Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  Monck ground his teeth with frustration. Why had the King ignored his advice? For all His Majesty’s faults – his unreliability, his detachment from reality and his fickleness – he surely must realise that he was fighting for his very life?

  The recollection of his encounter with King Charles flooded back to him. He could all but feel the warm afternoon sunshine and smell the grass in Christchurch garden. After his delivery under the tower of Great Tom by a troop of the King’s horse, he had been conducted first to Lord Digby, the King’s Secretary of State, whose silver-tongue had persuaded Monck to convey to His Majesty every opinion the King sought.

  ‘Having rendered signal service to His Majesty, you stand high in His Majesty’s regard, Colonel Monck,’ Digby had said persuasively, waving the travel-stained soldier into the sequestered peace of the garden. Seeing them approach, Charles had risen from a wooden bench under a rose arbour, setting aside the book he had been reading. Monck had followed Digby across the lawn, whereupon the King had subjected Monck to that famously seductive smile, almost supressing his stammer as he greeted the man he had once entrusted with a secret message to his commander-in-chief at La Rochelle.

  ‘C-Colonel Monck.’

  Monck had bent over the outstretched and elegantly gloved hand. ‘I have c-cause, Colonel, to take note of your service yet again, for it was you who saved the guns at Newburn, if I recollect correctly.’

  ‘I had that honour Your Majesty.’

  ‘And got your men safe back to Newcastle in good order, I collect.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Monck responded briefly, preferring to forget the shambles of the defeat of Lord Conway by the Scots under Alexander Leslie four years earlier. The King seemed unaware of the nature of the humiliating defeat of his forces.

  ‘Come, C-Colonel, w-walk with me. And h-how long were you in the L-Low Countries with the Prince of Orange?’

  ‘Some seven years, Your Majesty.’

  ‘S-seven years.’ The figure had clearly impressed the King. ‘And you distinguished yourself at the storming of Breda, I am given to understand.’

  ‘I did my duty …’

  ‘And yet you resigned your commission,’ the King broke in. ‘Pray tell me for what reason?’

  ‘A number of my soldiers misconducted themselves at Dort, sir. I had arraigned them under a court-martial, but the Dutch burgher-masters insisted that I had no authority within their own liberty and that they alone had the power of judgement and condemnation. My appeal to his highness, Prince Frederick Henry, proved ineffectual.’

  ‘A matter of honour, then.’

  ‘A matter of principle, Your Majesty.’

  ‘And not a matter of intemperate outburst, a fit of pique?’

  Monck coloured, recalling the rage he had succumbed to at the intransigence of the Dutchmen. ‘My men, sir, were my first and only consideration, not only those who stood charged but the effect upon those who did not if I too easily gave up their comrades.’

  ‘And so you came home to see service under Conway in Scotland?’ Whatever the King had heard, he brushed the matter aside.

  ‘And afterwards in Ireland under the Earl of Ormonde, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I h-have heard much of that, Colonel, and I have you in my good opinion. For that r-reason I wished to sp-speak with you. P-pray tell me, Colonel, how dost thou see the present conduct of the war?’

  Monck, a man of middle height, had looked sharply at the diminutive figure of the King strolling beside him, his cane in hand, his tread measured, his fine featured face with its wisp of beard. The King’s seemingly unperturbed demeanour struck Monck as incongruous, even outrageous, had not such a consideration reeked of arrant presumption. The sequestered peace of the enclosed garden seemed a place beyond reality; more a metaphorical statement of the King’s position: isolated, remote, detached, disinterested, sweet-scented, far above the quotidian swirl of the wicked world beyond its high and confining walls. For a moment Monck resented Digby’s manoeuvring; he himself was a plain-spoken soldier and prided himself on the fact; he was no courtier, capable of counselling a King, and especially not a King so lost to reality. And yet his duty plainly said he must speak. His brain raced as Charles turned and looked up at him expectantly.

  ‘Colonel Monck? I seek thy opinion, sir.’ A note of asperity entered the King’s tone, ‘Be so pleased as to give it.’

  Monck seized his opportunity. ‘Your Majesty’s forces are labouring under great disadvantages,’ he began. ‘The situation might have been saved after Edgehill and perhaps again, late last year when London lay under some exposure, but the heart of Your Majesty’s misfortunes lies with the management of your armies …’ Monck paused.

  ‘P-pray do go on.’ Charles’s interest, if interest there was, seemed affected, a function of Kingship.

  ‘Sir,’ Monck seized his moment and plunged in. It was nothing less than his plain duty to speak truth unto power. ‘No good can be done with men who have no stomach for the fight for want of pay, victuals and those necessities without which no campaign can be conducted with any hope of success. Want of discipline, so oft attributed to the troops without reference to those who command them, is lacking here too. You have able enough men to command, but they are gentlemen soldiers who see no compulsion to share the hazards of the march, and in that fundamental lack of example the common soldier sees himself demeaned. When all are exposed to sudden shock, it stands self-evident that a body of men needs to conduct itself as one. When the most of it knows its commander and his familiars may bolt upon their horses if things miscarry, they seek not the destruction of the enemy, but the moment of their own exposure. To be truthful, sir, your captains may have no lack of personal courage, but they have great want of experience and firmness.’ He paused again, anxious to judge the impact of his words upon the King.

  ‘Go on, Colonel.’ Monck sensed he had engaged the King’s attention now.

  ‘There is more besides, sir. It doth not encourage a man if he knows that should the shock of battle wound him, he will be abandoned and left like a changeling on the parish. Soldiers, particularly in civil strife, have families and a man lacking in faith in his commanders, fearful for his life, hungry and cold, will think first of his own skin be he given half a chance.

  ‘If, sir, thou wast to set up ten thousand men, picked out of all Your Majesty’s forces, and over them commission such officers as were known to have seen service under a general of reputation, who fully understand that an army marches more than it fights, eats more than it discharges from its muskets or its cannon, and wears out shoe-leather and horse-nails at a great rate than it consumes gunpowder and ball, then such men, amenable to just discipline, might achieve much on your behalf. Recall, sir, a force of ten thousand may be paid less than three or four armies each of four or five thousand, yet would be more effectual.

  ‘Forgive me, Your Majesty, but I have seen the state of your troops, sir, and while I do not doubt their professions of loyalty, they are too oft forgot when it comes to push of pike. Moreover, I have seen the like before, sir,’ Monck added with an ardent passion that could not fail to catch the King’s attention, ‘at Cadiz, La Rochelle and Rhé: they are ripe, sir, ripe …’

  ‘By which you m-mean useless?’ The King had arrested his perambulation, restraining Monck with the merest touch of his cane so that both men turned towards each other.

  ‘By which I do, sir.’

  There had followed a long silence and Monck stood stock-still while the King remained immobile, head bowed as he pondered Monck’s words. Monck stared at the crown of the King’s hat, and the flutter of the long blue-dyed ostrich plume that wound round it and over the wide, encircling brim. Suddenly the King looked up at him.

  ‘Have you anything to add, Colonel?’ Charles asked.

  ‘Aye, sir. To press my point, Your Majesty, you must adopt such a course of training and superior management on the model of the English brigade in the Prince of Orange’s service. Thus was formed a force of s
oldiery inured to danger and hardship, watchful over their own interests and calculating in the manner of waging war in which their own lives were at stake. They proved men who were orderly in their violence, calm in the execution of their duty, loyal, brutal – for without force, war was an imbecility – but not vicious. Their rapacity was always subject to the Laws of War under a discipline to which every man subscribed by the contract of his own service. Such an army, sir, would do the least damage to your subjects and their property, carry opinion in Your Majesty’s favour where it has fallen away and thus better bear-up your cause to a happy conclusion. Moreover, insofar as it is practicable to do so in any war – but is an objective always to be borne in mind in a civil war – when once the victory is decided between a divided people, all must afterwards live each with the other faction.’ Monck paused, then added, ‘That is all, Your Majesty.’

  The King fixed Monck with his gaze for some moments and Monck, sensible of the protocol, dropped his eyes.

  ‘Look at me, Colonel Monck.’ The King’s face broke into a smile. ‘I thank you for your candour. I will consider your proposal while, in the meantime, my Lord Digby has a commission for you. Go you to Nantwich to which place Lord Byron lays siege.’

  Disappointed, deflated, half expecting the King to appoint him on-the-spot to the task of reforming his army so carried away by his advocacy had he become, Monck took his leave with a bow. Digby led him from the garden and the King’s presence. As he passed again beneath Great Tom and into the world beyond the yellow court, Monck realised with a shock that the King’s detachment was fatal to his cause. Charles’s fate was irredeemable.

  Recalled yet again to the present, Monck found himself staring down at the filthy Thames as the ebb carried the flotsam of London down to the open sea. The images of the King’s smile and of Byron’s cavalry wheeling impotently about in the mired snow seen from Acton Church faded, along with the subsiding bitterness that any recollection of his disgraced regiment could conjure. ‘And there, at Nantwich, I proved the justice of all my assertions to the King,’ he murmured to himself. ‘And of what use is righteous indignation?’ he asked of himself in a louder voice, turning from the window into the circumscribed world of his small cell.

  He took up his seat at the table and drew a clean sheet of paper towards him. Pausing a moment to gather his thoughts, he began to write again.

  Men have two ways to come by wisdom, either by their own harms, or other men’s miscasualties: And wise men are wont to say (not by chance, nor without reason) that he who will see what shall be, let him consider what hath been: For all things in the world at all times have their very counterpane with the times of old.

  He stopped, drawing the previous sheet of script towards him and, realising that what he had just written did not follow, placed it to one side, to be inserted later. It was then that he noticed his stock of paper was almost depleted and that he was about to exhaust the quire that he had purchased. Now he had not the means to buy more and the knowledge robbed him of any desire to write further. After a moment’s gloomy reflection he turned instead to Raleigh’s Political Observations. Opening it at random his eyes fell upon the words:

  Whoso desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again…

  A Latin tag followed, incomprehensible to Monck, but the sense of Raleigh’s eloquence, so close to his own thoughts, struck him with its coincident certainty. He felt a shiver of something numinous, as if touched by the ineffable.

  But Raleigh had been in The Tower too, and his liberation had been by way of the executioner’s axe.

  *

  Bishop Wren became a regular visitor, enjoying more freedom than either Monck or Warren, and Monck began to relax in his company so that their conversation ranged over many subjects. Such was the intensity of their discourse that Monck was reminded of the long conversations he had enjoyed with his old comrade-in-arms, Henry Hexham, the wise and experienced quartermaster of George Goring’s regiment in which they had both served in the Low Countries. Monck owed much to the military knowledge imparted by that conscientious and loquacious old soldier. What Monck’s precipitate departure from the comforts of home had denied him by way of formal education, Hexham made up for in the speciality of modern warfare. Few understood better, or communicated with more ease, the new and geometrically satisfying theories of pyroballogy accompanying the use of artillery; few could propound with more reason the rules for drilling pike-men and the advantages of the precise placement of musketeers in the intervals between their deployed companies so that each arm complemented and supported the other. Hexham explained the complicated business of siege-works, of mine and counter-mine, of sap and trench, of swine’s feathers, fascine and gabion. Most important of all, he impressed upon the young George Monck, was the quartering of men, the securing of their route of march, the laying-in of victuals and fodder as much as powder and shot, all of which knowledge Hexham had acquired as the fruits of long experience under Vere and Goring. More particularly in his influence upon the impressionable and eager Monck, was the impact of Hexham’s service. This seemed to Monck to mark Hexham with some inexplicable but enviable virtue, convincing the younger man of the value of experience, of a life of duty in which Monck was able to find himself and throw off the intemperance that had led him into trouble over Battyn. In this way he kept clear of the temptations open to victorious soldiers of fortune and was, in some wise, a Puritan in his profession of arms. When he had spoken to King Charles of men who were calculating in the manner of waging war and orderly in their violence, it had been no conjuring of the ideal out of his imagination. Monck knew such disciplined troops had existed and he saw himself impeccably one of them. For Monck accepted that war was a necessity between states, an ineluctable condition of human existence wherein the mark of civilisation lay in the amelioration provided by the Laws of War. Thus did Henry Hexham have a profound effect upon George Monck, casting the mould into which the ambitious young man poured his very being.

  Now Wren complemented the lectures of the old soldier, sensing Monck’s desire for knowledge and his capacity for absorbing it, complemented by his unusually serious single-mindedness that combined with an unfashionable disregard for pleasure. Wren recognised in Monck a man of industrious and dedicated temperament, a man who promised – at least as much as such a thing could be expected in this imperfect world – to possess an incorruptible spirit. Shrewdly Wren guessed that that early sin, about which Monck had imparted a hint, had so worked upon him that it had acted as a crucible to the young man’s developing character. While Wren knew that Monck could not match the intellectual giants with whom Wren himself had wrestled at Cambridge, especially in that famous disputation of 1616 as to whether a dog might make a syllogism, he knew that those who judged Monck to be dull of wits were wrong, very wrong. Superficially he might convey that impression, but there was more to Monck than met the eye, much, much more. Even in his steadfast refusal to extricate himself from imprisonment, something that had become open gossip in The Tower, Wren saw the working not of a fool, but a deeply principled man. If all men were formed for some earthly purpose, Wren presciently perceived that George Monck had been wrought by God for some mighty work. Monck was, Wren was sure, a man of patience who considered all circumstances before making a decision. And when made, Wren guessed, Monck would act with energetic alacrity, forcing the point with that necessary impetus and force to achieve a successful conclusion. Had he not led the forlorn-hope at Breda, storming the breach in the city’s battered walls and thereby decisively carrying the place? Monck had never spoken of it, but Wren had learned the details of it from others, particularly Warren who seemed almost blasphemously close to worshipping his quondam commander.

  Although in Wren’s intuition lay the envious admiration of the intellectual for the man-of-action, this ca
me with insight and conviction; in Monck, Wren had discovered a man whose services might be indispensable to God and the King.

  In prison men find consolation in odd things. Some befriend a rat, others tease the mortar from the stones without any real hope of liberty, others score the resisting stones with their name and the date of their immuring, leaving the fool to saw at his window bars with anything abrasive that came to hand. Wren undertook the gentle mentoring of a spirit he found open to him in the belief that in their country’s desperate hour of need, George Monck would prove a faithful redeemer of the King’s worthy and righteous cause.

  Monck was, of course, quite oblivious to the bishop’s adoption of a near-sacred mission. He refused Wren’s offers of money, explaining that the arrival of a subvention from his brother was imminent. In fact his most recent and abject letter to his sibling, chiefly exhorting him to arrange for his exchange, yielded neither liberty nor funds. But the days passed until Christmas loomed and on that Holy morning Wren brought him the sacrament, whereupon Monck knelt in humility and received the body and blood of Christ as a Christian gentleman ought to do.

  Wren left him on his knees, explaining there were others whose pastoral needs he must attend to.