IRETON, Henry (1611-51), of Attenborough, Notts.

Background and early career

Ireton is thought to have descended from a Saxon family that had settled at Little Ireton in Derbyshire by the end of the twelfth century.45Shirley, Stemmata Shirleiana, 326-7. Four centuries later, the Iretons ranked among Derbyshire’s lesser gentry, owning property in and around Little Ireton that was probably worth, at most, a few hundred pounds a year. When Ireton’s grandfather, William, who styled himself ‘esquire’, drew up his will in 1602, he charged his estate with legacies of £100 to each of his four daughters and annuities of £6 13s 4d to each of his three younger sons. He also left debts of about £1,300, which may have required Ireton’s father to restructure and perhaps reduce the family’s estate. At any rate, at some point between 1602 and 1608, the Iretons relocated to Attenborough, near Nottingham, where they held the lease of the parish rectory, which had been bequeathed to William Ireton by his brother-in-law William Zouche of Attenborough (another of William’s brothers-in-law was a certain John Bradshawe, who was possibly a kinsman of Ireton’s fellow regicide John Bradshawe*).46PROB11/103, ff. 41-2; Farr, Ireton, 15-16, 34. Once settled in Nottinghamshire, Ireton’s father, German Ireton, sold the manor of Little Ireton to Collingwood Sanders, father of the future parliamentarian officer Thomas Sanders*.47J.L. Hobbs, ‘The Sanders fam. and the descent of the manors of Caldwell, Coton-in-the-Elms and Little Ireton’, Jnl. Derbys. Arch. and Natural Hist. Soc. n.s. xxi. 8; Farr, Ireton, 16.

Ireton was evidently raised in a strongly godly household. Both his parents were presented to the church authorities on numerous occasions for their failure to ensure the upkeep of the chancel of Attenborough church, for receiving communion without kneeling and for other ‘puritan’ offences. According to Lucy Hutchinson, wife of Ireton’s cousin John Hutchinson* (another future regicide), Ireton received ‘an education in the strictest way of godliness’ and grew up to be ‘a very grave, serious, religious person ... a man of good learning, great understanding and other abilities’. Moreover, at least one of Ireton’s brothers, John, became a Congregationalist during the 1640s, while another emerged as a prominent Fifth Monarchist.48Infra, ‘John Ireton’; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 53, 62; Farr, Ireton, 17-25, 27-8.

Because the custom of ultimogeniture prevailed in Nottinghamshire in the seventeenth century, when German Ireton died in 1624, the bulk of the family’s estate was inherited not by Henry, as the eldest son, but by his youngest brother Thomas.49Farr, Ireton, 37. It is possible that the Iretons received help from John Hutchinson’s father, Sir Thomas Hutchinson*, in putting Henry through Trinity College, Oxford, in the late 1620s and then in maintaining him as a student at the Middle Temple. Lucy Hutchinson referred to Ireton as ‘one that had received so much advantage to himself and his family by Sir Thomas Hutchinson’s countenance and protection that he seemed a kind of dependent upon them’.50Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 53; Farr, Ireton, 37-9. Having received at least a basic legal training at the Middle Temple, Ireton returned to Nottinghamshire at some point in the early 1630s and, with his mother, managed the family’s several lawsuits. Mother and son were presented in the 1636 visitation for refusing to kneel to receive the communion.51Farr, Ireton, 25-6, 39. In 1639, Ireton took out two loans (one from his brother-in-law Edward Forde) amounting to at least £3,000 to help with the purchase of the manor of Minshull Vernon, Cheshire, for £5,500.52LC4/202, ff. 135, 137v; C54/3419/40. On 2 November 1640, Ireton was among the signatories to the indenture returning Sir Thomas Hutchinson and Robert Sutton as knights of the shire to the Long Parliament.53C219/43/2/76.

Fighting for Parliament, 1642-4

In the early months of 1642, Ireton emerged as a leading member of Nottinghamshire’s nascent parliamentarian interest. On 28 February, he and Francis Thornhagh* presented a petition to the Commons, urging the king to reject evil counsellors and return to Westminster, annexed to which was a protest ‘shewing the many obstructions caused by Serjeant [Gilbert] Boune* to hinder the said petition’.54CJ ii. 458b; To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty a Petition Presented…at York (1642, 669 f.6.6); Wood, Notts. 12. The House ordered that Boune (a future royalist) be sent for as a delinquent and put out of the Nottinghamshire commission of peace. It was probably this incident Lucy Hutchinson had in mind when she claimed that Ireton

being very active in promoting the Parliament and the godly interest in the country [i.e. Nottinghamshire], found great opposition by some projectors and others of corrupt interest that were in [the] commission of the peace. Whereupon making complaint at the Parliament, he procured some of them to be put out of commission and others better affected to be put into their rooms.55Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 53.

These ‘others better affected’ included John Hutchinson, who was added to the Nottinghamshire bench on 2 March 1642.56C231/5, p. 509. Ireton was probably part of a delegation (that included Hutchinson) from Nottinghamshire that presented the county’s February petition to the king at York the following month.57A True Relation of Some Remarkeable Passages Concerning Nottingham-Shire Petition (1642), 1-2 (E.143.8); Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 54. At some point in June, Ireton joined James Chadwicke* and other leading inhabitants of Nottingham in a petition to the Commons, requesting orders for preventing the town, castle and county magazine falling into the hands of the king’s supporters. In response to this petition, Parliament, on 1 July, authorised the town’s parliamentarians to raise and train troops and nominated Ireton as a captain of horse.58CJ ii. 644a, b; LJ v. 173a-b; Wood, Notts. 15-16. On 11 July, the Commons gave him leave to convey to Nottingham 30 helmets, 30 ‘great saddles’, 20 carbines and 20 cases of pistols.59CJ ii. 664a.

Ireton clearly meant business. Although whether he had acquired much, if any, military experience before the summer of 1642 is very doubtful. Lucy Hutchinson later described him as ‘the chief promoter of the Parliament’s interest’ in Nottinghamshire, but finding the county ‘generally disaffected, all he could do when the king approached it [in July 1642] was to gather a troop of those godly people which the cavaliers drove out, and with them he went into my lord of Essex his army’.60A Catalogue of the Names of the Dukes [etc]...that have Absented Themselves from the Parliament (1642), 14 (E.64.4); Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 62. Ireton and his troop were apparently in the thick of the fighting at the battle of Edgehill in October 1642.61CJ iii. 11a. His reasons for taking up arms against the king doubtless owed much to his powerful commitment to godly religion and (if his later words are any guide) a hostility to personal monarchy. During the army debates at Whitehall in December 1648, he maintained that ‘the ground of the war was not difference in what the supreme magistracy [was but] whether [it was] in the king alone’.62Clarke Pprs. i. 326, 327; ii. 80; Farr, Ireton, 40.

Ireton and his troop remained part of Parliament’s main field army until January 1643, when they were sent to reinforce the parliamentarian garrison at Nottingham. As a result of this move, Ireton was appointed to the Nottinghamshire county committee, promoted to the rank of major, and his troop was incorporated in a local regiment under the effective command of Francis Thornhagh.63SP28/255; CJ ii. 940b; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 14-15. ‘Valour and [godly] zeal beget folly’, was the sarcastic remark of one local royalist after Ireton had ‘killed a bear, running [it] through with his sword at the stake in Nottingham – the bear being held by the nose with a cord’.64Bodl. Add. C.132, ff. 40v, 57v. Yet although Ireton is invariably portrayed as a puritan zealot and fire-breathing war-party man, in March 1643 – at the time of the Oxford treaty between the king and Parliament – he put his name to a letter from the Nottinghamshire county committee to the royalists at Newark that ended with the sentence

Now lastly to manifest our desires for this country [county] and the kingdom’s peace, we wish and charge you let all men know for whom or with whom you treat, that if any considerable number of the abler sort of inhabitants of this county will join with [?you in] a petition to the king, we shall heartily join with them in another to the Parliament – in both to beg and declare ourselves for an utter disbanding of all forces on both sides.65Notts. RO, DD/294/2/1.

The other signatories to this letter included Francis Pierrepont*, Charles White*, Hutchinson and Thornhagh. It is unlikely that the committeemen were so naive as to imagine that this offer of theirs would lead anywhere. But it is noteworthy that two future regicides – Ireton and Hutchinson – were at least willing to put their names to a plea for the rapid conclusion of the war by peaceful means.

In July 1643, Ireton and his troop were drawn into the field as part of the force that Sir John Meldrum and Colonel Oliver Cromwell led into action at Gainsborough. From that point onwards, writes Lucy Hutchinson, Ireton ‘quite left Colonel Thornhagh’s regiment and began an inseparable league with Colonel Cromwell’.66SP28/255; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 84, 86, 87. Cromwell stated in August that he was looking to recruit ‘honest, godly men’, and in Ireton he certainly found one.67Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 248. In August or September, he appointed Ireton deputy governor of the Isle of Ely and incorporated Ireton’s troop in his own regiment of horse.68SP28/255; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 15. One bitterly hostile witness of Cromwell’s and Ireton’s government of the Isle during the period 1643-4 claimed that it became

a mere Amsterdam, for in the chiefest churches on the sabbath day the soldiers have gone up into the pulpits both in the forenoon and the afternoon and preached to whole parish ... they having got whole families as Independents into that Isle from London and other places under their command; likewise having made poor men of that Isle captains, as I conceive, because they profess themselves Independents ... Major Ireton is still making a show of raising of fortifications, but it is verily believed it is but a pretence to get monies.69‘The quarrel between the earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell’ ed. D. Masson (Cam. Soc. n.s. xii), 73-4.

When the Presbyterian-dominated Committee of Accounts* issued an order at the end of July 1644, requesting Ireton’s accounts, he became very defensive, writing what was at times a vituperative letter in response, in which he claimed that there was a conspiracy against him, led by those whom he had questioned over their own accounts. He agreed that the ‘accompt, indeed, is most just to be required by you, but (I must crave leave to think) [it] might have been more seasonable at another time then [sic] to take off the state’s servants from their several charges in the army or country in this busy time of action’. He signed himself ‘your humble servant in the Lord’, which was a particularly godly form of ascription.70Supra, ‘Committee of Accounts’; SP28/255; Farr, Ireton, 46-7.

As part of Cromwell’s regiment in the Eastern Association army, it is possible that Ireton saw action at Marston Moor in July 1644. His troop certainly received pay on the battlefield.71SP28/125, pt. 3, unfol. In September, he wrote to the commander of the Eastern Association army, Edward Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester, complaining of the ‘miserable’ condition of the horse through lack of pay – a major grievance of Cromwell’s, who felt that the cavalry (which contained many Independents) had been deliberately neglected.72Add. 63788B, f. 11; Holmes, Eastern Assoc. 147. A few months later, Ireton stood firmly behind Cromwell in denouncing the earl’s dilatory generalship. Ireton claimed that he had repeatedly urged Manchester to take decisive action against the king’s forces, but that the earl had declared ‘that he would not have the present war ended by the sword but by accommodation’.73CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 158-9; Farr, Ireton, 47-8. In this quarrel, as in his support for Colonel John Hutchinson against his enemies on the Nottinghamshire county committee, Ireton sided with the emerging Independent interest against the increasingly ‘Scottified’ Presbyterians.74Supra, ‘John Hutchinson’.

Ireton in the New Model army, 1645-6

Sir Thomas Fairfax* nominated Ireton and his younger brother Thomas as captains of horse in the officer list for the New Model Army. Neither proved acceptable to the Presbyterian majority in the Lords, however, and their names were struck out in favour of less radical men – though in the end, the pro-army majority in the Commons succeeded in securing most of Fairfax’s original nominees, including both Iretons.75Temple, ‘Original officer list’, 54, 66, 73; I. Gentles, ‘The choosing of officers for the New Model Army’, HR lxvii. 274, 277. Just a few weeks after the New Model had been established, in May 1645, Fairfax promoted Henry Ireton to colonel of horse in place of Sir Michael Livesay*, who had forfeited his commission because of a recent mutiny among his troops.76Moderate Intelligencer no. 11 (8-15 May 1645), 88; Temple, ‘Original officer list’, 68; Gentles, ‘Choosing of officers’, 266. On the morning of the battle of Naseby, 14 June, Cromwell secured the appointment of Ireton as commissary-general of horse – in other words, his second in command of the cavalry. Ireton commanded the left wing of the parliamentarian horse, which was duly routed by Prince Rupert’s forces, while Ireton himself was ‘dangerously wounded’ and briefly captured. In a more even contest, with less seasoned commanders by his side, his inexperience might have cost Parliament the battle.77Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva, 35; LJ vii. 433b; Gentles, New Model Army, 55-9. A month after the battle, talking with the future Leveller leader John Lilburne and his associates in Westminster Hall, Ireton reportedly endorsed allegations that ‘if God had not blessed our army to be in a good condition’ [i.e. defeated the king at Naseby], Sir Robert Harley and other Presbyterian MPs would have forced Parliament to make peace with the king. Ireton and Lilburne were certainly named in the House as witnesses to the charge that ‘the Speaker [William Lenthall] hath sent to the king £60,000, and Sir Robert Harley and ten of the House of Commons had a hand’ in it.78Add. 18780, f. 118; J. Bastwick, A Just Defence of John Bastwick (1645), 7-8 (E.265.2); D. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), 326, 327-8.

Ireton figured prominently in the New Model’s campaigns in the west country during 1645-6 and at the siege of Oxford, where he was singled out by the king as a possible instrument for arranging a personal treaty. On being informed that Ireton ‘was a man of great power and credit with the soldiery and very earnestly affected to peace’, Charles ‘thought it fit to make some trial of him, whether he would undertake to accept and protect his Majesty’s person upon the former conditions’ [the Uxbridge peace propositions] and to that purpose sent Sir Edward Forde (Ireton’s brother-in-law) ‘to sound his inclinations’. But Ireton refused to play ball and instead informed Cromwell of this approach, who duly reported it to Parliament.79A Narrative by John Ashburnham ed. G. Ashburnham (1830), ii. 71; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary i. 1-4; Farr, Ireton, 51, 52-3.

It was during the last weeks of the siege of Oxford that Ireton married Cromwell’s eldest daughter, the 22-year-old Bridget. The couple were married on 15 June 1646 at Holton church, near Oxford, by the army chaplain and fiery Independent divine William Dell – a colleague of Cromwell’s and Ireton’s from their days in the Eastern Association army. To what extent Ireton shared Dell’s godly anti-formalism is hard to say. Ireton certainly does not seem to have been as unorthodox in his religious opinions as two of his regimental chaplains during the later 1640s and early 1650s, Thomas Patient (Baptist) and Joseph Salmon (Independent turned Ranter).80‘Thomas Patient’, ‘Joseph Salmon’, Oxford DNB. As part of the marriage settlement, Cromwell assigned to Ireton the lease of a farm in Ely. A few months after the wedding, Cromwell wrote to his daughter, urging her to not to let married life ‘cool thy affections after Christ’. Indeed, Cromwell hoped that it would prove ‘an occasion to inflame them. That which is best worthy of love in thy husband is that of the image of Christ he bears’.81Holton par. reg.; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 401-2, 416; Farr, Ireton, 53-5; ‘William Dell’, Oxford DNB.

Parliament and the army’s penman, 1646-7

Ireton and the leading Worcestershire parliamentarian Richard Salwey were returned as ‘recruiters’ for the Westmorland borough of Appleby on 27 October 1645. The two men, who were obviously complete carpetbaggers, owed their seats to the good offices and local military clout of the Independent grandee Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton.82Supra, ‘Appleby’. Ireton does not appear to have taken his seat until mid-November 1646, and his first committee appointment was not until 7 December 1646, more than a year after he had been elected.83Perfect Diurnall no. 173 (16-23 Nov. 1646), 1388 (E.513.25). Between then and Pride’s Purge in December 1648, he was named to only a further 11 committees.84CJ v. 4a, 6b, 9b, 10b, 11a, 15a, 117b, 148a, 153a, 336a, 484b, 546a. Attending Parliament was not his priority – partly because he was diverted by his duties in the army, but also, perhaps, because he recognised the Houses’ potential to abuse their authority in much the same way that the king was perceived to have abused his. Ireton probably had fewer emotional ties to the Houses than had some Members from families of more established parliamentary lineage. Moreover, he entered the Commons at a time when the Independents’ majority was beginning to dwindle and the Presbyterian interest was gathering strength.

At least one of Ireton’s early committee appointments would have reminded him, if he needed reminding, that his own religious sympathies were not shared by a majority of his fellow Parliament-men (and it is worth noting that there is no evidence that Ireton ever took the Covenant). Thus on 12 December, he was to a committee for examining none other than William Dell for the unauthorized publication of a sermon he had delivered to Commons on the morning of 25 November and for his criticism of a sermon delivered that afternoon by Christopher Love, who had preached strongly in favour of a Presbyterian church settlement.85CJ v. 10b. That same day (12 Dec.), however, Ireton was named to a committee for examining a work by the Presbyterian ministers of London in favour of jure divino Presbyterianism.86CJ v. 11a. The majority of MPs were insistent that Parliament should remain the final arbiter on questions of church government – a sentiment that Ireton undoubtedly shared. On 17 December, he was granted leave to attend his military duties, and he does not appear to have returned to the House until the spring of 1647, by which time the Presbyterians were firmly in the majority at Westminster and gearing up to disband most of the army and send the remainder to Ireland.87CJ v. 18a, 117b.

Ireton’s role as the army’s ‘penman general’ and political manager in its quarrel with the Westminster Presbyterians during the spring and summer of 1647 has been dealt with in numerous studies and requires no detailed analysis here.88Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 162-3; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, passim; Gentles, New Model Army, 150-1, 168-9, 171-2, 174, 181-4; B. Taft, ‘From Reading to Whitehall: Henry Ireton’s journey’, in The Putney Debates ed. M. Mendle (Cambridge, 2001), 176-81; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, chs. 2-3. In contrast to Sir Thomas Fairfax* and of course many Presbyterian officers, Ireton seems to have had few qualms about pursuing what he regarded as the army’s just claims – at first over pay and conditions and then for settling the kingdom – in defiance of Parliament. With the Westminster Presbyterians clearly intent on a reckoning with the army, he was one of a group of officers that drafted a petition to Parliament on 21 March, requesting indemnity, payment of arrears and redress of related grievances before disbandment. If the Presbyterian grandee Sir William Waller* can be credited, Ireton made a speech in the Commons late in March or early in April in which he conceded the fact of ‘agitation’ within the army but that he and his fellow officers ‘were necessitated to yield to it to prevent a worse’ – the same excuse that Fairfax used. Ireton referred to ‘a great inflammation in the army and that there was no course to be held for the allaying of it but by a gentle and tender proceeding’. Waller and other leading Presbyterians were convinced that certain officers, among them Ireton, far from yielding to necessity were in fact fomenting and organising resistance among the soldiery – although the Levellers would later accuse Ireton of exactly the opposite.89Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 184-6; J. Wildman, Putney Proiects (1647), 7 (E.421.19); Waller, Vindication of the Character and Conduct of Sir William Waller (1798), 54-5, 56-60; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 435-7; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 32-3, 36; M.A. Norris, ‘Edward Sexby, John Reynolds and Edmund Chillenden’ HR, lxxvi. 39; Farr, Ireton, 56-9.

Whatever Ireton’s precise role at this early stage in the army’s politicisation there is no reason to suppose that he was averse to reaching an agreement with Parliament so long as the soldiers’ material grievances were properly addressed.90Farr, Ireton, 59. Yet as an MP himself, with friends among the Independent grandees, he was almost certainly aware of the wider political context of the army’s fate – that is, the Presbyterians’ need to break up the New Model in order to weaken the Independent interest and clear the ground for their own settlement with the king. In other words, the army’s fate was inextricably linked to that of the three kingdoms. Ireton knew just how high the stakes were – which would help to explain why his quarrel early in April with Denzil Holles*, one of the architects of the Presbyterians’ policy towards the army, almost culminated in a duel. Holles had derided Ireton’s arguments ‘in justification of the army’s petition, which was the occasions [sic] of the quarrel’, and the two men were apparently eager to settle the matter by force but were restrained by Waller and some other gentlemen (although sources used by Sir Edward Hyde* claimed that Ireton had refused to fight on grounds of conscience).91Bodl. Clarendon 29, ff. 165v, 193; CJ v. 133a; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 238; Ludlow, Mems. i. 189-90.

One of Ireton’s fellow officers, Colonel Edward Wogan, who later turned royalist, alleged that (at some point in mid-April) Ireton was

not ignorant what the Parliament was resolved to do and, at council of war, took occasion to speak of this – how the Parliament had no good intentions towards the army and that it was a sad reward for we [sic] many years service to be cast off without any reward for their service or security for their persons after they were disbanded; likewise, that the Parliament was resolved to set up the king again, that there would be no living for any in that kingdom that had served in our army. All the officers that were present were much moved at this and besought the commissary to advise them what they were to do. He answered there was no way but one to prevent this, which was that every officer should repair to his respective command and to send a trooper of each troop with the grievances of the several troops to Saffron Walden, where the general [Fairfax] was then going to receive the commissioners of both Houses that were coming down to disband the army.92Clarke Pprs. i. 425.

Indeed, according to Wogan and several other commentators, Ireton masterminded the New Model’s political machinations during 1647, working closely with Cromwell to coordinate strategy between Westminster, army headquarters and the rank and file. Wogan hinted that Ireton played an important role that spring in creating the system of regimental ‘adjutators’. Of course, the reliability of Wogan’s account is open to question. Nevertheless, it is consistent with the tough line that Ireton generally favoured towards the parliamentary Presbyterians, as well as with evidence that he was keener that most senior officers to work with the adjutators and bring them within the formal structures of army government.93Clarke Pprs. i. 427; LJ x. 409a; Gentles, New Model Army, 171-2; Norris, ‘Sectarian grandees’, 41-3, 45, 51, 52; Taft, ‘Ireton’s journey’, 177; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 61-6. Cornet Joyce’s seizure of the king at Holdenby early in June was very probably an example of a combined operation between Ireton and Cromwell, leading Independents at Westminster (notably Sir Arthur Hesilrige*) and the adjutators.94Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’; Waller, Vindication, 136, 138-9; LJ x. 409a; Norris, ‘Sectarian grandees’, 48-51; Farr, Ireton, 73-4. That autumn, Ireton and Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* would support the council of officers’ request to Fairfax for Joyce’s promotion to the rank of captain.95Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXVI, f. 6.

With the army’s seizure of the king in June 1647, its declared political objectives broadened to include the negotiation of a general settlement of the kingdom – although securing the ‘real freedoms of the free people of England’ had figured among the soldiers’ demands, including those of Ireton’s own regiment, since at least May.96Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLI, f. 111v. Ireton was again a central figure during this new phase of the army’s political evolution, both as a member of its executive councils and in drafting its various letters and declarations of June and July. As an MP, he was almost certainly consulted over the army’s articles of impeachment against the Eleven Members (headed by Holles).97Waller, Vindication, 174-5; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 118; Farr, Ireton, 76-81. However, the fact that he received only four committee appointments during 1647 does not suggest that he had very much firsthand experience of Presbyterian machinations at Westminster.98CJ v. 117b, 148a, 153a, 336a.

That the army had a larger design in hand than simply the redress of its grievances or the removal of its enemies at Westminster is clear from its Representation of 14 June 1647 and its Remonstrance of 23 June. In these two manifestos, both drafted substantially by Ireton, the army outlined its desires ‘as to the complete settlement of the liberties and peace of the kingdom’, including provision for ‘the rights, quiet and immunity of his Majesty, his royal family and his late partakers’ [i.e. the royalist party].99A Declaration of the Engagements…from His Excellency Sir Tho: Fairfax, and the Generall Councel of the Army (1647), 36-46, 57-67 (E.409.25); Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 467; Taft, ‘Ireton’s journey’, 177. In the Representation in particular, Ireton justified the army’s proceedings on the basis of the superior claims of natural over positive law, referring to

the equitable sense of all laws and constitutions as dispensing with the very letter of the same ... when the safety and preservation of all is concerned ... And accordingly, the Parliament hath declared it no resistance of magistracy to side with the just principles and law of nature and nations, being that law upon which we have assisted you.100Declaration of the Engagements, 39-40.

But implicit in the Representation is the principle that natural law arguments could be deployed only in extremis – in this instance, when corrupted MPs threatened ‘the safety and preservation of all’ – and only by Parliament or its agents (such as the army) as the representative of the community and the guarantor of its historic liberties. Although Ireton acknowledged the supremacy of parliamentary authority, the Representation reveals that he was almost as hostile to the idea of an unbounded Parliament as he was to that of an unbounded king. The power wielded by Parliament was ‘in its own nature so arbitrary’, he insisted, it could be curbed only by regular, biennial elections – hence the inclusion in the Representation of detailed proposals for reforming Parliament and the electoral system.101Declaration of the Engagements, 41-4; Taft, ‘Ireton’s journey’, 177-8; S. Mortimer, ‘Henry Ireton and the limits of radicalism, 1647-9’, in Revolutionary England ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (2017), 56-8, 60.

By July 1647, the army and Independent grandees were preparing the ground for a treaty with the king, and the task of drafting the terms for this settlement was entrusted to Ireton and Colonel John Lambert*.102Clarke Pprs. i. 179, 184, 197, 212, 213; Farr, Ireton, 81-3; Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619-84 (Woodbridge, 2003), 57. Ireton and Lambert were in many ways a natural choice for this delicate assignment, for not only had they worked together before, negotiating the surrenders of Truro, Exeter and Oxford, but they were also effectively the protégés of the army’s two most powerful figures, Fairfax and Cromwell.103Farr, Lambert, 60. The evidence suggests that Ireton and Lambert performed their task in consultation with the Independent grandees and that their draft (parts of which survive in Ireton’s hand) was subsequently amended after further input from their fellow officers, from adjutators and civilian radicals and then, at a later stage, from ‘some of his Majesty’s faithfullest counsel at law and some others of eminentest integrity’ among the royalists allowed to attend the king – a group that included James Stuart, 4th duke of Richmond, Sir John Berkeley*, John Ashburnham* and Ireton’s brother-in-law Sir Edward Forde.104LPL, MS 679, pp. 81-4, 162; Wildman, Putney Proiects, 11, 12, 13-15; LJ x. 409b-410a; ‘Mems. of Sir John Berkeley’, in Select Tracts ed. F. Maseres (1815), ii. 363; Narrative by John Ashburnham ed. Ashburnham, ii. 91-2; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 82-5, 89; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647’, HJ xxx. 568, 579, 586-7; A. Woolrych, ‘The debates from the perspective of the army’, in The Putney Debates ed. Mendle, 61-3; I. Gentles, ‘The politics of Fairfax’s army, 1645-9’, in The English Civil War ed. J. Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), 184-5. Ireton was anxious that the ‘good affections to the peace and welfare of the kingdom’ made by this group of royalists be acknowleged in his and Lambert’s draft of the army’s terms for settlement – or the Heads of Proposals as they became known. Among Ireton’s working papers on the Heads is a draft statement (which never made the final version) in his hand that

there have been of late strong endeavours of a factious and desperate party [i.e. the Presbyterians] to embroil the kingdom in a new war and, for that purpose, to induce the king, the queen and prince [of Wales] to declare for the said party and also to excite and stir up all those of the king’s party to appear and engage for the same, which attempts and the dangerous consequences of them have been very much prevented by the counter endeavours of many of the king’s party out of their desires to avoid any further misery to their country.105LPL, MS 679, p. 162.

The Heads of Proposals may well have been based upon those that Cromwell, Sir Henry Vane II* and Richmond had offered to Charles in September 1646, promising to restore him to ‘the full execution of his regal authority’ and the establishment of a ‘moderated episcopacy’.106NAS, GD 406/1/2044; The Hamilton Papers ed. S.R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxvii), 115; Col. Joseph Bampfield’s Apology ed. J. Loftis, P.H. Hardacre (Lewisburg, 1993), 48-9; D. Scott, ‘Rethinking royalist politics, 1642-9, in The English Civil War ed. Adamson, 54, 56. That the Heads, like the 1646 terms, were so generous to the king apparently owed much to Cromwell’s and Ireton’s willingness to go as far as they could to secure Charles’s compliance. Indeed, a range of commentators, from the royalist Berkeley to the Leveller John Wildman*, claimed that Ireton had personally rendered the Heads more palatable to the king on the basis of their discussions together in private ‘conferences’. Wildman largely blamed Ireton for removing from the Heads any restriction upon the king’s negative voice (parliamentary veto).107Wildman, Putney Proiects, 13-15; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 177, 196. Besides this concession, the Heads allowed Charles to exercise control of the militia and nomination of his councillors after ten years and left room for the establishment of a moderated (non-coercive) episcopacy. Ireton, it has been argued, regarded the idea of a limited negative voice for the king and the House of Lords as a ‘vital bulwark to the potential anarchy of a universal franchise’.108Farr, Ireton, 86-7, 88-90; Taft, ‘Ireton’s journey’, 181; Mendle, ‘Putney’s pronouns: identity and indemnity in the great debate’, in The Putney Debates ed. Mendle, 136, 138-9. But his willingness to acknowledge a legitimate constitutional role for the king, as for the Lords, was more than simply a matter of political calculation. The ancient constitution, he believed, afforded rights and privileges to the king that ought to be honoured. One of those rights was the negative voice, and therefore Charles’s consent to any new constitutional settlement was required if it were to be binding upon him as well as upon the nation at large.109Mortimer, ‘Ireton’, 66.

If the Heads are any guide, Ireton and Lambert regarded the monarchy, properly bounded, as a vital part of the constitution, while harbouring a deep mistrust of Parliament as it then stood.110Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. Gardiner (1906), 316-18; Taft, ‘Ireton’s journey’, 180-1. This apprehension may well account, in part, for one of the Heads’ most constitutionally innovative features – a ‘council of state’ to supervise the kingdom’s armed forces.111Constitutional Docs. ed. Gardiner, 316-26. The council would serve ostensibly to limit the king’s powers rather than the authority of Parliament, which, as in the Representation, would be held in check by biennial elections and a more equitable distribution of seats. The council’s authority in relation to Parliament was left largely undefined. Nevertheless, it was clearly envisaged as a powerful body in its own right.112Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 163. Lilburne would later claim that it was Ireton ‘who first offered that expedient of government by way of a council of state, which was soon after the army’s engagement near Newmarket heath [5 June 1647]’.113J. Lilburne, The Hunting of the Foxes from New-Market and Triploe-Heaths [sic] to White-Hall (1649), 8 (E.548.7). Yet given Ireton’s acceptance of the principle of parliamentary supremacy, his willingness to endorse the introduction of a potentially rival constitutional body is surprising. The idea of a powerful executive council certainly did not figure prominently in his later speeches and writings, and if it was championed by any of the army grandees in 1647 then – pace Lilburne – it was more likely to have been Lambert than Ireton.114Infra, ‘John Lambert’.

Ireton, the king and Putney, 1647

Despite the king’s refusal to commit to the Heads, Cromwell and Ireton continued to pursue the path of negotiation with him. They were also obliged to maintain pressure on Parliament – even after the army had marched into London early in August and restored those Members who had fled the Houses following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ of 26 July. There were still enough Presbyterians in the Commons to block an ordinance sent from the Lords for declaring void all the legislation passed during Speaker Lenthall’s absence. A number of the adjutators demanded that the army conduct a purge of Parliament. But the senior officers preferred to use slightly more subtle tactics to bring the Commons into line, stationing 1,000 cavalry in Hyde Park and doubling the guards around the Palace of Westminster; while Cromwell and Ireton made ‘menacing speeches in the House ... By all which means and the terror of their surly, impeaching looks ... many of the Members were driven away and the poor House forced ... to pass the ordinance’.115D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 172-3; Gentles, New Model Army, 195-6.

Yet having subdued the Presbyterian threat, Cromwell and Ireton found themselves facing an even more formidable opponent in the shape of a coalition of radical soldiers, citizens and MPs. Whereas the army and Independent grandees could not envisage a viable settlement without the agreement of the king, preferably on the basis of the Heads, many of the adjutators and their civilian allies had lost all faith in Charles and were now demanding a much tougher stance against him, indeed a more radical settlement altogether. On several occasions that autumn, Cromwell and Ireton ‘and many of their party’ in the Commons were obliged to defend the king’s interests and their policy of continuing to negotiate with him.116Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 47, 60, 73, 76v, 125, 134v-135, 152v, 164; Staffs. RO, D868/4/91; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 4 (5-12 Oct. 1647), sig. D2v (E.410.19); [J. Harris], The Grand Designe (1647), sig. A4 (E.419.15); Animadversions upon the Armies Remonstrance (1649), 8-9 (E.570.3); Ludlow, Mems. i. 165-6; ‘Boys Diary’, 149; HMC 5th Rep. 173; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 202; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 87-8. In a letter to Ralph Lord Hopton* on 28 September, Sir Edward Forde claimed that Cromwell and Ireton had ‘of late ... spoken much in the king’s behalf, seconded by young Harry Vane [Sir Henry Vane II], Mr Solicitor [Oliver St John] and Mr [Nathaniel] Fiennes’.117Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 76v. Ireton was reportedly so determined ‘to make good what he hath promised’ to the king that when Cromwell’s attitude towards Charles appeared to harden in October, Ireton ‘in discontent offered to quit his command in the army’.118Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 134v-135. By sticking so determinedly to the cause of a negotiated settlement with the king, Ireton became the main target of radical invectives against ‘courtiers’ and traitors among the army and Independent grandees.119[J. Wildman], A Cal to All the Souldiers of the Armie (1647), 5, 7 (E.412.10); Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 228; Woolrych, ‘The debates from the perspective of the army’, 65; Farr, Ireton, 90, 97-8; D.P. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1977), 75-6. ‘Your credits and reputations have been much blasted’, one adjutator told Cromwell and Ireton on the first day of the Putney debates, 28 October, ‘for seeking to settle the kingdom ... in relation to the king’.120Clarke Pprs. i. 228. Unrepentant, Ireton roundly declared

I do not seek, or would not seek, nor will join with them that do seek the destruction either of Parliament or king. Neither will I consent with those or concur with them who will not attempt all the ways that are possible to preserve both and to make good use ... of both for the kingdom.121Clarke Pprs. i. 233; Farr, Ireton, 92.

Among the various arguments Ireton used at Putney against those – soon to be dubbed Levellers – demanding a radical revision of the ancient constitution, perhaps the most persuasive, for him anyway, was that drawn from divine providence. Ireton was guided ultimately by his faith and the need in all ‘public actings’ to ‘wait upon God’. Until he could be convinced that God had declared against king, Lords and property, he would defend them (this was also Cromwell’s line, although again there are signs that his attitude towards Charles was now less conciliatory than Ireton’s). Almost as important was Ireton’s conviction of the army’s obligation to honour its previous engagements to secure the rights and liberties of king and Parliament as well as those of the people. Here, he was also swayed by his fear of an unbounded Parliament. Unless the king and Lords possessed a negative voice over matters directly affecting them they would be unable ‘to preserve themselves against the injuries of the Commons’.

Having deployed natural law arguments in the army’s June Representation, Ireton did so again at Putney but with greater circumspection. At one point in the debates he urged his fellow soldiers to ‘have a regard to safety – safety to our persons, safety to our estates, safety to our liberty. Let’s have that as the law paramount, and then let us regard positive constitution as far as it can stand with safety to these’. More often, however, he appealed either to positive law – ‘the civil constitution of this kingdom’ – or to the army’s engagements: ‘when I hear men speak of laying aside all engagements to [consider only] that wild or vast motion of what in every man’s conception is just or unjust [natural law], I am afraid and do tremble at the boundless and endless consequences of it’.122Clarke Pprs. i. 256-7, 264, 296-7, 301, 306, 314, 322, 341, 391, 398, 403; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 221, 222, 223-4, 236, 237, 240, 241, 252, 253; Mendle, ‘Putney’s pronouns’, 31, 126, 129, 138-9; J. Morrill, P. Baker, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the regicide, and the sons of Zeruiah’, in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ed. J. Peacey (Basingstoke, 2001), 21-2; Farr, Ireton, 100, 102, 103, 105, 19; G. Burgess, British Political Thought, 1500-1660 (Basingstoke, 2009), 256.

Ireton’s aim throughout the Putney debates was to demonstrate that his invoking of the ‘laws of nature and nations’ in the Representation did not justify the radical blueprints for settlement propounded in The Case of the Army Truly Stated or the Agreement of the People. Insofar as men had rights by nature, ‘these were not political rights, as the supporters of the Agreement were keen to claim, but simply the right to life itself ... the law of nature did not provide the blueprint for any particular constitutional arrangement; it authorised nothing more than self-defence when it was absolutely necessary’. Arguing against Rainborowe and the authors of the Agreement, who appealed to rights ‘in the abstract, rights than belonged to all men’, Ireton was adamant that ‘political and civil rights could be understood only in relation to particular communities whose agreements over time had generated laws and customs ... It was the legal system founded upon these covenants [and upheld by Parliament] that enabled men to hold property and to enjoy political rights and privileges’. For Ireton, no property or electoral rights could be held independent of Parliament and the political community that it represented. If anyone desired to share in these rights, they must first place themselves within that community – most obviously by purchasing property.123Mortimer, ‘Ireton’, 63-5, 68.

Ireton’s views on property and the ancient constitution propelled him to the forefront of resistance to claims based upon inherent birthright in the famous debate at Putney on 29 October 1647 concerning manhood suffrage. It was, in fact, Ireton who had raised the whole issue of the franchise in the first place – apparently hoping to strengthen army unity by trying to expose and isolate his Leveller opponents as dangerous fanatics. But this stratagem risked backfiring because of the tactless, at times even rancorous, way in which he dismissed the claims of the ‘poorest he’. In Ireton’s commonwealth, only those with ‘a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom’ were full citizens.124Clarke Pprs. i. 301-2; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 235-8; Woolrych, ‘The debates from the perspective of the army’, 72; Taft, ‘Ireton’s journey’, 184-5; Farr, Ireton, 106-110; Burgess, British Political Thought, 256-9.

The Putney debates ended on 11 November 1647 in a qualified victory for Cromwell, Ireton and the cause of army unity. A compromise had been reached in which most of the Levellers’ more radical ideas, as laid out in the Agreement, were rejected, and the army was committed instead to pursuing constitutional reforms that were largely in line with its June 1647 declarations and the Heads of Proposals. These terms reflected Ireton’s fundamental position at Putney – ‘that settlement must start with the English Parliament and not with natural right’. The grandees, however, or Ireton anyway, suffered defeat inasmuch as the idea of a personal treaty with the king was tacitly dropped. This reversal was particularly humiliating for Ireton because he was identified at Putney as the main promoter of negotiations with Charles. Indeed, when it became clear that he was being made a kind of scapegoat for the perceived error of treating with the king, he stormed out of the meeting, ‘protesting he could come no more there to be a partaker of the high neglect and violation of reason and justice which he observed to reign amongst them’. He was subsequently moved to return ‘but continues resolute’. Evidently the spirit of compromise at Putney only went so far.125Clarke Pprs. i. 441; J. Morrill, P. Baker, ‘The case of the armie truly re-stated’, in The Putney Debates ed. Mendle, 120-2; Farr, Ireton, 112, 114-15; Mortimer, ‘Ireton’, 65-6.

Second civil war

On the very day that the debates at Putney ended – 11 November 1647 – Charles fled the army’s custody at Hampton Court, contrary to the terms of his parole, to finish up a few days later a prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. For Ireton, this must have been a particularly bitter betrayal. At Putney he had called repeatedly for the army to abide by its engagements, even to the king, and had attracted much criticism as a result. Yet now the king had demonstrated how little store he set by his engagements to the army. The king’s flight from Hampton Court, and evidence that emerged during November of his secret treating with the Scots, certainly hardened Ireton’s attitude towards Charles. However, there is no evidence that he followed Cromwell from early November in thinking that some kind of formal reckoning with Charles was likely and indeed desirable.126‘Mems. of Sir John Berkeley’, 383-4; Letters between Col. Robert Hammond...and the Committee of Lords and Commons at Derby-House (1764), 20-2; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 118-20; Morrill, Baker, ‘Sons of Zeruiah’, 21-3, 31. In one of his drafts of the army’s declaration to Parliament of early December, An Humble Representation from His Excellencie Sir Thomas Fairfax, Ireton included a lengthy section concerning the settlement of the kingdom, in which he accepted the need for continuing negotiations with the king. He made clear that ‘without full and safe provision for those public interests of the kingdom, we cannot desire or willingly admit a peace with his Majesty but would rather run all hazards of a non-settlement in that way’. But he remained committed to the Heads of Proposals and its concessions to the king’s party as a viable basis for settlement

... if anything within the intent and effect of our proposals [i.e. the Heads of Proposals] (which for aught we understand have not yet been examined or considered particularly in the Houses) should for want of further notice of them be omitted by the Parliament in a matter essential to the interest of the kingdom or of good men in it, or (in things not essential) that were just and reasonable for the king’s party to avoid their unnecessary prejudice, ruin and despair and to induce a compliance in other necessary matters, we must crave leave to remind the Parliament of such things.127LPL, Ms 679, pp. 77-8.

This and other passages in this declaration concerning a treaty with the king were omitted from the published version, which focused instead on Parliament’s failure to address the army’s grievances over arrears of pay, free-quarter, disbandment and indemnity. Parliament was also reproached for its halting progress in prosecuting the City and Westminster Presbyterians for their ‘crimes’ against the army and the public interest. But Ireton was silent on the subject of the king’s perceived offences and apparently content for Parliament to enter into a personal treaty with him after he had assented to the Four Bills.128LPL, MS 679, pp. 61-80, 165-6, 175; An Humble Representation from His Excellencie Sir Thomas Fairfax (1647, E.419.16).

What seems to have pushed Ireton into outright opposition to the idea of further treating with Charles was the king’s rejection of the Four Bills and signing of the Engagement with the Hamiltonian Scots in late December 1647. Cromwell and Ireton attended the Commons on 3 January 1648 to support a motion by Sir Thomas Wroth that Charles should be impeached and the kingdom settled without him. Ireton apparently argued that Charles had broken his ‘covenant’ with the people and that Parliament should keep faith with the ‘valiant men’ of the army and proceed to settlement without him – or, as he put it in an army declaration a few days later that has plausibly been attributed to him, ‘for the settling and securing of the Parliament and kingdom without the king and against him’. The debate ended with the House passing the vote of no addresses. However, if Wroth had also suggested that Charles should be impeached, Ireton does not seem to have followed up this idea – although he would later insist that ‘all men’ understood the vote ‘to imply some further intentions of proceedings in justice against him’ [the king].129CJ v. 416a; [C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 72 (E.463.19); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 962; A Remonstrance of His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax (1648), 8 (E.473.11); Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 320-1; Farr, Ireton, 120-3. There were various reports during the early months of 1648 that Cromwell, Ireton and some of the Independents grandees were secretly treating with Charles on the basis of the Heads or contemplating the idea of deposing him in favour of the prince of Wales or the duke of York – or doing both.130Bodl. Clarendon 29, ff. 279v, 307; [Walker], Hist. of Independency, 109, 164; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iv. 56-8, 85, 99; Bampfield’s Apology ed. Loftis, Hardacre, 69; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 329-30; Morrill, Baker, ‘Sons of Zeruiah’, 24. It is interesting to note that the ‘unavoidable journey ... into the country upon my private occasions’ that occupied Ireton from mid-March until early April coincided with discussions in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire among the Independent grandees, allegedly to consider ‘a treaty with his Majesty, thereby (if possible) to disengage him from the Scottish interest’.131Infra, ‘William Pierrepont’; LPL, MS 679, p. 85; Whitelocke, Diary, 210; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 174.

Before departing on this ‘unavoidable journey’ in mid-March 1648, Ireton asked Fairfax for permission to quit the New Model. With the army largely shorn of supernumerary forces, ‘and the remainder ... being re-settled in good order and discipline and in a way of constant pay ...and there being ... no visible disturbance in the army or kingdom’, he was anxious to step aside from serving as the butt of ‘hard censures’ by the army’s enemies. But Fairfax was distracted at the time by news of his father’s death (on 13 Mar.), and by the time Ireton had returned from his journey into the country the premonitory rumbles of the second civil war had begun and it was all hands to the pump.132LPL, MS 679, p. 85.

Ireton was closely involved in concerting the army’s strategy during the second civil war – as his correspondence with Hesilrige as governor of the four northern counties makes clear – and served as second-in-command to Fairfax in the campaigns in Kent and Essex.133Leics. RO, DG21/275/k; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 127. He received only two committee appointments in the Commons during 1648, and it is unlikely that he attended the House on a regular basis between the end of April and the beginning of January 1649.134CJ v. 484b, 546a; Add. 78221, f. 10; Mercurius Elencticus no. 23 (26 Apr.-3 May 1648), 174 (E.438.7); Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. T. Carte (1739), i. 175; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 115; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 170. Writing to Colonel Robert Hammond*, the governor of Carisbrooke Castle, on 9 July, he claimed that the ‘threats and violence’ of the ‘rabble multitude and cavalierish party about London’ had caused most ‘of those faithful Members of the Commons House, by whom under God the interest of Parliament and Kingdom has been hitherto carried or upheld’, to withdraw from Westminster ‘for their own and their country’s safety’.135Hammond Lttrs. 80-1. Shortly after the Commons voted on 28 July to open a no-holds-barred personal treaty with the king, Edmund Ludlowe II* met with Ireton at the siege of Colchester to discuss whether the army should intervene to prevent the negotiations taking place. According to Ludlowe, Ireton thought it best ‘to permit the king and the Parliament to make an agreement and to wait till they had made a full discovery of their intentions, whereby the people becoming sensible of their own danger, would willingly join to oppose them’.136Ludlow, Mems. i. 204; Farr, Ireton, 127-8.

Whatever his thoughts at the prospect of a treaty with the king, it was ostensibly for personal reasons and to protect the army and himself from public criticism that Ireton tried once again, late in September 1648, to resign his commission.137Bodl. Carte 22, f. 319; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS CXIV, f. 88; Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. Carte, i. 175, 193; Gentles, New Model Army, 267. In explaining his decision to Fairfax, he repeated the reasons he had given in March – that he could see no military need for his services and that the best thing he could do for the kingdom ‘and the cause of good men in it’ was to stand down.138LPL, MS 679, pp. 85-6. But Fairfax scrupled to accept his resignation without parliamentary approval, and therefore Ireton drafted a long letter to the Speaker on 7 October, reiterating his request for a discharge. His reasons were several – to attend to his much-neglected ‘private occasions’ now that there was no ‘present actual [military] service requiring my continuance’ and, as he had explained in March, to deprive the army’s enemies of an easy and high-profile target

though the generality of the army have been endeavoured to be blasted, yet myself with some few other principal officers have been singularly branded (and that not by your enemies alone but [by] much-pretending friends) ... to render us persons serving for and driving on not the public but our own private interests and advantages and, in pursuance thereof, using indirect practices, arts and counsels to continue and greaten unnecessarily the army, merely for the upholding of ourselves in power and pay.

If ‘such scandals and jealousies’ persisted, claimed Ireton, it would not only threaten the army’s existence – and thereby the kingdom’s safety – but also make it seem that Parliament’s management of affairs was merely ‘the serving of a particular party or faction and by the power of an army to uphold a few men’s greatness and dominion over the kingdom’. When the ‘belief or supposition of such things’ had become a ‘matter of jealousy and offence to some honest men’, argued Ireton’, ‘and of advantage to evil men (whereby to work prejudices against a good cause in the minds of the weak), I conceive I ought carefully to avoid and take away all occasion of the one and the other’.139LPL, MS 679, pp. 15-17. Either this letter was never sent or the Speaker and Fairfax refused to countenance it, for shortly afterwards Ireton, in the company of his wife, Cromwell, Colonel Nathaniel Rich* and the Independent divine Hugh Peters, embarked on a process of ‘religious self-examination’ that resulted in the conviction that it was ‘high time’ to ‘clear the House again ... with a new purge of impeachment’.140Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 27 (26 Sept.-3 Oct. 1648), sig. Nn2 (E.465.19); Farr, Ireton, 132.

Ireton may well have worked with army radicals and possibly the Levellers in encouraging the flood of petitions to Fairfax from regiments and garrisons across the country that autumn, calling for an end to the Treaty of Newport and for justice against those who had defiled the land with ‘innocent blood’. The petition from Ireton’s own regiment, in which he was probably complicit, was one of the few that accused Charles directly of blood-guilt, although it went on to demand that ‘criminal persons’ be proceeded against until the king ‘shall be acquitted of the guilt of shedding innocent blood’. The petitioning campaign occurred in tandem with, and complemented, Ireton’s drafting of the army’s most important manifesto of 1648, the November Remonstrance.141Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 28 (3-10 Oct. 1648), sig. Pp6 (E.466.11); no. 30 (17-24 Oct. 1648), sig. Tt4 (E.468.37); nos. 32-3 (31 Oct.-14 Nov. 1648), sig. Zz3v (E.470.33); Mercurius Elencticus no. 47 (11-18 Oct. 1647), 387 (E.468.14); The True Copy of a Petition Promoted in the Army (1648), 5-6 (E.468.18); Gentles, New Model Army, 268-9; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 132-7; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 135-8.

Remonstrance and Purge, 1648

The Remonstrance was drafted principally by Ireton, apparently on the basis of discussions with Cromwell, Rich, Peters and others. One newsbook editor thought it ‘more then probable’ that the work also represented a ‘design ... hatched by some Members of the House’ [of Commons].142Bodl. Clarendon 31, ff. 312-13; Mercurius Pragmaticu no. 35 (21-28 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbbv (E.473.35); Mercurius Elencticus no. 53 (22-29 Nov. 1648), 514 (E.473.39); ‘Farr, Ireton, 139-40. Fragments of Ireton’s draft of the Remonstrance have survived, and they include material relating to both the Lords and the king that did not make the published version

That the House of Peers are a court sitting and [are] to be consulted with and to give their assent or dissent but only for and as to their own interests and their dependents ... That such proceedings may be had towards this king as may make succeeding kings yet further to know they are accountable to Parliaments for their actions as well as to other men.143LPL, MS 679, pp. 5, 91, 177.

Most modern historians – like many royalist commentators at the time – have been persuaded that the Remonstrance called for the king’s death or at least represented ‘a justification for regicide’.144Farr, Ireton, 138, 140, 152; C. Holmes, ‘The Remonstrance of the army and the execution of Charles I’, History, civ. 588-9, 590-1. There is little doubting the fact that the Remonstrance implicitly threatened the king with execution and that Ireton was prepared by this point to sanction regicide if necessity and providence demanded as much. But it is very hard to read the Remonstrance as a straightforward demand for the king’s death; certainly if Ireton believed that Charles must die ‘he had a hard time saying as much’. Only once in what was a 70-page publication, that took four hours for the clerk of the Commons to read out, did Ireton refer directly to the prospect of ‘exemplary justice being done in capital punishment upon the principal author and some prime instruments of our late wars’ – and even here it is not entirely clear whether Ireton was calling for the king’s death per se or as a pre-requisite for granting amnesty to ‘delinquents’.145Remonstrance of His Excellency, 64; S. Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ xlv. 731; Kelsey, ‘The ordinance for the trial of Charles I’, HR lxxvi. 313; Farr, Ireton, 139. Moreover, at one point in the Remonstrance, Ireton conceded that if the king could ‘justly allege and make it appear’ that he had not acted against the public interest ‘let him then be acquitted in judgement and the guilt and blame be laid where else it is due’. He also conjectured that once the king’s crimes had been ‘judged according to righteousness’, and assuming that Charles showed genuine remorse, ‘a sense of the hand of God against him’, and evidence of ‘a change of heart and principles’, then ‘his person might be capable of pity, mercy and pardon’.146Remonstrance of His Excellency, 23-5, 51. Admittedly, Ireton rehearsed at great length why he thought both eventualities – Charles successfully shifting the guilt elsewhere or suffering a genuine change of heart – almost inconceivable.147Remonstrance of His Excellency, 25-6, 29-36, 41-2, 46, 49, 56; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 124-5; Farr, Ireton, 147-8. Nevertheless, if Ireton was indeed unswervingly committed to regicide it seems a strange tactic even to raise the possibility that the condemned man could either make a case for himself or make amends and thereby avoid execution.

Ireton was much less restrained in demanding that the king be subject to a ‘judicial trial’, and although he admitted, for form’s sake, the possibility that the king might clear himself of the charges against him, he clearly believed that Charles was guilty of high treason in repeatedly levying war against his own people and of ‘all the innocent blood spilt thereby’ and that he should be punished so that ‘the wrath of God for the same’ might be appeased and as an example to other would-be tyrants.148Remonstrance of His Excellency, 23-4, 49-50, 56, 61, 62, 64; Farr, Ireton, 146-7, 150-2. It is on the question of what form that punishment should take that the Remonstrance is perhaps at its most opaque. Biblical precedents requiring expiation for the shedding of innocent blood ‘by the blood of him that shed it’ would seem to point to the king’s execution – and such precedents were certainly in Ireton’s mind. However, the concept of blood-guilt could be spun in several different ways, not all of which required retributive justice.149Ludlow, Mems. i. 207; C. Holmes, ‘The trial and execution of Charles I’, HJ liii. 307-8; S. Kelsey, ‘The trial of Charles I’, EHR cxviii. 584-5; P. Crawford, ‘“Charles Stuart, that man of blood”’, JBS xvi. 57-8; Farr, Ireton, 198-201.

The Remonstrance begins to make more sense if it is understood not as a coherent political programme but as an attempt to build consensus within the army and among ‘honest’, godly people generally around two main objectives – that the Treaty of Newport was destructive of the public interest and should be stopped and that the king should undergo a formal trial of some sort. MPs had jeopardised the safety of the people by making a treaty with the king, and therefore the ‘rule of salus populi suprema lex’ (the people’s safety is the supreme law) and ‘public necessity or extremity’ warranted, indeed necessitated, resistance to their authority – as Ireton had argued, under similarly exceptional circumstances (as he saw it), in the Representation. Like that earlier work, the Remonstrance demonstrated his commitment to Parliament as the supreme arbiter of the nation’s law, the ultimate guarantor of the people’s safety. But where Parliament would not, or could not, uphold that principle, it was incumbent upon its creation and servant, the army, to do so.

Although the Remonstrance shared much of the same conceptual framework as Ireton’s earlier writings, it departed from them in several important respects. Absent or removed at draft stage was any proposal for a powerful executive council or the limited concessions to the rights of the king and Lords that he had made in the Heads and at Putney. The king must be brought to trial in order to demonstrate, once and for all, that he was not above the law or the power of Parliament. With the prospect of trying Charles very much in mind, Ireton argued that a reformed Parliament should have the power in cases where it finds ‘offence, though not particularly provided against by particular laws, yet against the general law of reason or nations and the vindication of the public interest, to require justice’. Yet reason and natural law must be guided and vindicated by the workings of divine providence. God was for Ireton the ‘the just assertor and patron of the right and vindicator of the hidden truth’ of all public proceedings.150Remonstrance of His Excellency, 4-6, 16, 22, 48; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 124, 126; Farr, Ireton, 143, 144, 152-3; Mortimer, ‘Ireton’, 67-8.

Ireton’s repeated reference in the Remonstrance to the army’s ‘error, frailty, unbelief and carnal counsels’ in negotiating with the king in 1647 – remedied, he claimed, by the vote of no addresses – was a mea culpa not so much for the benefit of MPs, the work’s ostensible audience, as the army radicals.151Remonstrance of His Excellency, 7, 43, 44, 52, 53. Similarly, he took care to address many of the constitutional concerns of the army and the Levellers. Thus he expressed the hope that after ‘public justice’ had been done and before dissolving itself, Parliament would consider ‘special overtures’ from ‘well-wishers to the public good’ (particularly as expressed in the Levellers’ petition of 11 September) in relation to the introduction of a new constitutional settlement that should include reform of the franchise, frequent elections, a supreme Parliament consisting solely of elected representatives, and a ‘subordinate standing officer or council’ that would manage ‘all ordinary matters of state’ and would govern in the interval between Parliaments. Crucially, this new settlement would be sponsored and ratified by Parliament and only then put to the people ‘to be further established by a general contract, or Agreement of the People, with their subscriptions thereunto’. His ‘supreme council or Parliament...or the representative body of the people therein’ would have ‘final judgement in all civil things’ – except that it could not ‘take away any [of] the foundations of common right, liberty or safety contained in this settlement and Agreement’. What exactly these ‘foundations’ were and whether or to what extent they included ‘things spiritual or evangelical’ was deliberately left unanswered.152Remonstrance of His Excellency, 14-16, 65-9; Clarke Pprs. ii. 176; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 125-6; Gentles, New Model Army, 273-4, 276; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 141-2, 143-4; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 253-4.

The majority of these concessions to the Levellers had apparently been included in the Remonstrance at a relatively advanced stage in its evolution on the basis of discussions with John Lilburne and his friends. In other words, the Remonstrance, no less than the Heads of Proposals, was a composite document that interwove material from a number of different, indeed competing, interests. But from what can be gauged of the completed draft before these pro-Leveller amendments, there is the strong impression that Ireton would have settled for government by a supreme elected representative, unbounded by any law paramount except salus populi and the requirement to hold regular elections.153Remonstrance of His Excellency, 14-16, 66-7; J. Lilburne, The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England Revived (1649), 34-5 (E.567.1); I. Gentles, ‘The Agreements of the People and their political contexts, 1647-9’, in The Putney Debates ed. Mendle, 157-8, 166; Burgess, British Political Thought, 260-1.

The Remonstrance was submitted to the army council in mid-November 1648, and after lengthy debate, some amendments and (possibly) a final appeal to the king (which failed), it was ‘unanimously’ approved – although there is evidence that Fairfax and several other officers were critical of its contents and may have tried to have it laid aside. In the end, it seems to have been fear that Parliament was on the point of agreeing to allow the king to return to London that clinched the council’s adoption of the Remonstrance.154Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 118, 119-22, 123; Gentles, New Model Army, 272, 274; Farr, Ireton, 142. On 17 November, the day after the Remonstrance had been accepted in principle, Ireton, Major Thomas Harrison I*, Colonel John Disbrowe* and Colonel Edward Gravener* wrote to Hammond that it had pleased God to dispose the hearts of the army ‘as one man’ and of ‘the godly from all parts’ to ‘interpose’ in the Treaty of Newport in such a way – the Remonstrance – as would ‘not only refresh the bowels of the Saints and all other faithful people of this kingdom but be of satisfaction to every honest Member of Parliament when tendered to them and made public’. To ensure that ‘justice and righteousness may take place’, they asked Hammond to take all measures to prevent the king’s escape.155Hammond Lttrs. 87-8; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 120-1. A few days later, Ireton and possibly the same group of officers sent a similar letter to Hammond, informing him that they had presented the Remonstrance to the Commons, ‘setting forth the danger and evils of the present treaty and desiring, amongst other things, that the person of the king may be brought to justice’.156Photocopy of ms in private hands, on file at the History of Parliament. By this stage it was Ireton ‘and his agents’ who were running the army’s political strategy and operations, probably with the knowledge and approval of Cromwell, who was at that time mopping up royalist resistance in northern England.157Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 30, sig. Tt4; Gentles, New Model Army, 266, 277, 278; Farr, Ireton, 161-6, 171-2.

The Commons’ refusal to engage with the Remonstrance or to break off negotiations with the king persuaded Ireton and his fellow officers of the need to move the army into London for a showdown with Parliament.158Gentles, New Model Army, 278-80. Ireton was already well-accustomed to thinking of the Commons as the tool of a ‘prevailing faction’ that was opposed to ‘the public interest and generality of honest men that have engaged for the same’.159Hammond Lttrs. 95-100; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 27, sig. Nn2; Farr, Ireton, 155-6. His preference, like that of Harrison and other officers, was either to force a straightforward dissolution of what they called ‘a pretended Parliament ... a mock Parliament’ or to stage a walk-out by ‘upright’ Members with whom the army would then cooperate to introduce a ‘just representative’ and bring Charles to trial. However, the officers were prevailed upon by Ludlowe and other radical Independent MPs, who did not want to surrender authority entirely to the army, ‘to opt for the less tidy alternative of merely purging the Commons of the army’s most notable enemies’. When the House voted on 5 December to accept the king’s answer to the Newport propositions as an acceptable basis for settlement, this was the final straw. That same day (5 Dec.), a group of three radical MPs and three army officers – Ireton almost certainly among them – convened at Whitehall to draw up a list of Members to be targeted the following day, in Pride’s Purge.160Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS CXIV, f. 128; Lilburne, Legal Fundamental Liberties, 38; Ludlow, Mems. i. 206, 209-10; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 129-30, 132-3, 140-2; Gentles, New Model Army, 281-2; Farr, Ireton, 167-9, 173. By the time Colonel Thomas Pride† had done his work on 6 December, Ireton had organised and led a military coup which saw the imprisonment or exclusion of over 200 MPs. In an army declaration of early January 1649 that the Presbyterian polemicist Clement Walker* attributed to Ireton, the purge is acknowledged ‘to be a course in itself irregular and not justifiable but both by honest intentions for the public good and an extraordinary necessity for the same’.161[C. Walker], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 167 (E.570.4); The Humble Answer of the General Councel of Officers of the Army (1649, E.537.14).

The Whitehall debates

Pride’s Purge, although successful in producing a compliant Commons, required the army to compromise and conciliate if it was to carry with it sympathetic Parliament-men, the Levellers and the ‘Saints’ towards a new political settlement and some kind of reckoning with the king.162Farr, Ireton, 175. Cromwell’s arrival in London on 6 December helped greatly in this respect. Cromwell and Fairfax, with their extensive contacts among the Independent grandees and leading royalists, worked during December to broker a settlement that would apparently have spared Charles’s life while neutralising the growing threat from his supporters in Ireland.163E. Stephens, A Letter of Advice from a Secluded Member of the House of Commons (1649) 4 (E.536.38); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 135, 154-6; S. Kelsey, ‘Politics and procedure in the trial of Charles I’, Law and Hist. Review, xxii. 10; A. Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), 97-100; ‘Thomas Fairfax’, Oxford DNB, ; J. Adamson, ‘The frighted junto’, in The Regicides ed. Peacey, 45, 46, 52-3. Their tactic has been described as one of ‘bargaining with menaces’ – making overtures to Charles while condoning hard-line measures in order to frighten him into compromising. Ireton, on the other hand, concentrated on broadening the new regime’s political base among the Levellers and their allies in the army – hence his leading role in the talks between the army and the Levellers that culminated in the debates in the council of officers at Whitehall during December 1648 and January 1649 over a second Agreement of the People.164Lilburne, Legal Fundamental Liberties, 35, 38-9; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 129; B. Taft, ‘The council of officers’ Agreement of the People, 1648-9’, HJ xxviii. 171-2; Farr, Ireton, 166. It is likely that these two policies – bargaining with the king and with the Levellers – were intended to be complementary. But is also possible that Ireton was committed to regicide and was working on the assumption that the king would remain obdurate. The evidence can support various interpretations. What does seem clear is that he was serious about reaching agreement with the Levellers and that he expended much time and intellectual energy in arguing his corner in the Whitehall debates.165Taft, ‘Council of officers’, 174; Farr, Ireton, 178, 182-4, 189-91; Adamson, ‘Peerage in Politics’, 263.

One of the most divisive issues in the Whitehall debates concerned the proper relationship between civil authority and religious observance. The draft of the Agreement called for almost complete liberty of conscience, denying the magistrate virtually any kind of restraining power to forbid religious practices deemed sinful or heretical. Ireton had already expressed his disapproval of this principle, and when the issue was raised at Whitehall on 14 December he was ready for a fight. He insisted that the magistrate’s first duty was ‘the preserving of humane society in peace’ and that this necessarily included care over religious as well as civil affairs. He was particularly concerned that the magistrate should be able to proceed against those who broke the first four of the Ten Commandments, concerning the worship of God, ‘for those things ... had a perpetual ground in relation to the duty of God, a perpetual rule by the law written in men’s hearts, and a testimony left in man by nature’. Although the Bible confirmed this ‘perpetual rule’, it was not necessary to be a Christian to arrive at a basic understanding of God and the moral order. Ireton was convinced that God’s commandments – and perhaps, too, specifically Christian doctrines such as the Trinity – could be discerned by ‘that light that every man hath left in him by nature’. Here, once again, we see Ireton resorting to natural law arguments to make his case. His leading opponents on this occasion were the Independent divine John Goodwin and the Leveller leader John Wildman. Both were extremely sceptical that the light of nature could offer any meaningful insight into the deity, both believed that the religious sphere was quite distinct from the civil, and both insisted on almost complete liberty of conscience – views that evidently struck Ireton as a recipe for anarchy.166Clarke Pprs. ii. 78-83, 97-9, 101, 106, 107, 109, 112-15, 121-3, 127, 128-30, 172; Taft, ‘Council of officers’, 177; Farr, Ireton, 179-80; S. Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), 191-4.

Ireton’s synthesis of natural law arguments and bias towards a supreme representative over a supreme constitution did not prove persuasive in the Whitehall debates. He and his supporters – a ‘conservative hard core’ of senior officers – were generally outvoted by the civilian Levellers present and their allies among the junior officers.167Taft, ‘Council of officers’, 177-8, 185; ‘Voting lists of the council of officers, December 1648’, BIHR lii. 143-6; Gentles, ‘Agreements of the People’, 166-7. Yet despite his evident problems with the revised Agreement, he supported its acceptance by the council of officers. Indeed, by 13 January 1649, he had largely embraced the idea of a supreme constitution as a necessary check upon the potentially arbitrary power of the executive. Until ‘God do so break it there will be some power exercised’, he declared, ‘it shall not be in the hands of king, or peers, or in the hands of commons’, but in those of a reformed and bounded representative and a subordinate council of state as laid out in the Agreement. He had also come to recognise, somewhat belatedly, that a supreme constitution would provide a bulwark against an electoral and political takeover by the nation’s ‘cavalierish’ majority or a restoration of the king and the Lords once the Long Parliament had been dissolved. But although the projected new constitution retained the clause he had included towards the end of the Remonstrance, stipulating that ‘no representative may in any wise render up or give or take away any of the foundations of common right, liberty and safety contained in this Agreement’, he evidently conceived of its role in constituting the new political order in more limited terms than did the Levellers. Parliamentary approval would authorise and initiate the revised Agreement, not its prior subscription by the people as the Levellers demanded. The Agreement’s principal function, for Ireton, was to act as a brake upon the power of a reformed representative; it was not to enshrine the principle of the sovereign will of the people.168Clarke Pprs. ii. 176-7, 179-80; Gentles, ‘Agreements of the People’, 161, 162-3; Taft, ‘Council of officers’, 182; Farr, Ireton, 181; J. Peacey, ‘The people of the Agreements’, in The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution ed. P. Baker, E. Vernon (Basingstoke, 2012), 56-7.

Whatever shape the new government took, Ireton was adamant that it (and the ungodly multitude) would need restraining until ‘the breaking forth of the power of God amongst men [would serve] to make such forms needless’. ‘We cannot limit God to this, or that, or other way’, he insisted, ‘but certainly if we take the most probable way according to the light we have’, God would give the Agreement success.169Clarke Pprs. ii. 176, 180. In the event, God, or at least the Rump, did not smile on the Agreement, for after it was presented to the House on 20 January 1649 it was laid aside for good, apparently without demur from Ireton and his fellow officers.170Taft, ‘Council of officers’, 181-5; Gentles, ‘Agreements of the People’, 167-8. Ultimately, it seems, Ireton preferred ‘the familiar polity of a supreme Parliament over the uncertain promise of a supreme constitution that commanded neither organized nor popular support’.171Taft, ‘Council of officers’, 183.

Ireton and the regicide

The first half of 1649 was by far the busiest period in Ireton’s parliamentary career. Far from being uncomfortable in the role of a Westminster politician, as one authority has recently argued, Ireton was clearly one of the movers and shakers in the youthful Rump, not to mention ‘its chief liaison with the army’.172Farr, Ireton, 208, 209; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 231, 356. Between early January and mid-July, he was named to almost 60 committees and served as teller in 13 divisions – mostly with committed republicans, among them Hesilrige, Vane II, Cornelius Holland, Lord Grey of Groby and Henry Marten.173CJ vi. 115a, 128b, 130a, 132a, 159b, 160a, 165a, 172b, 192b, 195b, 257a; S. Barber, ‘The engagement for the council of state’, HR lxiii. 56. Among his appointments were additions to the important executive bodies the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, the Committee of Navy and Customs* (of which he was an active member), the excise committee and the Derby House Committee* – though this last was quickly replaced by the Rump’s council of state.174CJ vi. 112b, 113b, 134b, 219b; Add. 63788B, f. 55; Bodl. Rawl. A.224, ff. 21-23v.

According to one royalist newsbook, Ireton had joined Cromwell, Marten, Thomas Scot I and 13 other Members on 14 December 1648 in voting against re-admitting those MPs who had been secluded at Pride’s Purge but against whom there was no charge.175Mercurius Elencticus no. 56 (12-19 Dec. 1648), 539 (E.476.36). However, his first appointment in the Rump was not until 4 January 1649, when MPs debated how to proceed with the king’s trial in the face of opposition from the Lords. Anticipating that the peers would reject the second ordinance for a court to try the king, as they had the first, hard-line Members urged that sole legislative authority should be vested in the Commons. A committee was then set up (4 Jan.), to which Ireton was named, for preparing the form of two questions upon the debate. It was probably this committee that was responsible for framing the three resolutions adopted later that day – that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’; that the Commons, being chosen by the people, have the supreme power in the nation; and that having supreme power they have the authority to make binding laws without the consent of either the king or the House of Lords.176CJ vi. 111a.

At the same time as Ireton was helping the Commons knock away one of the pillars of the ancient constitution, he was heavily involved in undermining another, the king. Surprisingly, he was not one of the most active members of the high court of justice, attending 11 of the 19 sessions of the trial commission. However, he was named to three of its sub-committees – ‘to advise of such general rules as are fit for the expediting the business of the said court’ (15 Jan.); for preparing the sentence against Charles as a ‘tyrant, traitor and murderer’ and a ‘public enemy to the commonwealth of England’ (25 Jan.); and to consider the time and place for the king’s execution (27 Jan.).177Muddiman, Trial, 195, 197, 201, 202, 206, 207, 210, 223, 224, 226; Kelsey, ‘Trial of Charles I’, 610. Ireton attended all four days of the trial itself, and on 29 January he joined Cromwell and several other MPs in taking the dissent to the 5 December vote that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement. It was probably that same day, 29 January, that he signed the king’s death warrant.178Muddiman, Trial, 76, 88, 96, 105.

Opinions differ, and will doubtless continue to do so, as to when during the preceding months Ireton had become irrevocably committed to regicide. Evidence from the Remonstrance can be used to support the argument that he was convinced by November 1648 at the latest that the ‘hand of God’ had signalled the necessity of Charles’s death.179Farr, Ireton, 138, 140, 152, 191-2, 196; Holmes, ‘Trial and execution’, 305-6. Yet one pro-army radical, writing from London on 8 January 1649, expressed frustration at the prospect of having to ‘hear again of Ireton’s proposals – viz. that it were perhaps safer to have the king live prisoner, for to dispose him awhile to abandon his negative [voice], to part from church lands, to abjure the Scots etc.’.180Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. Carte, i. 202; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 183. And several commentators alleged that Ireton used the Baptist prophetess Elizabeth Poole in an attempt to convince his fellow officers of the wisdom of trying and perhaps deposing Charles but of stopping short of executing him.181To Xeiphos ton Martyron, or a Brief Narration of the Mysteries of State (1651), 69-70; ‘Elizabeth Poole’, Oxford DNB; M. Brod, ‘Politics and prophecy in seventeenth-century England’, Albion, xxxi. 398-9, 401-2. If Ireton was one of the architects of the king’s trial – as he surely was – he presumably approved of the instructions repeatedly given to the court’s president John Bradshawe* that Charles be urged to plead to the charge against him.182Supra, ‘John Bradshawe’; Farr, Ireton, 185-6, 187-9. These instructions do not suggest a tribunal geared to only one possible outcome – the king’s execution. Recent work on the trial has seen it as a last-ditch attempt at bargaining with menaces and that it was only Charles’s obduracy – his refusal to acknowledge the court’s authority or to plead to the charge – that convinced most of his judges, Ireton perhaps included, that the providential moment for justice against ‘that man of blood’ had finally arrived.183Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’; ‘Trial of Charles I’.

Serving the Rump, 1649

Ireton’s reward for orchestrating Pride’s Purge and the king’s trial was to be passed over by the Rump for a place on the first council of state. When the nominations for the council were considered by the House on 14 February 1649, Ireton and his fellow army radical Thomas Harrison I were rejected after the House divided against putting the question that their names be considered for appointment.184CJ vi. 141a. Until recently it was thought that conservative elements in the Rump had been responsible for thwarting the two men’s election by way of protest at their prominent role in the purge, trial and regicide and that Ireton had then hit back by devising an oath of loyalty for the new councillors that obliged them to swear approval of the king’s trial.185Worden, Rump Parl. 179-80; S. Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, PH xxii. 217, 223; Barber, ‘Engagement for the council of state’, 45-6. The consensus now seems to be that it was more likely to have been civilian republicans, anxious to limit army influence in the new regime, who blocked the two officers’ appointment. Moreover, Ireton’s involvement in devising the conciliar oath was apparently limited to his minority tellership with Henry Marten on 22 February in favour of inserting a clause endorsing the king’s trial.186Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, 224-5; Barber, ‘Engagement for the council of state’, 47, 56.

Neither Ireton’s belated enthusiasm for the Agreement, nor his rebuff at not being made a councillor of state, deterred him from throwing himself into the Rump’s efforts to strengthen its authority, vindicate its proceedings and to silence its critics, including the Levellers. From late January 1649, he was named to a series of committees for preventing anyone, from county sheriffs to Presbyterian ministers, from publishing or proclaiming material against the trial and execution of the king or from otherwise ‘intermeddling’ in matters of state.187CJ vi. 124a, 126b, 131b, 179a, 256a. Evidently assured by this stage that providence had decreed against the peers as a constitutional ‘form’, he was named to the 6 February committee for bringing in an act for abolishing the Lords.188CJ vi. 132b. Ten days later (16 Feb.), he was named second to a committee for preparing a declaration to be read out by the judges on circuit, justifying the new regime and the principle that ‘the people (under God) is the original of all just power ... but ... the people in their politic constitution lawfully assembled by their representative’.189CJ vi. 143b; Sergeant Thorpe Judge of Assize for the Northern Circuit, His Charge (1649, E.1068.1). On 7 March, he was nominated to a committee on a bill for abolishing kingship, to which was also referred the bill for abolishing the House of Lords.190CJ vi. 158a.

Although Ireton was capable of showing mercy to the commonwealth’s enemies – serving as a majority teller on 8 March 1649 with Marten in favour of respiting the execution of the royalist officer Sir John Owen – and helped to secure the passage in May of an act of oblivion for low-level royalist offenders, he was a teller with Sir Arthur Hesilrige on 8 and 14 March in favour of hastening the demise of Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland and of Browne Bushell, both of whom had appeared for the king during the second civil war.191Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 192; CJ vi. 159b, 160a, 165a, 195b, 207b. In committee, he helped to draft legislation for exempting leading royalists from pardon and to tighten the rules for compounding with delinquents.192LPL, MS 679, pp. 23-30, 87-90; CJ vi. 162a. The Levellers, too, had become surplus to Ireton’s requirements by the spring. The tireless efforts of Lilburne and his colleagues to encourage the soldiers to overthrow their commanders and implement the Leveller agenda would lead to serious mutinies in the army during April and May. According to a variety of commentators, Cromwell, Ireton, Hesilrige, Edmund Prideaux I* and Colonel Thomas Pride* headed the pack of Rumpers and army officers that hunted ‘for matter of accusation’ against the Levellers that March and April.193Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 4 (8-15 May 1649), sigs. Dv, D2 (E.555.14); Mercurius Militaris no. 3 (1649), 30-1 (E.554.13); J. Lilburne, A Preparative to an Hue and Cry after Sir Arthur Haslerig (1649), 8-9 (E.573.16); An Anatomy of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn’s Spirit and Pamphlets (1649), 9-11 (E.575.21]; [Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 197-8. On 18 April, Ireton, Marten and John Lisle were ordered to pen a ‘sharp reprehension’ to a group of Londoners who had petitioned the Rump for the release of Lilburne and other Leveller leaders imprisoned in the Tower. That same day (18 Apr.), he was appointed with Thomas Scot I and James Chaloner to bring in a declaration against the promoters of Leveller writings.194CJ vi. 189b. The declaration accused the Levellers of ‘insisting upon some things manifestly destructive to propriety and to the most necessary subsistence of the army, and lastly endeavouring such a liberty of conscience as if allowed would in all likelihood introduce nothing but heresy ... and profaneness’.195Add. 71448, ff. 49-50. Clement Walker* claimed that Ireton, ‘the better to keep himself in a neutral, reconciling posture’, laid down his commission in protest at Cromwell’s determination to crush the army mutinies by force.196[Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 180. More credible, given that some of Ireton’s own troopers were among the mutineers, is a report in one of the newsbooks that he ‘pleaded that fair means ought first to be used toward them in regard they were men that had done, and might do, many eminent services and [that] many of those things they stood for were just and reasonable’.197Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 4ii (8-15 May 1649), sig. D3 (E.555.14); Gentles, New Model Army, 332, 333. Certainly Ireton did not take to the field himself to help suppress the mutineers. But it is very unlikely that he disapproved of Cromwell and Fairfax for doing so. Indeed, on 26 May he was named first to a three-man committee for preparing an act explaining the reasons for a day of public thanksgiving to God for His ‘great mercy vouchsafed to this whole commonwealth by the success he hath given to the Parliament forces in timely suppressing the late insurrection and rebellion’.198CJ vi. 218a-b; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 75; Worden, Rump Parl. 193.

It is probably Ireton’s voice defending the new regime that can be heard in a declaration, drawn up in response to letters from the Scots commissioners of January 1649, that the Rump ordered to be published in February. The task of drafting this declaration had been specially referred to Ireton and Marten on 3 February, and it was reported by Ireton a fortnight later (17 Feb.).199CJ vi. 131b, 145a. Throughout this work there are echoes of the Remonstrance and its denunciations of the (now deceased) king and references to ‘impartial execution of justice ... against that man of blood’. More revealing is what the declaration has to say on the subject of religion.

As for the truth and power of religion, it being a thing intrisincal between God and the soul, and the matter of faith in the gospel being such as no natural light doth reach unto, we conceive there is no humane power of coercion thereunto, nor to restrain men from believing what God suffers their judgements to be persuaded of.

Was it Marten who wrote this or had Ireton altered his views on the capacity of man’s ‘natural light’ to discern fundamental religious truths? The declaration’s trenchant defence of rule by a sovereign representative with the power to make and repeal laws as it saw fit is also interesting. Ireton’s flirtation with the concept of a supreme constitution had been brief indeed.200A Declaration of the Parliament of England, in Answer to the Late Letters…from the Commissioners of Scotland (1649, E.544.17).

Ireton undoubtedly devoted most of his time in Rump to championing the interests of its armed forces. He chaired, reported from, or was named first to committees for impressing seamen, imposing martial law, taking soldiers’ accounts and for the better provision of pay for the troops, and he was a leading figure in liaising between the council of officers and the Army Committee*.201CJ vi. 147a, 148a, 149a, 150a, 150b, 202b, 206a, 208b, 209b, 215b, 217a, 218b, 228b, 254a; SP28/258, f. 168; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXVII, ff. 59-62; H. Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England 1649-60 (Oxford, 2013), 89. Similarly, his numerous appointments to committees on the assessment, the excise and for the sale of the king’s goods, crown lands, church lands and delinquents’ estates can be put down to a concern to maximise state revenues for the maintenance of the army and navy. Again, he was regularly named first to these committees, and reported from several of them.202CJ vi. 127a, 147b, 159a, 160b, 161a, 161b, 162a, 172a, 185a, 201a, 205b, 213a, 216b, 222b, 228b, 254b.

Naturally, too, Ireton was attentive to the religious needs of the new commonwealth, and as a great believer in seeking the will of the Lord through prayer and holy vigil he set much store by the Rump’s public professions to God. On 20 April, he was selected to request the Independent divine and army chaplain Isaac Knight to preach before the House on the next day of public humiliation; on 23 April, he reported to the House an act he had drafted for setting aside a day (apparently every month) for a public fast and humiliation.203CJ vi. 152a, 190a, 190b, 193a. Whether he favoured tithes as a means of maintaining a public ministry is not clear, but he was certainly committed to providing a ‘very comfortable subsistence’ for ‘those to whom God hath given grace to be found faithful in the work of the gospel’.204Declaration of the Parliament of England, 16. On 26 April, he was named to a committee for settling £20,000 a year for the maintenance of preaching ministers.205CJ vi. 196a. In May, he was added to the forerunner of what was perhaps the Rump’s most formidable body for enforcing godly orthodoxy, the committee for regulating the universities.206CJ vi. 201a. His last appointment in the Rump was his tellership with Cromwell on 9 July against retaining a clause in a vote against ‘non-conformable’ (i.e. anti-government) preaching that required all ministers to observe days of public humiliation or thanksgiving.207CJ vi. 257a.

Command in Ireland, 1649-51

Ireton, with the new rank of major-general, served as second in command to Cromwell in the reconquest of Ireland that began in the summer of 1649.208CJ vi. 234a. Among the secretariat that Cromwell and Ireton took with them to Ireland was perhaps Parliament’s most influential political writer, Henry Parker.209Aylmer, State’s Servants, 261; ‘Henry Parker, Oxford DNB’. A few weeks before Ireton set sail, he received the £2,000 towards payment of his arrears that the Commons had ordered the Army Committee to pay him ‘in respect of the service he is about to undertake in Ireland’.210CJ vi. 234a; SP28/61, f. 313v. Until that point, it seems, he had received no more than £800 in back-pay for his time in the New Model, having suffered losses in the service of the state that reportedly amounted to £3,000.211SP28/52, f. 174v; R. Massey, The Examination and Correction of…A Relation of the Discourse Between Mr. Hugh Peters and Lieut. Collonel Iohn Lilborn (1649), sig. A3; Farr, Ireton, 60; C. Hoover, ‘Cromwell’s status and pay in 1646-7’, HJ xxiii. 709. In December 1650, his wife Bridget received a further £1,500 on his behalf.212SP28/305, unfol.

Following Cromwell’s recall to England in the spring of 1650 to conduct the campaign against the Scots, he commissioned Ireton as his deputy in Ireland – which the Rump approved on 2 July but appointed four MPs (Colonel Edmund Ludlowe, Colonel John Jones, Miles Corbet and John Weaver) as commissioners to assist him.213CJ vi. 435a; Farr, Ireton, 222-3. Although Ireton conducted what was generally an efficient campaign in Ireland, it is likely that he was given command there not so much for his military talents as his connections with Cromwell and his proven ability in the politics of negotiation and settlement.214Gentles, New Model Army, 356-80; J.S. Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), passim; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, chs. 9-10. Indeed, he may have been designated as Ireland’s post-conquest governor – this is certainly consistent with his appointment by the Rump in January 1650 as president of Munster.215CJ vi. 328a, 343a, 345b; Farr, Ireton, 206-7, 219. He was generally considered less hostile to the Irish than was Cromwell, but even so he was willing to employ methods against both enemy civilians and soldiers that would have been considered brutal by the standards of warfare in England. The commemorative medal he had struck to mark his governorship in Ireland featured the image of a soldier firing the roof of an Irish peasant’s cottage, while a battle rages in the background. The accompanying Latin motto translates as ‘justice and necessity commanded it’.

In Ireland, as in England, Ireton was guided by his resolve to seek the ways of the Lord though ‘frequent exercise of prayer, with fasting’, and by the need to deal severely with those he deemed guilty of shedding innocent blood.216Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 72-4; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 56; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 205-6, 214-19, 232-6. Yet the massive difficulties he faced in Ireland, material as well as military, encouraged him to take a pragmatic approach towards the Irish. In March 1651, he and the commissioners urged the Rump ‘to hold forth some terms of favour and mercy’ towards the Irish as to their ‘lives, liberties and estates ... which will be a means to settle the distracted condition of the country and reduce those in hostility against the state’.217Ludlow, Mems. i. 486-7; Farr, Ireton, 237-8. Ireton’s preferred long term solution to the problem of Ireland, however, was to purge its towns of Catholics and replace them with godly English families.218Farr, Ireton, 238-40. The Rump was evidently pleased with his work as lord deputy, voting in September 1651 to settle an estate worth £2,000 a year upon him ‘as a mark of the Parliament’s favour for his great and eminent services for the commonwealth’.219CJ vii. 15b. But on receiving news of this reward, Ireton reportedly declared that the Rump

had many just debts, which he desired they would pay before they made any such presents; that he had no need of their land and therefore would not have it and that he should be more contented to see them doing the service of the nation than so liberal in disposing of public treasure.220Ludlow, Mems. i. 286.

He may not have needed land in England, but he certainly acquired land in Ireland – many thousands of acres of it in county Kilkenny.221Carte Manuscripts ed. Russell, Prendergast, 174-5; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB.

Last rites, 1651-2

Driven by godly zeal and a powerful sense of public duty, Ireton followed such a punishing schedule and was so heedless of his bodily welfare that he worked himself into an early grave. A bad cold, contracted at the siege of Limerick in November 1651, turned into a ‘burning fever ... Yet for all this he ceased not to apply himself to the public business’. It all proved too much for a constitution weakened by ‘immoderate labours’ and the bloodletting and purges administered by his doctors, and he died on 26 November.222Ludlow, Mems. i. 292-4, 495; The French Intelligencer no. 4 (9-16 Dec. 1651), 27 (E.651.1); ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 241-3. His friend and fellow regicide John Cooke, who was deeply saddened by news of his death, thought that

if he erred in any thing ... it was in too much neglecting himself, for like a candle he wasted his vitals to give light to others, seldom thinking it time to eat till he had done the work of the day at nine or ten at night, and then [he] will sit up as long as any man had business with him. Indeed, he was every thing from a foot soldier to a general and thought nothing done whilst any thing was undone.223J. Cooke, Monarchy, No Creature of God Making (1652), sig. g (E.1238.1).

Ireton’s passing, according to Ludlowe, was ‘universally lamented by all good men’. Colonel John Jones I* wrote to Thomas Scot I* in December that he could ‘never hope to be acquainted with so humble, patient, wise, religious, self-denying man as he was’. Ireton’s death was said by Bulstrode Whitelocke* to have ‘struck a great sadness into Cromwell, and indeed it was a great loss to him of so able and active, so faithful and so near a relation and officer under him’.224Ludlow, Mems. i. 294, 496-7; Severall Procs. in Parl. no. 115 (4-11 Dec. 1651), 1780 (E.791.23); Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 371; ‘Inedited lttrs. of Cromwell, Col. Jones, Bradshaw and other regicides’ ed. J. Mayer, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, xiii. 179, 197; Worden, Rump Parl. 292. Ireton’s faith and intellect had been greatly respected by his father-in-law to the extent that some contemporaries believed, wrongly, that Ireton ‘by his obstinacy’ was able ‘to prevail over Cromwell and to extort his concurrence contrary to his own inclinations’.225Bodl. Clarendon 45, f. 439; Clarendon, Hist. v. 264. Whitelocke, who knew both men well, was nearer the mark when he claimed that ‘no man could prevail so much [upon Cromwell] nor order him so far as Ireton could’.226Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 371. They formed a close political partnership in which Cromwell’s pragmatism tempered Ireton’s idealism. If Cromwell had harboured doubts about the need to purge Parliament and put the king on trial then Ireton more than anyone would have stiffened his resolve. Certainly Cromwell’s relationship with Ireton had ‘greater depth, politically and emotionally’ than with that of his other kinsmen in the army such as Colonel Charles Fleetwood*, who was to marry Ireton’s widow.227Farr, Ireton, 2, 13, 202, 244, 245.

Ireton’s corpse was shipped from Ireland to Westminster Abbey, where it was given a state funeral on 6 February 1652 that ‘was as magnificent as that of the late earl of Essex’. The chief mourner was Ireton’s brother John, sheriff of London; Cromwell was one his assistants. The funeral sermon was preached by the Independent divine John Owen*, who was one of Cromwell’s favourite ministers.228Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XXII, f. 22; Farr, Ireton, 8-11. Owen concluded his funeral sermon with the hope that Ireton’s ‘indefatigable industry’, his ‘faith on the promises of God and acquaintance with His mind in His mighty works of providence’, his ‘love to the Lord Jesus and all his Saints’, his ‘eminent self-denial in all his concernments’ and his ‘impartiality and sincerity in the execution of justice’ would inspire many other to be ‘raised up in the power and spirit wherein he walked before the Lord’.229J. Owen, The Labouring Saints Dismission to Rest (1652), 24 (E.654.3). Ireton’s eminent sense of self-denial would probably have recoiled at the lavishness of his funeral and at ‘the magnificent monument’ that was constructed for his resting place in Westminster Abbey

so much did he despise those pompous and expensive vanities; having erected for himself a more glorious monument in the hearts of good men by his affection to his country, his abilities of mind, his impartial justice, his diligence in the public service and his other virtues, which were a far greater honour to his memory than a dormitory amongst the ashes of kings.230Ludlow, Mems. i. 295; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 504; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB; Farr, Ireton, 10-11.

Ireton died intestate, but in December 1651, the Rump renewed the grant of land it had made in September, this time for the benefit of his widow and four children.231CJ vii. 52a, 53a; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 503.

Although Ireton was long dead by the time of the Restoration, the 1660 Convention ordered on 15 May that he should be ‘attainted of high treason, for the murthering of the late king’s majesty’.232CJ viii. 27a. On 10 December, Parliament ordered that the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, Bradshawe and Colonel Thomas Pride* should be ‘taken up and drawn upon a hurdle to Tyburn and there hanged up in their coffins for some time and after that buried under the said gallows’.233LJ xi. 205a. This order was carried out between 26 and 30 January 1661 but with one final indignity – Cromwell’s, Ireton’s and Bradshawe’s heads were removed and placed on spikes on top of Westminster Hall, where they would remain for many years to come.234Townshend Diary ed. J.W.W. Bund (Worcs. Hist. Soc. 1920), i. 69; Farr, Ireton, 3-4. Rudely divested of its occupant, Ireton’s monument in Westminster Abbey was then destroyed.

Assessment

Ireton’s life and death elicited contrasting reactions from contemporaries. To the royalists and Levellers he was ‘the cunningest of Machiavilians’, the ‘Arch-hypocrite’ and ‘politique Master Ireton’ – principal author of the king’s death. To the Saints and republicans he was the very image of a godly paladin.235Clarendon, Hist. v. 264-5; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (4-11 Jan. 1648), sig. R2 (E.422.17); no. 24 (5-12 Sept. 1648), sig. Hhv (E.462.34); R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 222; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB. Modern scholars have generally portrayed him as the intellectual hard-man of the English revolution – the army’s ‘cold, clear-minded theoretician’; ‘a clear-headed radical thinker’ with ‘a coherent vision of godly republicanism’.236Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 79; Worden, Rump Parl. 75; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB. He was certainly a formidable debater and an effective, if sometimes rather long-winded, polemicist. But to imply that he was operating according to some deep-laid plan and systematically developing a particular ideological programme is probably to credit him with greater coherence and consistency of thought than he possessed. In fact, his most effective attribute as the army’s pen-man and intellectual leader was adaptability. Between the summer of 1647 and the spring of 1649, he moved from what seems to have been hostility to the notion of an unbounded Parliament (the Heads of Proposals), to approval of an all but supreme representative (first draft of the 1648 Remonstrance), to qualified enthusiasm for a supreme constitution and a bounded Parliament (the revised Agreement), before reverting finally to acceptance of an unbounded House of Commons (the Rump).

These shifts in Ireton’s thought probably owed much to the tension in his outlook, as in Cromwell’s, between reverence for traditional elements of the established order (the rights of property and, in religion, perhaps the Trinity) and attentiveness to God’s overthrowing providence. Ireton was, after all, that most contradictory and conflicted of creatures, a gentleman puritan. His experiences as a soldier, particularly no doubt in battle, strengthened the puritan elements in his psyche. Not for nothing was he referred to as ‘absolutely the best prayer-maker and preacher in the army’.237Ath. Ox. iii. 299; ‘Henry Ireton’, Oxford DNB.

Some historians have discerned in Ireton’s writings the influence of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius and of the English scholar who engaged most deeply with the Grotian canon, John Selden*.238Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 246; M. Mendle, ‘Introduction’, in The Putney Debates ed. Mendle, 11, 246; Farr, Ireton, 109, 154, 182. But perhaps a more likely source of inspiration for Ireton, certainly on the political uses of natural law arguments, was the work of Henry Parker. The two men were on close terms by the late 1640s – indeed, Ireton has been described as Parker’s patron.239H. Parker, The Generall Junto (1642), 26-7 (669 f.18.1); M. Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1995), 28, 152, 160, Farr, Ireton, 231-2; Burgess, British Political Thought, 266. It was Parker who was truly the systematic, clear-minded thinker of the parliamentarian cause. Ireton was more politician than theoretician and was necessarily attuned to political circumstances. His political legacy was the Rump and regicide; his intellectual legacy is harder to discern, although by no means negligible. The connections he drew (building on Parker) between natural law, necessity and salus populi helped to bring these concepts into the mainstream of English political discourse. The broader parameters of this debate would be shaped by more formidable theorists – notably, Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. But Ireton’s writing and speeches, especially the Remonstrance of 14 June 1647, drew attention to the political potential of these ideas and sustained their relevancy long after Ireton’s head atop Westminster Hall had rotted away. 

Ireton’s brother John represented London in the 1653 Nominated Parliament, and Ireton’s only son, Henry Ireton†, sat for Cirencester and Tewkesbury under William III and Queen Anne.240HP Commons 1690-1715.