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

by Peter Ackroyd

  Bishop: There is but one stage more; it is turbulent and troublesome, but a short one. It will carry you from earth to heaven, and there you will find joy and comfort.

  King: I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.

  Bishop: You exchange an earthly for an eternal crown – a good exchange.

  One blow dispatched him. The principal executioner then took up the head and announced, in traditional fashion, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ At that moment, according to an eyewitness, Philip Henry, ‘there was such a groan by the thousands then present, as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again’.

  31

  This house to be let

  The death of the king had delivered a mortal shock to the body politic but as a pamphleteer, Marchamont Nedham, put it, ‘the old allegiance is cancelled and we are bound to admit a new’. There was work to be done. The Rump Parliament passed an Act for the ‘sale of the goods and personal estates of the late king’. The image of Charles was removed from all public buildings, and his statue at the Exchange was smashed into pieces; on its now empty pedestal were inscribed the words ‘exit tyrannus, regum ultimus’ (the tyrant is gone, the last of the kings).

  At the beginning of February the House of Lords, and the office of king, were formally abolished; kingship was declared to be ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty and safety and public interest of the nation’. In theory the Rump Parliament now had unlimited authority, yet it was hardly representative of the people. It contained approximately ninety members, since the rest of them had been purged or had voluntarily withdrawn. Other members returned to parliament later, when they could not be charged with collaboration in the king’s death, but of course all of them were divided in their principles and their allegiances. Under the pressure of immediate events, however, they remained a relatively coherent body; only later would it become clear that no consistent ideology could be expected from them. They were reformers rather than revolutionaries, driven by the force of events and circumstances. The Rump was essentially improvised rather than organized; it was born out of necessity and expediency.

  Yet the army was also an indispensable power in the new state; Cromwell was a member of parliament as well as a leading army officer. Where did supremacy really lie? If the sword truly ruled, then the answer was obvious. But the main participants professed to believe that they had engineered a constitutional settlement under the aegis of parliament. The politics of ambiguity prevailed, in a situation where no single or fundamental authority was ever named.

  A council of state, comprising some forty-one members with thirty-one of them coming from parliament itself, was established to determine policy. Cromwell was the presiding officer. Standing committees were set up for the army, for the navy, for Ireland and for foreign affairs in general. The most pressing concern was that of money; with an army of 70,000 soldiers to maintain and pay, funds were desperately needed. The councillors resorted to fresh taxation, pleas of loans from the City, and the confiscation of royalist estates. It did not help that this was a year of disastrous harvest, in which many inhabitants of Lancashire and Westmorland perished through starvation. Bulstrode Whitelocke reported that the magistrates of Cumberland certified that 30,000 people ‘had neither bread nor seed corn, nor the means of procuring either’. Yet the council had other great tasks; it was expected to unify the three kingdoms, to assert the nation’s ascendancy at sea and to protect commerce.

  The councillors, faced with these burdens and charges, seem to have been largely enthusiastic and efficient. A French envoy, sent by Cardinal Mazarin to spy out the land, wrote that ‘not only are they powerful by sea and land, but they live without ostentation, without pomp and without mutual rivalry. They are economical in their private affairs, and prodigal in their devotion to public affairs, for which each man toils as if for his private interest. They handle large sums of money, which they administer honestly, observing a strict discipline. They reward well and punish severely.’ It was reported that in this period Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton were ‘extremely well pleased’ at the pace of affairs. Every revolution has its early heroic days.

  In the middle of March Cromwell was chosen by the council to become commander-in-chief of the army with the central purpose of subduing royalist Ireland. Scotland also posed a problem. Its government, on hearing of the king’s execution, immediately proclaimed his eighteen-year-old son Charles II as king. The most serious threat came from Ireland, however, where the royalist lieutenant-general, the duke of Ormonde, was dominant. He had aligned himself with the confederate Catholics, rulers of two-thirds of the country after the rebellion of 1641, in support of the new king. Cromwell would soon go back to war.

  In May the Rump passed a final Act that proclaimed England to be a free commonwealth; a kingdom had become a republic. All things must now be directed towards what was called the public good; and of course all things might be justified by invoking it. As Milton put it, ‘more just is it, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain their liberty’ than that a greater number compel the rest to be their fellow slaves. From this time, for example, we may date the emergence of the fiscal state with national taxation and public spending as its principal activities.

  Yet this was also, according to the inscription on the new great seal, ‘the first year of freedom, by God’s blessing restored’. The revolution in public affairs now lent additional energy and purpose to religious enthusiasts and radicals of every kind. It was time for a new heaven and a new earth. A woman rose up among the congregation in Whitehall Chapel and stripped naked with the cry ‘Welcome the Resurrection!’

  The Ranters believed that to the pure all things were pure; Laurence Clarkson, ‘the captain of the Rant’, professed that ‘sin had its conception only in imagination’. They might swear, drink, smoke and have sex with impunity. No earthly magistrate could touch them.

  The Fifth Monarchy men and women were actively preparing for the reign of Christ and His saints that was destined to supersede the four monarchies of the ancient world; the reign of Jesus would begin in 1694. They would clap hands and jump around, calling out, ‘Appear! Appear! Appear!’; they would be joined by travelling fiddlers and ballad-singers until they were in an emotional heat.

  The Muggletonians also had apocalyptic and millenarian tendencies. They believed that the soul died with the body and would be raised with it at the time of judgment, and that God paid no attention to any earthly activities. They also asserted that heaven was 6 miles above the earth and that God was between 5 and 6 feet in height.

  On 16 April some Diggers came to St George’s Hill, near Weybridge in Surrey, where they proceeded to dig and sow seed in the common land. One of them, William Everard, proclaimed that he had been commanded in a vision to dig and plough the land. They believed in a form of agrarian communism by which the English were exhorted finally to free themselves from ‘the Norman yoke’ of landlords and owners of estates before ‘making the earth a common treasury for all’.

  The Quakers believed that no visible Church was necessary and that divine revelation was permitted to every human being; Christ might enter the soul and kindle an inner light. They also called for the abolition of lawyers and universities; they refused to pay tithes or to take off their hats in the presence of their ‘superiors’. They were also known to disrupt the orthodox church services. They called each other ‘saints’ or ‘friends of the truth’ but, because of their tremblings and quiverings in worship, they became popularly known by the name now attached to them.

  At the beginning of May a translation of the Koran was issued from the press. Religious liberty was contagious. Two months before, John Evelyn had attended an Anglican service in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel.

  Political, as well as religious, radicals were in the ascendant. John Lilburne, one of the levellers who had helped to promote agitation in the New Model Army, had turned against the new administration. In ‘England’s Ne
w Chains Discovered’ he lambasted Cromwell and the army grandees for dishonesty and hypocrisy; he accused them of being ‘mere politicians’ who wished to aggrandize themselves while they pretended ‘a waiting upon providence, that under the colour of religion they might deceive the more securely’. A pamphlet, ‘The Hunting of the Foxes’, complained that ‘you shall scarce speak to Cromwell but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl and repent, even while he does smite you under the fifth rib.’

  Cromwell was incensed at the pamphlet and was overheard saying at a meeting of the council of state, ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces … if you do not break them, they will break you.’ By the end of March Lilburne and his senior colleagues had been placed in the Tower on the charge of treason. The levellers, however, were popular among Londoners for speaking home truths about the condition of the country. When thousands of women flocked to Westminster Hall to protest against Lilburne’s imprisonment the soldiers told them to ‘go home and wash your dishes’; whereupon they replied that ‘we have neither dishes nor meat left’. When in May a group of soldiers rose in mutiny for the cause of Lilburne, Cromwell and Fairfax suppressed them; three of their officers were shot. As Cromwell said on another occasion, ‘Be not offended at the manner of God’s working; perhaps no other way was left.’

  Assaults also came from the opposite side with royalist pamphlets and newsletters mourning ‘the bloody murder and heavy loss of our gracious king’ and proclaiming that ‘the king-choppers are as active in mischief as such thieves and murderers need to be’. The authorities were now awake to the mischief of free speech, and in the summer of the year the Rump Parliament passed a Treason Act that declared it high treason to state that the ‘government is tyrannical, usurped or unlawful, or that the Commons in parliament assembled are not the supreme authority of this nation’. There was to be no egalitarian or libertarian revolution. At the same time the council of state prepared ‘An Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets’ that was designed to prohibit any pamphlets, papers or books issued by ‘the malignant party’. A resolution was also passed by the Rump that any preacher who mentioned Charles Stuart or his son would be deemed a ‘delinquent’.

  On Tuesday 10 July, Cromwell left London and travelled west in a coach drawn by six horses. He was on his way to Ireland. He had hesitated at first, not wishing to leave the country in turmoil and confusion. But once he reached his decision, or professed to believe that providence had directed him, he was very firm. ‘It matters not who is our commander-in-chief,’ he once said, ‘if God be so.’ The army leaders had feared a royalist invasion from Ireland, although in truth there was very little chance of one. Nevertheless they could not endure an enemy close to England’s shores; it presented a clear and dangerous menace to the new republic.

  Cromwell arrived, in the middle of August, at a favourable moment; the royalist navy had been swept from the seas by the ships of the commonwealth, and the duke of Ormonde’s army had been all but annihilated outside Dublin after a surprise attack by parliamentary forces. Cromwell wrote from his ship that ‘this is an astonishing mercy’. He believed that he was indeed the Lord’s chosen servant and, when he landed at the port of Dublin after a stormy crossing, he promised a crusade against ‘the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish’. They were for Cromwell vastly inferior both in race and in religion; he treated them as if they were less than human.

  Cromwell wished to do his work rapidly and effectively but, despite his command of 20,000 men, no set battles were fought. Instead he proceeded to conquer the enemy in a series of sieges. He went first to the city of Drogheda, a little over 30 miles north of Dublin, where he summoned the royalist governor to surrender. On the following day, 11 September, having received no formal submission, he attacked; in a series of bloody battles and skirmishes the defenders were overwhelmed. According to Cromwell’s express orders all those who were carrying weapons were put to the sword. That was the rule of war: 3,000 of the garrison, as well as all priests and friars, were killed. ‘I am persuaded’, Cromwell wrote, ‘that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches.’ The slaughter has remained in the folk memory of Ireland to this day.

  From Drogheda Cromwell and his men marched down to Wexford, a little over 70 miles south of Dublin, where there was yet more killing in the name of God. The city did not need to be stormed since the gate had been opened in the face of imminent attack; yet when the soldiers entered the town they began a fierce onslaught upon the inhabitants, many of whom begged for mercy in vain. It is reported that 200 women were killed beside what is now the Bull Ring; a memorial plaque is on the site of the massacre.

  Cromwell stayed in Ireland for another nine months. Any hope that the Irish would capitulate after the spectacle of bloodshed in Drogheda and Wexford was soon dispelled, and he found himself engaged in a series of struggles against stubborn resistance. At the beginning of December he abandoned the siege of Waterford under a storm of rain, ‘it being as terrible a day as ever I marched in all my life’. As soon as the army moved inland, away from the coast, the climate and geography of the country reduced them more quickly than did the enemy; fog and rain and mist descended upon them, while dysentery and malarial fever also did their work. Problems of supply were added to those of morale.

  The war itself continued for another two years; it had acquired the character of what might be termed guerrilla warfare with the native forces attacking the invading army in a series of raids and skirmishes. Yet by his swift and punitive response Cromwell had achieved the task of destroying any potential for a royalist attack upon England.

  The remaining enemy now lay in the north. The Scots had already invited King Charles II to travel to his kingdom, and negotiations between the two sides began in March at Breda, a city in the south of the Netherlands where the young king and his court resided. Parliament and the council of state were thoroughly alarmed at the conjunction, and Cromwell was soon made aware that his presence was needed at home. At the end of May 1650, he sailed for England, leaving behind him Henry Ireton as lord deputy of Ireland; when he landed at Bristol, he was given the welcome for a returning hero.

  Charles II needed to find support wherever he could, and the chance of a Scottish army was not one to be missed. So aboard ship on 23 June, just before landing in Scotland, he signed a solemn oath to uphold the national covenant and to ensure that Presbyterianism became the official religion of England as well as of Scotland. He swore this in bad faith, having no regard for the Presbyterian cause or its proponents, but his immediate interests were of more importance. One Scottish negotiator, Alexander Jaffray, later concluded that ‘he sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him’. The king had learned, like his father, the arts of disguise and dissimulation. Yet his signature meant that war was now certain.

  Sir Thomas Fairfax refused to lead the English army into Scotland on the grounds that the invasion would violate the ‘solemn league and covenant’ that had been signed between the two nations seven years before and never repealed. Cromwell countered with the question ‘whether it is better to have this war in the bowels of another country or of our own’; his argument was persuasive and it was he who led the army once more. Fairfax, uncertain about the direction of the commonwealth and unwilling wholly to depose the king, now resigned as lord general. Cromwell was appointed to be his successor.

  Cromwell crossed the border on 23 July with 11,000 horse and foot, but the enemy was not to be seen. The commander of the Scottish forces, David Leslie, had determined upon a strategy of harassment rather than open battle in order to cut off Cromwell’s communication with England; he was successful in that regard, and Cromwell was forced to draw back to the coastal town of Dunbar 30 miles to the east of Edinburgh. Leslie then swept forward to ensure that Cromwell could have no contact with England. The commanders of both armies believed in divine prov
idence and the sacredness of their cause; both sides fasted and prayed, their respective ministers exhorting them in long sermons. In the phrase of the time, only the harder nail would be able to drive out the other.

  At Dunbar Leslie believed that the English were trapped between his army and the sea; he waited on high ground but the Scottish ministers in the camp persuaded him to move down towards the enemy. Cromwell saw the manoeuvre and exclaimed that ‘God is delivering them into our hands; they are coming down to us’. And so it proved. The English called out, ‘The Lord of Hosts!’ while the battle cry of the Scots was ‘The Covenant!’ The Scots were routed after a brief resistance; 3,000 were killed and 10,000 captured. Very few English casualties were reported. A witness informed John Aubrey that, after the battle, Cromwell ‘did laugh so excessively as if he had been drunk; his eyes sparkled with spirits’. The whole of southern Scotland now fell to the English. Other consequences followed. With the apparent judgement of God against them, the Presbyterian ministers lost much prestige and authority; never again would the covenanting movement maintain its previous power over Scotland.

  The young king was now in desperate circumstances. After his submission to the presbyters in the early summer of 1650 he was now at Perth in the power of the ‘committee of estates’, who governed Scotland when parliament was not in session. He hated Scotland and despised the Presbyterian ministers who exhorted him and preached at him; he detested their hypocrisy, as he saw it, and was nostalgic for the simple pieties of the Church of England. After he heard of Leslie’s defeat he tried to escape from his oppressors, but some troops from the ‘committee of estates’ managed to intercept him and to persuade him to return on the promise that he would be granted more powers. On the first day of 1651 Charles was crowned king of Scotland in Scone; the medieval village was the traditional and hallowed site of kingship.