The King's Revenge (10 page)

The reality was very different, as Henshaw himself well knew:

The verdict was a foregone conclusion. Gerard, Vowell and Fox were executed on 10 July. Several conspirators were ‘Barbadosed’
– sent off as slaves to an almost certain death in the sugar plantations. According to one of Thurloe’s agents the king was
well aware of what was planned and had sanctioned it.
¹⁷

The foiling of the Gerard plot had huge consequences. Public sentiment swayed towards Cromwell. The lid was firmly screwed
down on dissent and the Sealed Knot all but unravelled. Willys was arrested and, blaming his old enemy Belasyse for betraying
him to Thurloe, challenged Belasyse to another duel. Once again, the two
men never drew a sword nor fired a pistol. According to Edward Hyde, the dissent that broke out in the Sealed Knot rendered
it even less active than before.
¹⁸
Perhaps it had been Thurloe’s intention to exaggerate the threat in order to destabilise the Knot and win public support
for the Protectorate.

With the Sealed Knot infuriatingly inactive, Charles decided to listen to those advocating an immediate uprising. He was now
twenty-four years old, three years had passed since he had sailed away from Shoreham, and his life was passing him by. If
he was ever to have revenge, ever to gain the throne, something had to be done – and done quickly. A new underground movement
in England seemed to present the answer. Unlike the Sealed Knot, the Action Party was designed not to be run by aristocrats,
but by a group of well-connected and ambitious gentry.

Chief among these was a veteran of the Civil Wars, Sir John Grenville. He had entered the first Civil War at the age of fourteen
in 1642 as a lieutenant in his father’s regiment. Following the Battle of Newbury, he became a courtier to the Prince of Wales
and one of his closest friends and advisors. After surrendering the Scilly Isles to a parliamentarian fleet in 1651, he elected
to live in England, having given his word he would withdraw from active pro-royalist activity.

In late 1654, the Action Party persuaded Charles of the possibility of a successful rising across England. There were rumours
that a major parliamentary figure such as Fairfax would defect. This was not so very far-fetched, for Fairfax and Grenville
were second cousins and Grenville had been attempting to woo the general into his camp. Fairfax proved infuriatingly hard
to entice. The Action Party’s plans took a serious knock when its arms supply network was infiltrated by Thurloe’s men and
various arms dumps were raided. In February 1655, Charles decided it was now or never. To ensure maximum support, a truce
between the Sealed Knot and the Action Party was imperative. Charles sent an emissary, Daniel O’Neill, to mediate. He was
picked up by agents of the Protectorate as soon as he landed in England and thrown in Dover Castle.

Confusion grew up as to when exactly the uprising was to take place. The same month, a group of Cavaliers turned up for a
rendezvous in Salisbury only to discover they were too early. They dispersed, but not before they had alerted the authorities
that rebellion was in the air. Several leading royalists were arrested and held for interrogation, weakening the incipient
rebellion.

Despite the setbacks, Charles stuck to his plan: leaving Cologne, where he was currently based, he moved to the coastal town
of Middelburg in the Netherlands, ready to cross to England once the rising took hold. The date for the uprising was set for
8 March. With hindsight, one can see that Charles must have been receiving very optimistic reports from England.

On the day Charles left Cologne, another key figure in the plan left the city and went to England. This was the quarrelsome
Henry Wilmot. For all his faults, Wilmot had pluck – he had accompanied Charles on his flight from Worcester and had sailed
with him from Shoreham on board the
Surprise
in 1651. The escape sealed their friendship and Charles made Wilmot the Earl of Rochester the following year.

From the moment Rochester landed at Margate and made for London, hardly anything went right. One of the few occasions for
optimism was when Daniel O’Neill escaped from Dover Castle. After that, there was little to cheer. Thurloe’s agents discovered
arms caches in London and several conspirators were arrested. As a result, defences at the Tower and other strategic points
were strengthened. Rochester realised that London could no longer be the focal point of the uprising. He headed north, believing
York was ready to declare for the king. He was greatly mistaken; when he and a hundred or so Cavaliers assembled on Marston
Moor, the city was unimpressed and kept the gates closed. The conspirators fled. In Cheshire, Nottinghamshire and Northumberland,
uprisings also failed.

In the south, the conspiracy took a more serious turn. Rochester had brought with him a soldier of fortune named Sir Joseph
Wagstaffe, known to be brutally effective. Wagstaffe was ordered to team up with Colonel John Penruddock, a Cavalier from
Wiltshire, and launch an attack on Winchester, where the assizes were in session.
^*
This plan was modified when the conspirators learned the judges were about to wrap up their hearings in Winchester and head
for Salisbury.

In the early hours of 12 March, Penruddock and Wagstaffe led a troop of several hundred men into Salisbury.
^†
They occupied the square, took over stables and entered the jail, releasing prisoners who agreed to join them. The High Sheriff
of Wiltshire and the assize judges were taken prisoner from their beds. Wagstaffe was for making an example of them by hanging
them in the square, but Penruddock intervened. The rebels erected their standard over the town but then appeared to lose all
sense of purpose. Taking the high sheriff along as a hostage, they marched out of Salisbury and through the towns of Blandford,
Sherborne and Yeovil, calling upon the people to rise up and accompany them. They met with little enthusiasm.

When word spread of the daring but strangely futile raid on Salisbury, the militias in surrounding towns were called up. Cromwell
ordered his brother-in-law, Major-General John Desborough, to crush Penruddock’s rebellion. Desborough was one of England’s
most accomplished military commanders. He immediately instigated military rule in the south-east, linking local militias and
army units into a single network. He then set off in pursuit at the head of an army. As he headed further west into Devon,
Penruddock must have known the game was up. Without any great strategic plan, he made for Barnstaple, a royalist town.

Penruddock’s force stopped at the village of South Molton, nine
miles to the east of Barnstaple. As the insurgents ate and rested their horses, they were surprised by a troop of cavalry
that had made speed from Exeter. In a scrappy fight and chase through the village, most of Penruddock’s men broke and fled.
Wagstaffe galloped off with them but Penruddock fought until there was no point in continuing and surrendered.

Along with twenty-five other conspirators, Penruddock was charged with treason. A special court was set up in Exeter. Among
the judges was the lawyer John Lisle, who was a close supporter of Oliver Cromwell, had helped draw up the sentence against
Charles and had acted as a legal advisor to the court. He went on to advise on the Commonwealth constitution and sat on the
committee that decided on the membership of the Council of State. The fact that such a heavyweight figure was drafted in showed
the significance of the trial. Penruddock argued he could not be guilty of treason as Cromwell had not been appointed Lord
Protector by Parliament. This excellent legal point cut no ice with Lisle and his fellow judges. They sentenced Penruddock
to death.

Penruddock’s wife, Arundel, petitioned Cromwell, asking for clemency for her husband. If he was executed as a traitor all
their family wealth would automatically be sequestrated and their seven children would starve. Cromwell had a gentler side
when he wished to show it, but on this occasion he was implacable. The stability of the state came before the pleading of
a mother for her children.

The sentence on Penruddock was carried out on 16 May. As befitted a gentleman, he was beheaded. One other conspirator was
beheaded and seven men of lesser social standing were hanged. In all, seventy or more rebels were shipped off to the West
Indies to work in the sugar plantations.
¹⁹

Other rebels were luckier. The Earl of Rochester was arrested in Aylesbury. Demonstrating once more his wonderful ability
to escape, he bribed the owner of an inn where he was held in temporary custody, and made his way to Cologne. Wagstaffe also
made it out of the country. Dozens of conspirators were captured and condemned to
death. Their sentences were commuted to transportation and, like their predecessors, they were ‘Barbadosed’.
²⁰

The Penruddock/Rochester uprising had little chance of succeeding, but it had a great effect upon the manner in which England
was governed. The military rule instigated by Desborough in the south-east was rolled out nationwide. Major-generals were
appointed in each county to run what was in effect a police state. The activities of all royalist families were severely constricted.
There was a precedent for such widespread suppression: the Puritan regime had turned Ireland into an even harsher police state.
Just before the Penruddock rising, General Fleetwood, commander-in-chief in Ireland, ordered that any Irish who refused to
move to Connaught under a mass migration programme were to be starved by having their crops confiscated. Shortly after this,
all Catholics were expelled from Dublin. The dire effects of the Cromwellian colonisation of Ireland in the 1650s require
no rehearsal here, for they have been thoroughly examined elsewhere.
²¹

The clampdown in England extended beyond Cavaliers to affect former friends, too. On a sad day in February 1656, Cromwell
ordered his old ally Thomas Harrison to be imprisoned without trial. Along with his fellow Fifth Monarchist John Carew, Harrison
had refused to swear he would not take up arms against what they saw as Cromwell’s betrayal of the Commonwealth. Harrison
and Carew were imprisoned on the Isle of Wight where they were soon joined by the irrepressible Harry Vane. Vane had published
a pamphlet on government entitled
A Healing Question
, which Secretary of State John Thurloe saw as a veiled attack on Cromwell.
²²
After Vane refused to refrain from further criticism, he was imprisoned. Under pressures from without and within, the great
Puritan experiment in freedom was rapidly turning sour, as Cromwell himself acknowledged with his call for a national day
of fasting to consider how the nation might be healed.

The pressure continued; hard on the heels of the Penruddock uprising, royalists hatched another plot to murder Cromwell. At
the
heart of the scheme were two former Levellers with royalist money raised from foreign sources. Edward Sexby and Miles Sindercombe
shared the belief that if the monarchy was restored, the people would find it so objectionable that they would tear it down
and re-establish rule by the Rump Parliament. They were both former soldiers in the New Model Army and had notable histories
of opposition to the army grandees. Sindercombe had taken part in the Leveller mutinies in 1649–doomed, small-scale rebellions
against what they saw as the hegemony of the army grandees. Sexby had been an army agitator and had been vocal in the army
debates in Putney, at which the Levellers tried, and failed, to make their case for universal male enfranchisement. He rose
to the rank of colonel but was relieved of his command for allegedly withholding pay from his men. While languishing under
an official cloud, he was dispatched on missions to Europe. Was Sexby deliberately disgraced so that he could forge links
with royalist elements in Europe as a double agent? We don’t know, but it seems likely. Despite his chequered career, he remained
close to Cromwell until the latter became Lord Protector.

From then on, Sexby involved himself in various secret plans to oust Cromwell and restore the Rump. He developed links with
exiled royalists close to Charles, whom he assured of his own royalist leanings. While Charles’s courtiers did not necessarily
believe Sexby’s story, they felt they could use him. In turn, when Sexby met Miles Sindercombe in the Netherlands in 1654
or ’55, he felt he had found someone he could use as an assassin. Sindercombe had been cashiered by General Monck, when sub-commander
of the parliamentary army in Scotland, for allegedly taking part in a Leveller plot. This made him an unemployed radical with
a good knowledge of weapons and a grudge to nurture.

Sexby realised that all previous attempts at insurrection had failed because they had featured no central action around which
the rebellion could coalesce. To ignite rebellion, one single, exceptional act of violence was necessary. Only the murder
of Oliver Cromwell would do it. Sexby commissioned Sindercombe to carry out the deed. The
two men travelled to London. Once there, Sexby gave Sindercombe free rein to organise the assassination and gave him £1500.
Since Charles was broke, this had to be obtained from the coffers of various royalist sympathisers.
²³
There was also a degree of separation that way. Sexby left Sindercombe to it and headed for Paris.

Using the alias Mr Fish, Sindercombe hired a house in King Street, just to the north of St James’s Palace. Realising he required
more people to help with organisation and the assassination itself, he hired former soldier John Cecil and a dubious character
called William Boyes. In an act of inspiration, he took on a member of Cromwell’s life guard, John Toope, who had first-hand
knowledge of the Protector’s habits and movements. Sindercombe promised Toope £1500 – his entire funds – to betray Cromwell.
In the event, Toope had to settle for £10 up front.