The King's Revenge (16 page)

Monck now moved to break the bar on the secluded Presbyterians taking their old seats in the Commons. On 21 February, he met
their
leaders secretly and agreed terms for their readmission the very next day. The Presbyterians were to settle the government
of the army and provide money for its maintenance, issue writs for a new Parliament to meet on 20 April, and dissolve the
Long Parliament as speedily as possible. It was also understood that they would not alter the form of the government.

What happened in the following hours is unclear. According to one account, Monck wavered all night over whether or not to
back the secluded members and betray the Rump, finally being persuaded to do so by his wife and aides. According to another,
the Council of State got wind that secluded members planned to force entry into the House but were reassured by Monck that
although he didn’t believe it, he would double the guard on the House.
³⁵

Next morning the guards were indeed doubled. However, their orders were not to stop the secluded members entering but to ensure
that they did. Under Monck’s protection, seventy-three MPs purged in 1648 pushed and laughed their way to the seats they had
been prevented from occupying since before the king’s death. They were led by William Prynne.

The forces favouring an accommodation with the king’s son were now a majority in Parliament and the General was evidently
behind them. The seven regicides in the house that day must have shivered. Time was running out for them.

February—April 1660

Events were moving even faster in Ireland than in England that February. In the space of a fortnight the argument over the
secluded members led to the seizure of Dublin Castle and an Irish declaration for a free Parliament – and the first arrests
of regicides took place.

The arrests were ordered by Sir Charles Coote, the ambitious president of Connaught and George Monck’s chief ally in Ireland.
He was acting on the prompting of Sir Arthur Forbes, one of Charles’s Irish agents. As the issue of the secluded members came
to the boil, Forbes urged Coote to declare for a free Parliament and arrest ‘those persons who had a hand in the murder of
the King’.
¹

Coote eagerly complied. He was one of many rats leaving the Commonwealth’s sinking ship. In the 1650s he had been ‘a scourge
of the King’s supporters … hanging royalist commanders, killing bishops and profiting vastly from confiscated royalist estates’.
²
But for a year he had been co-operating with Irish royalists and was desperate to curry favour. Edmund Ludlow, during his
four months’ rule in Dublin, had become so wary of Coote that at the time of the Booth emergency he ordered the Irish magnate
not to leave Dublin. Ludlow was right to be suspicious – Coote had a force assembled
ready to proclaim the king had Booth’s insurrection not been so firmly crushed. Four months later Coote was to play a key
role in the coup that ousted Edmund Ludlow’s commissioners. A month after that he laid the treason charges against Ludlow,
alleging that he had deserted his post and plotted with the army.

Now Coote hoped to play kingmaker by encouraging Charles to make his bid for the crown through a landing in Connaught. There,
an Irish army led by Coote would be waiting. The negotiations with Sir Arthur Forbes which led to his hunt for regicides had
begun with Coote making the case for an Irish landing. ‘His own restoration agenda, after dispatching Ludlow,’ suggests Geoffrey
Robertson, ‘was to have the King come first to Ireland, receive a rapturous welcome and progress on to London with Coote at
all times at his triumphant side.’
³

Acting on the royalist agent’s prompting, Coote tracked down five men who had been involved in some way in the king’s trial
and were now in Ireland: prosecuting counsel John Cook, judge John Jones and the army officers Hercules Huncks, Robert Phayre
and Matthew Tomlinson, who had been on duty guarding the king. The five were quietly seized by Coote’s men. There appears
to have been no legal sanction for the arrests but all were held in Athlone or Dublin preparatory to being sent to England.

The star catch was fifty-two-year-old John Cook, the brilliant legalist who had compiled the indictment of the king and served
as lead prosecutor at the trial. Charles’s refusal to recognise the court meant that Cook’s role had been confined to reading
out the indictment to the seated monarch. Nevertheless, he was probably top of the royalist hate list now that John Bradshaw
was dead. Charles had once included him with Cromwell and Bradshaw as men who were ‘incapable of forgiveness’. Ironically,
Cook had just written – though anonymously – a pamphlet defending his friend Edmund Ludlow from charges of treason and attacking
Coote, whose ‘design must be first to bring in the excluded members from 1648 and then – ding dong bells – will come in king,
lords and commons’.
⁴

Another military figure from the king’s trial soon ended up in Coote’s dungeons too. This was Sir Hardress Waller, whose signature
was eleventh on the death warrant. The senior figure in the Council of Officers in Ireland, Waller had watched developments
in England with mounting alarm. He tried to persuade the officers’ council to declare against readmitting the secluded members.
The officers turned him down. In some desperation Waller formed a plan to seize his opponents but was betrayed. Waller and
his supporters were forced to barricade themselves in Dublin Castle.

Next day, while the defenders of the castle prepared for an attack, the Council of Officers called for the immediate admission
of the secluded members. It was a huge psychological blow against the Rump and in favour of the Stuarts. The day after that,
a convention organised by Coote’s rival Lord Broghill endorsed the officers’ declaration and the Dublin Castle garrison gave
Hardress Waller up. He was held at Athlone, together with John Cook and the four others seized by Coote. They would remain
in confinement in Ireland for months before being briefly released, then arrested again.

In England, George Monck’s decision to reverse Pride’s Purge and readmit the secluded members ushered in a brief new era in
which members of the Rump were bit players and Parliament was controlled by Presbyterian grandees. These were the men who
had fought against Charles I alongside the Rump but who, believing that a deal could be done, had negotiated the Treaty of
Newport.

The terms of the treaty had involved parliamentary control of the military and the right of Parliament to nominate the great
offices of state, the king’s councillors and the judges, and to raise taxes, if need be without permission of the king. The
Presbyterian grandees, men like the Earls of Manchester and Newcastle, believed they could bring back the king’s son on the
same terms. After taking their seats on 22 February the Presbyterians wasted no time. They fulfilled a commitment to Monck
by appointing him supreme commander of the armies of England, Scotland and Ireland, with the title Lord General. They then
turned the legislative clock back nearly a dozen
years, annulling over a period of twenty-six days much of the most radical legislation passed since 1649 – including the orders
legitimising the purge of the House and their own exclusion. Presbyterianism was established as the state religion. The Westminster
Assembly’s Confession of Faith was imposed as standard doctrine and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 tying England to
Scotland’s form of Presbyterianism was reinstituted. And, crucially, the declaration of fidelity that required new members
to pledge loyalty to a government ‘without King or House of Lords’ was abolished.

All this had to be achieved quickly because of the deal with Monck, which obliged the Presbyterians to keep the Long Parliament
going to allow enough time to prepare for the election of a ‘free’ Parliament. They set themselves 16 March as the date for
dissolution of the Parliament they had striven so long to enter.

After the secluded members’ first dramatic appearance in the House, Haselrig, followed by Scot, had stormed out and hours
later led a delegation to confront George Monck. According to Edmund Ludlow, the fat little man was as civil as ever and treated
them to more protestations of loyalty to the Commonwealth. He explained feebly that he had let the secluded members in to
get them off his back – ‘free himself from their importunity’ was Ludlow’s phrase – and insisted he would ensure they did
no damage. Charles would be kept out. As Ludlow reports it, Monck took off his gloves at this juncture, grasped Haselrig by
the hand and said, ‘I do here protest to you, in the presence of all these gentlemen, that I will oppose to the utmost the
setting up of Charles Stuart, a single person, or a house of peers.’

Yet the direction in which the country was travelling was unmistakable. The growth of royalism was signposted daily. ‘Everybody
now drinks the King’s health without any fear, whereas before it was very private that a man dare do it,’ Pepys observed.
⁵

The differing fates of the two men who had rebelled against Parliament and fought each other at Winnington Bridge just six
months back offered a more personal sign of the times. On 22
February Sir George Booth, the Presbyterian leader of the crypto-royalist revolt in August, was released on a bail of £5000.
Nine days later John Lambert appeared before the Council of State and was told to pay four times as much, £20,000, as a security
for his freedom. Lambert was reputed to be a wealthy man but he was unable to find £20,000 and was sent to the Tower.

In the first week of March there was speculation about the return of Richard Cromwell. Edward Montague, Samuel Pepys’ patron
and number two at the Admiralty, let drop to Pepys that ‘there was great endeavours to bring in the Protector again’. The
exiled court picked up the same gossip. There was talk too of offering Monck the crown. According to one account, republican
leaders had pressed the proposal on him but he had refused. Some of the regicides among them were seemingly promoting the
idea that anyone was preferable to Charles Stuart.

There were desperate republican attempts to reverse the tide. Propagandists poured out pamphlets, tracts and broadsides warning
against the Stuarts. Puritan preachers like Barebone, Peters and Owen prayed for the godly to unite in the Good Old Cause
and Edmund Ludlow’s republican comrades plotted an uprising.

Predictably, the most powerful warning came from the Secretary for Foreign Tongues. John Milton switched for a moment from
composing his masterpiece
Paradise Lost
and at the end of February thundered out six thousand horrified words on the prospects of a restored monarchy.
The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth
threatened, ‘if we return to kingship, and soon repent, as undoubtedly we shall, when we begin to find the old encroachments
coming on by little and little … we may be forced perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought, and spend over again
all that we have spent.’ The poet was no democrat in the modern sense of the word. But he implored the citizenry not to backslide
into autocracy and with uncanny accuracy forecast the decadence England would invite if it said yes to Charles: ‘a culture
of servile deference to a King who must be adored like a demi-god
with a dissolute and haughty court about him, of vast expense and luxury, masques and revels … among the perpetual bowings
and cringings of an abject people’. The poet sent a letter to George Monck enclosing a copy and a summary of the tract. It
is not known whether the General replied, or if he even read it.

The booksellers in St Paul’s Churchyard were equally well fed by the royalist propagandists. It was still too risky to call
openly for a restoration, but the streets were flooded with lampoons of the Rump and broadsides calling for a free Parliament,
which everyone knew meant a Stuart restoration. Prynne alone published more than twenty pamphlets in 1660, mostly against
the Rump. According to Thomas Rugge’s
Diurnal
(daily diary), ‘Rump ballads’ were being given ‘for nothing to poore Girles for to sell’.
⁶

Significantly, royalist literature downplayed vengeance. When a group of royalist gentry in Worcestershire daringly published
a tract in favour of monarchy, they declared that they had no thought of revenge and wished only for peace and unity. Royalists
in other counties began issuing honeyed declarations. Later, when the restoration had been secretly agreed, a declaration
signed by ten earls, four viscounts, five lords and a host of baronets, knights and squires denied any thoughts of vengeance.
That would change completely, and soon.

On Saturday 17 March, three weeks after George Monck had taken Sir Arthur Haselrig by the hand and reiterated his fidelity
to the Commonwealth, the General met the royalist agent Sir John Grenville late at night in his chambers in St James’s Palace.
Having employed Monck’s brother Nicholas as a go-between during the Booth uprising, this time Sir John gained access to Monck
himself through Sir William Morrice, a kinsman and aide of the General whom a contemporary described as his ‘elbow-Counsellor’.
Morrice persuaded the General to receive Grenville secretly and escorted him into Monck’s chamber.
⁷

Grenville brought Monck the same offer as that conveyed the previous August. In return for effecting a restoration, Monck
was again
promised £100,000 a year to distribute as he liked between himself and the army, along with the choice of any high office
he liked – Grenville suggested Lord High Constable. As with the earlier offer, the details were passed by word of mouth. All
that was written down was a short message: ‘I cannot think you wish me ill, for you have no reason so to do; and the good
I expect from you will bring so great a benefit to your country and to yourself, that I cannot think you will decline my interest.’
Charles had written a commission to Greenville, which perhaps he was also supposed to show to the General, and which perhaps
he did: ‘I am confident that George Monck can have no malice in his heart against me, nor has done anything against me which
I cannot easily pardon’, it read; ‘and it is in his power to do me so great service, that I cannot easily reward; but I will
do all I can.’

Monck’s response was unequivocal. According to notes of the conversation which Grenville transcribed later, ‘he pledged his
life’ to the king. Monck then called in Morrice, who had been told to wait outside. From then on Monck would use his kinsman
as an ‘indirect and deniable channel to the royal court’. Deep into the night the three men discussed the way to effect a
restoration. Monck appears to have counselled against Charles indulging in open displays of vengefulness such as had characterised
earlier proclamations issued in his name. He suggested that Charles forestall people’s fears by promising a free and general
pardon to all who swore allegiance to him. He advised the king to counter other fears by confirming land settlements made
since the wars and proclaiming freedom of conscience. Monck told Grenville to write it all down but also to commit it to memory.
The meeting then broke up.

The following Monday they met again, and Monck checked that Grenville had memorised every detail before taking the paper from
him and burning it. He insisted that no one else save Charles himself should know about the meeting. Grenville was then packed
off to Brussels with Monck’s proposals. He took with him Monck’s assurance that ‘his consistent object had been the King’s
restoration’, an account accepted by his admirers ever since.
⁸