of Social History, 39 (1994), pp. 223–54.
James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (2000), chapter 6, especially pp. 247–8, 250, 254–5.
Alastair MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History (Basingstoke, 1996), chapter 5.
G.E. Aylmer (ed.), The Levellers in the English Revolution (1975), pp. 48–9.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’, in G.E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–60 (1972), pp. 57–78;
J.C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Democracy’, PANDP, 40 (1968), pp. 174–80.
See also Christopher Thompson, ‘Maximillian Petty and the Putney Debate on the Franchise’, PANDP, 88 (1980), pp. 63–9.
John Sanderson, ‘But the People’s Creatures’: The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester, 1989), p. 116; Thompson, ‘Maximillian Petty’, p. 68.
Mark A. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), p. x.
Mark A. Kishlansky, ‘The Army and the Levellers: The Roads to Putney’, HJ, 22 (1979), pp. 795–824;
John Morrill, ‘The Army Revolt of 1647’, reprinted in his The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (Harlow, 1993), pp. 307–31.
Mark A. Kishlansky, ‘Consensus Politics and the Structure of Debate at Putney’, JBS, 20 (1981), p. 52.
Glenn Burgess, ‘Protestant Polemic: The Leveller Pamphlets’, Parergon, 11 (1993), pp. 58 and 66.
Jason Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’, HJ, 43 (2000), pp. 625–45.
Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–49 (Cambridge, 1977), chapters 7 and 8.
Glenn Burgess, ‘Radicalism and the English Revolution’, in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (eds.), English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 71–3; Baker, ‘Despicable Generation of Men’, pp. 97–102.
For various interpretations of both the Levellers and the Agreements, see Richard Gleisner, ‘The Levellers and Natural Law: The Putney Debates of 1647’, JBS, 20 (1980), pp. 74–89;
A.C. Houston, ‘“A way of Settlement”: The Levellers, Monopolies and the Public Interest’, HPT, 14 (1993), pp. 381–420;
Samuel Denis Glover, ‘The Putney Debates: Popular Versus Elitist Republicanism’, PANDP, 164 (1999), pp. 47–80;
Quentin Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), pp. 156–70.
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Vernon, E., Baker, P. (2012). Introduction: The History and Historiography of the Agreements of the People. In: Baker, P., Vernon, E. (eds) The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291707_1
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