"To which Ireton and Cromwell replied with arguments that seem like prescient apologetics for the compromise of 1688. The common solider had fought for three things: the limitation of the prerogative of the Crown to infringe his personal rights and liberty of conscience: the right to be governed by representatives, even though he had no part in choosing them: and the “freedom of trading to get money, to get estates by”—and of entering upon political rights in this way. On such terms, “Liberty may be had and property not be destroyed.” For 100 years after 1688 this compromise—the oligarchy of landed and commercial property—remained unchallenged, although with a thickening texture of corruption, purchase, and interest whose complexities have been lovingly chronicled by Sir Lewis Namier and his school. The Leveller challenge was altogether dispersed—although the spectre of a Leveller revival was often conjured up, as the Scylla to the Charybdis of Papists and Jacobites between which the good ship Constitution must steer her course. But until the last quarter of the 18th century the temperate republican and libertarian impulses of the “Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthsman” seem to be transfixed within the limits of Ireton’s definition."

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Original Language: English