Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  On hearing the news of the king’s seizure, parliament convened and hastily granted all arrears of pay to the New Model Army; the city fathers now demanded that a force of cavalry be raised for the defence of the capital. The army itself was on the move and marched to Triploe Heath, 7 miles nearer London, and began to advance ever closer to the city. Cromwell wrote a letter to the civic authorities, asking for a just settlement of the liberties of the people under the aegis of parliament; he warned, however, that if the army met concerted opposition it would be freed from the blame for ‘all that ruin which may befall that great and populous city’.

  When the army reached St Albans, a little over 20 miles from London, The Declaration of the Army was published in which were proposed shorter and more representative parliaments beyond the reach of oligarchy or regal authority; no force in the nation should have ‘unlimited power’. Its author was Sir Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s new son-in-law. The Declaration was accompanied by charges against eleven named Presbyterian members of parliament; they were accused of treasonable dealings with royalists at home and abroad. Parliament seemed willing and able to defend them but, on 26 June 1647, the eleven men thought it prudent to withdraw from Westminster and eventually to flee abroad. This was the period in which ‘purge’ entered the English political vocabulary. The great constitutional historian Henry Hallam wrote that on this day ‘may be said to have fallen the legislative power and civil government of England’.

  Throughout the month of June the leaders of the army were in constant and courteous contact with the king. It is clear enough that they still wished to reach a settlement which would allow him to retain his throne with altered powers; he was the only power that might conceivably unite the nation now dangerously divided between army and parliament. Yet he was still beset by accusations of hypocrisy and double-dealing. At one point the king told Henry Ireton that ‘I shall play my game as well as I can’; to which Ireton replied that ‘if your majesty have a game to play, you must give us also liberty to play ours’.

  The New Model Army had by now worked its way around to Reading, which provided a more convenient route to London. The more radical of the ‘agitators’ now pressed for a final march upon the city, but Cromwell favoured delay and negotiation. Ireton had drafted a policy document, Heads of the Proposals, that effectively repeated the propositions set out in The Declaration of the Army including a biennial parliament and a new council of state.

  Parliament, noticeably more moderate or more fearful after the expulsion of the eleven members, voted to accept the proposals. They agreed in particular that control of the city militia should be returned to the old committee of militia, which meant effectively that the city force would be under the command of the now dominant army. The Lords and Commons, however, had not calculated the ferocious response of the Presbyterians in London itself who feared for their lives and property if the army came to rule. A crowd of citizens and apprentices accompanied a deputation of Londoners and besieged the Lords, shouting that ‘they would never come out’ unless they reversed their decision. Another crowd, or mob, burst into the Commons and demanded that they repeal their earlier judgement. ‘Vote! Vote!’ The members were too terrified to do anything other than comply. Parliament had proved itself to be at the mercy of any powerful group, and was thus unable to legislate for anything; sixty of the Independent members, together with the Speaker, now fled to the army at Reading for safety. They lent added legitimacy to the soldiers’ cause.

  The Heads of the Proposals had been submitted for the king’s consideration. Some of the terms were mild enough. The bishops would not be abolished but deprived of the power of coercion; the old liturgy and the new covenant would have equal force in a broad context of religious liberty and toleration. The army and navy would be returned to the king after ten years. Only five royalists would be excluded from pardon. If Charles had accepted these terms, he could have returned to the throne with his honour intact. The king, however, rejected the document without giving it any serious consideration. His stated response was that ‘you cannot be without me. You will fall to ruin if I do not sustain you.’ One of his advisers, Sir John Berkley, whispered to him, ‘Sir, your majesty speaks as if you had some secret strength and power that I do not know of.’ The moderates on both sides now began to lose all hope.

  The intimidation of parliament by the London mob, and the failure of negotiations with the king, prompted the New Model Army finally to march upon London. A brigade of horse took Southwark on the night of 3 August, and the civic leaders of the city woke up to find their principal avenue across London Bridge in the hands of what must now be called the enemy. The sudden occupation ‘struck them dead’, according to Clarendon, and ‘put an end to all their consultation for defence’. Their only object now was to conciliate those whom they had previously offended and to prevent the army from firing and plundering their mansions.

  The whole army of 18,000 men, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, now entered the city; Cromwell rode at the head of the cavalry, while Fairfax sat in a carriage beside Cromwell’s wife. Fairfax was met at Hyde Park by the mayor and aldermen, who proffered a formal apology and offered him a gold cup; he refused to accept the gift, and sent them on their way. With the Speaker and the members of the Commons with him, he seemed now to represent the legitimate authority of the nation. One puritan Londoner, Thomas Juxon, wrote after watching the soldiers marching through the streets of London, that ‘’tis remarkable that it never was in the minds of the army to carry it so far; but were brought to it, one thing after another, and that by the designs of their enemies’. The army also made sure that the great defensive wall, erected by Londoners at the beginning of the war, was pulled down. Fairfax did not intend a military occupation of the city, however, and established the army headquarters some 6 miles away at Putney.

  Charles, now residing at Hampton Court, was willing graciously to listen to the proposals put forward by Cromwell and the other leaders of the army; but he was resolute in defence of his interests, and refused to compromise. Many Independent members were willing, and indeed eager, to dispense altogether with the king. They even accused Cromwell of pursuing his own self-interest in continuing to negotiate with him; it was whispered that he was about to be honoured as the new earl of Essex.

  Yet Cromwell was in truth becoming angry and frustrated at the king’s constant prevarications and refusals; he began seriously to doubt his sincerity. At some point, towards the end of October, he refused to travel any more to Hampton Court. Those who attended the monarch now began to notice an alteration in the manners and civility of the soldiers who were stationed about him; the king’s guard was doubled.

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  To kill a king

  The army now began to take stock of its power and its situation. The levellers made an early contribution to the debate when in October they published a pamphlet, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Stated’, in which they demanded a more representative parliament; they maintained the then revolutionary doctrine that all power was ‘originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this nation’. No mention, therefore, was made of king or lords. They had support among the more radicalized soldiers who agreed with their call for national renovation. ‘The Case of the Armie’ was swiftly followed by the ‘Agreement of the People’ that argued for a new political order based upon a written constitution. Both sets of proposals seemed to be guiding the army towards the establishment of a republic.

  Some of the principal officers, Cromwell among them, did not support the more extreme measures being canvassed; it was proposed, therefore, that the arguments be tested in open debate. The deliberations were held at St Mary’s Church, on the southern side of Putney Bridge, at the end of October and lasted for three weeks; gathered here were the several generals, together with four representatives from each of the thirty-two regiments. The importance of the proceedings was not lost upon any of the participants, and indeed the ‘Putney debates’ of 1647 re
main one of the most significant expressions of English political thought.

  On the first day Edward Sexby, one of the representatives of the soldiers, complained that ‘we have laboured to please a king, and, I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him’. Cromwell then remarked that the radical ‘Agreement of the People’ was naively formulated in the belief that a new constitution could be created without any consideration of English tradition or precedent. He had been told that faith would make a way through all difficulties but ‘we are very apt all of us to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination, and carnal reasonings’. He was suggesting that expediency and self-deception may be at the heart of political revolution. He also made more practical criticisms. All of this change was to be achieved in the name of the people but he questioned, ‘Were the spirits and temper of the people of this nation prepared to receive and to go along with it?’

  A defining moment of the debate arrived when Thomas Rainsborough, one of the representatives of the levelling movement, declared that ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he’ and should therefore be allowed the vote. It was a call that was not to be answered until 1918. Henry Ireton rejected the idea of manhood suffrage, however, and argued that the vote should be given to ‘persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies’. Only those with a financial stake in the country, in other words, should be allowed to determine its direction.

  At one point in the proceedings Cromwell was moved to declare that ‘the foundation and the supremacy is in the people, radically in them’, but he also argued that the sovereign authority must be that of a parliament however constituted. In this uncertain time the force of power was absolutely required. He compared himself to a drowning man. ‘If it have but the face of authority, if it be but a hare swimming over the Thames, I will take hold of it rather than let it go.’ A more ominous note, for the king, emerged when Captain Bishop claimed that the woes of the nation came from ‘a compliance to preserve that man of blood’ by which he meant Charles. The captain was alluding to a passage from the second Book of Samuel: ‘Thou art taken in thy mischief because thou art a bloody man.’ The phrase soon became commonplace.

  The final set of proposals that emerged from Putney did not reflect the demands of the levellers or the debate about the future of the king; it was designed only to preserve the unity of the army. It recommended an extended franchise but maintained the ancient framework of king, Commons and Lords with the Commons in effective control. The commanders of the army then brought the debates to a summary close by ordering all of the participants to return to their regiments. A partial mutiny by some of the more radical troops was quickly put down. A restructuring of the army, in the following year, allowed its leaders to remove those soldiers of suspect sympathies.

  The king now confounded everyone by escaping from Hampton Court. He had gone down some private stairs and, meeting with two associates, fled south. He seemed to have had no certain destination but eventually decided to make for the Isle of Wight where he had the sea at his back. He left behind some papers, one of which was an anonymous letter warning him of the danger of assassination. He also left a letter to parliament in which he asked to ‘be heard with freedom, honour and safety, and I shall instantly break through this cloud of retirement and show myself ready to be pater patriae’.

  The governor of the Isle of Wight, Robert Hammond, received this father of the nation with no little apprehension; he was under the command of the army, and had no wish to disobey his superiors. But he was violently opposed to the levellers in the ranks and could guarantee the king’s safety from their attentions. It may also have suited Cromwell to leave the king on the island; he was far from the reach both of the more sanguinary levellers and of the Scots who might wish to negotiate with him. In the best possible circumstances the king might even take to the sea and journey to exile in France.

  The king was now in Carisbrooke Castle under guard. He could set himself up as an object for auction, as it were, with many prospective bidders. Cromwell might still wish to come to an accommodation with him. Despite Robert Hammond’s best endeavours, the Scots might somehow be able to find a way of communicating with him. Almost as soon as he was ensconced in the castle he began to practise his subterfuges; he concealed messages in the lining of gloves, he engaged in secret conversations with his servants, he drew up elaborate plans for sending and receiving clandestine letters.

  This was the period in which Cromwell openly broke with the king and spoke bitterly against him in the army council. There is a story, never fully substantiated, that Cromwell intercepted a secret letter to the queen in which Charles announced that he would make an arrangement with the Scots rather than with the army. It was soon remarked at Westminster that, in Carisbrooke, Charles had thrown a bone between two spaniels and laughed at their enmity. That alone would have been enough to turn Cromwell against him. He now began to sympathize with the position of the more radical soldiers as resolute anti-monarchists. He observed that ‘if we cannot bring the army to our sense, we must go to theirs’.

  Cromwell’s suspicions were soon confirmed. Towards the end of December the king, after secret negotiations with the Scottish commissioners, signed an agreement known as ‘the Engagement’. He promised to introduce Presbyterianism as the state religion for an initial three years; he would confirm the ‘solemn league and covenant’ in the English parliament, but would not oblige his subjects to take its oath. In return the Scots would support Charles’s demand for a personal treaty and the disbandment of all English armies; a Scottish army would then be dispatched to London to expedite ‘a full and fair parliament’. The document was sealed in lead and buried in the garden of the castle. He then refused to deal with a parliamentary deputation, at which point Colonel Hammond dismissed the king’s servants and doubled his guard.

  Charles: Shall I have liberty to go about to take the air?

  Hammond: No. I cannot grant it.

  On 3 January 1648, the Commons passed the ‘Vote of No Addresses’ by a majority of fifty. No more communications, or proposals, would be put to the king. Cromwell fully supported the decision on the grounds that the people should not ‘any longer expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God has hardened’. The council of the army also pronounced that it would stand by the kingdom and parliament ‘without the king and against him’.

  Yet at a subsequent dinner the army was still manifestly divided. The commanders argued amongst themselves about the relative merits of ‘monarchical, aristocratical or democratical government’, but could come to no conclusion. At the end of the discussion Cromwell, in one of those fits of boisterousness or hysteria that punctuated his career, threw a cushion at one of the protagonists, Edmund Ludlow, before running downstairs; Ludlow pursued him, and in turn pummelled him with a cushion.

  Colonel Hammond was soon informed that a treaty with the Scots had been signed while the king was in his safe-keeping, and he determined to find it. He entered the king’s chamber without warning; the king rose from his bed in alarm and put on his gown; Hammond proceeded to search its pockets, at which point Charles struck him. It was reported that, against all precedent, the colonel returned the blow.

  The king’s incarceration incensed those who supported the royalist cause. Riots occurred in Ipswich and in Canterbury. A news-writer in London reported that ‘the counties are full of discontent, many insurrections having been lately made, even near this city’. The majority of the newspapers and pamphlets were strongly royalist and on the anniversary of the king’s accession, 27 March, celebratory bonfires blazed in the capital. Coach travellers, driven through the streets, were compelled to drink the king’s health. The butchers of the city declared that if they could catch Colonel Hammond ‘they would chop him as small as ever they chopped any of their meat’.

  At the beginning of April the lord mayor sent some t
rained bands to disperse a crowd of apprentices in Moorfields; the crowd turned on the bands, captured their weapons and marched off shouting on behalf of ‘King Charles!’ Petitioners, seeking the rule of a king again, flocked to London from Kent, Essex and Surrey. The cavaliers were jubilant, and the Presbyterians once more gained a hold over parliament. In April the Commons passed a motion calling for a treaty with the king.

  The signs of civil war were once more apparent. The first acts came from Wales where, in April, a royalist commander occupied Tenby Castle; soon enough the whole of South Wales had declared in the sovereign’s favour. The leaders of the army spent a day in tears and prayers. How could it be that blood and battle had returned to the nation? Had the previous war been fought for no purpose? At a meeting of the New Model Army in Windsor it was concluded 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 had shed’.

  The army council then ordered Cromwell to enter South Wales with two regiments of horse and three of foot; it took him six weeks to defeat the rebels. Other anti-parliamentary forces had emerged throughout the country, guided not so much by zeal for the king as dismay at the taxes and county committees imposed by parliament. Berwick and Carlisle were taken by the disaffected; Pontefract was also seized in a surprise attack, and Scarborough declared for the king. The men of Essex marched under a banner raised by a royalist commander, General Goring. A section of the fleet off the Downs also declared themselves for the king, and joined with the men of Kent in their revolt. It had also become clear that the Scottish army was being assembled on the border in order to fight for the king.

  This represented a serious challenge to the authority of parliament but this second civil war, as it became known, ended once more in victory for the New Model Army. The Scottish army did not cross the border until July, by which time most of the risings in England and Wales had been put down by the army’s superior military force; Cromwell dealt with the north, and Fairfax with the south. It had not been a war, but a series of scattered risings and outbreaks of fighting with no serious attempt to co-ordinate what might have been a successful rebellion. Without a coherent strategy the rebels were no match for the New Model. They had waited vainly for the Scots until it became too late to fashion serious resistance.