Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (23 page)

Hobbes found the Commonwealth teeming with the new faiths, many with names that reflected their aims. The Levellers (see p.
195) were fighting for social equality; the Diggers prayed and campaigned for land reform; the Baptists favoured adult baptism;
the Quakers trembled at the name of the Lord; the Ranters, for their part, believed that nothing human was wrong, permitting
them to‘rant’ — meaning to swear blasphemously — while also smoking and drinking and practising free love. The Muggletonians
took their name from their spokesman Ludovicke Muggleton, who claimed to be one of the godly witnesses mentioned in the Book
of Revelation; while the Fifth Monarchists derived their theories from Daniel’s Old Testament dream: they interpreted
the four beasts he saw as the four great empires of the ancient world, which were now being succeeded by a fifth, the reign
of Christ — whose saints they were.

Hobbes threw up his hands at this bewildering array of creeds. These manifestly contradictory views of God confirmed his amoral
and very post-modern view of life’s essential chaos. But the Commonwealth’s closest thing to Leviathan, Oliver Cromwell, rather
welcomed the diversity.’I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us,’ he said,‘than that one of God’s children
should be persecuted.’

When the Diggers and Levellers had threatened property and public order immediately after the death of the King and again
during the Protectorate, Cromwell had gone along with the army’s suppression of their disorder. He expected his major generals
to be stern in their enforcement of the new regime. But when it came to the faith inside a man’s heart and head, he held firmly
that freedom of worship was the right of‘the most mistaken Christian [who] should desire to live peaceably and quietly under
you, [and] soberly and humbly desire to live a life of godliness and honesty’. Liberty of conscience was‘a natural right,
and he that would have it ought to give it’.

This was the cue for Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel. In 1654 he sent his son to see the Lord Protector, and the following year
he left Amsterdam for London and was granted a personal audience. The Jews had been expelled from England three hundred and
fifty years earlier by Edward I (see
Great Tales,
vol. 1,
p. 174
), and prejudice still lingered. Indeed, rumours of the letters the rabbi had been sending to Cromwell had prompted
speculation that the Lord Protector might be
planning to sell St Paul’s to the Jews, to be turned into a synagogue: Christian merchants, it was feared, would be elbowed
aside by ringleted Shylocks.

Cromwell was too clever to exacerbate such feeling with a formal decree or invitation of readmission to Jews. But he used
his personal authority to make sure that they could now benefit from the toleration being enjoyed by other religious groups.
In 1656 Jews started worshipping openly in their own synagogue in Creechurch Lane, near London’s Aldgate, and within a few
years there were thirty to forty Jewish families, mostly of Portuguese origin, operating in the capital as bankers and as
dealers in gold and gemstones. The centuries of exclusion were over.

I
N SEPTEMBER 1651, KING CHARLES II CLIMBED
up a makeshift wooden ladder to hide in the branches of a leafy oak tree near Boscobel House in Shropshire. His face was
blackened with soot scraped from inside a chimney and his hair had been hastily cropped. Wearing the rough breeches and shirt
of a simple woodman, he carried enough bread, cheese and beer to sustain him till nightfall. The twenty-one-year-old, who
had been claiming the English throne since the execution of his father eighteen months earlier, was on the run. The royalist
army he had led down from Scotland had been routed at Worcester two days earlier, and now the Roundhead search parties were
scouring
the countryside.‘While we were in this tree,’ he later recalled,’we see soldiers going up and down in the thicket of the wood,
searching for persons escaped, we seeing them, now and then, peeping out of the wood.’

In later life, Charles loved telling the story of his refuge in the Royal Oak — how sore his feet had felt in his badly fitting
shoes and how he had actually spent most of his time in the tree asleep. Thirty years later he related the full story: on
one occasion he had hidden in a barn behind mounds of corn and hay, on another the sound of galloping hooves had made him
dive behind a hedge for cover.

Charles was a fugitive for no less than six weeks, first heading north from Worcester, then doubling back south, finally making
his escape to France from the little port of Shoreham in Sussex. Along the way he was sheltered by dozens of ordinary folk
— millers, shepherds, farmers — as well as by prosperous landowners, many of them Catholics, who would hide him behind the
panelling in their priest holes. There was a price of £1,000 on Charles’s head, and the death penalty for anyone who helped
him. But the King, as this young man already was in the eyes of most, would not be betrayed.

The Crown exercised an enduring hold on England’s affections. The many faults of Charles I were forgotten in the shock of
what came to be seen as his martyrdom, and the succession of republican experiments from Commonwealth to Protectorate made
a restoration of the monarchy seem the best guarantee of stability. But the death of Cromwell in September 1658 did not immediately
lead to the return of Charles II. Power rested with the thirty thousand officers and men
of the Puritan army who were, for the most part, fiercely opposed to the return of the monarch, not to mention the‘popish’
Church of England. The title of Protector had been taken over by Oliver’s son Richard, and so long as the victors of the Civil
War hung together it seemed likely that Charles would remain in exile. As his shrewd adviser Edward Hyde put it, for the monarchy
to be restored, its enemies — Puritans, parliamentarians and soldiers — would have to become‘each other’s executioners’.

It happened more quickly than anyone had imagined. Richard Cromwell was no leader — he lacked his father’s sense of purpose
and the very particular prestige that old‘Ironsides’ had always enjoyed with his fellow-generals and other ranks too. After
only seven months the army removed Richard, and May 1659 saw the return of the forty or so remaining members of the’Rump’
Parliament. This little band of veterans who had survived Pride’s purge and dismissal by Oliver Cromwell could claim a distant,
if slightly tortuous, legitimacy that went back, through all the travails of the Commonwealth and Civil Wars, to England’s
last full-scale elections in 1640. But they handled their comeback no more competently than their previous spell in power.
By the end of 1659 they were again presiding over chaos, with taxes unpaid and rioters calling for proper elections.

Watching this slide into disorder was George Monck, commander of the English army occupying Scotland. Of solid Devon stock,
the fifty-one-year-old Monck was a tough professional soldier, but he hated what he called the‘slavery of sword government’
as fiercely as any civilian. In the closing days of the year he mobilised his forces at Coldstream,
where they were stationed on the Scottish border, and started the march south. When he reached London in February 1660, he
insisted that Parliament’s deliberations could not continue without the participation of the MPs who had been excluded by
Pride’s purge and he finally put an end to the infamous Rump. London celebrated with revelling and barbecues. That night,
II February, the streets smelt of roasting meat as rumps were turned on open-air spits in every corner of the city — thirty-one
bonfires were counted on London Bridge alone.

Monck was now England’s undisputed ruler, but he refused to make himself Lord Protector. Instead he opened negotiations with
Charles II, whose little government-inexile was gathered at Breda in Holland, and on 4 April 1660, Charles issued the Declaration
of Breda, effectively his contract for restoration. Shrewdly heeding the advice of Edward Hyde, he kept his promises vague,
placing his destiny in the hands of a free parliament’. Charles undertook to grant liberty to‘tender consciences’ and a free
pardon to all who had fought for Parliament — with the exception of the‘regicides’ who had signed his father’s death warrant.
The army was promised settlement of all pay arrears in full.

The following month, the diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys joined Charles and his brother James, at Scheveningen
near The Hague, on the ship that would bring them back to a triumphant reception in London. It was the Commonwealth’s flagship
the
Naseby,
named after the parliamentary victory in the Civil War, and after dinner its name was repainted — as the
Royal Charles.
England was royal again.

As sailors shinned up the rigging, setting the sails for England, Pepys fell into conversation with the tall, dark thirty-year-old
who would shortly be crowned Charles II. Walking up and down the quarterdeck with him, the diarist was impressed. He found
Charles‘very active and stirring… quite contrary to what I thought him to have been — and scarcely able to believe quite how
dramatically his fortunes had been transformed in a mere nine years.‘He fell into discourse of his escape from Worcester…
where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through.’

P
LAGUE CAME TO ENGLAND WITH THE BLACK
Death in 1348, and it stayed. According to London’s’bills of mortality’, people died quite regularly from the infection,
which had ballooned to epidemic proportions in 1563, 1593, 1603,1625 and 1636. The rich studied the bills of mortality as
a guide to their holiday plans. When the weekly plague rate started rising, it was time for a trip to the country.

The Latin
plaga
means a blow or knock, and in those days people often interpreted the erratic pattern of plague infections as punishing blows
from an angry God. A more earthly explanation was that poisonous vapours lurked beneath the earth’s crust, symptom of a cosmic
constipation
that could only be cured’by expiring those Arsenical Fumes that have been retained so long in her bowels’.

Modern science remains baffled by the comings and goings of this deadly contagion. We know that bubonic plague is spread by
infected fleas living on rats and humans. It is
not
spread from human to human by physical contact or even by human breath, except in the comparatively rare cases of pneumonic
plague where the infection, having penetrated the lungs, is then breathed out by the sufferer in his or her brief remaining
hours of painful life. The multiplication of rats and their fleas can be related to climactic factors — the rat flea
Xenopsylla cheopis
hibernates in frosty weather and flourishes at 20-25 degrees Celsius. But no one has convincingly connected particular conditions
of heat or cold to the epidemic years — not least to September 1665, when plague hit England again with a vengeance. The bills
of mortality mounted alarmingly — to seven thousand deaths a week by the end of the month — and the city streets sounded to
the tolling of bells and the rumbling of plague carts as their drivers hooked up bodies left in doorways to convey them to
the burial pits outside the city walls. Crosses were daubed on homes where infection had struck and their doors were boarded
up, condemning those inside to almost certain death or — in just a few unexplained cases — to miraculous recovery.

Outside London, the plague spread wherever X.
cheopis
travelled, and it is thought to have reached the village of Eyam in Derbyshire that September in a box of tailor’s samples
and old clothing sent to Edward Cooper, a village trader. The clothes were damp on arrival, so Cooper’s servant,
George Vickers, placed them before the fire to dry. Within three days, a bluish-black plague-spot appeared on Vickers’s chest,
and he died the next day. Cooper followed him to the graveyard two weeks later, and by the end of October Eyam had suffered
another twenty-six deaths. The mortality rate slowed during the hard Peak District winter to between four and nine a month,
but with spring it rose again, and by midsummer 1666 over seventy of the village’s 360 inhabitants had succumbed.