The King's Revenge (17 page)
Grenville was now launched on weeks of secret negotiation, shuttling between Monck and Charles as plans for the restoration
matured. The only outward sign that something was moving was Charles’s abrupt departure from Brussels and relocation in Breda
in the Dutch Republic. This move was made on the advice of Monck, who counselled him against remaining in the Spanish Netherlands
while England was still at war with Spain.
Given the temper of the army, Monck’s insistence on security was understandable. Monck had launched a new purge in the officer
ranks soon after arriving in London, getting rid of radicals like Francis Hacker. He had also replaced distrusted regiments
in London with his own men. But the army, and indeed the navy, still bulged with republican sectarians, and crucially remained
deeply imbued with hatred for the Stuarts. As a correspondent put it in a letter to Prince Charles dated 20 March, ‘the army
is not yet in a state to hear your name publicly.’
9
Monck himself would later refer to being ‘involved in many and great difficulties’ because of the republicanism of the army.
Monck’s most persistent army opponent was now John Okey, another of the king’s judges. Active in marshalling army opposition
when the Presbyterians dropped the requirement on members to sign an engagement against single-person rule, Okey also led
opposition to a new Militia Bill which invested command of the militia in local dignitaries and revived old fears that the
army was to be disbanded. On 8 March he appeared at the head of a delegation of officers presenting a remonstrance to Monck.
This was accompanied by talk of officers mounting another ‘interruption’ like Lambert’s six months earlier. It caused ‘a general
damp over men’s minds and faces’, remarked Pepys.
10
‘They were high [angry] on both sides’, a royalist noted. ‘It is feared we shall have some combustions.’
11
The furore soon abated. Monck, aware as ever of what he could get away with, felt strong enough to slap Okey and the officers
down. In Clarendon’s words, ‘He told them that he brought them not out of
Scotland for his nor the Parliament’s counsel, that for his part he should obey the Parliament and they should do the same.’
12
He followed up with a general command to officers to return to their regiments and banned them from holding political meetings.
Thus he closed down what had been treasured as a right since the first Civil War. Pepys sighed in relief. ‘I was told, that
the General had put a stop to it, so all was well again.’
13
Shortly afterwards, Monck took the final step to control of the military. He circulated a declaration for officers to sign
in which they promised obedience to whatever Parliament decreed. Okey was among the minority who refused to sign. But officers
from forty regiments did sign it. Remarkably, the deeply political New Model Army had been taken almost out of politics.
Publicly, Monck continued to reiterate his commitment to a Commonwealth. Such was his apparent sincerity that royalists became
convinced that he was at heart a republican. ‘Monck is, God knows,’ a correspondent complained to Hyde. ‘He comes once a day
into the Council of State. Time will discover whether he be a wise man or a fool. He lately wished his right hand might rot
off if he were reconcileable to the King.’
14
Among republicans fearing the personal consequences of a vengeful monarchy, the talk was of mounting a coup. Edmund Ludlow’s
memoirs reveal that from late February he and other increasingly panicked republicans were discussing military intervention.
His memoirs admit that the plotters came together not just ‘for the public interest’ but also because of the ‘dangerous condition
of their affairs and … their own preservation’. Ludlow proposed calling together members of the Rump’s old Council of State
and raising rebellion in their name. He revealed that he already had the promised backing of two regiments in the Home Counties
and a commitment from Herbert Morley, commandant of the Tower. He also had hopes of John Lawson and the fleet. By mid-March
the plot had reached the stage of attempting to raise money. ‘A considerable party of those who had been engaged against the
King’ agreed to
contribute money for troops, Ludlow recalled. However, the plot stopped there. It was scuppered because, it seems, Sir Arthur
Haselrig had sold the pass.
Slingsby Bethel, a member of the Council of State, was sent to Haselrig’s chambers with plans for the uprising. When he arrived
he found Haselrig with his head in his hands moaning, ‘We are undone.’ If George Monck is to be believed – and in this instance
he may not have lied – Haselrig had concluded a Faustian pact with the General. The story was detailed in a sensational letter
Monck wrote to the Speaker many months later when Haselrig was facing execution. He claimed that Haselrig’s friends had asked
him to write it to save his life. It described an agreement by which Haselrig was to get out of Monck’s way in return for
his life. According to the letter, some time after the secluded members were readmitted to the House, Sir Arthur had concluded
that a Stuart restoration was inevitable and had come to beg for Monck’s protection. He told Monck that a restoration would
mean ‘ruin to his person, family, and fortune’. Monck, it seems, was only too happy to help if that would put Haselrig out
of the game. ‘At this conjuncture in time,’ he wrote, ‘no man was so capable to obstruct my designs as Sr Arthur Hasilrig.’
He explained that Haselrig had under his immediate command ‘the government of Berwick, Carlisle, Newcastle, and Tynmouth,
with a regiment of foot and one of the best regiments of horse in the Army’. Moreover, Haselrig had the biggest hand in selecting
officers during a massive purge in the army the previous year and so had a huge ‘influence upon all the rest of the regiments
in England’.
15
George Monck’s price for saving the republican leader was Sir Arthur’s retirement from the fray. ‘I told him that if he would
engage to me to go home to his own house and live quietly there, I would undertake to secure his life and estate; whereupon
he did so engage.’
Haselrig’s despair seems to have been the signal for others to give up hope. Ludlow writes:
Mr. Scot also informed me, that he had lost all hopes of getting such a number of our council of state together, as should
be necessary to put in execution the design which I had proposed; and that, having notice that the new council of state had
resolved to seize his person, he designed to retire into the country, as well to secure himself, as to endeavour to be elected
into the ensuing convention … These things put me in further doubt of my own safety, and moved me to provide for myself as
well as I could. To that end I seldom lay at my own house after Mr. Scot’s departure from London.
Scot managed one more republican trumpet blast before he departed. The day before the Long Parliament finally dissolved itself,
Presbyterian MP John Crew moved that the House bear witness against the ‘horrid murder of the king’. One member who plainly
feared that fingers might be pointing at him protested that he had neither hand nor heart in the king’s death. A furious row
over monarchy developed and, disastrously for him, Thomas Scot was unable to keep his sharp tongue out of it. In a speech
justifying the trial he declared: ‘Though I know not where to hide my head at this time, yet I dare not refuse to own that
not only my hand, but my heart also, was in that action.’ He concluded by declaring that he should desire no greater honour
in this world than that the following inscription might be engraved on his tomb: ‘Here lieth one who had a hand and a heart
in the execution of Charles Stuart, late King of England.’ He was announcing his own death warrant and obviously realised
it.
The day ended memorably for royalists. In the evening a man with a ladder, paint and brushes approached the quadrangle of
the old Royal Exchange where a row of statues of all the monarchs of England except Charles I stood. After Charles’s execution
his statue had been pulled down and an inscription put in its place, reading
Exit Tyrannus Regum Ultimus, Restitutae Angliae Libertatis Anno Prime Die. XXX Januarii MDCXXXXIIX [sic]
(So ends the rule of the
last tyrant. Liberty was restored to England on the thirtieth day of January 1648).
*
Soldiers and others watched the painter climb his ladder and cheered lustily as he painted over the inscription, descended
his ladder and shouted ‘Long live King Charles the Second.’
16
On cue, royalist supporters came out into the open. ‘Hesitation suddenly ceased everywhere and the torrent was at its full,’
writes Masson. ‘They were drinking Charles’ health openly in taverns; they were singing songs about him everywhere; they were
tearing down the Arms of the Commonwealth in public buildings and putting up the king’s instead.’ In the Commons, Edward Stephens
took the risk of making a speech enthusiastically in favour of monarchy and was applauded for his pains.
Anglican clerics, so long restrained, came out into the open too. On 5 April, Matthew Griffith was briefly jailed for publishing
a zealously royalist sermon,
The Fear of God and the King
, taken from Proverbs 24.21: ‘fear thou the Lord and the King’. Blind John Milton replied with
Brief Notes upon a late sermon
: ‘so wide [is] the disjunction of God from a King,’ he wrote, ‘we could not serve two contrary masters God and the King.’
Griffith’s pamphlet was technically treasonable; a few weeks later the world would be turned upside down and Milton would
be dubbed the traitor.
A handful of republicans fought the election, including Ludlow and Scot. Both felt themselves to be in jeopardy but risked
a last show of defiance. Ludlow contested the Hinden seat in his native Somerset which he had previously represented, and
noted that he was now a bogey man. Local Cavaliers ‘had printed the names of the late king’s judges, of which number I had
the honour to be one’ and they issued warnings to the electors that they ‘should certainly be
destroyed by the king if they elected me’. Nevertheless he won a clear majority over a royalist, Sir Thomas Thynne. It was
a Pyrrhic victory. Thynne later had some of Ludlow’s votes declared invalid and was awarded the seat.
Scot’s old seat was in Buckinghamshire, where his opponent was a royalist baronet. According to Henning’s
History of the House of Commons
, ‘No efforts were lacking to ensure his [Scot’s] defeat including the production of an alleged bastard during the election
campaign.’ Nevertheless, Scot tied in votes with his monarchist opponent. After the election, however, the House, now with
a royalist majority, ruled that his votes were invalid and ordered the local mayor into custody for a false return.
17
Increasingly, Ludlow felt personally threatened:
I continued my course of passing sometimes through Westminster Hall that they might see that I had not withdrawn upon any
design yet not so frequently or publicly as formerly, lodging sometimes at one friend’s house, sometimes at another. And when
I lodged at my own home I took special care that the outer gates should be kept closed and that he who attended at them should
not permit any to enter of whom he had the least suspicion before he had first given me notice that if I saw cause I might
withdraw myself which by reason of back doors I had opportunity to do.
18
On the evening of 11 April at about eight o’clock, John Lambert, his hands bound with cloth, slid down a rope that was tied
to his window and escaped from the Tower of London. Six men were waiting by the wall. They hustled him on to a barge that
vanished into the night. He wasn’t missed till morning, because a maid put on his nightcap, lay in his curtained bed and managed
a convincing ‘Good night’ when the warder came to lock up. It was said that the rope he used was of silk woven by a lady.
Lambert was not seen for some days, finally surfacing in
Warwickshire. The auspices must have seemed propitious with reports suggesting that soldiers were flocking to him. ‘The defection
appeared general,’ wrote François Guizot, ‘an attempt was made, for the purpose of securing the soldiers, to oblige them to
sign the address from their officers; but they deserted in crowds: the army of London alone remained entire.’
19
Monck sent Richard Ingoldsby in pursuit of Lambert. One of a small band of Cromwellian turncoats who had switched allegiance
after Richard Cromwell’s fall, Ingoldsby was now a king’s man, falling over himself to disavow his past. He was particularly
anxious to impress because he was also a regicide.
The Lord General does not appear to have been especially confident. After Ingoldsby’s force had departed, he summoned Charles’s
envoy Sir John Grenville and told him, ‘If Ingoldsby is beaten, and the army revolts to Lambert, I shall declare for the king,
publish my commission, and raise all the royalists to arms in England, Scotland, and Ireland: be in readiness to receive orders.’
He then wrote also to thank the king, and to engage himself formally in his service.
20
Lambert’s men were scouring England for support. A major sent to find Edmund Ludlow discovered him in a safe house in Somerset,
where he had gone to ground on hearing news of Lambert’s escape. The major seems to have given a breathlessly upbeat description
of troops flocking to join Lambert in the Midlands: already he had a thousand horse, and the greater part of the army was
going to come over to him. After imparting this information to Ludlow, the major explained that they looked to him to raise
the west and had arranged a rendezvous in Oxfordshire. Ludlow duly dispatched messengers to trusted commanding officers in
Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, asking them to be ready to march. But he held back from a public declaration till Lambert’s
prospects were clearer. Distrust for Lambert was widespread and Ludlow shared it. He had risked his life opposing the proposal
to give the throne to Oliver Cromwell and was one of those who feared that Lambert had similar Cromwellian ambitions. Before
joining him he wanted to know what Lambert’s
agenda was. The major answered ‘that it was not now a time to declare what we would be for, but what we would be against,
which was that torrent of tyranny and popery that was ready to break in upon us’. Ludlow replied that ‘the best way to prevent
those mischiefs, would be to agree upon something that might be contrary to them’. Ludlow was still waiting for a reply a
week later when Ingoldsby caught up with Lambert near Daventry.
21
