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

by Jordan, Don

  The day ended memorably for royalists. In the evening a man with a ladder, paint and brushes approached the quadrangle of the old Royal Exchange where a row of statues of all the monarchs of England except Charles I stood. After Charles’s execution his statue had been pulled down and an inscription put in its place, reading Exit Tyrannus Regum Ultimus, Restitutae Angliae Libertatis Anno Prime Die. XXX Januarii MDCXXXXIIX [sic] (So ends the rule of the last tyrant. Liberty was restored to England on the thirtieth day of January 1648).* Soldiers and others watched the painter climb his ladder and cheered lustily as he painted over the inscription, descended his ladder and shouted ‘Long live King Charles the Second.’16

  On cue, royalist supporters came out into the open. ‘Hesitation suddenly ceased everywhere and the torrent was at its full,’ writes Masson. ‘They were drinking Charles’ health openly in taverns; they were singing songs about him everywhere; they were tearing down the Arms of the Commonwealth in public buildings and putting up the king’s instead.’ In the Commons, Edward Stephens took the risk of making a speech enthusiastically in favour of monarchy and was applauded for his pains.

  Anglican clerics, so long restrained, came out into the open too. On 5 April, Matthew Griffith was briefly jailed for publishing a zealously royalist sermon, The Fear of God and the King, taken from Proverbs 24.21: ‘fear thou the Lord and the King’. Blind John Milton replied with Brief Notes upon a late sermon: ‘so wide [is] the disjunction of God from a King,’ he wrote, ‘we could not serve two contrary masters God and the King.’ Griffith’s pamphlet was technically treasonable; a few weeks later the world would be turned upside down and Milton would be dubbed the traitor.

  A handful of republicans fought the election, including Ludlow and Scot. Both felt themselves to be in jeopardy but risked a last show of defiance. Ludlow contested the Hinden seat in his native Somerset which he had previously represented, and noted that he was now a bogey man. Local Cavaliers ‘had printed the names of the late king’s judges, of which number I had the honour to be one’ and they issued warnings to the electors that they ‘should certainly be destroyed by the king if they elected me’. Nevertheless he won a clear majority over a royalist, Sir Thomas Thynne. It was a Pyrrhic victory. Thynne later had some of Ludlow’s votes declared invalid and was awarded the seat.

  Scot’s old seat was in Buckinghamshire, where his opponent was a royalist baronet. According to Henning’s History of the House of Commons, ‘No efforts were lacking to ensure his [Scot’s] defeat including the production of an alleged bastard during the election campaign.’ Nevertheless, Scot tied in votes with his monarchist opponent. After the election, however, the House, now with a royalist majority, ruled that his votes were invalid and ordered the local mayor into custody for a false return.17

  Increasingly, Ludlow felt personally threatened:

  I continued my course of passing sometimes through Westminster Hall that they might see that I had not withdrawn upon any design yet not so frequently or publicly as formerly, lodging sometimes at one friend’s house, sometimes at another. And when I lodged at my own home I took special care that the outer gates should be kept closed and that he who attended at them should not permit any to enter of whom he had the least suspicion before he had first given me notice that if I saw cause I might withdraw myself which by reason of back doors I had opportunity to do.18

  On the evening of 11 April at about eight o’clock, John Lambert, his hands bound with cloth, slid down a rope that was tied to his window and escaped from the Tower of London. Six men were waiting by the wall. They hustled him on to a barge that vanished into the night. He wasn’t missed till morning, because a maid put on his nightcap, lay in his curtained bed and managed a convincing ‘Good night’ when the warder came to lock up. It was said that the rope he used was of silk woven by a lady.

  Lambert was not seen for some days, finally surfacing in Warwickshire. The auspices must have seemed propitious with reports suggesting that soldiers were flocking to him. ‘The defection appeared general,’ wrote François Guizot, ‘an attempt was made, for the purpose of securing the soldiers, to oblige them to sign the address from their officers; but they deserted in crowds: the army of London alone remained entire.’19

  Monck sent Richard Ingoldsby in pursuit of Lambert. One of a small band of Cromwellian turncoats who had switched allegiance after Richard Cromwell’s fall, Ingoldsby was now a king’s man, falling over himself to disavow his past. He was particularly anxious to impress because he was also a regicide.

  The Lord General does not appear to have been especially confident. After Ingoldsby’s force had departed, he summoned Charles’s envoy Sir John Grenville and told him, ‘If Ingoldsby is beaten, and the army revolts to Lambert, I shall declare for the king, publish my commission, and raise all the royalists to arms in England, Scotland, and Ireland: be in readiness to receive orders.’ He then wrote also to thank the king, and to engage himself formally in his service.20

  Lambert’s men were scouring England for support. A major sent to find Edmund Ludlow discovered him in a safe house in Somerset, where he had gone to ground on hearing news of Lambert’s escape. The major seems to have given a breathlessly upbeat description of troops flocking to join Lambert in the Midlands: already he had a thousand horse, and the greater part of the army was going to come over to him. After imparting this information to Ludlow, the major explained that they looked to him to raise the west and had arranged a rendezvous in Oxfordshire. Ludlow duly dispatched messengers to trusted commanding officers in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, asking them to be ready to march. But he held back from a public declaration till Lambert’s prospects were clearer. Distrust for Lambert was widespread and Ludlow shared it. He had risked his life opposing the proposal to give the throne to Oliver Cromwell and was one of those who feared that Lambert had similar Cromwellian ambitions. Before joining him he wanted to know what Lambert’s agenda was. The major answered ‘that it was not now a time to declare what we would be for, but what we would be against, which was that torrent of tyranny and popery that was ready to break in upon us’. Ludlow replied that ‘the best way to prevent those mischiefs, would be to agree upon something that might be contrary to them’. Ludlow was still waiting for a reply a week later when Ingoldsby caught up with Lambert near Daventry.21

  It was now that Monck’s insistence on quartering suspected regiments in different parts of England and dividing them into sections paid off. Dispersal made concerted action that much more difficult. Haselrig’s horse was spread over five towns, Francis Hacker’s regiment over three Midland counties. When the call came from Lambert, one of Colonel Hacker’s units saddled up ready to go, while others marched through Nottingham swords drawn, but the end result appears to have been that just a dozen or so men actually set off. Reports of isolated handfuls of soldiers and officers being arrested on the roads to the Midlands suggest that it was the same everywhere.

  One of Haselrig’s troops did get through, only for its captain – no less than Sir Arthur’s son – to switch sides. According to a field report from one of George Monck’s officers, a few hours before the denouement at Daventry one of Ingoldsby’s officers captured Captain Haselrig, but released him on his promise to send his whole troop over to join Ingoldsby, ‘which he faithfully performed’.22

  In the end, when Ingoldsby caught up with Lambert the escaped general had no more than seven squadrons of cavalry and a very small body of infantry, totalling less than a thousand. They were posted behind a little brook which became the line separating the two forces. There was a standoff for some four hours as both sides harangued and shouted, loath to fight former comrades, endeavouring instead to prise men away from the ranks opposite.

  Ingoldsby, dressed as a common trooper, reportedly infiltrated Lambert’s line and persuaded twenty-five horsemen to cross over. Eventually Ingoldsby gave the order to charge; his infantry fired, wounding two of Lambert’s men. In turn Lambert advanced, commanding his cavalry to reserve
their fire till they closed in on the enemy; but when they arrived within pistol shot, they stopped and lowered their guns. The final battle of the Civil Wars was over.

  Ingoldsby reportedly rode up to Lambert, shouting, ‘You are my prisoner.’ Lambert asked to negotiate but his plea was refused. Lambert’s officers, led by Daniel Axtell and John Okey, are said to have pressed Ingoldsby to let their leader escape. But Ingoldsby was immovable. He was going to keep his prize and prove his new loyalty. According to one report, ‘Lambert put his horse to a gallop to save himself; but Ingoldsby, darting off in pursuit, closed upon him, with his pistol in his hand, calling on him to surrender, or he would shoot him. Lambert’s fortunes had too often failed him; he had no longer a hope left to sustain him; he lost his courage, stopped, vainly requested his liberty, then submitted.’23 It has to be said that the accounts of Lambert’s pathetic end probably originated from Ingoldsby or one of his lieutenants and are inconsistent with the accounts of courage that Lambert exhibited time after time in his career. But of course it suited Monck for the aura around the army’s great hero to be destroyed.

  Lambert was brought back to the Tower less than a week after he had quitted it. On his way, Ingoldsby obliged his prisoner to stand under the gallows at Tyburn. The following week there was a great military review of London and surrounding militias in Hyde Park – twelve thousand men from various regiments, in white, green, blue, yellow and orange, but not it seems in the scarlet of Cromwell’s New Model Army.

  All was over for this revolutionary army and its allies. Samuel Pepys was one of many who celebrated, seeing Lambert’s defeat as a decisive blow against the ‘fanatics’. On 24 April, he wrote: ‘Their whole design is broken and things now very open and plain and every man begins to be merry and full of hopes.’

  10

  EXODUS

  April–May 1660

  John Lambert’s abject defeat, followed by his humiliating treatment at Tyburn, marked the end of the republican era. Three days after his capture the new Convention Parliament met and proclaimed Britain a monarchy.* The Lords were re-established too. Some thirty peers simply occupied their old chamber and acted as if the upper house had never been abolished. The final piece in the jigsaw, the proclamation of Charles Stuart as monarch, would not be in place for a further week, but everyone knew that the restoration was unstoppable. A frightening summer was ahead for the men associated with the execution of Charles I.

  A sign of things to come arrived on 27 April when a party of militiamen descended on the Staffordshire home of the Fifth Monarchist leader General Thomas Harrison and took him away. He was the first of Charles I’s judges to be arrested in England. No one had more to do with the king’s death than Harrison. He had pressed for the trial, he had been in charge of security at the trial, he had attended every session, he had even taken charge of the dead king’s funeral. Not surprisingly his name topped the lists of the king’s ‘murderers’ that royalists now took to scattering around.

  Harrison was arrested by Colonel John Bowyer, one of the secluded MPs. Well provided with horses and arms, he could have made a show of resistance or escaped. He did neither. He would have counted it an ‘action of desertion of the cause in which he engaged, to leave his house’, explained Mark Noble, the first biographer of the king’s judges.1 George Monck sent an order to convey Harrison to the Tower. His horses were impounded and sent to London for the use of the king. The king would lay claim to the property and estate of every so-called regicide, most of it going to his brother James, Duke of York.

  Edmund Ludlow, who was well aware that he might be the royalists’ next target, attempted to secure what he could of his estate before the authorities acted. He tried to make over to his brother-in-law £1500 of livestock on his property in Ireland and to have tenants’ rents collected. But his old enemy Sir Charles Coote, without any authority from Parliament, seized it all, taking control of the estate and forcing Ludlow’s tenants to pay rents to him. Colonel Theophilus Jones, Coote’s chief collaborator in wresting control of Ireland from the Rump, took away the pick of the livestock, presumably for himself.

  In London, the business of restoring the monarchy occupied a fraction of the time it had taken to displace it. This mighty political turnabout was achieved in just over a week. The process began on 1 May with an elaborate charade. Charles’s trusted middleman Sir John Grenville presented himself at the door of the council chamber in Whitehall flourishing a letter. It bore the royal Stuart seal and was addressed to General George Monck. The General affected not to know Grenville and theatrically commanded the guards to hold him while the document was examined. Grenville announced that it was a declaration from the king and that there were similar missives for the Commons, the Lords, the City of London, the army and the fleet.

  The document, the Declaration of Breda, contained Charles’s promise of clemency to most of his enemies, and those of his father, if they swore fealty. It was an astute document that breathed forgiveness. The crucial passage announced a ‘free and general pardon’ to all who within forty days offered their loyalty and obedience to the king, ‘excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament – these only to be excepted’. The declaration then repeated the assurance:

  Let all our subjects … rely upon the word of a King, solemnly given by this present Declaration, that no crime whatsoever, committed against Us or our Royal Father before the publication of this, shall ever rise in judgment, or be brought in question, against any of them, to the least endangerment of them, either in their lives, liberties, or estates.

  Charles undertook to settle army pay arrears and to confirm land settlements made since 1648. Remarkably for a son of Charles I, he also pledged to guarantee ‘liberty for tender consciences’, or freedom of worship.

  The forty-day countdown for former enemies to pledge allegiance began on the day the declaration was published, 1 May. The wording would persuade some of his father’s judges that if they pledged in time (by 10 June) they would qualify for clemency. It wasn’t so. They were misled, or they misled themselves. A flurry of activity followed the reading of the Breda document in the Lords and the Commons. Peers and commoners hastened breathlessly in and out of joint meetings in the Painted Chamber and back to their own chambers as the two houses raced to be first to declare England a monarchy again. In mid-afternoon the Lords won. Their statement read: ‘The Lords do own and declare that, according to the ancient and fundamental Laws of this Kingdom, the Government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons.’ The Commons had to follow suit: ‘this House doth agree with the Lords … that, according to the ancient and fundamental Laws of this Kingdom, the Government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons.’

  The statement had the bonfires burning, the drink overflowing and the maypoles going up for the first time in a dozen years of grey Puritan rule. The giant maypole set up at the traditional point in the Strand was said to have been erected by John Clarges, a blacksmith from the Savoy, who was not only an ardent royalist but also George Monck’s father-in-law. ‘Transcendant was the Joy all over England which issued from this good News,’ wrote the monarchist historian William Howell nearly two decades later.2

  Three days after the declaration of a monarchy, the royal arms were restored to the Courts of Justice, and the statue of Charles was returned to Guildhall. Throughout the following month the effigy of Cromwell, which only eighteen months before had been crowned with a royal diadem, draped with a purple mantle, and borne with all imaginable pomp to Westminster Abbey, was exposed at one of the windows at Whitehall with a rope fixed round its neck.

  The next eight days saw a battle between the Presbyterians and the new, wildly royalist intake in the Commons over the limits to be put on royal power. The Presbyterian grandees in the Lords, the Earls of Manchester and Newcastle and Sir Thomas Wharton, were determined to impose conditions on the incoming king and pushed for those accepted by Charles I in the Treaty of Newport in 1648. Those ha
d denied the king control of the army and reserved for Parliament the appointment of council members, judges and other officials. The Presbyterians wanted no less. They were set on preventing any more favourites like a Strafford or the Duke of Buckingham taking the helm.

  A year earlier, young Charles would have accepted almost any terms. Around Easter 1659 his courtiers were so desperate that they had canvassed the idea of him securing the throne by marrying a daughter of John Lambert, who would then play kingmaker. Apparently Charles had gone along with the proposal. But Lambert wanted no part of it. Now, in April 1660, emboldened by George Monck’s commitment to him, Charles felt so strong that he pressed for an unconditional restoration. He let it be known that his ‘honour’ demanded no less.

  All eyes were on Monck. ‘The General hath been highly complimented by both Houses,’ wrote the courtier Henry Coventry to the Marquis of Ormond, ‘and without doubt the giving the King easy or hard conditions dependeth totally upon him; for if he appear for the King, the affections of the people are so high for him, that no other authority can oppose him.’3 The Presbyterians tried to set up a committee in the Commons to consider putting the Newport terms to the king. This proposal was seconded, but got nowhere. According to one contemporary account, ‘It was foreseen that such a motion might be set on foot’ and Monck was ‘instructed how to answer it, whensoever it should be proposed.’4 Instructed is probably the wrong word, but Monck played the saboteur anyway – first by suggesting that Charles could be trusted to be accommodating when he assumed the throne and then by frightening Parliament. He told the Commons that he could not answer for the peace ‘either of the nation or the army’ if there was any delay in bringing over the king. Although universal peace reigned all over the nation at the moment, ‘many incendiaries stood ready to raise the flame’. The portly general referred dramatically to information he dared not release and talked of ‘the blood or mischief’ that delay might produce. The speech ended with a warning that the consequences would be upon Members’ own heads; this ‘was echoed with such a shout over the house, that the motion was no more insisted on’.