The King's Revenge (15 page)

In Westminster, a struggle had begun over the so-called secluded Members of Parliament, those who had been dragged out of
the House in the course of Pride’s Purge in 1648 and thereafter excluded. They had favoured an accommodation with the king
then and probably favoured a similar arrangement with his son now in 1660. Crucially they could outvote the Rump if allowed
back in. At their head was the bizarre figure of William Prynne, the lead attack dog in the parliamentary campaign that led
to the execution of Archbishop Laud. Prynne had become a Puritan martyr in the 1630s when he lost his ears as punishment for
alleged sedition, having written a pamphlet which called women actors ‘notorious whores’. Coincidentally or deliberately,
it had appeared at a time when Queen Henrietta Maria had shocked convention by acting in a theatrical extravaganza staged
before the king. Prynne’s remark was seen as being aimed at her. Hauled before the Star Chamber, he was fined a colossal £5000,
jailed and had both his ears clipped. Despite these punishments there was no let-up in his pamphleteering and Prynne was hauled
up before the Star Chamber a second time. The remnants of his ears were cut off, his nose was slit, the letters ‘S’ and ‘L’
(for ‘seditious libel’) were branded on his cheek and he was fined another £5000. Thereafter Prynne wore his hair long, covered
with a close-fitting cap. He was not a comfortable sight. John Aubrey described him as having ‘the countenance of a witch’.
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Though Prynne was hailed as a parliamentary hero, he had opposed putting the king on trial and was one of the members of the
Long Parliament purged in 1648. By 1659 he was openly a king’s man and unarguably the royalists’ most effective propagandist.
He launched a blitz of news sheets and pamphlets denouncing the Rump and asserting the rights of the excluded members. A letter
to the future Charles II’s secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas, enthused about Prynne, ‘His quill doth the best present
right to our
edge and though his ears are lost he hears now very well and speaks more loyalty to a general reception than any other.’
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In April 1659 Prynne had attempted to barge his way into the House the first time the Rump took power. He tried again in December
when the Rump returned. Both times he failed, but both attempts furnished wonderful propaganda material.

Monck pulled out of York on 16 January and made for Nottingham. Before his departure, the news reached him that he had been
made a member of the Council of State and would be required to take the oath abjuring the Stuarts. His only reply was that
he was sending two regiments back to Scotland and bringing four thousand foot and eighteen hundred horse to London – which,
as François Guizot puts it, was ‘a sufficient force to overawe, without raising suspicion’.
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His priorities at this point were first to keep the Rump in line and second, as his chaplain later revealed, to secure military
domination in London.

In Nottingham two of Monck’s key informants were waiting, his brother-in-law Thomas Clarges and one of his chaplains, Thomas
Gumble, who had been sent to seek out potential allies in London. They drew a picture of an isolated, deeply unpopular Parliament
that had to rely on troops to restrain the mobs. Monck was told that two colonels with regiments in the capital, Herbert Morley
and John Fagge, were secretly prepared to offer him their support. That night Monck had Gumble compose a letter to the Speaker
asking to be allowed to garrison the capital with his own men, claiming that all but Morley’s and Fagge’s regiments were unreliable.
He withheld the letter for the present and decided to spring the idea on the Rump at the last possible moment.

The next day a coach bearing two more men from London caught up with Monck somewhere between Nottingham and Leicester. Thomas
Scot and Luke Robinson had been sent by the Council of State, ostensibly to welcome him. Their real mission was to make sure
the General took the oath abjuring monarchy well before he reached London. Little is known about Robinson, who just scraped
through in the last place on the Council of State. Scot, however, remained second only to Haselrig in influence within the
Rump. A regicide and proud of it, he had been an unbending opponent of Cromwell since 1653, and after the Lord Protector’s
death became a leading figure in the Parliaments of 1658 and 1659. In this latest incarnation of the Rump, Scot was secretary
of state. His presence on the mission was testament to its importance.

Monck treated the two with the deference a Stuart king might demand. ‘The highest honours were prepared for their reception,’
wrote Guizot. ‘Monck spared no demonstration of humility, becoming the most obsequious servant of the Parliament.’ The emissaries
insisted on accompanying Monck to London. At every stop he took a back seat, allowing Scot and Robinson to treat with the
petitioners who were invariably waiting for Monck at every stopping place.
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It was not a comfortable journey. Mutual distrust reigned behind the civilities. According to Dr Skinner, another of Monck’s
chaplains, the two parliamentary emissaries managed to take rooms adjoining his at every stopover and ‘always found or made
some hole in the door or wall to look in or listen (which they practiced so palpably that the general found it out and took
notice of it to those about him reflecting on their baseness and evil) that they might more nearly inspect his actions and
observe what persons came to him’. Monck called the two ‘my evil angels’.
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The column from Scotland arrived at St Albans, twenty-five miles from the capital, at the end of January, and was ordered
to bivouac. Among the great and the good awaiting them here was Hugh Peters, Oliver Cromwell’s favourite preacher and a hate
figure for monarchists. Peters delivered a long sermon of welcome in which he likened Monck to a Moses leading his people
out of the wilderness.

For those still suspicious of him, Monck produced more reassurance. He ordered one of his own officers to be thrashed for
claiming that he planned to bring in the king. And he slapped down petitioners from his native Devon who called for the secluded
members to be brought back.

At St Albans Monck dispatched a messenger to Parliament carrying the letter, composed three weeks earlier, in which he asked
that, the London-based troops being allegedly ‘untrustworthy’, some regiments be removed from London to make way for his own
men. Many months later Monck revealed that his strategy had been to split up individual regiments, quartering some units here,
others there, so as to minimise the chances of coordinated action against his plans.

Unsurprisingly, the letter caused a heated debate in Parliament. The Rump had spent months hand-picking individual army officers,
many of them radicals. Under Monck’s proposal they would be replaced by units whom Monck had spent months trying to purge
of exactly such elements. Nevertheless Parliament accepted the proposal.

The handover was tense and almost took a bloody turn when outgoing troops briefly staged a mutiny and refused to leave without
payment of arrears. The difficulty was overcome by a promise of payment at the first stop, and Monck’s four regiments marched
briskly in. Observers were struck by the silence of the watching Londoners. The unpopularity of the army in the capital was
palpable. So was the unpopularity of the Rump Parliament: on 7 February Pepys noted, ‘Boys do now cry “kiss my Parliament”
instead of “kiss my arse”, so great and general a contempt is the Rump come to among all men.’
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Monck was allotted rooms at the Palace of Westminster, the ‘Prince’s apartment’. Edmund Ludlow persuaded an old friend of
Monck, Vice Admiral John Lawson, to go with him to see the new arrival. When they arrived he treated them to ‘many … protestations
of zeal to the common cause with many professions of friendship to ourselves’, recalled Ludlow. Admiral Lawson was reassured.
‘He said to me’, Ludlow wrote, ‘that since the Levite and the Priest had passed by and would not help us, he hoped we had
found a Samaritan that would do it.’
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‘It was not yet time to undeceive, and yet it was becoming difficult to blind them,’ writes Guizot of Monck’s position as
he faced his
supposed political masters in Parliament. ‘Monck, now exposed upon the stage, and urged from all quarters by impatient observers,
could no longer betake himself to his favourite resource of silence. Taciturnity no longer served the purpose of disguise,
and falsehood became necessary.’

Nan, Monck’s royalist wife, was part of the deceit. Having travelled down from Scotland by sea weeks earlier, she now played
the part of the dedicated republican hostess. She ‘took especial care to treat the wives of the members that came to visit
her,’ writes Ludlow, ‘running herself to fetch the sweetmeats, and filling out wine for them; not forgetting to talk mightily
of self-denial, and how much it was upon her husband’s heart that the government might be settled in the way of a commonwealth.’
Presumably the words stuck in her throat.

Four days after his arrival, Monck was put on the spot. Pressure on the Rump climaxed in a declaration from the Common Council
of London that no more tax would be levied until the nation was represented by a freely chosen Parliament. Faced with bankruptcy,
the Council of State issued a punitive rejoinder. It authorised Monck to arrest eleven London burgesses and destroy defensive
posts and chains erected at the city gates to keep the army out. Portcullises were to be wedged open and the great gates of
the city themselves unhinged.

Monck perceived a threat to his own position. Refusal to carry out the orders would lay him open to dismissal from his command,
and possibly worse. According to a leak attributed to Thomas Scot’s son, his father had made arrangements to throw Monck in
the Tower should he defy the orders.

The General’s aides were all for defiance. But early on 9 February Monck headed a column of troops into the City and by nightfall
had arrested nine of the eleven burgesses, and removed all the posts and chains. Next day, on further orders from the Rump
he burnt the gates. Haselrig was ecstatic. Monck had proved himself the servant of Parliament. ‘All is our own,’ he exclaimed.
‘He will be honest.’
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The joy was short-lived. A day later, Monck went to the Guildhall to show the Lord Mayor a copy of a letter he had written
to the Rump. It was devastating. The letter attacked the use of force against London, complained that John Lambert and Sir
Harry Vane were still in the city and that supporters of the junta still retained commands, and reprimanded the House for
allowing men accused of high treason to sit among them. This was a dig at Edmund Ludlow. But what had Sir Arthur Haselrig
storming out of the House in rage was a call on the Rump to issue writs for an election almost immediately. The letter requested
it be done by 18 February – under a week.

The atmosphere in London was transformed when the import of the letter circulated. Samuel Pepys, then clerk to the Naval Board,
captured the excitement in his diary entry for 11 February. He was present in Westminster Hall to see the reaction of MPs.
‘I went up to the lobby, where I saw the Speaker reading of the letter; and after it was read, Sir A. Haselrig came out very
angry, and Billing [a prominent Quaker who a few days earlier had been beaten up by some of Monck’s soldiers], standing at
the door, took him by the arm, and cried, “Thou man, will thy beast carry thee no longer? thou must fall!”’

Pepys then made for Guildhall, where Monck had gone to explain his letter to the Lord Mayor and the aldermen. The General
apologised to them for what had happened on the preceding two days and declared that the work which he had been ordered to
carry out was ‘the most ungrateful he had ever performed in his life’. The Rump, he told them, would not sit beyond 6 May.
It was a transformative moment. Monck had entered the city’s headquarters a villain and left a hero. Pepys was just in time
to see him departing and was deafened by the crowd when it glimpsed the presumed liberator. ‘Such a shout I never heard in
all my life,’ the diarist recorded, ‘Crying out, “God bless your Excellence.”’

After a protracted visit to an alehouse – one of many that day – Pepys walked home through a London that seemed on fire:

A hiatus of ten days followed as Parliament’s leaders struggled to bring the General back on side. They sent Thomas Scot and
Luke Robinson to his lodgings with a pacifying message of thanks for his work in the city. The duo whom he had treated with
such obsequiousness on the road from Nottingham found difficulty even getting an audience. The Rump then performed a humiliating
U-turn to appease the General by dropping the oath abjuring monarchy. An amendment replaced the oath with a mere ‘engagement’
to be ‘faithful to the Commonwealth … without a King’. The worried parliamentarians also scurried to satisfy the General by
getting Harry Vane and John Lambert out of London. Vane, though accounted too sick to travel, was ordered to be ‘carried’
over one hundred miles to his house in Lincolnshire. Lambert was given four days to surrender to the Council of State or suffer
loss of his estates.
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