The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (46 page)

Charles had chosen to give himself up to the Scots because there was a possibility that they might back him against the English. Tensions had not abated between the factions into which the Parliamentary cause had divided. Indeed the split between the Presbyterians and the army had become so serious that the Presbyterian MPs sent their own representatives hurrying north to negotiate separately with the king and the Scots against the army. They suggested that the king should be returned to power under certain conditions, the so-called Propositions of Newcastle: Presbyterianism would become the established Church, Parliament would control the army and the fleet for twenty years, and there would be strict enforcement of the laws against Catholics. But these were the very conditions that Charles had rejected before the war, and in the end he could not bring himself to accept them. In January 1647, in return for £400,000 owed to them in army back-pay, the king was handed over to Parliament by his Scots jailers and then conveyed to Holmby House in Northamptonshire. The Scots now journeyed north back to their own country, leaving the army, which increasingly looked to Cromwell as its leader, to continue its struggle for power with the Presbyterians.

During the first six months of 1647, while the king remained at Holmby House, the antagonism between the army and the Presbyterians intensified. The Independents’ or soldiers’ influence in Parliament was increasing and the Presbyterian MPs were very alarmed at the way the army had become a political force and saw a future for itself as part of the government. They had expected that once the war was over it would disperse and leave them to rule. The Presbyterians decided to strike first. If they could disband the New Model Army, then the threat from its men would disappear. The Presbyterians made the mistake of not paying its wages first–in the case of the cavalry these were ten months in arrears. The army simply refused to disband. Instead it mutinied and elected its own political council, on which Cromwell was the leading light.

By June 1647 Cromwell with his usual tactical genius saw that he would have to seize the most important piece on the chessboard: the king. He despatched Cornet Joyce to Holmby House to capture Charles for the army and take him to the old Tudor palace of Hampton Court. The army meanwhile marched to London and expelled eleven Presbyterian MPs from Parliament, thus proving itself just as much an enemy to Parliamentary privilege as Charles had been. Its leaders now offered the king their own Heads of Proposals. These were rather reasonable: Charles could return to the throne so long as Parliament met every two years; bishops could be restored so long as no one had to obey them; and the prayer book could be reintroduced so long as its prayers were not compulsory.

But these straightforward men with their straightforward ideas were dealing with the wrong man. Convinced after the expulsion of the Presbyterians from Parliament that internecine war was about to erupt between the two Parliamentary sides, Charles simultaneously entered into secret negotiations with the Scots and the English Presbyterian party, believing he could bargain with them from a stronger position after the army’s offer. He escaped to the Isle of Wight and, though he was captured and held in Carisbrooke Castle, still contrived to send secret messages to the Scots and negotiate with them.

At Carisbrooke the devious Charles managed to sign the Engagement, a single treaty with the more moderate Covenanters under the Marquis of Hamilton, who had deserted Argyll. Under the Engagement, Charles finally agreed to establish Presbyterianism in England, but to suppress all heretical sects–which included all the sects gathered under the banner of the Independents–as soon as a Scots army had invaded England and set up a new Parliament. By 1648 a combination of the Presbyterians’ fear of the extreme sectarians in the army, the king’s intrigues and the news that a Scots army would come to their rescue had welded the English Presbyterians, the royalists and the Presbyterian Scots together to make common cause.

The Second Civil War began with risings in Kent and Essex in June, and in South Wales in July. The Thirty Years War had just ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, so the king had a hope of Catholic continental troops coming to his aid. But Fairfax defeated the Kent rebels and Cromwell, having crushed the rising in Wales, went on to destroy the small and inadequate Scots army at Preston. The Essex royalists surrendered a fortnight later, at the end of August 1648. And though the Second Civil War was now over, the danger to the Parliamentary cause had not evaporated. As a sign of the pro-royalist mood in the country, no fewer than nine ships of the fleet suddenly changed sides and sailed to Holland to join the Prince of Wales.

Ominously the new crisis made the army turn violently against the king, in the belief that he could never be trusted again. Disgusted with the king’s lack of plain dealing, it published a declaration stating that it was its duty ‘to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed, and the mischief he had done to his utmost against the Lord’s cause and people in these poor nations’. It had had enough of delay and negotiation, and events were moving towards an uncontrollable finish. Forcibly removing Charles from the Isle of Wight, where he had had considerable freedom of movement, the army imprisoned him under twenty-four-hour guard in Hurst Castle in Hampshire, before transferring him three weeks later to Windsor. Then on 6 December 1648, in what is called Pride’s Purge, 143 Presbyterian MPs were ejected from the Commons by troops under Colonel Thomas Pride. The remaining members, forming the Rump Parliament, were Independents, supporters of Oliver Cromwell and the army.

The army now insisted that the king be brought to trial. Though the House of Lords refused to countenance such a step, a
soi-ditant
High Court of Justice was created by a vote of the House of Commons. It consisted of 135 commissioners, few of whom were lawyers, none of whom were judges, and a lowly provincial lawyer named John Bradshaw was elected president. On 20 January 1649 King Charles stood trial beneath the hammer beams of Westminster Hall where his distant ancestors had once dispensed justice. Beyond the little world of Westminster the rest of England was stunned by the army’s presumption.

Though he might have lost his kingdom, Charles had not lost his wits. In a loud voice, his stammer for once not detectable, he asked by what authority he had been brought to the bar, for no authority existed in England to try a king. ‘By the authority of the people of England,’ Bradshaw replied. But Charles would not answer to the charges of an unconstitutional court and refused to say anything throughout the rest of the trial. His son the Prince of Wales, who had wept uncontrollably in Holland when he heard what was happening, now sent a piece of blank paper to the Rump, declaring that he would put his signature to any demand if his father’s life was spared. But it was to no avail.

The ‘court’ continued to hear the evidence against the king. As nothing was said in his defence, it was shown that the king had made war on his people, had raised troops against Parliament and had been a ‘tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation’. He was therefore sentenced to death by having his head severed from his body.

The death warrant was signed by only 59 of the 135 commissioners. The rest had slunk away, reluctant to set their names to a document of such dubious legality. Thus Charles I was condemned to death by a minority of the court, which had been established by a minority of the House of Commons, indeed by an illegal remnant thereof, and without the concurrence of the House of Lords.

Unexpectedly, in the face of death Charles I showed a strength and dignity nobody knew he possessed. As one writer put it, ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.’ On 30 January the king was executed outside Banqueting House in Whitehall, which Inigo Jones had built for his father James I. When he stepped on to the scaffold, a small figure dressed all in black, Charles was quite composed; he had spent the last days of his life praying with the Bishop of London, William Juxon. Because it was such bitter weather he wore two shirts, so that a shiver of cold would not be mistaken for one of fear. All round Whitehall, steel-helmeted men on horseback kept the crowds at bay. But there were hundreds and thousands of people nevertheless. When the head with its long, black, flowing locks was severed from the body, a terrible cry went up from the crowd like a soul in pain.

A witness noted in his diary, ‘The blow I saw given, and can truly say with a sad heart, at the instant whereof, I remember well, there was such a groan by the thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.’ As the masked executioner held up the dripping head and said, ‘Behold the traitor Charles Stuart,’ there was no shout of triumph, only the sound of smothered weeping. Realizing that all had not gone to plan, the army now hustled the people out of Whitehall. The body was removed for embalming before it was taken to Windsor. St George’s Chapel would be its final resting place.

There is a story, which has the ring of truth, that on the night of the king’s execution, while the body was still lying at Whitehall, a hooded figure approached. Looking at the royal corpse, he muttered with some regret, ‘Cruel necessity.’ It has always been believed that this was Oliver Cromwell.

Death transformed the foolish, treacherous king into a martyr, and a book which was said to comprise his last prayers and meditations, the
Eikon Basilike
(‘The Royal Image’) became a bestseller in England and Europe. The poet John Milton was forced to mount a very unsuccessful public relations exercise against it, and put out a booklet showing why it was always lawful to put tyrants to death. The poet Andrew Marvell, a partisan of Cromwell’s, was so impressed by the way the king had died that he immortalized it in verse:

England was now declared to be a republic or Commonwealth. Despite the existence of the Prince of Wales the monarchy was abolished, as was the House of Lords. Only the House of Commons remained unaltered since Pride’s Purge. For the present, while the new order shook down, it was still the old Rump Parliament. Its MPs selected forty-one men to be members of a Council of State. The regicide Bradshaw was president and the poet John Milton was Latin secretary, the equivalent of foreign secretary today, for all diplomatic correspondence was written in Latin. Though Oliver Cromwell was one of the new regime’s most important figures, his role continued to be lieutenant-general of cavalry, and as yet subordinate to Fairfax. Their military skills were needed immediately, for danger threatened the young republic at home and overseas.

On the one hand the martyrdom of Charles I had considerably revived royalist feeling. Abroad such was the revulsion at the spilling of royal blood that in Holland and Spain England’s ambassadors were both assassinated. At the same time within the army itself the widespread Leveller sect (among the more extreme of the Independents) was not content with the political settlement. Its members wished to go much further than keeping the old Rump Parliament for they believed in universal male suffrage–they had plans to allow the vote for all men regardless of their wealth, and to abolish personal property. They therefore mutinied, threatening to attack Parliament and force free elections. Cromwell, believing that this was the beginning of anarchy, decided that the Levellers had to be put down. ‘Break them in pieces. If you do not break them, they will break you,’ he said to the Council. He and Fairfax crushed the rebellion by arresting its leaders at dead of night in Burford, Oxfordshire.

Even more alarming to the life of the young republic was the situation in Scotland and Ireland. Both countries had thrown off English rule. The execution of Charles I caused more problems than it solved. It rallied the royalist Presbyterian forces in Scotland, where the Prince of Wales was immediately proclaimed King Charles II. In Ireland a powerful army of Protestant royalists and Catholic lords arose under James Butler, Marquis of Ormonde. Ireland was the threat which needed dealing with most urgently, for the Prince of Wales and Prince Rupert–now commanding the royalist fleet–were on their way there to join Ormonde and encourage the royalist cause.

Accordingly Cromwell, as the army’s greatest soldier, set off for Ireland where he proceeded to lay siege to two of the most important royalist garrisons, Drogheda and Wexford, in September and October 1649. Since they would not surrender, once he had captured the towns he put the entire garrison to the sword, an act which was undoubtedly brutal but not illegitimate by seventeenth-century rules of siege. He justified his conduct by saying that he hoped that thereby less blood would be spilt in the rest of Ireland, whose inhabitants would submit more readily if they knew he would show no mercy.

By 1650 the reconquest was complete. Once more Ireland was reconstructed along inimical English lines; this time her land was redistributed among Cromwellian soldiers, a new English garrison to subdue the natives. The Irish had the choice of renouncing their Catholicism or being resettled beyond the Shannon in the moorland of Connaught–hence the expression ‘to hell or Connaught’. To this day the name of Cromwell is pronounced with peculiar loathing by the southern Irish.

Cromwell was next needed in Scotland. By July 1650 the Prince of Wales was at the head of an army of Covenanters. Although Charles was almost powerless and Scotland continued to be ruled by the Scots nobles under Argyll, the threat of a Stuart in that country was too great to be ignored. Cromwell’s initial invasion was a failure as the Scots were masters of never actually giving battle, and the weather, hunger and sickness started to eat into the English numbers. But on 3 September Cromwell won one of his greatest victories at the Battle of Dunbar against his former colleague David Leslie. Soon after Edinburgh and the Lowlands were controlled by the English occupying army. By now Cromwell was commander-in-chief of the army, for Fairfax–who since Charles I’s trial had been uneasy about the direction the army was taking–had resigned.

The following year the hard-pressed Covenanters crowned the Prince of Wales Charles II of Scotland at Scone, the ancient coronation seat of the Scottish kings. In August they invaded England, hoping that a crowned king might rally royalists to their cause. But after less than a month’s campaigning, on the anniversary of Dunbar, 3 September 1651, Cromwell defeated Charles at the Battle of Worcester. Even the wily Argyll was forced to agree to Cromwell’s terms: Scotland became a commonwealth like England, the Scottish Parliament was abolished, the Presbyterians lost their Assembly. Instead freedom of worship for all Puritans was guaranteed and so was free trade between the two commonwealths.

Charles himself managed to escape to France after a great many astonishing adventures which have passed into folklore. After some valiant hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Worcester, when he was heard to shout that he had only one life to lose, he was forced to linger in the west midlands. There he hid in the priest-holes of friendly recusant houses such as Moseley Old Hall near Wolverhampton and Boscobel House in Shropshire, since the army was guarding all the bridges over the Severn to prevent his escape from Welsh ports. His most celebrated hiding place, after soldiers began to search Boscobel House itself, was up the huge oak tree behind it, along with another royalist on the run with him. All day long the Roundhead soldiers tramped about beneath–it never occurred to them to look above their heads where the two rebels clung to the oak’s leafy branches.

After Boscobel, in order to get to the coast the future king had to be disguised as a manservant. Eventually he was smuggled out of the country at four in the morning in a fishing boat from Shoreham in west Sussex. The government had put up notices offering a reward of a thousand pounds to anyone who could give information on the whereabouts of ‘Charles Stuart, son of the Late Tyrant’. As Charles was exceptionally recognizable we must conclude that many people did know who he was but elected to keep his secret. It was an indication of the royalist sentiment that was beginning to return under the new tyranny of Parliament. Nine years later it would restore Charles to his father’s throne.

But if peace in the three former kingdoms had been established for the moment by Cromwell’s crushing victories, the infant republic continued to be regarded with considerable hostility abroad. In the case of Holland this led to the First Dutch War (1652–4). There were many similarities in outlook between what were now two Calvinist republics. Protestantism had drawn them together against the Catholic powers in Elizabeth’s time, but trade rivalry in the East Indies and Dutch sympathy with the royal cause made relations unfriendly. It needed only a spark to start a war. It was provided in 1651 when the Rump Parliament tried to transfer some of the lucrative Dutch carrying trade into English hands by means of a new Navigation Act. It forbade the importation into England or the English colonies of goods that were carried in any ships other than those of their country of origin. The Dutch were infuriated that the English Commonwealth should benefit from one of their most profitable businesses.

The First Dutch War took place entirely at sea. In theory the Commonwealth was in no position to fight, let alone win, because it had no proper navy. But a Somerset Puritan named Robert Blake, who had captured Taunton from the royalists, turned out to be as good a ‘general at sea’ as on land, and trounced Holland despite her maritime expertise. The greatest English seaman until Nelson, Admiral Blake triumphed against the leading Dutch seaman Van Tromp, whom he defeated off the Texel in 1653. With the Treaty of Westminster the following year, English supremacy over the North Sea was established, the Dutch promised not to aid the royalists and the English carrying trade began its lucrative growth.

The crisis of the Dutch War failed to heal the splits that were appearing once again in the government of the republic. For some time many in the army had nursed a mounting hostility to the self-satisfied Rump MPs, many of whom had held their seats for almost fifteen years. Army leaders believed that it was time for the Rump to dissolve itself, allowing fairer elections that would produce a House of Commons that was more representative of the English nation. But the Rump MPs were very comfortable as things were, and in April 1653, far from agreeing to a free election, they began to put through an act to prolong their existence. Cromwell took action.

Bursting into the Commons with his soldiers, Cromwell told them, ‘It is not fit that you should sit here any longer!’ He began to throw the MPs out, including the speaker, whom soldiers pulled down from his chair by his gown. Then, though an MP named Thomas Harrison warned him that what he was doing was very dangerous, he ordered his men to remove the golden mace, symbol of the speaker, the authority of the House of Commons. ‘Take away this bauble,’ said Cromwell bleakly.

Cromwell was now the supreme power in the land, a military dictator who believed God had given him a superior knowledge of what was right for the country. He had not lost faith in Parliament as an institution–after all, he had fought for the Parliamentary cause with every atom of his being. It was just a question of finding the
right
kind of Parliament. Over the next few years he would experiment with a variety of national gatherings, for he remained anxious not to abandon the Parliamentary principle. But he was nearly always disappointed. His guiding principle was that England should be ruled by a community of the righteous. In his first attempt at constructing a Parliament to his liking, which became known as the Little Parliament, Cromwell decided that a quick way of ensuring that only the godly were elected was for the candidates to be selected by their local Independent church. So stringent were the criteria they had to comply with–these embraced the number of times the candidate prayed each day, for example–that in the whole of England only 139 really God-fearing men could be found who were worthy to be MPs.

A typical member, who gave the Parliament its nickname, the Barebones Parliament, was an Anabaptist preacher and leatherseller called Praisegod Barbon or Barebones. Unfortunately holiness did not guarantee intelligence. Within eight months, by December 1653, the Little Parliament of unworldly saints who wanted to abolish whatever they could get their hands on–lawyers, priests, government–were seen by Cromwell to be completely unworkable. They were dismissed.

To take its place the army’s Council of Officers instead proposed an Instrument of Government, England’s first written constitution. It provided for a 400-seat unicameral Parliament–a new House of Commons to which for the first time MPs would be elected from Scotland and Ireland. But while the House of Lords remained abolished, a lord protector, Cromwell himself, was to rule the country with the aid of the Council of State. As soon as Parliament met in September 1654 its members began to make difficulties, especially the more extreme republicans who disapproved of the king-like role of lord protector. Four months later, in January 1655, Cromwell dissolved it as peremptorily as any Stuart king had done.

A royalist rising in Wiltshire under Colonel Penruddock brought more trouble, and Cromwell used it as an excuse to impose martial law, dividing England into eleven districts run by major-generals. This, historians believe, was perhaps the single most important factor in turning the country’s thoughts towards a restoration of the monarchy. For, although most people would have encountered something of the Puritan way of life, this was their first experience of a daily existence entirely ordered on Puritan lines, and they loathed it. Used to considering themselves a free people, the English found the restriction of personal liberty which the Puritan code involved unbearable. Fines were imposed for swearing, for sporting activities, for gambling and for drunkenness. The Puritans had already shut all the theatres, but now pubs and inns were closed down if the local major-general considered there were too many in one district. Any judge who attempted to query the new martial laws was removed from office, and, though Parliament was in abeyance, taxes were raised without its permission. Had it not been for the threat presented by the army, the people would probably have risen in revolt.

But Cromwell also had many admirable qualities. Just as he was a magnificent general, he was an outstanding statesman who served English interests well. In many ways he lacked personal ambition, and was driven instead by his sense of God’s will. Righteousness prompted him to rebel against Charles I, and a desire to impose further righteousness on the people of England, since they could not work it out for themselves, turned him into a dictator. In many respects Cromwell was wise and liberal. Although Roman Catholics and High Anglicans remained outside the fold, a preacher of any persuasion–from Baptist to Presbyterian to Independent–could hold a living in the Church of England. And Cromwell, like all Puritans, was positively philo-Semitic because of his interest in the Bible. Although there probably had always been small unofficial Jewish communities living in London, it was Cromwell who in 1656 invited the Jews to return, though it was not until 1664 that Edward I’s legislation was reversed. So it was that the Jewish community began to re-establish itself in England, bringing immense wealth, culture and useful continental contacts for the Cromwellian government.

The advancement of British interests and influence abroad was vigorously pursued by Cromwell. After the Dutch War he attempted a Protestant foreign policy of which Walsingham would have approved–not least in his use of Louis XIV to put pressure on the Duke of Savoy to prevent the further slaughter of the duke’s Protestant subjects, whose bones ‘scattered on the Alpine mountains cold’ were the subject of one of Milton’s best known sonnets. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, Protestantism was no longer an automatic link between countries. Though Cromwell made treaties with Sweden and Denmark, trade rather than religious conviction was the driving force. Far more important in the European scheme of things was the fierce rivalry between Spain and France, directed by Cardinal Mazarin on behalf of the ambitious boy-king Louis XIV.