Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (46 page)

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.