History of England 1-6

At the beginning of July the spiritual world was to be set in order. An assembly of divines met at Westminster to administer a thorough purging of faith and worship, religious discipline and religious government. They were to draw up a ‘directory’ to take the place of the Book of Common Prayer, and to compile a ‘confession of faith’ to which all men must subscribe. This was the true heart and inspiration for the civil struggle that had so lately begun. The commissioners first met in Henry VII’s chapel but, as the weather grew bleaker, they withdrew into the relative comfort of the Jerusalem Chamber. They sat for five years, and engaged in more than 1,000 meetings from nine in the morning until one or two in the afternoon.

They wept, and fasted, and prayed. Robert Baillie, one of the new Scottish commissioners, described that

after Dr Twisse had begun with a brief prayer, Mr Marshal prayed large two hours most divinely. After, Mr Arrowsmith preached one hour, then a psalm, thereafter Mr Vines prayed near two hours, and Mr Palmer preached one hour, and Mr Seaman prayed near two hours, then a psalm. After Mr Henderson brought them to a short, sweet conference of the heart confessed in the assembly, and other seen faults to be remedied, and the convenience to preach against all sects, especially Baptists and antinomians.

The syntax might be faulty, but the fervour is evident.

When they were not at prayer they debated predestination, election, justification and reprobation. They also discussed more political affairs. Ought the state to impose one form of religion, or should the free will of the individual decide the matter? Ought the state to punish those of a faith different from that of the majority? For a month they considered the role of individual congregations within the broad unity of a Presbyterian regime. What did it say in Scripture about these topics? How had the Church of Antioch been related to the Church of Jerusalem? Thus solemnly they debated with one another. The Scottish Presbyterian divines argued with their English puritan counterparts; the English were all in favour of a ‘civil league’ that would keep ‘a door open in England to independency’ while the Scots favoured a ‘religious covenant’. It was never likely, however, that the English would accept the full rigour of the Scottish religion or that parliament would concede predominance to any national Church. Oliver Cromwell himself was a notable Independent who favoured toleration and plurality; many of the leaders of the parliamentary army shared his convictions.

A few days after the formal opening of the Westminster assembly Essex made a startling proposal. He suggested that the terms of truce given to Charles at Oxford should be offered to him again. If the king refused them once more, he should withdraw from the field so that the two armies could settle the matter in one pitched battle. It was a form of duel. This proposition could not be construed as a serious one, but it does emphasize the attachment of Essex to an old chivalric code. This was not, however, an age of chivalry. Pym declared the notion to be ‘full of hazard and full of danger’. It was the first serious indication from Essex of weakness or doubt about the progress of the war, and it was the cause of much apprehension. He was now, according to a newsletter, the Parliament Scout, ‘abused in pictures, censored in pulpits, dishonoured in the table talk of the common people’.

A number of reversals dismayed the parliament. At Roundway Down, in Wiltshire, a parliamentary army was vanquished and those who survived were taken prisoner; among them were the members of a regiment completely clad in armour, known as ‘the Lobsters’. At Chalgrove, in Oxfordshire, the royalists were the victors again and John Hampden died of his wounds. Prince Rupert stormed and overcame Bristol, the second city of the kingdom; this victory was followed by the surrender of Poole and Dorchester, Portland and Weymouth. Gainsborough and Lincoln would soon be lost.

A ‘peace party’ had now grown up in the Lords, thoroughly shaken by news of the defeats, but Pym and his cohorts faced them down with the help of intimidation by the London mobs. But the mobile vulgus could be fickle. In the second week of August 2,000 or 3,000 women descended on Westminster with white ribbons in their hats. Simonds D’Ewes recorded that they ‘came down in great confusion and came to the very door of the House of Commons, and there cried as in diverse other places, Peace, Peace’. He added that they ‘fell upon all that have short hair’ and cried out, ‘A roundhead! A roundhead!’

Parliament was rendered even more unpopular by the imposition of a new tax called ‘excise’, a flat rate charged upon commodities such as meat, salt and beer. The king in turn raised money through voluntary donations and a tax raised on the royalist counties known as ‘the contribution’; nevertheless his funds were very much lower than those of parliament.

Charles had again taken the offensive and was marching towards Gloucester. Cromwell wrote to parliament that ‘you must act lively! Do it without distraction! Neglect no means!’ On 10 August the royalist army had reached the city; Charles invited the officers of Gloucester to submit and, on their refusal, he encircled it and laid siege for three weeks without gaining entry. On 5 September a parliamentary force under the command of the earl of Essex arrived on the scene and, in the face of failure and exhaustion, Charles’s forces withdrew.

It was the first major success of parliament for many months, and was greeted by jubilation in London and Westminster. In his history of the war Clarendon wrote that ‘the Parliament had time to recover their broken forces and more broken spirits, and may acknowledge to this rise the greatness to which they afterwards aspired’. He also wrote that on the royalist side there was ‘nothing but dejection of mind, discontent and secret mutiny’. On the withdrawal from Gloucester the prince of Wales asked his father if they were going home. Charles replied that ‘we have no home’.

The forces of the earl of Essex could not remain in Gloucester indefinitely, since they were needed elsewhere. The royalist army waited in the neighbourhood for their eventual withdrawal, with the purpose of cutting them off from London. For a few days the troops turned and manoeuvred, marched and counter-marched, both sides making for London. The king’s men spent one unhappy night of wind and rain before pursuing the enemy as far as the town of Newbury in west Berkshire. On 20 September a battle ensued that lasted all day with the parliamentary forces pushing slowly against the royalists through winding lanes and hedges; the soldiers of the king held on to their position, keeping the enemy from the road to London, but they eventually withdrew that night. They were thoroughly exhausted, and it seems likely that they had run out of ammunition. It had not been a battle notable for tactics or for strategy but rather a grim and bloodstained stalemate; all had depended, in the phrase of the period, on ‘push of pike’. Both sides of course claimed the victory.

It is easy to recite the names and dates of battles but less simple to describe their nature. In truth they were composed of a hundred desperate struggles between individuals who had no notion of what was going on around them; there would have been waves of panic fear when a group of men was consumed with the horror of dying and fled; it would have been impossible for the commanders to direct the action except by impetuous chance and sudden instinct. It was a flailing, wavering, shuddering mass of men and horses. Victory, or defeat, was largely a matter of chance.

The terror and confusion were such that both sides believed that they had advanced upon the burning gates of hell. A royalist captain, Richard Atkyns, recalled of one conflict that

the air was so darkened by the smoke of the powder that for a quarter of an hour together (I dare say), there was no light seen, but what the fire of volleys shot gave: and ’twas the greatest storm that I ever saw, in which thought I knew not whither to go, nor what to do, my horse had two or three musket bullets in him immediately which made him tremble under me at a rate, and I could hardly with spurs keep him from lying down, but he did me the service to carry me off to a led horse, and then died.

A more prominent royalist commander, William Cavendish, described how ‘the two main bodies joining made such a noise with shot and clamour of shouting, that we lost our ears, and the smoke of powder was so thick that we saw no light, but what proceeded from the mouth of guns’. Chaos descended. The savage shouts, and the screams of the wounded or the dying, resounded through the darkened air.

26

The women of war

The reader may grow tired of the deeds of arms and men. If women were not exactly invisible in the period of civil war, they were still at a notable disadvantage in the affairs of the world. Yet exceptions can be found. In the summer of 1638 Lucy Apsley married John Hutchinson, who at the opening of the war enlisted in the parliamentary army. He was an Independent, like Cromwell, and was therefore acceptable to the army command; in 1643 he was appointed to be governor of Nottingham Castle. He was one of those who eventually signed the king’s death warrant. Some years after the war was over Lucy Hutchinson wrote for her eldest son an account of this unhappy time. It was eventually published under the title of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.

The book is not a history of the war in the style of Clarendon, but rather a vivid and intimate account of its proceedings from the point of view of a committed participant. Although Lucy Hutchinson is ostensibly writing an encomium on the life and career of her husband, her own character and beliefs continually break through. She even provides a brief sketch of her early years that emphasizes how unusual she was among her contemporaries. She disliked plying the obligatory needle and thread, and had a horror of playing with other children. When she was forced to mingle with her young contemporaries she delivered lectures to them and made it quite plain that she detested their company. She abhorred their ‘babies’, better known now as dolls. She infinitely preferred the ‘serious discourses’ of the adults which she memorized and repeated. In the time allowed for play she preferred to apply herself to her books.

So the account of the war itself springs from the pen of a spirited and remarkable character. It is not a record of battles and sieges, but in large part a collection of character portraits and of first-hand accounts of life in the field of conflict. She describes these portraits as ‘digressions’ but in fact they convey the human face of the war, with all its threats and suspicions, hypocrisies and lies. She rejects the name of ‘roundhead’ for her husband, for example, on the grounds that he had a full head of hair. Since it was not cropped short, however, his puritan comrades distrusted him.

Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir is in fact most revealing for its account of the internecine suspicion and conflict between the members of the puritan party; John Hutchinson was at odds with his army council in Nottingham, for example, while the members of parliament and the army were always in conflict. Even the leaders of the various parliamentary contingents were themselves ‘so emulous of one another, and so refractory to commands, and so peeking in all punctilios of superiority’ that it was surprising they could ride together on the same field.

A command came from Westminster for John Hutchinson to gather together all the horse he could spare for the relief of Montgomery Castle; as a consequence, he proceeded to consult with the political committee of the local members of parliament that had oversight of Nottingham. Lucy Hutchinson reports that her husband asked that a number of soldiers be requisitioned, to which request they replied ‘None’. Hutchinson, falling into a rage, reminded the committee that a direct order from parliament had to be obeyed. She describes the members as ‘factious little people’ who fomented squabbles, divisions, delays and scandals. Their behaviour only added to the chaos of war.

She herself was courageous at times of crisis. A few months before her husband took charge of Nottingham he was run to ground in Leicester, where a royal warrant was issued for his arrest. A sudden trumpet alerted her family to the presence of the king’s troops but Hutchinson ‘stayed not to see them, but went out at the other end as they came in’; he may have escaped through one of the city gates, or perhaps through a ‘geat’ or opening. Lucy Hutchinson, then heavily pregnant, remained to confront the officers.

Captain: ‘It is a pity you should have a husband so unworthy of you that he has entered some faction and dare not be seen with you.’

Lucy Hutchinson: ‘You are mistaken sir. My husband would not hide himself from you, or not dare to show his face.’

Then Lucy told a lie. She called down her brother-in-law, George Hutchinson, and announced to the captain that this man was in truth her husband. The subterfuge worked; John Hutchinson got clean away while George eventually obtained his liberty. It was a close-run thing, however, and is testimony to the dreadful risks that Lucy Hutchinson was willing to run.

She recounts in some detail the siege of Nottingham by the king’s army, marked by no great strategic initiative but by endless bickering and argument among those who were besieged. ‘What is the cause to me,’ one doctor asked John Hutchinson, ‘if my goods be lost?’

‘You might prevent that hazard by securing them in the castle.’

‘It pities me to spoil them. I had rather have the enemy have them than that they should be spoiled in the removal.’ The doctor then rebuked Hutchinson ‘for countenancing the godly townsmen’ to whom he referred as ‘puritanical prick-eared rascals’. He infinitely preferred the ‘malignants’ or royalists.

When John Hutchinson was eventually charged with colluding in the execution of the king, after the war was over, Lucy Hutchinson forged a letter in his name to the Speaker of the House of Commons with the request that he should not be taken into custody but called to account when he was needed. Her forgery was accepted. She was a formidable woman. Her husband, however, eventually died in prison for complicity in another plot. He gives the impression of being an impulsive and contentious man who was supported by a strong-minded and strong-principled woman; it is impossible to estimate how many other such relationships flourished in the Civil War. The evidence suggests, however, from the exploits of Lucy Hutchinson to the female crowds who often assembled at Westminster, that there was a tradition of adventurous women who helped to fuel the conflict. In the ballad literature of the time it is suggested that some women dressed as men in order to join the armies of either side.

It should be noted of course that Lucy Hutchinson came from a relatively privileged family and was not in that sense necessarily representative of her sex; but older and deeper traditions of female liberty persisted still. Puritanism itself was uniquely susceptible to the authority of women, and actively promoted a partnership of the sexes in religious duties and devotions; many puritan women became part of an informal network of communication, for example, exchanging manuscripts and treatises between neighbouring families. Some of them also took part in forming congregations and nominating ministers. Letters, manuscripts and commonplace books testify to a distinct religious and intellectual female community.

The wives of certain Baptist, and ‘leveller’, leaders shared their husbands’ faith to the extent that they inhabited the same prison cells. Other women were intent upon defending their homes when they were placed under siege. Lady Elizabeth Dowdall defended Kilfenny Castle, in Limerick, on her own initiative even though her husband was himself on the premises. She wrote that on ‘the ninth of January, the High Sheriff of the county, and all the power of the county, came with three thousand men to besiege me. They brought two sows [cannon] and thirty scaling-ladders against me. They wrote many attempting letters to me to yield to them which I answered with contempt and scorn.’

Other royalist women played their own part in the civil struggle. Ann, Lady Fanshawe, was the daughter of Sir John Harrison, a child of superior birth who was educated in the usual fashion with needle, thread, virginals and lute; but above all else she enjoyed riding and ‘was I wild to that degree … I was that which we graver people call a hoyting girl’. All the clichés and stereotypes of childhood tend to fall apart in the face of direct testimony. Were girls and women really as servile or as domesticated as the courtesy books suggest? Could all the domestic novels, the family portraits and the sentimental poetry have got it wrong? Perhaps only the plays, with their rampant and mischievous women, got it right.

Fanshawe came from a fiercely royalist family and, at the opening of hostilities, her brother joined the king at Nottingham; her father was threatened with transportation to ‘the plantations’ while all of his goods were sequestrated by parliament. He was put under house arrest, but managed to escape and to join the king at Oxford. She fled with him, as she put it, ‘from as good houses as any gentlemen of England … to a baker’s house in an obscure street’. But she coped with the overcrowding, the sickness, the plague, the lack of supplies and the general fear of catastrophe. This was wartime Oxford.

In 1644 she married her second cousin, Sir Richard Fanshawe, who was even then a member of the council attached to the prince of Wales with the title of secretary of war. As such he and his family moved in tandem with the prince’s court. Ann Fanshawe rarely writes of the war itself but reserves her comments for the peripatetic life she was obliged to endure. She was not without resource. She procured a pass for her husband through the good offices of ‘a great Parliament man whose wife had formerly been obliged to our family’. She carried £300 of money from London to Paris without being searched. The household travelled to Cork, perhaps to gain money or support, but at the beginning of October 1649, ‘by a fall of a stumbling horse (being with child), broke my left wrist’.

While she lay in bed that night, her wrist bound, she was roused by the news that the Irish were firing the town after it had been taken by Cromwell. Her husband had gone to Kinsale on business; pregnant and in pain she gathered together her husband’s manuscripts for fear of seizure and managed to pack in wooden crates all of their portable belongings, including clothes and linen; she also managed to conceal £1,000 in gold or silver which, to their puritan assailants, would have been a treasure worth killing for. At three o’clock in the morning, attended only by a man and a maid, she walked by the light of a taper into the crowded marketplace where she was confronted by ‘an unruly tumult with their swords in their hands’.

Bravely enough, she demanded to see the commander-in-chief of the Protestant forces. By great good fortune he had once served with Sir Richard Fanshawe, in different circumstances, and under the weight of her entreaties and in light of her evident plight he granted her a safe conduct. Bearing the pass she walked unmolested ‘through thousands of naked swords’ until she reached Red Abbey, a fourteenth-century Augustinian establishment that acted as a meeting place. Here she took out some loose coin and hired a neighbour’s cart, into which she piled all of her belongings, before making her way to her husband in Kinsale. It is a story of bravery to match any told by the soldiers of either side.

On another stage of her adventure she was aboard a Dutch ship with her husband when a Turkish galley, well manned, advanced towards them. She was ordered by the captain to go below, on the grounds that if the Turks saw a woman they would know the ship to be part of a merchant fleet and therefore attack it. If they spied only men, they might believe it to be a man-of-war. Once she had gone below she called for the cabin boy and, giving him half a crown, purchased his cap and coat. Suitably concealed she returned to her husband’s side on deck.

She seems to have been an expert at disguise. On another occasion she dressed herself as a ‘plain’ or ‘lowly’ woman in order to obtain a pass for a journey to Paris. She made her way to the parliamentary military headquarters at Wallingford House in Whitehall.

‘Woman, what is your husband and your name?’

‘Sir, he is a young merchant, and my name is Anne Harrison.’

‘Well, it will cost you a crown.’

‘That is a great sum for me but, pray, put in a man, my maid, and three children.’

‘A malignant would give me five pounds for such a pass.’

Once she had received it she managed by careful penwork to change the name from ‘Harrison’ to ‘Fanshawe’; there was no need for further concealment because she was already known to the ‘searchers’ at Dover, having passed that way before.

‘Madame,’ one of the ‘searchers’ told her, ‘I little thought that they would give pass to so great a malignant, especially in such a troublesome time as this.’

Even in times of war certain known opponents could still come and go as they pleased.

Ann Fanshawe wrote her memoirs in the 1670s, after the death of her husband, for the benefit and education of her family. They are a notable addition to the literature of the civil conflict, but they also throw an indirect but welcome light upon the otherwise generally hidden women of the war.

27

The face of God

In the middle of November 1643, parliament announced itself to be the supreme power in the land by authorizing the use of a ‘great seal’ to replace that of the king; on one side were the arms of England and Ireland while on the other was engraved an image of the Commons sitting in their chamber. One of their most important members, however, was no longer present. John Pym had been the key strategist of the parliamentary cause; he had been the quiet revolutionary, playing his cards largely behind the scenes, exploiting temporary setbacks or victories, and in some part controlling the mobs of London. Cautiously and slowly he had maintained the direction and impetus of the movement against the king.

His death from cancer of the lower bowel only reinforced the divisions and factions at Westminster, where some wished for an honourable settlement with the king and others demanded total victory. Disagreements were also evident in the royal court at Oxford, where questions of immediate tactics and general strategy were furiously debated; some wanted an attack upon London, for example, while others favoured the capture of the southwest. One of the king’s courtiers, Endymion Porter, remarked that God would have to intervene in order to cure all the divisions between the royal supporters; as is so often the case, the most bitter fights were between those on the same side.

At the end of January 1644, Charles summoned a parliament of his supporters at Oxford to which came the great majority of the Lords and approximately one third of the Commons. There were now two parliaments in the country striving for mastery. The ceremony for the opening of the Oxford parliament took place in Christ Church Hall, and in his customary address the king said that ‘he desired to receive any advice from them which they thought would be suitable to the miserable and distracted condition of the kingdom’. He had also taken the precaution of bringing over from Ireland some of the regiments of the army he had dispatched to extirpate the rebels.

In the following month the Westminster parliament established a ‘committee of both kingdoms’. In one of the most important circumstances of the war 20,000 Scots had already, in the middle of January, crossed the border to support the parliamentary cause; after prolonged negotiations with their English allies, they had come to defend the common Protestant faith in the form of a ‘solemn league and covenant’ between the two nations. It had been voted by parliament at the beginning of February that this covenant should be taken and sworn by every Englishman over the age of eighteen; the names of those who refused to take the oath would be sent to Westminster. A new committee, composed of English and Scottish representatives, would manage the direction of the war; among its members were the earl of Essex and Oliver Cromwell.

The advantage lay now for the first time with parliament. In a battle at Cheriton in Hampshire, the royalist forces were overwhelmingly defeated; the parliamentary cavalry was now more than a match for its royalist counterpart. Oliver Cromwell himself had been promoted to become lieutenant-general of the ‘eastern association’, where he began to form the cavalries of seven counties into a coherent fighting force. With its command of London and many of the significant ports, in any case, the financial resources of parliament were far greater than those of the king. Charles had armies of approximately half the size of those commanded by his enemy. Many people, on both sides, recognized that his cause would suffer the more the war was prolonged.

In the early summer of the year two parliamentary armies, under the command of the earl of Essex and Sir William Waller respectively, advanced upon Oxford in order to hold the king in a vice of their making. The king managed to make his escape with 7,000 men and, on 6 June, fled to Worcester. He had also received news that his forces in York were besieged, and wrote from Worcester to Prince Rupert ‘in extreme necessity’. Charles urged his nephew to ride to the relief of York in order to save the cause.

Prince Rupert arrived outside York, in the last days of June, only to find that the forces of the parliamentary besiegers had made a tactical retreat. Animated by bravado or by faith in his strategy he pursued his enemy to Marston Moor, in the north of the country, for what might have been a final confrontation. The parliamentary soldiers, wearing white handkerchiefs or white pieces of paper in their caps, were the stronger force; they were the first to charge, from the advantage of higher ground, and their sudden onslaught scattered the royalists. An eyewitness, Arthur Trevor, wrote that ‘the runaways on both sides were so many, so breathless, so speechless, so full of fears, that I should not have taken them for men’.

In what was the largest battle ever fought on English soil, 4,000 of the king’s troops had been killed, and his army had disintegrated. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Valentine Walton, Cromwell said of the enemy that ‘God made them as stubble to our swords’. Prince Rupert, in a spirit of mockery rather than admiration, dubbed the victorious commanders as ‘Ironsides’. The cities of York and Newcastle surrendered. It was a notable victory for parliament and, at least in retrospect, it marked a turning point of the civil war.

The victory of Cromwell at Marston Moor lifted him to eminence in parliament no less than on the field of battle. One of his most notable opponents, the earl of Clarendon, admitted that he possessed ‘a great spirit, an admirable circumspection and sagacity, and a most magnanimous resolution’. He was resolute and fearless, and thus a fitting adversary for a king.

He had not distinguished himself in early life and seems happy to have farmed the flat land of the southeast midlands. He once declared that ‘I was by birth a gentleman living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity’. He was one of what were called the ‘middling sort’. Yet even in that enviable condition he was not free from superstitious terror, and in his first years of married life he consulted a London physician who recorded in his casebook that Cromwell was ‘valde melancholicus’; by this he meant that his patient was nervous or depressed to an abnormal degree. Another doctor had suggested that he suffered from hypochondria and indeed, under stress or nervous excitement, he would sometimes fall ill.

His religion was the most important aspect of his character. His depression of spirits may have been the context or the catalyst for the sudden revelation – we do not know when it was vouchsafed – that he was one of ‘the elect’. The blinding light of God’s grace surrounded him, and he was transformed. He wrote to his cousin, Elizabeth St John, that ‘I live (you know where) in Mesheck, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies blackness; yet the Lord forsaketh me not’. The reference is to the 120th psalm: ‘Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!’ This scriptural allusiveness and simple piety are at the heart of Cromwell’s faith.

He knew that he had been saved by the grace of God, and the certainty of redemption lay behind all of his judgements; he believed implicitly in the power of divine will to guide the actions of men. He waited on providence. He prayed for a sign. He wrote that ‘we follow the Lord that goeth before’. He sought for the divine meaning of the events occurring around him and saw all things in the context of the eternity of God. Since he had a private sense of what he called ‘true knowledge’ or ‘life eternal’, he was impatient of religious debate and doctrinal niceties. What did they matter before the overwhelming power of God? He once said that ‘I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted among us than that one of God’s children should be persecuted’.

His first years in parliament were not particularly auspicious; he was regarded as a forceful and impetuous, rather than elegant, speaker whose manner was sometimes clumsy or unprepossessing. But together with his family connections at Westminster – the puritan party was in some sense a wide circle of relatives – he fought steadily and assiduously for the parliamentary cause. He was adept at committee work, and was blessed with an acute understanding of human character. Yet he professed not to have been ambitious on his own behalf but rather for the cause he had chosen.

Cromwell was of singular appearance. The London doctor whom he had consulted noted that he had pimples upon his face. These seem to have been supplanted by warts on his chin and forehead. His thick brown hair was always worn long over the collar, and he had a slim moustache; a tuft of hair lay just below his lower lip. He had a prominent nose and one of his officers, Arthur Haselrig, once said to him that ‘if you prove false, I will never trust a fellow with a big nose again’; his eyes, in colour somewhere between green and grey, were described by Andrew Marvell as being of ‘piercing sweetness’. He was about 5 feet 10 inches in height and, according to his steward, John Maidstone, ‘his body was well compact and strong’; he had a ‘fiery’ temperament but was very quickly settled, and was ‘compassionate … even to an effeminate measure’. He was often boisterous in company, with a taste for rough country humour; there were times indeed when, according to Richard Baxter, he displayed too much ‘vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much’.

Like his opponents he thoroughly enjoyed hawking and the pursuits of the field; he also liked to play bowls. He had a great love of music and one of his colleagues, Bulstrode Whitelocke, recalled that ‘he would sometimes be very cheerful with us, and laying aside his greatness he would be exceeding familiar with us, and by way of diversion would make verses with us and everyone must try his fancy. He commonly called for tobacco, pipes and a candle, and would now and then take tobacco himself; then he would fall again to his serious and great business.’

That great business was, at the latter end of 1644, to drive the war forward until the king surrendered; in this purpose, however, he was not supported by other parliamentary commanders. The earl of Essex and the earl of Manchester, in particular, were in favour of some accommodation with Charles; it was suspected by some, therefore, that they were less than zealous in their military offensives. Manchester used to say that it was easy to begin a war, but no one could tell where it would end. He was in command of the eastern association, with Cromwell as his lieutenant-general, and the earl’s desire for peace led to a complete breakdown in trust between the two men. Manchester in particular had an impatient dislike of sectarians and what he called ‘fanatics’, among whom he placed Cromwell himself.

At a council of war the following exchange took place.

Manchester: If we beat the king ninety and nine times yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once we shall all be hanged and our posterity made slaves.

Cromwell: My lord, if this be so why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it ever so base.

Cromwell had already written to his brother-in-law that ‘we have some among us much slow in action’.

The argument between the two military commanders came to a head after an inconclusive battle with the king at Newbury, where it seemed that Manchester had deliberately held back his army. He is supposed to have said to one of his colleagues, who urged instant action, that ‘thou art a bloody fellow. God send us peace, for God does never prosper us in our victories to make them clear victories.’ It was now believed, by Cromwell and others, that Manchester had become a traitor to the cause.

Towards the end of November Cromwell came into the Commons in order to denounce Manchester; the earl’s ‘backwardness of all action’ and his ‘averseness to engagement’ sprang from his unwillingness to prosecute the war ‘to a full victory’. He was therefore questioning his loyalty. Three days later Manchester returned fire, in the Lords, and charged his opponent with insubordination and slander. Cromwell was accused of saying that he hoped for a day when there would be no peers left in England. The ‘peace party’ on the parliamentary side now considered a move to impeach Cromwell for treason, but was persuaded that it was not wise to do so. A single sheet of print was found in the streets of the city attacking Essex and Manchester with the words ‘Alas poor parliament, how art thou betrayed!’

On 9 December Cromwell pressed home his advantage. He told the Commons that ‘it is now a time to speak, or forever hold the tongue. The important occasion now is no less than to save a nation out of a bleeding, nay almost dying, condition which the long continuance of war hath already brought it into, so that without a more speedy, effectual and vigorous prosecution of the war … we shall make the kingdom weary of us and hate the name of Parliament’. He realized that only a clear victory over the king would decide the issue.

The eastern association had already informed the ‘committee of both kingdoms’ that local contributions were not enough to maintain an army, and the committee therefore decided ‘to consider of a frame or model of the whole militia’. This was Cromwell’s opportunity. It had become time to reorganize the various armies on a different basis, and for Cromwell the most obvious model was that of his own regiment of ‘godly’ men. He had said that ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’.

Immediately after Cromwell’s speech another member of the Commons, Zouch Tate, rose to suggest a thorough reorganization of the army. It was first necessary to dismiss such fractious and incompetent commanders as Essex and Manchester. So Tate, no doubt in collaboration with Cromwell, proposed what was called ‘a self-denying ordinance’ by means of which no member of either house could take on a military command or an official place in the state. This removed at a stroke the noble earls. In theory it also removed Cromwell but it was widely and correctly believed that an exception would be made for such a successful military leader. The whole business might therefore be seen as an enterprising bid by Cromwell for sole command.

It may be worth remarking that this session of parliament was the one that abolished Christmas. The traditional festival was deemed by the Commons to encourage ‘liberty to carnal and sensual delights’ and instead the day was to become one of fast and penance.

Cromwell had told his colleagues that until ‘the whole army were new modelled and governed under a stricter discipline’ there would be no certain or ultimate victory. So the force became known as the New Model Army, known to its enemies as the ‘New Noddle’. It was effectively a standing army from which all aristocratic commanders had been displaced; no English army had ever before been so constituted. It was to be organized on a national basis, and financed by a new national tax; the morale of the soldiers would therefore be maintained by consistent payment. It was to be professional, disciplined and purposeful. Its commander, known as ‘Black Tom’ for his muddy complexion, was Sir Thomas Fairfax, who had previously been in charge of parliament’s northern army.

It was an amalgamation of older regiments rather than a new army, but it was designed to be a more stable and coherent force drawn up with the sole purpose of defeating the king in battle. That is why Essex and Manchester had been removed from any military command. The commission given to Fairfax made no mention of the old provision that he was bound to preserve the king’s safety on the field of battle. New muskets, swords and pistols were manufactured; the coats of the infantry were of red cloth, becoming the standard uniform for the next 200 years.

Some of its officers believed in a religious mission for themselves and their soldiers; Cromwell’s regiment, for example, considered itself to be a ‘gathered Church’. ‘Go now,’ one preacher declared, ‘and fight the battles of the Lord!’ It is unlikely that the rest of the army shared that godly purpose, but they may have been animated by the zeal of their more pious fellows.

But what was now meant by the godly? Cromwell and his colleagues favoured the Independent cause in religion, effectively espousing toleration in England; the earl of Manchester and his supporters had adopted the Presbyterian cause with no room for other sects or groups. In this endeavour they were supported by their Scottish allies. Even while parliament was debating the arrangements of the new army, the Book of Common Prayer was abolished and a puritan Directory of Worship took its place; this new text was to be delivered to the people by means of a national Presbyterian system. That system was not destined to last for very long.

One of the great expositors of the Book of Common Prayer was now led to the scaffold. On 10 January 1645, Archbishop Laud was taken from the Tower to the place of death on Tower Hill. He told the people assembled there that ‘this is a very uncomfortable place’. As he knelt for the executioner, he prayed aloud for ‘grace of repentance to all bloodthirsty people, but if they will not repent, O Lord, confound all their devices’. Essex lamented the old man’s death. ‘Is this’, he asked, ‘the liberty which we promised to maintain with our blood?’ The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that ‘it was done for the entertainment of the Scots’. It had been a year of much blood.

There was now very little intention of compromise on either side, but some brief negotiations took place at Uxbridge in February 1645. The two parties divided the town, with the parliamentary team in one inn and the royalist delegation in the other. Nothing was achieved, of course, but the king was still sanguine about his chances. Despite the disaster at Marston Moor he had not yet been decisively defeated, and he believed that the divisions in the opposite party between Independents and Presbyterians would work to his advantage. He was calm and indomitable, sustained by his belief that no one could touch the Lord’s anointed. His commanders, and his forces, were still a match for those of parliament.

He had also received welcome news from Scotland where his principal supporter, the earl of Montrose, had already won notable victories over the Scottish covenanters. ‘Give me leave’, Montrose wrote to him, ‘with all humility to assure your majesty that through God’s blessing I am in the fairest hopes of reducing this kingdom to your majesty’s obedience.’ This in turn rendered the covenanting army in the north uneasy, distracted by the argument that they should withdraw from England and return to fight for their home territory. Charles was firmly persuaded that the fortunes of battle might still be with him.

The new campaign opened in the spring of 1645. At the beginning of May the New Model Army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, was about to begin the siege of Oxford. In the course of this action he received another message from Westminster. Charles had summarily taken his army into the east midlands, where he stormed and sacked the parliamentary town of Leicester. Fairfax now decided to follow him, with Oliver Cromwell as his second-in-command.

The great confrontation could no longer be delayed. On 14 June the two armies were in the fields outside the village of Naseby, in Leicestershire, where the parliamentary army had a large advantage in numbers. When the parliamentary forces made a tactical withdrawal to reach higher ground, Prince Rupert mistook the movement for a retreat; so with his cavalry he made for the enemy. Cromwell managed to beat them back, and then charged the royalist infantry. The king’s soldiers resisted for a while but, under the combined assault of Fairfax and Cromwell, they fell apart and fled. They were pursued by the parliamentary troopers for 14 miles before they reached the safety of Leicester.

Naseby was a devastating defeat for the king. His infantry had been destroyed and 5,000 of his men, together with 500 officers, had been captured; his arms and artillery had been taken. The women of the royalist camp were treated with great ferocity; those from Ireland were ‘knocked on the head’ – killed is another word – while those from England had their faces slashed with daggers. Oliver Cromwell, after the battle, declared that ‘this is none other than the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory’. Clarendon concluded that at Naseby ‘the king and the kingdom were lost’.

For the king, indignity was heaped upon dismay. Among the wagons captured after the battle was one that contained all of his private correspondence. When the king’s cabinet was opened, it revealed the extent of his dealings with the Irish Catholics in search of troops; it also disclosed his plans to use French, or Swedish, soldiers for the sake of his cause. It could now be asserted that the New Model Army was truly a national army ready to defend England, and at Naseby it had decisively proved its worth. It had also demonstrated that the Independent cause was now the strongest. Cromwell himself was the man singled out for future glory and, according to Bulstrode Whitelocke, he began ‘to grow great even to the envy of many’. Yet many also believed that God was with him.

Most of the king’s supporters and councillors believed that his case was desperate, and that he must yield to necessity by negotiating with parliament. The king himself on occasions feared the worst and, in a secret letter to his son, wrote that ‘if I should at any time be taken prisoner by the rebels, I command you … never to yield to any conditions that are dishonourable, unsafe to your person, or derogatory to royal authority’. Yet he refused to have ‘melancholy men’ about him; he chose to entertain himself with sports and pastimes. He wandered about the country between Hereford, Oxford and Newark; these were three of his last remaining fortresses in his kingdom.

Prince Rupert, whose rashness may have cost Charles the battle of Naseby, now hurried on to Bristol; he needed to make that city safe against an enemy army that might descend upon it at any moment. From there he wrote to a colleague that ‘his majesty hath now no way left to preserve his posterity, kingdom and nobility, but by a treaty’. When he was shown the letter the king was incensed. In his reply he wrote that in his role as a soldier or statesman ‘I must say there is no probability but of my ruin’; yet as a king and a Christian he knew that ‘God will not suffer rebels and traitors to prosper’.

This was not necessarily so. At Langport to the south of Bristol, on 10 July 1645, the New Model Army, fresh from its victory at Naseby, decisively defeated the royalist army of the southwest; the cavalry of the king had been destroyed, and his last hope of winning the contest seemed to be over. Cromwell exulted. ‘To see this,’ he said, ‘is it not to see the face of God?’

28

The mansion house of liberty

One parliamentary occasion has gone unnoticed in this account of victories and defeats on the field. An ordinance of 14 June 1643 had been passed ‘to prevent and suppress the licence of printing’. It was declared necessary to suppress the ‘great late abuses and frequent disorders in printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books to the great defamation of religion and government’; a committee of censors, therefore, was appointed to license new publications and to seize any that were unlicensed.

One republican deplored what he considered to be this reversion to the evil practices of the past that had no place in the new world for which he so devoutly wished. The Presbyterian members of parliament, who were largely behind the measure, might as well ‘kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image: but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth: but a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.’ This is the unmistakable prose of John Milton.

Milton was a Londoner animated by a spirit of enquiry and an awareness of his own genius. From an early age he pored over his books by candlelight in Bread Street, brooding over fables and histories until he had knowledge and time enough to compose the fables and history of his own country. He was a born republican, averse to authority and discipline in any of its forms. There would come a time when he would denounce Charles I in Latin, so that the world might hear. He declared that England was ‘the elect nation’, a prophecy endorsed by other clerics and divines of the period, thus emphasizing the millennial aspirations of the seventeenth century.

In 1637, in his twenty-ninth year, Milton wrote in a letter that ‘my genius is such that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period in my studies’. He read as if for life; for him, it was life. Yet the storms of the world would soon surround him, obscuring for a time that bright particular star by which he set his course.

He had studied at Cambridge and followed his period at that university with an intensive course of private scholarship that continued for some eight years. Blessed with a fair face, and an even fairer mind, he began a tour among the devoted scholars and learned poets of Europe; his voyage of sweet discovery was curtailed, however, when he was obliged to return to London in 1639 at the time of the Bishops’ War.

He had studied with the overriding ambition to become a poet that the world would not willingly ignore. But the desperation of the age turned him from poetry to prose, to the language of men in debate and conflict. He began writing his pamphlets against the bishops in 1641 and indulged his taste for polemic at a time of delusion and disagreement. In The Reason of Church Government he denounced those prelates who ‘have glutted their ingrateful bodies’ with ‘corrupt and servile doctrines’; they were fed ‘scraggy and thorny lectures … a hackney course of literature’ and were filled with ‘strumpet flatteries … corrupt and putrid ointment’. They were scum and harlots and open sepulchres. The language of the streets, which he heard all around him, came naturally to a Cockney visionary.

Milton wrote his treatise Areopagitica in Aldersgate Street; but the little pamphlet in due course made its way around the world as the most eloquent and inspiring defence of the freedom of expression. For this founding statement upon the liberty of speech he modelled himself upon the Attic orators who had once spoken to the Athenian people; the Areopagus was the rock upon which the final court of appeal held its sessions. Milton was clearly adverting to the republican and even democratic status of the English parliament which he described as ‘that supreme and majestic tribunal’. He wrote copiously and elegantly, constructing sentences that have been described as baroque palaces, but all the time his style was tempered by the urgency and seriousness of the puritan cause.

Areopagitica was ready for the press by the autumn of 1644, two or three months after Cromwell’s victory at Marston Moor; hopes for the Independent cause were high, and Milton himself was touched by the optimism of the moment. All was still possible. On the title page was printed:

AREOPAGITICA

A SPEECH OF MR JOHN MILTON

For the Liberty of UNLICENC’D PRINTING,

To the PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND.

Milton’s passion for free speech, for liberty of thought and conscience in the making of a new world, was a powerful corrective to all the obfuscators and doctrinaires of parliament who had partly triumphed with the signing of the solemn league and covenant with the Scots in the previous year. He railed against those with closed minds, of which the Presbyterians were the largest number. Censorship and licensing would be ‘the stop of truth’. The people of England would suffer from the change, when ‘dull ease and cessation of our knowledge’ would inevitably lead to ‘obedient uniformity’ or to ‘rigid external formality’.

He insisted that ‘we must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and wool packs’. He recalled his travels into Italy where he visited Galileo ‘grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition’. If the silence of conformity were to be imposed upon England, too, it would ‘soon put it out of controversy that bishops and presbyters are the same to us both name and thing’. What if the Presbyterians were no better than the Laudian Church writ in sterner letters?

What did the censors and opponents of freedom have to fear? ‘He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.’ Milton’s phrases rise like waves before they fall upon the shore, the poetry of his being flooding beneath them. His sentences are grave, sonorous and magniloquent but not untouched by the occasional asperity of irony or wit.

In Areopagitica he addresses the political nation with an encomium that proclaims the fervent seriousness of the time. ‘Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.’ It is an excellent tribute to the intellectual resources of the country in this period of conflict and argument. Milton considered England to be particularly blessed by what he called ‘the favour and love of heaven’. It was this faith that gave strength and optimism to the puritan cause.

He writes, too, of London as a beacon of that cause. ‘Behold now this vast City; a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded by His protection … Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this City.’ He is suggesting that there is nothing to fear in the proliferation of sectarians and schismatics; they are all part of the glory of God.

Of all the writers of the period Milton is the one most able to embody the seriousness and the determination of the religious cause. In the loftiness of his mind, in the dignity and grandeur of his most stately utterances, we may glimpse the essential nobility of the age. ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle muing [renewing] her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance…’

In later years Milton served as Latin secretary for Cromwell and the protectorate, in which capacity he served the puritan cause as faithfully as before. Yet disillusion would set in soon enough, followed by bitterness and despair. Like many of his generation he was, by the end of Cromwell’s rule and the return of the king, beset by misery and isolation, bewilderment and grief.

29

A game to play

The last twelve months of war were confused and uncertain. No one knew when, or how, it would end. The king no longer had the resources to fight any more major battles; he held on to a few cities such as Bristol and Worcester, but his strength was essentially limited to individual fortresses or garrisons. A campaign of siege warfare had begun, with parliamentary forces coming upon one royalist stronghold after another. The rules of siege were well known to all the participants. After the defence had put up as good a fight as they could, they could then demand a ‘parley’ and bargain upon the terms of surrender; if they capitulated, they were spared. If they refused to surrender, they were likely to be stormed and massacred.

In this weary and bloody period groups of men and women emerged ready to defy and fight both parties in order to save their neighbourhoods. The ‘clubmen’ were called after the primitive weapons they often carried. The farmers and yeomen of Wiltshire and Dorset, for example, had already established bands of watchmen to seize any soldiers caught in the act of plunder and to march them back to their respective camps for punishment. They did not know which side was winning or losing. They did not know of Naseby or of Langport. They wished only to preserve their lives and property.

Now some countrymen, armed with sickles or scythes as well as clubs, took the offensive. They gathered to protect their harvests and their granaries with the message that:

If you offer to plunder and take our cattle

You may be sure we’ll give you battle.

If the clubmen had any other message, it was simply that the two sides should come together and that the war should be ended. Clubmen risings took place in several counties, from Sussex to South Wales, but particularly in those regions that, as one of their leaders put it, had ‘more deeply … tasted the misery of this unnatural internecine war’. Money and supplies had been extorted from them; soldiers had been quartered upon them against their will; local authority had often broken down. They wanted a return to order and to the ‘known laws’.

The unsettled mood of the localities may perhaps be traced in the large number of witch trials in the period. Three days after the battle of Naseby thirty-six supposed witches were put on trial at the Essex assizes, and all but one of them were executed on the charge of black art and of conjuring up the devil. It has been estimated that, in this summer, one hundred old and young women were executed. This was a world of anxiety.

The king was now reduced to limited forays to lift a siege here or support a town there, but he lived in fear of any parliamentary army bearing down upon him; he was concerned that, if he were captured, he would suffer at the hands of the puritan troops. He received some comfort from the fact that the Scots seemed prepared to negotiate with him. They were ready to break with parliament, now that it was beginning to incline towards Cromwell and the Independent cause. They had been accused of doing little since their first arrival in England, and their payments were in arrears.

Yet this small hope for the royalist cause was almost overwhelmed by the news that Bristol had fallen; Prince Rupert had signed a treaty of surrender. Sir Thomas Fairfax had surrounded the city towards the end of August and laid siege. By the beginning of September Rupert realized that he could hold out no longer. He did not have enough troops to defend the walls of the city, and the citizens were increasingly desperate. Fairfax was growing impatient and directed an assault against some royalist defenders; when they had been cut down he sent the terms of surrender to his combatant. The prince accepted and, on 11 September, evacuated the town.

The loss of the second city of the kingdom was a grievous blow to the king, who at once suspected a plot to suborn him. He even considered the possibility that Rupert was about to launch a military coup and remove him from the throne before negotiating a truce with parliament. ‘Nephew!’ he wrote in anger, ‘though the loss of Bristol be a great blow to me, yet your surrendering it as you did is of so much affliction to me, that it makes me not only forget the consideration of that place, but is likewise the greatest trial of my constancy that hath yet befallen me; for what is to be done, after one that is so near to me as you are, both in blood and friendship, submits himself to so mean an action?’ He dismissed him from his service, and advised him to return home. The prince had not been a popular figure and, as he marched out of Bristol, the citizens cried out, ‘Give him no quarter! Give him no quarter!’

Two or three days later the cause of the king was shaken further with the news that the forces of Montrose in Scotland had been defeated, and that the earl had fled back to the Highlands. The king’s best hope had gone. In this period it was ordered by parliament that ‘the boarded masque house at Whitehall’ should be pulled down and its materials sold. The days of the cavalier were coming to an end.

In October Prince Rupert made his way to Newark Castle, where the king was lodged. He strode up to his uncle and told him that he had come to give him an account of his conduct at Bristol; the king would not speak to him and sat down to supper, during which he ignored him. Eventually he allowed his nephew to give evidence before a council of war, the members of which decided that the prince had not been guilty of any want of courage or fidelity. He could have done no other but surrender or face the entire destruction of his troops and of the town. The king reluctantly accepted the verdict, with the proviso that he believed his nephew could have held out longer. Charles left Newark a few days later, and quickly made what had now become a dangerous journey back to Oxford.

In his extremity the king began negotiating with various parties in order to preserve himself. He had already told his son to sail for France and remain under the protection of his mother who had sailed from Falmouth in the summer. Now he sought to divide the two principal groups in parliament by dealing separately with the Independents and the Presbyterians; he seemed willing to grant liberty of conscience to the former while inclining towards the latter on the grounds that the army was too democratic. He told his wife that ‘I had great reason to hope that one of the factions would so address themselves to me that I might without difficulty obtain my so just ends’. He had opened provisional negotiations with the Scots, also, and was still attempting to treat with the Irish.

The fighting in the last few months of the war became sporadic and desultory. Prince Rupert set out from Oxford on cavalry raids, but achieved little. The royalist troops on the border of Wales and England tried desperately to hold on to Chester and its related ports in the hope of welcoming an Irish army. That army never arrived and, in any case, Chester eventually fell. Sir Thomas Fairfax conducted the parliamentary campaign in the west against a divided and demoralized enemy. A royalist army was raised to confront him but, at Torrington, it fell to pieces.

In the last battle of the great civil war, near Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire, the royalist forces were soon overpowered and surrendered en masse. The royalist commander, Sir Jacob Astley, told his captors that ‘you have now done your work and may go play, unless you fall out among yourselves’. And that is what they proceeded to do.

The king, now facing ruin, tried to buy time with various proposals, secret or otherwise. He offered to come to Westminster, but his overture was rejected; it was considered likely that he would try to detach one faction and place himself at its head. Charles himself wrote that ‘nothing will satisfy them but the ruin, not only of us, our posterity and friends, but even monarchy itself’. Eventually he decided that he would go over to the Scots; he was their native king, after all, and they did not share the levelling principles of his principal parliamentary opponents. He would be secure both in conscience and in honour; he would also be under the protection of a large army.

The Scots themselves had to act warily, since they did not wish to antagonize their paymasters at Westminster. They would be obliged to come upon the king, as it were, by accident. On 27 April 1646, the king left Oxford in disguise as a servant, and by a circuitous route made his way to the Scottish army at Newark. The Scottish commanders told their English allies that this was a ‘matter of much astonishment’ to them.

Soon enough Charles realized that he was as much a prisoner as a guest. When he tried to give the word of command to his guard he was interrupted by the lord general, Alexander Leslie, who told him that ‘I am the older soldier, sir; your majesty had better leave that office to me’. It seems likely that the Scots wished to keep their king as a hostage until parliament paid them the money they were owed. They took him to Newcastle, where almost at once he became subject to their demands. He must sign the covenant. He must impose Presbyterianism on all of his people. He must abandon the Book of Common Prayer. When one minister told him that his father, James VI, would welcome such a settlement the king replied that ‘I had the happiness to know him much better than you’. ‘I never knew’, he wrote to his wife, ‘what it was to be barbarously treated before.’ Yet he pretended to compromise while playing for time; he hoped that his opponents would become further divided, and he believed that fresh aid would come from France or Ireland or the Highlands or anywhere.

At the end of July, parliament sent the king a number of propositions to which he should accede if he wished to retain the throne. He should embrace Presbyterianism and extirpate the bishops; he should persecute Independents or Catholics, and give up his army for twenty years. Privately he swore that he would not surrender ‘one jot’ but in his public response he agreed to consider the demands in a mild and obliging spirit. He wrote privately to his wife that he had to deliver ‘a handsome denying answer’, an unenthusiastic response that would not alienate his captors. All of these secret letters were written in code and smuggled out of his quarters.

The flight of the king to the Scottish army had precipitated the final split between the forces of his enemies. The Scottish army and parliament now deeply distrusted one another, and their differences were reflected in the open divisions between the Presbyterians and Independents at Westminster. It is of no importance whether we choose to call them religious sects or political parties; now they were both. They were known as ‘factions’ or ‘juntoes’ or ‘cabals’.

The Presbyterian cause, in its ideal state, proposed that its Church should rule by inherent right as the one divinely ordained form of religious government, and that no other churches or sects should be permitted. The Independent cause rested on the belief that a true Church was a voluntary association of believers and that each congregation had the right to self-government; it was Calvinist in tendency but it favoured toleration. Cromwell had said that ‘he that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience’. A Presbyterian divine stated, however, that ‘to let men serve God according to the persuasion of their own consciences, was to cast out one devil that seven worse might enter’. Another Presbyterian divine, Thomas Edwards, published a book entitled Gangraena in which he listed the heresies of the radical sectarians, each one to be crushed in its egg ‘before it comes to be a flying serpent’. Here, then, was the great divide. In the broadest secular terms the Presbyterians supported parliament, while the Independents favoured the army.

Conflicts and divisions arose frequently in parliamentary debate. On one occasion the Commons spent the day discussing matters of religion until darkness fell upon the assembly; a motion was advanced to bring in candles, but this was disputed. When a division was called it was already too dark to count the members on either side, and it was suggested that candles be introduced to resolve the issue. But could candles be brought in before the house had formally requested them? So the affairs of the nation were determined. This was a new age of political life.

The eventual refusal of the king to take the covenant undermined his value to the Scottish Presbyterians, who now thought it best to make a bargain with parliament. On receipt of the moneys owing to them, they would hand back the sovereign; under these circumstances, perhaps, Charles might negotiate a treaty with their allies at Westminster. So for the sum of £400,000 he was surrendered. The haggling over money damaged their credibility, however, and the earl of Lauderdale predicted that it ‘would make them to be hissed at by all nations; yeah, the dogs in the street would piss upon them’. As the army marched out of Newcastle, leaving the king behind, the fishwives of the city cried out, ‘Judas! Judas!’ The king himself said that they had sold him at too cheap a rate.

Charles set out for parliamentary custody at the beginning of February 1647 almost as a conquering hero, and cheering crowds lined his route. At Ripon he touched for the king’s evil, thus asserting his divine power over the disease of scrofula. At Nottingham the lord general of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, dismounted and kissed his hand. The king arrived at Holmby House, in Northamptonshire, in the middle of February. He remained for five months; he spent much time in his private quarters or ‘closet’, played at bowls or rode in the neighbourhood.

The Presbyterians and their supporters at Westminster now began to plan for the disbandment of the New Model Army and for its replacement by a less sectarian and more reliable force. They also ignored the English army’s demands for payment of arrears in wages, and for an indemnity against prosecution for any actions committed in the late war. It was now becoming a dangerous dispute between army and parliament. In this period Oliver Cromwell collapsed, and almost died, from something known as an ‘impostume in the head’; it was some kind of swelling or abscess, perhaps in part induced by nervous strain.

The sectarians and supporters of the army, or as they called themselves ‘well-affected persons’, sent a ‘Large Petition’ to parliament in which they asserted the supreme authority of the people; they also demanded that the Lords and Commons exempt ‘matters of religion and God’s worship from the compulsive and restrictive power of any authority upon earth’. Among these passionate sectarians emerged a group that were known as ‘the levellers’. Royalist newsletters had given them the name, since ‘they intend to set all straight, and raise a parity and community in the kingdom’. We might perhaps describe them as spiritual egalitarians.

They were essentially a London group who issued several hundred tracts, and could muster perhaps a few hundred sympathizers; their colour was sea-green and they wore sea-green scarves or ribbons. One of their unofficial leaders, John Lilburne, wrote to Cromwell in this year that he and his co-religionists ‘have looked upon you as the most absolute single-hearted great man in England, untainted or unbiased with ends of your own’.

The army itself was in a state of agitation close to mutiny, and sent a petition of complaint to Sir Thomas Fairfax. In turn parliament passed a declaration denouncing ‘enemies of the state and disturbers of the peace’. The army that had saved parliament was therefore branded as an enemy, which in turn was considered to be in effect a declaration of war. ‘The Apology of the Soldiers to their Officers’, published at the beginning of May, complained that their intentions were ‘grossly and foully misconstrued’ and asked ‘Was there ever such things done by a parliament … is it not better to die like men than to be enslaved and hanged like dogs?’

Against this background the people of England suffered. This year, 1646, marked the beginning of six terrible harvests in a period when the price of bread doubled and the cost of meat rose by more than a half. The agriculture of England was its life and staple; its partial collapse therefore shook the already troubled kingdom.

The members of the New Model Army were quartered at Saffron Walden, where some parliamentary commissioners came to recruit soldiers for service in Ireland; they were greeted with complaints and questions. The troops wanted to know when, in particular, their arrears of payment would be met; they received no coherent response. Eight of the ten cavalry regiments then chose representatives who would in time become known as ‘adjutators’ (or, as their opponents called them, ‘agitators’) for the army’s cause. Cromwell pleaded for a compromise, arguing that if parliamentary authority ‘falls to nothing, nothing can follow but confusion’. Yet parliament was in turn determined to crush the army, on the principle that ‘they must sink us, or we sink them’. It was now being whispered that the army sought an accommodation with the king, whereby it might contrive to destroy the Presbyterian cause. Fairfax explained that Charles had become ‘the golden ball cast between the two parties’. Which way would he roll, or be rolled?

The army leaders believed that parliament was about to establish a new army with the king at its head, so they moved to act first. At six in the morning of 4 June 1647, the king emerged from Holmby House to be confronted by a party of 500 horse, drawn up in neat ranks, under the command of Cornet Joyce. Joyce asked permission to escort Charles to some other place. The king demanded to see his commission, but Joyce prevaricated. ‘I pray you, Mr Joyce, deal with me ingenuously and tell me what commission you have.’

‘Here is my commission.’

‘Where?’

Joyce turned around and gestured towards the assembled horsemen. ‘It is behind me.’

‘It is as fair a commission,’ the king replied, ‘and as well written as I have seen a commission written in my life: a company of as handsome, proper gentlemen, as I have seen a great while.’

The New Model Army took him to the village of Childerley outside Cambridge. Charles did not particularly care in whose camp he rested; it was enough for him, as he put it, to set his opponents by the ears. Yet, with the king in its hands, the army had now become a political as well as a military force. The role of Cromwell in the Holmby House plot has never been clear; Joyce visited him five days before the action, however, and it is not likely that they discussed horsemanship. When Cromwell told the king that Joyce had acted entirely on his own initiative Charles retorted that ‘I’ll not believe you unless you hang him’. In fact Joyce received promotion and a generous pension.

On the day after Charles had been taken to Childerley Hall the regiments met near Newmarket in order to draw up a ‘solemn engagement’ in which they pledged to stay together until their legitimate demands were met. ‘Is that the opinion of you all?’ ‘It is, of all, of all.’ There were also cries of ‘Justice, justice, we demand justice!’ A new ‘general council of the army’ was established, with Cromwell among its members. He had ridden to the army headquarters at Newmarket from London, having heard rumours that the Presbyterians were about to consign him to the Tower. He had endeavoured to hold the peace between the opposing factions, but now he formally took the army’s part as its chief representative.

On hearing the news of the king’s seizure, parliament convened and hastily granted all arrears of pay to the New Model Army; the city fathers now demanded that a force of cavalry be raised for the defence of the capital. The army itself was on the move and marched to Triploe Heath, 7 miles nearer London, and began to advance ever closer to the city. Cromwell wrote a letter to the civic authorities, asking for a just settlement of the liberties of the people under the aegis of parliament; he warned, however, that if the army met concerted opposition it would be freed from the blame for ‘all that ruin which may befall that great and populous city’.

When the army reached St Albans, a little over 20 miles from London, The Declaration of the Army was published in which were proposed shorter and more representative parliaments beyond the reach of oligarchy or regal authority; no force in the nation should have ‘unlimited power’. Its author was Sir Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s new son-in-law. The Declaration was accompanied by charges against eleven named Presbyterian members of parliament; they were accused of treasonable dealings with royalists at home and abroad. Parliament seemed willing and able to defend them but, on 26 June 1647, the eleven men thought it prudent to withdraw from Westminster and eventually to flee abroad. This was the period in which ‘purge’ entered the English political vocabulary. The great constitutional historian Henry Hallam wrote that on this day ‘may be said to have fallen the legislative power and civil government of England’.

Throughout the month of June the leaders of the army were in constant and courteous contact with the king. It is clear enough that they still wished to reach a settlement which would allow him to retain his throne with altered powers; he was the only power that might conceivably unite the nation now dangerously divided between army and parliament. Yet he was still beset by accusations of hypocrisy and double-dealing. At one point the king told Henry Ireton that ‘I shall play my game as well as I can’; to which Ireton replied that ‘if your majesty have a game to play, you must give us also liberty to play ours’.

The New Model Army had by now worked its way around to Reading, which provided a more convenient route to London. The more radical of the ‘agitators’ now pressed for a final march upon the city, but Cromwell favoured delay and negotiation. Ireton had drafted a policy document, Heads of the Proposals, that effectively repeated the propositions set out in The Declaration of the Army including a biennial parliament and a new council of state.

Parliament, noticeably more moderate or more fearful after the expulsion of the eleven members, voted to accept the proposals. They agreed in particular that control of the city militia should be returned to the old committee of militia, which meant effectively that the city force would be under the command of the now dominant army. The Lords and Commons, however, had not calculated the ferocious response of the Presbyterians in London itself who feared for their lives and property if the army came to rule. A crowd of citizens and apprentices accompanied a deputation of Londoners and besieged the Lords, shouting that ‘they would never come out’ unless they reversed their decision. Another crowd, or mob, burst into the Commons and demanded that they repeal their earlier judgement. ‘Vote! Vote!’ The members were too terrified to do anything other than comply. Parliament had proved itself to be at the mercy of any powerful group, and was thus unable to legislate for anything; sixty of the Independent members, together with the Speaker, now fled to the army at Reading for safety. They lent added legitimacy to the soldiers’ cause.

The Heads of the Proposals had been submitted for the king’s consideration. Some of the terms were mild enough. The bishops would not be abolished but deprived of the power of coercion; the old liturgy and the new covenant would have equal force in a broad context of religious liberty and toleration. The army and navy would be returned to the king after ten years. Only five royalists would be excluded from pardon. If Charles had accepted these terms, he could have returned to the throne with his honour intact. The king, however, rejected the document without giving it any serious consideration. His stated response was that ‘you cannot be without me. You will fall to ruin if I do not sustain you.’ One of his advisers, Sir John Berkley, whispered to him, ‘Sir, your majesty speaks as if you had some secret strength and power that I do not know of.’ The moderates on both sides now began to lose all hope.

The intimidation of parliament by the London mob, and the failure of negotiations with the king, prompted the New Model Army finally to march upon London. A brigade of horse took Southwark on the night of 3 August, and the civic leaders of the city woke up to find their principal avenue across London Bridge in the hands of what must now be called the enemy. The sudden occupation ‘struck them dead’, according to Clarendon, and ‘put an end to all their consultation for defence’. Their only object now was to conciliate those whom they had previously offended and to prevent the army from firing and plundering their mansions.

The whole army of 18,000 men, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, now entered the city; Cromwell rode at the head of the cavalry, while Fairfax sat in a carriage beside Cromwell’s wife. Fairfax was met at Hyde Park by the mayor and aldermen, who proffered a formal apology and offered him a gold cup; he refused to accept the gift, and sent them on their way. With the Speaker and the members of the Commons with him, he seemed now to represent the legitimate authority of the nation. One puritan Londoner, Thomas Juxon, wrote after watching the soldiers marching through the streets of London, that ‘’tis remarkable that it never was in the minds of the army to carry it so far; but were brought to it, one thing after another, and that by the designs of their enemies’. The army also made sure that the great defensive wall, erected by Londoners at the beginning of the war, was pulled down. Fairfax did not intend a military occupation of the city, however, and established the army headquarters some 6 miles away at Putney.

Charles, now residing at Hampton Court, was willing graciously to listen to the proposals put forward by Cromwell and the other leaders of the army; but he was resolute in defence of his interests, and refused to compromise. Many Independent members were willing, and indeed eager, to dispense altogether with the king. They even accused Cromwell of pursuing his own self-interest in continuing to negotiate with him; it was whispered that he was about to be honoured as the new earl of Essex.

Yet Cromwell was in truth becoming angry and frustrated at the king’s constant prevarications and refusals; he began seriously to doubt his sincerity. At some point, towards the end of October, he refused to travel any more to Hampton Court. Those who attended the monarch now began to notice an alteration in the manners and civility of the soldiers who were stationed about him; the king’s guard was doubled.

30

To kill a king

The army now began to take stock of its power and its situation. The levellers made an early contribution to the debate when in October they published a pamphlet, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Stated’, in which they demanded a more representative parliament; they maintained the then revolutionary doctrine that all power was ‘originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this nation’. No mention, therefore, was made of king or lords. They had support among the more radicalized soldiers who agreed with their call for national renovation. ‘The Case of the Armie’ was swiftly followed by the ‘Agreement of the People’ that argued for a new political order based upon a written constitution. Both sets of proposals seemed to be guiding the army towards the establishment of a republic.

Some of the principal officers, Cromwell among them, did not support the more extreme measures being canvassed; it was proposed, therefore, that the arguments be tested in open debate. The deliberations were held at St Mary’s Church, on the southern side of Putney Bridge, at the end of October and lasted for three weeks; gathered here were the several generals, together with four representatives from each of the thirty-two regiments. The importance of the proceedings was not lost upon any of the participants, and indeed the ‘Putney debates’ of 1647 remain one of the most significant expressions of English political thought.

On the first day Edward Sexby, one of the representatives of the soldiers, complained that ‘we have laboured to please a king, and, I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him’. Cromwell then remarked that the radical ‘Agreement of the People’ was naively formulated in the belief that a new constitution could be created without any consideration of English tradition or precedent. He had been told that faith would make a way through all difficulties but ‘we are very apt all of us to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination, and carnal reasonings’. He was suggesting that expediency and self-deception may be at the heart of political revolution. He also made more practical criticisms. All of this change was to be achieved in the name of the people but he questioned, ‘Were the spirits and temper of the people of this nation prepared to receive and to go along with it?’

A defining moment of the debate arrived when Thomas Rainsborough, one of the representatives of the levelling movement, declared that ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he’ and should therefore be allowed the vote. It was a call that was not to be answered until 1918. Henry Ireton rejected the idea of manhood suffrage, however, and argued that the vote should be given to ‘persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies’. Only those with a financial stake in the country, in other words, should be allowed to determine its direction.

At one point in the proceedings Cromwell was moved to declare that ‘the foundation and the supremacy is in the people, radically in them’, but he also argued that the sovereign authority must be that of a parliament however constituted. In this uncertain time the force of power was absolutely required. He compared himself to a drowning man. ‘If it have but the face of authority, if it be but a hare swimming over the Thames, I will take hold of it rather than let it go.’ A more ominous note, for the king, emerged when Captain Bishop claimed that the woes of the nation came from ‘a compliance to preserve that man of blood’ by which he meant Charles. The captain was alluding to a passage from the second Book of Samuel: ‘Thou art taken in thy mischief because thou art a bloody man.’ The phrase soon became commonplace.

The final set of proposals that emerged from Putney did not reflect the demands of the levellers or the debate about the future of the king; it was designed only to preserve the unity of the army. It recommended an extended franchise but maintained the ancient framework of king, Commons and Lords with the Commons in effective control. The commanders of the army then brought the debates to a summary close by ordering all of the participants to return to their regiments. A partial mutiny by some of the more radical troops was quickly put down. A restructuring of the army, in the following year, allowed its leaders to remove those soldiers of suspect sympathies.

The king now confounded everyone by escaping from Hampton Court. He had gone down some private stairs and, meeting with two associates, fled south. He seemed to have had no certain destination but eventually decided to make for the Isle of Wight where he had the sea at his back. He left behind some papers, one of which was an anonymous letter warning him of the danger of assassination. He also left a letter to parliament in which he asked to ‘be heard with freedom, honour and safety, and I shall instantly break through this cloud of retirement and show myself ready to be pater patriae’.

The governor of the Isle of Wight, Robert Hammond, received this father of the nation with no little apprehension; he was under the command of the army, and had no wish to disobey his superiors. But he was violently opposed to the levellers in the ranks and could guarantee the king’s safety from their attentions. It may also have suited Cromwell to leave the king on the island; he was far from the reach both of the more sanguinary levellers and of the Scots who might wish to negotiate with him. In the best possible circumstances the king might even take to the sea and journey to exile in France.

The king was now in Carisbrooke Castle under guard. He could set himself up as an object for auction, as it were, with many prospective bidders. Cromwell might still wish to come to an accommodation with him. Despite Robert Hammond’s best endeavours, the Scots might somehow be able to find a way of communicating with him. Almost as soon as he was ensconced in the castle he began to practise his subterfuges; he concealed messages in the lining of gloves, he engaged in secret conversations with his servants, he drew up elaborate plans for sending and receiving clandestine letters.

This was the period in which Cromwell openly broke with the king and spoke bitterly against him in the army council. There is a story, never fully substantiated, that Cromwell intercepted a secret letter to the queen in which Charles announced that he would make an arrangement with the Scots rather than with the army. It was soon remarked at Westminster that, in Carisbrooke, Charles had thrown a bone between two spaniels and laughed at their enmity. That alone would have been enough to turn Cromwell against him. He now began to sympathize with the position of the more radical soldiers as resolute anti-monarchists. He observed that ‘if we cannot bring the army to our sense, we must go to theirs’.

Cromwell’s suspicions were soon confirmed. Towards the end of December the king, after secret negotiations with the Scottish commissioners, signed an agreement known as ‘the Engagement’. He promised to introduce Presbyterianism as the state religion for an initial three years; he would confirm the ‘solemn league and covenant’ in the English parliament, but would not oblige his subjects to take its oath. In return the Scots would support Charles’s demand for a personal treaty and the disbandment of all English armies; a Scottish army would then be dispatched to London to expedite ‘a full and fair parliament’. The document was sealed in lead and buried in the garden of the castle. He then refused to deal with a parliamentary deputation, at which point Colonel Hammond dismissed the king’s servants and doubled his guard.

Charles: Shall I have liberty to go about to take the air?

Hammond: No. I cannot grant it.

On 3 January 1648, the Commons passed the ‘Vote of No Addresses’ by a majority of fifty. No more communications, or proposals, would be put to the king. Cromwell fully supported the decision on the grounds that the people should not ‘any longer expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God has hardened’. The council of the army also pronounced that it would stand by the kingdom and parliament ‘without the king and against him’.

Yet at a subsequent dinner the army was still manifestly divided. The commanders argued amongst themselves about the relative merits of ‘monarchical, aristocratical or democratical government’, but could come to no conclusion. At the end of the discussion Cromwell, in one of those fits of boisterousness or hysteria that punctuated his career, threw a cushion at one of the protagonists, Edmund Ludlow, before running downstairs; Ludlow pursued him, and in turn pummelled him with a cushion.

Colonel Hammond was soon informed that a treaty with the Scots had been signed while the king was in his safekeeping, and he determined to find it. He entered the king’s chamber without warning; the king rose from his bed in alarm and put on his gown; Hammond proceeded to search its pockets, at which point Charles struck him. It was reported that, against all precedent, the colonel returned the blow.

The king’s incarceration incensed those who supported the royalist cause. Riots occurred in Ipswich and in Canterbury. A news-writer in London reported that ‘the counties are full of discontent, many insurrections having been lately made, even near this city’. The majority of the newspapers and pamphlets were strongly royalist and on the anniversary of the king’s accession, 27 March, celebratory bonfires blazed in the capital. Coach travellers, driven through the streets, were compelled to drink the king’s health. The butchers of the city declared that if they could catch Colonel Hammond ‘they would chop him as small as ever they chopped any of their meat’.

At the beginning of April the lord mayor sent some trained bands to disperse a crowd of apprentices in Moorfields; the crowd turned on the bands, captured their weapons and marched off shouting on behalf of ‘King Charles!’ Petitioners, seeking the rule of a king again, flocked to London from Kent, Essex and Surrey. The cavaliers were jubilant, and the Presbyterians once more gained a hold over parliament. In April the Commons passed a motion calling for a treaty with the king.

The signs of civil war were once more apparent. The first acts came from Wales where, in April, a royalist commander occupied Tenby Castle; soon enough the whole of South Wales had declared in the sovereign’s favour. The leaders of the army spent a day in tears and prayers. How could it be that blood and battle had returned to the nation? Had the previous war been fought for no purpose? At a meeting of the New Model Army in Windsor it was concluded that ‘it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed’.

The army council then ordered Cromwell to enter South Wales with two regiments of horse and three of foot; it took him six weeks to defeat the rebels. Other anti-parliamentary forces had emerged throughout the country, guided not so much by zeal for the king as dismay at the taxes and county committees imposed by parliament. Berwick and Carlisle were taken by the disaffected; Pontefract was also seized in a surprise attack, and Scarborough declared for the king. The men of Essex marched under a banner raised by a royalist commander, General Goring. A section of the fleet off the Downs also declared themselves for the king, and joined with the men of Kent in their revolt. It had also become clear that the Scottish army was being assembled on the border in order to fight for the king.

This represented a serious challenge to the authority of parliament but this second civil war, as it became known, ended once more in victory for the New Model Army. The Scottish army did not cross the border until July, by which time most of the risings in England and Wales had been put down by the army’s superior military force; Cromwell dealt with the north, and Fairfax with the south. It had not been a war, but a series of scattered risings and outbreaks of fighting with no serious attempt to coordinate what might have been a successful rebellion. Without a coherent strategy the rebels were no match for the New Model. They had waited vainly for the Scots until it became too late to fashion serious resistance.

The second civil war had a bloody ending on its two principal fronts. The Scottish army, under the command of the duke of Hamilton, had made a slow progress southward through the rain and wind of an unseasonably cold summer; ill-trained, and much smaller than expected, it was sustained by no great cause, and as a consequence its morale was low. The New Model was at least bolstered by the knowledge that it was fighting an invasion force.

The two sides encountered each other at a pitched battle near the walls of Preston, on 17 August, in which the infantry of both armies pressed hard upon each other. The Scots were eventually pushed back, with the loss of 1,000 men. Cromwell pursued the remainder of the Scottish army which, battered and broken, laid down its arms. It was the first battle in which he enjoyed overall command, and it was his most signal victory.

All the remaining royalists from the southeast had fled behind the walls of Colchester where, in the middle of June, Sir Thomas Fairfax prepared for a long siege against them. It was the most distasteful and inglorious event of the entire civil war. Fairfax had decided to starve the city into submission until there came a time when the inhabitants, having exhausted the provisions of cats and dogs, were forced to devour soap and candles; it was reported that the royalist soldiers had told the inhabitants to eat their children. The royalist commander, the earl of Norwich, then sent 500 women and children out of the town; Fairfax refused to receive them and with threats they were driven back behind the walls. By the end of August, reduced, as it was said, ‘by Captain Storm without and by Captain Hunger within’, the royalists surrendered; two of their commanders were then put in front of a firing squad. This second phase of the civil war was more harsh and intense than the first; there was no longer time for mercy.

After his victory at Preston Cromwell believed that he had seen once more the hand of God. He trusted that he was doing the work of the Lord; that is why he waited upon divine providence to guide his actions and to direct his way forward. He was a blind mole in search of grace, sometimes surrounded by darkness, yet his faith in providence was his rock and his refuge. He wrote to a friend and colleague, Philip Wharton: ‘I can laugh and sing in my heart when I speak of these things.’

The battle at Preston effectively marked the end of the second civil war, and of the turmoil that had mangled the kingdom since the king had first raised his banner six years before. It has been calculated that 100,000 soldiers and civilians died in the course of the conflict, and that a larger portion of the population perished than in the Great War of 1914–18. It has therefore justly been described as the bloodiest war in English history. One hundred and fifty towns, and fifty villages, suffered significant damage; 10,000 houses were destroyed.

In the course of the second civil war Charles made several attempts to escape from Carisbrooke Castle. He had never ceased to conspire, and to devise stratagems against his captors and his enemies; he would, for example, conceal coded messages in the heels of his servants’ boots. Some supporters managed to smuggle to him a cutting tool and a supply of nitric acid, then known as aqua fortis, to dismantle the iron bars of his window; but the design was forestalled and came to nothing. On another occasion he tried to squeeze through the bars but became trapped, stuck between his chest and shoulders, and could only extricate himself with difficulty.

Yet after the final victory parliament still wished to treat with him, against the wishes of the army whose leaders had denounced him as ‘a man of blood’ who had effectively instigated the second civil war. The majority of the members of the Lords and Commons, together with the large part of the population, now wished for peace at any price. The king was therefore taken out of confinement in the castle and lodged with his friends and servants in Newport, to which town the parliamentary commissioners came. He sat under a canopy of state with his advisers behind him; the parliamentary delegation sat before him.

He was in a more tractable mood, no doubt because the victory of the New Model Army brought an effective end to his resistance. He wished to come to an agreement with parliament on the very good grounds that he feared the army much more. So within a few days he had conceded thirty-eight of their propositions and in return was granted four of his own. He submitted in large part to the religious demands of the commissioners, and agreed to give up control of the militia for a period of twenty years. The parliamentary negotiators were no doubt aware that he might renege on these promises if ever he returned to full power.

The king himself wrote to an adviser, Sir William Hopkins, that ‘the great concession I made this day – the Church, militia and Ireland – was made merely in order to my escape … my only hope is that now they believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less careful of their guards’. Yet at the same time he was ever mindful that a different fate might await him. He might be a king who had emasculated his sovereignty. He might be condemned to perpetual imprisonment. He might die upon the scaffold. He also feared assassination by friends of the army, and while at the castle had lived in terror of being poisoned by Hammond or one of his gaoler’s associates.

One of the king’s secretaries, Sir Philip Warwick, saw his master standing at a window with the parliamentary legation behind him and noticed that he was crying ‘the biggest drops that ever I saw fall from an eye’. From the moment his servants had been withdrawn by order, he had neglected his personal appearance; his beard remained untrimmed while his clothes were worn and faded. His once luxurious hair had turned almost entirely grey, thus imparting a new shade of melancholy to his face.

The army was growing increasingly impatient with the negotiations at Newport and, in November, drew up a ‘remonstrance’ calling for ‘exemplary justice’ for the notorious man of blood. The leaders of the army were calling for his death. They had also begun the march back to London after completing their business against the Scots in the north.

On the first day of December the king was removed from the Isle of Wight and taken to Hurst Castle on the coast of Hampshire. Cromwell and his colleagues feared, rightly, that parliament had drawn up plans to invite him back to Westminster. They were also apprehensive of any kind of formal agreement between the two parties. Cromwell declared that any Newport treaty would be only a ‘little bit of paper’. He wrote to Hammond that the king was ‘an accursed thing’ with whom there could be no agreement.

On 5 December parliament resolved to settle with the king on the basis of the terms concluded at Newport. On the following day Colonel Thomas Pride stood outside the chamber of the Commons with a list of names; he checked them off, one by one, as each member tried to enter. Some were allowed to go forward while others were detained or arrested by soldiers who stood behind him. The Presbyterian members, who favoured the Newport treaty, and other of the king’s supporters, were summarily removed. It was the first, and last, military coup d’état in English history. It seems to have been engineered by Henry Ireton rather than by Oliver Cromwell, but when Cromwell returned to London that night from Yorkshire he declared that ‘I was not acquainted with this design, yet, since it is done, I am glad of it’. As far as he was concerned, all the providences of God were coming together without his claiming responsibility for them.

In a dreary castle, on the edge of a stretch of shingle spit, the king was immured for two weeks; it was a place of mist and fog where the air was damp and heavy from the marshes that lay all around it. His room was small and dark, lit with candles even at noon, and from the slit of a window he could look out across the Solent. The soldiers brought in his meals ‘uncovered’, not wearing their hats. ‘Is there anything more contemptible’, he is supposed to have asked, ‘than a despised prince?’

He must have known, or guessed, that all hope was at an end; the army was the master of the kingdom, and must now surely seek his death. Yet, like Cromwell, he was seized with a sense of destiny and of religious purpose; he believed that he might enjoy the fate of a martyr to a holy cause. He had meditated on all the sufferings and ignominies that were likely to befall him, and had hardened his resolve against the rebuffs of the world. Like Cromwell, too, he valued his own life less than the principles for which he fought. So even in this extremity he remained apparently calm and even cheerful.

After ‘Pride’s Purge’, as it became known, approximately 200 members were left of the previous assembly; yet they now constituted the House of Commons and eventually became known as ‘the Rump Parliament’ or, as Clarendon interpreted it, ‘the fag-end of a carcass long since expired’. Some of them had not stayed necessarily to support the army but to avert the prospect of direct military rule without any parliament at all.

On 19 December the king began the journey from Hurst Castle to Windsor where, by the order of the army officers, he was to be ‘secured in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice’. Yet the nature of that ‘justice’ was unclear. Many in the army did not wish for a sentence of death. Despite his fierce words about the man of blood, Cromwell seems to have been among those who did not favour condign punishment. Charles might now be so chastened and so desperate that he would yield. The army, and perhaps a newly elected parliament, would thereby acquire legitimacy and authority if they held power with the assent of the king. In the event that he was tried and found guilty, he might be deposed rather than executed. Charles’s death was as yet by no means a necessity.

Another consideration moved Cromwell. An envoy had been sent to Ireland by the king intent upon raising an army; if Charles could be dissuaded from following the project, another great threat would be lifted. The prospect of a royalist Ireland was enough to persuade Cromwell to make one last attempt at a settlement.

The army leaders then sent an envoy to Windsor in order to discuss the terms of a possible agreement, but the king refused to see him on the grounds that he had already ‘conceded too much, and even so had failed to give satisfaction, and he was resolved to die rather than lay any further burden on his conscience’. So the prospect of death came ever nearer. The refusal of the king to make any further compromise seems to have persuaded Cromwell that he must indeed be tried and executed. He told the Commons that ‘since the providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to providence’.

On New Year’s Day 1649, the Rump Parliament passed without any opposition an ordinance for the king’s trial on the grounds that he had contrived ‘a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation’; he had wished to make himself a tyrant and had prosecuted a cruel and bloody war for that purpose. The Lords rejected the ordinance, whereupon the Commons passed a resolution that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and that they themselves represented the people. The Commons therefore declared themselves to be the supreme power in the state. They also passed an ordinance to establish a new high court of justice with 135 commissioners. In the event only 52 arrived on the appointed day of the king’s trial. The army council was also divided. One of its members asserted that the king of England could be tried by no English court. Cromwell responded: ‘I tell you, we will cut off his head with the crown upon it!’

Charles was to be brought from Windsor to St James’s Palace on 19 January. When the king was told of the coming journey, he replied that ‘God is everywhere’. The trial began on the following day. The soldiers brought him from the palace to Whitehall in a closed sedan chair, and then to Westminster in a curtained barge. The roll of judges was called and, when the name of Sir Thomas Fairfax was announced, a woman cried out that ‘he has more wit than to be here’; it was the voice of his wife.

The king was conducted into Westminster Hall and sat down in the place provided without the least sign of unease; all the judges, according to Clarendon, were ‘fixing their eyes upon him, without the least show of respect’. The solicitor general, John Cook, then read out the charges against him. ‘Hold a little,’ the king said. He tapped Cook on the shoulder with a silver-tipped cane but the official paid no attention. He tapped him twice more, when the silver tip came off and rolled across the floor. No one picked it up for him. A few days later he confessed that ‘it really made a great impression on me’. It might also be seen as an omen of his beheading. When Cook called him ‘a tyrant and a traitor’, he laughed aloud. How could a sovereign be accused of treason when the meaning of treason was a crime against the sovereign? He did not understand that the word now denoted a trespass against the sovereign power of people and parliament. The king’s state, formerly preserved in all honour and authority, had been turned into ‘the state’.

After the recital the president of the court, John Bradshaw, asked him for an answer to the impeachment against him. Bradshaw sat in a crimson velvet chair before the king, with the judges arrayed behind him; the guard was ranged to the left and right of the prisoner as well as behind him. The spectators sat in galleries on either side, or stood at the lower end of the hall.

‘I would know’, the king asked, ‘by what power I am called hither?’ This was the supreme question. He added that ‘there are many unlawful authorities in the world, there are robbers and highwaymen’. He had managed to overcome his habitual stammer.

He was informed that he had been brought to trial ‘in the name of the people of England, of which you are elected king, to answer them’.

‘England was never an elective kingdom, but a hereditary kingdom for near these thousand years.’

The dialogue continued a little longer until Bradshaw adjourned the proceedings. As the king passed the great sword of justice on the clerk’s table he was heard to say, ‘I have no fear of that.’

On the second day of the trial the king once more refused to plead. He did not recognize the authority of the court. Bradshaw ordered him to be taken away.

‘I do require that I give in my reasons—’

‘Sir, ’tis not for prisoners to require.’

‘Prisoners! Sir, I am not an ordinary prisoner.’

On the third day he again refused to plead, declaring that ‘it is the liberty of the people of England that I stand for’. He was asked to plead forty-three times, altogether, but he would not accept the authority of parliament over him. On 27 January the judges, sitting in the Painted Chamber at Westminster, declared the king to be ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public enemy’ who deserved death ‘by the severing his head from his body’. Before sentence was passed upon him in the court Charles argued that the case was so serious that it should be put before a joint session of parliament. Some of the judges, anxious to be relieved of the responsibility of regicide, favoured the idea. ‘Art thou mad?’ Cromwell hissed at one of them. ‘Canst thou not sit still and be quiet?’ The king’s proposal was not accepted.

After Bradshaw had read out the sentence of death Charles asked permission to speak.

‘No, sir, by your favour, sir. Guard, withdraw your prisoner.’

‘I may speak after the sentence. By your favour, sir, I may speak after the sentence ever.’ He was roughly led away by his guard as he continued to cry out. ‘By your favour, hold! The sentence, sir – I say, sir, I do – I am not suffered for to speak. Expect what justice other people will have.’ All around him the soldiers and the spectators screamed, ‘Justice! Justice! Justice!’

In truth the trial and death of the king were contrived by a small, if committed, minority who in no way represented the wishes of the nation. Two Dutch ambassadors pleaded for his life. Sir Thomas Fairfax made a similar supplication to the council of the army. The prince of Wales sent a blank sheet of paper, signed and sealed, so that parliament might write down any conditions it wished. These pleas were not enough. Cromwell and Ireton, in particular, were obdurate. The king must die. Otherwise there would be no safety for themselves or for the new commonwealth.

The last days of the king were for those around him a sorrowful mystery. On 29 January he burnt his papers and his ciphered correspondence. Two of his young children, Elizabeth and Henry, still in the hands of his enemies, were permitted to visit him. When they caught sight of their father, they both burst into tears. He told his thirteen-year-old daughter that he was about to die a glorious death for the liberty of the land and for the maintenance of the true religion. He told his ten-year-old son that the boy must not permit the army to place a crown on his head while his older brothers were still alive. The boy replied: ‘I will sooner be torn in pieces first!’ The king’s guards wept. This was an age of tears.

On the last night of his life, 29 January 1649, the king slept soundly for approximately four hours. When he awoke he told his personal servant that ‘this is my second marriage day’. He asked for two shirts since ‘were I to shake through cold, my enemies would attribute it to fear’. When he left St James’s Palace several companies of infantry were waiting to escort him to Whitehall Palace; the noise of their drums was so loud that the king could not be heard. He was taken to his bedchamber where he waited until parliament had passed a resolution prohibiting the announcement of any successor to the throne. He refused dinner but instead took a piece of bread and a glass of wine. At the appointed time he was escorted to the great Banqueting House.

It was so cold that the Thames had frozen. When he stepped out, from a window on the first floor, the low scaffold was before him; it was draped in black, and the two executioners were heavily disguised. Their identities have never been discovered. The cavalry were at either end of the street and armed guards kept back the people; spectators were on the rooftops, in the houses and in the street itself. The king tried to speak to them but they were too far off. So he dictated his last words to a shorthand writer and two attendants, among which was his declaration that ‘a subject and sovereign are clear different things’. He then claimed that ‘I die a martyr to the people’ before lying down with his head upon the scaffold. The bishop of London was with him.

Bishop: There is but one stage more; it is turbulent and troublesome, but a short one. It will carry you from earth to heaven, and there you will find joy and comfort.

King: I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.

Bishop: You exchange an earthly for an eternal crown – a good exchange.

One blow dispatched him. The principal executioner then took up the head and announced, in traditional fashion, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ At that moment, according to an eyewitness, Philip Henry, ‘there was such a groan by the thousands then present, as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again’.

31

This house to be let

The death of the king had delivered a mortal shock to the body politic but as a pamphleteer, Marchamont Nedham, put it, ‘the old allegiance is cancelled and we are bound to admit a new’. There was work to be done. The Rump Parliament passed an Act for the ‘sale of the goods and personal estates of the late king’. The image of Charles was removed from all public buildings, and his statue at the Exchange was smashed into pieces; on its now empty pedestal were inscribed the words ‘exit tyrannus, regum ultimus’ (the tyrant is gone, the last of the kings).

At the beginning of February the House of Lords, and the office of king, were formally abolished; kingship was declared to be ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty and safety and public interest of the nation’. In theory the Rump Parliament now had unlimited authority, yet it was hardly representative of the people. It contained approximately ninety members, since the rest of them had been purged or had voluntarily withdrawn. Other members returned to parliament later, when they could not be charged with collaboration in the king’s death, but of course all of them were divided in their principles and their allegiances. Under the pressure of immediate events, however, they remained a relatively coherent body; only later would it become clear that no consistent ideology could be expected from them. They were reformers rather than revolutionaries, driven by the force of events and circumstances. The Rump was essentially improvised rather than organized; it was born out of necessity and expediency.

Yet the army was also an indispensable power in the new state; Cromwell was a member of parliament as well as a leading army officer. Where did supremacy really lie? If the sword truly ruled, then the answer was obvious. But the main participants professed to believe that they had engineered a constitutional settlement under the aegis of parliament. The politics of ambiguity prevailed, in a situation where no single or fundamental authority was ever named.

A council of state, comprising some forty-one members with thirty-one of them coming from parliament itself, was established to determine policy. Cromwell was the presiding officer. Standing committees were set up for the army, for the navy, for Ireland and for foreign affairs in general. The most pressing concern was that of money; with an army of 70,000 soldiers to maintain and pay, funds were desperately needed. The councillors resorted to fresh taxation, pleas of loans from the City, and the confiscation of royalist estates. It did not help that this was a year of disastrous harvest, in which many inhabitants of Lancashire and Westmorland perished through starvation. Bulstrode Whitelocke reported that the magistrates of Cumberland certified that 30,000 people ‘had neither bread nor seed corn, nor the means of procuring either’. Yet the council had other great tasks; it was expected to unify the three kingdoms, to assert the nation’s ascendancy at sea and to protect commerce.

The councillors, faced with these burdens and charges, seem to have been largely enthusiastic and efficient. A French envoy, sent by Cardinal Mazarin to spy out the land, wrote that ‘not only are they powerful by sea and land, but they live without ostentation, without pomp and without mutual rivalry. They are economical in their private affairs, and prodigal in their devotion to public affairs, for which each man toils as if for his private interest. They handle large sums of money, which they administer honestly, observing a strict discipline. They reward well and punish severely.’ It was reported that in this period Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton were ‘extremely well pleased’ at the pace of affairs. Every revolution has its early heroic days.

In the middle of March Cromwell was chosen by the council to become commander-in-chief of the army with the central purpose of subduing royalist Ireland. Scotland also posed a problem. Its government, on hearing of the king’s execution, immediately proclaimed his eighteen-year-old son Charles II as king. The most serious threat came from Ireland, however, where the royalist lieutenant-general, the duke of Ormonde, was dominant. He had aligned himself with the confederate Catholics, rulers of two-thirds of the country after the rebellion of 1641, in support of the new king. Cromwell would soon go back to war.

In May the Rump passed a final Act that proclaimed England to be a free commonwealth; a kingdom had become a republic. All things must now be directed towards what was called the public good; and of course all things might be justified by invoking it. As Milton put it, ‘more just is it, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain their liberty’ than that a greater number compel the rest to be their fellow slaves. From this time, for example, we may date the emergence of the fiscal state with national taxation and public spending as its principal activities.

Yet this was also, according to the inscription on the new great seal, ‘the first year of freedom, by God’s blessing restored’. The revolution in public affairs now lent additional energy and purpose to religious enthusiasts and radicals of every kind. It was time for a new heaven and a new earth. A woman rose up among the congregation in Whitehall Chapel and stripped naked with the cry ‘Welcome the Resurrection!’

The Ranters believed that to the pure all things were pure; Laurence Clarkson, ‘the captain of the Rant’, professed that ‘sin had its conception only in imagination’. They might swear, drink, smoke and have sex with impunity. No earthly magistrate could touch them.

The Fifth Monarchy men and women were actively preparing for the reign of Christ and His saints that was destined to supersede the four monarchies of the ancient world; the reign of Jesus would begin in 1694. They would clap hands and jump around, calling out, ‘Appear! Appear! Appear!’; they would be joined by travelling fiddlers and ballad-singers until they were in an emotional heat.

The Muggletonians also had apocalyptic and millenarian tendencies. They believed that the soul died with the body and would be raised with it at the time of judgment, and that God paid no attention to any earthly activities. They also asserted that heaven was 6 miles above the earth and that God was between 5 and 6 feet in height.

On 16 April some Diggers came to St George’s Hill, near Weybridge in Surrey, where they proceeded to dig and sow seed in the common land. One of them, William Everard, proclaimed that he had been commanded in a vision to dig and plough the land. They believed in a form of agrarian communism by which the English were exhorted finally to free themselves from ‘the Norman yoke’ of landlords and owners of estates before ‘making the earth a common treasury for all’.

The Quakers believed that no visible Church was necessary and that divine revelation was permitted to every human being; Christ might enter the soul and kindle an inner light. They also called for the abolition of lawyers and universities; they refused to pay tithes or to take off their hats in the presence of their ‘superiors’. They were also known to disrupt the orthodox church services. They called each other ‘saints’ or ‘friends of the truth’ but, because of their tremblings and quiverings in worship, they became popularly known by the name now attached to them.

At the beginning of May a translation of the Koran was issued from the press. Religious liberty was contagious. Two months before, John Evelyn had attended an Anglican service in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel.

Political, as well as religious, radicals were in the ascendant. John Lilburne, one of the levellers who had helped to promote agitation in the New Model Army, had turned against the new administration. In ‘England’s New Chains Discovered’ he lambasted Cromwell and the army grandees for dishonesty and hypocrisy; he accused them of being ‘mere politicians’ who wished to aggrandize themselves while they pretended ‘a waiting upon providence, that under the colour of religion they might deceive the more securely’. A pamphlet, ‘The Hunting of the Foxes’, complained that ‘you shall scarce speak to Cromwell but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl and repent, even while he does smite you under the fifth rib.’

Cromwell was incensed at the pamphlet and was overheard saying at a meeting of the council of state, ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces … if you do not break them, they will break you.’ By the end of March Lilburne and his senior colleagues had been placed in the Tower on the charge of treason. The levellers, however, were popular among Londoners for speaking home truths about the condition of the country. When thousands of women flocked to Westminster Hall to protest against Lilburne’s imprisonment the soldiers told them to ‘go home and wash your dishes’; whereupon they replied that ‘we have neither dishes nor meat left’. When in May a group of soldiers rose in mutiny for the cause of Lilburne, Cromwell and Fairfax suppressed them; three of their officers were shot. As Cromwell said on another occasion, ‘Be not offended at the manner of God’s working; perhaps no other way was left.’

Assaults also came from the opposite side with royalist pamphlets and newsletters mourning ‘the bloody murder and heavy loss of our gracious king’ and proclaiming that ‘the king-choppers are as active in mischief as such thieves and murderers need to be’. The authorities were now awake to the mischief of free speech, and in the summer of the year the Rump Parliament passed a Treason Act that declared it high treason to state that the ‘government is tyrannical, usurped or unlawful, or that the Commons in parliament assembled are not the supreme authority of this nation’. There was to be no egalitarian or libertarian revolution. At the same time the council of state prepared ‘An Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets’ that was designed to prohibit any pamphlets, papers or books issued by ‘the malignant party’. A resolution was also passed by the Rump that any preacher who mentioned Charles Stuart or his son would be deemed a ‘delinquent’.

On Tuesday 10 July, Cromwell left London and travelled west in a coach drawn by six horses. He was on his way to Ireland. He had hesitated at first, not wishing to leave the country in turmoil and confusion. But once he reached his decision, or professed to believe that providence had directed him, he was very firm. ‘It matters not who is our commander-in-chief,’ he once said, ‘if God be so.’ The army leaders had feared a royalist invasion from Ireland, although in truth there was very little chance of one. Nevertheless they could not endure an enemy close to England’s shores; it presented a clear and dangerous menace to the new republic.

Cromwell arrived, in the middle of August, at a favourable moment; the royalist navy had been swept from the seas by the ships of the commonwealth, and the duke of Ormonde’s army had been all but annihilated outside Dublin after a surprise attack by parliamentary forces. Cromwell wrote from his ship that ‘this is an astonishing mercy’. He believed that he was indeed the Lord’s chosen servant and, when he landed at the port of Dublin after a stormy crossing, he promised a crusade against ‘the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish’. They were for Cromwell vastly inferior both in race and in religion; he treated them as if they were less than human.

Cromwell wished to do his work rapidly and effectively but, despite his command of 20,000 men, no set battles were fought. Instead he proceeded to conquer the enemy in a series of sieges. He went first to the city of Drogheda, a little over 30 miles north of Dublin, where he summoned the royalist governor to surrender. On the following day, 11 September, having received no formal submission, he attacked; in a series of bloody battles and skirmishes the defenders were overwhelmed. According to Cromwell’s express orders all those who were carrying weapons were put to the sword. That was the rule of war: 3,000 of the garrison, as well as all priests and friars, were killed. ‘I am persuaded’, Cromwell wrote, ‘that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches.’ The slaughter has remained in the folk memory of Ireland to this day.

From Drogheda Cromwell and his men marched down to Wexford, a little over 70 miles south of Dublin, where there was yet more killing in the name of God. The city did not need to be stormed since the gate had been opened in the face of imminent attack; yet when the soldiers entered the town they began a fierce onslaught upon the inhabitants, many of whom begged for mercy in vain. It is reported that 200 women were killed beside what is now the Bull Ring; a memorial plaque is on the site of the massacre.

Cromwell stayed in Ireland for another nine months. Any hope that the Irish would capitulate after the spectacle of bloodshed in Drogheda and Wexford was soon dispelled, and he found himself engaged in a series of struggles against stubborn resistance. At the beginning of December he abandoned the siege of Waterford under a storm of rain, ‘it being as terrible a day as ever I marched in all my life’. As soon as the army moved inland, away from the coast, the climate and geography of the country reduced them more quickly than did the enemy; fog and rain and mist descended upon them, while dysentery and malarial fever also did their work. Problems of supply were added to those of morale.

The war itself continued for another two years; it had acquired the character of what might be termed guerrilla warfare with the native forces attacking the invading army in a series of raids and skirmishes. Yet by his swift and punitive response Cromwell had achieved the task of destroying any potential for a royalist attack upon England.

The remaining enemy now lay in the north. The Scots had already invited King Charles II to travel to his kingdom, and negotiations between the two sides began in March at Breda, a city in the south of the Netherlands where the young king and his court resided. Parliament and the council of state were thoroughly alarmed at the conjunction, and Cromwell was soon made aware that his presence was needed at home. At the end of May 1650, he sailed for England, leaving behind him Henry Ireton as lord deputy of Ireland; when he landed at Bristol, he was given the welcome for a returning hero.

Charles II needed to find support wherever he could, and the chance of a Scottish army was not one to be missed. So aboard ship on 23 June, just before landing in Scotland, he signed a solemn oath to uphold the national covenant and to ensure that Presbyterianism became the official religion of England as well as of Scotland. He swore this in bad faith, having no regard for the Presbyterian cause or its proponents, but his immediate interests were of more importance. One Scottish negotiator, Alexander Jaffray, later concluded that ‘he sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him’. The king had learned, like his father, the arts of disguise and dissimulation. Yet his signature meant that war was now certain.

Sir Thomas Fairfax refused to lead the English army into Scotland on the grounds that the invasion would violate the ‘solemn league and covenant’ that had been signed between the two nations seven years before and never repealed. Cromwell countered with the question ‘whether it is better to have this war in the bowels of another country or of our own’; his argument was persuasive and it was he who led the army once more. Fairfax, uncertain about the direction of the commonwealth and unwilling wholly to depose the king, now resigned as lord general. Cromwell was appointed to be his successor.

Cromwell crossed the border on 23 July with 11,000 horse and foot, but the enemy was not to be seen. The commander of the Scottish forces, David Leslie, had determined upon a strategy of harassment rather than open battle in order to cut off Cromwell’s communication with England; he was successful in that regard, and Cromwell was forced to draw back to the coastal town of Dunbar 30 miles to the east of Edinburgh. Leslie then swept forward to ensure that Cromwell could have no contact with England. The commanders of both armies believed in divine providence and the sacredness of their cause; both sides fasted and prayed, their respective ministers exhorting them in long sermons. In the phrase of the time, only the harder nail would be able to drive out the other.

At Dunbar Leslie believed that the English were trapped between his army and the sea; he waited on high ground but the Scottish ministers in the camp persuaded him to move down towards the enemy. Cromwell saw the manoeuvre and exclaimed that ‘God is delivering them into our hands; they are coming down to us’. And so it proved. The English called out, ‘The Lord of Hosts!’ while the battle cry of the Scots was ‘The Covenant!’ The Scots were routed after a brief resistance; 3,000 were killed and 10,000 captured. Very few English casualties were reported. A witness informed John Aubrey that, after the battle, Cromwell ‘did laugh so excessively as if he had been drunk; his eyes sparkled with spirits’. The whole of southern Scotland now fell to the English. Other consequences followed. With the apparent judgement of God against them, the Presbyterian ministers lost much prestige and authority; never again would the covenanting movement maintain its previous power over Scotland.

The young king was now in desperate circumstances. After his submission to the presbyters in the early summer of 1650 he was now at Perth in the power of the ‘committee of estates’, who governed Scotland when parliament was not in session. He hated Scotland and despised the Presbyterian ministers who exhorted him and preached at him; he detested their hypocrisy, as he saw it, and was nostalgic for the simple pieties of the Church of England. After he heard of Leslie’s defeat he tried to escape from his oppressors, but some troops from the ‘committee of estates’ managed to intercept him and to persuade him to return on the promise that he would be granted more powers. On the first day of 1651 Charles was crowned king of Scotland in Scone; the medieval village was the traditional and hallowed site of kingship.

Cromwell remained in Edinburgh for almost a year after his victory at Dunbar, while Leslie strengthened the remains of his army less than 40 miles northwest at Stirling. But there was no possibility of the two armies clashing in the vicinity; the nature of the terrain, and the wild weather of winter, made any campaign unlikely. In any case Cromwell fell dangerously sick in February 1651. He suffered from a ‘feverish ague’, perhaps contracted in Ireland and exacerbated by the campaign in Scotland; he had told his wife, the day after Dunbar, ‘I grow an old man, and feel the infirmities of age marvellously stealing upon me.’ He was on the brink of death on three separate occasions and, in alarm, parliament dispatched two physicians to his bedside. He himself was convinced that God had sent him sickness in order to test his faith.

By the early summer, however, he was fully recovered; he believed that he had been saved for a purpose, and almost at once took advantage of the more favourable weather to renew his campaign. In a series of manoeuvres he so arranged matters that the roads south to England remained open to the royalist forces. It might have seemed like an unpardonable blunder, but in fact Cromwell had wanted to remove the Scottish troops from Scotland where they could not otherwise be dislodged. He had set a trap that Charles now entered. Cromwell warned the Speaker of the Rump Parliament that ‘I do apprehend that if the enemy goes for England, being some few days march before us, it will trouble some men’s thoughts and may occasion some inconveniences’. Yet he believed that all would be well, and all manner of things would be well.

The king, hopeful that the royalists of England would flock to his banner, came across the border by way of Carlisle. Certain ‘scares’ and conspiracies had been reported in these early days; disaffected royalists met at racecourses or in taverns to plot their schemes but, without any organized direction, they remained inchoate. The government also sent agents provocateurs among them, known as ‘decoy ducks’. In the spring of this year a royalist conspiracy was discovered in the City of London that involved several Presbyterian ministers; one of their number, Christopher Love, died on the scaffold. This was considered by some to be an affront to religion while others, such as John Milton, celebrated it as a blow against disobedience and treason.

Yet few supporters joined the king on his journey south, principally because the Scots were not popular among the English people; they could not support an ancient enemy, even if a lawful monarch led them forward. David Leslie himself was doleful and, when the king asked why he was so sad in the presence of such a spirited army, he replied quietly that ‘he was melancholic indeed, for he knew that army, how well soever it looked, would not fight’. Nevertheless the king made his way down the northwestern counties, through Cumberland and Cheshire and Staffordshire; he could not think of changing course towards London, since the regiments of the enemy were now pursing him. Cromwell’s strategy had been entirely successful.

Charles took refuge at last in the perennially royal city of Worcester. ‘For me,’ the king said, ‘it is a crown or a coffin.’ Cromwell had not the patience to try a siege on this occasion but decided instead upon an immediate attack, on both sides of the town, by means of the Severn. With the royalist army at half the strength of its antagonist, the result was not really in doubt. Charles, watching the action from the tower of the cathedral, made one last effort to consolidate his forces in a battle that lasted for three hours. When he rallied some of his men for another fresh sally, they threw down their arms. ‘Then shoot me dead,’ he said, ‘rather than let me live to see the sad consequences of this day.’ Brave words were not enough, however, and by the early afternoon of 3 September 1651, the royalist army had been scattered to the winds. The young king disappeared into the greenwood, among the birds and foxes, where he could not be found. It was Oliver Cromwell’s last battle and it was for him, as he wrote, ‘a crowning mercy’.

The wanderings of the young king have become the stuff of legend; he made his secret way through England for forty-two days, and was concealed in eighty-two different hiding places; forty-five people, by the smallest count, knew who he was and where he was. Yet not one of them betrayed him. The image of the king still burned brightly in some loyal hearts. It was noted that many of those who preserved him were Roman Catholic.

In the course of his peregrinations he was disguised as a labourer; he hid in a barn, in a wood and on a farm. He adopted the disguise of the son of a tenant farmer, and was recognized in silence by the butler of the manor where he rested. He stayed in a ‘priest hole’, devised to protect visiting Jesuits, and lay concealed among the boughs of an oak tree in the grounds of Boscobel House. He dressed as a country man, in a worn leather doublet, and as a servant in a grey cloak. Posters were pasted in villages and market towns asking for the capture of ‘a tall, black man, over two yards high’; the ‘black’ referred to his somewhat swarthy complexion. On one occasion he was surprised by the sound of bells and sight of bonfires, arranged after a false report of his death.

In Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, a blacksmith told him that the king should be hanged for bringing in the Scots. At Bridport, disguised as a servant, he entered a street that was filled with troops searching for him; he dismounted and led his horse as if he were taking it to a stable. At Brighton an innkeeper knelt down and kissed his hand, saying ‘that he would not ask him who he was, but bid God bless him whither he was going’. One attempt at escape by sea was abandoned, but on 14 October he sailed from Shoreham to the relative safety of Normandy. On his return to France the young king was asked if he would ever return to Scotland, to which he replied that he would rather be hanged first. When he arrived at the French court he was still ragged and dirty after his adventures.

Cromwell returned in triumph to London bearing with him, like a Roman emperor, the prisoners whom he had taken. He was granted an income of £4,000 per year, and the palace at Hampton Court was bestowed upon him. There could be no doubt that he was the first man of the state.

Yet he came back to a city very different from that which he had left at the beginning of the Irish campaign. The first ‘year of freedom’, after the heady days of the council of state, had been less than glorious. The Rump Parliament had been almost overwhelmed with the pressure of business; it set up committees for legal or ecclesiastical reform, but then did nothing to carry their conclusions into effect. Accusations of favouritism, and even of corruption, were often heard. It was widely believed that its principal concern was for its own survival.

Parliament did pass a few bills, however, designed for the supposed good of the commonwealth; one of them was an Act making adultery a capital offence. It was not a great success. Four women, and no men, were executed. In many other respects the members of parliament seemed to have lapsed into a state close to inertia. It was reported that the present government was reduced to a ‘languishing condition’ in the provinces.

Yet Cromwell’s triumphs were evident. Scotland was seized and strengthened by one of Cromwell’s key generals, George Monck, and was governed by a military regime for the next eleven years; Cromwell remarked that ‘I do think truly they are a very ruined nation’. No king of England had ever conquered Scotland. Ireland was in no better case; after Cromwell’s withdrawal another general, Edmund Ludlow, practically completed the conquest of that country. The Act of Settlement, passed in the summer of 1652, condemned Catholic landowners to the wholesale or partial forfeiture of their estates while those who had actively supported the Irish rebellion were in theory condemned to death. Cromwell had achieved the unparalleled feat of ascendancy over the three kingdoms.

When he returned from his victory at Worcester he was told that great things were expected of him in peace no less than in war; it was his task, according to a letter sent to him, to ‘ease the oppressed of their burdens, to release the prisoners out of bonds, and to relieve poor families with bread’. Yet he could only achieve these laudable aims through the agency of the Rump Parliament that seemed in no way inclined to obey his orders with the same promptness as the soldiers of the New Model Army. Those parliamentarians who were members of the council of state were in most respects still conscientious and diligent, yet others were not so easily inspired by Cromwell’s zeal or vision.

Cromwell had argued for an immediate dissolution of parliament, making way for a fresh legislature that might deal with the problems attendant upon victory. Yet the members prevaricated and debated, finally agreeing to dissolve their assembly at a date not later than November 1654. They gave themselves another three years of procrastination. The army was by now thoroughly disillusioned with those members who seemed intent upon thwarting or delaying necessary legislation. The more committed soldiers believed them to be time-servers or worse, uninterested in the cause of ‘the people of God’.

In truth the Rump was essentially a conservative body, while the army inherently favoured radical solutions; there was bound to be conflict between them. Yet Cromwell himself was not so certain of his course; he wished for godly reformation of the commonwealth but he also felt obliged, at this stage, to proceed by constitutional methods. He did not want to impose what was known as a ‘sword government’. Another possibility was also full of peril. In the current state of opinion it was possible that, unless fresh elections were carefully managed, a royalist majority might be returned; this could not be permitted.

The condition of England was enough to cause dismay. The late wars had badly injured trade, with a consequent steep increase in unemployment; bands of beggars roamed the land in numbers not seen since the last century. The country gentry and other landlords were devastated by the various taxes imposed upon them; those who favoured the royalist cause found their lands in danger of confiscation or sale. The prisons were filled with debtors. The Church was in confusion, with radical sectaries and orthodox believers still engaged in recrimination and complaint. Episcopacy had been abolished but no other form of national Church government had taken its place; it was said that the mass of the people could not find ministers to serve them. Many called, without success, for legislation to abolish burdensome taxes, to simplify and improve the judicial process, to ease the public debt and to lower the cost of living.

One evening in the autumn of 1652, Cromwell was walking in St James’s Park with a member of the council of state, Bulstrode Whitelocke. Cromwell asked his companion for his counsel on the present condition of affairs, remarking of the Rump Parliament that ‘there is little hope of a good settlement to be made by them, really there is not’. Whitelocke then replied that ‘we ourselves have acknowledged them the supreme power’.

Cromwell: What if a man should take upon him to be king?

Whitelocke: I think that remedy would be worse than the disease.

Cromwell: Why do you think so?

Whitelocke: As to your own person the title of king would be of no advantage, because you have the full kingly power in you already, concerning the militia, and you are general.

Cromwell went on to reflect, at least according to Whitelocke’s diary, that ‘the power of a king is so great and so high’, that ‘the title of it might indemnify in a great measure those that act under it’; it would in particular be useful in curbing ‘the insolences and extravagances of those whom the present powers cannot control’. It is possible that the conversation sprang from hindsight on the part of Whitelocke but its purport is confirmed by Cromwell’s remark in an earlier meeting of officers and parliamentarians that ‘somewhat of a monarchical government would be most effectual, if it could be established with safety to the liberties of the people’. Certainly he believed that his military victories had been delivered to him by God. Why should his destiny now be in the hands of a Rump? He could have waited patiently for a sign but ambition and a sense of mission (they are not to be distinguished) soon drove him forward.

The army had already presented a petition of complaint to parliament in which it was recommended that miscreants in positions of authority should be replaced by ‘men of truth, fearing God and hating covetousness’. This was a standard preamble based on Exodus 18:21. They listed many necessary reforms that needed ‘speedy and effectual’ redress. The members of the Rump promised to take such matters ‘under consideration’.

Cromwell attempted to mediate between the officers and parliamentarians, although he believed that the Rump was in general guided by pride and self-seeking. He told a colleague that he was being pushed to action, the consideration of which ‘makes my hair stand on end’. His practice was always to withdraw into himself, in a process of self-communing, before taking swift and decisive action.

The officers of the New Model Army had devoted the first week of 1653 to prayer and fasting, seeking for God’s counsel. From this time forward the members of the Rump feared some form of military intervention. It was rumoured that parliament was preparing a bill for new elections, vetted by its own members, that would destroy the army’s expectations of godly reformation; it was also claimed that parliament was about to remove Cromwell from the leadership of the army.

On 20 April Cromwell came into the chamber of the House of Commons, dressed in plain black, and took his seat; he had left a file of musketeers at the door of the chamber and in the lobby. He took off his hat and rose to his feet. He first commended the Commons for their early efforts at reform but then reproached them for their subsequent delays and obfuscations; he roamed down the middle of the chamber and signalled various individual members as ‘whoremaster’ and ‘drunkard’ and ‘juggler’. He declared more than once that ‘it is you that have forced me to do this, for I have sought the Lord night and day that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work’. He spoke, according to one observer, ‘with so much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted’; he shouted, and kicked the floor with his foot.

In conclusion he called out, ‘You are no parliament. I will put an end to your sitting.’ He then called for the musketeers and pointed to the parliamentary mace lying on the table. ‘What shall be done with this bauble? Here. Take it away.’ He said later that he had not planned or premeditated his intervention and that ‘the spirit was so upon him, that he was overruled by it; and he consulted not with flesh and blood at all’. This is perhaps too convenient an explanation to be altogether true. He had dissolved a parliament that, in one form or another, had endured for almost thirteen years. The Long Parliament, of which the Rump was the final appendage, had witnessed Charles I’s attempt to seize five of its members and then the whole course of the civil wars; it had seen some of its members purged and driven away. It was not a ruin, but a ruin of that ruin. It ended in ignominy, unwanted and unlamented. Cromwell remarked later that, at its dissolution, not even a dog barked. On the following day a large placard was placed upon the door of the chamber. ‘This House to be let, unfurnished.’

32

Fear and trembling

The most powerful image of the age, after the demise of the Tudor line, was that of a society without divine sanction. In the early decades of the seventeenth century Jacobean tragedy, as we have seen, assumed a world without God where men and women struggle for survival. The civic broils of the 1640s had rendered the prospect of chaos only more acute. Out of that fear and insecurity came a book that has been described as the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language.

Thomas Hobbes had shown no signs of greatness. After a conventional humanist education at Oxford he became tutor and companion to William Cavendish, second son of the 1st earl of Devonshire; with that gentleman he undertook the almost obligatory European tour. On a subsequent journey, to Geneva, he experienced his moment of awakening. He happened to open a copy of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry and was immediately impressed by the Greek mathematician’s reliance on deduction through definitions and axioms; it was the method, not the matter, that inspired him. In that spirit he began to brood on the nature of human society.

He began work on Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil in the late 1640s, the volume eventually being published in 1651. It was begun at a time, therefore, of chaotic civil war; its writing continued through the trial and execution of a king; it was completed in a period when the political experiment of the Rump Parliament was being challenged by various sects and interests. Where was certainty, or safety, to be found? Hobbes was in any case of a timorous and fearful nature. He wrote, at the age of eighty-four, that ‘fear and I were born twins’.

So Leviathan emerged from the very conditions of the time, or what he called ‘the seditious roaring of a troubled nation’. He did not read other political or philosophical accounts; he believed ‘that there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of philosophers’. He followed his own bright line of thought through all of its logical consequences. He would ponder and ruminate, then jot down the phrases and conclusions that came to him. One axiom would lead to another, and then to the next, so that he was inexorably guided towards his own vision of the world.

His clarity of purpose, and his rigorous method, allowed him to cut through all the political cant of the period; his was a thorough scepticism that pierced the pious platitudes and false generalizations, the truisms and solecisms, that always attend political discourse. He would proceed only upon first principles maintained by firm definition and vigorous argument. He stated that ‘words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools’.

So his argument opened. Stripped of order and security, men are at enmity one with another in ‘a perpetual contention for honour, riches and authority’. The goad for action and conflict is pre-eminently ‘a perpetual and restless desire for power’. The strength of one man is more or less equal to that of another, leading to an eternal war of all against all. Once the dire predicament is understood, a solution may be found amid the discord. The fear of death encourages prudence and the desire for self-preservation; the principles of reason might therefore be applied to the quest for peace, and for life rather than death. A form of contract might be agreed whereby each man is ‘contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself’. Each man agrees that he will not do to another what he would not have done to himself.

This instinct for self-preservation then becomes the key element in what might be described as Hobbes’s metaphysic whereby ‘man which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, has his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity, and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep’. This is the foundation of his theory of the state.

The contract between men is the beginning of wisdom. How is it to be maintained? It cannot be entrusted to the individuals themselves. It must be transferred to ‘a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance’. There must be an authority that can enforce the contract in perpetuity; supreme authority demands supreme power and, as Hobbes puts it, ‘covenants, without the sword, are but words’. To escape from fear and trembling, therefore, men must agree among themselves to create a system of such powerful control that no deviation or dissension, no unrest or cause of unrest, will be tolerated. They transfer their own prudence and reason to this other thing, this living absolutism that he names as ‘great Leviathan’. This act of authorization is the mutual surrender of the natural rights of each man in order to create the sovereign power which will guide and protect them.

Leviathan will impose the religion of the state, thus avoiding the divisions that Hobbes saw all around. There will be no such thing as liberty of conscience, which simply created confusion and, in the case of England, bloodshed. Justice and truth are to be determined by civil authority rather than individual choice. Justice is simply what the law demands.

It did not matter whether this omnipotent authority was king, or conquering invader, or magistrate; it was only important that it existed, and that it was authorized to act and to will in place of individual action and private will. Only thus could true order be maintained. That is why some critics accused him of complying with the doctrine of the divine right of kings, while others attacked him for compounding with Cromwell’s commonwealth.

In his preface to the Latin translation of his treatise he wrote that ‘this great Leviathan, which is called the State, is a work of art; it is an artificial man made for the protection and salvation of the natural man, to whom it is superior in grandeur and power’. By the rigorous argument from first principles, Hobbes believed that he had uncovered the true imperatives of civil society. He was also convinced that he had written for the benefit of mankind, and in the last sentence of the work he concludes ironically that ‘such truth, as opposeth no man’s profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome’.

Leviathan created a sensation at the time, and it has been said that it inspired universal horror. The Commons proposed to burn the book, and one bishop suggested that Hobbes himself should be tied to the stake. It was so exact, so convincing in its logic, so simple in its argument, that it was difficult to repudiate without relying upon the political pieties and the cant that Hobbes had already attacked.

Nevertheless he was denounced as an atheist and as a materialist. Clearly he had no very great confidence in human nature, and described the character of any man’s heart as ‘blotted and confounded … with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting and erroneous doctrines’. He stated that ‘the value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power’. He added that ‘to obey, is to honour, because no man obeys them whom they think have no power to help or hurt them’. His clarity of judgement is sometimes terrible; he has the savagery of the true moral philosopher, and Leviathan must rank as one of the central statements of the seventeenth century.

33

Healing and settling

Cromwell had engineered what was in effect a second revolution. He was now, by virtue of the sword, the indisputable head of state and sole source of power. The officers of the army concluded a dispatch with the encomium that ‘we humbly lay ourselves with these thoughts, in this emergency, at your excellency’s feet’. The ministers of Newcastle upon Tyne made ‘their humble addresses to his godly wisdom’. Yet Cromwell did not intend or wish to be a dictator; he was still concerned with the constitutional niceties of his unique position.

He appointed a reformed council of state, with himself a prominent participant, but its thirteen members were in something of a quandary. They were in a situation without precedent, faced with the obligation of creating a constitution out of nothing. Some in the army wished for government by the council itself, perhaps with the assistance of a carefully selected parliament; others pressed for near universal male suffrage; yet others demanded a council of godly men on the model of the Jewish Sanhedrin.

Cromwell spent eight days locked in conversation with his councillors, and from their deliberations emerged a wholly original form of parliament. It was eventually agreed that members of the new assembly should be either nominated by the various Independent congregations or favoured by the army and by prominent individuals; those chosen were to be ‘known persons, men fearing God, and of approved integrity’. One of the godly men chosen to serve was Isaac Praise-God Barebone, a leather merchant and preacher from London who, at his warehouse in Fleet Street, proclaimed the imminent coming of Jesus Christ. His colourful name and nature led to this nominated parliament becoming known as ‘Barebone’s Parliament’. There were 144 men who were nominees, and thus it was also called the ‘Little Parliament’; it was indeed the smallest parliament to date ever to sit at Westminster.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that all of its members were zealots; the preponderance of them held the rank of gentleman, and their number included a viscount and a baron as well as several baronets and knights. The provost of Eton and the high master of St Paul’s School were among them. Yet, unsurprisingly, the radical element prevailed in their deliberations; those who burn hottest inflame the rest. No one wishes to be known as tepid or lukewarm. In his opening address to them, Cromwell remarked that ‘we are at the threshold’ and that ‘you are at the edge of promises and prophecies’. It was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era.

The members of the new assembly were zealous and busy, but they were perhaps not worldly enough to judge the consequences of their decisions. They determined to abolish the court of chancery, for example, and drastically to simplify the law; some in fact demanded the abolition of the common law, to be substituted by the code of Moses. They voted to abolish tithes, a proposal that might have eventually led to the disestablishment of the Church and the violation of all rights of property.

The alarm and horror of the nation soon became manifest, and Cromwell realized that it was time to end an experiment that had lasted for just five months. He is reported to have said that he was more troubled now by fools than by knaves. A parliament of saints had gone to excess. He had learned that it was not possible to create instruments of power in an arbitrary manner; they had no stable foundation, and therefore veered wildly from side to side. In December the more conservative or moderate of the members were persuaded to launch a pre-emptive coup by voting in an early morning session that they should abdicate their powers; the radicals were in a prayer meeting at the time. The Speaker then took up the mace and led them in procession to Whitehall Palace where Cromwell was waiting to greet them. He professed later to being surprised by their arrival, but this is hard to credit.

A few of the godly remained in the chamber. An army officer entered and asked them, ‘What do you here?’

‘We are seeking the Lord.’

‘Then you may go elsewhere for, to my certain knowledge, he has not been here these twelve years.’

The abrogation of this ‘Little Parliament’ was greeted with considerable relief by those whose livings had been threatened by it. The lawyers celebrated and, according to an Independent lay preacher, ‘most men upon this dissolution take occasion to cry Aha, Aha’.

And then there was one. It was said that, in bringing an end to ‘Barebone’s Parliament’, Cromwell took the crown from Christ and put it on his own head. One of his military associates, General John Lambert, had drawn up what was called an ‘Instrument of Government’ in which Cromwell would be granted power as Lord Protector of the British Republic. This ‘Instrument’ has the distinction of being the first, and the last, written constitution of England. Yet its system of checks and balances, including a council, did not dispel the impression that Cromwell was now an autocrat in all but name. Clarendon noted that ‘this extraordinary man, without any other reason than because he had a mind to it … mounted himself into the throne of three kingdoms, without the name of king, but with a greater power and authority than had ever been exercised or claimed by any king’.

On 16 December 1653, Oliver Cromwell stood before a chair of state in Westminster Hall. He was dressed in a suit and cloak of black velvet, with long boots; a band of gold ran around his hat. He looked up and raised his right hand to heaven as he swore to observe all the articles of the new constitution; John Lambert then knelt and offered him a civic sword sheathed in its scabbard as a token of peaceful rule. In the proclamation of public acts he was now styled ‘Olivarius Protector’ in the same manner as ‘Carolus Rex’. His passage through the streets was guarded by soldiers. He insisted that the series of nine paintings by Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar, should not be sold off but remain at his apartments in Hampton Court Palace. The proceedings of his court, in such matters as the reception of ambassadors, resembled those of Charles I. His son, Henry Cromwell, was greeted in the entertainment grounds of Spring Gardens with cries of ‘Room for the prince’. Lucy Hutchinson wrote that for Cromwell’s family to emulate regal state was as ridiculous as to dress apes in scarlet.

Many of his former supporters now railed at him for betraying the cause of godly reformation. He was accused of sacrificing the public good to ambition and was denounced as a ‘dissembling perjured villain’. Biblical insults were hurled at him as the ‘Old Dragon’, the ‘Little Horn’, the ‘Man of Sin’, and the ‘Vile Person’ of Daniel 11: 21. At the pulpit set up by Blackfriars one preacher, Christopher Feake, proclaimed that ‘he has deceived the Lord’s people’; he added that ‘he will not reign long, he will end worse than the last Protector did, that crooked tyrant Richard. Tell him I said it.’ Feake was brought before the council and placed in custody. The governor of Chester Castle, Colonel Robert Duckenfield, put it a little more delicately when he wrote to Cromwell that ‘I believe the root and tree of piety is alive in your lordship, though the leaves thereof, through abundance of temptations and flatteries, seem to me to be withered much of late’.

In a sense the revolution was now over, with all attempts at radical reform at an end. Cromwell instituted a reign of quiet in which men of property might feel safe; in effect he inaugurated a gentry republic. It cannot be said that the new dispensation was received with any great enthusiasm, yet for many it must have been a relief after the disordered governance of recent years. For others, of course, it made no difference at all.

In the first eight months of their power the Lord Protector and the council, in the absence of parliament, passed more than eighty ordinances. Scotland and Ireland were to be incorporated within the commonwealth. The court of chancery was to be reformed. Duels were forbidden, and cock-fighting suppressed; horse racing was suspended for a period. Public drunkenness, and profanity, were punished with a fine or with a whipping. No more than 200 hackney carriages were allowed in London. The postal service was reformed, while the prisons and the public highways were improved. The treasury was reorganized. This was a practical administration.

Cromwell and the council were no less pragmatic in foreign affairs. The European powers were docile, perhaps in fear of a resurgent English navy that had recently challenged and defeated the Dutch. Peace was made with the Protestant nations, among them Sweden and Denmark. France and Spain vied with each other for the favour of the protectorate, in which equation Cromwell tended to incline towards the French side; he wanted to remove the influence of Charles II on the French court.

He also favoured balance in religious matters. An ordinance in the spring of 1654 established a commission of ‘triers’ who would check the qualities and qualifications of proposed clergymen. In the summer of the year commissioners were appointed to every county as ‘ejectors’ who would remove ministers guilty of ignorance, insufficiency, or scandalous behaviour. Cromwell supported religious liberty except for those who espoused pope or bishops. Anglicans were in theory no more tolerated than Roman Catholics, but in practice they were given tacit acceptance.

From a policy of benign neglect, Cromwell created a variegated Church made up of Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists. Doctrine was less important to him than spirit; dogma did not concern him as long as he could create a community that had what he called ‘the root of the matter’ within it. It has been described as not so much a national Church as a confederation of Christian sects. Some of the more committed Anglicans went into exile ‘waiting for a day’, as they put it, when Charles II might claim his throne. Yet many were not exercised by religion at all. In his diary entry for 11 May 1654, Evelyn noted that ‘I now observed how the women began to paint themselves, formerly a most ignominious thing, and used only by prostitutes’.

Small groups of royalists frequented certain taverns of London, and of the provincial towns, where they engaged in plots against the protectorate. Where there are conspiracies, however, there are apt to be informers and suborners. In February 1654, eleven men were arrested at the Ship Tavern by the Old Bailey. It became clear, in the course of investigations, that a powerful group of royalists had been formed to incite a popular rebellion; it was known as the Sealed Knot. The exiled king was in constant and secret correspondence with his supporters, and seemed particularly interested in a scheme to assassinate Cromwell himself. He was to be shot after he had left Whitehall for Hampton Court on a Saturday morning.

Yet Cromwell had created a very efficient secret service under the command of John Thurloe, secretary to the council of state, and the details of the plot were known almost as soon as they were formulated. Alerted by his spymaster Cromwell took to the water on that morning and avoided an attack. Soon after the failure of the conspiracy the authorities mounted raids in London taverns and houses, in the course of which 500 people were arrested. Two of the leaders were executed, while others were transported to Barbados. An old Catholic priest was also seized and executed.

Yet the punishments did not deter other plotters, who would soon attempt to rise again. Cromwell was given a copy of a letter written by the new king in which Charles advised his supporters to ‘consult with those you dare trust, and, if you are ready, agree upon a time…’ Cromwell now always carried a gun. In a riding accident, later in the year, the pistol fired in his pocket and the wound kept him in bed for three weeks.

The occasion for a parliament, according to the ‘Instrument of Government’, had now come. On 4 September 1654, Cromwell addressed the new assembly in the Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace; he sat in the chair of state while the members were seated on benches ranged against the walls. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘you are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw.’ He then proceeded to speak for three hours on the various manifestations of God’s providence in an oration that veered from messianic enthusiasm to scriptural exposition. He had called parliament, but ‘my calling be from God’. He was thus reiterating, in his own fashion, the divine right of kings. He was above parliament. Yet he came to them not as a master but as a fellow servant. Now was a time for ‘healing and settling’.

Yet the new parliament was by no means a compliant body. For some days its members had debated, without reaching any conclusion, whether they should give the protectorate their support. On 12 September they found the doors of their chamber closed against them, and they were asked once more to assemble in the Painted Chamber where the Protector wished to address them. He chided them for neglecting the interest of the state, ‘so little valued and so much slighted’, and he would not allow them to proceed any further unless and until they had signed an oath to agree to ‘the form of government now settled’. All members had to accept the condition that ‘the persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it is hereby settled in one single person and a Parliament’. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I am sorry, and I could be sorry to the death that there is cause for this. But there is cause…’

Some members protested and refused to sign, but the majority of them either agreed or at least submitted. Cromwell still did not attempt to guide the debates, but he became increasingly alarmed at their nature. He is reported to have said in this period that he ‘would rather keep sheep under a hedge than have to do with the government of men’. Sheep were at least obedient. The members voted to restrict the power of the Protector to veto legislation; they also decided that their decisions were more authoritative than those of the council of state. They believed, in other words, that parliament should still be paramount in the nation. That was not necessarily Cromwell’s view. From day to day they debated every clause of the ‘Instrument of Government’, with the evident wish to replace it with a constitution of their own. On 3 January 1655 they voted to reaffirm the limits to religious toleration; two days later they decided to reduce army pay, thus striking at Cromwell’s natural constituency. On 20 January they began to discuss the formation of a militia under parliamentary control.

Two days later, Cromwell called a halt. He lambasted them for wasting time in frivolous and unnecessary discourse when they should have been considering practical measures for the general reformation of the nation. He told them that ‘I do not know what you have been doing. I do not know whether you have been alive or dead.’ He considered that it was not fit for the common welfare and the public good to allow them to continue; and so, farewell. The first protectorate parliament was dissolved. The larger problem, however, was not addressed. Could a representative parliament ever coexist with what was essentially a military dictatorship?

Cromwell and the council once more reigned without challenge, but the price of power was eternal vigilance. In his speech of dissolution Cromwell had warned that ‘the cavalier party have been designing and preparing to put this nation in blood again’ together with ‘that party of men called levellers’. The royalist supporters of the Sealed Knot had indeed survived, despite deportations and executions, and seem to have entered an unlikely association with the radical republicans who shared an interest in removing Cromwell from power. For those of a levelling tendency Cromwell was infinitely worse than Charles; he had used them, betrayed them and set himself up as a despot. Yet the royalists could not even agree among themselves. They had planned six different regional conspiracies in 1654, but the only rebellion was a short and ill-organized affair in the West Country. The spymaster, Thurloe, had done his work.

*

Cromwell had been considering a possible friendship or alliance with Spain, despite the fact that as a Catholic state it was one of the horns of the beast. He had said to a Spanish envoy that an alliance was possible on the conditions that the English were granted liberty of conscience within the Spanish dominions and that free trade be allowed between England and the West Indies. The envoy replied that this was ‘to ask my master’s two eyes’.

Without any agreement, therefore, Cromwell felt emboldened to test Spanish power in the sensitive area of the West Indies. He convinced himself that the action was part of a religious crusade against popery, and he trusted that the warfare would not spread to Europe; he was mistaken, or misguided, in both aspirations. At the end of 1654 Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables set sail for Barbados with the order ‘to gain an interest in that part of the West Indies in possession of the Spaniards’. They arrived safely enough, in the spring of the following year, but their expedition thereafter was not a success.

The English forces sailed to the island of Hispaniola with the purpose of subduing the city of Santo Domingo and taking its treasure. The men marched for four days through rough country in the burning sun with little fresh water; they were apparently untested soldiers who had no idea of the conditions they would confront. Exhausted and demoralized, they were an easy prey for a group of horsemen and cattle-herders who surprised them in ambush. The remaining members of the expedition, still under the command of Venables, managed to sail on to Jamaica where they were able to take and occupy the island. But at the time it seemed like a poor reward, with the additional risk that Spain might now declare a general war against the old enemy.

The news of the failure to rout Santo Domingo reached Cromwell towards the end of July. He locked himself in his room for an entire day. He had hoped to control the trade and treasure routes of the Spaniards, but he had been thwarted. The new republic had never suffered a military defeat before. He had seen himself as the protector and champion of Protestant interests, but the hand of God seems to have been against him. Cromwell had said, in reply to those who had originally questioned the wisdom of the expedition, that ‘God had not brought us hither where we are but to consider the work that we may do in the world as well as at home’. Yet the Lord had not blessed this work in the world. This caused Cromwell the most painful reflections of his rule, and presaged the fears and doubts that would attend the last years of his protectorate. Wherein had he offended? Or was it the nation itself that had provoked God’s anger?

It may not be coincidental, therefore, that soon after the disaster in the Indies a network of godly rule was established in England. The country was divided into eleven districts, or groups of counties; at the head of each was imposed a major-general of decidedly puritan inclinations. These army commanders were instructed to raise taxes and revive the local militia, to enquire into the conduct of clergy and teachers, to arrest any suspect persons and to prevent further royalist uprisings. Their costs were met by charges imposed on royalists alone. This became known as the ‘decimation tax’, taking one tenth of the ‘malignants’’ profits from the land, an injustice to which they were forced to submit without complaint. The newspapers and periodicals were suppressed, and no item of news could be printed without the permission of John Thurloe.

Cromwell was attempting that reformation of manners which the last parliament had signally failed to achieve. The major-generals were instructed ‘to encourage and promote godliness and virtue’ and, as a result, the pastimes of the people were largely suppressed. Colonel Pride, who had led the purge of parliament seven years before, raided the beargarden at Bankside; he himself killed the bears, and then ordered his troops to wring the necks of the game-cocks in other parts of London. Alehouses were shut all over the country; stage plays as well as ‘mirths and jollities’ were forbidden.

One major-general, William Boteler, informed Thurloe that he had imprisoned ‘drunken fellows’ and others ‘suspected to live only on the highway’; those accused of illegal brewing or of keeping a ‘lewd house’ were also arrested. Those who travelled on the Lord’s day could be set in the stocks or placed in a cage; unmarried men and women who had ‘carnal knowledge’ of each other could be sent to a house of correction; those who swore or uttered profanities were heavily fined.

Public morals may have been improved by these measures, but public sympathy for Cromwell’s regime was lost. The people did not wish to be governed, or corrected, by military officials with an attendant crew of spies and informers. Some of the major-generals were considered by the gentry to be low-born interlopers, and the natural leaders of the counties did not relish their loss of authority. A nation cannot be made virtuous by diktat or by government inspectors. The experience of the major-generals, with their troops of horse behind them, also helped to augment the national hatred for standing armies.

The experiment did not last for very long; the major-generals were sent to their counties in the autumn of 1655 and were summoned back to Westminster in the spring of the following year for consultation. With a great war against Spain growing ever more likely, fresh revenues were urgently needed; the major-generals seem to have persuaded a reluctant Cromwell to call another parliament rather than impose further taxation by decree. Thus they contrived their own fall. It was not likely that the representatives of the nation, however they were chosen, would tolerate a continuation of godly rule.

*

After the attack by Penn and Venables on the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, Spain declared war on England as a natural and almost inevitable consequence. The West Indian adventure had become a European imbroglio with infinitely more dangerous possibilities. Spain and France were old enemies, however, and Cromwell now inclined towards the court of the young Louis XIV. A commercial treaty was signed in the autumn of 1655, containing certain secret clauses about the expulsion of Charles II from French territory; the English king had in fact already left for Spa and Aachen. Charles then promptly fashioned an agreement with Spain that would allow him to live in the Spanish Netherlands (what is now Belgium and part of northern France); he promised that, on his accession, he would return Jamaica to the Spanish. He was disheartened, always in need of money; he was surrounded by squabbling courtiers. With no realistic prospect of regaining his throne, nothing could ease his distress of mind.

Cromwell was himself in no easy condition. The failure of the expedition to the West Indies, and the onset of war with Spain, had precipitated a sickness described by the French ambassador as ‘a bilious colic, which occasionally flies to the brain’. He added that ‘grief often persecutes him more than either of these, as his mind is not yet accustomed to endure disgrace’. Cromwell survived, but became even more aware of the extent to which the commonwealth relied upon his presence. Who else could preserve the unity and constancy of the state? He was showing signs of his age and of his cares; his hand trembled when he held his hat. ‘Study still to be innocent,’ he told his son, Henry. ‘Cry to the Lord to give you a plain single heart.’

With the plans for a new parliament, and with the preparations for war, Cromwell and his councillors were hard pressed. The Venetian envoy observed that ‘they are so fully occupied that they do not know which way to turn, and the Protector has not a moment to call his own’. Cromwell had no very sanguine expectations about parliament. He may have realized that, far from ‘healing and settling’, the rule of the major-generals had provoked fresh dissension; he must have feared in any case that the combined opposition of republicans and silent royalist supporters might produce a majority against him. He explained later, ‘that it was against my judgement but I could have no quietness till it was done.’

The course of the election campaign was strenuous, and Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell that ‘here is the greatest striving to get into Parliament that ever was known’. The call went out against the representatives of the military regime. ‘No swordsmen! No decimators!’ It was a further sign that the country was restless and discomposed. The council of state took measures of its own, however, and excluded approximately one hundred of the elected members for ‘immorality’ or ‘delinquency’; it was another example of brute military power, and provoked much outrage in the country. How could this be called a free parliament?

Cromwell opened its proceedings on 17 September 1656, with a warning of the forces ranged against the country. England was at war with Spain, and the Spanish king was even then preparing to assist Charles Stuart in an invasion launched from Flanders. ‘Why, truly,’ he said employing his usual nervous syntax, ‘your great enemy is the Spaniard. He is. He is a natural enemy, he is naturally so.’ As for the enemy within, the levellers and the cavaliers were plotting to seize a seaport to welcome the king’s forces.

In the course of a long and rambling speech Cromwell defended the major-generals for suppressing vice and for espousing the cause of true religion. And what of the forced taxation to pay for them? ‘If nothing should be done but what is according to law, the throat of the nation may be cut while we send for some to make a law.’ The tenor of this comment is similar to one he had made before, that government should be judged by what is good for the people and not by what pleases them. He was by instinct an authoritarian.

On the day of his speech, three conspirators met to take his life as he entered parliament; they hired a house that stood beside the east door of Westminster Abbey, and planned to shoot him as he left there on his way to the Painted Chamber. They were levellers who wished to return to the old form of a puritan republic. Yet, in the face of a crowd, they lost their nerve and dispersed; it was only the first attempt that the leader of the group, Miles Sindercombe, would undertake. Cromwell, meanwhile, dismissed all such threats as ‘little fiddling things’. News soon came that might yet please the parliament and the nation. At the beginning of October Thurloe announced to parliament that Admiral Blake had seized several Spanish treasure ships on their way back to Cadiz; it was perhaps a sign that God was still with them. Parliament set aside a day for national thanksgiving.

A new Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Sagredo, came to England at this time and wrote that he found ‘not elegant cavaliers but cavalry and infantry; instead of music and ballets they have trumpets and drums; they do not speak of love but of Mars … no patches on their faces but muskets on their shoulders; they do not neglect sleep for the sake of amusements, but severe ministers keep their adversaries in incessant wakefulness. In a word, everything here is full of disdain, suspicion and rough menacing faces…’

Parliament was variously and continually employed with private petitions and private bills as well as matters of state. A member complained that ‘one business jostled out another’. It seemed likely that, just as its predecessor, it would achieve nothing of any consequence. Yet the religious zeal of its members was not in doubt when the case of James Naylor was put before them. He was a Quaker whose preachings aroused apocalyptic yearnings among his disciples; he was ‘the hope of Israel’ and ‘the Lamb of God’. In the summer of the year he had entered Bristol as Christ had once gone into Jerusalem; two women led his horse while others cried out ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Israel’. He was arrested and brought before the bar of parliament where he was questioned. ‘I was set up,’ he said, ‘as a sign to summon this nation.’

A debate of nine days followed his appearance in which it was agreed that this horrid blasphemy was more dangerous to the nation than any Spanish warship; it struck at the heart of its relationship with God, than which nothing was more precious. ‘Let us all stop our ears,’ one member said, ‘and stone him.’ It was not clear whether parliament had the judicial power to punish him, yet the members voted that Naylor should be placed in the pillory and whipped through the streets; his tongue was to be bored through with a hot iron and the letter ‘B’ for blasphemer branded on his forehead. He would then be sentenced to an indefinite imprisonment.

The ordeal of the tongue and forehead took place at the end of the year. A diarist, Thomas Burton, noted that ‘Rich, the mad merchant, sat bare-headed at Naylor’s feet all the time. Sometimes he sang, and cried, and stroked his hair and face, and kissed his hand, and sucked the fire out of his forehead.’ Naylor was patient, and the spectators were sympathetic to the plight of one who had endured the wrath of this parliament. Cromwell himself wished to know ‘the grounds and reason’ for its assumption of judicial power, but no response was ever made for the very good reason that the sentence was both arbitrary and unjustified. Some contemporaries warned that, if parliament felt itself able to condemn and punish one misguided man, who could feel safe?

At the beginning of 1657 a debate was held on a bill for maintaining the ‘decimation tax’ to subsidize the major-generals. To the surprise of many Cromwell’s son-in-law, John Claypole, opposed the measure; this was generally believed to mean that the Protector had withdrawn his support from the godly commanders in the field. Parliament itself was in large measure composed of people from the communities who had been subject to the strict measures of the major-generals, and the bill was rejected by thirty-six votes. The pietistic experiment was ended.

Another question of governance was raised. Should not Cromwell now become king and the House of Stuart be replaced by the House of Cromwell? This would satisfy the yearning of many people for a return to a traditional form of government. If Cromwell were sovereign, he might be able to curb the pretensions of parliament that had already gone beyond its powers. The newsletters anticipated a sudden ‘alteration of government’. On 19 January 1657, one member, John Ashe of Freshford, moved that Cromwell ‘take upon him the government according to the ancient constitution’.

On 23 February Sir Christopher Packe brought forward a remonstrance, under the title of the ‘humble petition and advice’, to the effect that Cromwell should assume ‘the name, style, title and dignity of king’ and that the House of Lords should be restored. The fury of the opponents of monarchy, most particularly the military element, was unrestrained. General John Lambert declared that any such reversal would be contrary to the principles for which he and his fellow soldiers had fought. Kingship had been so bathed in blood that it could not be restored. This was not a theoretical point. Cromwell was informed that a group of soldiers had bound themselves on oath to kill him as soon as he accepted the title.

Four days after the ‘humble petition’ had been advanced, one hundred representatives of the army visited Cromwell at Whitehall where they pleaded with him to resist the offer of advancement. He told them that he liked the title of king as little as they did; it was nothing but a bauble or a feather in the hat. He then reviewed the history of the last few years, in which he stated that he had faithfully followed the advice of the army; he said that ‘they had made him their drudge upon all occasions’, yet they had not met with success. None of the parliaments, none of the constitutional proposals, had worked. He told them that ‘it is time to come to a settlement’. A House of Lords, for example, was needed to check the pretensions of the Commons; they left him with their fury ‘much abated’, and a few days later another army delegation assured him that they would acquiesce in whatever he decided ‘for the good of these nations’.

The debate in parliament lasted for more than a month and occupied twenty-four sittings, some of them lasting all day. Eventually, at the end of March, Cromwell was formally requested to assume the crown. He replied that he had lived for the last part of his life ‘in the fire, in the midst of trouble’, and he requested more time for reflection. It was thought that he would accept the role of king, if only to unite a predominantly conservative nation, but in truth he was in conflict with himself. He knew that his senior military colleagues were passionately opposed to the change, but he knew also that this might prove his last and best chance to return the country to its traditional ways. It was in his means to provide the conditions for a regular and stable government.

It was not a question of private ambition; as he had said many times, the crown and sceptre meant very little to him. He already had more power than any English king. So he struggled. Thurloe said that Cromwell had ‘great difficulties in his own mind’ and that ‘he keeps himself reserved from everybody that I know of’; when a parliamentary delegation came to him, in the middle of April, ‘he came out of his chamber half unready in his gown, with a black scarf around his neck’. No doubt he prayed incessantly for divine guidance, hoping that as in the past a resolve or a decision would be presented to him as if by an act of grace.

He heard vital news of God’s providence in England’s affairs when he was told that Admiral Blake had successfully maintained a siege of the Spanish coast and had destroyed another treasure fleet, thus disabling Spain as a maritime power. England now effectively controlled the high seas, an ascendancy that was unprecedented in its history. With colonies in Jamaica and Barbados, as well as those such as Virginia on the American mainland, Cromwell was the first statesman since the days of Walsingham to contemplate a global empire. As Edmund Waller put it,

Others may use the ocean as their road

Only the English make it their abode.

Pepys noted, in the pusillanimous years of Charles II, that ‘it is strange how everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him’.

Yet on the most pressing matter of monarchy he could not, or dare not, come to a decision. On 3 April he declared to a parliamentary delegation that he could not discharge his duties ‘under that title’; five days later parliament urged him to reconsider, on which occasion it is reported that he delivered ‘a speech so dark, that none knows whether he will accept it or not’. He may still have been waiting for divine guidance. He knew that it was proper and expedient that he should take the crown but, as he said, ‘I would not seek to set up that which providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.’ In the first week of May it is reported that he told a group of members of parliament that he had decided to accept the title; yet once more he changed his mind.

On 8 May he told parliament that he could not and would not become King Oliver I. ‘At the best,’ he said, ‘I should do it doubtingly. And certainly what is so [done] is not of faith.’ The protests of the army officers had in the end proved to be persuasive; two of them, Fleetwood and Desborough, had in fact married into Cromwell’s family. They had told him that, if he accepted the crown, they would resign from all their offices and retire into private life. Other officers, who had been with him from the beginning and had fought with him through fire, also registered their strong disapproval. This was decisive. He could not at this late stage abandon his comrades and colleagues; he could not betray their trust or spoil their hopes. So his final answer to parliament was that ‘I cannot undertake this government with the title of king’.

The only way forward was by means of compromise. Even if Cromwell would not be king, he could accept the other constitutional measures recommended by parliament; in particular it seemed just, and necessary, to re-establish the House of Lords as a check upon the legislature. On 25 May the ‘humble petition’ was presented again with Cromwell named as chief magistrate and Lord Protector, an appointment which he accepted as ‘one of the greatest tasks that ever was laid upon the back of a human creature’. On 26 June 1657, Oliver Cromwell was draped in purple and in ermine for the ceremony of installation in Westminster Hall; upon the table before his throne rested the sword of state and a sceptre of solid gold. The blast of trumpets announced his reign. His office was not declared to be hereditary but he had been given the power to name his successor; it was generally believed that this would be one of his sons. So began the second protectorate, which was now a restored monarchy in all but name.

34

Is it possible?

There was a time for celebration. At the end of 1657 one of Cromwell’s daughters, Frances, married Robert Rich, the grandson of the earl of Warwick, and the ceremonial matched the status of the pair. Music and song echoed through the corridors of Whitehall in honour of the occasion; the orchestra comprised forty-eight violins and fifty trumpets. Guns were fired from the Tower in the manner of previous royal weddings. There was even ‘mixt dancing’, men and women together, that continued until five o’clock the following morning. In the spirit of the festivity Cromwell was moved to spill sack-posset, a rich and creamy drink, over the dresses of the women and to daub the stools where they were to sit with sugar and spice. He had an almost rustic sense of fun. At the subsequent wedding of another daughter, Mary, the ceremony at Hampton Court included a masque in which Cromwell played the non-speaking role of Jove. It was an astonishing return to the customs of the Stuart kings.

The French envoy reported that ‘another spirit’ was abroad and that ‘the preachers of old time are retiring because they are found too melancholic’. When Cromwell gave banquets for foreign envoys ‘rare music’ was always part of the occasion and, in the great hall of Hampton Court, two organs were placed for the use of a resident organist. It is to the credit of Cromwell, too, that under his rule the opera was introduced into England. The Protector was known to be a great lover of harmony, both of instruments and of voices.

Immediately after his installation Cromwell had adjourned parliament until the new year; when it reappeared, it would be in its old constitutional form of two houses. He had named his new council; it was the same as its predecessor, with the solitary exception of John Lambert who had resigned all of his offices and retired with a large pension. He had once believed that he would be the Protector’s successor but he now realized that he would be pre-empted by another, and younger, Cromwell.