For a time, economic hardship worked in favour of the king and the ‘Engagers’. Throughout England, ‘bad weather ruined the harvests of corn and hay for five years from the autumn of 1646 onwards, and every succeeding year until the harvest of 1651 exacerbated the problems left by the previous one’. In Essex, Parson Ralph Josselin noted in May 1648 ‘when rye was earing and eared, such terrible frosts [came] that the ear was frozen and died and cometh unto nothing'; while in June he reported ‘corn laid [flat], pulled down with weeds: we never had the like in my memory.’ In the Isle of Wight, when King Charles asked a landowner ‘whether that [wet] weather was usual in our island’, he replied ‘that in this forty years I never knew the like before’ and predicted that ‘wheat and barley will bear such a price as was never known in England’.37 In London, according to James Howell, ‘a famine doth insensibly creep upon us, and the Mint is starved for want of bullion. Trade, which was ever the sinew of this island, doth visibly decay and the insurance of ships is risen from two to ten in the hundred.’ Howell continued, ‘’Tis true we have had many such black days in England in former ages, but those paralleled to the present are as the shadow of a mountain compared to the eclipse of the moon.’ The Leveller John Wildman agreed. In January 1648 he warned the House of Commons that ‘trading was decayed and the price of food so excessive that it would rend any pittiful heart to heare and see the cryes and teares of the poore, who protest they are almost readie to famish’. According to Wildman, the clothiers ‘professed that trading was so dead, that some of them, who set at work formerly 100 did not now set at work above a dozen’ and that ‘The poor did gather together in troops of 10, 20 [and] 30 in the roades and seized upon corne as it was carrying to market, and devided it among themselves before the owners’ faces, telling them they could not starve.’ He predicted that ‘a sudden confusion would follow, if a speedie settlement were not procured’.38
Such dire predictions led the leaders of both Parliament and the Army to make major concessions. The former promised immunity to serving soldiers and financial relief to their wounded comrades, as well as to the widows and orphans of the slain; the latter agreed to demobilize some 20,000 veterans, some from garrisons and regional forces and the rest from among the radicals who had joined the New Model Army during the occupation of London. Parliament failed, however, to address the grievances of the navy, which allowed royalist agents to provoke a mutiny among the unpaid crews of many warships; and, without naval protection, London's seaborne trade virtually came to a halt.
Now, with the navy mutinous and the New Model Army reduced in size, the second Civil War began. Charles's supporters seized and fortified Pembroke Castle, to serve as a bridgehead for Catholic troops expected from Ireland; rebellions spread in Kent and Essex; and royalists in the north seized both Carlisle and Berwick in preparation for the invasion of the ‘Engager’ army from Scotland. Cardinal Mazarin, in Paris, complained with some justification that ‘the affairs of that country [Great Britain] are in perpetual motion, [creating] an impenetrable uncertainty of what will happen next’.39
Gradually, Cromwell recovered south Wales and routed the Scottish invasion, while Fairfax and his men pacified the southeast; and afterwards the victors converged on London, angry and embittered. Fairfax and his troops had spent 11 weeks in the trenches around Colchester, the weather being ‘very wet, the season very sad'; while Cromwell's men in the northwest, having struggled all day along roads turned by the constant rain into quagmires, slept at night ‘in the field close by the enemy, being very dirty and weary, having marched twelve miles’. Cromwell complained that his cavalry ended the campaign ‘so exceedingly battered as I never saw them in all my life’ while ‘these ways and the weather have shattered [the infantry] all to pieces’.40 Such privation helps to explain the Army's implacable treatment of its adversaries during and after the 1648 campaign. Whereas in the first Civil War, with few exceptions, both sides had treated at least their English enemies with respect, the victors now severely punished those who fell into their hands. When Colchester surrendered, Fairfax court-martialled and shot two of its commanders and sentenced many other defenders to penal servitude in the West Indies. In Wales, Cromwell shot two royalist commanders as soon as they surrendered and sold over 200 more to merchants for transportation to Barbados.
But what penalty should await the monarch who had done most to cause the late war? Since English Law offered no precedents for bringing a wayward sovereign to justice, the Army's leaders took the matter into their own hands: on 20 November 1648 they demanded that Parliament execute ‘capital punishment upon the principal author and some prime instruments of our late wars’ (namely Charles and his leading supporters), and the following morning troops surrounded the Palace of Westminster and either excluded or arrested all Members of Parliament thought likely to vote against a trial. Since many other members prudently stayed away, the House of Commons was reduced to a ‘Rump’ (as it became derogatorily known) of scarcely 150 members (down from almost 600 before the war); and the Rump obligingly created a ‘High Court of Justice’ consisting of 135 judges, including both MPs and officers.
Proceedings began on 20 January 1649, when the king was brought into court under guard. John Cook, ‘solicitor-general for the Commonwealth’, read out the charges against him. ‘Out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will’, Charles had tried 'to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people'; and to that end had ‘traitorously and maliciously levyed war against the present Parliament and the people therein represented’. Some 50 eyewitnesses gave depositions concerning 12 specific acts of violence (what today would be called ‘War Crimes’) between 1642 and 1645 in which the king had taken part. The king refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, showed no contrition, and even smiled as he listened to some of the evidence against him, until on 27 January 1649 his disrespectful demeanour, together with the evidence marshalled by Cook, persuaded 59 members of the High Court of Justice to ‘adjudge that he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and publick enemy, shall be put to death, by the severing of his head from his body’. Only on the scaffold on 30 January (a day of exceptional cold, with icebergs floating down the Thames) did Charles assert his innocence. Moments later, the masked executioner – whom some believed to be Cornet George Joyce – cut off his head.41
Creating the British Republic
The ‘Rump’ now became the supreme executive as well as the supreme legislative authority in England, but at first it did not know what to do with its unlimited power. It took three weeks for them to remove the name ‘king’ from all legal documents and to vest the monarch's executive functions in a Council of State; six weeks formally to abolish the House of Lords; and almost four months to declare ‘the people of England and of all the dominions and territories thereunto belonging’ to be a ‘Commonwealth’.42 Meanwhile, a volume entitled Eikon Basilike (‘The king's image’), in which the late king ‘set down the private reflections of my conscience, and my most impartial thoughts, touching the chief passages … in my late troubles’, had by year's end appeared in 35 English and 25 foreign editions (see Plate 3).43
As Eikon Basilike rallied royalist opinion, the heavy taxes required to maintain the army and navy reduced support for the Rump. Three permanent taxes established by Parliament in 1643 proved particularly burdensome: a reorganized customs tax (whose yield was applied directly to the navy); the ‘assessment’ (a tax on wealth and income, ironically allocated among towns and shires on the same basis as the hated Ship Money, to pay the army); and excise duties (initially levied only on alcohol and certain goods considered non-essentials, but later also on staples, which both paid the army and paid off debts). Their collection proved particularly difficult in 1649, because of the extreme weather and failed harvest. Even in London, normally the best-supplied region of England, the price of flour reached a level unequalled for another half century, a
nd the soldiers of the New Model Army received a wage supplement so that they could buy enough food to live. Civilians enjoyed no such assistance, and London's extant Bills of Mortality show an excess of burials over baptisms. In Essex, Ralph Josselin recorded in his diary the persistent ‘great dearth and want of all things’ in almost every month of 1649, and claimed that ‘the times were very sad in England, so that men dared not travel and, indeed, rich men were afraid to lie in their houses, robbers were so many and bold’.44 The magistrates and clergy of Lancashire clearly perceived ‘the hand of God’:
In this county hath the plague of pestilence been ranging these three years and upward, occasioned manifestly by the wars. There is a very great scarcity and dearth of all provisions, especially of all sorts of grain … which is full six-fold the price that of late it hath been. All trade (by which they have been much supported) is utterly decayed. It would melt any good heart to see the numerous swarms of begging poore, and the many families that pine away at home, not having faces to beg; … to see paleness, nay death appear in the cheeks of the poor; and often to hear of some found dead in their houses or high-wayes for want of bread.45
Amid such dearth, domestic critics of the new regime multiplied. In April 1649 some Levellers accused the Rump of ‘tyranny’ and their imprisonment provoked a demonstration outside Parliament by several hundred women, and the presentation of a protest signed by some 10,000 people. New radical groups also appeared: the ‘Fifth Monarchists’, who wanted to set up a regime ruled by ‘saints’ to prepare for the imminent Second Coming; the ‘Diggers’, who proclaimed that all property should be held in common; the ‘Ranters’, who believed that they had discovered a divinity within themselves that freed them from conventional morality; and the ‘Quakers’, who admitted no distinction in social rank between men and women, or between rich and poor. None of them supported the new Republic.
Critics of the Rump also multiplied outside England. Immediately after the regicide, the Scots Parliament provocatively proclaimed their allegiance to ‘Charles the Second, king of Great Britain and Ireland’ and, even more provocatively, declared that before he could exercise his royal powers, he must promise to uphold ‘the security of religioun, the union betwix the kingdoms, and good and peace of [all] his kingdoms according to the Solemn League and Covenant’.46 This was, in effect, a new declaration of war on England. In Ireland, the Catholic Confederates also recognized Charles II as their legitimate king, and agreed to maintain 18,000 soldiers to fight for his cause: by July 1649 only Dublin and Londonderry lay beyond their control. In addition, royalists controlled the Scilly and Channel Islands while, across the Atlantic, Virginia not only proclaimed its allegiance to Charles II but also outlawed those who denied that he was the rightful king of England. The governors of Bermuda, Antigua, Newfoundland and Maryland soon followed suit and, even in New England, only Rhode Island formally recognized the Commonwealth: settlers elsewhere regarded the regicide as ‘a very solemn and strange act’ and awaited evidence that the new regime enjoyed divine approval before committing themselves.47 In Europe, virtually no government recognized the Commonwealth; the tsar of Russia expelled all English merchants; and royalist exiles murdered the diplomats sent abroad by the young Republic to Spain and Holland, and almost killed a third in Russia.48
Faced by such hostility, the Rump debated the terms of an oath of allegiance known as the ‘Engagement’ to be taken by the new Council of State. A proposal to include language approving Parliament's trial of Charles I was defeated by 36 votes to 19 (an indication both of the small size of the Rump and of doubts concerning the regicide). In the end, the councillors simply swore to serve the current government, ‘without king or house of peers’, to the best of their abilities. The Rump soon imposed a similar oath on all members of Parliament, state employees and members of the armed forces, as well as on clerics, teachers and students at universities and schools. Finally, in January 1650 all males aged 18 and over had to swear that ‘I do declare and promise that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England as it is now established, without a king or House of Lords.’ Nevertheless, one member of the Rump (although not a regicide) lamented that ‘all the world was and would be their enemies’ and that ‘the whole kingdom would rise and cut their throats on the first good occasion'; another committed suicide on the first anniversary of the king's execution; and a third died a month later of depression.49
Ireland presented the most immediate problem for the Commonwealth, and in August 1649 Cromwell sailed for Dublin with 12,000 veterans from the New Model Army, together with a train of 56 siege guns and a war chest of £100,000. The brutal sack first of Drogheda and then Wexford persuaded most of the remaining rebel strongholds to surrender, and within a year London controlled Ireland more effectively than ever before. The poet Andrew Marvell euphorically hailed the regicide as the foundation stone of a new and glorious Roman empire. According to his ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland’,
So when they did design
The Capitol's first line,
A bleeding head where they begun
Did fright the architects to run;
And yet, in that, the State
Foresaw its happy fate.
Now the Irish are ashamed
To see themselves in one year tamed …
And Marvell predicted that his hero would soon do the same in Scotland:
The Pict no shelter now shall find
Within his party-coloured mind;
But from this valour sad
Shrink underneath the Plaid.50
The ‘Picts’, like the Irish, had left the Rump little choice. No sooner had Cromwell returned in triumph to London in June 1650 than news arrived that Charles II planned to return to Scotland, swear to impose the Covenant on all his hereditary dominions, and invade England. The Rump therefore decided to launch a pre-emptive strike and once again sent Cromwell and veterans from the New Model Army. Against them, the Scottish Covenanters suffered from several disadvantages. Since 1636, Scotland had experienced the worst sustained drought in a millennium (page 335 above) culminating, according to historian Sir James Balfour, in heavy snow followed by a cereal harvest of ‘small bulke’ in summer 1649, so that the prices of foodstuffs ‘of all sortes were heigher than ever heirtofoe aney[one] living could remember’. Indeed, he averred, ‘the lyke had never beine seine in this kingdome heretofor, since it was a natione’. Balfour also noted a panic reaction common to many countries during the Little Ice Age: claiming that ‘the sin of witchcraft daily increases in this land’, and fearing divine punishment if it continued, the Scots Parliament issued some 500 witchcraft commissions in 1649–50, resulting in more executions for sorcery than at any other time in Scottish history.51
The Covenanter leadership also attempted to avert the Lord's wrath by purging their army of all ‘malignant, profane, scandalous persons’ – but this fatally weakened their strength when in July 1650 Cromwell did what Charles should have done a decade before: crossed the Tweed with a large army, an artillery train, a large fleet to cover his right flank and a war chest of over £1 million. At the battle of Dunbar on 3 September some 3,000 Scottish soldiers died and 10,000 more fell prisoner. Cromwell hailed his victory as a ‘high act of the Lord's Providence to us’.
For many, both at home and abroad, the victory at Dunbar confirmed the Republic's legitimacy. In London, the Rump confidently struck commemorative medals, which it issued to all soldiers who had taken part (the first ‘campaign medals’ since Roman times). In Boston, Massachusetts, the Reverend John Cotton hailed the victory as the long-awaited sign that God approved of the new republican regime, celebrated a special day of thanksgiving and wrote a personal letter of congratulation to Cromwell. In Paris, Thomas Hobbes put the finishing touches to the first masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language: Leviathan, or the matter, form, and power of a commonwealth, ecclesiastical and civil. Despite its lasting fame, the book was ‘occasioned by
the disorders of the present time’. Seeking to show ‘the mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience’, Hobbes argued that ‘If a monarch subdued by war render himself subject to the victor, his subjects are delivered from their former obligation, and become obliged to the victor’ – namely the Rump.52
Naturally, Charles II (to whom Hobbes thoughtlessly presented a special copy of his book) disagreed. Refusing to accept that God would uphold a regicidal regime against an anointed king, he assembled a ‘national army’ in Scotland that included Highland clansmen and royalists as well as Covenanters, and in summer 1651 they swept southwards, covering 330 miles in three weeks until they reached Worcester, where they hoped to receive reinforcements from the surviving English royalists. Instead, on 3 September 1651, the anniversary of Dunbar, Cromwell attacked and once more prevailed: another 3,000 Scots fell on the field and 10,000 more became prisoners. Relatively few escaped, like Charles II, to fight another day. To Cromwell, this ‘most remarkable, seasonable and signal victory’ was ‘for aught I know, a crowning mercy’ to the young Republic. The Rump organized a victory parade in London, which included some 4,000 Scots prisoners who promptly went into penal servitude – some to drain the Fens and mine Tyneside coal, the rest to labour in the American colonies – and declared that 3 September should forever be celebrated as a day of thanksgiving. It was just getting started.53
Creating the First British Empire
No sooner had Cromwell triumphed at Dunbar than he urged the Rump to seek wider horizons: ‘you shall shine forth to other nations, who shall emulate the glory of such a pattern, and through the power of God turn into the like’. Specifically, Cromwell proposed exporting England's Revolution and the Rump, by now a relatively homogeneous assembly that met almost every weekday to exercise both the executive and legislative functions of government, accepted this new charge with enthusiasm.54
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