Introduction, I

The object of this volume is to exhibit, in certain aspects, the political thought of the Puritan revolution. Its attention is focused on the Army Debates about the constitutional settlement, commenced in the autumn of 1647, interrupted by the suppression of the General Council of the Army and the preoccupations of the Second Civil War, and resumed on the eve of Charles’ trial and execution. But it looks before and after in order to illustrate and supplement what they yield.

The Debates have a special value, even beyond the pamphlet literature of the day, in giving us a spontaneous and unconscious revelation of the Puritan mind as it wrestles with its problems, practical and theoretic, in an effort not merely to justify a policy and battle down opposition, but to arrive at truth and agreement. There are the sharpest cleavages of opinion between the Independents and their allies to the Left, and they sometimes develop an acrimony in debate that suggests outlooks absolutely alien from each other. But even where they differ most markedly, they talk a common language very foreign to our ears; and all their differences are at last reducible to one: the point at which a revolutionary ideal must compromise with the demands of actual life, including those of order, tradition, sentiment, and vested interest. If the leaders on both sides came to the debate with a policy to advance, and with their minds largely closed, the other participants (who also reveal the Puritan temper and ideology) came both to convince and to be convinced; their presence and intervention are the necessary links between the opponents.

To provide an easily accessible text of these Debates was the first aim of the present volume, the only existing text (the late Sir Charles Firth’s in his Clarke Papers) having been long out of print and increasingly difficult to procure. On other grounds a new edition, based on a careful collation of Firth’s text with the manuscript, seemed desirable, especially for the general reader. The debates were taken down in shorthand, presumably by Edition: current; Page: [[12]] William Clarke (then assistant to John Rushworth, the secretary to the General and the Council of War), and were probably not deciphered and copied in a fair hand till after the Restoration. The original notes were doubtless very defective. At some points the manuscript appears to be relatively correct and complete. At others it presents little more than a series of isolated phrases. Occasionally the order of the speeches is confused, owing (as Firth plausibly suggests) to the pages of the shorthand notes having got into the wrong order. What is less easy to explain is how sentences and clauses within a single speech have been wrested from their correct positions: we can only assume that it was due to a frenzied effort on the part of the stenographer to catch up with the speaker. But by far the commonest type of error is precisely the one that would be expected when an unskilful reporter is trying to copy verbatim the speeches in an excited argument: namely, the omission of words and phrases and the telescoping of sentences. No speech of any length is wholly free from this defect, and what appears at first sight to be an error in order sometimes turns out to be more easily explicable and remediable as an error of omission. The punctuation, which consists mainly of commas, serves in many instances rather to obscure than to clarify the sense. I have adopted modern punctuation, spelling, and capitalization, since those of the original merely set an obstacle between the reader and the idea. Every other departure from the manuscript I have recorded in ‘Notes on Text’ (pp. 479 ff.), so that the student may at any given point check the text with the manuscript’s reading if he chooses, in a way impossible in Firth’s edition. Wherever feasible, I have restored the order of the manuscript. Finally I have tried (at the cost of a great deal of time and labour) to leave no speech and no sentence unintelligible. Assuming the presence of an error of omission wherever the manuscript gave no clear sense, I have added in square brackets such words as seemed necessary to link up the broken fragments and to present in an intelligible form the argument deducible from the speech itself and from the answers that it received. The result is a text which yields the speaker’s sense much more readily than does that printed in the Camden Society’s volumes. Nor do I think that it can justly be described as a less conservative text. It adopts many of Firth’s emendations; it rejects some of his deviations from the original, especially his transpositions and omissions; its new departures consist almost Edition: current; Page: [[13]] wholly in additions, set in square brackets, which have only to be passed over in order to exhibit the reading of the manuscript (unless a letter indicates some further departure, precisely recorded in the notes). The general reader who is willing to accept my judgment, can ignore square brackets and letters; the special student has before him the materials with which to construct at any moment his own reading. Firth has spoken of the extraordinary difficulties presented to an editor of these reports by the state of the original. I can only in my own excuse emphasize these difficulties once more, and then record my constant debt to—for it would be impertinence to praise—his editorial labours: his many valuable emendations, and, where he has not ventured to emend, his luminous footnotes on the argument.

It is singularly fortunate that the debates reported (or those whose reports have survived) deal with two of the most significant issues of Puritan political thought: democracy, or the proposed reform of the constitution in the direction of liberty and equality, with its attendant break with the past; and the question of religious liberty. Thus they form an ideal point of departure for studying these two major and closely related themes, to whose illustration I have devoted Part III of the volume. The selections there presented are not the sources, but representative analogues, of the arguments advanced in the Debates. As such they often serve to clarify the meaning of those arguments, and at the same time to illustrate the habit of mind from which the arguments spring. Less intimate in their revelation than the Debates, they have their own value in exhibiting the Puritan temper and ideology, and are worthy of inclusion on their independent merits since many of them are available to the modern reader only in the largest or most highly specialized library. Finally the Debates refer to some other documents, intrinsically less interesting perhaps, but essential to an understanding of what is said. These I have placed in an Appendix, together with some evidence on the religious and political enthusiasms of the New Model, and some material, from the Clarke MSS. and other sources, on the activities of the Agitators and the Council of the Army.

The chief interest of the Debates, and of the Supplementary Documents, is the light they throw on the Puritan mind. But if they are not to be misinterpreted they must be studied in connection with the situation in which the Puritans find themselves.