Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  ‘You had no instructions to act thus, General Monck?’ he was asked by Lord Mulgrave.

  ‘None, my Lord.’

  ‘Not from any person of this Council not here present but whose authority you might have assumed carried the weight and opinion of us all?’ Mulgrave gestured left and right. The allusion to Cromwell was clear and unambiguous and, again, Monck faced his interrogator.

  ‘Not from any person, my Lord.’

  ‘You were driven simply by the situation in which you found yourself?’ asked Fairfax, not unkindly.

  ‘Military necessity compelled me, with neither counsel nor instruction, to choose the lesser of two evils, Sir Thomas.’

  Black Tom had been one of the recipients of Cromwell’s letters and Honest George must needs dissemble. He had lied for Cromwell and yet his high-standing reputation for probity washed any suspicion from his interlocutors’ minds. He watched as they sat back, looked from one to another and murmured amongst themselves. Monck noted that Lord Lisle avoided his eye and then Bradshaw ordered him to await a decision in an anteroom.

  A quarter of an hour later he was summoned again and the Lord President addressed him.

  ‘The Council has no powers to approve of your action, General,’ Bradshaw said. ‘Indeed the weight of opinion is against you and your action. Here, in this Chamber, we tend to disapprove of the entire matter, thinking it prejudicial to our great enterprise against the Irish rebels.’ Bradshaw paused and Monck steeled himself: The Tower beckoned once again. And beyond The Tower perhaps something worse. Bradshaw cleared his throat and went on, ‘You shall therefore make a report, and appear before the Bar of the House on Wednesday next. The Council will lay a formal request to this effect and it has been thus minuted. That is all.’

  All hopes now dashed, Monck made his way back to his lodgings. The thought of Anne tempted him to walk to the City but any encounter with her in public would prove awkward and he had no wish to compromise her until he knew his fate. Besides, it would soon be known that he was in London and he had no wish to brave the ignorant prejudice of its opinionated citizens. Better that he kept his own company until he knew the outcome, though all he could realistically anticipate was a further incarceration in The Tower. That, he mused ruefully, would at least make it easy to contact Mistress Ratsford.

  And perhaps, if he ever heard of it, Cromwell’s intervention.

  *

  As bidden Monck appeared at the Bar of the House of Commons, eyeing the flutter of papers laid before the clerks and wondering which had a bearing upon his own case. It became rapidly clear that the news of the rout of Ormonde by Jones at Rathmines, resulting in the saving of Dublin, had only just arrived. Had Cromwell held Jones’s express, and included it with his couriered despatch touching Monck himself? It seemed possible, even likely. But any comfort derived from this distant manipulation was dissolved as he was questioned, for the mood of the House was plainly hostile. There was, he was informed, evidence in his own hand, admitting to having some advice pertaining to the negotiations with O’Neill. Mystified as to the origin of this information, or the precise details, Monck was about to ask to see the relevant paper, when the Speaker, William Lenthall, asked him to name these advisers.

  ‘I had no such advisers, sir. I did it upon my own score,’ he replied staunchly, ‘without the advice of any other persons. Only formerly I had some discourse of Colonel Jones, and he told me if I could keep off Owen Roe O’Neill and Ormonde from joining, it would be a good service.’

  ‘Had you,’ the Speaker continued, ‘any advice or direction from Parliament, or the Council, or the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, or any person here, to do it?’

  Monck’s response was deliberately categorical. ‘Neither from Parliament, nor the Council, nor the Lord Lieutenant, nor any person here had I any advice or direction. Isolated as I was, I did it upon my own score for the preservation of the English interest there …’ he paused, nodding at the papers lying on the table behind the mace, then added, ‘… and it has had some fruits accordingly.’

  A murmur rose and the Speaker called for silence. Addressing Monck he said coldly, ‘You shall withdraw, sir, and await our pleasure.’ As Monck left the Chamber amid a rising crescendo of babble, he heard Speaker Lenthall call again for silence. Outside he settled to await his verdict. He could hear nothing but the swell of debate, which seemed interminable and afforded him at least the comfort of knowing opinion was divided. Occasionally a member emerged, threw a non-committal glance in his direction, before hurrying off on some business of his own. The day drew on and members whom he recognised as having left earlier, came back again to glance pityingly at his lonely figure as they re-entered the Chamber.

  Eventually he heard the rise of general comment and the Speaker’s voice ring clear above the racket. Someone came out and told him that the House was about to divide on the question of whether it approved the proceedings of General Monck. Again the noise increased and then, sometime later, it subsided again and his informant returned to state that it did not. Again a rising noise and a second motion was proposed; he learned that the members were about to divide on a vastly more ponderous issue. His informant pressed a piece of paper in his hand on which a hasty contraction of the motion had been scribbled.

  That the H, do utterly disapprove – the innocent blood that has been shed is so fresh in this H.’s memory – that this H. do’ detest and abhor the thoughts of any closing with any Popish rebels who h’ve had their hand in shedding blood. Amendm’t added – that Col. M’s conduct excusable on grounds of necessity.

  Monck stared down at it, wondering who had laid down the amendment. Without it he would likely hang and he felt his heart thump as he recognised the imminent danger he was in. Somehow it was worse than that frozen instant in the breach at Breda when, it had seemed to him, he had stood quite alone in plain sight of the multitude of the enemy. But that moment of exposure had passed, to reserve him for another fate. Better he had been blown into eternity as an honest soldier, leader of a forlorn hope whose death could at least atone for his sins and lay glory to his name. Now …

  Within the Chamber the noise gave nothing away as the debate proceeded and the time passed. Candles were next called for and, as the doors to the Chamber opened to admit them, Monck heard someone shout for vengeance against the massacred. After his weary months of campaigning in Ireland, it astonished Monck to hear this emotional rallying call. It was true that many innocent Protestants had been martyred for their stubborn faith, but so too had many Catholics, as his own ruthless harrying of the helpless peasants bore eloquent witness. It was madness to assume ends could be reached without violence; but the trick was to temper that violence, to apply only that much as was necessary to achieve the objective, and afterwards deal fairly with the enemy. ‘Harm no man beyond what war demands,’ Monck muttered to himself, forgetful of his root-and-branch advice to Cromwell and feeling a growing contempt for these extreme vapourings, uttered by men as distant from immediate danger as was the moon from the earth. What, in God’s name, could he expect from these people?

  ‘These are difficult times,’ he recalled Cromwell saying. And: ‘I shall not forget you …’

  Placed where he now was, such assurances, no doubt kindly meant, signified nothing. And then he recalled Cromwell’s assurance that he would await news of the outcome of Monck’s summons before sailing for Ireland. At the time of its utterance it had seemed but one more reassuring kindness. Now, it was ominous. If Monck had not lied on Cromwell’s behalf, the Lord Lieutenant stood to be recalled, destroying all hope of whatever Cromwell and his party of friends stood for and intended to do in this new Republic.

  Sunk in this reverie Monck was lost for a while to the events on the far side of the Chamber doors. Suddenly, however, they flew open and a throng of people tumbled out to grasp his hand, to slap his back and to shout at him that they knew all along that Honest George was a man of unimpeachable probity.

  ‘Some of them wanted
you committed to The Tower, General!’ a well-wisher shouted from the back of the red-faced crowd.

  ‘Better The Tower was committed to you, sir,’ bellowed another, as a wave of guffaws met this witticism.

  ‘General Monck. A word, sir, if you please. Gentlemen, pray make way.’ It was Black Rod, confirming the news the pack of friendly members had borne from the Chamber of the House. ‘The motion was carried in your favour to the extent of remonstrating with the evil of the matter but that your conduct was excusable,’ James Maxwell pronounced solemnly. ‘You are free to go, General.’

  Monck, suddenly unable to speak, made his bow and was borne out into the soft August darkness by the throng. But he thought no longer of himself, only of Anne.

  *

  By the end of the week Monck woke to the news that an account exonerating him had been published ‘by Authority’. An opposition hack calling himself ‘The Man in the Moon’ entitled this public exculpation ‘a blindation’, an opinion with which Monck privately agreed, but people forgot all the popularly cited ‘evidence’ heaped against him, chiefly his previous stubborn loyalty to the King and with it the taint of ‘malignancy’. Where previously he had hardened himself against hostile glares, he now found himself cheered, such was the fickle nature of public opinion. Lord Lisle sought him out and told him – was there something meaningful in Lisle’s sober tone? – that on 12 August ‘Oliver had sailed’.

  Monck met the news with the rejoinder that he was happy the great expedition was at last under way, adding that, ‘The pity of it was that he himself was unemployed.’

  ‘Then you must complete writing your military theories, General,’ Lisle said encouragingly. ‘I should much like to see them.’

  Monck bit off an admission they had been finished long ago and nodded. It was only afterwards that he chid himself; he was becoming too accomplished a liar and must guard against it in the future.

  He finally quit the Westminster inn and took up lodgings in the City, sending a boy with a note to Anne, along with instructions to await a reply. He never saw the boy again; instead Anne came that evening to his rooms bearing a bag containing some personal effects and his papers. She had a black-eye, the side of her head seemed strangely contused and her eyes were red and swollen with crying. So badly was she disfigured that, for a moment Monck failed to recognise her.

  ‘Anne?’ Then: ‘For the love of God come in, come in! Tell me who did this to you.’ He took the bag from her and drew her inside his rooms. ‘Was this Ratsford? The damned scoundrel!’

  ‘He has gone,’ she said, falling sobbing, into his arms. ‘Oh, George, George, how I have longed for you …’

  ‘Come, you are safe now,’ he said soothingly, vowing to settle matters with Ratsford on the morrow.

  He was astir early next morning. For all her battered state, he was immensely cheered by the appearance of Anne in his bed. He looked across at her, still sleeping, then attended to some letters newly arrived, but which had been following him round for some few weeks. The discharge of Parliament, though it deprived him of any hope of a command, lightened his spirits so much that it was only after the burden had been lifted that he realised the extent of the yoke he had borne in Ireland. Anne would heal, he thought looking at her, and Oliver had promised …

  For a moment it struck him that he would not now be happy to get a summons from Cromwell to join him in Ireland; he had had a bellyful of Ireland. With Anne estranged from the loathsome Ratsford and no immediate employment in prospect for himself, he must consider what should be done.

  He impatiently slit the seal of one of the letters, fearful that it might be a summons to attend the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin but it brought news of a sadder kind. His older brother Tom had been killed by a fall from his horse and George was notified that he was heir-in-tail to Potheridge. He looked again at the letter and found it had been written over eighteen months earlier, lost to him as he campaigned in Ireland. The lateness of this sad intelligence seemed to add to the burden of imposition a mere execution of his duty had laid upon him and, for a moment he teetered on the brink of giving way to the red rage that, after all his tribulations seemed about to engulf him. But, at that moment, Anne stirred and woke with a groan at the pain in her face. Their eyes met and, sensing something wrong, she asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘My brother Thomas is dead. Do you remember I told you something of my family in the West Country?’

  ‘Aye, I do, and I know you for a Devon man,’ she said smiling awkwardly, having long liked his burr.

  ‘This letter has taken over a year to reach me …’

  ‘You did not write to me for even longer.’

  ‘Did I not?’ he asked sharply, looking at her directly.

  ‘No George, you did not.’

  He lowered his eyes again at the letter in his lap. ‘Then I am sorry for it, my dear, truly sorry …’ Monck sighed and smote his thigh. ‘Brother Tom, brother Tom,’ he said in a voice full of regret, then felt the warmth of Anne’s body close to him, and her arms about his shoulder. He looked up at her bruised face and smiled. ‘I think we must go down into Devon,’ he said, ‘for there are matters of business to which I have to attend and to which my attention is long overdue.’

  ‘Our attention, George,’ she whispered in his ear.

  ‘Aye,’ he agreed indulgently and turning he kissed her again. ‘Aye, Anne, our attention.’

  POTHERIDGE

  Summer 1649 – June 1650

  They had left London for the West Country after a brief but fruitless attempt to find Ratsford. No-one knew of his whereabouts, not even his drinking cronies. Someone thought Ratsford might have taken ship, though with what prospects it was unclear. As Anne herself remarked, there were few opportunities for a mixer of perfumed waters aboard any vessel but Monck, recalling his service aboard the Perseus, could divine the train of thought that might have led the errant Ratsford towards the forest of masts and spars that crowded London’s pool. It appeared, however, that prior to whatever departure he had contrived, Ratsford had enjoyed an evening of free-spending. Moreover he had, as Anne discovered with a shock, stolen the cache of money she had put by, hidden in a secret place behind the rough panelling of their rooms.

  ‘I did not know he knew of it,’ she said furiously at the revelation of her husband’s infamy.

  ‘Drunkards are uncommon cunning,’ Monck soothed, adding, ‘Do not fret, I have just sufficient for the two of us …’

  For Anne, her husband’s theft was a double outrage, for she had been hoarding the money against the day when she would be free of her brutal spouse and able to establish herself independently. ‘But this was mine, George, mine,’ she bewailed, ‘money I had earned myself and to which he had no right! It is plain theft, damn him!’

  This was a side of her he had never previously seen and he found it pleasing. ‘Your spirit does you credit Anne, but his actions give you grounds for leaving him …’

  She blew out her cheeks and paused, looking at him and seeing the import of his words in his blue eyes. ‘Grounds for leaving him …’ she repeated, uncertainly.

  ‘Aye …’

  ‘He has certainly left me,’ she said, mindful of the lost purse. ‘And taken twenty-two sovereigns … Everything …’

  ‘All your savings? And in gold,’ Monck remarked. It lent colour to those hints of both carefulness and cupidity that he had suspected in her. She would not be a woman to squander a man’s substance, he thought, not that brother Tom’s inheritance had left him over much beyond a trail of entailments, annuities and debt.

  ‘What use is base coin?’ Anne was saying dismissively, adding that: ‘It is lucky he did not have the gold the King sent you.’

  ‘Well, he did not, so there is an end to the matter. Now come away, I have horses and a carriage awaiting us. You will find Potheridge more congenial than the stews of London. Let us put an end to all this.’

  He had proved right. Anne, who had never ventured beyond the Cit
y bounds, had shown a childish delight throughout the journey, seemingly unaware of its discomforts, its flea-ridden inn beds in which they tumbled among the filthy sheets, the rain rutted roads, or the abominable jolting of the conveyance. Despite struggling against a hard wind and sleet which met them on Salisbury Plain they stopped briefly to wonder at the megaliths of Stonehenge. After four days they descended into the valley of the Torridge and Anne was utterly beguiled by the narrow sunken lanes and the prospect of the old house as it emerged from the trees and Monck told her they were almost at the end of their journey.

  After leaning out of the carriage window to peer ahead she drew back into its gloomy interior and regarded him, her eyes aglow, her voice tremulous with wonder. ‘Why George, George,’ she asked breathlessly, as if scarce able to comprehend her changed circumstances, ‘is this now all yours?’

  It was indeed, but it came with problems of its own and for Monck the weeks that followed were a mixture of pain and pleasure. He recaptured something of his lost youth in the company of his younger brother Nicholas, who was the incumbent in the distant parish of Plymtree, a hard day’s ride across the county, and fell into the easy habit of riding over once a month or so. Nicholas had none of George’s fire-in-the-belly, but was bookish and gently-mannered, as behove a man of the cloth. A staunch Royalist, Nicholas disapproved of brother George serving Parliament, but Monck persuaded him, as he had persuaded Wren, that he was both pragmatist and patriot and wrought in the first place for the good of the country.

  ‘You have the cure of souls, brother,’ he concluded, fixing Nicholas with his blue eyes so that his brother, like Wren before him, perceived something of the man Monck could be upon the battlefield. ‘But I have a duty towards them while they live and seek to provide for their families. Parliament has at least established a kind of peace over England and that most are grateful for.’