Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  ’All my birds have flown,’ admitted Charles, disconsolately conceding defeat. Having set their trap, the five had made good their escape, slipping down to the river, where a boat took them into hiding in the City. As the crestfallen King turned on his heel to leave the chamber, the suddenly emboldened Members reminded him of their rights and let out catcalls of‘Privilege! Privilege!’ at his retreating and humiliated back.

  The debacle marked a breaking point. Compromise was no longer possible between an obstinate monarch and a defiant Parliament, and six days later, on io January 1642, Charles slipped out of Whitehall with his family. He stopped briefly at Hampton Court. Then Henrietta Maria headed for Holland with the crown jewels, hoping to raise money, while Charles rode towards York, intent on raising the army he would need to fight the Civil War.

  ROUNDHEADS V. CAVALIERS

  1642-8

  LADY MARY BANKES WAS A FORMIDABLE woman, the mother of fourteen children. When the Civil War broke out in August 1642 it fell to her to defend the family home at Corfe Castle in Dorset. Her husband was a senior judge and a privy councillor, so when the King had gone north to raise his standard that summer Sir John Bankes followed. He soon found himself, like all the Kings councillors, denounced by Parliament as a traitor.

  Down in Dorset, the local parliamentary commander anticipated little trouble when he arrived at Corfe to take the surrender of the Bankes’s home. But he had not reckoned on the valiant Lady Mary, who shut the gates against him. When his men attempted to scale the walls they found themselves showered with rocks and burning embers thrown by the family’s loyal retainers — cooks and chambermaids included. Even a prize of £20 (£2,240 today) offered to the first man to reach the battlements attracted no takers. Hearing of royalist troops in the nearby town of Dorchester, the parliamentarians slunk away.

  It took an act of treachery to capture Corfe three years later. One February night in 1646, an accomplice in the garrison opened the gates to fifty parliamentary troops disguised as royalists, and Lady Bankes, a widow since her husband’s death at Oxford two years previously, was arrested. Parliament confiscated their lands and decided to‘slight’ Corfe Castle: they stacked the main towers with gunpowder barrels, then exploded them.

  The bravery of Lady Mary and the spectacular ruins of her castle that loom over Corfe to this day illustrate the drama of England’s Civil War and the damage it wreaked. Modern estimates suggest that one in every four or five adult males was caught up in the fighting: 150 towns suffered serious destruction; 11,000 houses were burned or demolished and 55,000 people made homeless — these were the years when the German word plündern, to plunder, came into the language, brought over by Charles’s loot-happy cavalry commander, his nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Nearly 4 per cent of England’s population died in the fighting or from war-related disease — a higher proportion, even, than died in World War I.’Whose blood stains the walls of our towns and defiles our land?’ lamented Bulstrode Whitelock to the House of Commons in 1643.’Is it not all English?’

  The Civil War was not like the Wars of the Roses, when everyday life had largely carried on as normal. The clash between King and Parliament involved the most fundamental question — how should the country be ruled? And to this was added the profound differences in religion that bitterly divided families and split friend from friend. Sir William Waller and Sir Ralph Hopton had been comrades-in-arms in the early 1620s, fighting Catholics on the continent. But now they found themselves on opposing sides, Sir William supporting Parliament because of his Puritan beliefs, Sir Ralph feeling that he must stay loyal to his monarch.’That great God which is the searcher of my heart knows with what a sad sense I go upon this service,’ wrote Waller in distress to his old friend in 1643, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy… [But] we are both upon the stage and must act those parts that are assigned us in this tragedy.’

  Both‘Roundhead’ and‘Cavalier’ were originally terms of abuse. Before the war began, royalists derided the‘round heads’ of the crop-haired London apprentices who had rioted outside Parliament in late December 1641 calling for the exclusion of bishops and Catholic peers from the House of Lords. In retaliation the parliamentarians dubbed their opponents caballeros, after the Spanish troopers notorious for their brutality against the Dutch Protestants. When Charles I heard this rendered into English as‘cavalier’ he decided that he liked the associations of nobility and horsemanship, and encouraged his followers to adopt the word.

  In October 1642 came the first great battle of the Civil War, at Edgehill, north of the royal headquarters at Oxford. Outcome: indecisive. In the year that followed, the balance swung the King’s way. But in July 1644 the two sides met en masse at Marston Moor, outside York, and Parliament was triumphant.

  ’God made them as stubble to our swords,’ boasted the plain-spoken commander of the parliamentary cavalry, Oliver Cromwell. In a famous letter to his fellow-officers from East Anglia, this stocky gentleman farmer who was fast becoming the inspiration of the parliamentary cause described what he looked for in his soldiers:’I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain what knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows,’ he wrote,‘than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.’ When it came to recruiting, explained the Puritan preacher Richard Baxter,‘none would be such engaged fighting men as the religious’.

  Religion was the inspiration of the New Model Army, the 22,000-strong professional fighting force that Cromwell and the parliamentary commander Sir Thomas Fairfax were now organising to replace the system of regional militias. Its regiments sang hymns, refrained from drinking, and made a point of listening to sermons. Royalists nicknamed this new army the‘Noddle’ in mockery of its constant godly head-bobbing in prayer, but sober discipline and holy certainty brought results. On 14 June 1645 at Naseby, just south of Leicester, the red-tunicked Noddle won the decisive victory of the Civil War, taking some five thousand prisoners, securing £100,000 in jewels and booty, and — worst of all from Charles’s point of view — capturing the King’s private correspondence. Soon published in pamphlet form, The King’s Cabinet Opened revealed that Charles had been plotting to hire foreign mercenaries and to repeal the laws against Roman Catholics.

  For Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan members of the New Model Army, this was the ultimate betrayal. It was proof that the King could never be trusted. Righteous voices were raised demanding the ultimate accounting with’Charles Stuart, that man of blood’.

  The Battle of Naseby left Charles I at the mercy of an army as convinced of their divine right as he was.

  BEHOLD THE HEAD OF A TRAITOR!

  1649

  EARLY IN JUNE 1647 CORNET GEORGE JOYCE led five hundred horsemen of the New Model Army to Holmby House in Northamptonshire. In civilian life, Joyce was a tailor. Now he was a cornet of horse, an officer who carried the flag — and his orders were to capture the King.

  The Battle of Naseby had finished the Cavaliers as a fighting force, and having vainly tried to play off his English and Scottish enemies against each other, Charles had ended up in parliamentary custody at Holmby. But Parliament and the army had fallen out over what should be done with their tricky royal prisoner, and now the army took the initiative. They would seize Charles for themselves. At dawn on 3 June, the King walked through the gates of Holmby to find Cornet Joyce waiting for him, with his fully armed fighting men lined up at attention.

  ’I pray you, Mr Joyce…’ asked the King,‘tell me what commission you have?’

  ’Here is my commission,’ replied the cornet of horse.

  ’Where?’ asked the King.

  ’Behind,’ replied Joyce, pointing to his ranks of red-coated troopers.

  The dramatic break between army and Parliament had occurred four months earlier, in February 1647, when MPs had voted to disband the New Model Army and to send its members home. England was exhausted by war, and reflecting the national mood, Parliament’s leaders set about negotiating
a settlement with the King.

  But the men who had risked their lives and seen their companions fall in battle were incensed. Parliament was not only dismissing them with pay owing, it was negotiating with the Antichrist, planning to restore Charles — along with his popish wife and advisers — to the throne.’We were not a mere mercenary army,’ complained’The Declaration of the Army’ of June that year,‘hired to serve any arbitrary power of the state, but [were] called forth… to the defence of the people’s just right and liberties.’

  Radical ideas had flourished in the war years. Once the army had taken custody of the King it had the power to shape the way England would be governed, and in October 1647 the Council of the Army met at St Mary’s Church in the village of Putney, south-west of London, to discuss future action. The agenda was set by the utopian ideas of the ’Levellers’, who were demanding that Parliament be elected by all men, not just on the existing franchise of property-holders and tradesmen. The Levellers wanted no less than to get rid of the lords and the monarchy.‘The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he,’ declared Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, as he kicked off discussion in what became known as‘the Putney Debates’.

  The case for the‘grandees’ — the established property-holders and others who held a‘fixed interest in the kingdom’ — was put by Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton. But the army’s groundbreaking discussions were cut short. Ensconced upriver at Hampton Court, Charles took fright at the reports reaching him from Putney, and on II November he escaped under cover of darkness, riding south towards the Channel.

  There is no telling what might have happened if, having reached the coast, Charles had then taken ship for France. But, not for the first time, the King turned in the wrong direction, heading for the Isle of Wight, where he had been informed — incorrectly — that the governor had royalist sympathies. In no time Charles found himself behind bars, in Carisbrook Castle, his abortive escape bid the prelude to what became known as the Second Civil War. Royalists now rose in revolt in Kent, Essex, Yorkshire and Wales, to be followed by an invasion by a Scottish army, lured south on a secret promise from Charles that he would introduce Presbyterianism to England and suppress the wilder Puritan sects.

  It was the last straw. Parliament and the New Model Army were reunited in their fury at Charles’s enduring intransigence, and these risings of the Second Civil War were put down with unforgiving savagery. When the King’s chaplain, Michael Hudson, was cornered on the roof at Wood-croft Hall in Lincolnshire, parliamentary troopers refused his appeal for mercy, flinging him and his companions into the moat below. As Hudson clung on to a drainage spout, his fingers were slashed off, and he was retrieved from the moat only to have his tongue cut out before being executed.

  The King was treated no less ruthlessly. Cromwell and the generals were now resolved to bring him to trial, and realising that a majority of MPs still favoured some sort of compromise, they organised a coup d’état. Early on the morning of 6 December 1648, a detachment of horsemen and foot-soldiers under Colonel Thomas Pride surrounded both Houses of Parliament and arrested or turned away all suspected compromisers and royalist sympathisers — more than 140 members.

  ’Pride’s purge’ made possible the final act of the drama. On New Year’s Day 1649, the hard-core of MPs remaining voted’to erect a high Court of Justice to try King Charles for treason’, and on 20 January the trial began. The only judge who would risk the terrible responsibility of presiding over the court was an obscure provincial justice, John Bradshaw. But even he, despite being a committed republican, was so fearful that he wore armour beneath his robes and had had his beaver hat lined with steel. The King, for his part, contemptuously declined to remove his own hat as he took his seat beneath the hammer-beam roof of Westminster Hall. This contrived court, he maintained doggedly during one hearing after another, had no right to try him: he, more than his judges, stood for the liberties of the people.‘If power without law may make laws…’ he declared,‘I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life.’

  It was to no avail. Witnesses were summoned to testify they had seen the King rallying his troops at Edgehill, Naseby and on other battlefields, thus proving him guilty of waging war on Parliament and people. He was thus found guilty as a’Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer, and Public Enemy to the good people of this Nation’. Death’by severing the head from his body’ was to be his fate.

  Ten days later, on 30 January, Charles walked out on to the raised scaffold outside his splendid Banqueting House that stands to this day, just across Whitehall from Downing Street. It was a piercingly cold afternoon. The Thames had frozen, and the King had put on an extra shirt so he should not be seen to shiver.

  A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,’ he declared defiantly in a long oration in which he denounced the arbitrary power of the sword that had made him‘the Martyr of the People’. Then, more prosaically, he asked the executioner,‘Does my hair trouble you?’ — tucking his straggling grey locks into a nightcap to leave his neck bare.

  The axe fell, severing the King’s head with a single blow, and the executioner leaned down to pick it up with the standard cry —‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ But the crowd, estimated at several thousand, scarcely cheered. Instead, recalled one seventeen-year-old boy later, the cry was greeted with such a groan as I have never heard before and desire I may never hear again’.

  ’TAKE AWAY THIS BAUBLE!’

  1653

  THE EXECUTION OF CHARLES I WAS THE SINGLE most remarkable event in the course of English history — and the person who brought it to pass has a claim to being England’s most remarkable man. Until almost the last moment, Oliver Cromwell had shared the fears many felt at the enormity of cutting off the King’s head. But when the death warrant was finally presented for signature to the apprehensive judges, it was Cromwell who bullied the requisite number into signing. He shouted down the waverers, flicked ink at them, and, in one case, actually held down a doubter’s hand to the page until he signed.

  In a portrait by the painter Samuel Cooper we can study the features of the fifty-year-old Cromwell at the moment he became the most powerful living Englishman. His nose is bulbous, his eyes large and strikingly blue; a dusting of salt-and-pepper whiskers conceals a mole beneath his lower lip and there is another, the size of a pea, dark and shiny, above his right brow.’The mirror does not flatter me,’ he told the painter.‘Nor should you, Mr Cooper. I’ll have it warts and all.’

  Cromwell was a curious mixture of arrogance and humility, ruthlessly sweeping aside obstacles, while also prey to depression in the opinion of some modern historians — he was once treated for‘melancholy’ by the exiled Huguenot physician Turquet de Mayerne. In addition, he suffered from bronchitis, though his wheeziness didn’t inhibit the eloquence full of fervour’ with which he came to the attention of the House of Commons; the MP for Huntingdon was sometimes seen with a piece of red flannel wrapped comfortingly around his throat.

  His certainty of the rightness of his cause came from a deep and austere Puritan faith that set him on an inescapable collision course with the High Church policies of Charles I. At one stage Cromwell contemplated joining the thousands of Separatists who were seeking their religious freedom in the Americas. Instead he stayed, rising meteorically through the ranks of the parliamentary armies to find himself charged with the task of creating a New World at home.

  Following Charles I’s execution, a series of votes in the purged House of Commons abolished the House of Lords and the monarchy, and on 16 May 1649 England was declared a‘Commonwealth’, ruled through Parliament by a Council of State of which Cromwell was a member. He was appointed Lieutenant General of the Commonwealth’s armies, and in 1649-50 commanded ruthless campaigns against revolts in Ireland — where he massacred Catholics with a brutality that stirs resentful memories to this day — and also in Scotland, which had briefly dared to crown Charles’s twenty-year-old son as Char
les II. These successes capped a military career that gave Cromwell a victory tally of won 30, lost o. As he returned triumphantly from each campaign, he was feted like Caesar.

  Like Caesar, too, he was drawn irresistibly towards political power.‘Take away this bauble!’ he angrily declared in April 1653, as he strode into the House of Commons with a company of musketeers and pointed at the symbol of parliamentary authority, the ceremonial golden staff, or mace, which was set on the table in front of the Speaker.

  Since 1648, when Colonel Thomas Pride had excluded those MPs likely to oppose putting Charles I on trial, the House of Commons had been a wildly unrepresentative body. Derided as the‘Rump’, or remnant, its little clique of surviving members —just 140 or so — had only paid lip service to the problem, solemnly debating the surrender of their power for more than four years, while greedily hanging on to its perks and profits.’You are no parliament, I say you are no parliament,’ declaimed the exasperated Cromwell.‘I will put an end to your sitting.’

  His alternative fared no better. The Nominated, or’Bare-bones’, Parliament (so nicknamed after the MP for London, the leather-seller turned preacher, Praise-God Barbon) was an assembly of Puritan worthies selected by local churches on such criteria as how many times the candidates prayed each day. First meeting in July 1653, this’Parliament of Saints’ dissolved itself after only five months, pushing Cromwell ever closer towards the option by which he had been tempted, but had been resisting, for so long.