Finding a name by which to identify the activists which have emerged in the course of Chapters 1 and 2 is fraught with difficulty. Most seventeenth-century names were epithets which began fife as risible attacks coined through opposition. Titles were like mud, slung by hostile forces, but subsequently rationalised by proud and defiant adoption. In the summer of 1647 the main ‘parties’ were described as Royalists, Presbyterians, Independents and Covenanters, but during negotiations between them all, some noted a group in the Commons (the Indepen- dent-ultraists of Chapter 1), together with Levellers and agitators in the army (the ‘populist faction’ of Chapter 2), which constituted a separable party. Lucy Hutchinson thought of the emergent third group in terms of allies of, though not synonymous with, the Levellers, and declared her parliamentarian husband to have been sympathetic to their cause:

Professing an ideology of responsibility for and towards the common weal, they opposed themselves to so-called private interest. They stood against privilege by birth, which seemed to license amorality, and were instead ‘good-hearted’, ‘honest’, ‘sober’ and ‘religious’. David Underdown placed particular emphasis on the word ‘honest’, in that it came to mean the ‘honest party’, the identifying mark of a particular political stance.

Previously, Underdown had referred to them as ‘extreme Independents’, but this does not satisfy, since this group sought to avoid the impression that they were allied to any pre-existent political faction.