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This chapter stresses the importance of Edwards’s Gangraena in the mobilization of zealous Presbyterian campaigns against Parliament’s proposals for church government in 1646-7. It looks especially at Edwards’s links to London petitioning campaigns, to attempts in the city to defend the Solemn League and Covenant, and to the struggles over the Presbyterian City Remonstrance of May 1646. His most important connections with the Westminster Assembly, the Common Council, and the Scots are discussed. The importance of John Goodwin’s congregation to the struggle for religious liberty is stressed, along with the role of the New Model Army and the city radicals highlighted in Part Three of Gangraena. Edwards here attacked the men who were soon to become identified as leaders of the Levellers. The Army’s occupation of London in August 1647 prompted Edwards’s flight to Amsterdam. Finally, the Presbyterian contribution to the parliamentarian public sphere is evaluated.

The first standing armies in the British Isles which contained experienced officers and could deploy sizeable field forces were the Scots Covenanting Army and the English New Model Army. The latter gradually displaced the English associational armies and eventually conquered the Three Kingdoms, and imposed a republican political settlement. Officers who were willing to learn by experience and reading military treatises came to appreciate that an expert knowledge obtained by training and drill were more valuable on the battlefield than valour and superior numbers. Many novice officers developed a more professional attitude to the business of war, but a high degree of politicization among both officers and men continued to disrupt discipline and contributed to political instability. Nonetheless, improved sources of finance and supply strengthened the military and naval forces and enabled the Commonwealth and Protectorate to lay claim to great-power status.

By 1949 the wartime army had been demobilised and War Office planners were creating the foundations of what Montgomery called the ‘New Model Army’. It had began to come into existence in 1947, with the passage of the National Service Act. It was not an all‐purpose army. Apart from making minimal allowances for colonial garrisons, it was configured with one major mission in mind, to deter or fight a hot war in Europe or the Middle East beginning no earlier than about 1957. But, by 1948‐49 the geopolitical situation that had given birth to it had begun to change in ways that undercut some of the fundamental assumptions upon which it had been constructed. The Cold War had begun, and after Montgomery left the War Office in November 1948, his successor as CIGS, Sir William Slim, had to spend the next three years reconfiguring his predecessor's creation to meet the new strategic circumstances that confronted Britain.

This chapter demonstrates how Edwards’s place as a lecturer in Christ Church, in the heart of revolutionary London, enabled him to produce Gangraena. His links with London Presbyterian clergy, with the Westminster Assembly, the London Common Council, and the Stationers’ Company brought him oral evidence, letters, and other manuscript sources. The accuracy of Edwards’s picture of religious divisions in London and in the provinces (particularly Kent and Essex), and his description of the New Model Army are assessed by comparing his version with that in other sources.

This chapter links Coleman Street Ward London to the rise of the Leveller movement. Saints from the Ward’s network of gathered churches and their members serving in the New Model Army travelled widely across the country, preaching antinomianism and demanding liberty of conscience as they fulminated against kingly government. Simultaneously, they organized Leveller mass petitions and operated an underground press in Coleman Street Ward that became the Leveller’s unofficial publishing house. Former New Englanders figured prominently among the Coleman Street churches, which supplied the New Model Army with soldiers and the cause of liberty of conscience with its popular base of support. Although the Bay Colony’s agents in Old England decried the Levellers, other former Bay colonists who subscribed to radical reformation principles heralded the Leveller movement and were elected officers in one of the New Models’ most militantly republican regiments. In 1647, they led a mutiny against the army high command to promote the Leveller constitution, The Agreement of the People.The mutiny arose in part from ideological cleavages between Levellers and the army commanders over how to interpret the republican principle of government by consent, which the Levellers articulated in their attempts to abolish the embodied, political “slavery” of military impressment. (conscription).

This chapter examines the evidence for Leveller influence on the politicization of the New Model Army in 1647 and follows the question of Leveller links with the army radicals through the Putney debates and on to the regicide and its aftermath. It argues that links between Leveller and army radicals are detectable but not evidence of very direct collaboration, but that both Leveller and army radicalism were part of a broader radical spectrum of opinion within which currents of radical thought circulated. The influence of Leveller ideas within the army should not be dismissed, and the evidence of the army-radical newsbook the Moderate shows that Leveller ideas were still appealing, even after Burford. Some coalescence of army and Leveller ideas was made possible by the army radicals’ insistence on soldiers claiming their rights not just as soldiers but as Englishmen, and by the Levellers’ sense of the possibilities of an army of conscientious Englishmen. The constitutional thought of the army leadership, army radicals, and Levellers again displays interaction and dialogue.

This chapter discusses the creation of the New Model Army in England. The outstanding military development of the winter of 1644 was the creation of the New Model Army, nationally financed, larger than any previous army, commanded by a new general with a hand-picked officer corps, and strategically and operationally under the control of the Committee of Both Kingdoms. This was a new venture. The appointment of the steering committee did not pave the way for it, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Sir William Waller's cry of despair after Cropredy Bridge. The Lower House chose for the moment to focus on remodelling the militia rather than challenging the Lords on the principle of self-denial, but the way in which they proceeded showed that it still lay at the heart of the reform programme.

Following military failures in late 1644, long-simmering religious differences burst into public, threatening to sunder parliament’s cause. A formidable presbyterian alliance gathered strength, deploying multiple tactics to pressure parliament to settle the church and crack down on the sects; at the same time, a developing independent coalition adopted equally sophisticated techniques of organization and propaganda to counter this push. This chapter analyzes these practices—including petitioning, lobbying, secret printing, street propaganda, rumormongering, and regular meetings—to reveal a novel environment of energetic partisan politics. These organizational developments were accompanied by ideological shifts, in which presbyterians drew back from earlier militant political commitments, while some independents articulated newly radical political ideas, hinting at social egalitarianism, press freedom, democratization of the polity, or limitations on state power. Moreover, these ideological shifts and religious divisions increasingly dovetailed with disputes over military reorganization, culminating in the creation of the New Model Army.