The King's Revenge (18 page)

It was now that Monck’s insistence on quartering suspected regiments in different parts of England and dividing them into
sections paid off. Dispersal made concerted action that much more difficult. Haselrig’s horse was spread over five towns,
Francis Hacker’s regiment over three Midland counties. When the call came from Lambert, one of Colonel Hacker’s units saddled
up ready to go, while others marched through Nottingham swords drawn, but the end result appears to have been that just a
dozen or so men actually set off. Reports of isolated handfuls of soldiers and officers being arrested on the roads to the
Midlands suggest that it was the same everywhere.

One of Haselrig’s troops did get through, only for its captain – no less than Sir Arthur’s son – to switch sides. According
to a field report from one of George Monck’s officers, a few hours before the denouement at Daventry one of Ingoldsby’s officers
captured Captain Haselrig, but released him on his promise to send his whole troop over to join Ingoldsby, ‘which he faithfully
performed’.
²²

In the end, when Ingoldsby caught up with Lambert the escaped general had no more than seven squadrons of cavalry and a very
small body of infantry, totalling less than a thousand. They were posted behind a little brook which became the line separating
the two forces. There was a standoff for some four hours as both sides harangued and shouted, loath to fight former comrades,
endeavouring instead to prise men away from the ranks opposite.

Ingoldsby, dressed as a common trooper, reportedly infiltrated Lambert’s line and persuaded twenty-five horsemen to cross
over. Eventually Ingoldsby gave the order to charge; his infantry fired,
wounding two of Lambert’s men. In turn Lambert advanced, commanding his cavalry to reserve their fire till they closed in
on the enemy; but when they arrived within pistol shot, they stopped and lowered their guns. The final battle of the Civil
Wars was over.

Ingoldsby reportedly rode up to Lambert, shouting, ‘You are my prisoner.’ Lambert asked to negotiate but his plea was refused.
Lambert’s officers, led by Daniel Axtell and John Okey, are said to have pressed Ingoldsby to let their leader escape. But
Ingoldsby was immovable. He was going to keep his prize and prove his new loyalty. According to one report, ‘Lambert put his
horse to a gallop to save himself; but Ingoldsby, darting off in pursuit, closed upon him, with his pistol in his hand, calling
on him to surrender, or he would shoot him. Lambert’s fortunes had too often failed him; he had no longer a hope left to sustain
him; he lost his courage, stopped, vainly requested his liberty, then submitted.’
²³
It has to be said that the accounts of Lambert’s pathetic end probably originated from Ingoldsby or one of his lieutenants
and are inconsistent with the accounts of courage that Lambert exhibited time after time in his career. But of course it suited
Monck for the aura around the army’s great hero to be destroyed.

Lambert was brought back to the Tower less than a week after he had quitted it. On his way, Ingoldsby obliged his prisoner
to stand under the gallows at Tyburn. The following week there was a great military review of London and surrounding militias
in Hyde Park – twelve thousand men from various regiments, in white, green, blue, yellow and orange, but not it seems in the
scarlet of Cromwell’s New Model Army.

All was over for this revolutionary army and its allies. Samuel Pepys was one of many who celebrated, seeing Lambert’s defeat
as a decisive blow against the ‘fanatics’. On 24 April, he wrote: ‘Their whole design is broken and things now very open and
plain and every man begins to be merry and full of hopes.’

April–May 1660

John Lambert’s abject defeat, followed by his humiliating treatment at Tyburn, marked the end of the republican era. Three
days after his capture the new Convention Parliament met and proclaimed Britain a monarchy.
^*
The Lords were re-established too. Some thirty peers simply occupied their old chamber and acted as if the upper house had
never been abolished. The final piece in the jigsaw, the proclamation of Charles Stuart as monarch, would not be in place
for a further week, but everyone knew that the restoration was unstoppable. A frightening summer was ahead for the men associated
with the execution of Charles I.

A sign of things to come arrived on 27 April when a party of militiamen descended on the Staffordshire home of the Fifth Monarchist
leader General Thomas Harrison and took him away. He was the first of Charles I’s judges to be arrested in England. No one
had more to do with the king’s death than Harrison. He had pressed for the trial,
he had been in charge of security at the trial, he had attended every session, he had even taken charge of the dead king’s
funeral. Not surprisingly his name topped the lists of the king’s ‘murderers’ that royalists now took to scattering around.

Harrison was arrested by Colonel John Bowyer, one of the secluded MPs. Well provided with horses and arms, he could have made
a show of resistance or escaped. He did neither. He would have counted it an ‘action of desertion of the cause in which he
engaged, to leave his house’, explained Mark Noble, the first biographer of the king’s judges.
¹
George Monck sent an order to convey Harrison to the Tower. His horses were impounded and sent to London for the use of the
king. The king would lay claim to the property and estate of every so-called regicide, most of it going to his brother James,
Duke of York.

Edmund Ludlow, who was well aware that he might be the royalists’ next target, attempted to secure what he could of his estate
before the authorities acted. He tried to make over to his brother-in-law £1500 of livestock on his property in Ireland and
to have tenants’ rents collected. But his old enemy Sir Charles Coote, without any authority from Parliament, seized it all,
taking control of the estate and forcing Ludlow’s tenants to pay rents to him. Colonel Theophilus Jones, Coote’s chief collaborator
in wresting control of Ireland from the Rump, took away the pick of the livestock, presumably for himself.

In London, the business of restoring the monarchy occupied a fraction of the time it had taken to displace it. This mighty
political turnabout was achieved in just over a week. The process began on 1 May with an elaborate charade. Charles’s trusted
middleman Sir John Grenville presented himself at the door of the council chamber in Whitehall flourishing a letter. It bore
the royal Stuart seal and was addressed to General George Monck. The General affected not to know Grenville and theatrically
commanded the guards to hold him while the document was examined. Grenville announced that it was a declaration from the king
and that there were similar missives for
the Commons, the Lords, the City of London, the army and the fleet.

The document, the Declaration of Breda, contained Charles’s promise of clemency to most of his enemies, and those of his father,
if they swore fealty. It was an astute document that breathed forgiveness. The crucial passage announced a ‘free and general
pardon’ to all who within forty days offered their loyalty and obedience to the king, ‘excepting only such persons as shall
hereafter be excepted by Parliament – these only to be excepted’. The declaration then repeated the assurance:

Charles undertook to settle army pay arrears and to confirm land settlements made since 1648. Remarkably for a son of Charles
I, he also pledged to guarantee ‘liberty for tender consciences’, or freedom of worship.

The forty-day countdown for former enemies to pledge allegiance began on the day the declaration was published, 1 May. The
wording would persuade some of his father’s judges that if they pledged in time (by 10 June) they would qualify for clemency.
It wasn’t so. They were misled, or they misled themselves. A flurry of activity followed the reading of the Breda document
in the Lords and the Commons. Peers and commoners hastened breathlessly in and out of joint meetings in the Painted Chamber
and back to their own chambers as the two houses raced to be first to declare England a monarchy again. In mid-afternoon the
Lords won. Their statement read: ‘The Lords do own and declare that, according to the ancient and fundamental Laws of this
Kingdom, the Government is, and ought to be, by King,
Lords, and Commons.’ The Commons had to follow suit: ‘this House doth agree with the Lords … that, according to the ancient
and fundamental Laws of this Kingdom, the Government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons.’

The statement had the bonfires burning, the drink overflowing and the maypoles going up for the first time in a dozen years
of grey Puritan rule. The giant maypole set up at the traditional point in the Strand was said to have been erected by John
Clarges, a blacksmith from the Savoy, who was not only an ardent royalist but also George Monck’s father-in-law. ‘Transcendant
was the Joy all over England which issued from this good News,’ wrote the monarchist historian William Howell nearly two decades
later.
²

Three days after the declaration of a monarchy, the royal arms were restored to the Courts of Justice, and the statue of Charles
was returned to Guildhall. Throughout the following month the effigy of Cromwell, which only eighteen months before had been
crowned with a royal diadem, draped with a purple mantle, and borne with all imaginable pomp to Westminster Abbey, was exposed
at one of the windows at Whitehall with a rope fixed round its neck.

The next eight days saw a battle between the Presbyterians and the new, wildly royalist intake in the Commons over the limits
to be put on royal power. The Presbyterian grandees in the Lords, the Earls of Manchester and Newcastle and Sir Thomas Wharton,
were determined to impose conditions on the incoming king and pushed for those accepted by Charles I in the Treaty of Newport
in 1648. Those had denied the king control of the army and reserved for Parliament the appointment of council members, judges
and other officials. The Presbyterians wanted no less. They were set on preventing any more favourites like a Strafford or
the Duke of Buckingham taking the helm.

A year earlier, young Charles would have accepted almost any terms. Around Easter 1659 his courtiers were so desperate that
they had canvassed the idea of him securing the throne by marrying a daughter of John Lambert, who would then play kingmaker.
Apparently Charles had gone along with the proposal. But Lambert wanted no part of it. Now, in April 1660, emboldened by George
Monck’s commitment to him, Charles felt so strong that he pressed for an unconditional restoration. He let it be known that
his ‘honour’ demanded no less.

All eyes were on Monck. ‘The General hath been highly complimented by both Houses,’ wrote the courtier Henry Coventry to the
Marquis of Ormond, ‘and without doubt the giving the King easy or hard conditions dependeth totally upon him; for if he appear
for the King, the affections of the people are so high for him, that no other authority can oppose him.’
³
The Presbyterians tried to set up a committee in the Commons to consider putting the Newport terms to the king. This proposal
was seconded, but got nowhere. According to one contemporary account, ‘It was foreseen that such a motion might be set on
foot’ and Monck was ‘instructed how to answer it, whensoever it should be proposed.’
⁴
Instructed is probably the wrong word, but Monck played the saboteur anyway – first by suggesting that Charles could be trusted
to be accommodating when he assumed the throne and then by frightening Parliament. He told the Commons that he could not answer
for the peace ‘either of the nation or the army’ if there was any delay in bringing over the king. Although universal peace
reigned all over the nation at the moment, ‘many incendiaries stood ready to raise the flame’. The portly general referred
dramatically to information he dared not release and talked of ‘the blood or mischief’ that delay might produce. The speech
ended with a warning that the consequences would be upon Members’ own heads; this ‘was echoed with such a shout over the house,
that the motion was no more insisted on’.

So Charles got his way. On 8 May the still absent prince was officially proclaimed ‘the most Potent, Mighty and Undoubted
King of England, Scotland and Ireland’, with no conditions attached.

By common consent among historians, this was a disastrous decision. William Cobbett wrote: ‘To the king’s coming in without
conditions may be well imputed all the errors of his reign.’
⁵
In the opinion of Edmund Burke,

How little truth there was to Monck’s warning about urgency was evident from Charles’s own reaction. He could hardly have
moved at a more leisurely pace. A man who all his life loved symbolic gestures, Charles opted to delay his arrival in England,
finally making a triumphal entrance in London three weeks later on his thirtieth birthday.

Over those weeks Parliament lavished spending money and compliments on the Stuarts, and worked on how to deal with the alleged
killers of the king. The Commons voted £50,000 in immediate cash for Charles, £20,000 for his brother James and £10,000 for
brother Henry, topped up by £10,000 from the City of London and a £3000 personal gift – a bribe – from William Lenthall, the
Speaker in the Long Parliament. Samuel Pepys was in the party sent to The Hague to accompany the Stuarts back to England.
His diary for 16 May 1660 notes the poverty of the royal entourage – ‘their clothes not being worth forty shillings the best
of them’ – and their relief at suddenly being in funds. ‘How overjoyed the King was when Sir J. Grenville brought him some
money; so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York to look upon it as it lay in the portmanteau before it
was taken out.’

While Charles dawdled in The Hague, the manhunt he had always promised himself got under way in London. The hunt would
dominate the first year of the new king’s reign and was still to resonate during that of his brother. The legislation authorising
it was a ‘Bill of General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion’ introduced into the Commons by the solicitorgeneral, Heneage Finch,
on 9 May. This was to be the focus of the regicide battle, specifying all those deemed guilty enough to die, those guilty
enough to lose everything but their lives and those to be let off with minor punishments.

During the first debates on the Bill, the king’s ‘inclination to mercy’ was stressed repeatedly, not least by Charles himself.
But those who suspected that they would be targets recalled the ferocious threats of revenge attached to his name in earlier
years. They were faced with stark choices – fleeing for their lives, keeping their heads down and praying for the best, or
standing their ground as martyrs for the cause.

Those who fled were arguably the wisest. Charles exhibited moments of ruthlessness that boded ill for anyone judged an opponent.
While preparing the ground for his landing in England, he dispatched a letter to Monck telling him to stop appeasing opponents.
He wrote, ‘There are many persons still contriving … against me and you and who must be rather suppressed by your authority
and power than won and reconciled by your indulgences. … it may be a little severity towards some would sooner reduce the
rest than anything else you can do.’
⁷
Later he told Parliament: ‘The same discretion and consequence which disposed me to the clemency I have expressed … will
oblige me to all rigour and severity towards those who shall not now acquiesce but continue to manifest their sedition and
dislike of the government, either in words or deeds.’
⁸

Among the first of the King’s judges to flee were William Goffe and his father-in-law Edward Whalley. Had they lingered they
would undoubtedly have been leading targets for arrest. A report to Charles’s Chancellor, Edward Hyde, pinpointed them as
particular enemies – Whalley ‘as a great stickler against the King and Goffe [as] another’.
⁹
On 4 May the two managed to slip unnoticed out of the
country just as the last pieces confirming the Stuart restoration were falling into place. The former major-generals kissed
their families goodbye and took horse for Gravesend, where passage awaited them on the
Prudent Mary
. She was bound for Boston.

The two refugees would no doubt have heard that Monck had just secured another endorsement from their former comrades in the
army. On 2 May the Declaration of Breda was read to a mass meeting of army officers who applauded it. The meeting repeated
the army’s recent commitment to abide by the will of Parliament and recorded the officers’ satisfaction with Charles’s promises.
There was a similar commitment from naval officers at a meeting aboard the
Naseby
, and of course this was marked by celebratory cannonade from the entire fleet.