A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  In April that year, after a petition bearing 20,000 signatures calling for the return of the Rump Parliament was presented to the Protector, and after he had been given to understand that if he failed to heed it a military insurrection was in the offing, Richard abdicated. He was summarily ordered to depart from Whitehall with his family (including his younger brother Henry, who might have made a much more formidable successor). The Rump Parliament (all forty-two members of it who showed up) was recalled. The Protectorate, which hard-core republicans like Ludlow had never ceased to regard as a defiled thing, was abolished and the Commonwealth restored. But what was immediately restored with it, of course, was the ferocious mutual hostility of the republican politicians and zealot soldiers, which had caused its disappearance in the first place. Without Oliver Cromwell to hold the ring they proceeded to tear each other, and what remained of the kingless state, to pieces, spinning into an anarchy from which the only possible escape was the return of the monarch. The extraordinary irony about the restoration of Charles II is not that he became king because the country desperately needed a successor to Charles I. He became king because it desperately needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

  As late as August 1659, when an attempted royalist rising led by Colonel George Booth was easily suppressed, it seemed that the odds against the imminent return of Charles II were still prohibitively steep. But the fratricidal self-destruction of all the alternative contenders for power – not just Rump against army, but even Rumper against Rumper (Vane and Haselrig were at each other’s throats and Ludlow hated both of them) – precluded any kind of republican stability. Opposing factions argued furiously about whether there should be one house of parliament or two, whether an upper house should be elected or appointed, while the real house, the house of the republic, was burning down around them. Crazily short-sighted though it seems in retrospect (no crazier in truth than many other revolutionary situations), the parties concerned were much more interested in destroying their immediate enemies than in agreeing on a secure republican regime that might have locked out a monarchy for the foreseeable future. It was, indeed, the republicans who killed the republic.

  Somehow, England in 1659 got sucked into a temporal worm-hole to emerge ten years earlier, in 1649, when everything – government, religion, social order – had been fluid, and no one quite knew how any of those matters might be resolved. Suddenly, in 1659, the pamphlet market was once again flooded with experimental proposals, tracts and broadsides. The country was back in its Torricellian gap, the void-in-a-void. Leveller tracts reappeared and with them a surge of apprehension among the horsey classes that democracy was about to strike down the counties. Fifth Monarchists like Christopher Feake belatedly declared that the real kingdom of Christ had not after all been frustrated, only postponed by Cromwell, the Antichrist. George Fox, in one of his brief vacations from prison, published Fifty-Nine Particulars ‘to bring the nation into a Garden, a free nation, a free people’, to abolish the fee-gouging of lawyers, to take care of the blind and lame; to ban the carrying of swords, daggers and guns for all those who did not require them in their office; and, not least, a reform dear to his heart, to improve the conditions of gaols so that ‘prisoners might not lie in their own dung and piss’.

  The pragmatic survivors from the government of the Protectorate stood back from all this ferment in horrified disbelief. At the Rota Club in London, William Petty could sit down with James Harrington to discuss the latter’s Oceana, in which, for the first time, the necessary connection between property and political power was exposed. But not for a minute could they countenance his ‘agrarian law’ limiting the size of landed estates. Experiments were not good for business, and they could see that the economy was suffering from the breakdown of orderly government. Shops were closed, trade stopped and tax strikes were threatened. Customs and excise dues went uncollected. Goldsmiths moved their stock out of London for safe-keeping. And it was more than ever obvious that a choice between inflexible republican zealots, who represented only themselves, and military dictatorship was no choice at all. They had built a formidable state – commercially dynamic, fearsome on the high seas, dependable in its revenues, scientific in its administration, a state built in partnership with, not against, the gentry of the counties. Before it was irreparably lost they needed to do their utmost to restore the stability enjoyed under the Protectorate. And since neither the republicans nor the generals would provide it, where else was there to go except to Charles Stuart? With any luck he would be the next Protector.

  Like many sea-changes in British history, this was not a gradual but a sudden decision, made by men such as Montagu, Lord Broghill and William Petty, who all voted with their feet at some point between the summer of 1659 and the end of the year. When John Evelyn decided to publish his royalist Apology late that year he made much of the fact that he was committing a capital offence. But he went ahead all the same and was gratified, though not perhaps surprised, that it was ‘universally taken up’. It was a sign of things to come that the man he approached to get a copy to Charles II was the Commonwealth’s own Lieutenant of the Tower, Herbert Morley. Evelyn believed this man would not betray him, since they were old schoolfellows. But he would still never have dared entrust him with the mission had he not also believed the Lieutenant was acting from prescient self-interest. Countless others did the same. Thomas Hobbes’s axiom that allegiance ended when the state’s capacity to protect had irreversibly broken down could never have seemed more glaringly self-evident.

  The man who finally pushed Britain over the edge to Restoration, ‘Black George’ Monck, was Hobbes’s kind of general, someone for whom the tactics of self-preservation had been learned the hard way. He had been born into an old gentry family in Devon, and his strongest links were to the Grenville family, who themselves produced royalist heroes and parliamentary turncoats during the civil war. Monck, who early on was a one-man weathervane, had his doubts about the prospects as well as the rightness of the royal cause but was personally converted by a meeting with Charles I. He should have stayed doubtful. Captured at the battle of Nantwich in 1644, he spent the next two years in the Tower, where at least he met the Presbyterian seamstress Anne who later became his wife. In 1646 Monck took the Covenant oath and went to Ireland as a colonel for parliament. He became close to Cromwell, whom he first met in August 1649 and evidently came to trust and revere. He fought alongside Cromwell at the battle of Dunbar in 1650 and, although without any naval experience, was made a commander of the fleet during the war with the Dutch, in which he proved himself indisputably clever, tough and brave.

  While the republic was disintegrating in England during 1659 Monck was in secure command of the army of Scotland. Although his old royalist allegiance made him a natural target for those who wanted him to come out early for Charles, Monck stayed aloof, not at all sure, for once, which way the wind was blowing, nor what would be the right, as well as the smart, thing to do. What was apparent to those who still hoped for a republican military regime – Lambert and Fleetwood – was that they could not expect any support from Monck, whose army was the most coherent and concentrated in Britain. And although he attempted to muster what forces he could, even Lambert knew that without Monck they were finished. At the point when he realized his game was up Fleetwood commented bitterly that ‘the Lord had blasted their Counsels and spat in their faces’. When Monck began his self-authorized march south from Coldstream near Berwick on 2 January 1660, with 7000 troops, it was as a soldier against rule by soldiers. But if it was clear what he was against – army interference in parliament – it was much less clear what he was for. The rump of the Rump, which had been restored at the mere prospect of his coming to London, hoped and assumed he was marching to protect them. But Monck kept his cards close to his chest and his powder dry, and at some point en route he was obviously impressed by the wild enthusiasm, not for preserving the Rump but for getting rid of it. The cry, nearly universal, was for a ‘free’ parliamen
t, which meant the return of all the members of the Long Parliament who had been shut out by Pride’s Purge.

  By the time Monck got to London at the beginning of February, the call for a ‘free parliament’ had developed from a campaign for constitutional amendment to something more like a desperate cry to get the country out of the chaotic hell that the Commonwealth had become. It was also, increasingly, the royalism that dared not (yet) quite speak its name. If appeals for liberty had once meant the end of kingship, now they very definitely meant its reinstatement. Even blind John Milton, standing by in impotent dismay as the republic unravelled, conceded its unpopularity in his last published attempt to reverse the rush back to monarchy. In his Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth he argued that a minority had the right to force the majority to accept freedom, while the majority could not coerce the minority into sharing their subjection as fellow-slaves. But the crowds of apprentices in London (as in Bristol and Exeter) who mounted demonstrations for the ‘free parliament’ that everyone knew would open the door for the king did not want to be forced to be free. They wanted to be subjects. Women offered their own verdict on the Rump by lifting their skirts, bending over and shouting: ‘Kiss my parliament!’

  On 11 February Samuel Pepys, who for five years had been a clerk in the Exchequer (the protégé of his powerful kinsman Edward Montagu), stood at the end of Strand Bridge and counted bonfires. There were thirty-one on the bridge alone. ‘At one end of the street, you would think there was a whole lane of fire, and so hot that we were fain to keep still on the further side,’ he wrote in his diary. The entire city seemed to have been turned into one great open-air spit, on which rumps – some fowl, some beef – were being roasted. The streets were greasy with celebration. It was not just meat that was being cooked, but the Commonwealth. Earlier that day it had been decided to readmit the members of parliament who had been shut out by Pride’s Purge over eleven years before. Pending a new ‘free’ parliament, Londoners were voting, as usual, with their bellies. There were carillons of carving knives on the city streets. ‘The butchers at the Maypole in the Strand’, wrote Pepys, ‘rang a peal with their knifes when they were going to sacrifice their rump.’

  History was now respooling fast. Men who had not shown themselves in politics for many years, like Sir Thomas Fairfax, reappeared along with their colleagues from the Long Parliament who had never forgotten the humiliation of their ‘seclusion’ in 1648. Two of the ‘birds’ of 1642, Denzil Holles and Arthur Haselrig, now faced each other, doubtless in mutual mortification – one of them about to be a republican on the run, the other headed for a Stuart peerage. But the pragmatists, not least Montagu, passed smoothly from one regime to the other. The parliament, which had first assembled twenty years before, now – heavily nudged by Monck’s soldiers and an armed royalist militia – killed itself off, ordering its own dissolution and the ‘free election’ that all concerned knew would produce a parliament for Restoration.

  Although, in a last gesture of piety towards the civil-war parliamentarians, royalists who had actually fought for Charles I were excluded, a hundred of them were none the less elected and duly took their seats in the ‘Convention’ Parliament of March 1660. Another fifty-eight members were unequivocal royalist supporters. Virtually the same number – close to 150 – were parliamentarians, although that did not make them republicans. Most of them belonged to the gentry, who had all along wanted a reformed monarchy. And now, so they hoped, they would at last get one. The terms that they sent with Monck and their commissioners to Charles II at Breda in the Netherlands were calculated to test his willingness for a reconciliation: an amnesty for those on the parliamentary side in the civil war (the regicide signers of Charles I’s death warrant excepted), a degree of liberty for ‘tender consciences’ and guarantees against reversing the changes in property that had taken place during the interregnum. But the Convention Parliament did not insist, as a precondition, on the king committing himself to executing these policies. For his part, Charles’s response from Breda on 4 April was shrewdly handled, offering a forty-day period of ‘grace’ for amnesties but leaving any exceptions to the discretion of later parliaments, the same going for matters of religion and property. To make parliament, rather than himself, the arbiter of these matters already seemed to advertise that the son would not go the way of the father.

  On 23 May 1660, Samuel Pepys watched Charles, along with his younger brothers and his cousin the boy Prince of Orange (later to be King William III) come on board the flagship of the Commonwealth, the Naseby, at Scheveningen near The Hague. Pepys kissed their royal hands to the sound of ‘infinite shooting of guns’ and took dinner ‘in a great deal of state’. After dinner the Naseby’s name was repainted as the Royal Charles. For Pepys and his patron Montagu, as well as for Monck and Thurloe – all Cromwellians – it was as painless as that. In the afternoon they set sail for England and the king

  walking here and there, up and down (quite contrary to what I thought him to have been), very active and stirring. Upon the Quarterdeck he fell in discourse of his escape from Worcester. Where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through. As his travelling four days and three nights on foot, every step up to the knees in dirt, with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on and a pair of country shoes, that made him so sore all over his feet that he could scarce stir.

  Pepys listened and listened, obviously agog. This was not what he had anticipated. The tall man with his mother’s black curly hair, dark eyes and thick lips was a spell-binder – someone who could, when he chose, scatter magic. Literally days after disembarking, Charles had touched 600 sufferers from scrofula in one emphatic demonstration of the healing power of the king. Thirteen years before, parliament had appointed a commission to draft a declaration denouncing the practice of touching for the ‘king’s evil’ as an absurd superstition. But here were the hordes of ordinary people, some with swollen or tumorous lymph glands, others with styes or mouth blisters, all convinced that royal magic had returned. In twenty years, 90,000 of the scrofulous would receive the royal touch and a gold chain to hang around their necks.

  John Evelyn, who had endured the kingless decade with unrepentant royalism burning in his breast, could hardly credit what was happening: ‘The greedinesse of all sorts, men, women & children, to see his Majesty & kisse his hands, in so much as he had scarce leasure to Eate for some dayes.’ Even as hard-bitten an old Presbyterian as Denzil Holles of Dorchester, who had fought Charles I at Edgehill, now addressed his son with slavish adulation as ‘the light of their [the people’s] eyes, the breath of their nostrils, their delight and all their hope’. On 29 May, Charles II’s birthday, not far from where Pepys had counted bonfires, Evelyn watched the cavalcade of 20,000 horse and foot escorting the king through London,

  brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpressable joy; The wayes straw’d with flowers, the bells ringing . . . I stood in the strand, & beheld it, & blessed God. And all this without one drop of bloud, & by that very army, which rebell’d against him: but it was the Lord’s doing . . . for such a Restauration was never seene in the mention of any history, antient or modern, since the returne of the [Jews from their] Babylonan Captivity, nor so joyfull a day, & so bright, ever seene in this nation: this hapning when to expect or effect it, was past all humane policy.

  Not everyone was celebrating in the heady days of May 1660. Edmund Ludlow, fortieth on the list of fifty-nine signatories of the death warrant of the king, watched the same revels with mounting disgust and disbelief. Jerusalem had suddenly become Sodom. What could you expect? ‘The Dissolution and Drunkenness of that Night,’ he hurrumphed, ‘was so great and scandalous, in a Nation which had not been acquainted with such Disorders for many Years past, that the King . . . caused a Proclamation to be publish’d, forbidding the drinking of Healths. But resolving, for his own part, to be oblig’d to no Rule of any Kind, he publickly violated hi
s own Order in a few days, at a Debauch in the Mulberry Garden.’ Above all, Ludlow was horrified to see ‘the Horse that had formerly belonged to our army, now put upon an Employment so different from that which they had first undertaken; especially . . . that for the most part . . . they consisted of such as had engaged themselves from a Spirit of Liberty.’

  On 30 January 1661 – the anniversary of Charles I’s execution – the remains of Oliver Cromwell, his son-in-law, Ireton, and John Bradshaw, who had presided over the court that had judged the king, were ‘dragged’, as Evelyn gleefully wrote, ‘out of their superbe Tombs [in Westminster among the kings], to Tyburne, & hanged on the Gallows there from 9 in the morning ’til 6 at night, & then buried under that fatal & ignominious Monument, in a deepe pitt.’ Evelyn thought back to the chaotic magnificence of Cromwell’s funeral in 1658. It had been just two and a half years between embalming and dismemberment. ‘Oh,’ he exclaimed ‘the stupendious, & inscrutable Judgements of God.’

  As far as Ludlow was concerned, Cromwell got what he deserved. For it had been his betrayal of the nation’s liberties and his greed for power that had killed the republic. But now the unswerving friends of liberty were paying the price. Dismay was followed by consternation and fear as army ‘grandees’ were abruptly turned into fugitives or supplicants desperately working the good offices of men who had been timely turncoats. The republicans looked on in horror as old friends and comrades associated with the death of Charles were brought before punitive tribunals, swiftly condemned and subjected to hanging and live quartering. Two of the regicides were dragged on a sled to Tyburn while facing the decapitated head of a third, the Fifth Monarchist ‘Saint’ Major-General Thomas Harrison. Ludlow made contingency plans for a rapid escape. Milton, now quite blind, reflected on the iniquities that must have deserved this rod across their backs.