This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  A series of Royalist plots were attempted, including a popular one known as Penruddock’s Rising. None was successful, but in 1655 Cromwell decided to split England and Wales into eleven districts, each to be run by a Major-General, a rank devised in the New Model Army in 1642. Almost without visible opposition, the Major-Generals policed, taxed and administered with a Puritan zeal that Cromwell respected. They raised taxes for the war against Spain and they raised the numbers in the Lords to nod through the Bills and money-raising legislature that Cromwell needed. Thus, by 1657 Cromwell had a clearly more agreeable, although not an entirely satisfactory, Parliament which produced an amended constitution called ‘A Humble Petition and Advice’. This allowed Cromwell to name his successor and to choose his own council of rulers. (So much for the starting point of modern democracy.)

  The Humble Petition and Advice also offered Cromwell the Crown, and there is some evidence that he liked the idea of becoming King so that he could continue what he saw as the Lord’s work. The idea that an English Republic would wish to go back to monarchy should not be surprising. Monarchy was presumably dynastic, therefore with all the obvious historical difficulties in mind, the people did like the laws of succession and accession. Moreover, a monarch represented the people: in return for allegiance, the monarch would protect the people from its enemies – foreign invaders and government. This did not mean, as everyone was aware, that a king or queen would instigate benign (if not divine) rule. In these circumstances, should Cromwell be King, the twitch of regicide could easily be at his collar just as it had been for the previous incumbent. Cromwell, who had such distinct views on how society should behave, who could be ruthless (as the Irish had discovered at the massacre at Drogheda), who could bend and break the constitution when it suited, was incapable of taking that final step to the throne. For weeks and weeks, in conference after conference, the Lord Protector produced little more than page after page after page of speeches imperfectly punctuated with indecision, with references to the apostles, to the Psalms and always to God’s will. But it was not until one Friday afternoon in May 1657 that Cromwell could bring himself to give Parliament his answer to their question: would he be King, or wouldn’t he? Answer came in the usual rambling way Cromwell seemed incapable of avoiding: no. No, he would not accept the Crown. Behind his refusal was, as ever, the army, particularly the lower orders who did not like the regalia of monarchy. It is doubtful that Cromwell could have held the army’s loyalty if he had accepted the Crown. Thanks to Cromwell, there was a well-trained army and it could turn on anyone and devour them; there was no institution in the land capable of stopping it from doing so.

  But the important point here is not so much that Cromwell did or did not become King, but that a large and important group understood that kingship once more mattered to the survival of society. Cromwell understood it clearly. This offer of the Crown to Cromwell was, therefore, an admission that at some stage the monarchy would be restored. It was also recognition that Cromwell’s weakness was partly based on the decision to execute Charles I. It may be an oversimplification, but Parliament, in its unsophisticated practice of politics and constitution, did not know how to exercise lasting power. Hence the irony: the real reason for offering Cromwell the Crown was to curb the very power that he had used to enforce his vision. He would protect the people for as long as the good Lord gave him the breath and strength to do so. Maybe, the Lord’s attention wandered for, on 3 September1658, on the anniversaries of the terrible massacre at Drogheda, the Battle of Dunbar and the Battle of Worcester, the Lord Protector died.

  The great experiment, the Commonwealth, the Republic, died with Cromwell; not officially or immediately, of course, but without Oliver Cromwell it ran out of steam. Cromwell’s son, Richard, took over as Lord Protector, but within eighteen months Charles II was heading for the throne.

  The momentous and revolutionary abolition of the monarchy in the middle of the seventeenth century failed because, in spite of the constitutional revolution, there was no structured party system. There was no machinery that could control jealousies or at least contain them beneath a recognized label. And where Oliver Cromwell had understood and coped with the jealousies of the army commanders, his son, Richard, could not and, indeed, fell victim to them. The army liked him and he was likeable, but he had no dictatorial powers, a fact that at first he did not understand. The irony was this: Cromwell needed Parliament just as monarchs had; even though Parliament was still imperfectly formed, it had enough personality to exercise what authority it had or could assume – against anyone. Remember, Parliament was not yet a permanent body. It was called when the Head of State either considered or was forced to consider that it had to be consulted. And although Cromwell, the Republic and Parliament are often lumped together, they were not one and the same. Cromwell fought Parliament just as earlier monarchs had done. Parliament fought the powers of the Protector, just as earlier Parliaments had fought the monarchs. Parliament was rather like an elected extraordinary general meeting of a corporation. And it was up to the Commons to grab back all those powers that it believed Oliver Cromwell had taken over. Parliament sensed that the army had become a new estate of the realm and therefore regarded itself immune to any democratic control

  The army, or rather its lower echelons and therefore majority, were demanding the sort of revolution popular in the developing world of the twentieth century. The army wanted a proper republic – not an experiment. Richard Cromwell had none of the guile, style, ruthlessness or support of his father. He was overthrown by the army, which resurrected the old guard of the long rejected and ridiculed Rump Parliament. But these were the death days of the great experiment in constitutional reform. The army was once more dividing, but for reasons of powerful ambition rather than monarchist and republican dogma. The rift at the top of the army grew and this sent shivers of disunity throughout the senior ranks who, to a man, started to have doubts about their hardline actions against Parliament. It was December 1659.

  George Monck, Commander-in-Chief of the army, had been one of the Parliamentary commanders in Ireland. His secret neutrality agreement with the Ulster Irish had made Cromwell’s suppression of Ireland that much simpler. Now, he marched south from Coldstream in the Scottish borders to London. But he marched with no personal ambition; Monck opposed the notion of army rule. He therefore accepted the need for free Parliamentary elections and free elections meant that those who had never really wanted a Republic came back to both Houses of Parliament. This did not mean they accepted without question the rule of the monarch, but they did accept, on reasonable terms, the institution of monarchy. So it was from this point that the Restoration of the monarchy was inevitable.

  Imagine the excitement that an ordinary change of government causes in our modern society and then guess what it might have been like in 1660 when the news spread of Monck’s arrival and the introduction of free elections. Certainly Samuel Pepys, opening his diary in 1660, was impressed.

  February 3

  I and Joyce [Mrs Pepys] went walking all over Whitehall, whither General Monck was newly come and we saw all his forces march by in very good plight and stout officers.

  Perhaps Pepys meant Monck’s officers were stout hearted rather than portly.

  February 7

  Boys do now cry ‘Kiss my Parliament’ instead of ‘Kiss my Arse’ so great and a general contempt is the Rump come to among all men, good and bad.

  February 11

  I walked in Westminster Hall, where I heard the news of a letter from Monck, who was not gone into the city again, and did resolve to stand for the sudden filling up of the House; and it was very strange how the countenance of men in the Hall was all changed with joy.

  The big debate in the 1650s may have been for the Republic, the Commonwealth, to have or not to have a monarch, to be Roman Catholic or Puritan, but at the same time as the political and social upheaval, a scientific and artistic revolution, which frightened the political leaders, was und
er way.

  By the end of the Republic, with Cromwell gone and Charles II about to ascend the throne, a different style of writing began to appear. It may be that people were adjusting to the new freedoms, trying to see who they were, rather than being told who they were and what they ought to be. Certainly the Restoration writers, for all their scallywag style, described what they saw around them and they had long abandoned the so-called metaphysical seriousness of their Elizabethan predecessors.

  Literature was constantly debated, and scientists were starting to prove that accepted ideas were bunkum. John Donne, in An Anatomy of the World, published in 1611, grappled with the new ideas.

  The new philosophy calls all in doubt,

  The element of fire is quite put out

  And even when Donne had taken holy orders, his poetry still reflected what the Oxford scholar, Maurice Ashley, called ‘an awareness of the mighty riddles of human life’. The seventeenth century was a century when writers and poets were categorized by their religious persuasions: Jeremy Taylor, Henry Vaughan and, of course, Donne were seen as Church of Englanders; John Dryden and Richard Crashaw were Roman Catholics; and John Bunyan and John Milton were Puritans. It was also a century that saw the introduction of a new industry.

  Until now something like 80 per cent of the population had worked in agriculture. The biggest industry was cloth, but the dark satanic mills were yet to come; the cloth industry was still a cottage industry. So imagine the consequences of the Civil War: the land had been ravaged and therefore so had the staple industry.

  But by the Restoration in the seventeenth century, the new industry that took root was coal. In the sixteenth century coal was a poor man’s fuel but in the first half of the 1600s there was a thirteen-fold – perhaps as high as a fifteen-fold – increase in coal production. Coal was not a cottage industry; it needed organized gangs of fit men to mine it. This is the beginning of private enterprise, with industry that produced collective, structured employment.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, the population of England and Wales stood at 5.25 million. London had doubled its size from 200,000 to 400,000. The next biggest town was Norwich, followed by Bristol, York and then Newcastle. The poor continued to be poor and the well-off lived very well. When the common people complained about their lot they were rarely listened to; and there was no one to represent them – at least no one they wanted to be represented by. They certainly wouldn’t have chosen Thomas Hobbes as their representative. In Leviathan, Hobbes’s treatise on political thought published in 1651, he argued against all the doctrinal notions that people were good and had the right to much better things. Hobbes argued that people were not at all good. They were, he thought, purely selfish creatures, out for what they could get, not for others, but for themselves.

  And Hobbes thought that notions of ‘right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place’. The only way to maintain society, he said, was to establish a total ruler, a dictator and to make everyone obedient. Hobbes argued that the extent of that obedience should be subject to various conditions, one of which was that the people should obey only as long as the sovereign was able to protect them.

  And so, according to Hobbes, the price of sovereignty was protection. And, in the year 1660, that concept was about to be tested once more. Across the water in Holland, King Charles II waited and drafted his promise that on his return he would grant ‘liberty to tender consciences’. By the end of May he entered London, and unlike his father, he did so in triumph and little fear for his life.

  The barely begun Republic was discarded and the people lined the streets to welcome, after what may have been to them an unconscionable time, the Restoration of the monarchy and Charles II for his coronation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  1660–81

  Before Charles II could return to England from his exile in Holland, one significant announcement, a concession almost, was needed. And it had to come from Charles himself because it had to do with the fear of revenge and the settlement of old scores, and something close to the army’s heart: backpay.

  If the returning monarch demanded retribution for all the acts committed against the Crown during the Civil War it would be a catastrophe. So a document, which became known as the Declaration of Breda, was drawn up. It was a finely drafted balance between what Parliament wanted and what Charles was willing to concede, and it reminded the people that the Crown was the King’s as God’s anointed. Equally, it was clear that revenge may be the Lord’s but not the King’s. With certain conditions, there would be a general pardon – a clean constitutional slate. Thus, the Declaration of Breda might well be subtitled the Declaration of Let Bygones be Bygones. Charles II put his name to the document, probably written by his Chancellor Edward Hyde (whose granddaughter incidentally would one day become Queen Anne), which meant that he could and would return to England. The constitutional tidying up could begin. On board the significantly named Naseby with Charles were his brothers the Dukes of York and Gloucester, his aunt Elizabeth, who was the Queen of Bohemia, his sister Mary, who was now the Princess Royal, and her son, William, who was the Prince of Orange and who would one day be King of England himself. It all seemed a quiet social occasion during the short voyage from the Netherlands. That sense of ordinariness evaporated as the Naseby headed towards Dover on 25 May 1660. The people who had once chased the King and his followers from England now lined the coast to wave him ashore. With the Restoration came the first signs of an emerging democratic system of government. Within forty years the first political parties appeared. Monarchy was supposed to be supreme, but it has been argued that when the monarchy returned, it did so with few powers. And the conflict of the past decade had begun because Parliament believed that the King had too many powers – or at least claimed them – and that the King saw himself above the rule of Parliament. We should remember that Royalists believed, with some proper authority, that the Commonwealth had no legal standing and that Charles II’s reign did not start in 1660 but at the death of his father, in 1649. Therefore, all the Parliamentary Acts that Charles I had agreed were now legal under Charles II. Everything else was illegal and therefore dropped. Take, for example, the Cromwellian practice of selling off the Church and royal estates: they were all restored. And Parliament didn’t have any greater role in the central government of the land than it had had before the rebellion.

  However, the power of the King and his advisers was contained, even reduced, by increasing regional and local responsibilities. More people would take part in the governing of the realm – it was the beginning of what is now called power-sharing. But in the early days of the Restoration, one fundamental difficulty remained: money and how to get it. And the first person to want money was, as ever, the King himself. This wasn’t simply the usual demands of the monarch: he wanted Parliament to pay his debts. And since the agreement was that he had been King since his father had died, Parliament must pay, and pay a great deal, because the debts included those of his father, King Charles I, which he, as monarch, was obliged to clear. The bill was dropped on to the dispatch box within four months of the King’s return. The present King’s debts were yet to come. Charles and his secretary, Edward Hyde, recognized that they would have to come to a compromise over the amount Parliament could afford to pay their King. But not all the debts were settled in gold. Breda had promised that none should be threatened by their guilt. But some were. There had been sixty names on Charles I’s death warrant. Twenty were dead and another twenty had gone into exile. Of the others, nine were executed. The remains of Oliver Cromwell were taken from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn and his long-dead head spiked for all to witness.

  The blood-letting done, Charles and his Parliament got on with the governing of the realm. And it was Charles’s Parliament: he, after all, could say when it should and should not be called. The Triennial Act meant little and, in truth, Parliament meant not much more. There was no great bureaucratic reformer as Thomas Cromwell
had been in Henry VIII’s time. But Charles felt safe with his Parliament of Cavaliers. He judged that they would be as loyal as any other group and so for eighteen years they governed together, although, it must be said, not very well and sometimes with little clear idea of who was in charge. Moreover, it was a period when the King was not inclined to champion causes, to take on political commitments, to depart from an instinct of compromise (all this is so typical of people who have been in exile for long periods). Certainly the King appears to have been someone who did not want anything to happen; anything, that is, that would disturb what he considered to be a very agreeable lifestyle. Charles II was, by all accounts, charming, considerably lazy and passionate. A man of pastimes, he was known as the Merry Monarch. He was tall, dark, handsome and athletic. He was also, in the romantic sense, a rogue. He took many mistresses (Nell Gwyn was only one of them), and fathered at least fourteen bastards. In between times he had a duty to rule, which at first he did through his Privy Council – or attempted to; unfortunately this Privy Council, or inner government of the King, would make policy at one private meeting and unmake it at another. However, it was soon made even less effectual when all important matters were first discussed through Privy Council committees, the most powerful of which was probably the origin of Cabinet government.

  From 1668, five men assumed the most important portfolio. They were: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale, known from their initials as the ‘Cabal’. Parliament itself was ill-tempered, with the Lords and Commons at odds and with much time spent talking about what to talk about. Yet this was a long Parliament. It lasted eighteen years, from 1661 to 1679, and was known as the Cavalier Parliament. The Cabal was swayed by two forceful personalities. One was Clarendon who was Charles II’s chief minister but not a member of the Cabal. He was the austere Edward Hyde, created Earl of Clarendon by Charles. He had been a member of the Short Parliament, served the King’s father at the start of the Civil War (although he was never quite trusted) and afterwards worked diligently as Charles II’s adviser in exile. Clarendon’s daughter, Anne, married the King’s brother, the Duke of York, who was to become James II. Hyde (Clarendon) was, therefore, a figure of considerable power and, hardly surprisingly, often openly disliked. The other influential figure was a member of the Cabal: Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftesbury.