(The paper called the Agreement read. Afterwards the first article read by itself: ‘That the people of England being at this day very unequally distributed by counties, cities and boroughs for the election of their deputies in parliament, ought to be more indifferently proportioned according to the number of inhabitants …’)

Commissary-General Henry Ireton: The exception that lies in it is this. It is said they (‘the people of England etc.’) are to be distributed according to the number of the inhabitants. This does make me think that the meaning is that every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered, and to have an equal voice in the election of the representers – those persons that are for the General Representative. And if that be the meaning then I have something to say against it. But if it be only that those people that by the civil constitution of this kingdom, which is original and fundamental, and beyond which I am sure no memory of record does go …

Commissary Nicholas Cowling (interrupting): Not before the Conquest.

Ireton: But before the Conquest it was so. If it be intended that those that by that constitution that was before the Conquest that has been beyond memory, such persons that have been before by that constitution the electors should be still the electors, I have no more to say against it …

Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom, and God having so far owned our cause as to deliver the enemies thereof into our hands, we do now hold ourselves bound in mutual duty to each other to take the best care we can for the future to avoid both the danger of returning into a slavish condition and the chargeable remedy of another war. For as it cannot be imagined that so many of our countrymen would have opposed us in this quarrel if they had understood their own good, so may we safely promise to ourselves that when our common rights and liberties shall be cleared, their endeavours will be disappointed that seek to make themselves our masters. Since therefore our former oppressions and scarce-yet-ended troubles have been occasioned either by want of frequent national meetings in council or by rendering those meetings ineffectual, we are fully agreed and resolved to provide that hereafter our representatives be neither left to an uncertainty for the time, nor made useless to the ends for which they are intended.

Since you have done the nation so much right and yourselves so much honour as to declare that ‘the people (under God) are the original of all just powers’, and given us thereby fair grounds to hope that you really intend their freedom and prosperity; yet the way thereunto being frequently mistaken, and through haste or error of judgement, those who mean the best are many times misled so far to the prejudice of those that trust them as to leave them in a condition nearest to bondage when they have thought they had brought them into a way of freedom. And since woeful experience has manifested this to be a truth, there seems no small reason that you should seriously lay to heart what at present we have to offer for discovery and prevention of so great a danger. And because we have been the first movers in and concerning an Agreement of the People as the most proper and just means for the setting the long and tedious distractions of this nation occasioned by nothing more than the uncertainty of our government, and since there has been an Agreement prepared and presented by some officers of the Army to this honourable House, as what they thought requisite to be agreed unto by the people (you approving thereof) we shall in the first place deliver our apprehensions thereupon.

Shows,

That although we are as earnestly desirous of a safe and well-grounded peace and that a final end were put to all the troubles and miseries of the commonwealth as any sort of men whatsoever, yet, considering upon what grounds we engaged on your part in the late and present wars and how far by our so doing we apprehend ourselves concerned, give us leave before you conclude (as by the treaty in hand) to acquaint you: first with the ground and reason which induced us to aid you against the king and his adherents; secondly what our apprehensions are of this treaty; thirdly, what we expected from you and still do most earnestly desire.

Be pleased therefore to understand that we had not engaged on your part but that we judged this honourable House to be the supreme authority of England, as chosen by and representing the people and entrusted with absolute power for redress of grievances and provision for safety, and that the king was but at the most the chief public officer of this kingdom and accountable to this House, the representative of the people, from whom all just authority is or ought to be derived for the discharge of his office. And if we had not been confident hereof, we had been desperately mad to have taken up arms or to have been aiding assisting in maintaining a war against him – the laws of the land making it expressly a crime no less than treason for any to raise war against the king.

A preparative to all sorts of people

If afflictions make men wise and wisdom direct to happiness, then certainly this nation is not far from such a degree thereof as may compare, if not far exceed, any part of the world, having for some years by-past drunk deep of the cup of misery and sorrow. We bless God our consciences are clear from adding affliction to affliction, having ever laboured from the beginning of our public distractions to compose and reconcile them, and should esteem it the crown of all our temporal felicity that yet we might be instrumental in procuring the peace and prosperity of this commonwealth, the land of our nativity. And therefore according to our promise in our late Manifestation of 14 April 1649, being persuaded of the necessity and justness thereof as a peace-offering to the free people of this nation, we tender this ensuing Agreement, not knowing any more effectual means to put a final period to all our fears and troubles.

It is a way of settlement, though at first much startled at by some in high authority, yet, according to the nature of truth, it hath made its own way into the understanding and taken root in most men's hearts and affections, so that we have real ground to hope – whatever shall become of us – that our earnest desires and endeavours for good to the people will not altogether be null and frustrate.

When I call to mind the general oppression before the parliament exercised upon good people conscientious in the practice of their religion, and that the presbyters did not only suffer as much as any therein but exclaimed and laboured as much as any thereagainst, it is a wonder to me – now that yoke is removed and a blessed opportunity offered by Almighty God to the people and their parliament to make every honest heart glad by allowing a just and contentful freedom to serve God without hypocrisy and according to the persuasion of conscience – that one sect amongst us, that is the presbyters that have been yoke-fellows with us, should not rest satisfied with being free as their brethren but become restless in their contrivances and endeavours till they become lords over us. The wonder is the same as it would have been had the Israelites after the Egyptian bondage5 become task-masters in the Land of Canaan one to another; but it is more in them who have been instructed by our Saviour in that blessed rule of doing unto others what they would have others do unto themselves.

Sir,

To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's. I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-propriety and may right myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man's right – to which I have no right.

To the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent CHARLES, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester, etc.

It may please your Highness,

In part of my acknowledgement to your Highness, I have endeavoured to do honour to the memory of the last King of England that was ancestor to the King your father and yourself; and was that King to whom both Unions may in a sort refer: that of the Roses being in him consummate, and that of the Kingdoms by him begun. Besides, his times deserve it. For he was a wise man, and an excellent King; and yet the times were rough, and full of mutations and rare accidents. And it is with times as it is with ways. Some are more up-hill and down-hill, and some are more flat and plain; and the one is better for the liver,* and the other for the writer. I have not flattered him, but took him to life as well as I could, sitting so far off, and having no better light. It is true, your Highness hath a living pattern, incomparable, of the King your father. But it is not amiss for you also to see one of these ancient pieces. God preserve your Highness.

Composition and sources

In 1621 a concerted anti-government movement within parliament, directed against the growing corruption within James I's administration, claimed its most distinguished victim. Abandoned by James and Buckingham (the real targets of the upheaval), Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor and head of the High Court of Chancery, was impeached on charges of having accepted gifts from suitors whose trials were still pending (a minor offence compared to the venality and corruption rife elsewhere in the Jacobean court). No evidence was ever produced that Bacon's judgements had been affected, indeed the charges against him were led by two suitors who were aggrieved that their gifts to the judge – a common practice in a society based on patron–client relations – had not produced verdicts in their favour. By contemporary standards it was careless of Bacon (or his servants) to have accepted these gifts, but if James and Buckingham had not made him their scapegoat he could doubtless have defended himself by pointing to the corruption around him.

Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy* or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit* and a strong heart to know when to tell truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of politiques* that are the great dissemblers.

Tacitus saith, ‘Livia sorted* well with the arts of her husband and dissimulation of her son’; attributing arts or policy to Augustus, and dissimulation to Tiberius. And again, when Mucianus encourageth Vespasian to take arms against Vitellius, he saith, ‘We rise not against the piercing judgement of Augustus, nor the extreme caution or closeness* of Tiberius.’ These properties*, of arts or policy and dissimulation or closeness, are indeed habits and faculties several*, and to be distinguished. For if a man have that penetration of judgement as he can discern what things are to be laid open, and what to be secreted, and what to be shewed at half lights, and to whom and when (which indeed are arts of state* and arts of life, as Tacitus well calleth them), to him a habit of dissimulation is a hinderance and a poorness. But if a man cannot obtain* to that judgement, then it is left to him generally to be close*, and a dissembler. For where a man cannot choose or vary in particulars, there it is good to take the safest and wariest way in general; like the going* softly, by one that cannot well see.

The greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel. For in other confidences men commit the parts of life; their lands, their goods, their child, their credit, some particular affair; but to such as they make their counsellors, they commit the whole: by how much the more they are obliged to all faith and integrity. The wisest princes need not think it any diminution to their greatness, or derogation* to their sufficiency,* to rely upon counsel. God himself is not without, but hath made it one of the great names* of his blessed Son; The Counsellor. Salomon hath pronounced that ‘in counsel is stability’. Things will have their first or second agitation:* if they be not tossed upon the arguments of counsel, they will be tossed upon the waves of fortune; and be full of inconstancy, doing and undoing, like the reeling* of a drunken man. Salomon's son found the force of counsel, as his father saw the necessity of it. For the beloved kingdom of God was first rent and broken by ill counsel;* upon which counsel there are set for our instruction the two marks whereby bad counsel is for ever best discerned; that it was young counsel, for the persons; and violent counsel, for the matter.

After the decease of that wise and fortunate King, King Henry the Seventh, who died in the height of his prosperity, there followed (as useth to do when the sun setteth so exceeding clear) one of the fairest mornings of a kingdom that hath been known in this land or anywhere else. A young King about eighteen years of age, for stature, strength, making, and beauty, one of the goodliest persons of his time. And although he were given to pleasure, yet he was likewise desirous of glory; so that there was a passage open in his mind by glory for virtue. Neither was he unadorned with learning, though therein he came short of his brother Arthur. He had never any the least pique, difference, or jealousy, with the King his father, which might give any occasion of altering court or counsel upon the change; but all things passed in a still. He was the first heir of the White and of the Red Rose; so that there was no discontented party now left in the kingdom, but all men's hearts turned towards him; and not only their hearts, but their eyes also; for he was the only son of the kingdom. He had no brother; which though it be a comfort for Kings to have, yet it draweth the subjects' eyes a little aside. And yet being a married man in those young years, it promised hope of speedy issue to succeed in the Crown.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings; who, being at the highest, want* matter of desire, which makes their minds more languishing;* and have many representations of perils and shadows, which makes their minds the less clear. And this is one reason also of that effect* which the Scripture speaketh of, that ‘the king's heart is inscrutable’. For multitude of jealousies,* and lack of some predominant desire that should marshal and put in order all the rest, maketh any man's heart hard to find or sound.* Hence it comes likewise, that princes many times make themselves desires, and set their hearts upon toys;* sometimes upon a building; sometimes upon erecting of an order; sometimes upon the advancing* of a person; sometimes upon obtaining excellency in some art or feat of the hand; as Nero for playing on the harp, Domitian for certainty of the hand with the arrow, Commodus for playing at fence, Caracalla for driving chariots, and the like. This seemeth incredible unto those that know not the principle that ‘the mind of man is more cheered and refreshed by profiting in small things, than by standing at a stay in great’.