On 11 February, the general told the Lord Mayor of his intention to have the secluded members readmitted, and the news spread like wildfire. Young Sam Pepys, whose fortunes stood to rise because he was nephew to Montague, excitably describes the roasting of the Rump:
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, it being about ten o’clock. But the common joy that was everywhere to be seen! At Strand Bridge I could at one view tell 31 fires. In King Street, there were rumps tied upon sticks and carried up and down. The butchers at the Maypole 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 nearly for heat.17
After this night of the long knives, there could be no doubt that the Rump was skewered. Civic leaders had decided that Restoration was best for business, and wealthy merchants had paid for all the rumps that hungry Londoners joyfully roasted and then devoured. Monck acted by pre-arrangement with Speaker Lenthall, his health suddenly restored, introducing into Parliament some eighty or so of the MPs excluded by Pride’s Purge. This operation, on 21 February, was skilfully handled: the Rumpers did not know what hit them. (They thought that the soldiers had gathered at the door of the Commons that morning to keep the secluded members out, rather than to let them in.18) Once readmitted, these presbyterian MPs outnumbered the hardcore republicans. They appointed a new Council of State, mainly of royalist-inclining Presbyterians, set Monck in full command, put Montague back at the Navy, released George Booth from the Tower and put Lambert there in his place. Then they dissolved, having issued writs for elections to produce a new ‘Convention Parliament’19 in late April, which everyone expected would vote to bring back the King on the Newport terms. His health was openly drunk and the royal standard – the lion and unicorn – was brought out from behind many a fireplace and openly displayed.20 The Rota Club wound itself up, since there was no point in further debate – the republic was a lost cause. Indeed, it was a dangerous cause, as the appearance of nasty little handbills presaged. Some merely listed the names of the judges present at the sentencing of ‘King Charles of blessed memory’; others gave the names and the addresses of the thirty-three witnesses that John Cooke had called to testify in the Painted Chamber hearings.21 There was no explanation – the message was all too clear.
Monck presided over the frantic jockeying for the expected royal favour. There would be royal disfavour as well, and servants of the commonwealth and the protectorate began to burn their papers, cover their tracks and make plans to leave the country. Pepys noticed ‘strange thing – how I was already courted by the people’ at the Admiralty, even before his relative, Montague, was confirmed as admiral.22 Colonel Morley changed his mind and begged John Evelyn to help him to a pardon: he was put in touch with John Mordaunt (soon to be Viscount Mordaunt) who provided one for £1,000. Oxbridge-educated moderates like Pepys and Montague sneered at Monck – ‘a dull heavy man’, ‘a thick-skulled fellow’;23 but he outsmarted them all with guile and instinct and authority. They were to blame him for betraying the Presbyterian cause of constitutional monarchy, which involved bringing the King back on the Newport terms. Monck upset their expectations by refusing to disqualify any candidates, thus permitting the election of many cavaliers – even those who had borne arms against Parliament – who outnumbered the Presbyterians when the Convention Parliament met, and wanted the King back almost unconditionally, on the terms his father had conceded following Strafford’s execution in 1641.
The penny finally dropped for Haselrig – two pennies in fact. He asked Monck, after he brought back the secluded members, whether he would honour his repeated promises to be loyal to the Commonwealth. Monck replied with a sneer, ‘How could he [Haselrig] expect anything from him whom he had endeavoured to make less than he was before he reached London?’24 He contemptuously offered to save Haselrig’s life for tuppence if he promised to retire from all public office. Haselrig quickly agreed: he withdrew his candidature for the new Parliament, and dispatched two pennies in a letter reminding the general of his promise (Monck, fork-tongued as ever, delivered on his life but not his liberty – he would die in prison).25 With Haselrig’s capitulation, the ‘Good Old Cause’ was good no longer – indeed it was bad for anyone who valued their life at more than tuppence. A few honourable men stayed and fought as best they knew how – Ludlow and Scot by standing for the new Parliament. Thomas Harrison refused all offers to flee abroad, being ‘so fully satisfied of the justice of his cause’ that he waited calmly at home for his arrest.26
Lambert, ingenious as ever, escaped from the Tower one night in early April, sliding down from his window on a silk ladder provided by Joan, a sympathetic chambermaid, who dressed in his night-shirt and cap and bade goodnight to the warder in a deep voice.27 As soon as he was free, Lambert raised the republican banner for a final stand, symbolically at Edge Hill where it had all begun. But thanks in part to Haselrig’s sacking and scattering of Lambert’s supporters in the army, Monck’s forces were so superior to the ‘Lambertines’, as they were derisively called, that any stand could only be symbolic. Monck showed a sense of humour, or at least of irony: to meet and beat Lambert he dispatched a large force under Colonel Dick Ingoldsby, who in 1649 had been one of the King’s most enthusiastic judges, but was now willing to fight for his life (in order to save it) against his former comrades. On 22 April Lambert surrendered after firing one symbolic shot. At the age of 41, this remarkable man was marched away to an imprisonment which would last for the rest of his long life.28
16
Endgame
AMIDST ALL THE excitement following Monck’s arrival in London, news from Dublin was barely noticed when it arrived weeks late through the winter storms. So it is impossible precisely to date the extraordinary event (one report has it as early as 10 February) that signalled the decision of the Irish Protestant establishment to declare for the King. That event was the unlawful arrest of Justice Cooke.
From Easter 1659, Cooke had sat on the Upper Bench until its sittings were suspended in September. Thereafter, he served where required – he was recorder of Waterford and received various commissions from the council deputed to run Ireland by the Rump and later by the Committee of Safety. His last job, in November, was to peruse a consignment of books intercepted by customs, to determine whether any were seditious or blasphemous. He reported within a fortnight, having read thirty of them, that they betrayed ‘an erroneous untoward spirit, denying any external reverence to magistrates, condemning ministers as anti-Christian hirelings and dumb dogs, expressing much bitterness against all manner of learning . . . and many popish and other erroneous tenets opinions contrary to sound doctrine’.1 It is sad to find any one of Milton’s circle making his living as a censor, vainly trying to keep Catholic opinion out of Ireland. By this time, with Bradshawe dead as well as Cromwell, Cooke was the only remaining member of that triumvirate named by Charles II in his wrath as incapable of forgiveness. The nearer the Restoration, the greater John Cooke’s value as a dish that might be carved fit for a new king.
The danger to Cooke became greater in December, when supporters of the Committee of Safety (i.e. those who would cling most firmly to a republic) were forced out in the Dublin coup and the new council of officers led by Sir Charles Coote sought to impeach Ludlow. The absent commander made haste to return and anchored off Dublin on 31 December. Fearing capture, Ludlow sailed south to the fort of Duncannon, manned by loyal officers, and remained there for three weeks while his leading supporters – including Colonel Phayre and Miles Corbet – were held prisoners in Dublin Castle. Cooke realised all too well that the agenda of Broghill and Coote was ‘to put the army in a pre
pared readiness to receive Charles Stuart at a week’s warning’, although that ‘must not yet be mentioned: the design must be first to bring in the excluded members from 1648, and then – ding dong bells – will come in kings, lords and commons’.2 This he wrote, presciently but anonymously, in a pamphlet entitled A Sober Vindication of Lieutenant-General Ludlow which his publisher at St Paul’s had out on the streets in early February. Ludlow had been attacked for favouring sectarians – Baptists and Quakers – but ‘a sectary is a name they give to the godly and to Parliament’s best friends’. Cooke begged – too late – for unity against the ‘common enemy’, the bishops and their cavaliers, who were masterful propagandists with their demeaning references to ‘the Rump’ and their siren slogan ‘a free Parliament’ by which they hoped to bring in the King. Ironically, Cooke had begun his public career by debunking pamphleteers who take refuge in anonymity, but Mary, his new wife, was pregnant, and the danger of the times made him fear for his family. He should have kept silent, but the old urge to say what he thought was right overcame caution. He signed himself as Philanthropus (‘one that loves the commonwealth as his own life’).
Now was the time for John Cooke to fly the country, and he knew it. William Steele had taken ship for the continent, and Miles Corbet, on escaping from Dublin Castle, followed him. There were boats leaving for New England, and a well-trodden path to safety in Geneva. But Cooke scorned to run away: once again, he would ‘wait on God’. He would not have long to wait.
By February 1660, Coote was in control in Dublin and had already been in secret communication with the King, as well as with Monck. His own Restoration agenda, after despatching Ludlow, was to have the King come first to Ireland, receive a rapturous welcome, and progress on to London – with Coote at all times by his triumphant side. (The plan was rejected by Hyde, who knew only too well that Englishmen refused to believe that any good could ever come out of Ireland.)
Sir Charles Coote was a man who never bothered over much with conscience or propriety and it occurred to him that within his grasp was a prize worth the unlawful taking. John Cooke – with whom he had often sat on tribunals and special commissions – would certainly earn him the King’s pardon. Coote had in the past been a scourge of the King’s supporters in Ireland, hanging royalist commanders, killing bishops, scorching earth and profiting vastly from confiscated estates. He needed now to demonstrate a new-found loyalty. So in early February he sent a friendly message asking Judge Cooke to wait upon him at Dublin. Cooke delayed, spending several days with Mary at Waterford, agonising over whether to go or to stay – or to go to America. Fatally, he went as far as Monkstown, on the outskirts of the city, where Coote sent a troop of cavalry to arrest him and hold him in the dungeon at Dublin Castle. There was no Upper Bench in session in Dublin to grant habeas corpus to its most senior member. Lord Broghill, now emerging as the real power in Ireland was not minded to help the Chief Justice who had sided with tenants against his father, the Earl of Cork. Besides, his sister had married Lord Goring’s son in a match the family had expected to bring wealth and status. After Cooke’s prosecution of Goring in 1649 (see here) the family estates had been forfeited.
Justice Cooke was Coote’s biggest prize and was soon followed by others: he double-crossed his supporter Sir Hardress Waller, a signatory to the King’s death warrant and arrested Colonel Hercules Hunks and Robert Phayre, who had been bidden to execute it; and captured two of the judges at the King’s trial, John Jones and Matthew Tomlinson. News of these arrests soon reached the royal court at Brussels: ‘In Ireland they play Rex’, a royalist agent wrote breathlessly to Hyde, ‘Cooke and five more are close prisoners in Dublin’.3 The royalists had every reason to distrust Coote, and thought at first he was playing a double game. There was panic that Ireland ‘outgoes our pace’ and there could be complications if Coote and Broghill (who had summoned an Irish Parliament and addressed it in favour of restoration) jumped the gun being primed so delicately by Monck in London. So the Council of State directed them to send Cooke and the others under close guard to England.4 Cooke’s immediate execution might disaffect Monck’s officers and alarm wavering supporters of the Restoration. So Judge Cooke’s fate was put on hold until the new Parliament could meet.
The counter-revolution was under way. After a decade when their cause appeared hopeless, Charles and his courtiers, living on borrowed money in Brussels, were bewildered at this sudden improvement in their fortunes. Now Edward Hyde came into his own: he organised the removal of the court from Brussels (then under the control of Spain, England’s historic enemy) to neutral Breda, in Holland; by early April he had drafted the Declaration of Breda, and a number of royal letters to accompany it addressed in turn to Monck, the Commons, the Lords and the City Council. At this time, the royal party could not judge its own strength: elections were underway and it had no expectation of winning them and no idea that it would win them spectacularly. The royal party wanted to come in at all costs, if need be under the Newport conditions, and was even prepared – but only if absolutely necessary – to forgo all revenge. It did not believe, then, that it would be in a position to execute its enemies: the object of the Breda letters was to overcome resistance by promising that there was no intention of settling old scores. ‘We wish that the memory of what is passed may be buried to the world’, said Charles with pretended magnanimity in his letter to the council and the officers of the army. To the newly elected House of Commons, the King offered reconciliation on their own terms:
If you desire security for those who in these calamitous times either wilfully or weakly have transgressed . . . we have left you to provide for their security and indemnity in such a way as you shall think just and reasonable . . .5
To the City of London, the King was explicit in his desire ‘to obtain peace . . . without effusion of blood’. The city should know ‘how far we are from the desire of revenge’.6
To its own surprise, the King’s party won the election: cavalier MPs outnumbered Presbyterians in the Convention Parliament, which met at the end of April. They wanted their King back and back Charles wanted to come – preferably, without any conditions at all. When some Presbyterians and moderate royalists, led by Matthew Hale, tried to impose the Newport Treaty conditions, Monck put his foot down: the security situation made it essential that there should be no conditions upon which opposition could fasten. Hyde, on hearing of Monck’s ploy to beat off Hale, roared with delight, whilst Montague shook with rage when he realised how the Prebyterians had been duped.7 The King, once again, was to be sole judge of what national security required. After the letters from Breda came a Declaration, also drafted by Hyde, and it was a diplomatic master stroke. Addressed ‘To all our loving subjects, of what degree or quality soever’, it sought ‘a quiet and peaceable possession of our right’. Everyone who within forty days declared ‘loyalty and obedience of good subjects’ was to be pardoned, ‘excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament’. As for the thorny question of return of confiscated estates, just satisfaction ‘shall be determined in Parliament’. But all soldiers in the service of General Monck should receive in full their arrears of pay.8
That was it. Never was regime change accomplished so artfully yet so effortlessly. The King promised nothing, except a vague ‘liberty for tender consciences’ and to pay the soldiers who followed Monck. The winner would take all: Charles II would ‘enjoy what is ours’, leaving Parliament to settle the vexed question of religion on the basis of tolerance (i.e. for Anglicans and their bishops, not necessarily for sects like Quakers and apparently not for Catholics). Parliament would also resolve the vexed issue of confiscated land – but since MPs would benefit, nothing could be more satisfying to them. Most craftily of all, the buck was passed to Parliament to decide how many human sacrifices to offer up to the divinely ordained, hereditary and more or less absolute King Charles II. The Declaration of Breda called for ‘the Restoration of King, peers and people to their just, ancient
and fundamental rights’: on 1 May it was read and adopted by acclamation in both Houses, followed by a unanimous vote that all books advocating republican government should be ‘brought into the House and burned’.9
The emollient promises of the Breda letters had come from the King’s perceived necessity rather than from the King’s heart. Taken literally, the Declaration of Breda meant that Parliament might apply the preferred amnesty to everyone, John Cooke included. But by the time it was read, the situation had changed. The cavaliers controlled the Commons and Lambert’s defeat had deprived the republicans of any military base. They were now at the King’s mercy: all he had to do, if he wanted revenge, was to ignore his Breda letters.
It did not take long to set in motion the machinery for this breach of trust. In mid-May the new House of Commons ordered that all who had sat in judgment on Charles I (they were now openly and officially called regicides) should be seized: several were apprehended trying to flee from Dover. At this stage, before the King’s return, it was assumed that only seven regicides need be put on trial, selected from the most publicly unrepentant: Thomas Harrison headed every list. Moreover, the number of MPs could be reduced by targeting the court’s officials, so a few days later Cooke was added, together with Broughton (the clerk who had read out his charge) and Dendy, the sergeant-at-arms. But the appetite for retribution grew as the opportunity to take it increased. The cavalier MPs wanted much wider vengeance – one of their number, John Lenthall, actually suggested that all who had borne arms against the King should be prosecuted, which would have meant tens of thousands of traitors, including many fellow MPs (who duly reprimanded him) and the turncoat Lords. Lenthall’s royalist zeal would even have executed his own father, William, the former Speaker, who had just sent a bribe of £3,000 to Charles in the hope of keeping his position as Master of the Rolls (the King kept the money, but told him the office was promised to another).10 On 6 June (just one week after his entry into London) Charles II proclaimed no fewer than forty-nine named regicides, as
The Tyrannicide Brief Page 35
