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

by Peter Ackroyd

  No Note he struck, but a new Story lay’d

  And the great Work ascended while he play’d.

  Cromwell is here praised for creating a structure of government that will, like Thebes, endure. He has also been able to create a unique form of leadership that was an appropriate substitute for royal government:

  For to be Cromwell was a greater thing,

  Then ought below, or yet above a King:

  Therefore thou rather didst thy Self depress,

  Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less.

  This polity has created a system of government that avoids the extremes of liberty or oppression:

  ’Tis not a Freedome, that where All command;

  Nor Tyranny, where One does them withstand:

  But who of both the Bounders knows to lay

  Him as their Father must the State obey.

  As a result England was respected and feared by all of its neighbouring nations:

  He seems a King by long Succession born,

  And yet the same to be a King does scorn.

  Abroad a King he seems, and something more,

  At Home a Subject on the equal Floor.

  This might be described as the ‘party line’ for Cromwell’s adherents, and may or may not reflect Marvell’s private thoughts on the matter. The difficulties of Cromwell’s position as Protector, and the emergence of many agents of opposition to his rule, are not mentioned. Marvell is giving expression to the opinions of many people, however, who seem to have believed that the government of a Protector was more effective than the government of parliament. The poetry here is of great fluency and sophistication; it is precise but not pointed, hard but not wooden, eloquent but not facile.

  The last poem by Marvell on Cromwell is also the most intimate. He had become by this time well known to the Protector’s household; he had been asked to compose songs for the marriage of Mary Cromwell to Lord Fauconberg, and had been commissioned by Cromwell to write poems for Christina of Sweden. In 1657 he had been given employment as assistant to John Milton in Milton’s position as Secretary of Foreign and Latin Tongues. So ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’, written in 1658, was his last gift to an employer whom he may have come to love as well as admire. It seems more than likely that he was allowed to enter the death chamber and to view Cromwell’s corpse:

  I saw him dead, a leaden slumber lyes,

  And mortal sleep over those wakefull eyes:

  Those gentle Rays under the lids were fled,

  Which through his looks that piercing sweetnesse shed;

  That port which so Majestique was and strong,

  Loose and depriv’d of vigour, stretch’d along:

  All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan,

  How much another thing, no more that man?

  35

  The young gentleman

  It was believed by some that after the death of Oliver Cromwell the fabric of the commonwealth would be torn apart; the centre would not hold. Yet the succession of his oldest son, Richard Cromwell, passed off without any commotion. No great public mourning was aroused by his father’s death, and very little debate was instituted about his role or his legacy. John Evelyn witnessed the Protector’s funeral where ‘there were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went’.

  Richard Cromwell was a modest and self-effacing man with none of the natural authority or commanding presence of his father. He was, according to an appendix to James Mackintosh’s Eminent British Statesmen, ‘a person well skilled in hawking, hunting, horse-racing, with other sports and pastimes’. Allusions were made to ‘Queen Dick’. He admitted soon after his accession that ‘it might have pleased God, and the nation too, to have chosen out a person more fit and able for this work than I am’.

  Yet almost at once he was engaged in the defining question of the moment. Should the army, or parliament, control this new gentry republic? Some of the army officers had already been demanding that they should have a commander-in-chief separate from the Protector, which meant in practice that they rejected the authority of the civil state. These officers were accustomed to meet at Wallingford House, the residence of Major-General Charles Fleetwood, who was their natural leader. Richard Cromwell, or ‘the young gentleman’ as he was known to some of them, did not concede their demand.

  His position was strengthened in the election of a new parliament at the beginning of 1659, when a majority of the members seem to have been moderate or conservative men who supported the government of the protectorate and disliked the pretensions of the army; some of them were secret royalists, sustained by the impression or belief that the nation was with them. They demanded that all political activity in the army should come to an end, which at once aroused Fleetwood and his supporters. The soldiers refused to obey the order, and the few colonels who supported it found themselves abandoned by their men. Fleetwood, the regiments of the army with him at St James’s, demanded that parliament be dismissed forthwith.

  The impasse might have signalled the beginning of another war, but Richard Cromwell took fright at the prospect. He is reported to have said that ‘for the preservation of my greatness (which is a burthen to me) I will not have one drop of blood spilt’. So he dissolved parliament and then, towards the end of May, abdicated his post as Protector. John Evelyn wrote in his diary that ‘several pretenders and parties strive for the government: all anarchy and confusion; Lord have mercy on us!’

  The leaders of the army decided against all precedent to revive the Rump Parliament that had been dissolved by Oliver Cromwell in the spring of 1653. In the beginning it had comprised some 200 members but the number had now fallen to 50. On their reappearance, however, they refused to be cowed by the authorities of the army and set about to reassert their power by granting the commission of officers to their Speaker rather than to Fleetwood. An open division between the two competing powers could not long be delayed.

  A rebellion against the army, organized by a coalition of royalists and disaffected Presbyterians, was effectively put down in the summer by General John Lambert, who had returned from his retirement to play once more a leading role in military affairs, yet within two months he and eight other officers were dismissed by parliament for promoting a petition deemed to be seditious. Lambert then in turn expelled the Rump and instituted a very short reign of the army. A ‘committee of safety’ was formed consisting of twenty-three officers and committed to govern without the rule of ‘a single person’ and without a House of Lords.

  The army itself was divided. One of its most senior officers, General George Monck, had been given the task by Oliver Cromwell of governing Scotland; from this vantage he looked upon the bewildering events in England with a wary and suspicious eye. He had thought of supporting Richard Cromwell but had then drawn back. He was considered by some to be a secret royalist. Now he refused to support Lambert and Fleetwood, but instead demanded the recall of the parliament so recently expelled.

  It might seem that anarchy had been loosed upon the world, but the world went its own way. A contemporary, quoted in the Clarendon State Papers, observed that in London ‘in all the hurly burly the streets were full, every one going about their business as if not at all concerned, and when the parliament sent unto the city to relieve them, they answered that they would not meddle with the dispute’. John Milton was not so sanguine and wrote that it was ‘most illegal and scandalous, I fear me barbarous, or rather scarce to be exampled among any barbarians, that a paid army should … thus subdue the supreme power that set them up’.

  Lambert was also forced to confront divisions among his own soldiers; they declared that they themselves would not fight Monck or anyone else, but would form a ring in which their officers could contest one against another in some form of prize fight; the troops stationed at Plymouth, and the entire fleet, then declared the Rump as the least worst alternative to unconstitutional military rule.
They desired a justly established government as well as freedom of worship. On 24 December Fleetwood, declaring that ‘God had spit in his face’, delivered the keys of parliament to its Speaker, William Lenthall.

  On that day the troopers now loyal to parliament marched to Lenthall’s house in Chancery Lane, where they pledged to live and die with the assembly at Westminster. Lenthall, thus encouraged, decided to reconvene parliament on 26 December; the leading officers no longer had the will, or the support, to discourage him. On 4 January 1660, Lambert, who had made an unsuccessful attempt to march north and confront Monck, was now obliged to submit himself to the restored parliament; the members ordered him ‘to one of his dwelling houses most remote from the City of London, in order to the quiet and peace of this commonwealth’. The confusion and uncertainty were the direct effect of Oliver Cromwell’s inability to create a stable governance. Hartgill Baron, a royalist supporter, wrote that ‘all things here at present are in so great a cloud that the most quick-sighted or wisest man living is not able to make a judgment of what may be the issue’. There were many, like him, who now looked to the king beyond the sea for deliverance from the chaos around them.

  General Monck, at the end of 1659, began marching south from Edinburgh with 8,000 men. His intentions were not clear, perhaps not even to himself; he said only that he had come into England in order to maintain the commonwealth. He may have believed that the army’s seizure of power had been misguided, but he was so taciturn and secretive that it is hard to be sure even of this. Pepys described him as ‘a dull heavy man’.

  When he arrived in London at the beginning of February many citizens called for ‘a free parliament’; that meant the removal of the Rump and a return to the duly elected authority that had been purged by Colonel Pride eleven years before. Parliament responded by ordering Monck to enter the city in order to restore public order and to arrest its leading opponents. On 9 February Monck obeyed by removing all the gates, portcullises, posts and chains that were the symbols of the city’s strength. The citizens believed that they had been betrayed and seem to have been beset with fear and dismay. It may have been that Monck deliberately set out to demonstrate the lengths to which parliament would go to protect its authority, and thus bring the people over to his side. No certainty is possible in the matter.

  Two days later, however, the unfathomable Monck wrote a letter to the Rump with the order to dissolve itself and to call for fresh elections. The effect was immediate and profound; according to one pamphleteer, Roger L’Estrange, the people ‘made bonfires very thick in every street and bells ringing in every church and the greatest acclamations of joy that could possibly be expressed’. Rumps of beef were roasted on every street-corner; rumps were tied on sticks and carried about; a great rump was turned on a spit on Ludgate Hill. Pepys reported that boys ‘do now cry “kiss my parliament” instead of “kiss my arse”, so great and general a contempt is the Rump come to…’ Ten days later Monck made a short cut by readmitting all the members of the Long Parliament who had before been excluded. These had been largely Presbyterian in temper and had been removed precisely because of their willingness to negotiate a settlement with Charles I.

  The newly restored parliament promptly decided to erase all the proceedings in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge, which meant that it now resumed supreme authority in obtaining a settlement with the king. Lambert was sent to the Tower along with other members of the previous regime. On 6 March Pepys noted that ‘everybody now drinks the king’s health without fear, whereas before it was very private that a man dare do it’.

  Charles II was still uncertain. He was not sure what Monck intended, and feared that the general might still set himself up as Lord Protector; there was even talk that Richard Cromwell might be asked to return to the post. Other supporters of the king did not trust Monck but believed that he would, in the old phrase, ‘play fast and loose’. The king had experienced so many false hopes that now he could do nothing but wait. If he took any premature action, it might ruin everything. Monck himself was obliged to proceed very carefully. He may have surmised that the restoration of the king would be the best possible outcome for the nation but he could not yet fully support the popular mood; he had to maintain the unity of his army, and could not afford to alienate those who were still called ‘commonwealth men’. He did not want to be suspected at this stage, as it was said, of ‘carrying the king in his belly’. A month or two later it was reported that Monck was determined either to restore the king by his own actions, and thus reap the subsequent rewards, or to prevent Charles’s return.

  In the middle of March 1660, parliament dissolved itself and prepared the nation for a new assembly in the following month. The Long Parliament had finally come to an end, after a haphazard and interrupted rule of a little over nineteen years. In this month a known royalist supporter, Sir John Grenville, was smuggled into St James’s Palace for a clandestine interview with Monck; Monck did not wish to write anything down but he intimated to Grenville, through an intermediary, that it might be fit and proper for the king to send him a letter setting out the intentions of the royal party. The general would then keep the letter in trust and reveal its contents at an appropriate time. By this happy subterfuge he might be able to ease the king’s path to England. In another account of this secret affair Grenville had brought a letter from Charles to the general, offering Monck high office in a royal administration; the general replied that he had always intended to restore Charles. Whatever the exact circumstances it is clear that the king and the general were coming to an understanding.

  At the beginning of April the king issued a ‘declaration’ from his temporary home at Breda in the Protestant Netherlands; no doubt he had consulted Monck’s wishes or suggestions in their clandestine consultations. The king offered a free pardon and amnesty to anyone who swore allegiance to the Crown, with the exception of those who had voted for the late king’s death; this was the only way of closing the chapter on the legacy of the civil war. Among other provisions was the promise of religious toleration to all peaceful Christians. Only thus could the struggles between Anglicans, Presbyterians and sectarians be resolved. Yet the king left all these measures to the final decision of parliament; this was seen by many to be a conciliatory gesture, but it also meant that parliament rather than king now incurred the responsibility of what might befall.

  So all was set fair for the first elected parliament in almost two decades. It was known as the Convention Parliament since, in theory, no parliament could be called without a writ from the king to that effect. It soon became clear that many of a royalist persuasion had been elected; the king’s friends had returned to Westminster. Charles’s declaration was read to both Houses of Parliament and was received with enthusiasm. On the morning of 1 May the Lords, now with many royalist peers readmitted on the orders of General Monck, declared 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 assented that afternoon. It was now generally believed that a stable parliamentary government could only be established upon royal power. The republic had come to an end, and the aspirations of the army had been defeated.

  On May Day, the once prohibited maypoles were set up all over the country. When the vice-chancellor and beadles of Oxford university tried to saw down a pole set up outside the Bear Inn, they were attacked by a crowd and beaten off. Pepys reported ‘great joy all yesterday at London, and at night more bonfires than ever, and ringing of bells, and drinking of the king’s health upon their knees in the streets, which methinks is a little too much’.

  Charles II had removed to The Hague, where six members of the Lords and twelve members of the Commons were ushered into his presence; they presented the humble invitation and supplication of the parliament that his majesty should return and take the government of the kingdom into his hands. They also presented him with the sum of £50,000 to expedite his journey. Fourteen London citizens then came
forward and offered the king a further £10,000. The city had not in previous years been wholly favourable to the royalist cause, and so its penitence was doubly appreciated. The king told them that he entertained a particular affection for London, as it was his place of birth, and knighted all of the citizens.

  He set sail for England on 24 May, having embarked on a vessel newly christened The Prince; early on the morning of 26 May he arrived at Dover, where he knelt on the shore to give thanks. Monck was waiting for him, kneeling on the pier. The mayor of Dover presented him with a Bible; the king accepted it, saying ‘it was the thing that he loved above all things in the world’. We may excuse him on this occasion of any attempt at irony.

  Monck and the king travelled together to Canterbury where Charles listened to the Anglican service, according to the Book of Common Prayer, in the cathedral. Wherever he went he was surrounded by crowds. He had time to write to his youngest sister, Henrietta Anne, that ‘my head is so dreadfully stunned with the acclamations of the people that I know not whether I am writing sense or nonsense’. From here the king progressed towards London to confirm and celebrate the fact of the Restoration.

  36

  Oh, prodigious change!

  The return of Charles II was greeted with jubilation that was for the most part sincere. At Blackheath, just before entering the capital, he was met by what one newsletter described as ‘a kind of rural triumph, expressed by the country swains, in a morris dance with the old music of the tabor and pipe’. It was believed that the restoration of the king would be accompanied by the revival of the old customs and traditions of the nation.