Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  But England was a different kettle-of-fish. Oliver Cromwell’s various experiments to rule with a Parliament had failed and the Treasury was empty, largely by reason of an expensive war with the Dutch and on-going hostilities with the Spanish, but also due to the exorbitant cost of army pay which was, in any case, in arrears. Meanwhile, the English Army that he had so brilliantly led, although riven with factions and sectarianism – both religious and political – insisted on the over-throw of the Protectorate and a resumption of ‘the good old cause’ of English Republicanism. The erstwhile members of Parliament, who ranged from radical republicans and sectaries, to cavalier Royalists, exploited every fissure and schism to promote a resumption of a sovereign Parliament in defiance of the Army’s ambitions. As for Richard Cromwell, he had proved to be a pleasant fellow, more suited to the green shires from which his daddy had emerged. Richard had been revealed as not being made of the same stuff as the man whose mantle had fallen upon his shoulders, despising his dying father’s advice to place his trust in George Monck above all others. Eight months after his assumption of the Protectorate, his attempts to settle a form of Parliamentary compromise ruined by the filibustering of militant republicans led chiefly by Sir Arthur Haselrig, he found himself incapable of governing the country and resigned. At the stroke of his pen he had transformed himself from Lord Protector into ‘Tumbledown Dick’.

  In the months of uncertainty and anarchy that followed, only Monck, ruling Scotland from Dalkeith Palace, had seemed the one sure and stable element among the turmoil. And even he had become a victim of tittle-tattle, innuendo and out-right slander emanating from every corner, being variously accused of nursing a desire to replace Tumbledown Dick as Lord Protector, or of being in secret contact with the exiled Charles Stuart. For his part, Monck, ever the scrupulous professional soldier who owed his loyalty to whomsoever had commissioned him, had held his peace, pledging himself to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons, who had signed his Commission as Commander-in-Chief. But Monck’s principled refusal to take any oaths kept his enemies pointing their accusatory fingers at him, whispering that he was up to something, though none knew what.

  In London, Speaker Lenthall was helpless; after weeks of correspondence and visitations from a variety of emissaries representing all shades of political opinion during which nothing had been settled, unrest across the country increased, spreading into Ireland. A Royalist uprising in Cheshire was put down, a cue to the Army in England to take matters more firmly into its own hands. Of most immediate interest to the patiently watching Monck was the force under General John Lambert, a man of infinite ambition who, in Monck’s estimation, probably had his eye on power for himself. Lambert’s troops, out-numbering Monck’s, were known to be heading north from their Cheshire success towards Newcastle. In response, Monck had concentrated his own Army on the line of the Tweed, and told nobody of his intentions.

  Now, as he stamped the snow off his boots and summoned his orderly, just as they were about to leave the cottage that acted as Monck’s head-quarters for the respite of their cold beds, he addressed the retreating orderly officers.

  ‘Are the good Doctors gently accommodated?’ he asked, referring to his two chaplains, John Price and Thomas Gumble, who occasionally doubled as Army clerks.

  ‘Aye, sir. In a cottage nearer the river,’ responded Captain Heath.

  ‘Then I bid you good night.’ Monck turned to Morgan, Clarke and Smith. ‘’Tis enough that I have two men of God on my staff,’ he quipped, seating himself and allowing his orderly to tug off his boots. ‘To have them about me at this hour would be unsupportable.’ Morgan, the irrepressible Welshman, laughed; Clarke and Smith merely smiled. ‘Well,’ said Monck, slipping his feet into shoes and standing and stretching, ‘I bid you good night, too. There’ll be more work tomorrow without our seeking it.’

  The three men watched as their chief withdrew into a small bed-chamber from where the noise of benches being dragged across the beaten floor told where Monck made up his couch.

  ‘He is extraordinary,’ remarked Clarke, half to himself, thinking of Monck’s advancing years, his infirmities, the great pains he took over the welfare of his men and the way he drove himself. Clarke, a younger man, was exhausted; exhausted with Scotland, exhausted with the punishing regime Monck put him under; exhausted with the endless business of acting as Monck’s military secretary, administrative assistant, spy-master and confidant.

  ‘What d’you think he is minded to do, Tom?’ he asked as Morgan threw his own boots into a corner and began to shake out a rug and make a pillow of his saddle-bags.

  ‘Give Lambert the bloody nose he deserves, I hope,’ the Welshman said disinterestedly as Smith, making the same preparations for sleep, grunted agreement. Morgan knew Clarke wanted to return to London with his wife, Dorothy, and that winter campaigning was too much for even Clarke’s devoted spirit.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then? Well, go and sort out the rest of the English Army. Lick it into the kind of shape only George can by purging its officers and paying its men… Now come, Will, you must get some rest.’ Morgan was already settling himself to sleep with the contented purpose only an old soldier possesses. ‘This is a cosy enough bivouac.’

  Clarke was still standing, staring about him, wondering – not for the first time - how in the name of all that was holy, did a man get a night’s sleep in such a place as this? He thought of Dorothy, warm in her bed in Dalkeith, and how she had pleaded with him to abandon Monck, resign and return to London. The couple had been in Scotland for almost ten years; it was time to go home. As Clarke began to make up his bed he noted Smith was already asleep as was Morgan, who snored lightly; doubtless Monck in the adjacent room was long since asleep too. How else could he keep this pace up without an instant ability to retire into the arms of Morpheus?

  But Monck was far from asleep. He had pulled up the two rough benches for a bed and used the evicted cottagers’ simple bed-place as a pillow for his head and upper body. A thin blanket lay over him, beneath which his legs troubled him, the pain an old one originating from his affliction of the spotted-fever acquired almost ten years earlier during his first posting as Governor of Scotland. Although physically tired, his mind was alert and turning over and over the sequence of recent events which seemed an endless string of importunate visits by persons intent on making mischief at his expense. Even Anne, his wife whom he had left at Dalkeith with their young son Christopher, had come in a coach to Coldstream to fret round him, reminding him – as if he needed reminding! – of at least one course of action that he might take to the infinite advantage of General and Mistress Monck, to say nothing of their sole surviving son-and-heir, Kit. The thought reminded him of their lost baby, George, a dismal recollection that he dismissed as soon as it formed. As to his wife, Anne had troubled him all one long and weary night behind the curtains of their four-poster bed in Dalkeith, whispering of the promise of £100,000 per annum for life. Monck was not slow to accrue wealth when it might be had legitimately, but Anne’s avarice was not merely obvious enough to be talked about among the so-called ‘courtiers’ surrounding the Governor’s household at Dalkeith; it had become distasteful to her husband. Anne’s recent and most extraordinary visit to Coldstream, which had occurred the previous day, had so angered her usually indulgent husband that she had hastened away concealing the tears of humiliation from her escort. She need not have bothered, the entire Army knew Old George had a shrew for a wife and many thought he was scared of her. But no-one ever quite knew exactly what George Monck was thinking and those who thought they did, too often concluded he was stupid.

  Now, though, he sighed. He did not mean to be unkind to Anne, for he loved her dearly and understood that her impoverished and unhappy start in life had conditioned her to covet money. But the arguments she reiterated were dangerous, notwithstanding the prospect of great wealth. Anne could see only the money; her husband could envisage the pit-falls that lay along the
way to getting it. And, in any case, it was all the fault of his brother, the Reverend Nicholas, late of the parish of Plymtree in Devon and now incumbent in the far wealthier living of Kelkhampton, who had come to Dalkeith some three months earlier, ostensibly to arrange the marriage of his eldest daughter Mary, then lodged in the household of her Uncle George, the Governor of Scotland. But Nicholas, the quiet country parson with no head on him for affairs of state, still less of discretion, had arrived on the behalf of the two brothers’ younger cousin, Sir John Grenville. Sir John was a prominent and declared Royalist, a member of the secret society of the Sealed Knot and in the power-vacuum caused by the tumbling-down of Dick Cromwell, was intriguing for the return of Charles Stuart to take the throne of his martyred father. Charles had been crowned King of Scotland near a decade earlier, before Cromwell defeated his Scots army at Worcester and again sent him into exile and ‘on his travels’.

  Nicholas had proved a nervous and unsuitable messenger. He had arrived when Monck had been about the daily business of Scottish affairs. Dalkeith Palace had been seething with petitioners, a meeting of the Council of Commissioners was in session, a meeting to which Cameron of Lochiel arrived late and stormed into the ante-chamber where Nicholas was kicking his heels. Reviling the weather and the roads, a lather of horse-sweat and tartan that a shocked Nicholas thought nothing short of barbarous, Lochiel did not even acknowledge the presence of the dark-garbed parson. No-one was expecting the Governor’s brother and while the orderly clerks paid their respects, they explained that no-one dared interrupt the Governor in Council. The impression that George was held in fear made Nicholas even more nervous, given the treasonable charge with which he had been entrusted. When therefore one of Monck’s two chaplains, the Reverend Doctor Price, a man of the cloth like Nicholas himself, hearing of the arrival of the General’s clerical brother, hurried to meet him, Nicholas readily agreed to walk with him in the gardens of the palace.

  An industrious busy-body, it did not take Price long to have Nicholas spilling the beans. He could hardly help himself because his message was so secret and so dangerous that he had committed it to memory, down to the last argument: £100,000 for life if Monck engineered the restoration of the Monarchy. The words having hovered upon his lips for so long, they now burst forth, stunning first Price, who was sympathetic to it, and then Brother George, who was not. When, later in the course of that busy day, Nicholas had his brother’s undivided attention, Monck rejected the proposal outright. He did not, however, report it to London as he would once have done when Clarke, his spy-master and ‘intelligencer’ had informed him of the many Royalist approaches he had received over the past years.

  The great esteem in which the House of Stuart was still held among the Highland Scots was to the thinking of many, including many Scotsmen, evidence of their backwardness. But their warlike propensities made it important to keep watch on their intentions and those of their Clan Chieftains. Apart from the astonishing sum on offer to Monck, what made Nicholas’s proposition so surprising was not the affirmation that the offer came through cousin Grenville – in whose gift the living of Kelkhampton lay and from whose hand the naïve Nicholas had accepted it – but the insistence that a restoration of the Monarchy received the avid support of William Morice. The highly intelligent and energetic Morice was Monck’s personal estate agent and managed Monck’s land at Potheridge in north Devon. He was besides a man of considerable local influence, the elected – but excluded – Member of Parliament for Plymouth. Morice, like an increasing number of the country gentry, wanted the restoration of the King to be constitutionally based and set alongside a more representative Parliament than had sat hitherto. Most important, these gentlemen argued, only an arrangement of this nature could restore order and break the dictatorial power of the Army in England. These men were in fear that, left to itself, the Army would impose the chaos of sectarian schism, or promote a new dictator. For the former there were numerous possibilities and permutations; for the latter the support was weaker and the contenders fewer, but the strongest was General John Lambert.

  Monck had taken council from his closest advisers: Gumble and Price, Clarke and Morgan, his physician Samuel Barrow, Colonel Ralph Knight – who commanded Monck’s own Regiment of Horse – and his brother-in-law, Tom Clarges, in London. He swore those with him to secrecy as he assured them they might speak their minds, whereupon they all declared for the King, a measure of the trust they placed in Honest George. As for Monck he had said nothing, committing himself neither one way nor the other. Experience had taught Monck to be as cautious in politics as he was decisive on the battlefield, for he had been imprisoned in The Tower of London charged with High Treason, dismissed from the Army and written off long before fate had wrought the curious twists in his fortunes that had taken him from a captured Royalist Colonel to Oliver’s most trusted subordinate and mentor to his successor Richard.

  Stretching out on his uncomfortable couch, Monck once again turned his own conduct over in his mind. He held his commission from what remained of the old Parliament that had originally formed the Commonwealth after the execution of King Charles; it bore William Lenthall’s signature and was endorsed by Cromwell under his assumption of the Protectorate. In all the chaos following Oliver’s death, Richard’s disastrous period of office and the aftermath of his resignation, Monck had merely continued with the business with which he was charged: the government of Scotland. True, as a Presbyterian himself, he had advised Richard to dispense with his father’s policy of religious tolerance, arguing for restoring order by forming an assembly of Godly Divines so that the country which he loved might, as he put it in a letter to the new Protector,

  have Unity in things necessary, Liberty in things unnecessary, and Charity in all things, compared with the Competing of Sects and thereby put a stop to that Progress of Blasphemy and Profanity, that I fear is too frequent in Many Places by the Great Extent of Excessive Toleration.

  Monck had also urged Richard to issue writs and call a new Parliament, one representative of the greater will of the people than what remained – the Rump, as it was termed – of the old Long Parliament. The members of the Rump had excluded any they suspected of harbouring Royalist sympathies, such as Monck’s agent, William Morice. Monck had advised the new Protector to reduce expenditure on the Army by amalgamating regiments and purging the officer-corps of the trouble-makers and ‘insolent spirits,’ so that no single officer had a large enough personal following to create political disturbance. Richard could then, Monck argued, draw the Army in England to himself, just as he, Monck, had done with the Army in Scotland.

  Monck sighed again. Had Dick Cromwell been half the man his father was he could have achieved this, but he proved incapable, revealing his weakness by making Monck a large offer of money for his military support, an offer a disappointed Monck spurned.

  ‘And there are those who say I think of nothing but money,’ he grumbled to himself, resenting the calumny that his wife’s all-too-obvious greed engendered.

  But while Monck had been distantly and patiently coaching Richard Cromwell, the Puritan Army in England had been taking advantage of Oliver’s weak successor. The strength of opposition to the continuance of the hated Protectorate in the person of the late Oliver’s ineffectual son roused the junior officers in the Army to such a fervour that it surprised their leaders, Sir Charles Fleetwood, James Desborough and even John Lambert. In late April these dissenting spirits made it clear to General Fleetwood that they would not support Richard’s Protectorate or his Parliament. The following day, the failure of Parliament to pass legislation due to Haselrig’s manoeuvrings led Richard to dismiss it with the consequence that, unable to rule, Dick tumbled down a month later.

  Since then Monck had steered his persistently middle-course. Anxious not to provoke any schism that might precipitate yet another Civil War, he politely concurred with the Army Council’s decisions, but added the caveats that he relied upon them acting wisely to protect
the just liberties of the whole people, of maintaining their good laws and rights, and of removing all oppressions and intolerable burdens ‘from off their necks’. He was also pointedly concerned for Richard Cromwell and his family, his younger brother Henry, and Oliver’s widow, Her Highness, the Dowager Elisabeth.

  ‘What else could I have done?’ he asked of the ghosts in the darkened room.

  Having thus placated the firebrands in the Army, Monck had written to Speaker Lenthall refusing to take any oaths, or to permit the slightest interference with the establishment of his Army in Scotland. He had, however, assured Lenthall that his loyalty and that of his soldiers lay with Parliament for, as he had written trenchantly and now whispered into the darkness as if it were his creed, ‘I received my education as a soldier used to receiving and observing commands. Obedience is my great principle. I have always and ever shall reverence the Parliament and its resolutions in all things as infallible and sacred. There!’ he muttered. ‘Is not that better and more binding than any oath?’ And then he recalled how easily the good intentions of one party are thrown into confusion by the untrustworthy ambitions of another. ‘If only others could be bound by such principles. Or even by considerations of their honour: so much for oaths!’