The army leadership's hesitation following the purge grew out of the need for genuine reflection with regard to the nature of any future political settlement. The Whitehall debates were designed to facilitate this process and, for Ireton, to forge as broad an Agreement as possible to give legitimacy to any new regime in the hope of establishing and maintaining civil peace. Lilburne, for his part, argued that the Whitehall debates were engineered by the army leadership to keep the Levellers and army radicals occupied. This has been accepted by Underdown. Ireton's approach to the Whitehall debates would suggest otherwise.

Ireton's tone grated upon those with whom he debated, yet his words implied a genuine desire for a broad settlement. This may have had a political element to it by isolating the radicals, but such an approach also derived from the essentially consensual nature of army politics. Massarella, drawing upon letters now in the National Library of Scotland, detects real enthusiasm for the Agreement. Gentles in turn has argued that all ‘the participants, among whom Ireton was preeminent, appeared to share the conviction that they were taking part in deliberations of the greatest political and historical importance’. Taft has shown how the Whitehall debates provide another example of how the army entered into genuine debate across its own membership, with its political allies as well as the Levellers, who it sought to incorporate into any new polity.