Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  The second civil war had a bloody ending on its two principal fronts. The Scottish army, under the command of the duke of Hamilton, had made a slow progress southward through the rain and wind of an unseasonably cold summer; ill-trained, and much smaller than expected, it was sustained by no great cause, and as a consequence its morale was low. The New Model was at least bolstered by the knowledge that it was fighting an invasion force.

  The two sides encountered each other at a pitched battle near the walls of Preston, on 17 August, in which the infantry of both armies pressed hard upon each other. The Scots were eventually pushed back, with the loss of 1,000 men. Cromwell pursued the remainder of the Scottish army which, battered and broken, laid down its arms. It was the first battle in which he enjoyed overall command, and it was his most signal victory.

  All the remaining royalists from the south-east had fled behind the walls of Colchester where, in the middle of June, Sir Thomas Fairfax prepared for a long siege against them. It was the most distasteful and inglorious event of the entire civil war. Fairfax had decided to starve the city into submission until there came a time when the inhabitants, having exhausted the provisions of cats and dogs, were forced to devour soap and candles; it was reported that the royalist soldiers had told the inhabitants to eat their children. The royalist commander, the earl of Norwich, then sent 500 women and children out of the town; Fairfax refused to receive them and with threats they were driven back behind the walls. By the end of August, reduced, as it was said, ‘by Captain Storm without and by Captain Hunger within’, the royalists surrendered; two of their commanders were then put in front of a firing squad. This second phase of the civil war was more harsh and intense than the first; there was no longer time for mercy.

  After his victory at Preston Cromwell believed that he had seen once more the hand of God. He trusted that he was doing the work of the Lord; that is why he waited upon divine providence to guide his actions and to direct his way forward. He was a blind mole in search of grace, sometimes surrounded by darkness, yet his faith in providence was his rock and his refuge. He wrote to a friend and colleague, Philip Wharton: ‘I can laugh and sing in my heart when I speak of these things.’

  The battle at Preston effectively marked the end of the second civil war, and of the turmoil that had mangled the kingdom since the king had first raised his banner six years before. It has been calculated that 100,000 soldiers and civilians died in the course of the conflict, and that a larger portion of the population perished than in the Great War of 1914–18. It has therefore justly been described as the bloodiest war in English history. One hundred and fifty towns, and fifty villages, suffered significant damage; 10,000 houses were destroyed.

  In the course of the second civil war Charles made several attempts to escape from Carisbrooke Castle. He had never ceased to conspire, and to devise stratagems against his captors and his enemies; he would, for example, conceal coded messages in the heels of his servants’ boots. Some supporters managed to smuggle to him a cutting tool and a supply of nitric acid, then known as aqua fortis, to dismantle the iron bars of his window; but the design was forestalled and came to nothing. On another occasion he tried to squeeze through the bars but became trapped, stuck between his chest and shoulders, and could only extricate himself with difficulty.

  Yet after the final victory parliament still wished to treat with him, against the wishes of the army whose leaders had denounced him as ‘a man of blood’ who had effectively instigated the second civil war. The majority of the members of the Lords and Commons, together with the large part of the population, now wished for peace at any price. The king was therefore taken out of confinement in the castle and lodged with his friends and servants in Newport, to which town the parliamentary commissioners came. He sat under a canopy of state with his advisers behind him; the parliamentary delegation sat before him.

  He was in a more tractable mood, no doubt because the victory of the New Model Army brought an effective end to his resistance. He wished to come to an agreement with parliament on the very good grounds that he feared the army much more. So within a few days he had conceded thirty-eight of their propositions and in return was granted four of his own. He submitted in large part to the religious demands of the commissioners, and agreed to give up control of the militia for a period of twenty years. The parliamentary negotiators were no doubt aware that he might renege on these promises if ever he returned to full power.

  The king himself wrote to an adviser, Sir William Hopkins, that ‘the great concession I made this day – the Church, militia and Ireland – was made merely in order to my escape … my only hope is that now they believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less careful of their guards’. Yet at the same time he was ever mindful that a different fate might await him. He might be a king who had emasculated his sovereignty. He might be condemned to perpetual imprisonment. He might die upon the scaffold. He also feared assassination by friends of the army, and while at the castle had lived in terror of being poisoned by Hammond or one of his gaoler’s associates.

  One of the king’s secretaries, Sir Philip Warwick, saw his master standing at a window with the parliamentary legation behind him and noticed that he was crying ‘the biggest drops that ever I saw fall from an eye’. From the moment his servants had been withdrawn by order, he had neglected his personal appearance; his beard remained untrimmed while his clothes were worn and faded. His once luxurious hair had turned almost entirely grey, thus imparting a new shade of melancholy to his face.

  The army was growing increasingly impatient with the negotiations at Newport and, in November, drew up a ‘remonstrance’ calling for ‘exemplary justice’ for the notorious man of blood. The leaders of the army were calling for his death. They had also begun the march back to London after completing their business against the Scots in the north.

  On the first day of December the king was removed from the Isle of Wight and taken to Hurst Castle on the coast of Hampshire. Cromwell and his colleagues feared, rightly, that parliament had drawn up plans to invite him back to Westminster. They were also apprehensive of any kind of formal agreement between the two parties. Cromwell declared that any Newport treaty would be only a ‘little bit of paper’. He wrote to Hammond that the king was ‘an accursed thing’ with whom there could be no agreement.

  On 5 December parliament resolved to settle with the king on the basis of the terms concluded at Newport. On the following day Colonel Thomas Pride stood outside the chamber of the Commons with a list of names; he checked them off, one by one, as each member tried to enter. Some were allowed to go forward while others were detained or arrested by soldiers who stood behind him. The Presbyterian members, who favoured the Newport treaty, and other of the king’s supporters, were summarily removed. It was the first, and last, military coup d’état in English history. It seems to have been engineered by Henry Ireton rather than by Oliver Cromwell, but when Cromwell returned to London that night from Yorkshire he declared that ‘I was not acquainted with this design, yet, since it is done, I am glad of it’. As far as he was concerned, all the providences of God were coming together without his claiming responsibility for them.

  In a dreary castle, on the edge of a stretch of shingle spit, the king was immured for two weeks; it was a place of mist and fog where the air was damp and heavy from the marshes that lay all around it. His room was small and dark, lit with candles even at noon, and from the slit of a window he could look out across the Solent. The soldiers brought in his meals ‘uncovered’, not wearing their hats. ‘Is there anything more contemptible’, he is supposed to have asked, ‘than a despised prince?’

  He must have known, or guessed, that all hope was at an end; the army was the master of the kingdom, and must now surely seek his death. Yet, like Cromwell, he was seized with a sense of destiny and of religious purpose; he believed that he might enjoy the fate of a martyr to a holy cause. He had meditated on all the sufferings and ignominies that were likely to befall him,
and had hardened his resolve against the rebuffs of the world. Like Cromwell, too, he valued his own life less than the principles for which he fought. So even in this extremity he remained apparently calm and even cheerful.

  After ‘Pride’s Purge’, as it became known, approximately 200 members were left of the previous assembly; yet they now constituted the House of Commons and eventually became known as ‘the Rump Parliament’ or, as Clarendon interpreted it, ‘the fag-end of a carcass long since expired’. Some of them had not stayed necessarily to support the army but to avert the prospect of direct military rule without any parliament at all.

  On 19 December the king began the journey from Hurst Castle to Windsor where, by the order of the army officers, he was to be ‘secured in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice’. Yet the nature of that ‘justice’ was unclear. Many in the army did not wish for a sentence of death. Despite his fierce words about the man of blood, Cromwell seems to have been among those who did not favour condign punishment. Charles might now be so chastened and so desperate that he would yield. The army, and perhaps a newly elected parliament, would thereby acquire legitimacy and authority if they held power with the assent of the king. In the event that he was tried and found guilty, he might be deposed rather than executed. Charles’s death was as yet by no means a necessity.

  Another consideration moved Cromwell. An envoy had been sent to Ireland by the king intent upon raising an army; if Charles could be dissuaded from following the project, another great threat would be lifted. The prospect of a royalist Ireland was enough to persuade Cromwell to make one last attempt at a settlement.

  The army leaders then sent an envoy to Windsor in order to discuss the terms of a possible agreement, but the king refused to see him on the grounds that he had already ‘conceded too much, and even so had failed to give satisfaction, and he was resolved to die rather than lay any further burden on his conscience’. So the prospect of death came ever nearer. The refusal of the king to make any further compromise seems to have persuaded Cromwell that he must indeed be tried and executed. He told the Commons that ‘since the providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to providence’.

  On New Year’s Day 1649, the Rump Parliament passed without any opposition an ordinance for the king’s trial on the grounds that he had contrived ‘a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation’; he had wished to make himself a tyrant and had prosecuted a cruel and bloody war for that purpose. The Lords rejected the ordinance, whereupon the Commons passed a resolution that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and that they themselves represented the people. The Commons therefore declared themselves to be the supreme power in the state. They also passed an ordinance to establish a new high court of justice with 135 commissioners. In the event only 52 arrived on the appointed day of the king’s trial. The army council was also divided. One of its members asserted that the king of England could be tried by no English court. Cromwell responded: ‘I tell you, we will cut off his head with the crown upon it!’

  Charles was to be brought from Windsor to St James’s Palace on 19 January. When the king was told of the coming journey, he replied that ‘God is everywhere’. The trial began on the following day. The soldiers brought him from the palace to Whitehall in a closed sedan chair, and then to Westminster in a curtained barge. The roll of judges was called and, when the name of Sir Thomas Fairfax was announced, a woman cried out that ‘he has more wit than to be here’; it was the voice of his wife.

  The king was conducted into Westminster Hall and sat down in the place provided without the least sign of unease; all the judges, according to Clarendon, were ‘fixing their eyes upon him, without the least show of respect’. The solicitor general, John Cook, then read out the charges against him. ‘Hold a little,’ the king said. He tapped Cook on the shoulder with a silver-tipped cane but the official paid no attention. He tapped him twice more, when the silver tip came off and rolled across the floor. No one picked it up for him. A few days later he confessed that ‘it really made a great impression on me’. It might also be seen as an omen of his beheading. When Cook called him ‘a tyrant and a traitor’, he laughed aloud. How could a sovereign be accused of treason when the meaning of treason was a crime against the sovereign? He did not understand that the word now denoted a trespass against the sovereign power of people and parliament. The king’s state, formerly preserved in all honour and authority, had been turned into ‘the state’.

  After the recital the president of the court, John Bradshaw, asked him for an answer to the impeachment against him. Bradshaw sat in a crimson velvet chair before the king, with the judges arrayed behind him; the guard was ranged to the left and right of the prisoner as well as behind him. The spectators sat in galleries on either side, or stood at the lower end of the hall.

  ‘I would know’, the king asked, ‘by what power I am called hither?’ This was the supreme question. He added that ‘there are many unlawful authorities in the world, there are robbers and highwaymen’. He had managed to overcome his habitual stammer.

  He was informed that he had been brought to trial ‘in the name of the people of England, of which you are elected king, to answer them’.

  ‘England was never an elective kingdom, but a hereditary kingdom for near these thousand years.’

  The dialogue continued a little longer until Bradshaw adjourned the proceedings. As the king passed the great sword of justice on the clerk’s table he was heard to say, ‘I have no fear of that.’

  On the second day of the trial the king once more refused to plead. He did not recognize the authority of the court. Bradshaw ordered him to be taken away.

  ‘I do require that I give in my reasons—’

  ‘Sir, ’tis not for prisoners to require.’

  ‘Prisoners! Sir, I am not an ordinary prisoner.’

  On the third day he again refused to plead, declaring that ‘it is the liberty of the people of England that I stand for’. He was asked to plead forty-three times, altogether, but he would not accept the authority of parliament over him. On 27 January the judges, sitting in the Painted Chamber at Westminster, declared the king to be ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public enemy’ who deserved death ‘by the severing his head from his body’. Before sentence was passed upon him in the court Charles argued that the case was so serious that it should be put before a joint session of parliament. Some of the judges, anxious to be relieved of the responsibility of regicide, favoured the idea. ‘Art thou mad?’ Cromwell hissed at one of them. ‘Canst thou not sit still and be quiet?’ The king’s proposal was not accepted.

  After Bradshaw had read out the sentence of death Charles asked permission to speak.

  ‘No, sir, by your favour, sir. Guard, withdraw your prisoner.’

  ‘I may speak after the sentence. By your favour, sir, I may speak after the sentence ever.’ He was roughly led away by his guard as he continued to cry out. ‘By your favour, hold! The sentence, sir – I say, sir, I do – I am not suffered for to speak. Expect what justice other people will have.’ All around him the soldiers and the spectators screamed, ‘Justice! Justice! Justice!’

  In truth the trial and death of the king were contrived by a small, if committed, minority who in no way represented the wishes of the nation. Two Dutch ambassadors pleaded for his life. Sir Thomas Fairfax made a similar supplication to the council of the army. The prince of Wales sent a blank sheet of paper, signed and sealed, so that parliament might write down any conditions it wished. These pleas were not enough. Cromwell and Ireton, in particular, were obdurate. The king must die. Otherwise there would be no safety for themselves or for the new commonwealth.

  The last days of the king were for those around him a sorrowful mystery. On 29 January he burnt his papers and his ciphered correspondence. Two of his young children, Elizabeth and Henry, still in the hands of his enemies, were permitted to visit him. When they caught
sight of their father, they both burst into tears. He told his thirteen-year-old daughter that he was about to die a glorious death for the liberty of the land and for the maintenance of the true religion. He told his ten-year-old son that the boy must not permit the army to place a crown on his head while his older brothers were still alive. The boy replied: ‘I will sooner be torn in pieces first!’ The king’s guards wept. This was an age of tears.

  On the last night of his life, 29 January 1649, the king slept soundly for approximately four hours. When he awoke he told his personal servant that ‘this is my second marriage day’. He asked for two shirts since ‘were I to shake through cold, my enemies would attribute it to fear’. When he left St James’s Palace several companies of infantry were waiting to escort him to Whitehall Palace; the noise of their drums was so loud that the king could not be heard. He was taken to his bedchamber where he waited until parliament had passed a resolution prohibiting the announcement of any successor to the throne. He refused dinner but instead took a piece of bread and a glass of wine. At the appointed time he was escorted to the great Banqueting House.

  It was so cold that the Thames had frozen. When he stepped out, from a window on the first floor, the low scaffold was before him; it was draped in black, and the two executioners were heavily disguised. Their identities have never been discovered. The cavalry were at either end of the street and armed guards kept back the people; spectators were on the rooftops, in the houses and in the street itself. The king tried to speak to them but they were too far off. So he dictated his last words to a shorthand writer and two attendants, among which was his declaration that ‘a subject and sovereign are clear different things’. He then claimed that ‘I die a martyr to the people’ before lying down with his head upon the scaffold. The bishop of London was with him.