The Tyrannicide Brief

by Geoffrey Robertson

  The ‘Vote of No Addresses’, by which it was determined to break off negotiations with the King, was intended as a rebuke for his high-handed dismissal of the four bills. This occasion marks the emergence of a small group of Independents who can be considered as embryonic republicans – ‘commonwealthsmen’ – although they had as yet no intention of bringing the King to trial. None the less, to the ‘Vote of No Addresses’ they attached a Declaration which had the makings of an arraignment, in its call for a requital of ‘the sighs and groans, the tears and crying blood (an heavy cry!) the blood of fathers, brothers and children at once, the blood of many hundred thousand free-born subjects in three great kingdoms’.1 It recited seven attempts to have Charles agree propositions and his seven rebuttals, together with evidence of double-dealing from his intercepted correspondence.

  Having established his intractability and insincerity, the Declaration republished Parliament’s charge against the Duke of Buckingham in 1626 over his alleged responsibility for King James’s death, and alleged that Charles had deliberately frustrated their inquiry. Then followed, in tumbling succession, an indictment of his entire reign: the loss of La Rochelle and the betrayal of the Protestant cause in France; the ship-money oppression and the scandalous sale of monopolies; the prorogation of Parliament and arbitrary personal rule; the whippings and nose-slittings, the brandings and deearings of the godly ministers; the aggressive war against the Scots; the Queen’s cultivation of popery; the King’s support for a plot with loyalist officers to free Strafford and bring in the Irish Catholic army (confirmed by the letters captured at Naseby); his attempt to arrest Pym and the other MPs in Parliament; the various attempts (proved by correspondence seized from Lord Digby) to raise troops from Sweden, Denmark and Holland; the pawning of the crown jewels to purchase arms and ammunition; and then, of course, the raising of his standard against Parliament and his attempts to enlist foreign troops to fight his subjects in the civil war.

  It was a monumental charge sheet, seasoned with sensational suspicions and weighted with references to documentary evidence from captured correspondence. The Declaration dropped the pretence that the King’s misconduct had been caused by ‘evil counsellors’. For the first time, evil was imputed not to counsellors but to the King himself. On 15 February 1648, Parliament ordered publication of the Declaration as ‘some of the many reasons why we cannot repose any more trust in him’. It was not so much a case for no confidence as a case for the prosecution; soon, news of ‘the Engagement’ with the Scots would provide proof beyond reasonable doubt that this King was the enemy of his own people. Charles I’s crime had been writ large in the Declaration: all that it lacked, since ‘treason’ was still considered by most lawyers as an offence committed against and not by the King, was a name. In less than a year, John Cooke would supply that name – he was to draw heavily upon the Declaration for his indictment of the King for the crime of tyranny.

  The Poor Man’s Case appeared at this time, envisioning a utopia in which laws were obeyed out of respect for a Parliament of commonwealthsmen. But that was not the Parliament of 1648. The bigoted Presbyterian majority had produced no popular leader: Denzil Holles and the ambitious lawyer Harbottle Grimstone were prominent but many of their followers wanted to make their fortune before negotiating an agreement with the King which would allow them to keep it. Most legislation derived from the fanatical mind of William Prynne, obsessed with a blasphemy ordinance that would put sectarians to death and with removing from the land all occasions for joy or high spirits. The theatres which had by 1643 become plague pits and for that reason been temporarily closed were now permanently shut by the Presbyterians, because they might spread pleasure. Maypoles were cut down, festival holidays were cancelled, even Christmas was abolished. It is little wonder that the opening shots of the second civil war in 1648 were fired not by royalists but by ‘Christmas rioters’ in Kent, protesting against the killjoy abolition of the festive season. They went on to form a battalion several thousand strong and to join with cavaliers who were regrouping in Essex.

  The country was spotty with disaffection. Parliament was blamed for maintaining high taxes and the army was cursed as the cause and resented for the free board and accommodation required for its soldiers whenever they came to town. London was volatile and unpredictable: the city fathers and merchants would favour any settlement which would let them do their business uninterrupted, and they had thrived under the King’s personal rule. The fruits of victory were turning sour: the prevalence on the streets of ‘banned’ royalist news-sheets, with their scandalous attacks on MPs and army officers, was symptomatic of the failure of Parliament to command loyalty or respect. A substantial part of the country had supported the King and would welcome him back, as would many of the older generation who yearned for Anglican worship and the guidance of prayer book and bishop. In March 1648 the anniversary of the King’s coronation was widely celebrated: bonfires were lit on all roads into London and the King’s health was jovially drunk in taverns throughout the land. Cooke’s gloomy forebodings in the Poor Man’s Case were coming true, just a month after its publication.

  The view from Carisbrooke was roseate enough in March for Charles to decide it was time to escape. But under the wary eye of the castle governor, his attempts failed – on one occasion farcically, as he became stuck between the bars of his bedroom window. None the less, his long-term prospects of reinstatement were good: the Scots were mustering for invasion in the north, royalist diehards had come out fighting in Wales and a cavalier fleet led by his eighteen-year-old son Charles, the Prince of Wales, hovered off the east coast. MPs were on tenterhooks, and attempted to reassure the nation of their fealty: on 28 April they passed a motion promising that the House would ‘not alter the fundamental government of the kingdom, by King, Lords and Commons’. The motion calculatingly omitted any reference to the only power in the land capable of governing – the New Model Army, led by Fairfax and dominated by Cromwell, although increasingly reflecting the political ideas of Henry Ireton.

  The day after the MPs made this nervous promise, army officers gathered for a prolonged prayer meeting at Windsor Castle. They led a fighting machine that was leaner as a result of parliamentary parsimony and became meaner after the officers searched their souls before girding their loins. As they prayed and wept and begged the guidance of a God who was sending them back into battle, the realisation dawned that they had been guilty of Hamlet’s sin of equivocation: the path laid open by the Lord after Naseby had not been taken. So they issued an ominous declaration that ‘it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he has shed and mischief he has done to his utmost, against the Lord’s cause and people in these poor nations’.2

  That was the mind-frame in which the men of the New Model Army set out to fight the second civil war. Fairfax took the eastern campaign, maintaining a controlling presence in London whilst fire-fighting in Kent and Essex and eventually corralling the King’s troops at the siege of Colchester. Cromwell put down the insurrection in Wales and then marched north to face a vastly greater Scots army, swelled by cavalier veterans, which he met in battle at Preston. His 8,000 ‘ironsides’ vanquished a force of 24,000 Scots and cavaliers under the inept command of the Duke of Hamilton. ‘Surely Sir’, Cromwell wrote to the Speaker of the House, William Lenthall, ‘this is nothing but the hand of God.’ It was not for him to tell Parliament what use to make of his victory, but of course he did: exalt God and ‘not hate His people who are as the apple of His eye’. Be kind to Puritans, in other words, was Cromwell’s victory message from the battlefield. But he added this warning to the parliamentary appeasers: ‘That they that will not leave troubling the land may speedily be destroyed out of the land.’ Since the main personage who would not leave troubling the land was Charles Stuart, it was obvious that Cromwell’s patience had run out.3

  A similar iron had entered into the allegedly g
entle soul of General Fairfax: at Colchester, which fell to his siege in August, he had two leading cavaliers – Lucas and Lisle – court-martialled and shot. This was in accordance with the laws of war, since they had taken to arms in breach of the condition of the pardon they had received for fighting in the first civil war, but it became a symbol of a more momentous question – of whether the King, who had set them on and in whose name they had fought, should suffer a similar fate. Fairfax made at this point a significant decision: the superior lords captured at Colchester – Goring, Capel and Holland – were not summarily court-martialled, like the two officers under their command, but were detained for a potential treason prosecution. Their fate, bound up with that of the King, would be decided by Parliament. They were soon joined in prison by the Duke of Hamilton, captured in September by Cromwell.

  But what, then, did Parliament do? Its officer MPs were still in the field, their lives for the last few months having been put at risk in battles fomented by the King from his ‘captivity’ in Carisbrooke. To their fury, the Presbyterian majority repealed the ‘Vote of No Addresses’ and appointed fifteen MPs as commissioners to negotiate a treaty with the King. It feared that the army, returning victorious with its MPs, would make common cause with the ‘commonwealthsmen’ – the Independents who formed a sizeable minority in the Commons and had the support of the Puritan peers. This coalition would insist on jettisoning the Solemn League and Covenant, which had been Pym’s price for Scottish support back in 1644, and require toleration for all manner of blaspheming sects. A settlement with the King was the only power-play which could forestall this, although as army Independents like Ludlow immediately pointed out, Charles was incapable of agreeing to any alliance which did not restore his prerogatives and his bishops, so negotiation was futile. It was a measure of Presbyterian fear – and desperation – that they could even think that the King would accept their terms. But for the next two months, the commissioners talked with Charles in the town hall at Newport, whilst the temper of the army reached boiling-point.

  Holles and Grimstone, the senior commissioners, began by prostrating themselves before Charles at a private audience and begged him to yield quickly to Parliament’s demands that he become a constitutional monarch, before the army imposed a dictatorship upon them all.4 The King was pleased to be told how much he was needed: as usual he temporised, and wrote secret letters telling supporters to disregard news of any concessions: he would make them as a means of buying time and would not be bound by them. His hopes of foreign support were buoyed, in mid-October, by the Treaty of Westphalia, the formal end of the Thirty Years War between the continental powers. Now, Henrietta Maria assured him, France would surely intervene on his side. Most heartening was the resurgence of royalist support in Ireland, where the Duke of Ormond had stitched together Catholics and Scots and some Presbyterian forces in a confederate army and was preparing to invade England to restore the King. Charles secretly encouraged Ormond and told him to ignore any treaty that might emerge from the Newport negotiations. But to the commissioners who reported back to Parliament on 1 December 1648, the King appeared to have conceded most of their demands: the sticking points remained, as ever, his refusal to countenance the abolition of bishops or prosecutions of his officers for war crimes.

  Meanwhile, the army was taking some final decisions. Henry Ireton, whose regiment had been the first to demand justice on the King for the second war,5 held discussions with Levellers and Independents at the Nag’s Head tavern in central London. He drew up The Remonstrance of the Army, for discussion by its officers and men in the course of November. News from the north that the popular and valiant Colonel Rainborough, so prominent in the Putney debates, had been slain by marauding royalists, jolted them into a realisation that the time had finally come to admit the logical conclusion of the second civil war. The interests of justice and the interests of peace in the nation conjoined to demand that Charles Stuart be brought to trial.

  The Remonstrance argued that it would be wrong to punish the Duke of Hamilton and the other royalist leaders, when ‘the capital and grand author of our troubles’ was accorded impunity.6 The King was, demonstrably, incapable of keeping any bargains he made with Parliament: he would always be scheming to recover his lost prerogatives. Any settlement which accorded some power to the King would necessitate that the army be maintained at full strength to stop him seeking more power: the consequent tax burden would make the army and Parliament so unpopular that the public would welcome a return to personal rule. Putting the King on trial was the only course that was just, and it would also provide some measure of deterrence to future tyrants by showing that kings were not above the law. His older sons who had fought with him against Parliament, i.e. Charles, Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York, should be sent into permanent exile.

  The Remonstrance reads in places like John Cooke’s pamphlets, and it is possible that the barrister had a hand in it, along with his friend Hugh Peters who was identified by royalist newsbooks as one of the authors. Its publication marked a new stage in the debate over the King – the emergence of the argument that justice, and not expediency, required his trial, both as retribution for the blood he was responsible for shedding and as a deterrent to future ‘grand delinquents’. Where the Remonstrance was notably silent, however, was about the appropriate sentence. Should it be execution (as for traitors) or pardon followed by exile? More importantly, who (if anyone) should take his place as monarch? The document spoke of future kings, with powers strictly limited by a constitution which provided for ‘sovereignty of the people’: its framers were not prepared to argue the case for a republic, even as late as November 1648. One bright idea – of an elected monarchy – had emerged in the course of discussions at the Nag’s Head tavern. No future king should reign ‘but on the election of and as upon trust from the people’.

  Another straw in the wind was the behaviour of Parliament’s great lawyers – Whitelocke and Widdrington (the keepers of the great seal – in effect job-sharing Lord Chancellors), John Bradshawe (now Chief Justice of Wales), and its judges, Keble and Thorpe. They were elevated to the rank of sergeants at law on 20 November and appeared in ceremonial procession with ‘quoits on their heads and woollen tippets around their bosoms . . . the people broke their hearts with laughing at the good old counsellors’. But it did not escape attention that the traditional climax of this ceremony, when each new Sergeant would dedicate a ring to his Majesty the King, was pointedly omitted.7 The Levellers were perceptive and sarcastic journalists: they reported the real reason why barristers wanted to become Sergeants (and now, QCs): ‘What was this, I pray you, but that they might have their fees doubled by any client?’8 And they figured that Ireton spoke with Cromwell’s voice. On hearing of the King’s attempts to escape to join Ormonde, their Monthly Mercury for November advised him to try again:

  Oh Charles, Old Noll (thy terror) now draws nigh.

  If thou wilt save thy neck, make haste to fly.9

  Cromwell all this time had been in the north, far from the army council encamped at St Albans or the smoke-filled rooms of the Nag’s Head tavern. But he had been mulling over his philosophy: ‘I desire from my heart – I have prayed for it – I have waited for the day to see union and right understanding between the godly people – Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists and all.’ He had been wrestling with his conscience by his usual convoluted method of ‘waiting upon the Lord’ (i.e. detecting the ways of God from hindsight). He wrote to Fairfax on 20 November that the men wanted impartial justice done upon offenders ‘and I verily think and am persuaded they are things which God puts into our hearts’. The second war he thought a ‘more prodigious treason’ than the first because it both was a breach of faith and involved an invasion of England by ‘foreigners’ – i.e. the Scots (conveniently forgetting how Pym had been the first to invite them to invade). By the end of the month he signalled his support for the Remonstrance, and was referring to the K
ing as ‘this man against whom the Lord has witnessed’.10

  In mid-November, news reached the Army Council from Holland that Prince Rupert had taken command of the royalist fleet – a signal that he would be back in action, probably in conjunction with Ormonde. The council adopted the Remonstrance and Fairfax, always instinctively loyal to consensus, forwarded it to Parliament. On 30 November he prepared for a march on London with an army which announced itself ‘full of sad apprehension concerning the danger and evil of the treaty with the King, or any accommodation with the King’. Intercepted messages indicated that Charles was preparing to escape and join with Rupert, so Fairfax on 1 December ordered the removal of the King from Carisbrooke to Hurst Castle, one of Henry VIII’s coastal forts, on a windswept mainland promontory from which escape was impossible. On 4 December the Presbyterian majority in Parliament decided upon a showdown with the army: it rejected the Remonstrance, declared the King’s removal to Hurst had been ‘without the advice or consent of the House’, and ordered Fairfax to keep his regiments outside London. Fairfax ignored the direction and marched into the city, setting up his headquarters at Whitehall. The climax seemed only to await the arrival of Cromwell, dawdling his way down from the north.11

  Late into the evening of 5 December the Commons debated the King’s responses from Newport, and resolved by 129 to 83 that ‘his majesty’s concessions are sufficient grounds to proceed upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom’.12 This decision in principle that the King’s position could form the basis for a treaty was the last straw for the Independents and the army who believed (with good reason) that further dealings with the King would mean a third civil war. Ireton wanted simply to dissolve this pigheaded Presbyterian Parliament, but the Independent MPs were concerned that fresh elections could backfire by returning the King’s supporters. Moreover, unless the King were tried quickly he might not be tried at all. So the next morning, 6 December, Colonel Pride marched a troop detachment to Westminster Hall and stationed them around the entrance to the House of Commons. He stood at the door, consulting a list of names of the MPs who had voted to support negotiations with the King. An independent MP – Lord Grey of Groby – was at Pride’s elbow, putting the names to faces of these MPs, who were refused entry.