The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History
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In a vain attempt to restore his authority, Ludlow returned to Dublin on 31 December, only to find the city and every other town except Duncannon in hostile hands. Ludlow spent fruitless days on a man-o’-war outside Duncannon trying to muster support. Then came news that his Irish enemies had launched treason proceedings against him in Parliament. He was accused of deserting his post in Ireland and of plotting with the army junta. That sent him at full speed once more to Westminster to defend himself.
In Westminster, a struggle had begun over the so-called secluded Members of Parliament, those who had been dragged out of the House in the course of Pride’s Purge in 1648 and thereafter excluded. They had favoured an accommodation with the king then and probably favoured a similar arrangement with his son now in 1660. Crucially they could outvote the Rump if allowed back in. At their head was the bizarre figure of William Prynne, the lead attack dog in the parliamentary campaign that led to the execution of Archbishop Laud. Prynne had become a Puritan martyr in the 1630s when he lost his ears as punishment for alleged sedition, having written a pamphlet which called women actors ‘notorious whores’. Coincidentally or deliberately, it had appeared at a time when Queen Henrietta Maria had shocked convention by acting in a theatrical extravaganza staged before the king. Prynne’s remark was seen as being aimed at her. Hauled before the Star Chamber, he was fined a colossal £5000, jailed and had both his ears clipped. Despite these punishments there was no let-up in his pamphleteering and Prynne was hauled up before the Star Chamber a second time. The remnants of his ears were cut off, his nose was slit, the letters ‘S’ and ‘L’ (for ‘seditious libel’) were branded on his cheek and he was fined another £5000. Thereafter Prynne wore his hair long, covered with a close-fitting cap. He was not a comfortable sight. John Aubrey described him as having ‘the countenance of a witch’.26
Though Prynne was hailed as a parliamentary hero, he had opposed putting the king on trial and was one of the members of the Long Parliament purged in 1648. By 1659 he was openly a king’s man and unarguably the royalists’ most effective propagandist. He launched a blitz of news sheets and pamphlets denouncing the Rump and asserting the rights of the excluded members. A letter to the future Charles II’s secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas, enthused about Prynne, ‘His quill doth the best present right to our edge and though his ears are lost he hears now very well and speaks more loyalty to a general reception than any other.’27
In April 1659 Prynne had attempted to barge his way into the House the first time the Rump took power. He tried again in December when the Rump returned. Both times he failed, but both attempts furnished wonderful propaganda material.
Monck pulled out of York on 16 January and made for Nottingham. Before his departure, the news reached him that he had been made a member of the Council of State and would be required to take the oath abjuring the Stuarts. His only reply was that he was sending two regiments back to Scotland and bringing four thousand foot and eighteen hundred horse to London – which, as François Guizot puts it, was ‘a sufficient force to overawe, without raising suspicion’.28 His priorities at this point were first to keep the Rump in line and second, as his chaplain later revealed, to secure military domination in London.
In Nottingham two of Monck’s key informants were waiting, his brother-in-law Thomas Clarges and one of his chaplains, Thomas Gumble, who had been sent to seek out potential allies in London. They drew a picture of an isolated, deeply unpopular Parliament that had to rely on troops to restrain the mobs. Monck was told that two colonels with regiments in the capital, Herbert Morley and John Fagge, were secretly prepared to offer him their support. That night Monck had Gumble compose a letter to the Speaker asking to be allowed to garrison the capital with his own men, claiming that all but Morley’s and Fagge’s regiments were unreliable. He withheld the letter for the present and decided to spring the idea on the Rump at the last possible moment.
The next day a coach bearing two more men from London caught up with Monck somewhere between Nottingham and Leicester. Thomas Scot and Luke Robinson had been sent by the Council of State, ostensibly to welcome him. Their real mission was to make sure the General took the oath abjuring monarchy well before he reached London. Little is known about Robinson, who just scraped through in the last place on the Council of State. Scot, however, remained second only to Haselrig in influence within the Rump. A regicide and proud of it, he had been an unbending opponent of Cromwell since 1653, and after the Lord Protector’s death became a leading figure in the Parliaments of 1658 and 1659. In this latest incarnation of the Rump, Scot was secretary of state. His presence on the mission was testament to its importance.
Monck treated the two with the deference a Stuart king might demand. ‘The highest honours were prepared for their reception,’ wrote Guizot. ‘Monck spared no demonstration of humility, becoming the most obsequious servant of the Parliament.’ The emissaries insisted on accompanying Monck to London. At every stop he took a back seat, allowing Scot and Robinson to treat with the petitioners who were invariably waiting for Monck at every stopping place.29
It was not a comfortable journey. Mutual distrust reigned behind the civilities. According to Dr Skinner, another of Monck’s chaplains, the two parliamentary emissaries managed to take rooms adjoining his at every stopover and ‘always found or made some hole in the door or wall to look in or listen (which they practiced so palpably that the general found it out and took notice of it to those about him reflecting on their baseness and evil) that they might more nearly inspect his actions and observe what persons came to him’. Monck called the two ‘my evil angels’.30
The column from Scotland arrived at St Albans, twenty-five miles from the capital, at the end of January, and was ordered to bivouac. Among the great and the good awaiting them here was Hugh Peters, Oliver Cromwell’s favourite preacher and a hate figure for monarchists. Peters delivered a long sermon of welcome in which he likened Monck to a Moses leading his people out of the wilderness.
For those still suspicious of him, Monck produced more reassurance. He ordered one of his own officers to be thrashed for claiming that he planned to bring in the king. And he slapped down petitioners from his native Devon who called for the secluded members to be brought back.
At St Albans Monck dispatched a messenger to Parliament carrying the letter, composed three weeks earlier, in which he asked that, the London-based troops being allegedly ‘untrustworthy’, some regiments be removed from London to make way for his own men. Many months later Monck revealed that his strategy had been to split up individual regiments, quartering some units here, others there, so as to minimise the chances of coordinated action against his plans.
Unsurprisingly, the letter caused a heated debate in Parliament. The Rump had spent months hand-picking individual army officers, many of them radicals. Under Monck’s proposal they would be replaced by units whom Monck had spent months trying to purge of exactly such elements. Nevertheless Parliament accepted the proposal.
The handover was tense and almost took a bloody turn when outgoing troops briefly staged a mutiny and refused to leave without payment of arrears. The difficulty was overcome by a promise of payment at the first stop, and Monck’s four regiments marched briskly in. Observers were struck by the silence of the watching Londoners. The unpopularity of the army in the capital was palpable. So was the unpopularity of the Rump Parliament: on 7 February Pepys noted, ‘Boys do now cry “kiss my Parliament” instead of “kiss my arse”, so great and general a contempt is the Rump come to among all men.’31
Monck was allotted rooms at the Palace of Westminster, the ‘Prince’s apartment’. Edmund Ludlow persuaded an old friend of Monck, Vice Admiral John Lawson, to go with him to see the new arrival. When they arrived he treated them to ‘many … protestations of zeal to the common cause with many professions of friendship to ourselves’, recalled Ludlow. Admiral Lawson was reassured. ‘He said to me’, Ludlow wrote, ‘that since the Levite and the Priest had passe
d by and would not help us, he hoped we had found a Samaritan that would do it.’32
‘It was not yet time to undeceive, and yet it was becoming difficult to blind them,’ writes Guizot of Monck’s position as he faced his supposed political masters in Parliament. ‘Monck, now exposed upon the stage, and urged from all quarters by impatient observers, could no longer betake himself to his favourite resource of silence. Taciturnity no longer served the purpose of disguise, and falsehood became necessary.’
Nan, Monck’s royalist wife, was part of the deceit. Having travelled down from Scotland by sea weeks earlier, she now played the part of the dedicated republican hostess. She ‘took especial care to treat the wives of the members that came to visit her,’ writes Ludlow, ‘running herself to fetch the sweetmeats, and filling out wine for them; not forgetting to talk mightily of self-denial, and how much it was upon her husband’s heart that the government might be settled in the way of a commonwealth.’ Presumably the words stuck in her throat.
Four days after his arrival, Monck was put on the spot. Pressure on the Rump climaxed in a declaration from the Common Council of London that no more tax would be levied until the nation was represented by a freely chosen Parliament. Faced with bankruptcy, the Council of State issued a punitive rejoinder. It authorised Monck to arrest eleven London burgesses and destroy defensive posts and chains erected at the city gates to keep the army out. Portcullises were to be wedged open and the great gates of the city themselves unhinged.
Monck perceived a threat to his own position. Refusal to carry out the orders would lay him open to dismissal from his command, and possibly worse. According to a leak attributed to Thomas Scot’s son, his father had made arrangements to throw Monck in the Tower should he defy the orders.
The General’s aides were all for defiance. But early on 9 February Monck headed a column of troops into the City and by nightfall had arrested nine of the eleven burgesses, and removed all the posts and chains. Next day, on further orders from the Rump he burnt the gates. Haselrig was ecstatic. Monck had proved himself the servant of Parliament. ‘All is our own,’ he exclaimed. ‘He will be honest.’33
The joy was short-lived. A day later, Monck went to the Guildhall to show the Lord Mayor a copy of a letter he had written to the Rump. It was devastating. The letter attacked the use of force against London, complained that John Lambert and Sir Harry Vane were still in the city and that supporters of the junta still retained commands, and reprimanded the House for allowing men accused of high treason to sit among them. This was a dig at Edmund Ludlow. But what had Sir Arthur Haselrig storming out of the House in rage was a call on the Rump to issue writs for an election almost immediately. The letter requested it be done by 18 February – under a week.
The atmosphere in London was transformed when the import of the letter circulated. Samuel Pepys, then clerk to the Naval Board, captured the excitement in his diary entry for 11 February. He was present in Westminster Hall to see the reaction of MPs. ‘I went up to the lobby, where I saw the Speaker reading of the letter; and after it was read, Sir A. Haselrig came out very angry, and Billing [a prominent Quaker who a few days earlier had been beaten up by some of Monck’s soldiers], standing at the door, took him by the arm, and cried, “Thou man, will thy beast carry thee no longer? thou must fall!”’
Pepys then made for Guildhall, where Monck had gone to explain his letter to the Lord Mayor and the aldermen. The General apologised to them for what had happened on the preceding two days and declared that the work which he had been ordered to carry out was ‘the most ungrateful he had ever performed in his life’. The Rump, he told them, would not sit beyond 6 May. It was a transformative moment. Monck had entered the city’s headquarters a villain and left a hero. Pepys was just in time to see him departing and was deafened by the crowd when it glimpsed the presumed liberator. ‘Such a shout I never heard in all my life,’ the diarist recorded, ‘Crying out, “God bless your Excellence.”’
After a protracted visit to an alehouse – one of many that day – Pepys walked home through a London that seemed on fire:
In Cheapside there was a great many bonfires, and Bow bells and all the bells in all the churches as we went home were a-ringing. Hence we went homewards, it being about ten o’clock. But the common joy that was everywhere to be seen! The number of bonfires, there being fourteen between St. Dunstan’s and Temple Bar, and at Strand Bridge, I could at one view tell thirty-one fires. In King Street, seven or eight; and all along burning, and roasting, and drinking for rumps. There being rumps tied upon sticks and carried up and down. The butchers at the May Pole in the Strand rang a peal with their knives when they were going to sacrifice their rump. On Ludgate Hill there was one turning of the spit that had a rump tied upon it, and another basting of it. Indeed it was past imagination, both the greatness and the suddenness of it. 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 merely for heat.
A hiatus of ten days followed as Parliament’s leaders struggled to bring the General back on side. They sent Thomas Scot and Luke Robinson to his lodgings with a pacifying message of thanks for his work in the city. The duo whom he had treated with such obsequiousness on the road from Nottingham found difficulty even getting an audience. The Rump then performed a humiliating U-turn to appease the General by dropping the oath abjuring monarchy. An amendment replaced the oath with a mere ‘engagement’ to be ‘faithful to the Commonwealth … without a King’. The worried parliamentarians also scurried to satisfy the General by getting Harry Vane and John Lambert out of London. Vane, though accounted too sick to travel, was ordered to be ‘carried’ over one hundred miles to his house in Lincolnshire. Lambert was given four days to surrender to the Council of State or suffer loss of his estates.34
Monck now moved to break the bar on the secluded Presbyterians taking their old seats in the Commons. On 21 February, he met their leaders secretly and agreed terms for their readmission the very next day. The Presbyterians were to settle the government of the army and provide money for its maintenance, issue writs for a new Parliament to meet on 20 April, and dissolve the Long Parliament as speedily as possible. It was also understood that they would not alter the form of the government.
What happened in the following hours is unclear. According to one account, Monck wavered all night over whether or not to back the secluded members and betray the Rump, finally being persuaded to do so by his wife and aides. According to another, the Council of State got wind that secluded members planned to force entry into the House but were reassured by Monck that although he didn’t believe it, he would double the guard on the House.35
Next morning the guards were indeed doubled. However, their orders were not to stop the secluded members entering but to ensure that they did. Under Monck’s protection, seventy-three MPs purged in 1648 pushed and laughed their way to the seats they had been prevented from occupying since before the king’s death. They were led by William Prynne.
The forces favouring an accommodation with the king’s son were now a majority in Parliament and the General was evidently behind them. The seven regicides in the house that day must have shivered. Time was running out for them.
9
THE ROUND-UP BEGINS
February—April 1660
Events were moving even faster in Ireland than in England that February. In the space of a fortnight the argument over the secluded members led to the seizure of Dublin Castle and an Irish declaration for a free Parliament – and the first arrests of regicides took place.
The arrests were ordered by Sir Charles Coote, the ambitious president of Connaught and George Monck’s chief ally in Ireland. He was acting on the prompting of Sir Arthur Forbes, one of Charles’s Irish agents. As the issue of the secluded members came to the boil, Forbes urged Coote to declare for a free Parliament and arrest ‘those persons who had a hand in the murder of the King’.1
Coote eagerly complied. H
e was one of many rats leaving the Commonwealth’s sinking ship. In the 1650s he had been ‘a scourge of the King’s supporters … hanging royalist commanders, killing bishops and profiting vastly from confiscated royalist estates’.2 But for a year he had been co-operating with Irish royalists and was desperate to curry favour. Edmund Ludlow, during his four months’ rule in Dublin, had become so wary of Coote that at the time of the Booth emergency he ordered the Irish magnate not to leave Dublin. Ludlow was right to be suspicious – Coote had a force assembled ready to proclaim the king had Booth’s insurrection not been so firmly crushed. Four months later Coote was to play a key role in the coup that ousted Edmund Ludlow’s commissioners. A month after that he laid the treason charges against Ludlow, alleging that he had deserted his post and plotted with the army.
Now Coote hoped to play kingmaker by encouraging Charles to make his bid for the crown through a landing in Connaught. There, an Irish army led by Coote would be waiting. The negotiations with Sir Arthur Forbes which led to his hunt for regicides had begun with Coote making the case for an Irish landing. ‘His own restoration agenda, after dispatching Ludlow,’ suggests Geoffrey Robertson, ‘was to have the King come first to Ireland, receive a rapturous welcome and progress on to London with Coote at all times at his triumphant side.’3