by Simon Schama
The Covenanter suspicion of royalist contamination of their army led them to purge it of any officers and troops whom they believed to be potentially disloyal. The result was a large but unwieldy and amateurish force, led by General David Leslie. It was this army that Cromwell smashed at the battle of Dunbar in September 1650. He had come to the command only after Fairfax (whose wife was a Presbyterian Scot and who had fought alongside the Covenanters) had refused to lead the northern expedition. The numerical odds were against Cromwell, but he offset them with one of his headlong cavalry-led onslaughts right at the thick of the Scottish force an hour before dawn when they were not yet properly mustered. Thousands were killed in the brief mêlée, thousands more taken prisoner.
The Scots retreated, as so often before, out of Midlothian and Fife across the Forth to Stirling, and Charles was duly inaugurated at Scone on 1 January 1651. But despite appalling weather and over-extended supply-lines, Cromwell took the war to them, crossing the Firth of Forth. In the summer of 1651, Charles and Leslie took what they thought was the audacious step of leaving Cromwell’s army floundering in the rain and mud while they marched west and south into England itself. The hope was (as it would be for Charles’s great-nephew Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745) that, once inside England, a nation of burning Stuart royalists would flock to his standard. And, as in 1745, it never happened. It was not that the entire country was so devoted to the new Commonwealth that rallying to Charles was under any circumstances unthinkable. It was rather that the armies of the republic were so obviously still formidable that it made absolutely no sense to anyone but the most blindly devoted royalist to hazard their safety by supporting so reckless a gamble. So the march down western England to Worcester – where, as Cromwell noted, the civil wars had begun – was a lonely and exclusively Scottish business. Cromwell had let them go deep into the heart of England from which there could be no way back. What had begun as a daring venture had become a steel trap closing fast on Charles II. Another substantial army moved north and west to join Cromwell. Together, outside Worcester, some 28,000 Commonwealth troops faced a royalist-Scottish army of hardly more than half that number. The result was a bloody catastrophe, which ended at twilight with men still hacking at each other in the streets of the city.
Oliver Cromwell returned to an even noisier triumph in London than had greeted his Irish victory. Charles embarked on the extraordinary six-week flight from captivity, which was the coolest and bravest thing he would ever do. Although once he got back to Paris and the exiled court he invented a great number of details – to avoid incriminating his helpers, it was said, but also because he evidently enjoyed telling the stories – the truth of his adventure was astonishing enough. Disguised as a country yeoman, with his mane of black curls cropped short, his face darkened with nut juice to look more weather-beaten and wearing a rough leather doublet, Charles outsmarted and outran his pursuers. Relying on a network of royalists in the West Country, many of them Catholics and thus expert at improvised concealment, Charles hid first in the Staffordshire woods around Boscobel House, the home of the Penderel brothers. Then, having failed to cross the Severn in an attempt to get to Wales, Charles was first hidden in a hayloft and then walked in the rain back to Boscobel, where he slept exhausted in one of the great oaks in the park while troopers searched the estate for him. For royalist legend-makers it was a perfectly emblematic moment: the young hope of the future safely cradled in the fatherly embrace of the ancient English tree. There followed a ride across country disguised as ‘William Jackson’, the manservant of Jane Lane; failure to find a safe passage either from Bristol or from Bridport in Dorset, where the quays and taverns were crawling with Commonwealth soldiers about to be shipped to the Channel Islands; and then abortive wanderings along the south coast before finally finding a reliable ship, the Surprise, at Shoreham in Sussex. Given the £1000 price on his head, and his willingness to test the limits of his disguise by engaging in reckless banter about the rogue Charles Stuart (the sort of game that amused the king), it was astonishing that he was not, in fact, betrayed or discovered. To royalists who had reconciled themselves to submitting for the time being to Leviathan, his near miraculous survival gave them a consoling legend to develop in competition with Cromwell’s depressing record of invincibility.
Charles II’s escape, dependent as it was on so many helping hands, says something important about this very English revolution: that it was (for its own good) deficient in those elements which make for the survival of republics – police and paranoia. Whether you were a gung-ho republican like Edmund Ludlow, a visionary like John Lilburne or a wistful royalist like John Evelyn, it was glaringly obvious that the Commonwealth had signally failed to develop an independent republican culture to replace the banished monarchy. No revolution, especially not those in eighteenth-century France or twentieth-century Russia or China, could hope to survive for even as long as they did without a conscious cultural programme for the redirection of allegiance. Those programmes were aggressively, even brutally, executed to orchestrate loyalty in the interests of the new state. (Hobbes would have understood this very well.) In their requirements of public demonstrations of allegiance – sung, sworn, chanted, enthusiasm reinforced by fear – they would make political neutrality either an impossibility or a crime. There could be no going back.
Nothing of the sort happened in the Britain of the 1650s. And in this sense the shocking drama of the beheading of Charles I is a misleading guide to the true nature of the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate. For the men who ran the country were not Jacobins, much less Bolsheviks, in stove-pipe hats and fallen collars. They were clear-eyed pragmatists who were prepared to mouth the necessary shibboleths about ‘Liberty’, always provided these were vague enough to avoid a commitment to anything like a systematic programme of radical change in, for example, the procedures of the law (as the Levellers had wanted). There had been a lopping all right, a lopping such as has never happened before or since. The king, court, house of peers and bishops had all gone. But this still left a lot of England undisturbed – the England that most of the bigwigs who now ran it, like Henry Marten and Arthur Haselrig, had grown up with, and were partial to and, for all the sound and fury of 1649, had never dreamed of doing away with in the name of some imagined new Jerusalem. Their Zion was still comfortably seated, thank you very much, in the magistrate’s chair, in the county hunts and in city counting houses, and in the 1650s it was doing very nicely. So it was possible for unrepentant royalists like John Evelyn (again in startling contrast to the fate of émigrés in the French Revolution) to travel back and forth between London and the Stuart court in Paris, armed with a passport issued to him personally by John Bradshaw, the judge who had presided over the court which had tried the king and who had sentenced him to death! In that same year, 1649, Evelyn bought himself another country estate, and in February 1652 he came back for good, in effect taking the Leviathan option offered by another of the returnees, his friend Hobbes, ‘no more intending to go out of England, but endeavor a settled life, either in this place [Deptford], or some other, there being now so little appearance of any change for the better, all being intirely in the rebells hands’.
But no prospect, either, for Evelyn of some nightmarish descent into revolutionary terror. In fact he saw, at first hand, an impressive demonstration of the republic’s commitment to upholding the traditional regime of law and order after he had been relieved by a pair of robbers at knife point, while riding through Bromley forest, of two rings (one emerald, one onyx) and a pair of buckles ‘set with rubies and diamonds’. The mere fact that Evelyn wore all this glittering hardware at all while out for a ride scarcely suggests he thought of the Commonwealth to which he had returned as an inferno of social chaos and disorder. And he was right. After two hours tied up against an oak ‘tormented with the flies, the ants, the sunn’, he managed to get loose, find his horse and ride to ‘Colonel Blount’s, a greate justiciarie of the times, who sent out a hugh & c
rie immediately’. In London Evelyn had notices of the mugging printed and distributed, and within a mere two days knew exactly what had become of his valuables, which were duly restored to him. A month later he was summoned to appear at the trial of one of the thieves, but not being ‘willing to hang the fellow . . . I did not appeare’. For the swift return of his jewellery and the exemplary apprehension of the malefactors Evelyn was ‘eternaly obliged to give thanks to God my Savior’. But he might also have given some credit to the smooth operation of the law in regicide England. For the next eight years of the interregnum he spent his days much as he would had there been a king on the throne, the significant exception being the difficulty of finding acceptable sermons to hear and the prohibition on celebrating Christmas, which upset him greatly (especially when one clandestine service was raided). But he went about his business, attending to his own estates and advising acquaintances and learned colleagues and gentry on the landscaping and arboriculture of their properties.
In the summer of 1654 Evelyn was able to stay for an extended time in Oxford, now transformed from the Laudian capital of the king and governed by heads of colleges like his host Dr Wilkins of Wadham, approved of by the Protector. Obedient or not, Oxford was none the less a congenial place of science and learning where Evelyn made the acquaintance of many of the prodigies who would be his colleagues in the Royal Society, including ‘that prodigious young Scholar Mr. Christopher Wren, who presented me with a piece of White Marble he had stained with a lively red [presumably in imitation of porphyry], very deepe, as beautifull as if it had ben naturall’. In fact Evelyn’s entire journey through England – through the West Country and back to East Anglia and Cromwell’s Cambridge – is a record of a country conspicuously going about its business, war damage being repaired, farms flourishing (even in a decade of some economic dislocation), gentlemen planning ‘beautifications’ to their houses and gardens. It was certainly not a country in shock.
And it was still being run largely by men of a practical, rather than a messianic, temper. To read the journal of a man like Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Middle Temple lawyer turned Buckinghamshire gentleman and MP, Commissioner of the Great Seal and a friend of Cromwell’s, is to be struck once more by the relentless normality of his life, by the imperturbable continuity before and after the killing of the monarch. What electrified Whitelocke in 1649 was not Charles I’s death. A staunch parliamentarian and moderate Puritan inclining towards the Independent view of liberty of conscience, he had none the less been against the trial and had declined to serve as one of the commissioners of the court (a gesture which in Jacobin Paris would have booked him a certain date with the guillotine). But Whitelocke had more important things to think about – above all the death of his second wife, Frances, a trauma which almost unhinged him. With all his misgivings about what the Commonwealth was supposed to be, and his sense that any English state ought to have ‘something of a monarchy’ about it (he suggested the youngest Stuart, Prince Henry of Gloucester, as a potential replacement, being of an age to be re-educated in political virtue and moderation), Whitelocke sailed on serenely in public life.
Men like Whitelocke, as well as the other dominant figures of the Council of State and the Rump Parliament, invested far more time and energy in preventing any sort of radical change than in promoting it. Their tenure in power suggests perhaps what a pragmatic government might have looked like had Charles I actually succeeded in winning over men like John Pym, rather than just appointing a few token opposition figures to his Privy Council in 1641. Instead of the firebrands he feared, Charles might have had what men like Henry Marten, Henry Vane and Arthur Haselrig had become – businessmen of state, mercantilists, money-managers. And, in their swaggering, beady-eyed way, fierce patriots. For if there was some sort of republican ideology that had replaced the inadequate and suspect policy of the Stuarts and around which the English (rather than the British) could indeed rally, it was that of the aggressive prosecution of the national interest. It’s all too easy to think of the Commonwealth after the battle of Worcester as living in a kind of pious peace. In fact, it lived in profane war with first the Dutch, then the Portuguese and then the Spanish. It was, as behooved a set of rulers who were excessively misty-eyed about the memory of the sainted Virgin Queen, the most successful warrior state, especially on the high seas, since the death of Elizabeth, in glaring contrast to the string of military fiascos perpetrated by the hapless Stuarts. Admiral Blake succeeded where Buckingham had failed. Cromwell at his most merciless triumphed where Essex had failed. The republic hammered out an empire not only in Britain (where both James I and Charles I had most pathetically failed) but overseas too, in the North Sea and the Baltic and beyond in the Atlantic, both sides of the equator. It was commercially rapacious and militarily brutal, beery chauvinism erected into a guiding principle of state. So a better guide to this kind of Britain than the execution of its king would be the Navigation Act of 1651, which prohibited any ships other than British or those of the country of origin from bringing cargoes to Britain, thus taking deadly aim at the shipping supremacy of the Dutch. It was a policy to maximize business which (another first) the state was prepared to back up with war if that’s what it took. Often it did.
Was this it, then? Was this the reason nearly 200,000 had lost their lives in battle, and far more than that number through disease and misery, just so that Britain could be run by a corporate alliance of county gentry and city merchants? Henry Vane and Arthur Haselrig, and the Rumpers might have said, yes. For it may not be the new Jerusalem but it is no small thing, this liberty of self-interest and of religious conscience. It’s a big thing. (And it would seem unquestionably big when making a return appearance at Philadelphia in 1776.) But for Oliver Cromwell, the godly Caesar, it was never, somehow, quite big enough. He was haunted by the thought that this do-as-you-like Britain was too paltry a dividend for all the blood sacrifices that had been made. His long, rambling speeches to the parliaments of the interregnum, which must have been almost as much torture to listen to as they were to give, combed relentlessly through the history of the civil wars in a hopeless effort to define the essential, redeeming meaning of the conflict.
Cromwell could never establish, to his own satisfaction, that clear and unarguable rationale because, just as he was hoping to ‘heal and settle’ the nation, the civil war was being fought all over again within his own personality. It was the same struggle that continued to frustrate the search for political peace in England: the war between godliness and good order. And the outcome for Cromwell, as for the Commonwealth, was far from clear.
Enough of him belonged to the party of order to respect its strong sense that the Stuarts had been fought so as to keep England the way it was imagined to have been until they came along. That was an England in which monarchs had been bound by the common law and in which there had been no way to tax the people but through parliamentary consent. The country gentleman in Cromwell respected and subscribed to this social conservatism. But anyone who endured his speeches to parliament would have known that there was also a godly zealot inside Cromwell, for whom moral reformation was paramount. For this zealous Cromwell, it made no difference how the war had begun. What mattered was how it must end. ‘Religion was not at first the thing contended for but God brought it to that issue at last and at last it proved to be what was most dear to us.’ He had worked by indirection, making the Stuart Pharaoh stiff-necked so that his Chosen People might rise and depart. But the vision of the Promised Land was a revelation that no one could have imagined at that setting forth, and it was the task of Cromwell to bring the people to it.
So he was Gideon no more. He was Moses. And the Rumpers seemed to him, more and more, like the worshippers before the Golden Calf. Cromwell looked coldly at the unscrupulous trade in confiscated properties, at the vulgar swagger of republicans such as Henry Marten whom he despised as a drunken libertine, and he was scandalized by the profanation of God’s bounteous grace. Cromwell’s vi
ew of government was essentially pastoral, or, as he would say later, constabular. It was the obligation of men to whom God had given authority and good fortune to provide disinterested justice for their charges. What he saw in the Rump was good law denied to the people so that lawyers might line their pockets. He saw fortunes being amassed in land and trade, and men being sent to fight against the Dutch so that merchants could fill their warehouses and fatten their moneybags. Was it to satisfy such carnal appetites that his troopers had left their limbs behind on the fields of Marston Moor and Dunbar? ‘The people were dissatisfied in every corner of the nation,’ he would say in a speech in July 1653, justifying the action he took against the Rump, ‘at the non-performance of things that had been promised and were of duty to be performed.’