The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  However, Plymouth, Hull and Gloucester were all serious threats to the royalists’ ability to maintain their position. Meanwhile one of Pym’s last actions had been to weight the scales of the war further in Parliament’s favour when he added the Scottish armies to Parliament’s cause. By an agreement of September 1643 known as the Solemn League and Covenant, in return for establishing Presbyterianism in England the Scots came in on Parliament’s side and lent it 20,000 men.

  Charles too was looking for outside help. By an agreement with the Irish Catholic rebels called the Cessation, which meant he would cease to prosecute them, he had the help of an army from Ireland. But this also only confirmed the king’s reputation as a man determined to restore papistry in England through the hated Irish Catholics.

  But the Scots army was a much more soldierly affair. After it joined the Parliamentary side, the tide of victory started to turn in the rebels’ favour. In July 1644, once the Scots had fought their way south to join up with the Fairfaxes in Yorkshire, one of the most important battles of the war took place. The king’s best generals, his nephew Prince Rupert and the Earl of Newcastle, were conclusively defeated at the Battle of Marston Moor. Hitherto Prince Rupert’s great weapon, his cavalry charge, had been irresistible. Now, however, he came up against the Eastern Association army, which had already covered itself with glory at Hull. These troops, raised from the eastern counties of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, were very strongly Puritan–many of the emigrants to America had come from the same region.

  The Eastern Association had gained a great reputation for their zeal and discipline. They were a new kind of Puritan soldier who sang hymns as they marched, who frowned on drinking, but who were as ferocious with the pike as any soldier fuelled on spirits. The most important figure in the Association was the profoundly religious Oliver Cromwell, the burly MP, who quite unexpectedly, since he had never been a soldier, was coming to the fore as a result of his exceptional military talent. In the first year of the war he had been so impressed by Prince Rupert’s use of cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill that he started training his own mounted troops. By Marston Moor the eastern counties cavalry were as proficient in the saddle as Prince Rupert’s men, and much more disciplined. In the end, that discipline, and the bravery of the Scots, turned the battle, and the royalists were routed. Cromwell said afterwards that ‘God made them as stubble to our swords.’ From that day forward the man who is also known as Old Noll for his large, potato-like nose would be christened Ironsides because no one could get through the iron sides of him and his men.

  Losing Marston Moor meant that the royalist cause lost control of the north. Though the south-west continued to be held by the king’s generals, the defeated royalist army remained stationed in the midlands for the first half of 1645. Charles’s plan was that it should join up with royalist troops recently raised by the Marquis of Montrose from the Highlands of Scotland. In an extremely surprising turn of events, Montrose, who had been one of the leading spirits of the Covenanters, turned against his Calvinist allies and backed the royal cause. He hoped the chastened king could be brought to act in a more restrained and constitutional manner.

  That same year Montrose swept through Scotland in a series of stunning victories and soon controlled almost the whole country. It was a feat made more remarkable by the fact that at the beginning of the campaign his cavalry had consisted of only three horses, and his army had comprised undisciplined Highland clans whose leisure time was passed by feuding with one another. But the combination of Montrose’s noble and inspiring personality and the clans’ traditional loathing of the Campbells, whose chief Argyll was the head of the Covenanters, had welded them into an unstoppably ferocious fighting force.

  In the Parliamentary camp, meanwhile, the knowledge that the war was still not won was making its leaders reconsider the way their army was organized. Just as Parliament had been divided on the question how far they should go in rebelling against the king, the Parliamentary leaders themselves were also becoming divided about their cause. Despite their importance in the earlier constitutional battle between Parliament and King, figures like the Earl of Manchester (formerly Lord Mandeville) and Essex had become rather afraid of making all-out war on the king. Manchester had been heard to say that he thought the war would never be ended by the sword, only by discussion. Furthermore, he warned, ‘If we should beat the king ninety nine times and he beat us once we should all be hanged.’

  These more moderate thinkers within the Parliamentary cause, who had a majority in the House of Commons, became known as the Presbyterian party when the question of what to do about the Church of England established a fault-line through which political divisions emerged. Their willingness to impose Presbyterianism on England through the Church, spoke of a respect for hierarchy that was opposed by the more radical Parliamentarians, the Puritan Independents who believed in religious toleration and whose leader in the Commons was Oliver Cromwell. Though the Independents were a minority party among MPs, most of the army was of their religious persuasion. The Independents tended to be more exaltedly religious men, belonging to the Independent religious sects and impelled by simple religious imperatives. They despised the Presbyterians’ softening attitude and believed that command should be taken away from people who were not prepared to go for outright victory over a wicked king.

  After some adroit manoeuvring behind the scenes by Cromwell, in February 1645 the Self-Denying Ordinance deprived all members of the Houses of Parliament of their commands–only Cromwell himself was excepted in recognition of his remarkable skills as a general. Manchester and Essex were forced to retire and the Parliamentary forces were now called the New Model Army, controlled by Cromwell as lieutenant-general of cavalry under Sir Thomas Fairfax, who became commander-in-chief. The New Model Army was intensely religious, as the Eastern Association had been, and hero-worshipped Cromwell. As a sign that extremists among the Parliamentary forces were seizing power, Laud was at last executed.

  Despite Montrose’s victories in Scotland, the year 1645 proved decisive for the Parliamentary armies. In June at the Battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire the king’s army was even more conclusively trounced than it had been at Marston Moor. After a tremendous initial charge whose impetus completely broke up the left wing of the New Model Army under Henry Ireton, Prince Rupert never followed through. He indulgently allowed his cavalry to vanish from the battlefield to pillage the Parliamentary baggage train. In his absence Cromwell’s soldiers cleaned up. As the royalists fled, they left behind not only most of their arms cache but Charles I’s secret papers. These revealed that, in order to entice the Irish Catholic army to England, the king had promised to suspend the anti-Catholic laws; he was also plotting to pay for foreign troops to invade England, which his son Charles had left the country to arrange. This only confirmed the Parliamentarians’ darkest fears of a future England oppressed by absolutism and sinful Catholicism.

  In September 1645 the king’s last hope of aid from the northern Scots died when Montrose was comprehensively defeated at Selkirk by the veteran Scots general David Leslie. Though the personal valour of Montrose’s Highland troops was incomparable, they did not understand the need to remain as an army at harvest time. Around August many melted away back to their glens. Meanwhile Montrose’s attempt to rally the Lowlands foundered on the Lowlanders’ Presbyterian hatred for Charles’s Irish Catholic allies. Montrose escaped to the continent, while that same month Charles’s last army outside Cornwall was defeated at Rowton Heath near Chester.

  At the beginning of 1646 the king’s army even lost its hold on the west when Truro, the capital of Cornwall, surrendered to its besiegers. Thereafter the writing was on the wall. In May, as town after town fell and the Roundheads began to approach the royalist headquarters, Charles left Oxford and rode north to surrender to the Covenanter Scots camped at Newark. They took him on to Newcastle. Finally, in June, Oxford was captured by the Parliamentarians and the First Civil War was o
ver.

  Charles had chosen to give himself up to the Scots because there was a possibility that they might back him against the English. Tensions had not abated between the factions into which the Parliamentary cause had divided. Indeed the split between the Presbyterians and the army had become so serious that the Presbyterian MPs sent their own representatives hurrying north to negotiate separately with the king and the Scots against the army. They suggested that the king should be returned to power under certain conditions, the so-called Propositions of Newcastle: Presbyterianism would become the established Church, Parliament would control the army and the fleet for twenty years, and there would be strict enforcement of the laws against Catholics. But these were the very conditions that Charles had rejected before the war, and in the end he could not bring himself to accept them. In January 1647, in return for £400,000 owed to them in army back-pay, the king was handed over to Parliament by his Scots jailers and then conveyed to Holmby House in Northamptonshire. The Scots now journeyed north back to their own country, leaving the army, which increasingly looked to Cromwell as its leader, to continue its struggle for power with the Presbyterians.

  During the first six months of 1647, while the king remained at Holmby House, the antagonism between the army and the Presbyterians intensified. The Independents’ or soldiers’ influence in Parliament was increasing and the Presbyterian MPs were very alarmed at the way the army had become a political force and saw a future for itself as part of the government. They had expected that once the war was over it would disperse and leave them to rule. The Presbyterians decided to strike first. If they could disband the New Model Army, then the threat from its men would disappear. The Presbyterians made the mistake of not paying its wages first–in the case of the cavalry these were ten months in arrears. The army simply refused to disband. Instead it mutinied and elected its own political council, on which Cromwell was the leading light.

  By June 1647 Cromwell with his usual tactical genius saw that he would have to seize the most important piece on the chessboard: the king. He despatched Cornet Joyce to Holmby House to capture Charles for the army and take him to the old Tudor palace of Hampton Court. The army meanwhile marched to London and expelled eleven Presbyterian MPs from Parliament, thus proving itself just as much an enemy to Parliamentary privilege as Charles had been. Its leaders now offered the king their own Heads of Proposals. These were rather reasonable: Charles could return to the throne so long as Parliament met every two years; bishops could be restored so long as no one had to obey them; and the prayer book could be reintroduced so long as its prayers were not compulsory.

  But these straightforward men with their straightforward ideas were dealing with the wrong man. Convinced after the expulsion of the Presbyterians from Parliament that internecine war was about to erupt between the two Parliamentary sides, Charles simultaneously entered into secret negotiations with the Scots and the English Presbyterian party, believing he could bargain with them from a stronger position after the army’s offer. He escaped to the Isle of Wight and, though he was captured and held in Carisbrooke Castle, still contrived to send secret messages to the Scots and negotiate with them.

  At Carisbrooke the devious Charles managed to sign the Engagement, a single treaty with the more moderate Covenanters under the Marquis of Hamilton, who had deserted Argyll. Under the Engagement, Charles finally agreed to establish Presbyterianism in England, but to suppress all heretical sects–which included all the sects gathered under the banner of the Independents–as soon as a Scots army had invaded England and set up a new Parliament. By 1648 a combination of the Presbyterians’ fear of the extreme sectarians in the army, the king’s intrigues and the news that a Scots army would come to their rescue had welded the English Presbyterians, the royalists and the Presbyterian Scots together to make common cause.

  The Second Civil War began with risings in Kent and Essex in June, and in South Wales in July. The Thirty Years War had just ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, so the king had a hope of Catholic continental troops coming to his aid. But Fairfax defeated the Kent rebels and Cromwell, having crushed the rising in Wales, went on to destroy the small and inadequate Scots army at Preston. The Essex royalists surrendered a fortnight later, at the end of August 1648. And though the Second Civil War was now over, the danger to the Parliamentary cause had not evaporated. As a sign of the pro-royalist mood in the country, no fewer than nine ships of the fleet suddenly changed sides and sailed to Holland to join the Prince of Wales.

  Ominously the new crisis made the army turn violently against the king, in the belief that he could never be trusted again. Disgusted with the king’s lack of plain dealing, it published a declaration stating that it was its duty ‘to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed, and the mischief he had done to his utmost against the Lord’s cause and people in these poor nations’. It had had enough of delay and negotiation, and events were moving towards an uncontrollable finish. Forcibly removing Charles from the Isle of Wight, where he had had considerable freedom of movement, the army imprisoned him under twenty-four-hour guard in Hurst Castle in Hampshire, before transferring him three weeks later to Windsor. Then on 6 December 1648, in what is called Pride’s Purge, 143 Presbyterian MPs were ejected from the Commons by troops under Colonel Thomas Pride. The remaining members, forming the Rump Parliament, were Independents, supporters of Oliver Cromwell and the army.

  The army now insisted that the king be brought to trial. Though the House of Lords refused to countenance such a step, a soi-ditant High Court of Justice was created by a vote of the House of Commons. It consisted of 135 commissioners, few of whom were lawyers, none of whom were judges, and a lowly provincial lawyer named John Bradshaw was elected president. On 20 January 1649 King Charles stood trial beneath the hammer beams of Westminster Hall where his distant ancestors had once dispensed justice. Beyond the little world of Westminster the rest of England was stunned by the army’s presumption.

  Though he might have lost his kingdom, Charles had not lost his wits. In a loud voice, his stammer for once not detectable, he asked by what authority he had been brought to the bar, for no authority existed in England to try a king. ‘By the authority of the people of England,’ Bradshaw replied. But Charles would not answer to the charges of an unconstitutional court and refused to say anything throughout the rest of the trial. His son the Prince of Wales, who had wept uncontrollably in Holland when he heard what was happening, now sent a piece of blank paper to the Rump, declaring that he would put his signature to any demand if his father’s life was spared. But it was to no avail.

  The ‘court’ continued to hear the evidence against the king. As nothing was said in his defence, it was shown that the king had made war on his people, had raised troops against Parliament and had been a ‘tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation’. He was therefore sentenced to death by having his head severed from his body.

  The death warrant was signed by only 59 of the 135 commissioners. The rest had slunk away, reluctant to set their names to a document of such dubious legality. Thus Charles I was condemned to death by a minority of the court, which had been established by a minority of the House of Commons, indeed by an illegal remnant thereof, and without the concurrence of the House of Lords.

  Unexpectedly, in the face of death Charles I showed a strength and dignity nobody knew he possessed. As one writer put it, ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.’ On 30 January the king was executed outside Banqueting House in Whitehall, which Inigo Jones had built for his father James I. When he stepped on to the scaffold, a small figure dressed all in black, Charles was quite composed; he had spent the last days of his life praying with the Bishop of London, William Juxon. Because it was such bitter weather he wore two shirts, so that a shiver of cold would not be mistaken for one of fear. All round Whitehall, steel-helmeted men on horseback kept the crowds at bay. But there were hundreds and thousands of
people nevertheless. When the head with its long, black, flowing locks was severed from the body, a terrible cry went up from the crowd like a soul in pain.

  A witness noted in his diary, ‘The blow I saw given, and can truly say with a sad heart, at the instant whereof, I remember well, there was such a groan by the thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.’ As the masked executioner held up the dripping head and said, ‘Behold the traitor Charles Stuart,’ there was no shout of triumph, only the sound of smothered weeping. Realizing that all had not gone to plan, the army now hustled the people out of Whitehall. The body was removed for embalming before it was taken to Windsor. St George’s Chapel would be its final resting place.

  There is a story, which has the ring of truth, that on the night of the king’s execution, while the body was still lying at Whitehall, a hooded figure approached. Looking at the royal corpse, he muttered with some regret, ‘Cruel necessity.’ It has always been believed that this was Oliver Cromwell.