Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  The portrait of Monck under which I occasionally dine is not a good one, being a copy of an original destroyed in the Blitz of 1940. I have drawn upon a handful of others from which to describe the man’s appearance. As to his character, I conceived him to be on the one hand ruthless, but upon the other, kind; a thorough-going professional soldier-of-fortune with a touch of genius and a prodigious capacity for hard work. He seemed to foreshadow the Duke of Wellington in his emphasis on the crucial details of logistics, and he put duty before all else. He led, as do all great leaders, by example and by placing the welfare of his troops before his own. Some of what I have him say or write is what it is recorded that he said or wrote; almost all of what I have him do, he did. My own inventions have been largely imaginative augmentations of what little we know, rather than free interpretations. For example, he did send two falcons to Lambert from Scotland, though there is no evidence that he received them from Ewan Dhu. I had Sir Ewan Cameron present them to Monck as a way of conveying Cameron’s change of heart and his conversion from Royalist rebel to a loyal supporter of Monck’s. This alone is a simplification; Ewan Dhu was self-interested, possessing a dubious code of conduct in common with his equals among the Highland Chieftains and their clans, all of whom Sir Walter Scott sanitised to such effect.

  I have had to gloss over a good deal, for fear of risking the reader’s patience: Monck’s early service in the Low Countries, for example, and his time in Ireland. He was indeed the hero of the forlorn-hope in the storming of Breda, but a gap in his life when he still lay under the shadow of the alleged murder of Nicholas Battyn and ‘disappeared’ from the record required the invention of service as gunner in the Perseus, a merchant ship in the employ of the Levant Company. This is not impossible; he was a Devon man with links to the great mariners of the Elizabethan Age, he was a trained soldier and, in common with other ship-owners, the Levant Company armed its ships against the Barbary corsairs. The device enhances his experience as an artillerist and gives him some tenuous grounding in seamanship which may, just may, years later have played some small part in recommending him for sea-service.

  Anecdotal history has not treated Monck kindly nor, I suspect, fairly. The two great diarists of the age tended to be hostile. Samuel Pepys, Montagu’s protégé, knew him well and did indeed work alongside Monck. Typically two-faced, Pepys was nevertheless less than kind. Nor did John Evelyn hold Monck in high opinion. Both naturally wrote from personal viewpoints, and both wrote of Monck in the later stages of his life when he was in decline and in almost constant ill-health. Even Gumble admits in his panegyric that by this time the dropsy and asthma afflicted Monck, the onset of which ‘did in some measure abate the faculties of his mind, he becoming after[wards] more drowsy and lethargical’. What is therefore the more remarkable is the fact that he had continued to undertake onerous duties after his health was broken – evidence of his strong sense of duty. His remaining in London during the plague; his conduct during the Four Day’s Battle (acknowledged by most naval historians as the greatest clash of men-of-war in the age of sail); his renewal of the fight against the Dutch after this defeat which culminated in the decisive victory of the following month; his summons to London to fight the great fire – these and these alone in any other man would have been sufficient to earn him a creditable niche in British history.

  Monck was thought to be stupid; ‘thick’, we might say today. He was reputedly avaricious and, given the great wealth he eventually accrued, penny-pinching, even mean. He had married beneath him and to a termagant, a shrew, a greedy woman, and an open Royalist. Both had been raised to ducal dignity on the back of him turning his coat. Given the ‘honours system’ of the Merry Monarch’s court, this is a fatuous accusation. Monck deserved his ennoblement a good deal more than Mr Palmer, whose own elevation rested upon his allowing the King to place a pair of cuckold’s horns upon his all-too-willing head. In gratitude for allowing his wife to warm his bed, the King created the acquiescent husband Lord Castlemaine and, later still, Duke of Cleveland.

  In a time of turmoil many accusations of infamy were flung about and many stuck to Monck, most of which were but partially justifiable. There were arguments that could be mustered to accuse Monck of murder, bigamy, high treason, bad-faith, turning his coat, lying, malfeasance, corruption in public affairs and adultery, but in an age when uncertainties prevailed, justice was slewed and adultery was a capital offence, one need not take these at the vicious face-value with which they were levelled at him. No doubt jealousy, intrigue and political faction played their insidious parts, and no man is perfect. It was Monck’s fate to be obliged to pick his way through the most awesome complexities of politics, religion, loyalty – both personal and national – that then prevailed, or perhaps, I should say, vacillated. In Scotland in 1654, he was charged with the suppression of what one side thought of as a just war, and his own master, Cromwell, considered open rebellion. In the event, Monck treated his beaten foe with a maturity and a consideration from which modern war-mongers could well learn; Scotland genuinely prospered, albeit briefly, under what was Monck’s relatively benign dictatorship.

  Despite Parliament’s assertions, this was never an age of democracy. At best it was an era presaging the long upheavals that would follow to bring us to our modern rocky assumptions about the Rights of Man and the sovereign will of ‘the people’.

  Seen in this light and against the extreme prejudices of his own time, Monck’s life is all the more amazing. He was no visionary, but a pragmatic man. As a harshly lampooning popular song said of him, ‘George Monck was a practical man’. His silent imperturbability, his playing-his-cards-close-to-his-chest, his dousing of personal ambition and submission to a greater authority than his own military power, were truly admirable. He did, it would seem, genuinely believe that the civil power was pre-eminent, and he did regard ‘the Three Nations/Kingdoms’ as deserving of some sort of unification under a system of government that was of general benefit. His patience in awaiting the outcome of events, his deep and true patriotism, his utter devotion to duty as he conceived it (that power which he possessed emanating from the origin of his commission), and his apparently genuine wish for the greatest good for the greatest number, are impressively ahead of his time. No wonder he was roundly vilified by the self-righteous bigots who flourished on all sides during his lifetime.

  As for his avarice, he took all that was his due according to the morals of his day and he refused a good deal that others might have quietly filched, most especially that of high office in Ireland. But he was not averse to money, far from it, and he used it to bend others to his will with some skill. Although he came from the country squirearchy and had Plantagenet blood in his veins, his father had been ruined to the point of desperate impoverishment and few who grow up short of bread and under social humiliation ever forget it. His wife Anne, whose love for Monck was warmly requited, came from a poor background and had been the victim of a brutal first husband. Can one blame her for her acquisitiveness, or the perhaps overly careful house-keeping that attracted accusations of meanness? Neither she nor her husband had any desire to squander the fortune that must be preserved if their beloved son was to maintain the glory of his Dukedom. Such things mattered then as they do now. The Moncks’ marriage was a very human relationship and both clung to each other in an age which degenerated under the restored Charles into an almost national debauch.

  In short, there is much to be admired in this man and his coterie. The devotion of companions and associates as disparate as Thomas Morgan (a soldier-of-fortune very like Monck, wedded to his duty and indifferent to politics), William Clarke, Thomas Clarges, William Morice, Thomas Gumble and even Cameron of Lochiel, all stand as silent witness to Monck’s true character, while the evidence of his soldiers’ sobriquet of ‘Honest George’ alongside Cromwell’s trust, only add to the portrait of a man that popular received-history might be seen to have traduced rather badly. No-one is more disliked than an upright and moderate ma
n among rogues, for he is a walking reproach whose good name must be muddied at every opportunity.

  Of course, the actual character of Monck drawn in these three stories is a product of my own imagination. I have no idea by what psychological process an obsessed story-teller converts what he or she reads of a real-life person into pages of fiction. All I know is that it happens, not without some excitement, and – at least as far as I am concerned – a buzz of satisfaction. If I feel that in my interpretation I have got it about right, no reader can ask more. That is not to say that a reader might not profoundly disagree with me, but those are the risks I run in writing an historical novel, and the reader accepts in scanning it.

  One has, however, to humanise the historical record and make Monck credible, along with those about him, particularly his intimates, such as Anne, Clarges and Clarke, not to say major figures like Oliver Cromwell and John Lambert (even Bishop Wren, uncle of the astronomer, mathematician and architect of St Paul’s Cathedral, Christopher). While Monck decidedly acted against Archibald Campbell, the Marquess of Argyll, his interventions on behalf of several of his old Parliamentary foes was merciful. Lambert’s life was spared, though he would die in prison after twenty-four years of durance; Fleetwood, subjected to a fine under the Indemnity Act, lived until 1692; Haselrig, that ‘absurd, bold man’ who was both ‘rash and hare-brained’ went to The Tower where he died in early January 1661. The Regicide Richard Ingoldsby’s claim that Cromwell had held his hand and forced his signature upon King Charles I’s death warrant is doubtful, for the name is clear and well-formed; but Monck’s sending him to confront Lambert and catch him at Daventry, thereby rendering a signal service, saved Ingoldsby’s life. He received a Royal Pardon and was made a Knight of the Bath at Charles II’s coronation. His nephew, a Major-General, served under Marlborough at Blenheim. Monck rescued others who do not feature in the novels, in particular Colonel Hutchinson whose wife, a prolific letter-writer, had little good of say of her husband’s saviour and it has been his fate to be treated thus by many, rather than admired for what he achieved.

  It struck me that, among his darker qualities, George Monck had a ferocious temper and there is a strange allusion to something of the sort in Gumble’s biography during the last days of Monck’s life. It got him into trouble from the start when he thrashed Nicholas Battyn for the humiliation the wretched lawyer visited upon George’s father. Later, Monck publicly beats two other people: a seaman in Whitehall (whom I named Harris) and an unknown army officer. The fact that a man so seemingly in control of himself occasionally lost his temper so consequentially led me to speculate that this internal conflict might produce a loss of self-esteem, even perhaps moments of self-doubt. It also seemed not unreasonable to assume that, despite his success at sea, he was never quite comfortable serving as a flag-officer and that when in this situation his self-doubt might plausibly resurface. So be it; I present George Monck as he may have been and I hope that I have done some honour to his shade.

  I have tried not to exaggerate anything about my protagonist’s amazing life. One thing I have not dared to tamper with is the achievement of his campaign against the Earls of Glencairn and Middleton in 1654. By any standards this is amazing, even epic. It deserves a better hand than mine to adumbrate it.

  While I was meditating on how to craft a story based on Monck’s life I came across several interesting documents. One was The Order and Ceremonies used at the Funeral of His Grace, George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, Earl of Torrington, & Co.; another was Monck’s own meditative treatise, Observations upon Military and Political Affairs, which he wrote when a prisoner in The Tower of London (and a third was a collection of letters written by Monck relating to the restoration of the King). In studying the first of these, I discovered the presence of John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, in Monck’s funeral procession – hence the Proem in the first novella, The Forging, and the Epilogue in the present work. The Observations reveal a good deal about Monck’s modus operandi, but also his thinking. What was even more interesting from the constructive point of view was that I increasingly judged it quite possible that Monck did in fact act as a role-model for the aspiring John Churchill, a hypothesis given greater weight by a subsequent reading of Winston Churchill’s magnificent biography of his illustrious ancestor, Marlborough, His Life and Times (though Churchill makes no mention of the young Marlborough being in Monck’s cortege). We shall never know, but the parallels – from alleged avarice to military method, from accusation of meanness to a difficult wife, from a firm marriage to public dislike, and even an allusion to the supremacy of Parliamentary rule – are, I think, convincing.

  Little of Monck now remains: a few remnants at Great Potheridge House, some memorials in Scotland, a portrait or two, a London street and a Canadian seaway named Albemarle. There is also that scurrilous English folk-song with its telling refrain that ‘George Monck was a practical man’ and the slow and lugubrious General Monck’s March danced to by Morris Men and said to reflect the slow progress of the march south from Coldstream as a-waiting-upon-events. Nothing of note then, except, that is, the British monarchy and the Coldstream guards! But even these two institutions have long buried his significance in their own histories. Scotland itself would rather remember the disastrous Stuarts, cheerfully forgetting that the egregious pertinacity of that later – and ‘Bonny’ – Charles Stuart led to the ruin of the Highlands and the divisive destruction of the country Monck had tended so carefully.

  Not that Monck’s own dynasty fared any better than that of the King he restored to the throne. Monck’s sole surviving son Christopher turned to the bad. Having been married to Elizabeth Cavendish immediately prior to Monck’s death, and made a Knight of the Garter by King Charles II immediately afterwards, Kit Monck was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Chancellor of Cambridge University, Colonel of both the King’s and the Queen’s Horse, Captain of His Majesty’s Life Guards, Lord Lieutenant of Devon and Wiltshire, and joint-Lord Lieutenant of Essex. Endowed with the vast fortune Monck had accrued, Kit and Elizabeth threw themselves into the giddy, foolish life of Charles II’s amoral Court. However, after a less-than-successful period in command of an English force in The Netherlands, the younger Monck appears to have suffered a personality change, becoming lugubrious and introspective. He did, however, raise the militia of Devon and Cornwall in 1685 against the Duke of Monmouth, the rebellious bastard son of Charles II who disputed the throne with his uncle, James II, the former Duke of York (and was soon to lose it to his Protestant daughter and her husband).

  Kit’s wife, meanwhile, was showing signs of mental instability which may have been exacerbated by her husband’s distant appointment as Governor of Jamaica. Here Kit Monck showed some promise as a reformer, but was better known as a drunk who died at thirty five of ‘a tropical disease’. Sadly his widow progressively deteriorated, squandering Monck’s huge fortune and losing the Potheridge Old George had so assiduously saved and had been rebuilding. She died insane at the age of eighty, whereupon the creation of the first Dukedom of Albemarle became extinct.

  Finally, I must make mention of two technical matters. The first is dates. Although it may be argued that these have no place in a story, historical novels based on fact cannot ignore them. I have not troubled the reader with the vexations of the ‘eleven days’ that so upset our forebears when the country changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in the mid-eighteenth century. However, most modern accounts use the Gregorian notation insofar as years are concerned. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for example, assumes that the year started on 1 January (and which, curiously, Gumble notes as New Year’s Day, 1669!), which removes the necessity of conversion for the modern reader. Thus for us today Monck’s march south starts on the second day of 1660, even though he would have written the date somewhat differently, placing it in 1659.

  The second is of place names. Most of these are familiar to the modern reader but the Inverlochy where Monck�
��s subordinate Brayne commanded, was later renamed Fort William. It is also worth mentioning that some place-names in Scotland are duplicated. The ‘little Loch Garry’ that features in The Tempering, and near which Morgan so decisively pounced on Middleton’s unwary column at Dalnaspidal, lies alongside the A9. One might pass it without noticing it and it should not be confused with the more picturesque Loch Garry near Fort Augustus where Morgan had his precipitate encounter with the rebels.

  Richard Woodman.

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