Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  The outrage he felt at the thought caused him to heave himself uncomfortably on his extemporised bed which creaked under his considerable weight. He emitted a curse and thought of Lambert, the man who had filched him of his due laurels on the field of Dunbar almost ten years ago; the cavalryman who had ridden high in the favour of Oliver thanks to dash and personality and good-looks. Lambert’s part in Cromwell’s reversal of English fortunes at Dunbar was important enough, however none of it could have been accomplished without the patient forethought and care of Monck. But Lambert the lawyer and amateur soldier had captured the imagination with his bold cavalry charges, whereas the plodding logistics of the officer responsible for the artillery and the supply-train made barely a mention in the victorious dispatch.

  ‘It would not have mattered had the popinjay not lorded it. And to think I took his handshake at Oliver’s bidding at face value. Great God, as a mark of my esteem I even sent him a gift of a pair of fine falcons that were given me by Cameron of Lochiel! And now…’

  And now? Well, Lambert was on the march.

  Of course, thought Monck, it was not unreasonable for Lambert to have been sent north to supress the rising in Cheshire, though among the exchange of messages and visitations Monck had received at Dalkeith there had been a correspondence with Lord Fairfax in Yorkshire. Fairfax, among many other land-owners, was disgusted by the powers assumed by the Army and was all for the return of the King as the lesser of two evils. Monck learned from him that the Cheshire rebellion enjoyed the support of moderate Presbyterians, people whom Monck most favoured in his religious beliefs. He had lent his name to a declaration drawn up by the Reverend Doctor Thomas Gumble advising the military junta that met in Wallingford House in London that their best course of action was to issue writs to fill the stalls in the House of Commons, recommending a new Parliament established rules for successive and representative Parliaments to sit. Monck was careful to couch this in terms of advice, never threatening either military intervention, or to suggest that if the Army junta did not comply, a restoration of the Monarchy would ensue – both of which would have caused a renewal of civil war. The declaration was held up, pending the outcome of the imminent encounter between Lambert and the Cheshire rebels.

  While Monck awaited news of this, Doctor Price had importuned him, demanding that he act in support of the Royalists and incredulous that Monck did nothing.

  Monck recalled the angry exchange with a smile. ‘In God’s name, Doctor Price! Would you have me ruin all and bring my neck to the block for love of the King?’ he had growled at the dissembling chaplain.

  ‘Sir!’ a thoroughly scared but dissembling Price had protested, ‘I have never named the King to you, either now or at any other time!’

  ‘No, you have not, but I know you, and I know your meaning.’

  And when the news of Lambert’s rout of the Royalists arrived, Monck had his own copy of the declaration burnt and was compelled to dissemble himself at a thanksgiving service held at Dalkeith in honour of Lambert’s victory. It seemed to Monck that the rumours swirling about were increasingly dangerous. He sent brother Nicholas and his daughter packing and asked Will Clarke to draw up a letter of resignation. ‘My health is broken and I am past fifty years of age,’ he had expostulated. ‘I wish only to spend my remaining days quietly at home.’

  Suddenly now, as then, the image of the old manor house at Potheridge swam into his mind’s eye, along with the woods and the winding silver gleam of the near-by Torridge as it turned north and sought its confluence with the Taw and their joint debouchement into the Atlantic Ocean. Here, he and Anne could live a peaceable life, watching the young Kit grow to manhood, free of the gubernatorial demands of Dalkeith and, from time-to-time, visiting the estates Monck had been granted in Ireland.

  ‘No-one is to be trusted,’ the old soldier murmured as he turned on his bed, aware that while he had his brother-in-law, Thomas Clarges, attending his affairs in London, he was unable to prevent the replacement of his senior officers by sectaries appointed by the Rump. Clarges, a sitting member of the Rump Parliament warned him of this devious attempt to subvert Monck’s authority. Colonel William Daniel, one of his devoted column commanders in the campaign of 1654, had been plucked from his post as garrison commander at St Johnstone by such a distant machination. Monck’s furious protest had availed him nothing, so he sent Anne to Edinburgh to conspicuously purchase portmanteaux for their removal to Devon.

  Going home with his daughter, Nicholas, who was aware of his elder brother’s intention to retire, had waited upon Clarges in London and told him of their mutual relative’s resolve. Alarmed, Clarges had in turn gone to Speaker Lenthall in whose opinion Monck stood high. Only recently had Monck learned from Clarges that by manipulating the business of the Commons, Lenthall had forestalled the reading of Monck’s letter of declaration and saved Monck’s reputation. In order to justify what his brother-in-law might have considered high-handed conduct, Clarges had explained himself in a letter, adding further intelligence of the Army’s increasingly outrageous conduct.

  Like myself, William Lenthall holds thee in High Esteem, knowing thee to be the Only Man capable of Opposing the Rising Power of John Lambert. Now, Lambert having overcome the Malignant Uprising in Cheshire, has conjoined with some Fifty of his Fellows at Derby and proposed that Fleetwood should Usurp thy place as Head of the Army and have Lambert as his Second, which all do know, who know Fleetwood, that Lambert’s meaning is plain, that He shall have all the Command of the Army unto Himself.

  A day or so later a courier from Lambert and his cronies at Derby placed a copy of this remonstrance in Monck’s hand. It asked for his support; he showed it to Clarke and Morgan and then ignored it. The Commons turned it down and Monck cheered up.

  ‘I know Johnnie Lambert,’ he growled, smiling again into the darkness. ‘He had o’er-reached himself along with his cronies and will likely encompass his own destruction.’

  A new attempt by the militant Army officers to circumvent the Parliament had led to Monck assuring Lenthall that any direct threat to the Rump’s powers would lead to his marching south. ‘If only the Members stand firm, then we can do it,’ he wrote privately to Clarges. The Members had stood firm – the old soldier chuckled at the thought of it, for if it proved nothing else, his advice had been heeded – and they had outlawed any attempt by the Army to levy taxes. They had also ordered Lambert and Desborough cashiered, though they had retained the ineffectual Fleetwood as a figurehead. Lambert, however, moved his troops to prevent Parliament from sitting. He arranged for Fleetwood to continue as General with himself as his second-in-command, appointed a Committee of Safety and assumed the government.

  One displaced Member of Parliament, Thomas Clarges, had swiftly despatched a courier telling Monck what had happened. Knowing Lambert’s clique enjoyed support among his own officers and that the Committee of Safety was supported by the likes of John Okey and Robert Overton whom – despite his valuable services – Monck had dismissed after Overton led a mutiny against him, Monck called in Morgan. Both men were aware that, while Monck had been absent serving as a General-at-Sea, the regiment of which Monck was the nominal Colonel had been ‘reformed’, meaning that radical sectarian officers had been appointed at the behest of London.

  Without hesitation Monck had immediately ordered his own Regiment paraded for review under arms but without an issue of powder and ball. Behind them were drawn-up Talbot’s Regiment, upon which Monck knew he could depend. Talbot’s infantry were issued with powder and ball and, prior to marching onto the parade-ground, had loaded their matchlock muskets. Accompanied by Morgan and his small staff, Monck rode towards the two battalions, resplendent on his black charger, girded by his orange sash, and wearing half-armour about his body. Having raked the lines of his own men with his blue eyes, he made to ride along the ranks of Colonel Talbot’s in their rear, but reined-in his horse and commanded his Regiment to turn about. Ordering Talbot’s Foot to present their firel
ocks, Monck then read out the names of his own Regiment’s lieutenant colonel, its major, four captains, seven lieutenants, four ensigns, a quartermaster and nine sergeants and corporals. Several he had arrested, imprisoned and later interrogated; the remainder he simply dismissed. He then read out the names of those selected to take their places. When he had finished he ordered his own shocked troops to face front again, rode round to the head of the formation and commanded the attention of both Regiments.

  ‘I address the officers now on parade,’ he had said, his blue eyes chips of ice, his voice harsh, uncompromising. ‘I rely upon your obedience,’ he bellowed. ‘Nothing less! If, however, any left in post doth dissent from this resolve of mine, he has absolute liberty to quit the service, to receive his pass-port and to leave. I would not have any officer nor soldier here against his will.’

  He had then sat his horse alone on front of them for two full minutes; not a man in the ranks moved, so terrible was the spectre of the old soldier on his charger. Then, just as he rowelled his mount’s flank and turned its head to walk it back towards Dalkeith Palace, the men began cheering him. He drew rein, pausing to doff his wide-brimmed, be-feathered hat to even greater enthusiasm and took his departure, leaving Lieutenant General Thomas Morgan, a diminutive figure near as terrifying as Monck, to dismiss the parade.

  ‘I have rarely seen a finer thing done, George,’ Morgan remarked later as the two men enjoyed a glass of wine in the Governor’s chambers.

  ‘A pity it was necessary,’ growled Monck. ‘Officers with political ambitions are dangerous to any Army and they may lead astray many giddy-headed but otherwise good fellows.’

  ‘You’ll have no more trouble from your boyos, George. They’ll follow you to Hell now.’

  ‘They followed me to Hell in Fifty-four, Tom. It was the new officers that didn’t.’

  ‘Bloody London,’ Morgan had said, summing up.

  Recalling the coup de théâtre now Monck chuckled again. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘it was indeed well done…’ Nor had that been all, for the following evening in a torrent of rain and a rising gale, a detachment of Horse had set off for Berwick under Captain Johnson with Monck’s orders to purge every Anabaptist and Independent in the garrison. Other troops of cavalry were sent to purge the garrisons at Ayr, St Johnstone, Inverlochy, Perth and Inverness. Among those thereby summarily dismissed from the Army was Colonel John Okey who had served with Monck in Scotland and thereafter nurtured an animus against the General. Monck could spare little thought for such men; he had greater matters to consider than the fates of individuals, cruel though they might be. As Johnson completed his commission at Berwick, a Captain Cobbet rode in from London. He was the Council of Safety’s emissary to Scotland, sent by Fleetwood and Lambert, and he was two days behind Clarges’s faster courier. Johnson promptly had him arrested and brought before Monck at Dalkeith, who sent him to join his fellow dissenters in Edinburgh Castle.

  Monck had next sent a galloper south with letters for Lenthall, Fleetwood and Lambert. I am engaged, the old soldier had written, in conscience and honour to see my Country freed (as much as in me lies) from the intolerable slavery of a Sword Government. This made his position crystal-clear: he had long believed the Army’s radicals were opposed to a representative Parliament and sought the destruction of the Church of England. Monck could tolerate the latter, but not the former. He particularly emphasised that, despite knowing the unrepresentative nature of the Rump, it being the best to hand, his Army in Scotland stood four-square behind it. To put his case plainly, Monck declared that he profoundly condemned the coercion the Army in England had put upon the Rump; in short the Army’s high command had acted illegally.

  Easily led, particularly by Lambert, Fleetwood had bleated: I much wonder you should put yourself in a posture of opposition to your old friends; to which a scathing Monck had responded. Let the Lord judge between you and me where the Guilt will rest. And when the Lord pleases to return the Parliament to their trust, I will submit my Actings to their Judgement.

  Then, not without irony but to complete his response to events in London, Monck had ordered a solemn day of fasting and public humiliation to seek ‘the Blessing of the Lord upon this Great Affair’.

  While Monck’s Army considered this Great Affair was the continuing purge in the other Regiments and garrisons which Monck and Morgan prosecuted with vigour, there were those who pondered that it might have some other meaning. It was the beginning of a campaign of disinformation that Monck began part in jest but with increasingly deadly intent. Always keen to keep his enemy guessing, he had cleared out any officer or ranker suspected of harbouring disloyal or radical views. He had also sent troops south to occupy Berwick in the name of the Governor of Scotland, thereby securing his left flank just as intelligence reached him that Lambert was marching north and his advanced troops were not far away; they had already occupied Chillingford Castle.

  By this time it was early December and, on the 8th, he had begun the concentration of his Army on the line of the Tweed, shifting his headquarters from Dalkeith to the little border town of Coldstream. Here he sat down and waited, and while he did so he constantly rode up and down the extended line, starting his rounds at two o’clock in the morning, his horse picking its way over ice and through snow, well aware that the appalling weather worked in his favour.

  At Coldstream, General Monck, linked by Berwick to the sea and a twice-weekly packet-boat with news from Ireland, conducted his correspondence, received the reports of his Colonels, his garrison-commanders, Clarke his ‘intelligencer’ and Clarges his ears and eyes in London. He had even been contacted by Henry Cromwell, the Lord Deputy of Ireland who sent Cornet Monck, a distant kinsman of the General, with his personal letters intended to rescue his brother’s doomed dynasty. Although this had proved too late and Henry had soon afterwards been removed from his Irish post, most of the intelligence that flowed first into Dalkeith and, later that unsettled year, into Coldstream, kept Monck and Clarke apprised of events as they unfolded.

  Thus, by mid-December Monck was sending off his gallopers from his smoky riverside cottage. They rode into England – to Clarges in London, to Morice in Devon, to Fairfax in Yorkshire – through by-ways and tracks and not along the Great North Road. All the while, Monck heeded the words of Cameron of Lochiel as to the quietude of the Highlands. As for England, a growing discontent with the Army and its Puritan leaders was stoking a deepening resentment among the ordinary folk. From the State’s Navy came news from Monck’s old vice admiral and comrade-in-arms, the former Leveller John Lawson, that the Fleet would follow Monck’s lead and had declared its loyalty to Parliament – even such an unrepresentative body as the Rump now was. ‘Montagu has secretly declared for the King,’ Lawson wrote of the man he had just superseded , ‘but I can assure Your Excellency that I shall be guided by you.’

  Meanwhile there was the proximate threat of John Lambert. Lambert may have the larger Army and Lambert’s troops may have been fired up with the zeal of the Lord, but they lived off the country; his men were therefore widely quartered, their pay was in arrears and they were busy alienating the Northumbrian farmers and cottagers thanks to Lambert’s indiscriminate billeting and demands for ‘free-quarter’. While Monck’s men grumbled at their conditions, they were well fed, paid, and, despite their privations, in vastly better living conditions than Lambert’s. Moreover, their billeting was not at the expense of their hosts. As the tough old General and his Colonels drilled them and harangued them, they grew in stature while Lambert’s men began to desert, some even coming over the Tweed into Monck’s encampments. Apart from turning the Northumbrians against him, Lambert had also made enemies in the City of London, which had dismissed all his pleas for loans with which to pay his soldiers.

  Lying unsleeping on his uncomfortable and improvised bed, Monck intuitively sensed his moment was imminent. He had no way of knowing yet how matters would play out; he had no clear idea of an objective, other than that of a sov
ereign obedience to Parliament. For a while his mind drifted, first to Anne and her poor, disappointed face, peering at him from her carriage as he had packed her off forthwith back to Dalkeith. He would write to her tomorrow, extend the olive-branch and send his love to his beloved Kit. Then he thought of the boy playing in the gardens of the palace gardens that Monck, the rough untutored soldier, had laid out and replanted to the delight of both himself and the Duchess of Buccleuch. Her Grace, to whose family Dalkieth Palace belonged, had been a frequent and friendly visitor whose influence had reconciled many of the old Scots aristocracy to Monck’s rule. More devious men than Cameron of Lochiel had been persuaded to accept the fait accompli that Monck and his Army represented, even that arch-dissembler, Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, whom Monck had tamed into co-operative neutrality but who still harboured equivocal feelings for the Stuarts.

  Monck stirred at the recollection, or was it the howl of the wind outside that disturbed his rest? In his present position he could never relax and yet every instinct in the old campaigner insisted he sought the balm of sleep. He turned affairs of state over one more time in his tired mind, and once more he came up against the unanswerable question: ‘What next?’