The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History

by Jordan, Don

  The king’s plotting bore fruit. In the spring, there were royalist uprisings around England and South Wales. Much more seriously, in July 1648 the Scots invaded and the second Civil War was under way. Gradually, the English uprisings were put down. In August, Cromwell defeated the Scottish army in a brilliant victory at Preston. Up to this point, Cromwell, Ireton and the other army leaders had continued to be monarchists, believing in a settlement which allowed the king to rule the country while increased powers were granted to Parliament and wider freedom to worship was permitted. Now, hearts had been hardened. Wild rumours circulated that Charles was about to be killed. Theories abounded, including one that he would be shot as the leader of an enemy force (i.e. the Scottish army), another that he would be tried in a kangaroo court, and yet another that he would be assassinated.

  These rumours marked a significant change in the views of the king’s opponents: many influential figures in the army and a few in Parliament were beginning to consider whether constitutional monarchy was any longer the only way forward – at least if it included Charles Stuart as its representative. Experience had changed Henry Ireton from a conservative thinker to a much more radical one. Where once he had believed in evolution, he now saw the necessity for a complete break with the past.

  Edmund Ludlow was another of those convinced that the future lay in a clean break with the past. Ludlow rode from London to Colchester, where the supreme commander of the New Model Army, General Sir Thomas Fairfax, was engaged in besieging one of the last royalist strongholds. Fairfax came from one of Yorkshire’s oldest families, which had supported Parliament’s side since the beginning of the war. He was a brave and capable soldier who had – as is so often the case in time of war – been promoted to senior rank at a very young age. The transition from warfare to the subtler arts of negotiation and deal-making was proving difficult for Fairfax’s traditional mind.

  Like the majority of people in the land, Fairfax envisaged a return to something like the old order, with a few constitutional changes to make the king more of an instrument of Parliament. His worry was what part the army should play in reaching a settlement. Ludlow was in no doubt. He wanted the army to move to forestall the majority in Parliament who now seemed bent on reinstating the king without any real concessions. Ludlow informed Fairfax that the agreement which was ‘being pressed with more heat than ever’ would ‘render all our victories useless thereby’.4 He pressed Fairfax for the army to take action but found him ‘irresolute’.

  A few weeks later, Parliament selected fifteen commissioners to begin a new round of negotiations with the king later known as the Newport negotiations. The eminent lawyer and politician Bulstrode Whitelocke was rightly sceptical about the talks, saying he was glad not to have been chosen, ‘all the previous treaties wherein I was a commissioner having proved so ineffectual’.5 His misgivings were prophetic.

  The king was moved to a private house in Newport, a more fitting venue for talks than Carisbrooke’s Norman keep. When negotiations opened on 19 September, Charles reverted to form, dragging his feet and agreeing to little. The role of the bishops was a major stumbling block. Charles emphasised that the bishops were – like himself – divinely appointed and so could not be swept away. For Puritan negotiators like the republican Sir Harry Vane, a persistent critic of the Stuarts’ rule, the bishops were a key element in the king’s arbitrary power over his subjects and a symbol of religious intolerance. The two sides circled around this impediment for weeks but made little progress.

  After many weeks of negotiation, the king made several concessions, agreeing that certain powers could pass to Parliament – as long as the arrangement was open to revision after a specific number of years. He also agreed that Presbyterianism would become the official state religion. The Church would no longer be run by bishops but by elected elders. This was not what religious dissenters wished to hear, for, unlike the Presbyterians, they were wary of the crown’s arbitrary powers; neither were the temporary shifts in power sufficient to placate those like Ireton and Cromwell who sought more permanent constitutional reform. It became clear that Charles was not negotiating in good faith; he continued to talk secretly with the Scots and he also entertained plans to escape to France.

  On 18 October, Henry Ireton’s regiment sent a petition to the House of Commons demanding that those responsible for the second Civil War should be brought to justice. After much heart-searching, Oliver Cromwell had finally come round to the same position. The petition stipulated that ‘the same fault may have the same punishment in the person of the king or lord, as in the person of the poorest commoner’.6 Bulstrode Whitelocke recalled afterwards that it was the ‘beginning of the design upon the king’s person, but not discerned till afterwards’.7

  To add to the controversy, Parliament ignored the army petition and agreed that once negotiations ended, Charles would be allowed to live in London, with his property and income restored. It looked as if Parliament was getting ready to restore the king to the throne no matter what. Inside the army, debate raged on how to proceed. While hardliners felt that all negotiation with the king was now fruitless, others believed there was still the chance of a deal.* It was decided to move Charles to Windsor Castle, a step nearer London. To begin with, he would be brought back across the Solent to Hampshire. A trusted, battle-hardened colonel named Isaac Ewer was given the task.

  The process that led to the king being snatched from Newport had begun only two weeks before in St Albans. Army radicals had demanded a meeting of the Army General Council, to which General Fairfax unenthusiastically agreed. Meeting in the ancient abbey on 16 November, the council discussed sending another petition to Parliament, setting out why the army was against the king’s reinstatement. The prime mover of the petition was Ireton, with Fairfax much opposed. The petition began by recalling the words of Cicero: ‘Salus populi suprema lex esto’ – ‘let the good (or safety) of the people be the supreme law’.8 Before the century was out, John Locke, the Whig philosopher, would use this phrase as a key tenet of his treatise on constitutional government. In the middle of the seventeenth century, however, it was a contentious proposition, striking at the very heart of the idea of the divine authority of a king.

  After much discussion, Fairfax was reluctantly won over. The army council agreed to back Ireton’s proposal that all negotiations should be broken off and the king brought to trial. Fairfax agreed the manifesto could go out under his name.9 It was presented to Parliament on 20 November. Fatefully, Parliament ignored it and continued with the Newport proposals.

  Cromwell, who was still travelling south from Scotland with his army, wrote to Fairfax, saying that ‘all the regiments’ in his army were against the treaty at Newport: ‘My Lord, I find a very great sense in the officers of the regiments of the suffering and ruin of this poor kingdom, and in them all a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon offenders; and I must confess, I do in all, from my heart, concur with them.’10

  By now Cromwell had reached a shattering conclusion – that the views of the people were only truly represented by the army, by virtue of its composition of thousands of soldiers who had fought two wars in which a hundred thousand had died. According to Cromwell, these soldiers now wanted ‘justice done upon offenders’ – which could only mean upon the king. A revolution was growing and Parliament remained largely oblivious. The majority of MPs were fixated on the discussions in Newport, while the flow of history was turning towards the army in St Albans, its political supporters in Westminster, and the steady, southern march of Oliver Cromwell.

  With no positive response from Parliament, Fairfax ordered the army to leave St Albans and move to Windsor on 25 November – sending out the signal that while the army was officially the tool of Parliament, it had in fact become an autonomous force that could, if necessary, impose its will on Parliament.

  That day, Cromwell wrote to his cousin Robert Hammond, the garrison commander of Carisbrooke. He argued that the people’s victori
es over the king’s forces meant that God was with them rather than with Charles: ‘My dear friend, let us look into providences; surely they mean somewhat. They hang so together; have been so consistent, so clear and unclouded.’ Furthermore, if Cicero’s argument were followed, then the people counted for more than a king. Cromwell concluded by calling the Treaty of Newport a ‘ruining, hypocritical agreement’.11

  Events began to move towards a climax. Ireton, Ludlow and their allies held a secret meeting. They decided that if Parliament restored an unrepentant king to the throne, all dissenting MPs should call publicly upon the army to come to their aid to restore public trust in Parliament. This declaration would prepare the ground for a military coup against both Parliament and king.

  At the end of November, Colonel Hammond received orders to move the king from Newport to Hurst Castle on the mainland. Hammond, a stickler for form, refused, saying he could only do so on orders from Parliament. Fairfax quickly wrote to Cromwell, telling him to get to London immediately. Perhaps he thought his best general, like the king, was deliberately dragging his feet – waiting to see what would happen.

  Parliament then received another petition, this time from Henry Ireton’s regiment, stating that the king could no longer be considered to be above ordinary mortals and bore responsibility for the second Civil War. Parliament ignored it. When the parliamentary negotiating team left the island, Colonel Hammond received orders calling him away from his command on a spurious mission. Before the day was done, the army council had given orders for the military occupation of London.

  Three days later, as the rain beat down on Newport, Colonel Ewer took a detachment of his Roundheads (Cromwellian foot-soldiers wore their hair in rounded basin cuts) and marched through the town to the house of Sir William Hopkins, where the king was billeted. With their musket fuses lit and smoking in the lantern light, the Roundheads entered the house. Searching for the king, they moved from room to room, permeating the interior with the unmistakable whiff of saltpetre, the smell of the battlefield and death. The king’s companions feared the worst.

  When the soldiers opened the door to the king’s private room, Charles was seated by the fire. He turned to face his visitors with a calm expression. Though he remained impassive, the king knew that the soldiers’ unannounced arrival late at night could only mean they were acting on the orders of the army and not of Parliament. It could even mean they were acting not solely on Fairfax’s orders but on those of sterner men like Henry Ireton.12

  Fearing for the king’s life, courtiers demanded that a messenger be sent to Carisbrooke Castle to find out whether there was indeed a plot to kill the king. Meanwhile, they hatched a plan to smuggle Charles to safety. The Duke of Richmond dressed up in a military cloak and demonstrated that he could walk straight past the guards at the door unchallenged. The king refused to attempt an escape. He was heartened by news from Carisbrooke that there seemed to be no plot to do away with him that night. He finished a letter to the queen, and went to bed.13

  In the morning, Charles was put in a coach and transported to the coast, where he was ferried across the Solent to Hurst Castle. News that the king had been taken by the army caused outrage in Parliament but its members could do little more than formally complain to Fairfax.

  There was little cheer for Charles during his first night at Hurst Castle. The Tudor fort was built on a blighted spit sticking out into the Solent and surrounded by a shingle beach exposed to the westerly winds blowing in from the Atlantic. Charles no longer had his retinue of courtiers and friends about him for advice and solace. He was allowed only a few servants and one or two companions chosen by Parliament, including Sir Thomas Herbert, who acted as his groom.

  The day after the king arrived at Hurst Castle, the army marched into London. In its vanguard was a regiment commanded by a man well known in the city, Colonel Thomas Pride, who had run a successful brewery in London before the wars. When war broke out, he joined the parliamentary forces and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, returning to his adopted city at the head of an occupying army.

  Meanwhile, Parliament debated whether the king’s concessions in Newport were grounds for a settlement. Sir Harry Vane, one of the Newport negotiators, reported that ‘the justice of our cause was not asserted, nor our rights secured for the future’. Others felt there was the basis of an agreement: Edmund Ludlow was disgusted that some Members of Parliament argued the king’s case, ‘as if they had been employed by him’. Late that evening, Parliament adjourned without a decision.

  On Tuesday 5 December, 129 Members of Parliament voted for the treaty and 83 against. Radicals, including Edmund Ludlow, went into secret consultations with their allies in the army. Henry Ireton was present, but Oliver Cromwell was still marching south with his regiments, possibly taking it slowly to see which way events would turn out. He did not have long to wait: the plotters decided on nothing less than a military coup d’état – the army would exclude from Parliament all MPs who favoured the terms of the Newport talks. There would be no waiting for Cromwell and his famous powers of persuasion. The deed would be done in the morning. It was the beginning of a revolution.

  There is room for debate over who first proposed such a course, but there is little doubt that the man who gave the order for the first act of the revolution was Henry Ireton. In the face of Fairfax’s continuing lack of resolve, Ireton was the de facto head of the army in London. He knew he had to select a steadfast officer to carry out the purge of the pro-Newport MPs. Colonel Pride had not only been a brewer before the war, he had also been a part-time soldier in the London militia. Who better, reasoned Ireton, to ensure there was no popular uprising against their action? Pride was a many-sided man, who in peacetime crusaded against corruption and courted unpopularity by campaigning against bear baiting and cock fighting. But he would go down in history for directing the events that took place the next day, 6 December 1648, which became known as Pride’s Purge.

  The following morning, Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke and his fellow Commissioner of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Widdrington, arrived in their legal finery for service in one of the courts held within the warren of buildings that contained Parliament. They were surprised to find lines of troops drawn up in the yards. Two regiments had taken over the buildings and their surroundings. The distinguished lawyers were even more surprised to be stopped and vetted at the door. It was what Sir Bulstrode had feared: an army coup. Deciding to brazen it out, the two grandees explained they were on business at the Court of Chancery and were allowed to enter.

  Once inside, Widdrington and Whitelocke were advised by a clerk that despite the army coup developing around them, they should take their seats in the Commons. No sooner had they done so than a clerk came up and told them not to sit. The two great office bearers rose in confusion. Whitelocke was then invited to talk to the Lords. As he went down the corridor towards the Lords’ chamber, he came across Colonel Pride, who was directing his men to arrest various members of the Commons and prevent others from entering. To his astonishment, Pride broke off from directing the coup to let Whitelocke through. On his way back from the Lords, he was even more amazed when Pride ‘saluted him civilly’. In a strangely understated judgment on so momentous an event, Whitelocke noted it was ‘sad to see such things’.14

  By the end of the day, Whitelocke was one of about two hundred members left in what became known as the ‘Rump’ of the Parliament. Colonel Pride’s men arrested 45 MPs and excluded 186 who they thought would not support the trial of the king, or who had voted to support the Newport treaty. The next day, another fifty MPs were excluded and three arrested.

  Realising the king’s situation was worsening by the day, close followers once again plotted his escape. Horses were hired on which Charles could flee while taking his daily exercise on the beach beside Hurst Castle and a ship was chartered to wait at anchor off the coast. The Duke of Lennox urged Charles to seize the moment but the king answered that he had given his word and would not
break it.15 On 15 December, the army council decided to move Charles to Windsor. Shortly after, Thomas Harrison arrived to tell Ewer the news. Harrison did not meet the king, who remained ignorant of his visit.

  In London, discussions were under way about how to proceed against the king. Cromwell favoured a trial but he was unsure how it could be done. The established laws of the land seemed to be an obstacle to putting the king on trial. If the king was set above all other men by God, how could other men try the king? Wrestling with this headache, on 18 December he called his friend and confidant Colonel Richard Deane – that ‘bold and excellent officer’16 – to a meeting with Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke and Sir Thomas Widdrington. We don’t know what advice the lawyers gave, but we can deduce by subsequent events that it was not what Cromwell and Deane had hoped for.

  Despite this setback, the army began to move the king to Windsor. The journey would take several days on horseback. The detachment of troops together with their prisoner and his depleted entourage set off for Winchester, where they spent the night before heading across the Downs to Alresford. People gathered along the roadside and shouted, ‘God preserve Your Majesty.’

  On the road out of the market town of Alton, the travellers came upon a troop of cavalry lined up along the side of the road. The appearance of the handsome and finely dressed commanding officer impressed the king. According to Sir Thomas Herbert, the officer was ‘gallantly mounted and armed; a velvet Montero was on his head’. He wore a new buff coat with ‘a crimson silk scarf about his waist, richly fringed’.17 The king asked Herbert the identity of this paragon of fashion. The answer chilled him to the bone. Of all the Roundheads and Cromwellians Charles knew, or knew of, this was the one he least wished to meet. This was the man who wished to see him dead in order that Christ could rule on earth in his place; this was the person who had called him ‘that man of blood’. It was the dandy Puritan himself, Colonel Thomas Harrison.