The King's Revenge (13 page)

Most of the leading republicans had kept a low profile while the army crisis developed. This puzzled Edward Hyde in Brussels.
On 11 April he had written to John Mordaunt, the king’s busiest agent, in London: ‘I would be glad to know the reason why
… we have not heard the least mention of Bradshaw, Lambert, or Harrison, as if they were persons who have no parts to act.’
Mordaunt replied that he couldn’t explain it, ‘but Ludlow, Lambert, and Harrison are deep in the army design, and no friends
of ours, unless by accident’.
¹¹

In fact a bridgehead had just been established between the republicans and army grandees. Early in April, Edmund Ludlow, himself
a lieutenant-general, visited Charles Fleetwood’s headquarters, Wallingford House, and outlined the republicans’ terms for
an alliance. From his account these boiled down to a simple commitment on the part of the grandees to restore a republic and
their support for Commonwealthsmen – republicans – in the army.
¹²

At this point Parliament blindly raised the stakes by starting to debate disaffection in the army, a move guaranteed to infuriate
the military. A test of wills began. Richard ordered Fleetwood to present himself before the bar of the House of Commons.
Fleetwood refused, whereupon Richard ordered his bodyguard to arrest him. The bodyguard in turn refused. Finally the two sides
called out their troops. Fleetwood ordered a muster of regiments at St James’s and Richard ordered a rival one in Whitehall.
Three of the king’s judges among the military chiefs backed Richard – Edward Whalley, one of the heroes of Naseby, his son-in-law
William Goffe and Richard Ingoldsby. When Goffe sent word for his four hundred men to come to Whitehall, however, they were
already on their way to Fleetwood’s muster in St James’s. Of Richard Ingoldsby’s six troops of horse, only one followed him
to Whitehall. Whalley’s men refused his order to his face. He begged them to shoot him, but they marched off to St James’s.
A biographer of Richard Cromwell wrote of ‘this universal abandonment’.
¹³

Richard was at the army’s mercy, and one of the hidden dramas of British history was now played out by candlelight in Whitehall
Palace, deep into the night. Richard’s two in-laws, Desborough and Fleetwood, confronted him and apparently refused to depart.
They insisted on a dissolution of Parliament, Fleetwood warning of a bloodbath if the sitting was allowed to continue. Desborough
told Cromwell that if he ordered a dissolution the army would take care of him and his interests, but if he refused to do
so the army would clear the MPs out and Richard would be left ‘to shift for himself’.
¹⁴

For hours the Lord Protector refused to dissolve his Parliament. Differing accounts suggest that at times he broke off discussions
with Fleetwood and Desborough to consult with his council. One account has several of them urging him ‘to remember that he
was Cromwell’s son, and to act as his father would have done’.
¹⁵
Another version has one of the council, Charles Howard, offering to ‘rid’ Richard of Fleetwood, Desborough, Lambert and Vane,
‘the contrivers of all this’. It seems that the boldest of the advisors was Richard Ingoldsby, who offered to take personal
responsibility for dealing with Lambert. The thirty-one-year-old ‘young gentleman’ wouldn’t hear of it. Richard Cromwell explained
‘that he neither had done, nor would do any person any harm; and that, rather than a drop of blood should be spilt on his
account, he would lay down that greatness which was but a burthen to him’.
¹⁶

At around four o’clock, as dawn was breaking, the Lord Protector finally caved in and agreed to a dissolution. Later that
day the announcement was made and Roundhead troopers stood at the doors of the chamber to prevent MPs entering. Richard immediately
ceased functioning as Protector and several weeks later officially resigned. The pathos of the scene was captured by Gilbert
Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, in his
History of My Own Times
: ‘Without any struggle he withdrew, and became a private man. And as he had done hurt to nobody, so nobody did ever study
to hurt him, by a rare instance of the instability of human greatness, and the security of innocence.’
¹⁷

The grandees had not planned to overthrow Richard and probably would have preferred to retain him as a puppet. But no deal
was possible between them and the affrighted Cromwellians in Richard’s Parliament and, anyway, radical junior officers probably
would not have allowed it. So, after some days, the army chiefs concluded an alliance with the republicans. They announced
the recall of the Long Parliament, which was first elected seventeen years earlier, minus those MPs excluded in various purges.
Some 120 members qualified, though fewer than 70 turned up in the House. The result was power for Haselrig, Ludlow and the
other Commonwealthsmen, who commanded the largest group in the recalled Parliament. When a ballot was held to select a new
Council of State, Haselrig came top, followed by Vane and Ludlow. In 1649, one of the MPs purged by Colonel Pride coined the
phrase ‘the rump’ to describe what remained of the Long Parliament. Ten years later it was a term of abuse.
^*

There are violently different views of the Rump Parliament among historians. At one extreme, George Monck’s biographer, François
Guizot, called it ‘a small faction of fanatical egotists, more important from their passionate activity than from their reputation
or talents’. Guizot dismissed Sir Arthur Haselrig as ‘a rapacious, headstrong, and conceited agitator’ and called Scot ‘almost
as vain, and even more obstinate and Blind’. At the other extreme, John Milton’s biographer David Masson portrays them as
courageously naive:

The flaw in their vision was identified by Austin Woolrych in his
Britain in Revolution
: ‘The Rumpers’, he wrote, ‘were dedicated to the republican principle that supreme power belonged of right to the chosen representatives
of the sovereign people, yet most of the people did not want a republic at all.’
¹⁹

The republicans began at a gallop. By June they had taken decisions to restructure the army, commission new militias, raise
funds to ease the army arrears, pension off Richard Cromwell and his mother, vet the judges, sell the last remaining royal
palaces and wind down the war with Spain. The self-consciously revolutionary Rump followed up with proposals for a host of
more fundamental reforms. Press restrictions would be lifted, enabling the first issue of the
Weekly Post
to be published.
^*
The rights of ‘tender consciences’, i.e. religious freedom, would be guaranteed – though not for Episcopalians or extreme
sectarians, and needless to say not for Papists either. Cases of arbitrary imprisonment would be vetted and political prisoners
of all kinds would be set free. Meanwhile, various groups got down to shaping a new constitution.

However, another preoccupation took up much of the parliamentary day from June to September – the purging of the army. This
was a central feature of the republican insistence that the army must be subordinate to Parliament. Remarkably, an unhappy
military hierarchy merely looked on as 1500 officers were displaced by Haselrig and company after being summoned to the House
of Commons to be vetted. Most were casualties of their religion or their politics, though not all. In an England stuffy with
unforgiving Puritans, morals were also scrutinised. Cornet Richard Hobson was put out because like Falstaff he was ‘old and
scandalous’ and Cornet Thomas Mason for ‘playing at table [on] the Lord’s day’. Quartermaster Thomas Kitterd (or Riddard)
shared the same fate,
not only for speaking words against the Council of State but because ‘he was accused of keeping a woman and giving her £3
a month’.
²⁰

Edmund Ludlow conducted a similar purge in Ireland, where he had been appointed military commissioner or commander-in-chief.
Although he was only there for three months, he reportedly dismissed and replaced eight hundred officers, largely with extreme
Puritans.

In July the inevitable strains caused by the Rump’s attempts to subordinate the army to parliamentary control saw relations
breaking down. There was a confrontation between the dominant figure in the army hierarchy, John Lambert, and Sir Arthur Haselrig,
the dominant voice in the Rump. Haselrig was increasingly convinced that the general aimed at becoming Lord Protector. But
the confrontation between them had to be postponed thanks to another crisis, the long-expected royalist uprising. The two
men had to sink their differences and face what threatened to be the most serious challenge to the republic in years. Haselrig,
acknowledging Lambert to be Parliament’s best general, took the risk of entrusting him with an army to put the royalists down.

The uprising had been planned in May. It was to be launched across the country in a series of insurrections scheduled to begin
on 1 August. In recognition of the Stuarts’ lack of appeal to Presbyterians, it was presented not as a royalist revolt but
as a groundswell against republican misrule. There was no mention of Charles’s name in the proclamations which the plotters
prepared to issue on breaking cover. Their propaganda was all about unjust taxes and repression. It may have irked the exiled
prince to be painted out of the picture, but it was not supposed to last. Charles was to land in southern England immediately
a foothold was obtained. In mid-July he left for Calais accompanied by the Marquis of Ormond and two servants, ready to embark
for Rye. His brother James – who had been promised several thousand French troops – was at Boulogne, from where he planned
a landing in Hampshire.

In preparation, Charles furnished James with a letter instructing what he could offer individuals in return for support once
he had landed. The letter is revelatory for what it says about Charles’s attitude to his father’s judges. In his desperation
to regain the throne, he was now apparently ready to deal with the men he had vowed to hunt down. He authorised James to allow
negotiations with ‘any repentant judge’ who offered ‘an extraordinary service’. Such a man could not be pardoned but would
escape prosecution and be allowed to go quietly into exile – ‘to convey away his estate out of my domain’. It would seem that
the cynical pragmatism that was to characterise Charles II’s reign extended even to his treatment of the hated regicides.

In the event, Charles’s readiness to treat with his father’s judges remained a secret. Like so many earlier royalist plots,
the insurrection ended in chaos, leaving the two royal brothers still on the wrong side of the Channel. The royalist plan
had been betrayed by a spy close to Charles himself. Key plotters were arrested, and French support never materialised. As
a result, the uprising was called off just two days before it was due to begin.

In some places the order to cancel failed to get through. Small bodies of armed horsemen gathered at appointed rendezvous
only to be captured by republican militiamen or scattered. The exceptions were Lancashire and Cheshire, where substantial
forces joined together under the command of Sir George Booth, a Presbyterian grandee who, having fought for Parliament in
the first Civil War, was then excluded from Parliament by Pride’s Purge. Booth’s men quickly captured Chester, at which their
numbers grew alarmingly, reaching upwards of six thousand.

Lambert was sent north to stop Booth, collecting militiamen and regular troops on the way. He caught the rebels at Winnington
Bridge, near Northwich, where he defeated them with ease. There was a minimum of casualties thanks to Lambert, who ordered
his cavalry not to pursue Booth’s fleeing troops for fear of massacre. In what could be called the last battle of the blood-soaked
Civil Wars,
fewer than thirty men were killed. Sir George Booth was captured a week later, disguised as a woman, after he took rooms at
an inn. A chambermaid, glimpsing his feet, realised that they had to be male.
²¹

Officers serving with Lambert were exultant at their easy victory; too much so. Shortly after their triumph a group of them,
swollen-headed in victory, drew up a memorandum calling for constitutional changes that Lambert and other army leaders had
been pressing on the Rump for months. Since Parliament had just vetoed these same proposals, it was an ill-judged and provocative
move. But Sir Arthur Haselrig’s reaction was more provocative still. Ignoring the pleas for restraint from his long-time ally
Sir Harry Vane, and apparently oblivious to the Rump’s ultimate dependence on army support, Sir Arthur had the Rump cashier
Lambert and other generals. Lambert responded by leading troops into Whitehall to close Parliament down. For the second time
in six months, MPs were locked out of the chamber in an army coup.
²²

The army then set up what was seen as a puppet government, a junta it called the Committee of Safety. This body, twenty-three
strong, was to exercise all the functions of the executive and was dominated by the army grandees Lambert, Fleetwood and Desborough.
But it included Rumpers willing to go along with the generals, notably Harry Vane, Bulstrode Whitelocke and Archibald Johnston,
Lord Wariston. Its priority was the production of a new constitution without delay, but the committee would collapse before
New Year and London would be plunged into chaos. Before summer the republic would be dead.

October 1659—February 1660

A week after the coup John Bradshaw died, like Oliver Cromwell reportedly a victim of malaria. The last public act of the
man who had presided over the trial of King Charles was to drag himself from his death bed to Whitehall to denounce the army
coup and reaffirm his republican beliefs. He let it be known that if called upon to try the king again he would be the first
man in England to do it.

Bradshaw’s republican comrades in the Rump were divided over how to react to the coup. Sir Arthur Haselrig and Thomas Scot
headed the irreconcilables among them, insisting on army subservience to the civil authority and vowing punishment for the
grandees. On the other side, Sir Harry Vane and the Rumpers who had agreed to join the Committee of Safety saw unity between
the army and Parliament as the prerequisite for the republic’s survival. ‘Shocked’ by the coup, Edmund Ludlow returned from
Ireland and tried vainly to reconcile the contending sides. It proved a futile task. The always fractious personal relationship
between the principal players, John Lambert and Haselrig, had become too poisonous. Lambert told Ludlow that ‘Sir Arthur was
so enraged against him, that he would be satisfied with nothing but his blood.’
¹
Haselrig
seems to have been equally enraged by the stance of his old friend Harry Vane.

No one of the stature of Oliver Cromwell was available to knock heads together. But a figure of considerable if meaner talents
was waiting in the wings. This was the short, overweight George Monck, commander-in-chief of the English army in Scotland
and the ultimate hero – or villain – of this history. Monck was the most enigmatic of Cromwell’s generals. His background
was royalist. He came from an impoverished family of West Country gentry and had earned his military spurs in the king’s service
in the 1630s. He was briefly employed as a royalist commander in the first Civil War until his capture in 1644. Thereafter,
he spent more than a year as a prisoner in the Tower, resisting blandishments to accept a command from Parliament. Eventually
he said yes and went on to distinguish himself in the second Civil War, after which he was appointed commander-in-chief in
Scotland. An ardent admirer of Oliver Cromwell, to whom he was unflinchingly loyal, he was an equally fierce oppressor of
suspected royalist conspirators and dutifully reported several approaches made to him by the exiled Charles II. Yet there
were doubts about this monosyllabic, solitary man. He was married to a loud-mouthed royalist, and the suspicion remained that
at heart he was still as loyal to the Stuarts as his indiscreet wife. Shortly before his death, Cromwell made a laboured joke
on the matter after Monck had informed him of a royalist attempt to recruit him, writing in response: ‘There be [those] that
tell me that there is a certain cunning fellow in Scotland called George Monck, who is said to lay in wait there to introduce
Charles Stuart; I pray you, use your diligence to apprehend him, and send him up to me.’
²

Cromwell’s joke was later to turn sour. For years Monck had been high on the list of Cromwellians whom the royalists viewed
as potential turncoats. His royalist background and personal acquaintance with the Stuarts encouraged hopes that he could
be persuaded to the cause, and the exiled Charles Stuart courted him by letter. In 1658 Charles wrote to Monck:

Monck did not reply, and he was discouraging when approached to change sides during the Booth uprising. In the weeks before
the uprising Charles put out feelers to several Cromwellians, again including Monck. In a rather plaintive letter he wrote:

Monck again did not reply, and he proved a disappointment when two of Charles’s emissaries appeared at his headquarters in
Dalkeith. The first was Colonel Jonathan Atkins, an old comrade in Ireland. According to John Price, one of Monck’s two chaplains
and also his biographer, Atkins told Monck of plans by ‘gentlemen of the north’ to back Sir George Booth and asked him to
join them. Monck turned him down. If these gentlemen did appear, he said, he ‘would send a force to suppress them … by the
duty of his place he could do no less.’
⁵

However, two days later there arrived a very different emissary.
Monck’s younger brother Nicholas was a country parson in Cornwall. His story was that he had journeyed four hundred miles
ostensibly to bring back his daughter, who was staying with her uncle and was due to marry. That was a cover. The curate,
a fervent royalist, had been picked to carry a mouth-watering offer to his brother. If George Monck helped Charles gain the
throne he would be rewarded with land and honours plus £100,000 a year for life, ‘to be disposed of at his own discretion’.

Nicholas bore an introductory letter from Charles, but the money offer was conveyed by word of mouth. The curate had promised
to give the message to Monck alone, but his brother was busy with dispatches when he arrived, and Nicholas was unable to contain
himself. He poured it all out to John Price, his fellow clergyman. Price later recalled continually going to and fro to the
door to check that there were no eavesdroppers in the vicinity.

Monck was not overly welcoming to Nicholas. They met later that night and after the older man was given the letter and told
of the offer, his attitude changed. The younger Monck explained how Sir John Greenville, a cousin deeply involved in the royalist
underground, had set up his mission. He also revealed plans for Presbyterians and Cavaliers to widen the uprising, with insurrections
across the country, plans involving no less a figure than Lord Fairfax. The loquacious Nicholas emerged from the meeting to
tell Price that his brother liked what he had heard, especially the involvement of Fairfax. ‘From this time on,’ wrote Price,
‘I do believe that his resolve was fixed for the King’s restoration.’

Monck’s decision would not become apparent for many months. Secrecy was, of course, essential. George Monck’s officers, many
of them Puritan radicals, were also mostly republicans, and Monck, or ‘the General’ as his entourage called him, was fearful
lest any of them should overhear his conversations. Price witnessed his fear and embarrassment at the loudly proclaimed royalism
of his wife Nan. She had once been married to a body servant of the Stuarts and was fiercely partisan for them. After dinner,
when her husband’s officers
had retired, leaving the General drinking with Price, she would sometimes appear and rant against the enemies of the king.
‘I have often shut the dining room door and charged the servants to stand without,’ Price recalled.
⁶

Next day, a Sunday, Monck convened a council of war comprising himself, his brother, his adjutant Major Smith, and his two
chaplains, Price and Thomas Gumble. The conclave continued into the night and the momentous decision was eventually reached
to come out against the ‘fanatics’ of the Rump and join Booth. Price was to draft the justification, a declaration for distribution
among the troops expressing the people’s ‘dissatisfaction’ with the Rump and the need for a new Parliament. That was to be
backed up by a letter to the army grandees in London and by immediate military moves. Smith was ordered to seize Edinburgh
Castle and the citadel at Leith.

Monck told Price ‘that he was resolved to commission the whole Scotch nation against Parliament and the army and all before
he would be taken tamely by them’.
⁷
The General had not lost his caution: as Smith made ready to depart for Leith, Monck disappeared, only to rush back to recall
Smith and the declaration. He wanted everything to be put on hold till receipt of the post in the morning, which would bring
news from the battlefronts. Price protested. There should be no delay, he insisted. At which the General ‘laid his hands on
my shoulders, frowned and paused and then in some anger spake thus: What Mr Price, wilt thou thus bring my neck to the block
… and ruin our whole design by engaging too rashly.’

The post brought news of Lambert’s victory at Winnington Bridge and of the poor turnout among other insurrectionists. Monck
immediately faced about. The dispatch to Parliament and the proclamation appear to have been destroyed. Edinburgh Castle and
Leith were left undisturbed and Monck put the fear of God into his brother as to what would happen if ever he talked. According
to Nicholas, he was warned by Monck that ‘if ever this business was discovered
[revealed] by him or Sir John Grenville he would do his best to ruin both of them.’
⁸

A few nights afterwards, Monck’s officers held a thanksgiving dinner to celebrate the victory of their comrades in England.
Monck, the guest of honour, led the toasts. For a long time no one, either among his own men or in the government, would be
given cause to doubt his loyalty to Parliament.

For Charles, there were more setbacks after the disappointments of August. He dispatched the dependable Marquis of Ormond
to Paris to try to raise support from Cardinal Mazarin and decided to travel south himself to Spain to remind the Spanish
of their promised help. In France, the Cardinal slapped down Ormond before he could complete his flowery introduction, saying,
‘I know that there is a King of England exiled from his kingdom. I know all his misfortunes so it is useless to tell me any
more. I can do nothing for him.’

As for Spain, Charles arranged to rendezvous with Ormond at Fuenterrabia on the Franco-Spanish border. Negotiations were under
way there between France and Spain to end the Thirty Years’ War and it was hoped that Charles would make his presence felt.
Instead, at this crucial moment, he went on holiday, vanishing en route to Spain in early September along with two companions.
He was out of touch with Hyde and everyone else for nearly three months. Surfacing in November, he wrote to Hyde explaining
that they had been unable to go by sea because of the weather and so had travelled by coach and horse. He had obviously had
a splendid time, describing ‘the pleasant accidents of the journey and not one ill one to any of our company, hardly as much
as the fall of a horse … By all reports I did expect ill cheer and worse lying, and hitherto we have found both the beds and
especially the meat very good.’
⁹

Sir Edward Nicholas, a dry stick, was not amused. ‘Reputation’, he told Ormond, ‘is the interest of princes … and he has lost
much of it by his unseasonable delay.’ The Spanish were hospitable when Charles arrived, but all that he left with was a sum
of money to help him back to Brussels.
¹⁰

George Monck had kept his head down for the two months following the Booth fiasco. Then on 18 October the news reached him
of the new coup mounted by the army grandees. Monck responded with a virtual declaration of war on the military junta. In
a letter to Speaker Lenthall he wrote, ‘I am resolved, by the grace and assistance of God, as a true Englishman to stand to
and assert the liberty and authority of Parliament.’
¹¹
He also wrote to his opposite number in Ireland, Edmund Ludlow, asking for his support, a letter Ludlow did not know about
for months.

Monck acted quickly. The great garrisons of Edinburgh and nearby Leith were secured by his men, parties were dispatched to
take Berwick and Newcastle and a purge of officers began. Colonels, majors and captains said to be of dubious fidelity to
Parliament were summoned to meetings, only to find themselves arrested en route or cashiered on arrival. Monck’s men were
ordered to stop short at the border but there was no doubt that Monck was seriously preparing to invade.

His fellow generals, not expecting such belligerency, were both placatory and defiant. In his reply to a terse letter from
Monck, Lambert wrote, ‘Nothing seems more desirable than to have a good understanding and union among ourselves.’ Charles
Fleetwood, the nervous and gentlemanly commander-in-chief in England, wrote: ‘My Lord, I love and honour you but give me leave
to say, no man of sober principles throughout this Nation will otherwise interpret this action of yours then
[sic]
a way to bring Charles Stewart [sic] amongst us again.’
¹²

Centuries later, historians cannot agree on whether or not the restoration of the Stuarts was Monck’s intention from the moment
he opposed the junta. At the end of October, the Committee of Safety dispatched Lambert to stop Monck, just as he had stopped
Sir George Booth. On 4 November, Lambert headed north with an army of Ironsides. The confidence of a victor must have coursed
through him, especially when it was clear that he far outnumbered his opponent. All told, he had mustered twelve thousand
troops after
picking up militiamen on the way. Monck had only about five thousand men, and was especially lacking in cavalry. He was lacking
in trust too. Despite the purges, there were too many Anabaptists for Monck’s liking among his officers and men, and too many
with loyalties to the army rather than to him. Monck told his brother-in-law that there were still some 140 ‘oppositionists’
among his officers. He needed a minimum of six weeks to replace them and reshape the army. Then he would be ready.
¹³