This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  There may have been some in the Lords moved by Strafford’s plea, but not in the Commons. Seeing the difficulty before them, the Commons continued with an Act of Attainder. In simple terms, this meant that any allegation could be declared without the need for a formal trial. By this time, many Members had gone home – perhaps because they wanted no part in what was happening. The Act was passed and Charles – with enormous misgivings – gave his royal assent. Strafford was executed, the first of Charles’s ministers to fall victim to Parliament’s – and Pym’s – revenge. Laud was impeached in 1640, but then inconveniently found not guilty by the Lords, which meant another Bill of Attainder in the Commons. He was eventually executed. The Lord Keeper and the Secretary of State both escaped death by fleeing to the Continent.

  The Commons then passed a Bill banning bishops from Parliament. The Lords resented this, not so much for the loss of bishops, but more because the House of Commons was telling them what to do. The Lords threw out the Bill. Then Parliament, after much discussion, presented a Bill which guaranteed that there couldn’t be more than a three-year gap between Parliaments. This second of three Triennial Acts of that time was a direct challenge to the King who considered that he alone decided when Parliament should be called.

  Strafford’s execution triggered an action in Ireland that perhaps the Parliamentarians had not quite anticipated. He had been a harsh ruler of Ireland. Now, those left in command were helpless to contain the uprising of Irish people that followed. Landowners were killed. Conflicting interests ended with much spilled blood. The King’s Lord Justices retaliated with a vengeance that not even Strafford would have employed. To describe it as mass slaughter, certainly of many Irish males from troubled places, would be an exaggeration, but that was how it seemed at the time to the Irish. The Puritans warned that slaughter also would be the way in England if the Catholic persuasion were to overcome the established Church. From the north came a joining of clans to invade England (although this is something of an over-simplification). From the King came demands for funds to fight the invaders. England was a country in certain turmoil. Thus, we should discard the illusion that the Civil War started simply because Parliament argued with the King. The more complicated picture is an amalgamation of the Scots invading England, to be defended by a penniless monarch; Parliament having to be called to get that money; Parliament, led by Pym, seeing an opportunity to put right eleven years of dissatisfaction; the destruction of the King’s inner cabinet by the zealous Pym (who, incidentally was mixed up in some shady commercial deals, so was hardly the Puritan goody some pretended him to be); and then the Irish rebellion.

  The story is further complicated because by the autumn of 1641, Pym’s support was not as strong as it had been at the start of the Parliament. And the King’s supporters were gathering their strength. A document called the Grand Remonstrance, which told the King where Parliament stood, and where the Parliamentarians thought he should stand, was put to the vote. Pym and his colleagues thought that would sort the Parliamentarians from the Royalists. On 22 November 1641, the Grand Remonstrance was put to the vote. The debate was furious. As one Member remarked, ‘We had like to have sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels.’ In the Commons, the Member for Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector of England, awaited the outcome. It is said that he told a friend that if Parliament lost the vote, then he would leave England forever. The Parliamentarians won, but only just. They secured 159 votes; the Royalists 148. The King’s supporters had stood by him and a majority of eleven was not sufficiently convincing for the Parliamentarians.

  Charles offered Pym the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pym turned it down. Charles made opposition Lords members of his Privy Council. Pym’s people accused them of becoming closet Royalists. And so by the end of 1641, the Parliamentarians – the Pymites – and the Royalists were quietly getting their forces together. And then the King lost his nerve. Taunted and goaded by Queen Henrietta, he decided to prosecute five of his principal opponents – including Pym and Hampden – for treason. It was 4 January 1642. The King, and 300 to 400 swordsmen, later known as the Cavaliers, went down to the House of Commons to demand the surrender of the five. But Pym and his colleagues had been warned, and they were not in the Commons.

  A crowd that included guild and trade apprentices then gathered outside Charles’s palace in London. This crowd had been roused and there is no evidence that it was a spontaneous gathering. It was the pudding-basin haircuts of the apprentices that later gave the Parliamentary forces their name: the Roundheads. Whatever the circumstances, the protest was enough to scare the King and his court to leave London for the safer environs at Hampton Court. During the early months of 1642 Charles still thought he could agree terms of his constitutional role but on one essential point Crown and Commons were wide apart: Parliament wanted the King to surrender his sovereignty over Church and State. Charles could never agree to that. In late August 1642, the King raised his royal standard in Nottingham. This was the formal declaration of war.

  Oxford University melted down its gold and silver to pay for the King’s war effort. The Queen sold many of the crown jewels and escaped to the Low Countries where she recruited for Charles. By the end of the autumn, Charles had an army of more than 12,000 foot soldiers and 4,000 cavalry. The Roundheads had more. The popular view is that Cromwell was to the fore in starting the war. He was not. In autumn 1642, Oliver Cromwell was not the leader of the Parliamentary Army. He was a Fens colonel organizing the cavalry of the Army of the Eastern Association commanded by the second Earl of Manchester. Only later did Cromwell become supreme commander. Equally, his family were hardly obscure. He was distantly related to the famous Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister: his great-grandfather was a nephew of Thomas Cromwell.

  Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599 – that put him about eighteen months older than the King. His parents were local gentry who had done quite well when monastery lands had been taken from the Church. He spent a year at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which was a Puritan college. He probably only left because his father died. Oliver had been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Cambridge in Charles’s third Parliament, followed by both the Short and the Long Parliaments. He supported John Pym and he condemned Strafford and Laud. He spoke vigorously, sometimes cruelly, against the suppression of the rights of the common man. He appeared against Anglicans and (of course) Catholics. But it’s difficult to label Cromwell simply as a Puritan because of his own contradictions. As he said, ‘I can tell you what I would not have, though I cannot, what I would.’ What is clear is that once he decided that he was doing ‘God’s work’ then he did so tirelessly and single-mindedly. And perhaps that was one of the secrets of his military success. He believed that a soldier who prayed best fought best.

  At the outset the Parliamentary rebellion claimed to fight for the King, and their commanders had instructions to rescue the King from his malicious advisers and counsellors. But by the autumn, the Parliamentary forces, instructed by German officers, were full of the passion of their cause.

  The King’s advantages and support was mainly in the north and West Country. The Parliamentarians were in London and the south and eastern counties. This meant the Parliamentarians had the King’s capital and so Charles had to take it back. They clashed at Edgehill on 23 October 1642: Charles and his nephews Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice on one side, and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex and son of his namesake, Elizabeth I’s favourite, on the other. This is often described as the first major battle of the Civil War but it ended, at best, indecisively, even though both sides claimed victory. The Parliamentarians, perhaps sensing the enormity of what was happening, offered terms. Charles, maybe over-confident after the battle, rejected any idea of peace. He wanted more than his capital back. He wanted his country. On he marched and met Parliamentarians again, this time at Turnham Green on the outskirts of London. He had to retreat and withdrew as far as Oxford which
became the Royalist headquarters.

  There were three armies for the King: Charles’s own command at Oxford; the Duke of Newcastle’s command in Yorkshire; and in the south-west, that of Ralph Hopton (1596–1652), a Puritan by instinct and birth but with a sense that Parliament should not control the militia. Then there were the Scots. They were against the King, which is why Charles – having to spread his resources – was defeated at Marston Moor near York in July 1644. The anti-Royalists at Marston had three commanders: the Scottish Earl of Leven (1582–1661); Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–71); and Edward Montagu, the Earl of Manchester (1602–71). Charles’s army was led by Prince Rupert. None of the commanders was very good. Prince Rupert was the lesser and 4,000 or so of his men were killed. The King no longer held the north of England and he had little chance of reaching and taking London.

  By June 1645 Fairfax and Cromwell had under their command the recently formed New Model Army. This superior force, along with more thoughtful tactics and organization, led to yet another defeat for the King, this time at Naseby. Worse was to come for Charles. Oxford, effectively his capital, fell in June 1646. By then the Scots had already taken Charles’s personal surrender at Newark. Any thoughts he had that he was safe in Scottish hands were dispelled when they handed him to the Parliamentarians in January 1647.

  Now was the time, if ever there were to be one, for the two sides to reach a truce and more. That could not take place and Charles escaped across the Solent to the Isle of Wight and once again hoped to find a solution with the Scots. He did, in December 1647 get Scottish promises of support. They in turn were promised that he would bring Presbyterianism to England. With hope, the Royalists rose again and this became a sort of second Civil War. But it was not much of one. Cromwell and Fairfax were truly in command. That year, 1648, the Scots invaded England in support of the Stuart King, but they were routed at Preston. Charles was captured and brought before a High Court that called ‘Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for the blood he had shed and mischief he had done to his utmost against the Lord’s cause and the people in these poor nations’. Charles refused to recognize the court and would not speak in his own defence. It would have made little difference. His death warrant was already written and was simply waiting for its signature.

  It was snowing on 30 January 1649 when Charles Stuart was beheaded in front of the Banqueting House in London that his father, James I, had commissioned Inigo Jones to build.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  1649–60

  England became a Republic in January, 1649. The monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican Church were abolished. The Great Seal of England was thrown aside and a new one minted: on one face it had a map of England, on the other, the House of Commons. Scotland was integrated, Ireland savaged. Adultery became punishable by death. War was declared on the Dutch. The Sergeant at Arms, Edward Denby, with his trumpeters and outriders, went about London announcing that whosoever shall proclaim a new King in this nation of England shall be a traitor and suffer death.

  Parliament had taken the legal murder of the King (for that’s what some believed it to have been) most seriously, and understood perfectly that its authority would have to be enforced by the sternest of means. Cromwell’s name had been on the King’s death warrant but at this stage in 1649 he was not the all-powerful leader usually depicted. The first task was to decide who should govern England. It would be a Council of State of forty-one men of highest authority including, sometimes reluctantly, lawyers. If the Republicans thought they had to contend only with a loyalist rump, that was to ignore a simple fact of moving from one system to another: those who might have quietly agitated for rights under the old system often seize the moment of change to campaign even more for their rights, lest they be overlooked. Thus, the Council knew all about the Levellers.

  John Lilburne (1614–57), the leader of the Levellers, had been jailed in 1638 for smuggling Puritan pamphlets into England. When he was released, he naturally enough fought on the side of the Parliamentarians. But he never settled at that. He was a rebel and so was sent back to prison, then exile. The Levellers were in some ways what the twentieth century would have called Socialists, Radicals or even Communists. As their name suggests, they wanted social justice to the extent that everyone should be at the same level in society. The next stage of that proposition was an elected Parliament. The views of the Levellers, as found in their Agreement of the People in 1647, would not be satisfied until the late nineteenth century. The Levellers should not be confused with the Diggers. This was a small, and short-lived, group of people who wanted to have an agriculture commune – a sort of kibbutz in England. The Diggers leader, Gerrard Winstanley (1609–60) was a true Christian ‘communist’, a seventeenth-century Marxist-Leninist as his Law of Freedom in a Platform published in 1652 and dedicated to Cromwell made clear. He opposed the idea of monarchy and landowners and wanted redistribution of wealth – and no wealthy. Cromwell had more urgent, and ruthless, matters on his mind. He may have set aside the Levellers, the Diggers and even a monarch, but the Irish Question was less easily answered.

  Cromwell was determined that not only would he crush the Irish leaders in the military sense, but he would do it so bloodily that it would send shivers of submission through the consciousness of the remainder of the people. And Ireland wasn’t united: there were factions and creeds, families for the Crown, families against it and families against each other.

  The Protestant Royalists, led by the Marquess of Ormonde, were once a well-organized troop of perhaps 12,000 men, but when Cromwell arrived in Ireland, Ormonde was weak. Yet he still attempted to defend the towns of Wexford and Drogheda. After the battle in September 1649 Cromwell wrote to the President of the Council of State, John Bradshaw:

  It hath pleased God to bless our endeavours at Drogheda. After battle we stormed it. The enemies were about 3,000 strong in the town. We refused them quarter. I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives. This hath been a marvellous great mercy. I do not believe that any officer escaped with his life, save only one lieutenant, who I hear, going to the enemy, said that he was the only man that escaped of all the garrison. The enemy upon this were filled with much terror. And truly I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood, through the goodness of God. Dublin 16 September 1649.

  Cromwell gave thanks to God for everything that had happened, according to his belief that a soldier who prayed fiercely, fought fiercely. Meanwhile, in Scotland the late King’s eldest son had been proclaimed King of Great Britain, France and Ireland. One of the conditions of support for the Royalist cause was that the newly proclaimed King, Charles II, should support the Presbyterian cause. This was a terrible condition, especially as it tacitly condemned his mother, a devout Catholic, as an idolater. But the Scottish Commissioners, who demanded of the King more than he could give in his heart, were determined to succeed, and they did. And it was from this moment that Cromwell understood that once he was done with Ireland, he would have to fight on the Scottish borders.

  Just twelve months after the massacre of Drogheda, Cromwell’s forces left 3,000 Scots dead at the Battle of Dunbar. The remainder fled. The Scots rallied under Charles II’s banner. At Scone they crowned him King, and followed him across the border. Cromwell let them. He watched their supply columns stretch, and he knew that the English Royalists would be of little use. In 1651, one year on from Dunbar and two years on from Drogheda, Cromwell defeated the Scots at Worcester. The King escaped and hid in a tree, and so spawned hundreds of public houses called the Royal Oak. Eventually he made his escape to Holland.

  By now, Cromwell, the commander of the army but not yet of the country, saw the signs that the army’s coming battle was with neither Royalist nor Irish opponents, but with Parliament itself. The army was no longer the servant militia of the great families and princes. It had, since Naseby, been a standing army, a national army. Cr
omwell understood the power it represented and the potential danger in its leaders.

  From the moment the Rump Parliament (the group of Long Parliamentarians who kept their seats and announced that England was to be a Commonwealth) ordered the execution of Charles I, its actions, unwittingly and with hindsight, led to the Restoration of the monarchy. Instead of taking bold decisions, Parliament, in its incompetence, became reactionary. The law, local administration and financial management were largely unchanged, and the weaknesses in them were never overcome. And so the republic was run by the committee. Cromwell, the most powerful personality of the time, was seeking Parliament’s revenge in Ireland, putting down the rebellion in Scotland and defeating the royalists at Worcester. It was the Rump Parliament that struggled ineffectively with the day-to-day conundrums of government.

  Cromwell wanted a God-fearing reform of society. Parliament was incapable of delivering so Cromwell called together an assembly of 140 like-minded, supposedly saintly, souls who became known as Members of the Barebones Parliament, named after one of its number, a preacher called Praisegod Barbon. For five months they pontificated, sniped and sneered. They swept aside legislation and replaced it with little that was practical and even less that was popular, especially with the Church, property owners and the army. Eventually the army decided to get rid of the ‘Saints’. It didn’t work. The hard-head Republicans wanted to rip the constitution apart. But Cromwell fiercely protected the principle of the 1653 Instrument of Government – the only written constitution Britain ever had – and determined that the Republicans should go. The Instrument of Government was designed to establish a Protectorate and to create a balance between the army and Parliament. Cromwell was declared Lord Protector on 16 December 1653, but he found, having rid himself of the Republican zealots, that he still did not have the control he wanted so he dissolved Parliament.