One consequence of the Glamorgan exposure, happening as it did when the King had been all but completely beaten in England, was a resolution of Parliament that Irish affairs should be managed thenceforward not by the mere Committee for these affairs meeting at Derby House, Westminster, and communicating with Inchiquin, Coote, and others in Ireland, but by "a single person of honour," in fact a Parliamentary Lord-Lieutenant. For this high post there was chosen Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle, M.P. for Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight. This was partly a tribute to Lord Lisle's own zeal and to service he had already rendered in Ireland, partly a compliment to his father, the Earl of Leicester, whom Charles had displaced from the Lord-Lieutenancy to make way for Ormond. Accordingly, from April 1646, while Ormond remained in power for Charles at Dublin, it was in the name of Lord Lisle, as "Lord Lieutenant-General," that all commissions for Parliament respecting Ireland were issued. Lord Lisle, however, had not gone over to Ireland, but had been waiting till he could take troops with him. It remained, therefore, for Ormond to do what he finally could in Ireland for the fallen King. He had been in negotiation with the Confederates for a Peace on more respectable terms than Glamorgan's, and yet valuable for the King; and though, after Charles's flight to the Scots, letters had come from Newcastle (June 11) countermanding previous instructions, Ormond had persevered. On the 28th of July, 1646, Ormond's Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels were signed at Dublin and published for general information. They promised the repeal of all acts against the Roman Catholic Religion in Ireland, and admission of Roman Catholics to a proportion of all places of public trust; and the recompense was to be an army of 10,000 Irish for his Majesty's assistance in England. The indignation among the Parliamentarians in Ireland, and throughout England and Scotland, was immense, and Ormond was the best-abused man living. Fortunately for him, he was extricated from the consequences of his own Treaty. The Papal Nuncio disowned it as insulting to the Church after Glamorgan's; the Roman Catholic clergy gathered round the Nuncio; there were riots wherever it was proclaimed; excommunications were thundered against its adherents; the Confederate Commissioners who had made the Treaty were imprisoned; the Nuncio himself became generalissimo, and, with Owen Roe O'Neile's army on one side of him and General Preston's on the other, declared war afresh against Ormond, and marched in his robes upon Dublin. For Ormond then there remained one plain duty. To save English rule and the existence of Protestantism in Ireland, he must hand over Dublin and the entire management of the war to the English Parliament. Having procured the King's full consent, he began a treaty with Parliament to this effect in Nov. 1646. As he was staunch in his desire to make the best bargain for the King he could, he was in no hurry; so that in February 1646-7, when the King was taken to Holmby, Ormond was still in Dublin, going on with the Treaty. In reality, however, by that time Ireland was as good as transferred to the Parliament. They had acted on the knowledge. Dec. 23,1646, "Resolved that this House doth declare that they will prosecute and carry on an offensive war in Ireland for the regaining of that kingdom to the obedience of the kingdom of England;" Jan. 4, 1646-7, "Resolved that an Ordinance be forthwith prepared and brought in for establishing and settling the same Form of Church- government in the kingdom of Ireland as is or shall be established in the kingdom of England;" such were two momentous votes of the Commons when the King was about to leave Newcastle. Nay, on the 28th of January, when the Scots were handing over the King to the English, Lord Lisle had left London for Ireland to assume his Lord-Lieutenancy. A new sword of State had been made for him; his Irish Council, of nine members at £500 a year each, had been nominated; and, at his special request, Major Thomas Harrison of the New Model had accompanied him. [Footnote: Authorities for the summary of Irish affairs from 1641 to 1647 given in the text are— Rushworth, VI. 238-249; Clar. 641, and at various other points; Whitlocke under Jan. 25 and 28 and March 9, 1646-7; Godwin, I. 245 et seq., and II. 102 et seq.; Commons Journals of dates given, with other entries from Dec. 1646 to Feb. 1646-7; and Carte's Ormond. Carte's large book is of some value from the abundance of information that was at his disposal, but is intrinsically silly.]
What could Lord Lisle do without troops? Now was the time for England to perform fully for "the gasping and bleeding Island" that duty of which, with all the excuse of her own pressing needs, she had been long too negligent. Now was the time to revenge the massacre of 1641, and re- subject Ireland to English rule and the one only right faith and worship. And were not the means at hand? An army of 25,000 or 30,000 Englishmen was now standing idle: why not disband and cashier part of them, and recast the rest into a new army for the service of Ireland? The question was obvious and natural to all; but it was put most loudly by the Presbyterians, because of a peculiar interest in it. They had never liked the Army of the New Model; all its victories had not reconciled them to it, or made them cease to regret the Army of the Old Model, That had been a respectable army, with the Earl of Essex at its head; this was an army of Independents, Sectaries, Tolerationists. Might not the disbanding of this army be so managed as to be at once a deliverance of England from a great danger and the salvation of Ireland? What was necessary in the process was to get rid of Cromwell, his followers among the officers, and the most peccant parts of the soldiery, so as to leave a sufficient mass to be re-formed, with additions, into an army of the Old Model type, the command of which might be given to Fairfax if he would take it, or perhaps to honest Skippon, or, best of all, to Sir William Waller.
This had been the understanding between the English Presbyterians and their Scottish friends since the close of the war. [Footnote: In a letter of Baillie's October 2, 1646, he expects "the Sectarian Army disbanded and that party humbled.">[ There was, however, another party likely to have a voice in the business. This was the Army itself.
Never under the sun had there been such an army before. It was not large according to our modern ideas of armies: only some 25,000 or 30,000 men, four-fifths of them foot-soldiers and the rest horse-troopers and dragoons. But imagine these all hardy men, thoroughly drilled and disciplined, and conscious that it was they who had done the work, they who had fought the battles, they who had saved England. Imagine farther that this Army had somehow come to be constituted, through its entire mass, on Cromwell's extraordinary principle, announced by him to Hampden at the beginning of the war, that the power of an army depends ultimately on the "spirit," or intrinsic moral mood, of the individuals composing it. Imagine that the atoms of this army were all "men of a spirit," men who had not fought as hirelings, but as earnest partakers in a great cause. Imagine them, if you like, as an army of fanatics. This phrase, however, might mislead, unless qualified.
The common conception of an army of fanatics is that of an army mad for one set of tenets. Now the Parliamentary Army was really, as the Presbyterians called it, an Army of Sectaries. It was a miscellany of all the forms of Puritan belief known in England, with forms of belief included that were not Puritan. The much largest proportion, after Presbyterians, of whom there were many, and ordinary Independents, of whom there were more, were Sectaries of the fervid and devout sorts, such as Baptists, Old Brownists, and Antinomians, with mystical Millenaries and Seekers, all passionately Scriptural, saturated with the language and history of the Old Testament, and zealously Anti-Romanist and Anti- prelatic; and these, on the whole, were the men after Cromwell's heart. Such, among others, was Harrison—whom Baxter, who had seen much of him, classes at this time among the Anabaptists and Antinomians, telling us "he would not dispute at all [with Baxter], but he would in good discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of Free Grace, which was savoury to those that had right principles, though he had some misunderstandings of Free Grace himself:" a man, adds Baxter, "of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory, but not well seen in the principles of his Religion; of a sanguine complexion; naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much;" and whom Baxter had once heard, in a battle, when the enemy began to flee, "with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God, with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture." But there were also in the army Sectaries of a cooler or easier order— Arminians, Anti-Sabbatarians, Anti-Scripturists, Familists, and Sceptics. Hardly a form of odd opinion mentioned in our conspectus of English Sects in a former chapter but had representatives in the Army; nay, new speculative oddities had broken out in some regiments; and it may be doubted whether even in the English mind of our own time there is any form of speculation so peculiar as not to have had its prototype or lineal progenitor in that mass of steel-clad theorists contemporary with the Westminster Assembly. Nor did each man keep his theory to himself. There were constant prayer-meetings in companies and regiments, and meetings for theological debate; troopers or foot-soldiers off duty would expound or harangue to their fellows in camp, or even from the pulpits of parish-churches when such were convenient; whenever the Army halted there was a hum of holding-forth. There were army-chaplains, it is true, and some of them, such as Peters, Dell, and Saltmarsh, great favourites; but, on the whole, the regular cloth was in disrepute: those who belonged to it were spoken of as the Levites or priests by profession; the need for such a profession was voted obsolete; and any man was held to be as good for the preaching office as any other, if he had the preaching gift. And with the respect for ordination had vanished the respect for most of the regular Church-forms and symbols. Not only did preaching officers and troopers, when they chanced to enter parish-churches, often eject the regular ministers from the pulpits, and hold forth themselves instead—in which kind of practice Colonel Hewson and Major Axtell are reported to have been conspicuous; but the contempt for established decencies of worship had vented itself, at least in occasional instances, in very profane humours. Soldiers had scandalized country-congregations by sitting with their hats on during prayer and singing; and Hewson's men were said once to have kept possession of a parish-church for eight days, having a fire in the chancel, and smoking tobacco ad libitum. Such were, doubtless, mere excesses here and there, which would have been rebuked by the more serious men who formed the bulk of the Army; but it is quite certain that even among these that extreme kind of Independency had become common which repudiated a National Church of any kind whatsoever, nay denied that there was any Church on earth at all, any system of spiritual ordinances visibly from God, anything but a great invisible brotherhood of Saints, walking in this life's darkness, passionately using meanwhile this symbol and that to feature forth the unimaginable, glad above all in the great glow of the present Bible, but expecting also, each soul for itself, rays and shafts from the Light beyond. Of this kind of indifferency to all competing forms of external worship, and even of doctrine, combined with either a mystical and dreamy piety, or a wildly-fervid enthusiasm, Dell and Saltmarsh, among the army- chaplains, seem to have been the most noted exponents; but it was really a modification of that which is already known to us as the Seekerism of Roger Williams. At all events, that absolute doctrine of Toleration which Roger Williams had propounded, and which was logically inseparable in his mind from Independency at its purest, had found its largest discipleship in the Parliamentary Army. Toleration to some extent was the universal Army tenet; even the Presbyterians of the Army, with some exceptions, had learnt to be Tolerationists in some degree. But a very full principle of Toleration had possessed most, and the most absolute possible principle was avowed by many. "If I should worship the Sun or Moon. like the Persians, or that pewter-pot on the table, nobody has anything to do with it," one sectary had been heard to say; and some even had "justified the Irish Rebellion," on the ground that the Irish "did it for the liberty of their consciences and for their country." If this last extreme application of the Toleration doctrine did actually come from the mouth of a sectary serving in the Army (which is not quite clear from the report), it must be regarded, I suspect, as one of those eccentricities of mess-table debate which, when Baxter talked of them to Colonel Purefoy, vouching that he had heard such things himself, that officer indignantly refused to credit, saying, "If Noll Cromwell should hear any soldier speak but such a word, he would cleave his crown." Precisely the Toleration doctrine, however, was that in which Cromwell himself was most thorough-going and most distinctly the representative of the whole Army. Even Baxter, after his two years of army-chaplaincy, spent in observing the medley of sects around him and combating their errors, could not refer Cromwell with positive certainty to any one of the Sects. He seemed most for the Anabaptists, Antinomians, and Seekers, but "did not openly profess what opinion he was of himself." But on Toleration of Religious Differences he was explicit and decided. All that were most to his mind in the Army "he tied together by the point of Liberty of Conscience, which was the common interest in which they did unite." [Footnote: This description of the Parliamentary Army is a digest of the best knowledge I have been able to form from various readings in contemporary books and study of Army documents; but particulars of it are from Baxter's Autobiography (1696), Part I. 52-57, and Edwards's Gangræna, Parts II. and III. passim. The good, though narrow and hypochondriac, Baxter may be thoroughly relied on for whatever he vouches as a fact known to himself; otherwise, cum grano. Edwards has to be put into the witness- box and cross-examined unmercifully, not as a wilful liar, but as an incredibly spiteful collector of gossip for the Presbyterians. After all, many of the so-called ribaldries and profanities reported by him of the Army Sectaries turn out innocent enough, or only very rough jokes, as when a soldier told a godly old woman that, if she did not believe in universal redemption, she would be damned. Perhaps his most horrible story is that of some soldiers taking a horse into a village church in Hunts and baptizing him in all due form at the font, giving him the name of Esau because he was hairy. The story, with a certificate of its truth by seven of the villagers, will be found in Gangræna, Part III. 17, 18. But, if the atrocity ever did occur, its date, according to Edwards himself, was June 2, 1644, i.e. in the time of the Old Model Army, to which the very objection of Cromwell and others was that it did not consist sufficiently of "men of a spirit.">[
There were three reasons why this extraordinary Army should object to being disbanded:—(1) They had large and long-deferred claims upon the Parliament for arrears of pay, compensation for losses, provision for the wounded and disabled and for widows and orphans, indemnity also for illegal or questionable acts done in the time of war. Was the Army to let itself be disbanded without due security on these points? (2) There was the unsettled question of Religious Toleration. The whole drift of things in the Parliament and in the Westminster Assembly seemed to be to a uniform and compulsory Presbyterianism; and was that a prospect to which the Army, or nine-tenths of it, could look forward placidly? The Army did not want to undo the Presbyterian settlement as already decreed, but they were unwilling to disband before a Toleration under that settlement had been arranged. (3) Over and above these two reasons, and in powerful conjunction with them, was another. The Army, although an Army, had not ceased to regard itself as a portion of the English people; nay, it had come to regard itself as a select portion of that people, whose opportunities of thinking and reasoning on political affairs had been peculiarly good. It had come to be, in its own belief, an organ of political opinion, representing wishes and feelings of large parts of the population which were not represented in Parliament, and representing these in the form of conclusions for the future more radical and more definite than any that Parliament alone was ever likely to work out. In short, those democratic ideas the prevalence of which in the Army had so surprised Baxter when he first joined it had now become paramount. It was not only that the Army had formed views more severe than those of the Presbyterians as to the proper terms of the settlement to be made with the King; it was that the Army thought the present the time for discussing the whole subject of the constitution of the country. The House of Lords, for example! Whether there should be a Peerage at all, legislating in a separate House by mere hereditary right, might be a very fair question, and was one on which the Army had pretty decided opinions But that the House of Lords then sitting—not the assembled Peerage of England at all, but a mere fifth-part of that Peerage, in the shape of some twenty-eight persons meeting from day to day, sometimes as few as half-a-dozen of them at a time, and not only partaking with the other House in the legislation, but often obstructing that House, thwarting it, throwing out its measures,—that this should continue who would maintain? No! the House of Lords must go, and the sole House in England must be the other House, the "House of Representers." But here too there was room for improvement. The House of Commons then sitting was numerically substantial enough, now that it had been Recruited; and no one could look back on the great things which the House had done without gratitude and admiration. But were there not signs of exhaustion, debility, and wrong- headedness, even in that House, arising partly from its long independence of the People, partly from the imperfect system of suffrage under which it had been elected. Only in an imperfect sense could the existing House be called a "House of Representers;" and, as soon as should be convenient, it must be dissolved and succeeded by a House fully deserving that name. For the election of such a House there must be a reform of the details of the electoral system, including the abolition of such anomalies as the return of one-twelfth of the whole House by the single and remote county of Cornwall, and a redistribution of seats in accordance with the proportions of population and property in the various parts of England. All these ideas, and many more, anticipating with surprising exactness the Parliamentary Reform movements of much later times, were agitating the Parliamentary Army while the King was in his captivity at Holmby. Pamphlets from London, actively circulated among the regiments, aided the discussion and supplied it with topics and catch- words. Especially popular among the soldiers, and keeping up their excitement more particularly against the House of Lords, were the pamphlets that came from John Lilburne and an associate of his named Richard Overton.—Lilburne, whom we left in October 1645, just released from the short imprisonment to which he had been committed by the Commons (antè, p. 390), had gone on again in his old pugnacious way, till, by Prynne's contrivance, he found himself in the clutches of the Lords. Called before that House, in June 1646, for a Letter he had printed, called The Just Man's Justification, he had amazed the Peers by conduct such as they had never seen before. He had refused to kneel, refused to take off his hat, refused to hear the charges against him, stopped his ears while they were read, denied the jurisdiction of the Peers, stamped at them, glared at them, told them his whole mind about them, appealed to the Commons as the sole power in the State, and altogether behaved like a mad ox. They had consequently fined him £4,000, and committed him to Newgate for seven years. For similar offences to the Peers, and similar contumacy when charged with them, Richard Overton, a printer and assiduous publisher of pamphlets, had also been sent to prison two months afterwards (Aug. 1646). There was considerable sympathy with both among the Londoners, and the Independents in the Commons had taken up Lilburne's case and procured the appointment of a Committee on it. Nor even in Newgate, it appears, had he been debarred the use of pen and ink; for, in addition to his former pamphlets, there had come from him fiercer and fresh ones—Anatomy of the Lords' Tyranny, London's Liberty in Chains, The Free Man's Freedom, The Oppressed Man's Oppressions, The Resolved Man's Resolution, &c. These were the pamphlets of Lilburne which, together with Overton's, one of which was An Arrow Shot into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords, were popular with the common soldiers of the Parliamentary Army, and nursed that especial form of the democratic passion among them which longed to sweep away the House of Lords and see England governed by a single Representative House.—Baxter, who reports this growth of democratic opinion in the Army from his own observation, distinctly recognises in it the beginnings of that rough ultra-Republican party which afterwards became formidable under the name of THE LEVELLERS. All the while, however, there was also a quiet formation, in some of the superior and more educated minds of the Army, of sentiments essentially Republican, but more reserved and tentative in the style of their Republicanism. Among these minds too it had become a question whether a mere settlement with the King even on the basis of the Nineteen Propositions would suffice, and whether the hour had not come for organic changes in the Constitution of England. Perhaps the leader of Army thought in this direction was Cromwell's son-in-law Ireton. [Footnote: Baxter ut supra; Gangræna, part III. passim; Lords Journals, June 10, 11, 23, and July 11, 1646 (Lilburne's case), and Aug. 11 (Overton's); Godwin, II. 407 et seq.; Wood's Ath. III. 353] That the English Presbyterians, bereft now even of that overrated support which had been afforded them by the presence of a Scottish Army in England, should have rushed into a struggle with the English Army, such as it has been described, without trying so much as a compromise on the Toleration question, is one of the greatest examples of political stupidity on record. They seem to have calculated mainly on the fact that they had a majority in Parliament. Of the few Lords forming the Upper House they could count nearly all as decidedly with them. In the Commons, too, where the balance had always been more nearly equal, Presbyterianism had of late been gaining force. Why it had been so is not very obvious. The latest Recruiters may have been politicians of a more Presbyterian type than the earlier ones; and of these earlier Recruiters some who had come in as Independents may have veered round. Men whose opinions are not very decided tend naturally to the winning side, and the King's flight to the Scots and their long possession of him had put Presbyterianism in the likelihood to win. However it had happened, the Presbyterians had of late been preponderating in the Commons. In a vote on Sept. 1, 1646, affecting the relations of the Parliament to the Scots, the Presbyterians had beaten the Independents by 140 to 101; in another vote on Dec. 25, on the question whether the words "according to the Covenant" should be added to a Resolution, the Yeas or Presbyterians had beaten by 133 to 91; and in an interesting vote on Dec. 31, on the question whether the words "or expound the Scriptures" should be added to a Resolution forbidding unordained persons to preach, the Yeas or Presbyterians had beaten by no fewer than 105 to 57. In this last vote Cromwell was one of the Tellers for the Noes or Independents. In testing divisions these numbers may be taken as representing the relative strengths of the two parties in the end of 1646 and the beginning of 1647. But, even with a considerable majority in the Commons, and with the Lords all but wholly a Presbyterian House, the confidence of the Presbyterians in confronting the Army can be accounted for only by reckless leadership. Holles and Stapleton, their most forward men in the Commons, appear to have been men of but ordinary faculty and decidedly rash temper, incomparably inferior to their great opponents. One argument they had, of which they did not fail to make the most. The City of London was eminently and staunchly Presbyterian; and would that great city, the central money-power of the nation, allow the Government to be dictated to by an Army of Sectaries? [Footnote: Commons Journals of dates given, with divisions generally between Aug. 1646 and Feb. 1646-7; Godwin, II. 263 et seq.]
The struggle, long foreseen, began actually in the first two months and a half of the King's stay at Holmby, i.e. in February, March, and April, 1646-7. The gauntlet was thrown down by Parliament. Feb. 19, in an unusually full House, it was carried by 158 (Holles and Stapleton tellers) against 148 (Haselrig and Evelyn tellers), that no force of Foot beyond what was necessary for garrisons should be kept up in England, but only a certain force of Horse. On the 5th of March there came a vote on the important question who should be the Commander-in-chief of the retained Army, and so jealous had the Presbyterians become even of Fairfax, because of his connexion with the existing Army, that the Independents, though going for him to a man, carried his appointment but by a majority of 12. Subsequent resolutions, carried without division, were that no member of the House should hold a military command (Cromwell's Self-denying Ordinance cleverly repeated against himself), that no officer in the future Army under Fairfax should be above the rank of Colonel, and that all officers should take the Covenant; and when, on the farther and more outrageous proposition, that all officers must conform to the Presbyterian Church-government, the Independents forced a division; they lost by 108 Noes (Haselrig and Evelyn), against 136 Yeas (Holies and Stapleton). By additional Resolutions of March 29 and April 8 the arrangements were completed. It was formally resolved that all the Foot of the existing Army not required for the garrisons should be disbanded, and that the future Army of Horse under Fairfax should consist of nine regiments of 600 each, or 5,400 in all, recruited out of the existing Army or otherwise. The Colonels for the nine re- modelled regiments were named, some of them cavalry Colonels of the existing Army, but not all. Cromwell's own regiment, or the regiment that should be built out of any safe shred of it with other materials, was to go to the Presbyterian Major Huntingdon.——So much for England and Wales; but what of the new Army for Ireland? That also had been arranged for. March 6, it was voted by the Commons that the Army for Ireland should consist of 8,400 foot, 3,000 horse, and 1,200 dragoons, to be recruited as far as possible from the existing English Army. But how about the command of this Army and the government of Ireland while it should be serving there? Lord Lisle, then in Ireland as Lord-Lieutenant for the Parliament, was one of Cromwell's disciples, and had been appointed by Cromwell's influence. It would not do to leave him in command. Fortunately, he had been appointed but for a year; and, to avoid re-appointing him, it was resolved (April 1) that the previous vote of the Houses for the management of Ireland through "a single person of honour" should be rescinded, and that, while the Civil Government should revert to the two Lords-Justices in Dublin, the military command should be in the hands of a Field-Marshal, attended by Parliamentary Commissioners. Sir William Waller was named for this Field-Marshalship; but the Presbyterians did not go to the vote for him; and Skippon, then at Newcastle, and unaware of the honour intended for him, was unanimously chosen (April 2). The Presbyterian Massey was to be his Lieutenant- General. As an inducement to officers and soldiers of the English Army to re-enlist for the Irish service, high pay was promised, with an option of taking part of it in the valuable form of Irish lands. [Footnote: Commons Journals of the dates given.]
0, if you had been at Saffron Walden in Essex, where the bulk of the English Army was quartered, when the news of these votes of the Commons reached them! What murmurs among the common soldiers, what consultations among the officers! The officers, as was fitting, took the lead. A deputation of four Colonels and five Lieutenant-colonels had already gone to London (March 22) with a Petition and Remonstrance. They had been received graciously enough by the Lords, but coldly and with rebuke by the Commons. Then, a great Petition being in preparation throughout the Army, to be signed by both officers and men, and addressed to Fairfax as Commander-in-chief, there had come, on a hasty motion by Holles, a Declaration of the two Houses (March 29-30) voting the same dangerous and mutinous, and threatening proceedings against such as should go on with it. With vast self-control on the part of the Army, and much good management on the part of Fairfax, the offensive Petition had been suppressed; and through a great part of April the dispute took the form of conferences between Fairfax and his officers and five Commissioners sent down to the Army from Parliament (Waller and Massey among them) to argue for the disbandment and promote re-enlistment for Ireland. At these conferences the questions of arrears, indemnity, the rate of pay in Ireland, &c., were all discussed, and the Commissioners tried to give satisfactory explanations. It was a great point with the Army whether Skippon would accept the Irish Field-Marshalship; and at one of the conferences, when Colonel Hammond was expressing this for his comrades, and saying that nothing would be more likely to induce them to enlist for Ireland than the knowledge that that "great soldier" was to be in command, "All, all!" cried the assembled officers, "Fairfax and Cromwell, and we all go!" No real conciliation, however, was effected; and on the 26th of April the Commissioners, in their "perfect list" of officers who had agreed individually to go to Ireland, could report but three Colonels, and a proportionate following of Captains and subalterns. Among the men it was worse. In one company, eight score strong, twenty-six had volunteered to go with their Captain; in another the Captain could not get a single man to join him. Parliament was taken aback by this ill success; but Holles and his party were undaunted. It was a gleam in their favour that Skippon, coming to London from Newcastle, did at length (April 27) accept the Irish Field-Marshalship. The Houses voted him their thanks and a gift of 1,000_l._and on the same day it was carried in the Commons, by the overwhelming majority of 114 to 7 (the Independents evidently abstaining from the vote), that the Army, horse and foot, should be immediately disbanded with payment of six weeks of arrears. Orders were also issued for the appearance at the bar of the House of some of the most refractory superior officers and the arrest of several subalterns; and at the same moment the Common Council of the City of London proved their Presbyterian zeal by ejecting Alderman Pennington and other prominent Independents from the Committee of the City Militia. On the very day of this concurrence of Presbyterian demonstrations (April 27) there was presented to the Commons a "Humble Petition of the Officers in behalf of themselves and the Soldiers," with an accompanying "Vindication" of their recent conduct. Lieutenant-general Thomas Hammond headed the list of Petitioners; next came Colonels Whalley, Lambert, Robert Lilburne, Rich, Hewson, Robert Hammond, and Okey; then Lieutenant-colonels Pride, Kelsay, Reade, Jubbs, Grimes, Ewer, and Salmon; then Majors Rogers, Axtell, Cowell, Smith, Horton, and Desborough; and there followed about 130 captains and inferior officers. Such an Officers' Petition might well have given the Presbyterians pause; but three days afterwards (April 30) there came something more extraordinary. It was a Letter brought to town, and delivered to Skippon and Cromwell for presentation to the House, by three private troopers, professing to be "agents" or "agitators" or "adjutators" for some regiments in the Army. It used very high language indeed. It complained of the "scandalous and false suggestions" current against the Army, spoke darkly of "a plot contrived by some men who had lately tasted of sovereignty," and declared flatly that the soldiers "would neither be employed for the service of Ireland nor suffer themselves to be disbanded till their desires were granted, and the rights and liberties of the subjects should be vindicated and maintained." The amazed House ordered the three troopers who had brought the Letter, and who were waiting outside, to be brought in. They came in, gave their names as Edward Saxby, William Allen, and Thomas Sheppard, and stood stoutly to their business. Holles and his clique were for committing them to prison; but, Skippon certifying that they were honest men, and another member suggesting that, if they were committed at all, it should be "to the best inn of the town, and sack and sugar provided for them," the more good- humoured counsel prevailed, and they were dismissed. Nay, their appearance and their Letter had produced an impression. In Holles's own words, "the House flatted," began to think it had been too peremptory, and resolved that Skippon, Cromwell, Ireton, and Fleetwood, should go at once to Saffron Walden, as mediators between it and the Army. [Footnote: Commons Journals of all the cited dates; Rushworth, VI. 444-475; Whitlocke, II. 121-137; Parl. Hist. III. 560-576; Holles's Memoirs by himself (1699), pp. 88-90.]
Agents, or Agitators, or Adjutators, the three bold troopers had called themselves; and it was the first time the Houses had heard the name. It announced, however, an important reality. The common soldiers had made up their minds that they could not leave the struggle for the Army's rights wholly in the hands of the officers, and that it might assist these officers if they, the rank and file, with the corporals and sergeants, formed an organization among themselves for the same ends. Accordingly, trusty men in each regiment had been chosen to meet and consult with others of other regiments, and the name "Agitators" or "Adjutators" had been given to these deputies. Very soon the organization was so perfect that every troop or company had its two Agitators, every regiment its distinct Agitatorship composed of the Agitators of the several troops or companies, and so by gradation upwards to general meetings of the Agitators of the whole Army and special meetings of Committees for maturing business more privately. Too obvious a connexion between this association and the higher army-officers was inconvenient; but it was useful to have connecting links in officers of the lower ranks; and the Presidency of the Agitators came, at length, to be vested in one such officer. This was James Berry, one of the captains of Fairfax's own horse-regiment, in which Desborough was Major. He had been a clerk in some iron-works in the west of England, and was "of very good natural parts, especially mathematical and mechanical." Before the war he and Richard Baxter had been bosom friends; but, since he had come into the Army and been much in the society of Cromwell, he had become, says Baxter, a man of new lights in religion, regarding the old Puritans of his acquaintance as "dull, self-conceited men of a lower form." During Baxter's two years of army-chaplaincy, Berry had never visited him, nor even seen him, except once or twice accidentally. [Footnote: Rushworth, VI. 485: Holles, 86, 87; Baxter's Autobiography, Part I. 57 and 97.]
Through the greater part of May, Fairfax being then in London, Cromwell, and his fellow-commissioners, Skippon, Ireton, and Fleetwood, remained at Saffron Walden, busy in their work of mediation. Three successive letters to Speaker Lenthall reported the amount of their success. It was next to nothing. They had obtained, they say in the last of the three letters (May 17), a complete statement of the grievances of the Army, in the form of papers which they would bring to town; but meanwhile they found the soldiers so unsettled that they did not think it safe to leave them. Skippon and Ireton, in fact, did remain; but Cromwell and Fleetwood returned to town, May 21, to report to the House in greater detail. Among the documents they brought with them, representing the opinions and demands of the Army, was one which had been prepared with extraordinary care. The various votes relating to the Army having been read to each regiment by its commanding officer, the regimental Agitatorships (apparently now first fully constituted) had reported the opinions and demands of the regiments severally, and these opinions and demands had been digested into one Draft at a conference of the chief officers, on the principle of including only such demands as were made unanimously by all the regiments. Rushworth does not give the document, but describes it as fair and moderate, and tells us in particular that, while it complained of misrepresentations and ill-treatment, and desired reparation, it denounced only one person by name. One is not surprised to learn that this was the Rev. Mr. Edwards. His Gangræna, it was said, had been written expressly to make the Army odious. [Footnote: Letters in Appendix IX. to Carlyle's Cromwell; Commons Journals of May 21; and Rushworth, VI. 485-6.]