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

by Jordan, Don

  At around four o’clock, as dawn was breaking, the Lord Protector finally caved in and agreed to a dissolution. Later that day the announcement was made and Roundhead troopers stood at the doors of the chamber to prevent MPs entering. Richard immediately ceased functioning as Protector and several weeks later officially resigned. The pathos of the scene was captured by Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, in his History of My Own Times: ‘Without any struggle he withdrew, and became a private man. And as he had done hurt to nobody, so nobody did ever study to hurt him, by a rare instance of the instability of human greatness, and the security of innocence.’17

  The grandees had not planned to overthrow Richard and probably would have preferred to retain him as a puppet. But no deal was possible between them and the affrighted Cromwellians in Richard’s Parliament and, anyway, radical junior officers probably would not have allowed it. So, after some days, the army chiefs concluded an alliance with the republicans. They announced the recall of the Long Parliament, which was first elected seventeen years earlier, minus those MPs excluded in various purges. Some 120 members qualified, though fewer than 70 turned up in the House. The result was power for Haselrig, Ludlow and the other Commonwealthsmen, who commanded the largest group in the recalled Parliament. When a ballot was held to select a new Council of State, Haselrig came top, followed by Vane and Ludlow. In 1649, one of the MPs purged by Colonel Pride coined the phrase ‘the rump’ to describe what remained of the Long Parliament. Ten years later it was a term of abuse.*

  There are violently different views of the Rump Parliament among historians. At one extreme, George Monck’s biographer, François Guizot, called it ‘a small faction of fanatical egotists, more important from their passionate activity than from their reputation or talents’. Guizot dismissed Sir Arthur Haselrig as ‘a rapacious, headstrong, and conceited agitator’ and called Scot ‘almost as vain, and even more obstinate and Blind’. At the other extreme, John Milton’s biographer David Masson portrays them as courageously naive:

  Remembering the great days of the Commonwealth between 1649 and 1653, and not inquiring how much of the greatness of those days had been owing to the fact that the politicians at the centre had then a Cromwell marching over the map for them … they set themselves, with all their industry, courage, and ability, to prove to the world that those great days might be renewed without a Cromwell.18

  The flaw in their vision was identified by Austin Woolrych in his Britain in Revolution: ‘The Rumpers’, he wrote, ‘were dedicated to the republican principle that supreme power belonged of right to the chosen representatives of the sovereign people, yet most of the people did not want a republic at all.’19

  The republicans began at a gallop. By June they had taken decisions to restructure the army, commission new militias, raise funds to ease the army arrears, pension off Richard Cromwell and his mother, vet the judges, sell the last remaining royal palaces and wind down the war with Spain. The self-consciously revolutionary Rump followed up with proposals for a host of more fundamental reforms. Press restrictions would be lifted, enabling the first issue of the Weekly Post to be published.* The rights of ‘tender consciences’, i.e. religious freedom, would be guaranteed – though not for Episcopalians or extreme sectarians, and needless to say not for Papists either. Cases of arbitrary imprisonment would be vetted and political prisoners of all kinds would be set free. Meanwhile, various groups got down to shaping a new constitution.

  However, another preoccupation took up much of the parliamentary day from June to September – the purging of the army. This was a central feature of the republican insistence that the army must be subordinate to Parliament. Remarkably, an unhappy military hierarchy merely looked on as 1500 officers were displaced by Haselrig and company after being summoned to the House of Commons to be vetted. Most were casualties of their religion or their politics, though not all. In an England stuffy with unforgiving Puritans, morals were also scrutinised. Cornet Richard Hobson was put out because like Falstaff he was ‘old and scandalous’ and Cornet Thomas Mason for ‘playing at table [on] the Lord’s day’. Quartermaster Thomas Kitterd (or Riddard) shared the same fate, not only for speaking words against the Council of State but because ‘he was accused of keeping a woman and giving her £3 a month’.20

  Edmund Ludlow conducted a similar purge in Ireland, where he had been appointed military commissioner or commander-in-chief. Although he was only there for three months, he reportedly dismissed and replaced eight hundred officers, largely with extreme Puritans.

  In July the inevitable strains caused by the Rump’s attempts to subordinate the army to parliamentary control saw relations breaking down. There was a confrontation between the dominant figure in the army hierarchy, John Lambert, and Sir Arthur Haselrig, the dominant voice in the Rump. Haselrig was increasingly convinced that the general aimed at becoming Lord Protector. But the confrontation between them had to be postponed thanks to another crisis, the long-expected royalist uprising. The two men had to sink their differences and face what threatened to be the most serious challenge to the republic in years. Haselrig, acknowledging Lambert to be Parliament’s best general, took the risk of entrusting him with an army to put the royalists down.

  The uprising had been planned in May. It was to be launched across the country in a series of insurrections scheduled to begin on 1 August. In recognition of the Stuarts’ lack of appeal to Presbyterians, it was presented not as a royalist revolt but as a groundswell against republican misrule. There was no mention of Charles’s name in the proclamations which the plotters prepared to issue on breaking cover. Their propaganda was all about unjust taxes and repression. It may have irked the exiled prince to be painted out of the picture, but it was not supposed to last. Charles was to land in southern England immediately a foothold was obtained. In mid-July he left for Calais accompanied by the Marquis of Ormond and two servants, ready to embark for Rye. His brother James – who had been promised several thousand French troops – was at Boulogne, from where he planned a landing in Hampshire.

  In preparation, Charles furnished James with a letter instructing what he could offer individuals in return for support once he had landed. The letter is revelatory for what it says about Charles’s attitude to his father’s judges. In his desperation to regain the throne, he was now apparently ready to deal with the men he had vowed to hunt down. He authorised James to allow negotiations with ‘any repentant judge’ who offered ‘an extraordinary service’. Such a man could not be pardoned but would escape prosecution and be allowed to go quietly into exile – ‘to convey away his estate out of my domain’. It would seem that the cynical pragmatism that was to characterise Charles II’s reign extended even to his treatment of the hated regicides.

  In the event, Charles’s readiness to treat with his father’s judges remained a secret. Like so many earlier royalist plots, the insurrection ended in chaos, leaving the two royal brothers still on the wrong side of the Channel. The royalist plan had been betrayed by a spy close to Charles himself. Key plotters were arrested, and French support never materialised. As a result, the uprising was called off just two days before it was due to begin.

  In some places the order to cancel failed to get through. Small bodies of armed horsemen gathered at appointed rendezvous only to be captured by republican militiamen or scattered. The exceptions were Lancashire and Cheshire, where substantial forces joined together under the command of Sir George Booth, a Presbyterian grandee who, having fought for Parliament in the first Civil War, was then excluded from Parliament by Pride’s Purge. Booth’s men quickly captured Chester, at which their numbers grew alarmingly, reaching upwards of six thousand.

  Lambert was sent north to stop Booth, collecting militiamen and regular troops on the way. He caught the rebels at Winnington Bridge, near Northwich, where he defeated them with ease. There was a minimum of casualties thanks to Lambert, who ordered his cavalry not to pursue Booth’s fleeing troops for fear of massacre. In what could be called
the last battle of the blood-soaked Civil Wars, fewer than thirty men were killed. Sir George Booth was captured a week later, disguised as a woman, after he took rooms at an inn. A chambermaid, glimpsing his feet, realised that they had to be male.21

  Officers serving with Lambert were exultant at their easy victory; too much so. Shortly after their triumph a group of them, swollen-headed in victory, drew up a memorandum calling for constitutional changes that Lambert and other army leaders had been pressing on the Rump for months. Since Parliament had just vetoed these same proposals, it was an ill-judged and provocative move. But Sir Arthur Haselrig’s reaction was more provocative still. Ignoring the pleas for restraint from his long-time ally Sir Harry Vane, and apparently oblivious to the Rump’s ultimate dependence on army support, Sir Arthur had the Rump cashier Lambert and other generals. Lambert responded by leading troops into Whitehall to close Parliament down. For the second time in six months, MPs were locked out of the chamber in an army coup.22

  The army then set up what was seen as a puppet government, a junta it called the Committee of Safety. This body, twenty-three strong, was to exercise all the functions of the executive and was dominated by the army grandees Lambert, Fleetwood and Desborough. But it included Rumpers willing to go along with the generals, notably Harry Vane, Bulstrode Whitelocke and Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston. Its priority was the production of a new constitution without delay, but the committee would collapse before New Year and London would be plunged into chaos. Before summer the republic would be dead.

  8

  THE INVADER

  October 1659—February 1660

  A week after the coup John Bradshaw died, like Oliver Cromwell reportedly a victim of malaria. The last public act of the man who had presided over the trial of King Charles was to drag himself from his death bed to Whitehall to denounce the army coup and reaffirm his republican beliefs. He let it be known that if called upon to try the king again he would be the first man in England to do it.

  Bradshaw’s republican comrades in the Rump were divided over how to react to the coup. Sir Arthur Haselrig and Thomas Scot headed the irreconcilables among them, insisting on army subservience to the civil authority and vowing punishment for the grandees. On the other side, Sir Harry Vane and the Rumpers who had agreed to join the Committee of Safety saw unity between the army and Parliament as the prerequisite for the republic’s survival. ‘Shocked’ by the coup, Edmund Ludlow returned from Ireland and tried vainly to reconcile the contending sides. It proved a futile task. The always fractious personal relationship between the principal players, John Lambert and Haselrig, had become too poisonous. Lambert told Ludlow that ‘Sir Arthur was so enraged against him, that he would be satisfied with nothing but his blood.’1 Haselrig seems to have been equally enraged by the stance of his old friend Harry Vane.

  No one of the stature of Oliver Cromwell was available to knock heads together. But a figure of considerable if meaner talents was waiting in the wings. This was the short, overweight George Monck, commander-in-chief of the English army in Scotland and the ultimate hero – or villain – of this history. Monck was the most enigmatic of Cromwell’s generals. His background was royalist. He came from an impoverished family of West Country gentry and had earned his military spurs in the king’s service in the 1630s. He was briefly employed as a royalist commander in the first Civil War until his capture in 1644. Thereafter, he spent more than a year as a prisoner in the Tower, resisting blandishments to accept a command from Parliament. Eventually he said yes and went on to distinguish himself in the second Civil War, after which he was appointed commander-in-chief in Scotland. An ardent admirer of Oliver Cromwell, to whom he was unflinchingly loyal, he was an equally fierce oppressor of suspected royalist conspirators and dutifully reported several approaches made to him by the exiled Charles II. Yet there were doubts about this monosyllabic, solitary man. He was married to a loud-mouthed royalist, and the suspicion remained that at heart he was still as loyal to the Stuarts as his indiscreet wife. Shortly before his death, Cromwell made a laboured joke on the matter after Monck had informed him of a royalist attempt to recruit him, writing in response: ‘There be [those] that tell me that there is a certain cunning fellow in Scotland called George Monck, who is said to lay in wait there to introduce Charles Stuart; I pray you, use your diligence to apprehend him, and send him up to me.’2

  Cromwell’s joke was later to turn sour. For years Monck had been high on the list of Cromwellians whom the royalists viewed as potential turncoats. His royalist background and personal acquaintance with the Stuarts encouraged hopes that he could be persuaded to the cause, and the exiled Charles Stuart courted him by letter. In 1658 Charles wrote to Monck:

  One who believes he knows your nature and inclinations very well assures me that notwithstanding all ill accidents and misfortune you retain still your old affection for me and resolve to express it upon the first seasonable opportunity which is as much as I look for from you. We must all patiently look for the opportunity which may be offered sooner than we expect. When it is let it find you ready, and in the meantime have a care to keep yourself out of their hands who know the hurt you can do them in a good conjuncture.3

  Monck did not reply, and he was discouraging when approached to change sides during the Booth uprising. In the weeks before the uprising Charles put out feelers to several Cromwellians, again including Monck. In a rather plaintive letter he wrote:

  I cannot think that you wish me ill, nor have you reason to do so; and the good I expect from you will bring so great a benefit to your country and to yourself that I cannot think you will decline my interest … If you once resolve to take my interest to heart I will leave the way and manner of it entirely to your judgment and will comply with the advice you shall give me … It is in your power to make me as kind to you as you can desire, and to have me always your affectionate friend.4

  Monck again did not reply, and he proved a disappointment when two of Charles’s emissaries appeared at his headquarters in Dalkeith. The first was Colonel Jonathan Atkins, an old comrade in Ireland. According to John Price, one of Monck’s two chaplains and also his biographer, Atkins told Monck of plans by ‘gentlemen of the north’ to back Sir George Booth and asked him to join them. Monck turned him down. If these gentlemen did appear, he said, he ‘would send a force to suppress them … by the duty of his place he could do no less.’5

  However, two days later there arrived a very different emissary. Monck’s younger brother Nicholas was a country parson in Cornwall. His story was that he had journeyed four hundred miles ostensibly to bring back his daughter, who was staying with her uncle and was due to marry. That was a cover. The curate, a fervent royalist, had been picked to carry a mouth-watering offer to his brother. If George Monck helped Charles gain the throne he would be rewarded with land and honours plus £100,000 a year for life, ‘to be disposed of at his own discretion’.

  Nicholas bore an introductory letter from Charles, but the money offer was conveyed by word of mouth. The curate had promised to give the message to Monck alone, but his brother was busy with dispatches when he arrived, and Nicholas was unable to contain himself. He poured it all out to John Price, his fellow clergyman. Price later recalled continually going to and fro to the door to check that there were no eavesdroppers in the vicinity.

  Monck was not overly welcoming to Nicholas. They met later that night and after the older man was given the letter and told of the offer, his attitude changed. The younger Monck explained how Sir John Greenville, a cousin deeply involved in the royalist underground, had set up his mission. He also revealed plans for Presbyterians and Cavaliers to widen the uprising, with insurrections across the country, plans involving no less a figure than Lord Fairfax. The loquacious Nicholas emerged from the meeting to tell Price that his brother liked what he had heard, especially the involvement of Fairfax. ‘From this time on,’ wrote Price, ‘I do believe that his resolve was fixed for the King’s restoration.’

&nb
sp; Monck’s decision would not become apparent for many months. Secrecy was, of course, essential. George Monck’s officers, many of them Puritan radicals, were also mostly republicans, and Monck, or ‘the General’ as his entourage called him, was fearful lest any of them should overhear his conversations. Price witnessed his fear and embarrassment at the loudly proclaimed royalism of his wife Nan. She had once been married to a body servant of the Stuarts and was fiercely partisan for them. After dinner, when her husband’s officers had retired, leaving the General drinking with Price, she would sometimes appear and rant against the enemies of the king. ‘I have often shut the dining room door and charged the servants to stand without,’ Price recalled.6

  Next day, a Sunday, Monck convened a council of war comprising himself, his brother, his adjutant Major Smith, and his two chaplains, Price and Thomas Gumble. The conclave continued into the night and the momentous decision was eventually reached to come out against the ‘fanatics’ of the Rump and join Booth. Price was to draft the justification, a declaration for distribution among the troops expressing the people’s ‘dissatisfaction’ with the Rump and the need for a new Parliament. That was to be backed up by a letter to the army grandees in London and by immediate military moves. Smith was ordered to seize Edinburgh Castle and the citadel at Leith.