Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  By July the issue of the Letters Patent making him Duke of Albemarle, Earl of Torrington, Baron Monck of Potheridge and heaven knew what besides had transported Anne into a world of near-fantasy. Such honours and their accompanying perquisites, patronages and influence made Monck, already a rich man, wealthy almost beyond the dreams of avarice. Used to the slanders of others he took little notice of the scurrilous pamphlets, gossip and rumours that accompanied all this, for the King had need not only of a Privy Counsellor, but a surrogate father whose advice was as impartial as it was judicious. This did not prevent Monck from setting a-foot measures to acquire a house in London, eventually a small mansion in Grub Street, plus the outright purchase of the former Tudor palace of New Hall, near Chelmsford in Essex. But the preoccupations that kept him busy were with the King, His Highness The Duke of York, Sir William Morice and the King’s first minister, Edward Hyde, now Earl of Clarendon.

  His Majesty King Charles II had set the stamp on his reign almost at the outset, to Monck’s intense and outspoken disapproval. Bishop Wren had done as Monck had bid him, preparing an Office for the King’s Restoration in accord with the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey. The great service of thanksgiving was to have been held on Charles’s entry into his capital, following his review of the Army on Blackheath on his thirtieth birthday. But Charles had declined the offer, turned it down point-blank, pleading exhaustion after the lengthy speeches he had endured from both the Lords and Commons, though rumour had it that he had installed his mistress, Mrs Palmer, in Whitehall Palace and gone at once to her bed.

  Remonstrating with the King the following day had been the first occasion on which Monck had used his new privilege of access to the Royal Presence, a privilege Charles must have regretted granting the old man. Although Monck moderated his language, his temper was ill-concealed and the young King was on the defensive.

  ‘Come, sir, you use me over harshly,’ Charles protested. ‘You should not believe what you hear, for it is not true.’

  ‘Your Majesty, I do not care what tittle-tattle is common among the people, but I care for what you do not undertake and it was requisite that you attended the Abbey church to give public thanks for the happy events of yesterday.’

  ‘I offered my sincere oblation to Almighty God in the Presence Chamber of this Palace, sir, before retiring, did I not James?’ The King called in the support of his brother, the Duke of York, sitting in the window seat.’

  ‘You did indeed, Sire,’ York agreed coolly.

  ‘Do not be angry, General Monck.’ Charles’s voice dropped. ‘I have great need of your good opinion of me and welcome your advice on all things. I am sorry for my omission but I was greatly fatigued and enduring the lengthy peroration of Mr Speaker Lenthall in the very Banqueting Hall from which my father stepped to his execution was damned near o’erwhelming.’

  Monck bowed his acquiescence. He was unmollified, hoping the rumours about Barbara Palmer were unfounded, but as sure that if the King had not bedded her the previous night, he would do so as soon as opportunity offered, for the young beauty had been a courier between the King and his friends in England, and was rumoured to have carried funds to the King in exile. Besides, Charles’s liaison with her was so well known that Mr Palmer’s cuckold’s horns were almost as visible as his nose.

  ‘Truly, George,’ the King said intimately, pressing his point. ‘I was so weary that I was scarce able to speak but I desire that you must know that whatsoever may concern the good of the people I shall be as ready to grant as you shall be to ask.’

  ‘Your Majesty is most gracious.’ Monck bowed again and withdrew. He was never quite certain whether or not he heard the King and his brother laughing as he withdrew, crossed the ante-room and walked down the passage. But he soon forgot such troubling details, for there was much to be done and that mostly only able to be accomplished by Monck himself. Chief among this deluge of administration and reorganisation was the disbandment of the Army, an immense and complex task that consumed most of the waking hours of Monck, his adjutant Smith, and Clarke in the weeks following the King’s Restoration. It had been decided to remove for ever the threat posed by a militant and self-righteous standing army, a mere purging of extremists being insufficient to guarantee a peaceable and biddable force. Besides, the Treasury was incapable of supporting a large and idle force. Instead, a smaller Army was to be reconstituted, based on oaths of loyalty to the King, for which there was no lack of loyal cavaliers. But, aware that turning off thousands of disaffected former members of the New Model Army would be almost as dangerous as leaving them in garrisons or quartering them on the country, Monck ensured a compliant Parliament granted substantial funds, largely raised from an unpopular poll-tax, for the retraining of the majority of the now unemployed soldiers, or the issue of grants encouraging them to return to the trades from which they had been called to the colours. Many were the tailors, smiths, bakers, porters, haberdashers, brewers, farriers, wheel-rights, cobblers and tradesmen and journeymen of all manner of occupations of the following years who had served in the New Model Army. Most had occasion to bless the name of George Monck who, as he declared to the House of Peers in which he was now installed, ‘truly turned swords into ploughshares’ and saw every man retire with the means to establish himself in civil life..

  ‘It was,’ John Lambert remarked with a sad irony when he heard of it in The Tower, ‘the most Puritan moment of the old fox.’

  As to the formation of the new but smaller Royal Army, Monck preserved some of his own force with which he had marched south from Scotland and turned the history of the Three Nations on his daring. To the new gentlemanly Life Guard which he had extemporised for the King’s landing, there was a new regiment of Royal Foot Guards raised largely from old Royalists, commanded by Cavalier officers, some of whom had endured exile with Charles, and there were some other troops whose disbanding was merely symbolic. His own Regiment of Horse, for example, found itself resurrected, as did the Regiment of Foot Oliver had so expediently cobbled together for him for the Scottish campaign of ten years earlier. Monck’s stolid infantry had been paraded in full review order with Monck at their head, mounted upon his famous black charger. At his word they had laid down their firelocks with a near simultaneous clatter; Monck’s Regiment was no more, and for a long moment a silence lay upon that motionless body of men. An instant later they were ordered to pick-up their weapons; henceforth they were His Majesty’s Second Regiment of Foot Guards, christening their resurrected state the ‘Coldstreamers’ that they should never forget their origins, and adopting the motto ‘nihil secondus’ – ‘second to none’ – to make plain their relationship with the parvenu and cavalier First Regiment of Foot Guards. Monck remained their Colonel-in-Chief, being joined by William, The Earl of Craven, a distinguished Cavalier in the Service of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, a daughter of James I and aunt to King Charles II, then in widowed exile in London with her son, Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

  Craven was among those who Monck had come to know and like on his return to London, a man who had unobtrusively guided Monck through some of the complexities of court protocol upon his elevation to his Dukedom. He had little enough time to focus on such bothersome matters, the process of disbanding the New Model Army being long and tortuous.

  For months a daily crowd of petitioners filled Monck’s own ante-room in The Cockpit, Army officers all of whom clamoured for his ear to plead their own desperate but especial cases. He and Clarke did what they could, but it was a tedious and, occasionally, heart-breaking task. From time-to-time, however, Monck found himself solicited on entirely different matters, thus one morning he found an oddly familiar name announced, one that he could not quite at first place until its owner followed Clarke into his presence.

  ‘Nehemiah Bourne, Your Grace,’ the man introduced himself, ‘late of the Speaker on the Tay station, I had the honour of dining with you…’

  ‘Ah, yes! I remember Captain Bourne, I remember.’ Unused to
his new title, Monck turned to his Secretary. ‘Will, you recall Captain Bourne. He delivered St Andrew’s into our hands while we marched against Dundee.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Clarke bowed as Monck motioned Bourne to a seat and invited him to take wine.

  ‘I cannot take advantage of Your Grace’s hospitality twice without recompense, nor shall I presume upon Your Grace’s time. I come here solely to request that you allow the Brethren of the Trinity House to elect you Master of their Incorporation. We know you for a busy man and would elect an executive Deputy Master to stand in your place where all dispositions of funds to the needy were concerned, but you would do us great honour if you would accept.’ Bourne smiled. ‘I have been deputed to lay our request before Your Grace. We would welcome you at Deptford where I think I may safely say a repast at least matching that which you laid before me in your quarters all those years ago.’

  Monck laughed. ‘I am touched, Captain Bourne. Presumably my sea-service against the Dutch did not too much expose my ignorance of matters nautical that your fellow Brethren might guy me with their superior knowledge of seamanship and navigation.’

  ‘On the contrary, Your Grace, you added to the laurels of our naval forces.’ Bourne rose and bowed. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I have importuned you o’erlong.’

  ‘Sweet words, Captain Bourne, sweet words, and I thank you for them.’

  ‘So, Your Grace,’ remarked Will Clarke with a tired smile, ‘the old seamen chose you above My Lord Sandwich.’

  ‘Better a Duke than an Earl, I suppose,’ Monck replied drily, returning to the papers before him.

  ‘No, Your Grace. I warrant they hold you in the greater esteem.’

  ‘You think so?’ Monck asked, looking up at Clarke.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Bourne smiled, ‘as sea-officers my Brethren are practical men.’

  In using the word ‘practical’, Monck wondered for a moment if Bourne referred to the words of that infamous and insulting song and then realised that he did not. He returned Bourne’s smile.

  ‘I am obliged to you. Please tell your fellows that I should be honoured to accept their kind offer.’

  *

  The labour of breaking up and disbanding the Army compassionately was an exhausting and prolonged business that would have proceeded with greater despatch had Charles not sent for ‘My Lord Duke of Albemarle’ when confronted on almost any decision upon which some colour, one way or the other, needed to be put. Since the King’s greatest expertise lay with the seduction of his courtiers’ wives, Monck was a too frequent intimate of His Majesty, guiding the younger man through the labyrinthine processes of handling the English political class. As to his predilection for sexual gratification, Monck thought it prodigious and excessive, the product of the idleness of exile. From Monck’s stern point-of-view, such folly was silly and did the King’s name little credit, distracting His Majesty from his principal and over-riding concern: the welfare of his people enshrined in his duty. Although the King regularly solicited Monck’s advice, he took it less frequently, and while he left Monck to handle the Army he proceeded to cast off some of the commitments that he had affirmed by the Declaration of Breda. The land transfers were not allowed to stand, some beneficiaries going through lengthy legal challenges at the termination of which they reverted to their former loyalist cavalier owners. There were also some short-lived and eccentric rebellions – a body of Quakers running naked through Yorkshire crying woe on the land, and a savagely repressed uprising in London, the first objective of which was the murder of General Monck. This was a final stirring of the Fifth Monarchists against which Monck ordered the Life Guards. These gentlemen soldiers, cavaliers to a man, found the grim and disbanded veterans of the New Model Army more than a match. Ensconced in houses and opening a withering fire on the approaching and over-confident cavalry, the Crop-heads flung the horsemen back in confusion.

  The discomfited gentry retreated precipitately to Whitehall, crying of an over-whelming force of at least five-hundred men being secure in strong-points. Monck called out his own regiment and mounted his horse, dismounting to lead the counter-attack on foot, sword-in-hand, with that ferocity he had demonstrated at Dunbar. Hurling the rebels out of their emplacements he discovered their number no more than fifty and by the evening the City was quiet.

  It was Charles’s thirst for vengeance that most disturbed Monck, a man disposed to conciliate and humour former enemies, the better to bring them to heel and a peaceable co-existence. His Majesty’s assent to the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was partial, setting aside the clause that left, technically at least, the decision to name those exempt from their past conduct to Parliament. Charles’s desire to pursue the Regicides occupied a good deal of His Majesty’s energies outside his bed-chamber, and Monck’s pleadings went often in vain.

  ‘You must sit among their judges,’ Charles commanded him and Monck knew he had been trapped. There was guile in the young King, or if not in him, then in his brother James. To make Monck party to his own revenge was the King’s way of binding Monck ever closer.

  Parliament had excepted five of the Regicides from the Act, but the number rose both from the prompting of a cavalier-dominated Parliament, and the King’s personal appetite for vengeance. The judiciary process was shameful, the charge of High Treason admitting of no defence. To listen to the case for the prosecution was to hear the Divinity of Kings proclaimed by those whose intellect might have better served common-sense by other means. It was not justice and one evening Monck importuned the King while he sat at cards with Mistress Palmer, now – thanks to the elevation of her compliant husband - Lady Castlemaine.

  ‘Sir, I had a notion to be private,’ Charles protested. Another man might have quailed at this remonstrance but Monck read the apprehension in the King’s eyes: he still laboured in some fear of the old soldier.

  Monck bowed, ignoring the King’s sole playmate. ‘I should not have invoked the privilege of immediate audience had not Your Majesty accorded it me, but Your Majesty must call off the hounds that bay after the blood of men who conceived they acted under the authority of the Parliament that governed England. It is a reasonable defence and I pray that thou showest clemency before you rouse the ire of those who still harbour great resentments against you, sir.’

  Charles had risen and held an embroidered kerchief to his lips. ‘Have a care sir, what you say, or I shall consider that you are of that party. Do you not hold that a man may seek justice from those who murdered his own father?’

  ‘Sir,’ replied Monck, his eyes blue chips of ice, ‘In my youth I took such an action in defence of my own poor father who, in the process of seeking to pay his respects to yours, he having fallen foul of his enemies, the very men who had promised him safe-conduct to make his obeisance. I acted in haste and have, ever since, had the leisure to repent my folly. I did not find the slightest comfort from so acting and have suffered from it to this day. Indeed, I anticipate it may lead to the damnation of my soul and thus I speak from experience in the presumption of my advice. Have a care for your own soul, sir. Desist now; do not pursue men who at the time of thy father’s trial did but what they conceived was their duty, thou hast had sufficient revenge upon those who followed their consciences and the stench of their burning entrails fills this Palace daily.’

  ‘Pah! I am a King, sir.’

  ‘Aye, sir, and it behoves thee to act as one! Thou art not yet crowned!’

  The two men stood confronting one another. Monck was aware of Castlemaine’s outrage at his effrontery and Charles’s distraction, though his eyes showed for a second both fury at Monck’s impertinence and then fear at his stern reminder of his insecurity. He sensed the King would do nothing and that what Castlemaine offered was the better option than dull duty, for it would come with soothing consolation. Monck knew himself beaten and made his bow.

  ‘Your Majesty will act as Your Majesty thinks wise, but I beg you consider how you shall be judged by He from whom you hold yo
ur Crown,’ he said pointedly. As he withdrew he heard the woman’s words.

  ‘What a tedious and fat man, Charles.’

  Monck did not hear what the King replied.

  Matters must, methinks, pass into my own hands, he thought to himself.

  There was no abating the vengeance and Monck heard that Charles, along with his brother James, had watched some of the executions from a window in the Holbein Gate of Whitehall Palace.

  Sitting remonstrating among the judges, Monck saved John Lambert from execution, though not from a life of incarceration, first in The Tower, afterwards in Castle Cornet on the island of Guernsey, and later still on Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound. There were others, too: the vacillating Fleetwood, Arthur Haselrig, Robert Lilburne, the poet John Milton, a number of other Army officers and even the former Speaker, Lenthall, whose head might have rolled had he not co-operated with Monck. Aware that his name stank in the nostrils of those who saw in him only a turn-coat who had made a mighty profit from his own treachery, Monck nevertheless attempted to ameliorate the vicious revenge the King and the Cavalier party attempted to mete out to all those associated with the King’s father’s execution. Both the King and the Commons, now led by the new Speaker and Royalist zealot, Sir Harbottle Grimston, extended their reach beyond the Regicides. The numbers condemned for High Treason rose steadily, in defiance of Monck’s intervention with the King. Parliament had agreed to arraign in all fifty-one men, ten of whom were unlikely to escape execution, but Monck was unable to do much, his health being increasingly uncertain.

  In only one case did Monck offer evidence against the accused, that of Archibald Campbell, the Marquess of Argyll who was tried in Edinburgh. Monck had letters that incriminated Argyll, whose support for Monck when Governor of Scotland had never been wholehearted and whom he had known was double-dealing to keep his place and his privileges. Monck knew too that Argyll’s playing of a double-game had compromised and destroyed others, but he confessed to Clarke in a moment of real intimacy, that if the King would be revenged upon the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, among others, whose disinterred corpse was ritually ‘executed,’ quartered and displayed for the better edification of the public, then ‘in all justice, Argyll ought not to be free of the consequences of his own sins’.