The Gateway Chronicle 2020

Religion
47
Putney Debates – October 1647
I
n a small ordinary Church, St Mary’s
at Putney, on the North bank of the
Thames about 6 miles out of London,
a series of debates took place in October
1647 which would profoundly influence
the development of ideas in Britain and
across the world for centuries to come. In
those debates, ideas were articulated
which, whilst sounding commonplace today,
were then radical and extraordinary.
By the summer of 1647, the Roundheads
were winning the English civil war. At
Marston Moor and Naseby, Oliver Cromwell's
New Model Army had crushed the
Cavaliers and King Charles I himself was
a prisoner. The
Civil War had
been brutal and
bloody – proportionally,
the
death toll was
greater than the
First and Second
World Wars
combined. But
the approaching
end of the war
fostered a new
fear among ordinary
soldiers - t
hat Parliament
and the army
generals (or
"grandees") were
preparing to sell
them out. Some
MPs, fearing the
army and keen for a settlement with the
King, wanted to cut soldiers' pay, disband
regiments, refuse indemnity for war damage
and pack them off to Ireland. In many
regiments, ‘agitators’ sprang up who f
ought back against these proposals - "We
were not a mere mercenary army hired to
serve any arbitrary power of a state, but
called forth ... to the defence of the
people's just right and liberties," said agitator
pamphlets circulating in the Summer
of 1647. For the first time, those who and
fought and suffered in a struggle demanded
some kind of recompense –
maybe political, maybe financial. The
sense that the elite would settle back into
the cosy status quo which had been preserved
through blood and toil was a powerful
theme of the pamphlets and petitions
which flooded the Army in the summer of
1647.
The grievances of the soldiers were taken
up by groups of radical thinkers, known
as Levellers, both inside and outside the
Army. Originally coming out of
churches in London in the mid-
1640s, the Levellers are often considered
to be the first “communists", declaring
that all degrees of men should be “levelled,
and an equality should be established".
Identified by their green scarves
and ribbons, the Levellers put forward a
post war manifesto entitled the
Battle of Edgehill,
October 1642