God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Charles had turned an amalgam of discontents into a new war, resulting in more unnecessary deaths, and this helped to crystallize support for hardliners in the army. In late April, on his way to war, Cromwell attended a prayer meeting in Windsor. There he would have heard Goffe call again for justice on a king who would plunge his people into war once more. News of the death of Colonel Fleming in south Wales arrived on the third day of the meeting, and it was in this atmosphere of anger that ‘Charles Stuart, that man of blood’ was said to be liable to be called to account ‘for that blood he had shed and mischief he had done to his utmost against the lord’s cause and people in these poor nations’.52

  These were more radical arguments than those of 1642/3, but they did not represent a consensus. Radical political demands were divisive within the army, and these divisions were exacerbated by renewed Leveller agitation. In April attempts to elect agitators were launched, and renewed campaigning behind the Agreement of the People enjoyed some success in Rich’s regiment, but there is little evidence of success elsewhere, and it was headed off at a meeting in St Albans.53 The call for justice should not be read forwards as a settled desire to kill the King, and the constitutional radicalism implied by Goffe was not necessarily representative of the whole army. But Goffe’s views as stated in Windsor did reflect something of the mood in which this war was embarked upon – fearfully, and hesitantly, but also with a strong resentment at the profligacy with which the royalists were willing to spend human lives.

  At Colchester later in the summer, the acrimony and recrimination brought England close to atrocities. That siege in particular suggested that at the end of the second civil war England was in danger of descent into the horrors experienced in Germany. Many in the army held Charles Stuart responsible for this, and the ‘murder of Rainborough’, having ignored God’s judgement in the first war and deliberately precipitated another one. Determination to avoid a third war might well come to justify harsh, and previously unthinkable, measures: individual cruelties might be seen as necessary to prevent cruelties of a more general and terrible kind.

  20

  The Occasioner, Author, and Continuer of the Said Unnatural, Cruel and Bloody Wars

  The Trial and Execution of Charles I

  Military victory was in political terms no more decisive now than it had been in 1646: what had been defeated, and what that defeat meant for the future, was in the eye of the beholder, and the certainties of the executions at Colchester were hardly the basis for political settlement. Failure to support armed royalism was an indication neither of support for those views, nor of any great love for matters as they stood. Some former parliamentarians had been prominent in their support for the risings, and for the Engagers, and there were significant divisions in the parliamentary alliance. The opinions voiced in print by the Levellers and by Goffe at the Windsor prayer meeting threatened the kind of settlement so strenuously opposed by Edwards and others towards the end of the first war.

  Parliamentary attitudes towards the Engagers and the provincial risings in England had been surprisingly equivocal. On 28 April, with invasion plans well in hand, Parliament had voted to reopen negotiations with the King on the basis of the Hampton Court proposals, and on 6 May the Lords and Commons passed a resolution ‘for the speedy settlement of the peace of both kingdoms, and preservation of the union, according to the [Solemn League and] Covenant and treaties’.1 In one sense this was quite reasonable since a settlement was clearly going to have to involve the King and could not be dictated by either a Scottish Presbyterian or the New Model army, certainly not if it was going to be a settlement for all three kingdoms. Parliament was also responding to sympathy for the risings, not least in London. But it was equally easy to see why that would enrage the New Model. At the time these votes were made public, military preparations in Scotland were underway, mutineers in Wales and the navy were supporting provincial risings, and more risings threatened elsewhere. In July, with the battle in England largely won, but Hamilton’s invasion underway, there was a clash between Lords and Commons over whether or not Hamilton’s army were enemies to the kingdom and putting the Duke of Gloucester on the throne was almost certainly mooted as a way out of the impasse. On 31 July Charles helpfully declared himself not to be bound by the Engagers” manifesto, which declared against toleration of sects or those using the Prayer Book.2

  Given these political ambiguities, it was reasonable for the soldiers of the New Model Army to feel that their risks and sacrifices had been made in the service of people who did not support them. The authorities in London, while committed enough to its defence, had certainly sent mixed messages in July and August; sufficiently mixed that they were regarded with suspicion by many of the firmer spirits in the army. Parliamentary moves during the summer to try to create the possibility for further negotiation involved political moves that were unacceptable to the army. The eleven members impeached at the command of the army the previous summer were readmitted, and quickly resumed their seats. Another breach was in the offing, between the New Model and a significant body of opinion in Parliament committed to keeping Charles and the Scots on board.3 Military victory ruled out the possibility of forcing such a treaty using the Engagers” army, but did not settle much else.

  The royalist cause had been severely handicapped during 1648. Charles had been forced to sit out the war, in close confinement on the Isle of Wight. It was the Queen and the Prince of Wales who had failed to provide the military co-ordination. But the royalist cause in 1648 had been at least equally an alliance of convenience. Personal loyalty to Charles, or at least a commitment to keeping him on the throne with some regal dignity intact, united people with very different aspirations – Engagers, English constitutionalists and Confederate Irishmen had all been courted by the King. In one view, of course, this was entirely appropriate – he was king to all these people, and had to find some way of reconciling all these people to a peaceful life under his rule. But in the conditions that now prevailed the practical future of such an alliance was far from clear – what kind of settlement could the Engagers, Poyer’s troops, the Confederates and the Kentish royalists all support? The Heads of Proposals probably came closest, but they were a product of the army that now confronted them. In this fundamental sense the war had settled none of the questions of 1642, and had been the more futile for being the second attempt to resolve them by arms. Calls for a deal with the King had tended to predominate in provincial petitions during the spring and summer, merging with violent resistance to the parliamentary regime. But once new talks about a settlement opened following the second civil war, it was petitions against a deal that predominated.4 For his critics, Charles appeared not as a monarch acting for all his people, but as a man, Charles Stuart, willing to do deals with anyone, however mutually contradictory those deals might seem. What could a further attempt at treaty possibly produce from a man such as this?5

  Parliamentary politics seemed to be moving towards a reopening of negotiations with the King. On 24 August, on news of the victory at Preston, the Vote of No Addresses was repealed: something that had been mooted earlier in the summer. There was an alliance here in favour of negotiation to avoid further conflict, a contrast with the view that only complete military dominance would secure a respectable peace. The best hope for this more moderate position was to get the King to agree to parliamentary control of the militia for twenty years and appointments of officers of state and the abolition of episcopacy in favour of Presbyterianism for at least three years.6 This was familiar territory, of course. Nothing had changed since the exasperated Vote of No Addresses except that Charles had started, and lost, another war. We can presume it was the losing rather than the starting that mattered; Charles was no more worth dealing with but was, perhaps, closer to being backed against a wall.

  But perhaps not. Division and disarray continued to characterize his opponents (or potential allies). Defeat for the Engagers” army in England led to their political eclipse in
Scotland, as kirk and Covenant risings in the west of Scotland, and the Whiggamore raid (a march on Edinburgh of several thousand supporters of the Covenant from south-west Scotland), drove them out of the centres of power.7 But these groups had little in common with the army and Independents in England beyond their mutual hostility to the Engagers. Scotland was not ripe for further military intervention in England, but it was not lined up behind the New Model, either. The decision to reopen negotiations with the King was contentious in army circles and there was more Leveller activity, calling for the long-delayed harvest of the fruits of the people’s sacrifice. The Humble Petition of Thousands of Well-Affected Persons was presented to Parliament on 11 September, urging settlement on the basis of the Agreement of the People, and an end to the Negative Voice of the King and the Lords. Two days of silence followed, prompting the presentation of another petition saying the same thing. Amidst the ensuing disturbance demonstrators were heard to say ‘that they knew no use of a King or Lords any longer; and that such distinctions were the devices of men, God having made all alike’. Some members commended the message: ‘the House must yield to them, or else it might be too hot to hold such as opposed it’. For others, like Sir Roger Burgoyne, this radicalism was a reason to persist in negotiation, demonstrating ‘what we are to look for from such a kind of men… if the Treaty should not proceed’.8

  Belief in the guilt of those who had prompted another war also led militants to demand an end to negotiation. According to his later, and possibly self-serving, recollections, Edmund Ludlow had met Fairfax earlier in September, hoping to get him to halt negotiations. Frustrated he went on to see Ireton, who agreed that the only peace likely to emerge would be a betrayal of the cause, but did not agree that now was the moment to intervene.9 From mid-September onwards such militants were mobilizing petitions. On 10 October the Commons received petitions against the treaty from Oxfordshire (a Leveller petition), Newcastle, Yorkshire and Somerset. That from Somerset had, in the now customary manner, been organized at the assizes, courtesy of a packed Grand Jury: it argued that the treaty would be the ‘ruin of God’s people’. Those in favour of negotiation, although slower off the mark to get petitions going, were more influential in Parliament.10

  Against the background of these divisions formal negotiations opened at Newport on 18 September. Charles had declared the impending negotiation a ‘mock-treaty’ on 2 August, and his only purpose in entertaining the proposals was to buy time. For example, on 9 October a breakthrough was apparently made – Charles agreed to hand control of the militia to Parliament for twenty years. He wrote the same day to a confidant: ‘The great concession I made this day, was merely in order to my escape,… for my only hope is, that now they believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less careful of their guards’.11

  These doomed discussions were initially limited to forty days, but the deadline was allowed to pass as a settlement was sought. Charles had insisted on a stipulation that no concession was valid until all points had been agreed, so the concession of control of the militia was even more worthless than our knowledge of his intentions suggests. There were divisions among the commissioners: Denzil Holles (who had only just had the threat of impeachment lifted from him by those on ‘his side’) and Harbottle Grimston wanted Presbyterianism but were relatively easy on political terms; Viscount Saye and Sele and Henry Vane wanted more constitutional safeguards but were willing to see a religious settlement along the lines of the Heads of Proposals. Negotiation on Presbyterianism was encouraged by Vane in particular, anxious for toleration. Locked into a familiar negotiation, with no clear new way out, Charles planned another escape on 7 October, aiming to spin out negotiations as long as possible to facilitate it. In the following days he accepted proposition after proposition until, on 17 October, they ran into the buffers on the treatment of delinquents. Proposals were batted backward and forward between the negotiators and Parliament throughout late October.12

  All the while Henrietta Maria, with the knowledge of her husband, was making plans for a renewal of the war with continental and Irish help. Ormond had been in Kilkenny since early October, trying to secure a peace in Ireland, which might allow a third war in England. On 1 November, Charles gave an evasive answer to Parliament’s demand that he disavow Ormond and this confirmed the suspicions about Charles that he had some such plan up his sleeve (the negotiations were not at this point public knowledge).13 Nonetheless, and although there was more than a little familiarity about all this, Charles did seem more willing to make concessions – not only on control of the armed forces and the government of Ireland for twenty years, but also his right to appoint his chief officials. By mid-November he had accepted much greater restrictions on his power than would have been necessary a year earlier, but the key sticking point remained – the fate of episcopacy.

  Charles’s own view of his best hope, as he revealed in a letter to Ormond, was to bring peace to Ireland in the hope of renewing war in England.14 As the treaty negotiations progressed, but those in Kilkenny were not called off, and as the risks of a peace that gave too much away increased, radical opinion in the army hardened.15

  A key figure in this was Ireton. He had probably given up on Charles as early as the autumn of 1647, at the time of his escape from Hampton Court. Regimental petitions echoing Leveller and county opposition to treaty gave Ireton support in his efforts to get the army to bring an end to the Newport negotiations. In October, Ireton’s regiment had been prominent in calling for justice irrespective of persons, a not very coded call to put the King on trial. With Cromwell at that time in Scotland, far away from the action, and Fairfax apparently indecisive, Ireton seized the initiative and drafted The Remonstrance of the Army. In its final form the Remonstrance called for an end to the treaty at Newport and for the King to be put on trial, promising ‘exemplary justice… in capital punishment upon the principal author and some prime instruments in our late wars’.16

  The demand for justice on the King was of course dramatic: it figured prominently in a shorter digest of the Remonstrance, and was echoed in the charges against the King when he was put on trial. But did ‘justice’ in this case necessarily mean execution? In the many calls for justice in the autumn of 1648 unequivocal demands for the King’s death were rare, and this righteous desire for vengeance did not lead directly to the killing of the King. The Remonstrance, one of the most straight-talking texts, also left room for manoeuvre. For example, in the passages about the necessity of justice much is made of Charles’s failure to show any remorse for his sins. If he were remorseful ‘his offence being first judged according to righteousness, his person might be capable of pity, mercy and pardon, and an accommodation with him, with a full and free yielding on his part… might in charitable construction be just (possibly) safe and beneficial’.17 This was hard to sell to men who believed that Charles was a man of blood on whom God demanded judgement,18 but that was not the opinion of the whole army. Equally problematically, there was little in his character or record to encourage the hope that he would be contrite. Nonetheless, the possibility was raised: killing him was not the main point. The real problem the army was addressing was how to get a just, safe and beneficial settlement. As things stood – the King unrepentant and still bent on conflict when he could manage it – there was no possibility of such a settlement by personal treaty. If he repented, or submitted to judgement, that might become possible – in particular, if he pleaded guilty, he need not die.

  Putting the King on trial was also a means of demonstrating that his interests were subject to the authority of the representative of the people. The army’s political intervention was justified, it was argued, because they were acting on behalf of the people: pursuit of their own rights had thus been transformed into a defence of English freedoms. The Remonstrance opens with an appeal to the principle of salus populi, acknowledging that the principle is easily abused, but asking whether that is best served by a personal treaty with the King. It goes on to argue tha
t in order to avoid future wars the people’s good must be at the centre of government, and that there must be a permanent safeguard against the use of government to pursue personal or private interests. Only a true representative of the people, with power over all persons, could guarantee this. Constitutional reform and the submission of the King to the power of the people’s representative were the two crucial elements of this constitutional settlement. The authority of this representative lay in reason and the law of nations, not custom or tradition, so that ‘if they [the people’s representative] find the offence, though not particularly provided against by particular laws, yet against the general law of reason or nations and the vindication of the public interest to require justice;… in such case no person whatsoever may be exempt from such account or punishment’.19 Clearly this aims at the King, who was throughout the Remonstrance and at his trial accused of pursuing a personal interest in upholding and extending his prerogative power against the interest of the people. But it goes on to say that no-one should ‘have power to protect others from their judgment or (without [the people’s representative’s] consent) to pardon whom they have judged’. The authority of the representative of the people was asserted by making the King answerable, and unable to excuse his friends.20

  The Remonstrance, though, sought to base the constitutional settlement not in custom, law or tradition, but in popular sovereignty: in that context the purpose of a trial would be to establish the ultimate source of authority by demonstrating that the King was answerable to the people. Another lengthy section lays out the need to limit the life of each parliament, since perpetual parliaments are open to manipulation and corruption, not least by the King. A regular succession of parliaments, with rules for election, is argued to be the only means to safeguard settlement, again suggesting that restoring him to his throne is one of the possible outcomes. Such a constitutional settlement, however, would not be safe so long as he was considered ‘above any human justice, and not accountable to, or not punishable by any power on earth, what ever he does’: the King must be admitted to trial and judgement as an example to his successors.21 Popular sovereignty restrained the will and interest of the King and was the guarantor of good government.22 An equal franchise would be introduced, but those who had engaged against Parliament would be excluded for a period of time, and those who did not subscribe to ‘a general contract or Agreement of the People’ would be excluded from its benefits.