Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  Nor were Monck’s hopes for a toleration of religious differences met, but matters remained unsettled when, on 23 April 1661, St George’s Day, the King rode in majesty to Westminster Abbey and his coronation. As Master of the Horse, the Duke of Albemarle rode in state behind the King, leading a beautifully caparisoned ‘Horse of Estate’, joining the Knights of the Garter inside the Abbey for the magnificently ceremonial service. But while Anne basked in her new role, Monck’s age and disabilities were beginning to weigh heavily upon him and by the summer he was a sick man, tired, breathless, his body – especially his legs - inclined to swell mysteriously, limiting his mobility. In November he was brought low the following month by the news of the death of his younger brother Nicholas, the erstwhile Bishop of Hereford. By December Monck was bed-ridden with a high-fever, intermittently delirious, bereft of movement, his mind wandering, his life despaired of.

  ‘Is he like to die?’ was the question constantly on the lips of those who loved him, chiefly Anne, whose dignity as a Duchess in Charles’s licentious Court was often compromised by her lack of good-locks, her accent and manners. She proved a down-to-earth contrast to those ladies elevated by their tenancy in the King’s bed, who were granted honours and titles on that account, yet thought nothing of poking fun at plain Nan Monck.

  The question of Monck’s future she put most often to William Clarke. Clarke, freed at last from a daily attendance on the Duke, but whose devotion and habit kept him near his master’s side, sought to comfort her.

  ‘The doctors’ opinions are divided, Your Grace,’ Clarke temporised with as much forbearance as he might muster in the face of Anne’s near hysterical pleadings. ‘I can do no more for him,’ he said simply on one occasion.

  ‘But he cannot die,’ Anne had responded. ‘He cannot… He simply cannot.’

  ‘We all must die, Your Grace,’ Clarke said quietly. ‘Shall I send Doctor Gumble to you?’

  ‘No! No, not him! He will confess George and see him into the hereafter just to say it was him that had the cure of His Grace’s soul… No, no, not him!’

  ‘Then there is truly nothing further I can do.’ Clarke grew weary of these conversations, sorry as he was for Anne. Everything she stood upon depended upon her husband. No-one knew better than Clarke, the part she had played in support of Monck and the crisis he had steered the country successfully through, for all the lampooning and gossip about her in Court and outside in general discourse.

  ‘I think he will die of disappointment,’ he said to Tom Clarges, as the two men took their tobacco after dining together shortly after Christmas.

  ‘In what sense?’ asked Clarges, puffing blue wreaths of smoke towards the ceiling.

  ‘He is, I am certain, disappointed with the King, and especially of the King’s conduct.’

  ‘In respect of the King’s women?’

  ‘Yes, that and His Majesty’s desire to proceed against the Regicides. He considered the disinterring of Oliver an act of gross and disgusting retribution unworthy of a King.’

  ‘But entirely to be expected of a Stuart Prince,’ Clarges added confidentially.

  Clarke nodded. ‘Indeed. And they speak ill of him everywhere, saying he was a place-seeker, worked only for himself and the augmentation of his fortune. God knows that is not the case, for the resignation of the Irish vice-royalty will cost him a pretty penny…’

  ‘Huh. Anne has reckoned that right enough,’ Clarges remarked disparagingly of his sister. ‘Nor does she help his case in the eyes of the distinguished ladies of the Court, pack of whores that they are!’

  ‘It seems the whole country had taken the infection.’

  ‘’Tis the result of years of repression and Puritan cant.’

  ‘It could have been different, aye, and so could this… this Restoration. Old George was at least a man of virtue in that respect and all this must trouble him.’

  ‘D’you think he regrets not taking the Crown for himself?’ Clarges asked.

  ‘Do you?’

  Clarges sighed. ‘He must have seen the folly of it; my sister as Queen would have been the least of it and his age was against him, but methinks he would have made a better fist of it than Charles Stuart, though it is High Treason to say it.’

  ‘Aye, and High Treason to think it,’ warned Clarke. ‘You have heard about Cromwell, Ireton and Deane, to speak of only a few?’

  ‘Yes. I can comprehend the King’s desire to take revenge upon the body of the Protector,’ replied Clargs, ‘but Deane? Lord God Almighty, but the General must never know, he was close to Richard Deane who was killed at his side. Besides these impious proceedings I hear there are plans to smoke out the Regicides in Holland and that Sir George Downing has the matter in hand under Clarendon’s direction.’

  ‘That is something foul and, if ’tis done, will provoke their High Mightinesses of the States General, to be sure.’

  ‘Oh, we shall fight the Dutch again, to be sure, but without Old George, for if he is still breathing he will be incapable of standing on a quarterdeck, the quacks diagnose a dropsy, I understand, which may prove fatal.’

  ‘May God have mercy upon him then,’ said Clarges, knocking out his pipe and draining his glass. ‘You must to Dorothy, Will, for ’tis late.’

  ‘And you? You are still intended for Ireland?’

  Clarges nodded. ‘Whether or not His Grace survives, both my own fortunes and his and that of his heir rest on the management of our lands there.’

  *

  For weeks, Monck lay a-bed in his apartment in The Cockpit, unaware that the mortal remains of his old comrade-in-arms and fellow General-at-Sea Richard Deane had been disinterred from their grave and flung into a common pit. Nor did he witness the appalling spectacle of the ritual public hanging of Cromwell’s stinking corpse, its mutilation and the boiling of his head for public exhibition. While he endured the ravages of his fever, the last of the Regicides had been horribly executed after their rendition from Holland. The three men had been located in Delft, winkled out and put aboard a small man-of-war, the Blackamoor, then lying off the Dutch coast. This had been accomplished by agents serving Sir George Downing, a true and opportunistic turn-coat, who sought thereby to claim King Charles’s good opinion. Among the Regicides seized was Colonel John Okey, one of Monck’s most persistent bêtes noire who had escaped apprehension when Lambert had been finally taken by Richard Ingoldsby near Daventry.

  Oblivious of this last turn of the screw, Monck continued to swim between consciousness and unconsciousness, his mind deeply troubled and ever afterwards affected by his fever. Although he retained vivid recollections of his visitors, he was never clear in his mind whether they were real or spectral. Had the King really condescended to visit him? Had the Duke of York? Later he was assured by Anne and Will Clarke that they had, but to Monck the ‘real’ attendants at his bedside were not the devoted Anne, nor his dutiful Secretary, nor his bidden son Christopher, but phantoms from his past whose reality in that dark time was indisputable. Nickolas Battyn came for him, backed-up by the seaman named Harris and the anonymous army officer he had thrashed on the march south from Coldstream, and they so disposed of him that he found himself, or at least his disembodied head, a-top an iron spike alongside the disinterred, desiccated and worm-eaten noddle of old and stinking Oliver. ‘You lied for me, God bless you George Monck,’ the lipless mouth said to him without moving, ‘and yet still they called you “Honest George”.’ Oliver laughed like a crow, and the cry was taken up by a score of the black carrion-eaters that came for the eyes of Honest George as his hair blew in the wind, high above London Bridge. Far below someone called out his name: Anne. Anne as he had first known her, bright, perky, slightly over-awed by the grand prisoner whose shirts she washed and ironed as she flitted in and out of the grim bastions of The Tower. He tried to call out to her, but he had no throat and was suddenly deluged with rain and found himself shouting hoarsely at his men to close-up as they waded the Broxburn to engage the Scots on the fa
r bank. The river was in spate, he could feel the water against his legs, threatening to topple him; but he had legs again now, and pressed on, pike in hand, while Lambert, Johnnie Lambert on a great bay horse, the dawn light gleaming on his cuirass and pot-helm, sword in hand, rode to cut him down. Monck shrieked at him, told him to address his attention to the common enemy in their front.

  ‘You are mine enemy, George Monck!’ cried Lambert, slashing at him so that Monck woke with a start. Anne, standing at the window of his bed-chamber, turned at the cry and was at his side in an instant, seizing his hand and pressing her cheek to it.

  ‘George! Oh, George, my darling, you are awake!’ The tears flooded her face so that she saw him indistinctly. Sniffing, she relinquished his hand, took up a kerchief and wiped first her own face and then his. Seeing his mouth open and his lips parched, she offered him water, kneeling again and uttering endearments, desperate for some expression of recognition. After a while he spoke, but it was clear to her that his mind still wandered.

  ‘The Coronation,’ he murmured. ‘Will was made a Knight… So, too, was Dickon Ingoldsby… Oblivion… not good enough… The King wants vengeance too heartily… The King is a man of intemperate appetites… His Royal Brother is a fool… They are Stuarts… Stuarts… The damnation of the Three Nations…’

  ‘Shush, shush.’ Anne became alarmed. Her husband’s meandering mind cut too close to his most secret thoughts, as Anne well knew, for she, unlike her worldly husband, was an uncritical monarchist. ‘Shush, my darling, you cannot say these things; they are treasonable…’

  But he was taking no notice of her and was again slipping from her, wandering into the fantastical world of his own trouble and over-heated mind, tramping again the glens of Scotland with his devoted column at his horse’s heels. He was calling to Morgan and there were Morgans everywhere, and behind the Morgans men to whom he was less well-disposed, the able but perverse Anabaptist cavalry officers whom he had purged and dismissed in acts of necessary peremptoriness. They now railed against him and he turned Morgan, all the Morgans, upon them and they were cast out into a desert where holy men wandered, begging for their bread. And then there was a new spectre from Scotland: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, who had put the Scottish Crown on the head of Charles Stuart but upon whom the King he had made in his native land had turned against, thanks to Monck.

  ‘And I…’ he rambled, shaking violently, ‘I alone sent Argyll to the block because he had helped me and acted against the Stuarts… That I should not have done… Never have done… May God have mercy upon my soul… Oh! Damnation to the House of Stuart…’

  ‘He was awake,’ a distracted Anne told Clarke and the doctors. ‘He was awake,’ she told Thomas Gumble who refused to leave the Duke’s household and take up his new position of canon of Winchester Cathedral.

  ‘I pray for him constantly,’ he reassured the Duchess obsequiously, as if that was all that was necessary. The quacks thought otherwise and disagreed among themselves, though they were led by the King’s personal physician, Sir Alexander Fraser. The patient would likely die of congestion of the lungs, for his asthma was advanced. His fever was a violent and putrid one; it had become tertian; no, it had become quotidian. It was a recurrence of spotted-fever and might pass; it would not, could not; it was a cancer; it was dropsy; his heart would give out; his brain was enfeebled. His Grace was old, worn-out from the rigours of hard service and, upon this they all came to agree, no human frame could stand the vexations of so prolonged a raging heat of the blood: My Lord Duke of Albemarle was lying upon his death bed.

  The variety of opinion offered to the wretched Duchess tore her heart to pieces; she was one day all hope, the next despair. By his bed in the small hours of the night she swore she would never cross her husband ever again if he recovered, but an hour later she had convinced herself of the rightness of the rumours that – somehow, God alone knew how – filtered in through the closed shutters from the street. People were saying that the great Duke’s slow and painful death was a Judgement, for he had aroused Almighty God’s displeasure in displacing the Godly from the ranks of the Army. Had not the Lord already spoken when he had taken young Henry, Duke of Gloucester? Now it was Monck’s turn; Monck had destroyed the New Model Army by disbandment, thereby destroying the very Instrument of the Lord of Hosts. Moreover, he had betrayed Oliver and the Protectorate, that which had been bought at such a cost of blood and treasure; he had betrayed the Commonwealth and, as God knew well, he had betrayed many of his friends. Others said that in saving Lambert he had merely condemned the poor man to a hell-on-earth, and he had dealt cruelly with Argyll, a man who had walked a similar tight-rope to himself…

  It went on and on, mercilessly wearing Anne down so that she too fell ill, though her distemper only took her from her husband’s bedside when she had need to tend to their son’s needs. The situation went on for so long that besides Clarke, Gumble, Morice and the occasional attendance of Monck’s old adjutant, Jeremiah Smith, few others – other than the doctors – visited the sick man or even asked after him. Though he wrote frequently, Clarges had gone to Ireland, Morgan was elsewhere and although he remained in contact, Monck’s newest acquaintance, the Earl of Craven, was busy attempting to wrest his vast estates back from those he conceived had stolen them from him. After his initial heart-warming concern, the fickle King found the distractions of the Court too strong. He collected mistresses with the same diligence Monck had once reserved for supply-wagons and kegs of black-powder.

  Monck was, in effect, given up for dead, though upon the King’s orders, Fraser persisted in dosing him with nostrums, bleedings and cuppings, the application of leeches and all the quackeries at his disposal.

  Only Gumble truly held to his belief that Monck’s life was not lost. ‘God doth not chastise his servants for their conscionable acts of duty,’ he attempted to reassure Anne. ‘His Grace was upon no sinful extreme as of letting the Rump of the Parliament govern for ever, nor of usurping power for his own sake. Instead he chose the way of justice and conscience, Restoring the King to his proper place, meting out just punishments, aye, even to Argyll. How in this did he injure the People of God? Indeed, he went to the extremity of recommending into His Majesty’s care the very trust of the people.

  ‘Your Grace,’ Gumble went on in words he would later paraphrase in writing, ‘I am rather inclined to think that this sickness that hath been laid upon him was inflicted upon him as an allay to his great prosperities, to teach him, in the very height of all his glories and felicities, humility and dependence upon God which is not an easy lesson for a man in as great a condition as My Lord Duke.’

  ‘Is such a lesson taught to like men? Is such a lesson taught the King?’ Anne responded sharply.

  ‘Perhaps, in other ways, at other times. Perhaps His Grace is especial, as his actions, dictated by God’s grace at personal cost, seem to me to show well. There is not a greater mark of Divine dissatisfaction than an interrupted prosperity in this life.’ Having delivered himself of this homily, Gumble looked at Monck who, at that moment seemed to be sound - and quite naturally - asleep. ‘The north-wind is more healthful,’ Gumble concluded enigmatically, ‘though the south is the more pleasant, and we all find it experimentally, that it is good to be afflicted.’

  It was an argument in which Anne could see neither merit nor logic, though it seemed to please Gumble. To Anne, God’s love seemed as perverse as that of mankind itself, but she could neither say nor think such a thing for long.

  Thus it was that in the first light of a winter dawn late in 1662 that Monck reached out his hand and brushed Anne’s hair as she laid her head asleep upon his counter-pane.

  ‘Anne?’ His voice was weak, but firm and something in it stirred her from sleep. She raised her head, her eyes bleary, unfocussed.

  ‘George?’ Her voice was tentative, uncertain, the tiny spark of hope alight. ‘George…’ She took his hand. It was steady; she pressed it and he did likewise. ‘George!
’ She was on her feet now: the impossible, the prayed for, had happened. He had been restored to her. She put her hand to her breast, finding breathing suddenly difficult.

  ‘Anne, God bless thee. Bring me the boy that I may look upon him.’

  CHAPTER SIX – LONDON

  January 1663 – April 1666

  ‘Your Grace, by this letter His Royal Highness makes but a general demand. He speaks of victuals, water, beer, powder and shot but leaves the precise charges to your discretion, as he does also the detail, of which there is a troublesome want.’

  For a month, England and the Seven Provinces had been at war. The acute commercial rivalry between the English and the Dutch had combined with the audacious rendition of the Regicides Okey, Barkstead and Corbett by Sir George Downing and others from their hideaway in Delft, to break down all diplomatic civilities. War was the inevitable consequence.

  Monck looked up from his desk in the Admiralty office at the attentive young man. He had revised his opinion of ‘Mister Peeps’ whom he had first encountered nursing a small spaniel of which the King was fond on the day of His Majesty’s landing at Dover. At the time he had formed the impression of the young man as a somewhat silly and sycophantic follower of His Royal Highness, James, Duke of York. Now, as James was preparing to embark to take command of the fleet in his capacity as Lord High Admiral, Monck was beginning to appreciate this Pepys’ ability as an administrator. His was a mind similar, if not superior, to Will Clarke’s, commanding a wealth of detail despite his ignorance of matters maritime – which reminded Monck of his own – but which the young man seemed eager to remedy. It was a little like the blind leading the blind, but they should get along, he had admitted to Anne when he had told her that the King had requested he took up his office as a General-at-Sea, a term then being dropped in favour of Admiral, as the shore-bound arm of the fighting fleet.