THE AGREEMENT OF THE PEOPLE	147
against the army's wishes. Cromwell by this time was thoroughly
out of patience with the presbyterian majority. 'These men',
he told Ludlow, 'will never leave till the army pull them out by
the ears.'^1 Unable to gain Fairfax's consent to use the army to
expel obnoxious members, Cromwell, taking the initiative into
his own hands, achieved his ends by a display offeree. He had
no sooner secured an independent predominance in parliament
than he was faced with the possibility of losing his influence in
the army. By October the inferior officers and rank and file
were exasperated at the long-drawn-out negotiations with the
king and at the failure of parliament to attend to the grievances
they had enunciated in the Solemn Engagement.^2 Five regiments
dismissed the agitators they had originally chosen and elected
others, and their example was generally followed. These new
agitators drew up the Case of the Armie Truly Stated, in which
they asserted that, while they claimed arrears and indemnity as
soldiers, as free commons they demanded rights and liberties.
There was to be a law paramount that parliament should meet
every two years and that it should be elected by all the free-born
of England, of the age of twenty-one or upwards. Since ^eall
power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the
people' and 'their free choice or consent by representors is the
only originall or foundation of all just government', the autho-
rity to make or repeal laws should reside in the house of com-
mons. Finally this document is remarkable for its insistence upon
the removal of general social grievances. In order to relieve the
poor from the oppressive excise upon beer, cloth, stuffs, and all
manufactures and English commodities, the demand was made
for a substitute duty on foreign products.
This was speedily followed by the Agreement of the People,
in which the levellers, as the extremists were beginning to be
called, embodied their constitutional theories. This proposed
that constituencies should conform to population, that the present
parliament should be dissolved on the last day of September
1648, that henceforth biennial parliaments should be chosen,
^1	Ludlow Memoirs, i. 148.
^2	In A Cal to All the Souldiers of the Armie (1647), Cromwell and others are accused
of making the king an idol, of kneeling before him and fawning upon him, 'a man
of blood; over head and eares in the blood of your dearest friends and fellow
commoners'.  If Cromwell should repent, let the soldiers follow him; if not, "ye
have men amongst you as fit to governe, as others to be removed and with a word
yec can create new officers.'