The British Civil Wars

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A history of the civil wars that wracked the United Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1632 until 1660. It is a tale of extraordinary political and social ferment that saw brutal internecine conflict, revolutionary turmoil and the abolition of the monarchy itself. It resulted in a constitutional settlement that remains broadly in place to the current day.

My sources include Civil War by Trevor Royle; the Revolutions podcast by Michael Duncan; the Kings and Generals video playlist on the civil war, and Wikipedia.

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Whitehall, 30th January 1649 - the Execution of Charles I by Ernest Crofts (1880s)

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The Glorious Revolution 1688-89: ‘[government] according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same.’

Parliament’s Own Restoration

William of Orange Landing in England by Jan Wyck (seventeenth century). Source: World History Encyclopaedia

DESPITE THE apparent comprehensive nature of the Restoration, which not only reintroduced the trio of sources of power and authority in England - Monarch, House of Lords and the Anglican Church, all of which the Commonwealth had abolished - together with the restoration of confiscated Royalist land, Charles II’s settlement did not last thirty years. The trigger for a further Parliamentary rebellion against the King may been James II’s determination to introduce toleration for Roman Catholics and bring Catholics into public life for the first time since the reign of Mary I, but the actual cause for James’ eventual overthrow, was the deep suspicion the King engendered in his subjects, both rich and poor, as to the nature of the Royal rule he wished to undertake. Parliament and the public were, by 1660, done with the republican experiment, its constitutional cul-de-sacs and the constant threat of renewed civil war. In exchange for stability and peace, the former Roundheads were willing to bequeath Charles almost all that his father had thrown away, including even Royal absolutism. However, implicit in this Royalist victory, was an understanding that the King would, voluntarily, rule with Parliament; would protect the Protestant religion, and would not pursue wholesale vengeance on those who had fought for the Parliamentary cause. Charles understood this unwritten compact and so, in the main, he ruled cautiously, generously and collectively with Parliament. Only regicides, extreme republicans, Levellers and Roman Catholics were excluded from the King’s settlement. Charles may have had the right to rule as an absolute monarch, but he had the sense never to attempt to do so. His brother, however, had neither the temperament, the patience nor the intelligence to navigate these post-Civil War waters, and these failings eventually led him to lose his throne.

James, a Roman Catholic, who had already survived a Whig attempt to exclude him from the succession (the so-called “Exclusion Crisis”) on the grounds of his faith, was resolved to end both the persecution of Catholics and their prevention from entering public life. He was determined, if necessary, to use the power of the restored Crown to its limit in order to achieve this. Whereas all social classes in the United Kingdoms retained a deep and abiding antipathy to Papism, this hostility to Rome was felt most strongly amongst the gentry - the former mainstay of the Parliamentary cause and the dominant class in the House of Commons. James was determined to legislate for Catholic toleration and for the repeal of the Tests Acts, the laws passed by the Cavalier Parliament that required public office holders to be loyal to the Church of England and which therefore denied access to influential posts in the administration of the country to Catholics and Nonconformists. This determination set the King on a collision course with Parliament.

James had already had a warning as to public uneasiness about his direction of travel. Just four months into his reign, in July 1685, he had been faced by a rebellion led by his nephew the dashing Duke of Monmouth, which sought to overthrow James and replace him with the reliably Protestant duke. Parliament supported the King throughout this crisis and the rebellion was eventually crushed by the Royal Army at the Battle of Sedgemoor, with Monmouth executed soon after. The following brutal judicial vengeance exacted by James in the south west, where the rebellion originated, shocked many hitherto loyalists, who felt James’ behaviour broke significantly with the style of rule of his brother, reintroducing civil war and revenge into England. After Monmouth’s Rebellion, a more sensible monarch may have moderated his stance on religion, but James was not that man.

Just four months after the defeat and execution of Monmouth, James, frustrated by Parliament’s failure to agree his pro-Catholic legislative programme, suspended the House of Commons and sought to rule through Royal decree. From November 1685 James ruled alone, simultaneously breaking his brother’s implicit agreement to govern in partnership with Parliament and invoking bad memories of over forty years before of the Personal Rule of Charles I. The issue at stake - that of maintaining the Protestant ascendancy - was significant enough an issue for most MPs, but there was genuine fear that James was intent on recreating the political conditions that had led directly to the wars between Parliament and the King, from which the Kingdoms had only recently recovered.

The resultant dissatisfaction with James’ rule was compounded by the birth of his son, James Francis Edward, in 1687, and the clear intention of James and Queen Mary to raise James Francis Edward as a Catholic. This provoked major Whig concern that a Catholic monarchy would be re- introduced to the realm, possibly followed by an attempt to bring England and Scotland back to Catholicism and absolutism. To the Parliamentary opposition, the stakes now seemed to be far higher than whether Catholics could hold political postings or join the army - the very future of the Protestant religion and Restoration constitutionality now seemed to be under threat. In reality, James is unlikely to have seriously contemplated reintroducing Catholicism as the state’s official religion, but his single-mindedness and high-handedness gave worried observers enough cause to fear the worst.

Whig attention therefore turned to James’ Protestant daughter, Mary, married to William Prince of Orange, Stadholder, or ruler, of the United Provinces of Holland. The Whig MP and Navy Treasurer, Lord Edward Russell headed a group of Parliamentary dissidents that contacted William to see if he would be willing to support a deposition of James in favour of Mary. The Whigs suggested feelings in England were running so high a Protestant republican revolution could result, thus excluding Mary permanently from the succession. William’s motivation in becoming involved in this plot was always somewhat ambiguous. His initial interest was piqued entirely by concern for the United Provinces and its on-going war with France. The wealth of England and Scotland he would be able to access if he became King could prove decisive in his unequal struggle with the French. His interest in being a Protestant champion was at this stage, decidedly secondary.

James began to sense danger. He issued a writ for general elections and a new Parliament to convene in 1688. Any Parliamentary relief that the King may have seen the error of his ways, did not last. James then ordered a Declaration of Indulgence to be read out in every Anglican Church to announce the ecclesiastical tolerance of Catholics. The Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops were charged with sedition and imprisoned in the Tower when they refused to carry out this command. They were later acquitted by the courts, but public outrage at the sequence of events was high and the whole crisis was hugely damaging to James, who was forced to drop the Declaration.

Ironically, this very crisis, prompted serious interest on William’s part in Russell’s approach. As James wrestled with his own Parliament and Church in his vain attempt to secure Roman Catholic toleration, William was worried the Stuart King may turn to Catholic France for support, and bring England’s military and naval strength to bear on Holland once more, in a renewal of the recent Anglo-Dutch naval conflicts. William therefore began to make contact with the Whig opposition. Ultimately Henry Sydney, Earl of Romney and another prominent Whig MP, authored an Invitation to William, along with six other signatories, to the prince, to assume the English throne on behalf of his wife. The signatures of Thomas Osborne, 1st Earl of Danby, and Henry Compton, Bishop of London, were crucial to securing the deal with William: both were known to be Tories, and thus reassured the Stadtholder that if he accepted the Invitation, he would not simply be heading up a factional rebellion against an anointed King.

William decided to invade in September 1688, assured there would be minimal English resistance. The royal navy was indeeed outmatched by the Dutch and the 34,000 strong Royal Army was in a poor state of training , equipment and morale. The rank-and-file soldiers were also in the main very pro-Protestant and had no wish to die defending what they saw as a new Royalist Catholic order, introduced by James.

William was careful to claim his invasion was to restore Parliamentary rule and to defend the Anglican Protestant religion. 200 Dutch ships and 40,000 men landed at Torbay in November 1688, while the English navy was trapped in Dartford by the weather. Too late, James tried to negotiate with Parliament and the bishops but they insisted on an end to toleration, the disinheritance of Charles Francis Edward, an end to absolutism and the elevation of Parliament to sovereign executive power legitimised by fixed regular elections. James could not agree to this and the negotiations collapsed. Apart from a minor engagement at Wincanton near Reading on 20th November, the Royal Army offered little opposition to the invasion and large numbers of officers defected to William. James was initially captured attempting to flee, but ultimately was permitted to leave for exile in France in December 1688.

William was offered the throne jointly with Mary in February 1689 and his new monarchy was underwritten by a formal Bill of Rights the following December. The Bill of Rights was not a declaration of citizens’ rights, and nor was it a constitution, but it was no less revolutionary for that, because it achieved what the original Parliamentary opposition to Charles I had called for in the late 1630s and early 1640s: a constitutional monarchy. The Whigs, effectively the heirs to John Pym and his allies, finally achieved legislative Parliamentary supremacy in what was in effect a contract between monarch and Commons. However, the Tories also won significant concessions: the Anglican settlement was preserved, along with inviolability of private property. Nonetheless, the effective transfer of sovereignty from monarch to Parliament was stark. The Bill of Rights stated firmly that elections would be free and regular; that Parliamentary debate should be free and all legislation would be passed by the Commons, with the monarch having no formal role. There would be no peacetime standing army and levies would be called by Parliament, not the King; rule by Royal decree was effectively banned. All this was achieved with virtually no bloodshed in England. The Restoration settlement was over and the Commons had unequivocally triumphed.

The British civil wars were not quite finished. James made an attempt to regain his throne militarily with French help, through Ireland, where his Catholicism and adherence to toleration assured loyalty, but he was heavily defeated by William at the Battle of the Boyne on 1st July 1690. His hopes were finally crushed when his Jacobite/French army was decisively defeated at Aughrim a year later in July 1691. He left the United Kingdoms for France forever the following October. Despite mid-eighteenth century Jacobite rebellions in his son and grandson’s name, the Stuart cause and its association with absolutism and personal rule, was over.

The events of 1688-90 became celebrated, particularly and unsurprisingly by Whig history as the “Glorious Revolution”. A moment, much remarked upon as empires in Europe bloodily rose and fell over the following centuries, as examples of British exceptionalism, in which major political change was achieved almost peacefully under a new, symbolic, monarchical system. However the power structures of England remained unchanged. Inherited wealth and land continued to disproportionately influence who could enter the ruling class; suffrage remained restricted, only becoming universal a century ago. England’s great republican experiment became viewed as no more than an anomaly, a self-serving fraud perpetrated on the British peoples by an ambitious and seditious military, headed by would-be dictators. Scotland recovered its independence under Charles II, but less than twenty years after the Glorious Revolution, a bankrupt Scottish mercantile class walked their country into an unequal union with England against which Scotland has chafed ever since. Ireland was forced to endure two centuries of impoverishment, sectarianism and the dispossession of its native peoples by a settler class of English and Scottish Protestants, until the last of the many Irish rebellions was successful in the early twentieth century.

English radicalism did return in the eighteenth century, and the Whigs did eventually evolve into a Liberal Party that challenged the Tory landed interests, with varying success, even as democracy spread its reach. Although that radicalism in time found an expression of sorts in the British Labour Party, it bore little relation to that of John Lilburne and the Levellers; the sincere republicanism of John Lambert and Arthur Heselrige is now a cranky obsession of irreconcilable leftists, who barely take it seriously themselves. Meanwhile the modern left and right argue endlessly over who has the greater claim on that ambiguous conservative radical, Oliver Cromwell. For good or ill, Great Britain still effectively lives under the settlement of 1689, itself only possible due the extraordinary civil conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s. Many of the constitutional contradictions and social injustices that drove the Parliamentarians, the millennial sects and the New Model Army to their revolutions remain in place to this day. Perhaps they always will.

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The Restoration: ‘As to things of State - the King settled and loved of all’

The Compromise Settlement of Charles II

King Charles II by John Michael Wright. Source: Wikipedia

FOR MANY former supporters of the Parliamentary cause, the Restoration must have been hard to take. For all the warm words of the Declaration of Breda, it must have felt to those that had followed John Pym, Arthur Heselrige, Oliver Cromwell and John Lambert, and especially the comrades of John Lilburne, that their own world had been turned upside down. For the Restoration, in so many ways, was precisely that. Not only was Charles II settled on his throne which in truth, by 1660, all but the most ardent republicans believed was the only way out of the constitutional impasse the Commonwealth had found itself in, but the House of Lords was re-established; the Church of England, including a hierarchy of bishops was reintroduced; the New Model Army was abolished and even the Divine Right of Kings was reinstated. It must have seemed to the advocates of the Good Old Cause that all those years of tumult, death and revolution were for naught: the Monarchy and all its works was back with a vengeance.

And of course, there was indeed vengeance. As described last time, the regicides that were still alive were pursued mercilessly by the new government, even the dead not being safe from the King’s wrath. In addition, the so-called “Cavalier Parliament” consisting of triumphal Royalist MPs, presided in many respects over a victor’s peace. The disestablishment of the New Model Army was, after the executions of the regicides, the most visible sign of a restored monarchy. The Army had been the instrument of Charles I’s defeat and the constant protector of the Commonwealth, and it had also been a major political player that forcibly dissolved Parliament after Parliament. To see this formidable military force that had destroyed the Royalist armies, crushed the Scots and ended the Irish Rebellion, simply disappear was no clearer sign that not only was the Parliamentary cause dead, but that the gravest threat to the Stuart regime was also no more - and without a shot being fired. The successor regiments that later became the Coldstream Guards and the Royal Horse Guards, comprised the core of a 7,000 man militia, loyal solely to the monarch - a situation that Charles I had long craved. These regiments would become the basis of the standing British Army, whose oath of loyalty remains to the monarch - an echo of the settlement of England’s civil wars.

Charles’ religious settlement was, on the face of it, a restoration of the Anglican Church in its prewar form. Episcopalianism was back, including in Scotland, supported by a new Book of Common Prayer. Bishops were also readmitted to a restored House of Lords, where they sit still. Despite Charles’ Breda promises of religious toleration, the Solemn League and Covenant was repealed, and the cause which had spurred the Scots into rebellion and war against the King’s government in the late 1630s was effectively suppressed. Although Charles himself was personally quite tolerant of different religious persuasions, including notoriously, Roman Catholicism, his Parliament was not. The confident Cavaliers remembered how hard the Presbyterians had tried to enforce their version of Protestantism on the three kingdoms; how the rule of the Major-Generals had tried to squeeze all joy out of Christian worship and, recalled with horror, the republicanism and threat to land ownership that millennial sects, sheltering within the ranks of the Levellers, had tried to introduce. A number of anti- Puritan bills were passed, most notably the Corporation Act of 1661 (which excluded non-Anglicans from public office) and the Five Mile Act of 1665 (which banned non-Anglican ministers from their former livings). These Acts effectively excluded Presbyterians and other low church groups from participating in the new political or religious establishment. This led ultimately to these disenfranchised faithful into forming their own churches. They called themselves Nonconformists and Dissenters, eventually formalising themselves into the various strands of Methodism. Within these churches the spirit of anti-Royalist and Anglican sentiment remained, leading ultimately to eighteenth century radicalism and part of the impulse that fuelled the desire for independence within Britain’s American colonies.

Scotland was freed of military occupation and its Parliament restored, but government garrison troops remained and Scotland never recovered the independent swagger it had enjoyed earlier in the century when it was able to interfere in the affairs of England and influence the outcomes of the civil wars with easy confidence. With its government impoverished and subservient, its independent military strength non-existent, its religion subordinated and the fault line between Highland and Lowland populations exacerbated by the civil wars, Scotland was a shadow of its prewar self. The days of routine Scottish invasions of England were over forever. In less than fifty years, Scotland’s mercantile class, faced with bankruptcy following catastrophic economic decisions and ill-advised colonial adventures, would petition the English Parliament and Crown for an Act of Union, granted in 1707, which would make the United Kingdom a political, as well as a monarchical, reality.

In Ireland, Charles’ government was focused on ensuring rebellion did not recur and made great efforts to rehabilitate, and reconcile with, the landowning Old English aristocracy and breaking its religious solidarity with the Old Irish rural workers and peasants that had driven so much of the rebellion’s early success. Charles’ own pro-Catholic sympathies helped this process, but he also did little to restrain Scottish Protestant settlement in the north and west, thus sowing the seeds of a sectarian conflict that would get ever more vicious over the next three hundred years.

But the Restoration was not absolute and Charles did not intend it to be, whatever the attitudes of the Cavalier Parliament. Charles had not spent half his life prior to his return on the run in order to simply repeat the mistakes of his father. Although not the constitutional monarch envisaged by George Monck, Charles nonetheless attempted to rule in partnership with Parliament. For Charles, his Divine Right to rule was a device to secure his legitimacy, not a principle by which a king should govern. There were several political factors that caused Charles to eventually dissolve the Cavalier Parliament in 1679, but new elections were held immediately. Unlike his father, Charles was never tempted by Personal Rule and was rarely in dispute with his Parliaments, unlike his predecessor governments. Parliamentary rule was solidified under Charles’ settlement in a way unimaginable in the years leading up to the civil wars.

Similarly, for all the anti-Puritanism of his regime, there was no systematic persecution of dissenters and no legal requirement for his subjects to adopt the new Prayer Book or the Anglican Communion. In Ireland, the ferocious oppression of Catholics and Irish self-determination was still in the future, and that would be driven principally by Protestant settlers, exacerbated significantly by the renewal of civil conflict in Ireland in the late 1680s. Charles was a cautious and astute man. His love affair with particularly, the English, population, had significantly dissipated by the end of his reign, but all his subjects, whatever their views of his government, were grateful to him for ensuring peace was maintained and that the conflicts that had led the inhabitants of the British Isles to fight and kill each other for years, were not reignited.

The immediate view of history, that lasted well into the nineteenth century, was that the British civil wars and the republican experiment were anomalies, best forgotten. The skill of the Stuart and Hanoverian regimes in suggesting the civil wars were no more than a family quarrel, quickly forgiven and forgotten, is the reason why there is no direct link between the proto-socialism of the Putney Debates and the the later Radicalism of the eighteenth century. Issues such as land reform and universal suffrage were effectively barred from public debate for 150 years.

Charles’ later reign did contain conflict and there was even a Radical attempt to kidnap the King at one point, but the most dangerous issue was that of the succession. A new political Parliamentary party, with a sneaking admiration for the Good Old Cause, called the Whigs, was formed determined to prevent the accession of Charles’ brother the openly Roman Catholic James, to the throne given the absence of a legitimate heir to Charles. A staunchly Royalist group which became known as the Tories formed to oppose the Whigs and support the Stuart succession. Thus the contours of future Parliamentary debate and factionalism began to take shape.

In February 1685, Charles died. There was, in the event, no challenge initially to James ascending the throne as King James II. However, the new monarch resembled his father in a haughty attitude and political ineptitude. The conflicts that drove civil wars would be reprised and, once again, absolute monarchy would be the loser.

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The Return of the King: ‘And all the world in a merry mood because of the King’s coming.’

Charles Restored to his Throne

Source: The BBC

SO CLOSE to being able to resume his throne, Charles II displayed a subtlety and flexibility that had always eluded his father, in order to achieve his ultimate goal. In consultation with Monck, the exiled King and his courtiers, principally Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, drew up the Declaration of Breda, a conciliatory document, issued on 4th April 1660, representing Charles’ commitments to the English people, recognising the altered political reality of his soon to be reclaimed Kingdom. The Declaration promised an amnesty for all who had fought against the Stuarts, with the exception of those who had signed Charles I’s death warrant (the so-called “regicides”) and high-ranking republicans. The sale of Royalist estates would remain in situ; the Army’s pay arrears would be made good, and religious toleration extended to all but Roman Catholics. Crucially, regular Parliaments were promised, along with Parliamentary control of the Army. It was a masterful document, designed to placate majority moderate Parliamentary opinion, and by implication, promising no return to Royal absolutism. In this context, Parliamentary elections were held and resulted in a Parliament absolutely committed to the restoration of the King and the terms of the Declaration of Breda. This Parliament, officially called the “Convention Parliament”, given the absence of a constitution to sanction it, unsurprisingly became popularly known as the “Cavalier Parliament”. It did not take long for the new Parliament to take on the appearance of a government of the victors, for all Charles’ bridge-building.

There was one last attempt to resuscitate the Good Old Cause. John Lambert escaped from the Tower and sought to raise a republican army to oppose the Restoration, choosing his rallying spot, perhaps symbolically, as Edgehill, the site of the first battle of England’s civil wars. Some four troops of cavalry joined Lambert, but the Army, firmly under Monck’s control and seduced by Charles’ promises of pensions and back pay, at last turned its back on its former commander. Lambert’s force was soon outnumbered and overpowered by a New Model detachment under the command of one of the regicides, Colonel Ingoldsby, who took his former colleague into custody. Ingoldsby would go on to become a significant figure at Charles’ court, unlike Lambert, for whom a lifetime of imprisonment awaited. On 1st May 1660, the Declaration of Breda was read to both Houses with the understanding that it would form the basis of the restoration of the English monarchy.

The way was prepared. Nothing now stood in the path of Charles’ triumphal return to England. Following a formal and personal invitation to return home by Monck and Sir Thomas Fairfax, Charles set sail from The Hague and landed at Dover on 25th May and from there processed through Kent to the capital, greeted all along his route by cheering and ecstatic crowds. His reception in London, once the centre of Parliamentary revolt against his father, was little short of delirious, characterised by bonfires, tolling bells, tapestries hung from windows and fountains allegedly running with wine. He was escorted by 20,000 soldiers, most derived from New Model regiments - perhaps the greatest irony of what became known as “The Restoration”. On 29th May, Charles received loyal addresses from the Speaker of the House of Commons and the former Parliamentary commander, the Earl of Manchester, representing the Other House. Charles was then proclaimed King.

Although the Restoration is generally viewed as being bloodless and a typically English counter-revolution, there was in fact a considerable amount of reckoning. Despite the narrative being set that the Parliamentarians won the civil wars and that the restored monarchy was a shadow of Charles I’s Personal Rule, this is only partially true. Charles II did ensure Parliament passed an Act of Oblivion and Indemnity, which pardoned all who had fought with the Commonwealth’s armed forces, but many of the stalwarts of the Commonwealth were exempted from the Act. In addition to John Lambert’s life imprisonment, several army officers were executed, the most notable being the New Model general and Fifth Monarchist, Thomas Harrison, who was hung, drawn and quartered, meeting his grisly fate with the cheery confidence of someone who knew he would return at God’s right hand to wreak vengeance on his oppressors. Most of the regicides that the new regime could get its hands on were executed, but some survived or were rehabilitated by the new government. General Charles Fleetwood, head of the Army under the post-Cromwell Protectorate, for instance, despite being sentenced to death, managed to successfully claim he had been coerced into signing Charles I’s death warrant, although the fact Monck vouched for him was probably significant. Most of the Major-Generals managed to escape abroad, usually to Europe, while Edward Whalley fled to North America, where he sought refuge amongst the Puritan communities there. John Desborough actually plotted republican revolt from Europe. Extradited, he managed to avoid trial and ultimately retired to Hackney.

Thomas Fairfax, a known opponent to the trial of Charles I and a crucial figure in securing the success of Monck’s overthrow of the Commonwealth, received a royal pardon, and resumed his peaceful retirement, living until 1679, his reputation intact. Arthur Heselrige, fierce republican but scourge of the Protectorate, was perhaps an ambiguous figure to the Royalist regime. He was not arraigned for treason, but he was imprisoned in the Tower. Any ongoing debate as to what to do with the veteran Parliamentarian was resolved by his death within the year. Richard Cromwell, continued his somewhat charmed existence. After his deposition by the Army, Richard lived in exile in France, and was eventually permitted to return to England, dying in 1680. Richard’s brother Henry, often viewed as potentially a more effective successor to their father as Lord Protector, was left unmolested, and became part of the Anglo-Irish landowning class until his death in 1674. In acts of performative “justice”, the deceased regicides, Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Thomas Pride and John Bradshaw, had their corpses exhumed, were posthumously beheaded, and their bodies publicly displayed as traitors.

The matter of retribution and punishment settled, Charles was now faced with ruling a much-changed English Kingdom and with reaching an equitable settlement with both Scotland and Ireland. Charles handled the post-civil war realms with dexterity and thoughtfulness, but his reign, although undeniably successful given the difficulties of his inheritance, did not do enough to fully resolve the issues of governance and sovereignty that had led to the destruction of his father, and he could not, ultimately, do enough to save the House of Stuart.

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The End of the Commonwealth 1659-60: ‘according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the Government is, and ought to be, by Kings, Lords and Commons’

George Monck Makes His Move

General George Monck Entering London with His Troops. Source: Mary Evans Picture Library website

THE FINAL days of the Commonwealth were filled with the very unresolved issues that had dogged the English republican experiment from its start - the question of legitimacy, the unsettled balance of power between the various postwar factions and the yearning of the populace for stable government. However, England’s civil wars had one last drama to play out before the Commonwealth’s denouement.

The Royalist plotters of the Sealed Knot, observing the crisis of the post-Protectorate regime, thought their time had come at last to seize the initiative by force. In July 1659, a series of uprisings across northern England was planned to overthrow the Rump and invite Charles II to assume the throne. As with other of the Sealed Knot’s schemes, this plot was also uncovered and then called off by its instigators, but not before Sir Thomas Myddleton had declared for the King in Wrexham and the Earl of Derby had entered England from the Isle of Man to try to incite Lancashire to rise. Neither succeeded in attracting much support, but Sir George Booth, a local landowner, mayor of Chester, and, significantly a former Parliamentarian, raised an army of 4,000 and proclaimed his support, less for a restored monarchy and more for a fresh Parliament, legitimised by new elections. This call for full Parliamentary representation became the increasing slogan of the growing opposition to the Army and England’s republic. Booth may have anticipated a coming public mood, but that mood was not universal yet. With no other anti-Rump force in the field, Booth headed to Manchester, pursued by a small Parliamentary force under the command of John Lambert. On 18th August the two armies clashed at Hartford Beech in Cheshire. The experienced Parliamentary force soon had the better of what turned out to be a set of running skirmishes until the Royalists finally routed as they attempted to cross Winnington Bridge. Both Myddleton and, eventually, Booth, were captured and the defeated Royalist soldiery were allowed to return to their homes. So ended the last set piece battle of the English civil wars.

Any Parliamentary solidarity that may have been engendered by this brief renewal of fighting in England, did not last long. Lambert, newly emboldened, was determined this time to secure the supreme leadership role he had denied himself after Cromwell’s death out of loyalty to his former commander. His opportunity came when his regiments, based in Derby, issued a proclamation to the Rump, requiring the granting of all the Army’s demands concerning pay, indemnity, religious toleration, the maintenance of republican government and the purging of “delinquent” MPs opposed to the military. Included in the demands was Lambert’s own elevation to second-in-command of the Army under General Charles Fleetwood. Naturally the Rump could not agree to what became termed the “Derby Petition” and retaliated by ordering Fleetwood to arrest Lambert in early October and issued an ordnance overturning all legislation passed during the Protectorate and requiring its validation by the House of Commons. In addition, under the lead of Arthur Heselrige, the Rump passed a further ordnance that reserved all tax-raising powers to the House of Commons and set about establishing a committee to take the control of the Army, ordering the London regiments to rally to defend Parliament. In the event, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the Army that won this stand-off: Fleetwood refused to move against Lambert who called on the same London regiments to muster and protect the Commonwealth. This they did, leading to the dissolution of the Rump Parliament yet again by military coup, and the establishment of a Committee of Safety to run the country by the Army’s Council of Officers.

Fleetwood and Lambert were in charge, but they had no practical plan as to what to do next. Lambert favoured restoration of the Protectorate, with himself as Lord Protector, but there was little appetite for this, even within the Army. The Committee of Safety could keep order, but in the absence of Parliament or constitution, it could neither raise taxes nor legitimise its role. It was a stop-gap, and the supporters of the Parliamentary cause saw no alternative to elections to a new and representative lower House. What was new however, was that in their determination to oppose both military rule and, as they saw it, the barely controlled radicalism on the part of the common soldiers, these former enemies of Charles I began to see the restoration of the monarchy as the only way out of this impasse, much to the surprise and delight of the exiled Stuart Court.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, General George Monck observed events south of the border enigmatically. He possessed the only military force of sufficient size and experience capable of challenging Fleetwood and Lambert, but his intentions were far from clear. Although Monck had sent sympathetic messages to Heselrige, he made no move to support the Rump or prevent its dissolution. Charles’ emissaries had contacted him offering the general vast rewards if he would defect to the Royalist side, but Monck had rebuffed their advances. Equally, he had not declared support for Committee of Safety either. The former Royalist turned Cromwellian loyalist was however about the enter the fray of Commonwealth politics decisively.

On 20th October, Monck declared his hand. He stated that he supported Parliamentary government and demanded the Council of Officers recall Parliament, threatening to bring his army into England in order to enforce this if necessary. Lambert and Fleetwood did not react well to this interference from their brother officer and prepared to resist any such incursion from Scotland. Lambert headed north to Newcastle, to rally the New Model forces there, but found to his consternation that the northern army was filled with dissent, infuriated at lack of pay and promised pensions, and that the soldiers too had joined the calls for new elections. Lambert succeeded in calming some of the agitation and he and Monck faced each other warily across the Scottish border. The issue was forced in November when in the south and in Ireland, the troops rebelled and demanded the recall of Parliament. When the fleet revolted too, threatening to blockade the Thames until the House of Commons sat again, Lambert, with his forces of questionable loyalty, knew his game was up. This was confirmed when the aged Sir Thomas Fairfax emerged from retirement to call for the restoration of Parliamentary rule. The northern armies deserted to the much-loved former commander en masse, leaving Lambert with no army and no options.

In December, military rule effectively fell apart, driven as much by the Council of Officers’ inability to pay the men as by the simultaneous and insistent, calls for the restoration of Parliamentary rule. On 26th December, Fleetwood and Lambert were forced to recall the Rump whose first action was to place the Army under Parliamentary control. Lambert, trapped between Monck’s forces and Fairfax’s new volunteer army of deserters, could not prevent this. On New Year’s Day 1660, Monck’s army crossed the Tweed and proceeded south, meeting no resistance. In fact, the Rump had told Monck that with the collapse of the coup, they no longer needed his presence in London, but the general proceeded to the capital anyway. The restoration of the Rump was only the first step in the ever-mysterious Monck’s probable plan.

As for Lambert, he submitted to the authority of the Rump and was immediately arrested and confined in the Tower of London. He would remain a prisoner for the rest of his days, finally dying, almost certainly suffering from dementia, in 1684. It was a sad end to one of the Commonwealth’s most capable politicians and soldiers. If, as he had wished, and others had urged, Cromwell had nominated Lambert as his successor and not his ineffective son, Lambert may have made a success both of the Protectorate and the English republic. Lambert in power would certainly have introduced a written constitution to England, with the formal checks and balances the British system of government lacks to this day. With Lambert leading the country in the late 1650s, the path to the Stuart restoration may have been blocked forever.

Once he reached London, Monck’s alliance of convenience with the Rump swiftly came to an end. It became clear that Heselrige and his allies were intent on calling highly restrictive elections that would ensure that only MPs who supported the Rump’s quasi-republican agenda would be able to serve. When in February, the Rump fell into dispute with the City of London council over proposed tax increases, and ordered Monck to suppress the Council, the general refused. Instead he gave the Rump seven days to dissolve itself and arrange full, unrestricted national elections. Given the impossibility of this deadline, a compromise was reached through an agreement to the restitution of the previous Parliament - the so-called Long Parliament - originally summoned by Charles I in November 1640, and forcibly dissolved in Pride’s Purge. The purged MPs returned to Westminster in triumph, escorted by Monck’s soldiers. The Long Parliament’s sole items of business were to confirm Monck as commander-in-chief of the Army, and to agree a date for its own dissolution and the calling of new elections. This it did on 16th March 1660.

Monck’s ultimate desire to see Charles II restored to his throne slowly became plain. As arrangements for elections were put into place, the general at last openly communicated with the Stuart court, which had transferred its location to Breda in Holland. But the enigma of Monck persisted: he was no political Royalist. He informed Charles’ emissaries that the King’s return to England would not be without conditions. There would be an amnesty for all who fought against the Crown in the civil wars; all sales of Royalist lands would remain in place; a degree of religious tolerance would be afforded, and the King would rule jointly with his Parliament. As the path for the unlikely restoration of a somewhat altered monarchy was cleared, John Pym would probably have approved.

[cromwellrex2]

Tumbledown Dick: ‘We shudder when we think of the account which we must one day give if we suffer the blood-bought liberties of the people to again be destroyed.’

The Fall of the Protectorate and the Good Old Cause’s Last Hurrah

Richard Cromwell by Gerard Soest. Source: Wikipedia

THERE WAS nothing inevitable about the fall of the English Protectorate when Richard Cromwell succeeded his father (as permitted under the Humble Petition and Advice) as Lord Protector in September 1658. With the support of the Army, as represented by his brother-in-law, General Charles Fleetwood, the intelligence service under John Thurloe and the councillors and Grandees of the Council of State, the succession was peaceful and Richard’s rule initially uncontested. However, beneath the seemingly placid surface, fundamental issues as to the nature of England’s religious settlement, the balance of constitutional power and where sovereignty resided, remained matters of intense debate and strong opinions, even without the opposition of recidivist Royalists. Richard Cromwell was not the man to contend successfully with the forces about to be unleashed. Affable, generally well-liked and without strong beliefs, Richard was ill-equipped to lead the still-fragile Proctectorate, and his unsuitability to the task bequeathed to him by his father would become more and more apparent as 1659 progressed.

The first challenge for Richard to deal with came from the New Model Army itself. The Army’s grievances were not new: they concerned pay arrears and formal legal indemnities against the actions of soldiers across what were now three civil wars. Oliver Cromwell and his lieutenants had dealt with these problems through a combination of concession and appeal to loyalty and patience. The latter approach had worked well - soldiers respected Cromwell, Fairfax and Lambert who had shared their travails over numerous battlefields and fundamentally trusted their wartime commanders. Richard Cromwell had no such well of support - he had only held one short military commission in 1647, and was felt by the men to be effete and uninterested in military affairs. Furthermore, the latent radicalism of the Army resurfaced, and many former Levellers in its ranks saw the opportunity to challenge the institution of the Protecorate about which they had doubts, and led by a Protector they felt was unworthy.

Richard’s problem was the state of the Treasury: the country’s debt was over £2m and military arrears at least £900,000. This meant that the Army, even under Fleetwood, whom Richard had made commander-in-chief, became an increasing critic of his rule. The fact that Richard, unlike his father, was not supreme military commander, made his position more precarious. The situation led, inevitably, to the recall of Parliament with the express intention, as usual, of granting the government more revenue. This took place on 27th January 1659, but far from helping Richard to resolve his implicit dispute with the Army, the Third Protectorate Parliament only exacerbated matters.

The Parliament was elected from the same constituencies as the previous Protectorate Parliaments, but this time without the interference of the Major Generals, or Oliver’s stern refusal to put up with rebellious behaviour. The result was that Arthur Hesilrige and his group of sovereign Parliamenarians were back on centre stage, this time with little or no restraint. Within months it soon became clear that Hesilrige and his followers were intent on dispensing with the Humble Petition, abolishing the Other House, banishing Scottish and Irish MPs and seeking to challenge, on behalf of the Commons, the Lord Protector and Council of State for the position of supreme executive authority. This faction also wished to contain both the size and the independence of the Army, so often the tool of premature Parliamentary dissolutions. This resulted in even more discontent within the military, particularly amongst the rank and file who feared Parliament was set not only on ending religious Toleration, but potentially disestablishing the Army itself. In such an environment, Radical agitation grew, and calls for the abolition of tithes and the introduction of land reform once again were heard.

Richard’s allies attempted to head off Parliamentary opposition by submitting bills to confirm both Richard’s position as Lord Protector, the constitutional position of the Other House and the legitimacy of the Humble Petition as England’s constitution. This move gave Hesilrige the opportunity to question the status of all three in the subsequent debate. Although ultimately the Commons accepted the bill, the Parliamentarians insisted on qualifications to the role of Lord Protector, which were not articulated, putting Richard into a position of intolerable semi-legitimacy. Hesilrige then hit on a brilliant piece of propaganda that managed to unite Parliamentarians, Army Radicals and religious sectarian groups alike: the slogan adopted by all who wished to oppose the Protectorate and the Humble Petition was that of the “Good Old Cause”.

Like many such slogans, the phrase meant everything and nothing. Its intention was to look back to a golden era when the Parliamentary cause was united against royal tyranny, a cause bonded in blood that sought to end monarchical absolutism in favour of Parliamentary sovereignty. Despite the fact there was virtually no period in the 1630s and early 1640s when the anti-Royalist cause was truly united, the nostalgia of the Good Old Cause was infectious and open to many interpretations. Given the ongoing contested nature of the Protectorate, the slogan’s power was almost fatal to Richard’s position.

On 2nd April 1659, General Fleetwood called an assembly of Radical officers and men to hear their political grievances. Unlike Cromwell at previous such assemblies, Fleetwood was unable to control the debate and junior officers, filled with the fervour of their interpretation of the Good Old Cause, drew up a petition threatening to remove counsellors whom they believed were betraying the cause. Parliament, realising this definition could include anti-Army MPs, declined to accept the petition. In fact, at the very moment that Richard was trying to reassert control over the Army by ordering them back to their garrisons, Parliament, in closed session, passed bills that effectively would have placed the Army under Parliamentary control and forbid its involvement in civil politics. This was unacceptable to Fleetwood who immediately ordered a general muster of the Army at St James’ Park on 21st April. Richard attempted to retaliate by ordering a counter muster at Whitehall, but the vast majority of officers and men followed their commander and turned out at St James’ Park. Richard’s authority was terminally compromised. The following day Fleetwood demanded that Parliament be dissolved.

Richard had no option but to go along with what amounted to yet another military coup. The Third Protectorate Parliament was forcibly dissolved with soldiers preventing the entry of any MPs brave enough to try their luck. Richard found his Council of State suddenly packed with New Model officers, including John Lambert, who emerged from retirement, delighted at the collapse of the Humble Petition and Advice. Fleetwood attempted to exercise control through the military Council of Officers, but the mood of the Council was insurrectionary and republican: it wanted an end to the Protectorate. In the meantime Hesilrige, exiled from power, argued that the body that had been most true to the Good Old Cause was the old Rump Parliament, constituted to sanction the execution of the King and the establishment of the Commonwealth. Both Fleetwood and Lambert were attracted to this option as a means of restoring constitutionality and calming the Radical elements of the Army. In early May, Fleetwood met Heselrige and agreed a deal that would see the restoration of the Rump, the abolition of the Protectorate along with an award of a pension to Richard Cromwell who would abdicate, and the restored Rump would focus on the religious and tithe reforms previous Parliaments had never concluded.

The Rump Parliament, consisting of just 40 MPs, was reconvened. Richard, now truly the “Tumbledown Dick” of historical calumny, retired to his estates with a government pension and the members of the Council loyal to Oliver and Richard Cromwell resigned their posts or headed into voluntary exile. The one exception to this was the Cromwellian general George Monck who swore fealty to the Rump but remained in Scotland, maintaining the harsh military rule that had applied since Dunbar and Worcester, but remaining politically opaque.

But this was no settlement. A resurrected Rump had even less legitimacy than the Protectorate or the Army. Both the new Parliament and the Army believed that they could control the other. The rhetoric of the Good Old Cause, by all sides, had brought England once again, not only to constitutional instability, but to the brink of renewed civil war.

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The Last Days of Oliver Cromwell, 1657-1658: ‘a larger soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was’

The Death of the Protectorate Monarch

Death of Cromwell. Source: Alamy Stock Photos

THERE WAS no immediate crisis as a result of Cromwell’s decision to turn down Parliament’s offer of the Crown. Cromwell continued as Lord Protector; the Council of State continued to meet and even the Second Protectorate Parliament peacefully concluded its term in June 1657, the first Parliament to do so since the reign of James I. In fact Cromwell was so content with the work of the Parliament, he ordered it to reconvene in January 1658. When Parliament did reassemble, it was however a different body to its predecessor. As agreed with Cromwell, it quickly passed all the requirements of the Humble Petition and Advice, with the exception of the restoration of the monarchy. The most significant of these changes was the reintroduction of an Upper House of approximately 70 appointed members, thus recreating all the aspects of the previous Stuart constitution with the exception of a unified Church of England. Crucially however, the new Parliament invited back into the Commons all those MPs who after the elections, had been excluded by the Major-Generals on the grounds of potential hostility to the regime. Adopting the Humble Petition as essentially England’s second written constitution after the Instrument of Government, the “new” Parliament then set about attempting effectively to undermine it to assert the primacy of Parliamentary authority over all others - principally the Upper, or “Other” House, the Council of State and, of course, the New Model Army. The ultimate authority of the monarchical Lord Protector was recognised but the notion of shared power with any other body was anathema to the radical Parliamentarians who, from their perspective, had been fighting for this settlement since the 1630s.

Cromwell could see trouble ahead and, despite his speeches to the Commons calling for political unity and respect for the Humble Petition, MPs simply listened politely before drawing up a further petition that called on the Lord Protector to grant Parliament supremacy in all things including primacy over the Other House and the Army; exclusive authority for tax-raising powers and control over appointments to the English civil service. The petition claimed that only by establishing unambiguous sovereignty within an elected Parliament, could any potential drift to tyranny as in the days of Charles I be prevented, and the prospect of military rule be permanently blocked. For Cromwell, wedded to the concept of shared power and what we would today call “checks and balances”, the petition had about it the smack of the rule of the mob. For the Huntingdon squire and cavalry colonel, this was unacceptable. The petition was due to be presented to him formally by a delegation of MPs on 4th February 1658, so the Lord Protector attended the Commons before that date and informed Parliament its services were at an end. Just over a month after it was reconvened, the Second Protectorate Parliament was dissolved and absolute power resided, yet again, in the hands of Cromwell.

This constitutional crisis, and the events leading up to it, breathed hope into the Royalist Court of the exiled King Charles II, now based in Spain. A number of Parliamentarians were concerned at what they viewed as increasingly arbitrary rule by Cromwell. These included William Waller, the Earl of Manchester and even Sir Thomas Fairfax. All three received overtures from the Stuart court, asking for their support for a Spanish-backed invasion of England, aimed at restoring Charles to the throne. However, these veteran Parliamentary commanders told the Royal envoys they would only support a Stuart restoration on the basis of the settlement Charles I had agreed at Newport with Parliament in the aftermath of the Second Civil War: namely the independence of the Army, the regular calling of Parliament, the introduction of a Presbyterian national church across the three kingdoms and Charles II’s acceptance of the permanent abolition of episcopacy. This the Royalists could not accept and the overtures therefore went nowhere. In the meantime, the Commonwealth had allied with France in a war against Spain and in the summer of 1658, the Army helped the French capture a number of Spanish possessions in French territory, including the town of Dunkirk, which the young Louis XIV then bequeathed to the English Commonwealth. As a Spanish-controlled Dunkirk was the only feasible port from which a Royalist invasion could be launched, it seemed the prospects of Charles ever regaining his father's throne were remote indeed.

There was indeed now an air of permanence about the Commonwealth which was accepted as a political reality both at home and abroad. Only the most die-hard Royalists of the Sealed Knot entertained hopes of the restoration of an absolute monarchy. Even the post of Lord Protector - with or without Parliament - provided the constitutional stability required in the former kingdoms. The fatal weakness of the Commonwealth was the lack of any understanding as to who would succeed Oliver Cromwell in the role. This was no longer an academic concern. Racked with gout, suffering from kidney stones and from a painful boil in his neck that could not be cured, Cromwell was a sick man. He had visibly struggled in his dispute with his second Parliament and his energy levels were low. The Humble Petition had given the Lord Protector the right to name his successor, but Cromwell had not yet done so.

Although failing, Cromwell had maintained his interest in running the country and had decided new Parliamentary elections would be held in the autumn. However, that August his daughter Bettie died from cancer, a tragedy from which arguably he never recovered. Later that month he contracted malaria, a common disease in the English Fens, and Cromwell proved too weak to fight it off. He returned to Whitehall for a change of air, but remained bed bound. On 3rd September, 1658, the Lord Protector died, the succession still unclear. Those at his bedside claimed that the day before he died he had nominated his son Richard as his heir, and this became generally accepted. Richard, or Dick, Cromwell, affable, lazy and unambitious, was possibly the worst choice to carry on England’s republican experiment.

As for Cromwell, his legacy will forever be contested. Claimed as hero and villain by both left and right, he fits neither category comfortably. He was a ruthless Parliamentarian and ultimately absolute ruler, who killed the King and yet spent the subsequent period trying to ensure untrammelled power never fell into the hands of one man, including himself; he was capable of wartime atrocities, particularly in Ireland, and yet he was a famously humane general who hated wasting the lives of his own men, and even those of his enemies; a republican hero who nonetheless suppressed radicalism and was passionately opposed to universal suffrage and land reform; a deeply religious man who nonetheless espoused religious toleration, and whose relationship with his God was intensely personal. In truth, there is no “real” Oliver Cromwell. In his heart, he represented the values of the English gentry from which he came and his constant intention was to oppose and end monarchical absolutism or its equivalents. And in this, at least in his own lifetime, Cromwell succeeded.

[cromwellrex2]

The Humble Petition And Advice: ‘With ermine clad and purple, let him hold, A royal sceptre, made of Spanish gold,’

Cromwell is Offered the English Crown

Cromwell Resolving to Refuse the Crown by Charles Lucy (1858). Source: Media Storehouse website

THE SECOND Protectorate Parliament assembled following an election in August 1656, and was not a pleasing sight to Oliver Cromwell. The Lord Protector, in his wish to be seen to be above the electoral fray had perhaps not made it clear to his military governors, the Major-Generals, that part of their role was to ensure that the reluctantly-summoned Parliament was to be as amenable to Cromwell’s rule as possible. In the event, to his horror, Cromwell saw a collection of MPs who consisted of Radicals, Independents, Presbyterians and Protectorate-sceptics that Cromwell anticipated would be a thorn in his side. He was furious and if the Second Protectorate Parliament did indeed presage the end of the rule of the Major-Generals, Cromwell’s own profound disappointment at his agents’ apparent willingness to allow free and fair elections in their counties, probably had as much to do with their demise as did the new Parliament’s antipathy to their rule. This antipathy had been raised to boiling point by a belated and ham-fisted attempt by the Major-Generals to exclude overtly oppositionist MPs from taking their seats - most of whom only found out they were excluded when soldiers barred them from taking their places in the House on the first day of the Parliament.

In the event, the September 1656 Parliament proved far less troublesome to Cromwell than the Lord Protector feared: in fact, its climactic action was ultimately to offer to make the Huntingdon squire King Oliver I.

The Parliament’s initial actions were in fact very much to Cromwell’s liking: the funds to continue the war with Spain were voted through with little if any opposition; the right of the Stuarts to the throne of England was annulled (which given the Scottish and Irish representation in the new Westminster Commons effectively removed the Royal Family from its right to rule in all three Kingdoms), and it established a devolved justice system, setting up a national court of equity in York. However a number of events came together in late 1656 to push the Commonwealth into a place of constitutional uncertainty. The first of these was the case of James Nayler, a messianic Quaker, who began to proclaim himself a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. He attracted a considerable following and his antics, including entering Bristol on a donkey with female devotees spreading his path with palm leaves was, understandably, considered entirely blasphemous by respectable society. The Parliament took it upon itself to prosecute Nayler and to enact a particularly cruel and visceral punishment on him (he was pilloried, branded, his tongue bored and he was whipped through the streets) with no authorisation sought from the Lord Protector or the Council of State. Cromwell himself, who was neither sectarian nor instinctively cruel, recoiled at the judgement and worried at the reaction of the Quakers, then a radical and growing religious movement, who might view Nayler's fate as a betrayal of the Commonwealth's much-vaunted religious toleration. Perhaps more importantly however, Cromwell queried where Parliament derived its authority to become directly involved in judicial decisions on blasphemy.

The next event took place on the same day as the vote on funds for the continuance of the Spanish war. The Major-General John Desborough attempted to secure a continuation of the Decimation Tax, the controversial levy on property-owning former Royalists designed to fund local militias accountable to the Major-Generals. This deeply unpopular measure was defeated on its second reading in January 1657 which effectively ended the means by which the Major-Generals could enforce their will in the counties. With Cromwell’s own loss of confidence in his military governors, the Major-Generals became increasingly redundant and their slow demise raised the issue of where the power of government now lay - was it with Parliament, the Council of State or in the person of the Lord Protector himself?

The final occurrence was an increased awareness of the vulnerability of Cromwell himself to Royalist or Radical assassination plots and, given the fragile constitutional legitimacy of his position, to the stability of the Commonwealth itself. Anti-Commonwealth sentiment threw up strange bedfellows and Colonel Edward Sexby, a New Model Agitator, previously active at the Putney Debates, worked with the Royalist die-hards of the Sealed Knot to attempt three separate assassinations of Cromwell. Although Thurloe uncovered each of them in time, they were sufficiently well planned for both Cromwell’s allies and Parliament to be unnerved at the prospect of the anarchy that would ensue should the Lord Protector be killed with no arrangements for his succession - both constitutional and personal - agreed.

The result was perhaps inevitable. The Instrument of Government, despite its promise, had never been allowed to operate as a fully established republican constitution. It is perhaps no surprise that men and women therefore turned to the settlement the country had known, albeit imperfectly for centuries, and calls arose more loudly and insistently for a new monarchy to be established, and for Oliver Cromwell to be made king. On 23rd February 1657, Parliament was presented with a petition entitled the Humble Petition and Advice, a means by which a non-Stuart monarchy could be restored and for King Oliver to be its first occupant. Many of Cromwell’s supporters, including both Lambert and Harrison, were appalled at the prospect of all they had fought for being overturned by the very man they had followed from Marston Moor to Worcester, and the Humble Petition was furiously debated. Ultimately however, the petition forced into open discussion the political ambiguity of the Commonwealth and the need for a constitutional settlement that would be acceptable to the majority of the population for most of the time. From the perspective of the Humble Petition’s advocates, their desired outcome was a constitutional monarch, a non-aristocratic second chamber and, preferably a Presbyterian English Church with an end to religious toleration. On the issue of a second chamber there was broad agreement across all parties and it was agreed that an upper house of seventy members, nominated by the Lord Protector, should be established. The question of the kingship however was much more problematic.

Ultimately, the matter came down to Cromwell’s own conscience and what he believed to be God’s will. On 25th March, Parliament voted to offer the crown to Cromwell. There then followed five weeks of uncertainty while Cromwell himself weighed up the pros and cons of the stark choice before him. On one hand, his own experience and intelligence told him the Commonwealth could not limp on with compromised or uncertain legitimacy, but on the other he feared the consequences of effectively reversing the Parliamentarian advances over seventeen years of war and contested peace. His hand was perhaps forced by a chance meeting in St James’ Park with Desborough and Lambert on 6th May. His two old comrades told Cromwell they could not support him assuming the role of monarch and would resign their commissions rather than serve their general as king. This seemed to be enough. Two days later Cromwell informed Parliament ‘I cannot undertake this Government with that title of king. And that’s my answer to this great and weighty business.’

Cromwell, ever God’s Englishman, had turned his back on the greatest prize. The Commonwealth lived on, but in what form was not clear, as both proponents and opponents of the Humble Petition took stock.

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The Rule of the Major-Generals 1655-56: ‘governors in every county, who ruled according to their wills, by no law but what seemed good in their own eyes’

The Commonwealth’s Military Regime

Source: GettyImages

FOLLOWING THE demise of the first Proctecorate Parliament, the constitutional balance that Lambert’s Instrument had tried to ensure began to fray at the edges. Faced with Hesilrige’s determination that Parliament should hold the only sovereign authority in the land, the temptation of Cromwell’s allies was to buttress the Lord Protector much more strongly than the constitution required, a tendency only exacerbated by Cromwell enduring a near fatal riding accident, which could have thrown open the whole issue of succession. Cromwell was swiftly named Lord Protector for life and given personal command of the militia and the New Model Army, giving him almost monarchical power to guard against any future Parliamentary coup. The ironies that the leader of Parliament’s forces in the British civil wars should be in this position, was not lost on the Commonwealth’s enemies.

These enemies spanned political opinion. Amongst the radicals, millennial sects such as the Ranters and the Quakers saw a resurgence in support (the latter in particular were viewed with suspicion by “respectable” republican opinion, given their profound belief in religious toleration). The more worldly, but still godly, Levellers increased their output of pamphleteering opposition to the “tyranny” of the Protectorate and the Fifth Monarchists and their ministers continued to fulminate at the deposition of the Barebones Parliament and the Commonwealth’s defiance of the Second Coming. However, the opposition that troubled the Protectorate far more, was the emergence of a secretive Royalist opposition to the regime with direct links to the exiled Charles II.

This conspiratorial group, sanctioned by Charles to act on his behalf to overthrow the Commonwealth, consisted mainly of aggrieved Royalist landed gentry and their sons, who had seen their lands sequestered by Parliament and who had no love for the political or religious ideologies of the victorious Roundhead factions. In 1653, they had formed themselves into a group known as the Sealed Knot. They were however talkers rather than doers and were soon compromised by infiltration by agents of John Thurloe, Cromwell’s head of intelligence. Slowly the Knot’s credibility as a realistic source of Royalist revolt faded as it was replaced by a much more active group known, appropriately, as the Action Party. This grouping differed from the Knot in that the older organisation was of the view that a general Royalist uprising was inevitable, given the Protectorate’s unpopularity, and they simply needed to wait for the revolt to happen naturally. The Action Party disagreed and put into place plans for declarations for the King in Hull, Newcastle and the south west in early 1655, confident this would incite the people to join them. Despite disruption by Thurloe’s spies, the conspirators continued with the plan, enacting it in February 1655. In the north the would-be uprisings were embarrassments, with only a handful of men turning up at the designated rallying points before dispersing. However, on 11th March, a more serious revolt began led by former Royalist officer, Colonel John Penruddock, who gathered 400 horsemen in an assault on Salisbury. Penruddock succeeded in capturing the local sheriff, supplemented his forces with freed prisoners and then headed off into Dorset and Somserset, seeking to incite a general revolt in Charles I’s former heartlands. It was not to be. No significant numbers joined Penruddock’s rebellion and his dwindling force was eventually chased down and crushed by the New Model Army at South Molton near Tiverton in Devon. Penruddock was captured and alongside eleven of his compatriots, was later tried for treason and executed.

Despite its disappointing nature, Penruddock’s rebellion nonetheless alarmed Cromwell and his allies and brought to a sudden end the policy of lenience and rehabilitation of former Royalists pursued hitherto. It also ushered in a curious period of partial military rule by the so-called Major-Generals. Traditional history’s judgement on this episode defines it as an aberrant exercise of untrammelled military dictatorship which imposed a joyless version of Puritanism on a sullen and resentful population. The truth is more subtle. The Royalist revolts led to the raising of more militia units in order to better oppose local uprisings and in effect act as auxiliaries to the New Model Army. The Major-Generals’ initial task was to supervise this purely military process. There were ten such officers, derived from the Army’s senior cadre. They were each allocated to one of ten groupings of English counties (including Wales), but in the absence of a sitting Parliament, it was not long until the Major-Generals began to exert influence and control over local civilian administration, thus giving the appearance of central military rule.

The new districts were implemented in August 1655. In addition to the practicalities of military organisation and the role of the Major Generals in identifying potential Royalist and Catholic rebels, Cromwell did make it clear that he expected a firm hand to be applied in bringing the people back in line with the word of God. He also gave the Major-Generals a degree of latitude as to how they achieved this. Therefore this religious mission did undoubtedly lead to a level of Puritan enforcement not hitherto seen in the Comminwealth: in many districts horse racing, ball games, prostitution gambling and alcohol drinking were banned and holidays associated in the Puritan mind with paganism, such as May Day and Christmas, were indeed done away with. Playhouses and taverns were closed down and these actions in particular, did not endear the Major-Generals or the Prictectorate, to the people. Although the Major-Generals effectively did have wide-ranging powers over the day-to-day lives of the population, they did not really posses the resources to impose what would be understood today as a military dictatorship. The Major-Generals’ overriding priority was to prevent any recurrence of Royalist rebellion and their chief tool to achieve this was fiscal: the so-called Decimation Tax.

This tax comprised ten per cent of the rental value of the properties of all known - but also suspected - Royalists, together with other taxes on smaller assets. This punitive action certainly did much to neutralise the ability of the Sealed Knot and the Action Party to organise, but many less wealthy and inactive or historic Royalists were swept into the purview of the tax, making it more unpopular than any of the partially-enforced restrictions on personal behaviour. The lack of proportionality of the tax meant both local leaders and the Commonwealth commissioners themselves, did not agree with its universal application and exemptions were common.

Meanwhile the Commonwealth was at war with Spain and the costs of pursuing the war (mostly conducted in the distant Caribbean) and of maintaining the rule of the Major-Generals and a domestic standing army, were beginning to strain the Protectorate’s treasury. Cromwell needed to raise more money, and that required more taxes. Under the terms of the Instrument of Government, this could only be achieved by recalling Parliament. Cromwell thus found himself in almost exactly the same position as Charles I in 1640: unwillingly having to reconvene a hostile group of MPs and to bargain with them to help finance his domestic policy and his foreign adventures. And like Charles he was faced with the possibility of factions within the House of Commons seeking to reassert Parliamentary authority over the executive. If Cromwell had had a sense of humour, even he might have smiled at this circular turn of events.

In May 1656, Parliament was recalled.

[cromwellrex2]

Lord Protector 1654-1655: ‘part of them, in the name of the people, gave up the sovereignty to him…’

The King Without A Crown

The Inauguration of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. Source: Prints and Ephemera website

THE EFFECTIVE constitutional suicide of the Nominated Assembly created the political moment for John Lambert’s The Instrument of Government to transition from being a philosophical contribution to the development of English republicanism, to being the means by which the inchoate experiments that had characterised the Commonwealth since the execution of Charles I, to be replaced by the English Protectorate.

Lambert’s work was the first, and remains the only, written constitution in British history. Cromwell himself had been unconvinced when Lambert had first presented the dense document to him. To the conservative Lord General, the Instrument owed too much to the Agreement of the People and radical sentiments expressed in the Putney Debates, but Cromwell’s difficulty was that he had nowhere else to go. The millennial aspirations of Thomas Harrison’s Fifth Monarchists were as much an anathema to him as was the reductive logic of restoring Charles II to his throne. Cromwell knew that Lambert had accurately highlighted the cause of the collapse of the Rump and the demise of the Barebones Parliament: with no executive figure to take the place of the King, there was no legitimacy to the Parliamentary remnants that had run England since the conclusion of the civil wars. So far, all decisive executive actions since 1648 had been enabled by the Army, and Cromwell, military man though he was, had no intention of becoming a dictator, reliant on the New Model Army to sustain him in power. And so it was, Cromwell accepted the Instrument of Government as the means by which to restore stable and accepted constitutional rule to England, and, by extension, to the conquered realms of Scotland and Ireland. Cromwell agreed to become a King without a crown, and assume the position of head of state, as Lord Protector.

On 15th December 1653, the Instrument was debated and adopted by the Council of State. The very next day, Cromell was sworn into office as the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England. The ceremony in the Court of Chancery in Westminster was a modest affair - Cromwell wore a sober dark suit under his ermine-lined robe, and if there was a Great Seal to confer status on his new office, there was no sceptre or orb, much less a crown. Cromwell may, to a degree, have assumed monarchical authority, but this was no new royal dynasty being put into place: Lambert’s Instrument made sure of this. Lambert had been acutely aware of how the failure to separate out executive and legislative powers ran the risk of leading to despotism when he wrote the Instrument. Therefore, although the Lord Protector would be pre-eminent, he would not be permitted to rule alone. In his new role, Cromwell would be obliged to heed the views of a representative Parliament, and he would also have to share government with an executive Council and no decisions by the Lord Protector could be implemented without the explicit consent of the other two institutions of government.

Parliament would comprise 460 seats: 400 for England and Wales and 30 each for Scotland and Ireland. Elections would take place every three years and no Parliament could be dissolved less than five months into its session. The Council comprised between 13 and 20 life members, providing a level of stability and continuity in government to set against the regular changes to the membership of the legislature as a result of the Parliamentary elections. Crucially, the Councillors could not be dismissed by the Lord Protector in the way the King had been able dispense with members of the Privy Council with whom he disagreed. Furthermore, the power to replace the Lord Protector, should he die in office, was vested with the Council. Control of the Army was shared between all three branches of the constitution. Therefore the Instrument in effect sought to introduce the type of constitutional monarchy that much Parliamentary opinion had sought to achieve both in the lead up to the civil wars and in the period of negotiation with Charles after the conclusion of the first civil war, but within a republican framework. The Lord Protector in many ways resembled a modern President bounded by different chambers of government. He could veto legislation, but not indefinitely: ultimately a majority vote in Council on a bill would be sufficient to see it pass into law following Parliamentary scrutiny and debate.

In actual fact, the republican constitution rarely worked as intended. There remained Royalist military activity in Scotland; Ireland, so recently engulfed in violent rebellion, could not be ruled constitutionally. Even in England, Presbyterian opposition to religious toleration (extended to all groups except Roman Catholics) and the fury of the Fifth Monarchists that a new head of state had replaced the King before the Second Coming, meant that elections were continually delayed. Even when Parliament finally met, Sir Arthur Haselrig, one of the five MPs Charles I had tried to arrest for treason in 1642, organised opposition to the Instrument itself, arguing that neither the office of Protector nor the Council were legitimate, and that both should be subordinated to Parliament. It seemed as though the debates of the early 1640s were being revisited.

Cromwell however was not going to tolerate this challenge. He attended the Commons and made it absolutely clear what the purview of Parliament was within the new tripartite system of governance. He produced a declaration for all MPs to sign, known as The Recognition, to ensure each Member understood the role of Parliament and its limitations. Haselrig resigned rather than be a signatory to the Declaration, but the agitation did not stop. In late 1654, Parliament again debated amendments to the Instrument which would give the Commons the final say in the selection of Council members and to the office of Lord Protector itself. By January 1655, it became clear to Cromwell that Parliament could not be trusted. The current crop of Radical and Presbyterian MPs were not interested in sharing power within a republican constitution; for the MPs themselves, they had not fought both literally and figuratively with the King for 14 years to establish the primacy of Parliamentary sovereignty only to hand that sovereignty over to, as they saw it, unelected military cronies and and a would-be monarch. When MPs submitted their amendments to the Instrument to the Council for ratification, Cromwell again attended the House to argue against the proposals; he also announced the dissolution of the First Protectorate Parliament. Members left the House without needing to be ushered out by soldiers this time, but, once again, a Parliamentary settlement had failed.

In the meantime, the country had to be governed. Ultimately, Cromwell and his Council, in their search for stability, returned to that constant alternative to Parliamentary rule: that of the Army. With the Instrument only partially enacted, the Lord Protector instituted the very system he had tried to avoid - rule by the military in the shape of a group of soldier-administrators that became known as the Major Generals.

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The “Barebones Parliament” July-December 1653: ‘you are as like the forming of God as ever people were’

Government by the Godly

Cromwell Addressing the Parliament. Source: Alamy Stock Photos

WITH THE dissolution of the Rump Parliament, the three former kingdoms of the British Isles were in unchartered territory. Ireland was effectively under English military occupation; Scotland was to all intents and purposes an English possession, but England itself now had no functioning government at all and the task of coming up with an answer to this constitutional quandary fell to the former nondescript squire, Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell’s first action was to reconvene the Council of State to provide some form of civilian government and counter charges from Royalists and Radicals that Cromwell, by deposing the Rump had effectively introduced a military dictatorship. His two main colleagues, John Lambert and Thomas Harrison, had very different views of what should succeed the Rump. Lambert, a reformist pragmatist, recognised that Parliament without a King was inherently a constitutional question mark. His view was that Parliament should be replaced by a professional body that would comprise executive authority but would not necessarily be representative; Harrison by contrast wanted a Parliament of the godly who would prepare the ground for the imminent Second Coming. The Council of State eventually proposed that a non-elected assembly should be formed, consisting of 140 members, representing the counties of England and the realms of Scotland and Ireland. These members would be nominated and approved by local Army Councils: it would most definitely not be a Parliament and was officially termed the Nominated Assembly.

The Assembly had its inaugural meeting on 4th July 1653 in Whitehall but inevitably had immediate problems of legitimacy. This was best illustrated by the scornful term applied to it by its critics at the time and to which it is known to history: “Barebones’ Parliament”. This perjorative was derived from the name of one of the members of the Assembly, the elaborately titled Praise God Barebon. This member had no particularly prominent role in the Assembly, but for the anti-military wags who coined the term, it symbolised both the scratchy legality of the Assembly itself and the widely held view that the body consisted of a non-representative group of religious fanatics, more intent on preparing the way for the Fifth Monarchy than bringing stability or good governance to the Commonwealth.

Cromwell’s speech to the Assembly reflected the precariousness of the situation. He told the members that he expected them to get down to enacting the long delayed legislation first promulgated by the Long Parliament in its series of disputes with Charles I, which the Rump had so signally failed to do. Equally, he was keen that the Assembly did not get too comfortable: once legislative priorities had been taken forward, a second Nominated Committee would be formed, tasked with establishing a new republican constitutional settlement. The Assembly, which ironically soon renamed itself a Parliament, initially approached the task with vigour. It met six days a week, attendance by members was high and enthusiasm to introduce the reforms Parliament had strived to implement in the late 1630s and early 1640s was genuine. However the Assembly soon encountered the same problems as the Rump. There was simply too much historic legislation to sift through. So many of the bills introduced in the days of John Pym that had met monarchical resistance or got nowhere because of the civil wars, were half-baked, ill thought through and even performative. In the event, however, what fatally undermined the Barebones Parliament was legal reform and the question of tithes.

Tithes were a major source of grievance for Puritans. They consisted of payments by each subject for the upkeep of their minister. Tithes dated back to before the Reformation and had been inherited by the Anglican church. Puritans viewed them as an imposition because parishioners had had no say in the choice of priest or minister (fundamental to Calvinist belief), and believed the whole system of ministry required overhaul, including the abolition of tithes altogether and the establishment of a state Church. The scrapping of tithes had long been an article of faith amongst the Presbyterian majority of the Long Parliament, but the Assembly came up against two very knotty practical problems: if tithes were to go, how were ministers’ livings to be paid for and, secondly, how to deal with the fact that laymen had, over the centuries , obtained the right to levy tithes, and many of those laymen were Parliamentary landowners. The Barebones Parliament soon fractured on the issue. The Presbyterian “moderates”, who recognised tithes had taken on an aspect of inherited property, argued for their reduction in scope, value and number, but did not agree with abolition; the religious fundamentalist “radicals” believed all tithes should be abolished immediately.

When it came to legal reform, the “moderate” faction was keen to ensure the inviolability of property remained intact, while nonetheless correcting archaic law that seemed to have feudal roots; the radicals wanted a new codification of English law and were much more relaxed about the protection of property rights. Into this mix was added the theocratic view of the Fifth Monarchists that Biblical law should inform the law of the Commonwealth. Ultimately the profound differences in view was not sustainable: the radicals formed their own separate committee to review the law, effectively ensuring that nothing would get done.

Factionalism did for the Barebones. After a “re-election” vote saw many of the religious radicals lose their seats, the Fifth Monarchists withdrew their support for the Assembly and began to attack it through sermons and pamphlets. The Monarchists’ preachers were some of the most fiery in the Commonwealth. A contemporary described their assaults on any aspects of the Assembly of which they did not approve, the ‘most horrid trumpets of fire, murther and flame’. Exacerbating an atmosphere of political division and conflict was the Assembly’s ill-advised decision to prosecute the newly-returned Leveller leader “Honest” John Lilburne for treason. Lilburne had been exiled by the Rump for sedition and he returned to England in June to support the godly radicals in their disputes with the Presbyterians. On his arrest, a huge campaign of Leveller and radical agitation began to petition for his release. In the event, Lilburne’s trial collapsed: the great champion of the common man simply used the unconstitutionality of the Rump who had exiled him, and that of the Assembly who sought to try him, to bring the proceedings into disrepute. Lilburne was acquitted.

As the work of the Assembly began to grind to a halt, John Lambert issued his own contribution to the future governance of the realm. In the autumn of 1653, Lambert published a document called the Instrument of Government, which effectively comprised the first attempt at a written constitution in British history. Cromwell himself was impressed with Lambert’s work, but he still hoped the Nominated Assembly would work. He was to be disappointed. In early December a moderate motion on tithes which recommended a thorough overhaul of the system but fell short of outright abolition, was defeated by an alliance of convenience between radicals who wanted abolition and conservatives who wanted the system to continue untouched. The frustrated moderates then despaired of the Barebones Parliament ever working. With the connivance of the Speaker, Francis Rous, at the next session, moderate members condemned their radical colleagues as saboteurs and quit the chamber. As they did so, a squad of soldiers, organised by Lambert, entered and forcibly removed the radical members. The moderates then marched to Cromwell’s office in Whitehall and collectively resigned from the Assembly, returning the powers the General had bestowed on them. The Barebones Parliament had dissolved itself.

For the second time in six months, an attempt to forge a postwar governing settlement for England had collapsed, the coup de grace having again been performed by the Army. Once again, Oliver Cromwell, without doubt the most powerful man in the country, had been presented with the dilemma of what to do next. Key to Lambert’s Instrument of Government was his contention that in the absence of a monarch, executive authority had to be replaced if the country was to have effective government. Whether willingly or not, it was now accepted by Cromwell that possibly only one man could fill the void the Rump and the Assembly had proved unable to do: Cromwell himself.

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The End of the Rump: ‘What shall we do with this bauble? Here, take it away.’

The Spontaneous Military Coup

Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament. Source: Alamy Stock Photos

THE COMMONWEALTH forces soon reduced the remaining resistance in Scotland. In short order, George Monck defeated the scattered remnants of Royalist, Engager and Covenanter opposition to the effective imposition of an English settlement in Scotland. That settlement was the same one as introduced to England: religious toleration for all but Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. Although the Church of Scotland loathed an arrangement that allowed Independents free worship, they had no choice. The taking of Stirling, Perth and Dundee (the latter with much slaughter, including of non-combatants) by the New Model Army throughout the late summer of 1651 followed by the news of Worcester, ended the last resistance of the Scottish government. With its final defeat, the Solemn League and Covenant also disappeared as a viable religious or political prospectus. During 1652, the Rump Parliament in England prepared legislation that effectively unified Scotland and England into a new Commonwealth. In March 1653, the Scottish General Assembly was suppressed: there was now only one, republican, government for both countries.

Similarly in Ireland, Sir Henry Ireton and later Edmund Ludlow, slowly took the remaining Confederate fortresses one by one, and by spring 1653, the organised Irish rebellion was finally over. Ireton himself did not see the final victory as he died of the plague during his ill-advised siege of Limerick. The settlement was harsh. All who had supported the rebellion, which included a substantial proportion of the Old English, had their lands confiscated and handed over to loyalists or Protestant settlers. Ireland became, in effect, a province of the Commonwealth: Charles Stuart’s three Kingdoms were no more.

With the fighting over, the Council of State, the Rump and the Army needed to decide what form of constitutional settlement now should be introduced following the final crushing of Royalism. The existing Commonwealth had been a pragmatic response to the monarch’s execution, continued warfare and the questionable legitimacy of the Rump Parliament, but now there could be no deferral of the debate as to what type of government should replace the Stuart monarchy. When the conflict began, the majority of Parliamentarians had no intention of replacing the king with some form of republicanism. Even Cromwell was a late convert to the cause, initially taking the view that a reformed monarchy could be preserved, perhaps under Henry Duke of Gloucester, Charles I’s youngest son, but as with so many of his Parliamentarian colleagues, the second civil war turned Cromwell to the view that monarchy itself was the problem, not simply the individual who wore the crown.

The starting point however was the Rump Parliament itself. Compromised though it was by Pride’s Purge it was nonetheless the linear descendant of what was still, technically, the Parliament of 1640. In early 1652, the Rump voted for its own dissolution from November 1654 and then set about attempting to deal with the backlog of legislation shelved for the duration of the civil wars. This included legal reform, debt relief, the establishment of a new national church to replace Episcopacy and the sequestration and sale of Royalist property. In addition, the Rump was tasked with producing propsals for the post war system of government - major questions such as parliamentary terms, the extent of the franchise, whether or not there should be a second chamber now the Lords was abolished, and should there be an equivalent senior governor of the nation to replace the office of King. These tasks were gargantuan, but the Rump’s efforts to address them seriously were half-hearted at best. Rather than deal with issues of reform and principle, the MPs of the Rump preferred to delve into matters of citizens’ personal behaviour, such as adultery and blasphemy, and obsess about the appropriateness of traditional Christian feast days and their possible pagan origins. It was in the early 1650s that the Commonwealth’s dour reputation as the Puritan regime that took down Maypoles, closed theatres and banned Christmas, took hold.

In the meantime, the Army was becoming impatient. Despite the Commonwealth having embarked on a needless naval war with Dutch Republic, the Army was idle, outside residual fighting in Ireland and northern Scotland, and remained radical in its political thinking. In August 1652, it issued a petition to the Rump that called for the dissolution of Parliament, early elections, the abolition of tithes, the settlement of military pay arrears, and the establishment of a National Treasury accountable to the new Commonwealth government. The difficulty for the Rump, and to some extent, Cromwell, was that the Army no longer spoke with one voice. Only Cromwell remained of the former Grandees and the coming men were John Lambert and Thomas Harrison, the victors of the third civil war. Whereas Lambert espoused a constitutional egalitarian republicanism, familiar from the Putney Debates, Harrison was a Fifth Monarchist and as such wished to see the Parliamentary system abolished altogether and replaced by a small conclave of the godly who would ready the former Kingdoms for the Second Coming, due, in the view of the Fifth Monarchists, at any time. What united the factions however, was their contempt for the Rump Parliament.

The Rump’s policy of sequestering Royalist lands to pay for the Dutch war, particularly irritated the New Model Army’s officer class, who had made frequent promises during the wars to Royalist hold outs that their continued ownership of their lands would be guaranteed, in return for a surrender. This apparent reneging on that promise offended military honour. This added to a general sense of self-serving indolence and drift associated with the Rump and led to a gathering of officers in London who requested Cromwell that he support the petition and forcibly dissolve the Rump. Cromwell was open to such an entreaty. He could see little benefit in maintaining the Rump Parliament any longer, and was tempted by the thought of assuming an overall role as “Protector”, either as the constitutional head of a republic or to usher in in a constitutional monarchy under Henry of Gloucester. However, what happened next did not have the appearance of a premeditated move against Parliament.

Matters reached a head in spring 1653. On 19th April, Cromwell, Harrison and Lambert met with sympathetic MPs and insisted the Rump needed to develop an immediate succession plan under which it should should dissolve itself rapidly, set a date for elections and hand over power to a transitional committee of forty godly men. To his alarm, Cromwell later heard Parliament was indeed debating succession, but not the plan put to MPs by the officers. The Rump’s apparent intention was to continue in place indefinitely. Cromwell and Harrison immediately attended the House of Commons and took their seats. After listening to the debate, Cromwell eventually rose and made a furious speech condemning the continuance of the Rump with words that have since become famous: ‘it is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately… how can you be a Parliament for God’s People? Depart I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’ With that Harrison brought in thirty or so musketeers who, amongst much protest, cleared the chamber. The mace, the symbol of the Speaker’s authority, was removed from the Commons, contemptuously dismissed as a “bauble”. Cromwell and the Army had dissolved the Rump by force.

Essentially the Long Parliament had been terminated by a military coup. Although the forced dissolution gave every appearance of being a spontaneous act, Cromwell moved swiftly to consolidate his position by informing the Council of State it had no further business to undertake as the legislature had been removed. A bloodless revolution had occurred that had removed the final element of the pre-war monarchical settlement - King, Lords and Commons - with no opposition or complaint from the country at large. The Rump, ineffectual and unpopular, passed from British history with barely a whimper.

Oliver Cromwell, once an obscure country MP and, in the early days of the civil wars, a cavalry colonel among many, was now master of all he surveyed: victorious general, regicide, breaker of Scottish Presbyterianism and the Irish Rebellion, and now a morally upright revolutionary too. The political future of the former three Kingdoms was now, effectively, in the hands of one man.

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The Battle of Worcester, 3rd September 1651: ‘say you have been at Worcester, where England’s sorrows began, and where happily they are ended.’

The “Crowning Mercy” and the end of the Civil Wars

Source: The Douglas Archives website

THE BATTLE of Dunbar shattered the fragile unity of the alliance gathered around Charles II to restore the Stuarts to the throne of England. The King was rapidly wearying of the dour Puritanism of the Covenanters and the constant lecturing he was receiving from Presbyterian ministers, suspicious of the sincerity of Charles’ conversion to the Calvinist cause. The “Kirk Party” (the old Covenanters who had reclaimed the government of Scotland after the failure of the Engager faction in the second civil war) began to lose ground. Charles was said to have been secretly delighted at the Kirk’s defeat at Dunbar, and looked to the rise of an authentic Scottish Royalism to propel him to his lost throne. His greatest hope was that the Catholic and pro-Suart Highlanders would come to his aid and he fled Edinburgh for Perth in October 1650, only to fall back into the hands of Covenanter forces as the promised Highland rebellion fizzled out.

At this point, the Presbyterian unity was also broken by the formation of a new military group known as the Western Association, based in the south-west of the country and under the command of a number of Covenanter officers. Their view was that the priority now was to defend the Solemn League and Covenant against the victorious Commonwealth forces, and that Charles Stuart should look to his own devices. On 2nd October the Western Association issued a ‘remonstrance’ to the Committee of Estates that blamed the defeat at Dunbar on the Kirk Party’s flawed strategy of supporting a King who continued to be surrounded by Anglican Royalists and whose personal conversion to Presbyterianism was skin-deep at best. A second remonstrance was released in which the Western Association effectively seceded from the Covenanter army, refusing to have any truck with the attempt to restore Charles to his throne. This resulted in a fundamental breach in the Scottish government in which the new faction, known as the “Remonstrants” was ranged against the Kirk Party.

With an English army dominant in Scotland and now the Covenanter government itself riven, Charles unexpectedly found himself in the welcome position of becoming the focal point of Scottish resistance against the invaders. Although most Scottish people entertained suspicion of Charles’ motivations and sincerity, they nonetheless recognised him as their sovereign, around whom they could rally to eject the hated English schematics of the New Model Army. Charles became head of an organic national Royalism that could yet transform his fortunes. The Kirk Party therefore determined to work with the Royalists to bring the Remonstrants to heel, but before they could, Cromwell and Major-General John Lambert did their work for them. The Western Association army was commanded by Colonel Gilbert Ker, who becoming aware of the Kirk’s intent to force the Remonstrants into compliance, thought his best option was to gain credibility and renown for his faction by defeating the English. Cromwell meanwhile had already decided to destroy Ker’s small army before moving on to contend with the Committee of Estates’ remaining forces under David Leslie. Initially Ker met with success, stymying Cromwell at the Clyde in late November and then moving to meet Lambert’s troops, whom he believed he outnumbered, outside Hamilton. On 1st December Ker entered the town believing Lambert’s troops had withdrawn, only to be ambushed by the Commonwealth forces as he did so. In the following short sharp battle, the Western Association army was destroyed.

The decisive defeat of the Remonstrants, although welcomed by the Committee, also deprived it of an army it had hoped to bring back into the fold. The government therefore quickly renounced previous strictures that had prevented Royalists, Anglicans, former Engagers and other “schematics” from forming armed forces. With the reluctant acquiescence of the Presbyterian ministers, the Kirk Party was able to increase its military strength to twenty five regiments by creating what was a genuinely Scottish national army, named the Army of the Kingdom. This paved the way for the formal coronation of Charles as King of Scotland at Scone, near Perth on New Year’s Day 1651. Charles was crowned by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, head of the Scottish government and now, at the apex of his power, kingmaker too.

However, despite the new optimism brought about by this display of national unity, what should happen next was not at all clear. Cromwell controlled the capital and all routes into England; Charles’ natural heartland of the Highlands was cut off from him and although Leslie had adopted a strong defensive line across the Firth of Forth, there was no immediately obvious military strategy that could feasibly deliver victory. Winter became spring which became summer with no movement by either side until Cromwell at last resolved to force the issue. In mid-July he ordered an amphibious crossing over the Forth, using flat-bottomed boats, and Commonwealth troops were soon landed on the Fife shore under the command of Lambert. The Scots moved to repulse the English force but Leslie’s soldiers were raw recruits who, in open battle, were no match for Lambert’s ironsides. The two armies met on the hills outside the town of Inverkeithing and it took just fifteen minutes for the experienced New Model troops to scatter their opponents. Over 2,000 Scots were killed in the ensuing rout, 1500 men were taken prisoner and the defensive front around Fife collapsed. There was now only one option left open to Charles and Leslie: to launch an invasion of England.

The evidence is that this is precisely what Cromwell wanted Charles and the Scots to do, because he removed his own forces from the roads into England and proceeded to attack and capture Perth. It is likely that the King and Leslie knew that they were heading into a trap, but Charles continued to entertain the hope that once the Royal standards were sighted in England, Royalists would rally to his cause and the relatively small army of 12,000 that commenced the march south on 31st July, would soon grow to become a force equal to those that could be fielded by the Commonwealth south of the border.

The Scots army crossed into England on 6th August. Charles’ high spirits did not last long. Not only did Argyll refuse to join the expedition on the grounds he thought it was folly, but the hoped-for rally of English Royalists did not happen. There was an abortive attempt to join Charles by Lord Stanley from the Isle of Man but, apart from this, just 200 reluctant recruits from Manchester joined the Royalist army. In truth, the English population were tired of war. They had no real love for the Puritan Commonwealth, but at least the New Model Army could enforce peace and slowly, over the last two years, life had begun to return to some sort of normality. Furthermore, there was no affection for the Scots who made up most of Charles’ army, either. This was the fourth Scottish invasion of England in twelve years and the destruction and plunder that had accompanied previous incursions had not been forgotten. Meanwhile, leaving George Monck to continue to hold Commonwealth positions in Scotland, Cromwell led an infantry-based force in pursuit, while Lambert and Colonel Thomas Harrison followed Charles at the head of two small cavalry forces, harrying his troops all the way. Finally, on 31st August, the Royalists arrived at Worcester, where Leslie determined the decisive battle needed to be fought.

Worcester did make sense as a base of operations from a Royalist perspective: the city had historically supported the King; it was bounded by the River Severn and was close enough to the Royalist heartlands of Cornwall and Wales. It was also defensible with a number of bridges into the city which could be destroyed or be blocked and it was partially walled. However, as the Royalists settled into their new stronghold, they were effectively surrounded. Cromwell, Harrison and Lambert had combined their forces and, supplemented by local Parliamentary levies, the Commonwealth army now numbered 31,000 men, significantly outnumbering Charles’ force. On 3rd September, Cromwell ordered an assault from the south, under Lambert, who built pontoon bridges to cross the Severn with 11,000 troops, while Cromwell himself positioned artillery to the east of the city and commenced a bombardment. Lambert’s troops encountered stiff resistance as they tried to cross the River Teme at Powick Bridge (ironically the site of the first skirmish of the first civil war) necessitating Cromwell to lead reinforcements to force the crossing. This in itself left the Commonwealth eastern flank exposed enabling Charles himself to lead a mounted charge out of the city that nearly broke the extended Parliamentary line. Fighting uphill, the Royalists were unable to pursue their advantage and when Cromwell’s troops returned, Charles was forced to retreat back into the town. Meanwhile Lambert had defeated the Scots facing him and the battle degenerated into a vicious street by street struggle. This ended when Cromwell captured Fort Royal and turned the city’s guns onto the Scots. The stubborn Royalist retreat became a rout with soldiers fleeing the city best they could.

The Royalist army was almost completely destroyed. 3,000 men were killed and 10,000 were captured, including Leslie and all his senior officers. Charles himself miraculously managed to escape and spent six weeks on the run, hunted by Roundhead troops and helped by a network of mainly Roman Catholic aristocratic safe houses. He almost certainly did seek refuge for at least one night in the oak tree at Boscobel while Parliamentary soldiers searched for him underneath its branches. Charles eventually managed to escape to France on 16th October. While he remained alive, the dream of the restoration of the monarchy remained intact, but in all practical terms, the Royalist cause was dead.

Cromwell himself knew that the nine year English civil war was indeed over. In his despatch to the Council of State, describing his final military victory in the Parliamentary cause, he summed up the country’s prevalent feelings of relief as much as triumph at the outcome of the battle, when he described Worcester thus: ‘It is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy.’

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The Third Civil War, August-September 1650: ‘all in disorder and running, both right wing and left.’

Dunbar: Cromwell’s Greatest Triumph

Highlander Pikemen at Dunbar by Graham Turner. Source: Warfare History Network website

WITH HIS unseemly betrayal of Montrose and, in effect the cause of High Church Scottish Royalism, Charles had given himself little choice but to accept wholeheartedly the requirements of the Scottish Committee of Estates and to relinquish Anglicanism. This conversion was not a happy one: Charles departed the Netherlands on 2nd June 1650, and when his ship was forced to dock in Helgoland, seeking refuge from Commonwealth naval pursuit, his accompanying Scottish commissioners required him to sign further binding conditions as sub clauses to the Treaty of Breda, confirming his adherence to Presbyterianism ‘in the presence of Almighty God.’ Charles was now effectively a theological prisoner of the Kirk. When Charles landed in Scotland he was immediately subjected to a regime of Puritan religious indoctrination, in an attempt to purge the young man of what the Covenanters believed were his Popish inclinations, inherited from both his father and his mother. Whereas Argyll’s government were determined to use the influence of their reluctant convert King to justify its suppression of all opposition to Presbyterianism within Scotland, it was not at this stage seeking to extend its creed to England, despite the terms of Breda and the Solemn League and Covenant. The English Commonwealth however were not so sanguine. For the Independents of the Rump Parliament and the New Model Army, the combination of ideological Puritanism with a Presbyterian version of Royalism was a potentially deadly threat, with the risk that any number of dissenters in England could rally to this new challenge to the still barely legitimate Commonwealth. The English Council of State believed a fourth Covenanter invasion of England was inevitable and it determined that the New Model Army should pre-empt this by invading Scotland first.

The command of the expedition was awarded to Oliver Cromwell, but not before a sincere attempt by both the Council of State and Cromwell himself to persuade the old warhorse Sir Thomas Fairfax to do so. Fairfax however declined. He was a reluctant supporter of the Commonwealth, having opposed the execution of Charles I, and was also a sincere Presbyterian who was genuinely troubled by Parliament’s reneging on its commitment to the Solemn League and Covenant: he could see no justification for an invasion of Scotland. On 22nd June, Fairfax, probably the most successful and influential Parliamentary commander of the civil wars, called a permanent end to his military career. Perhaps typically of this general, characterised as he was by his loyalty, dignity and humanity, his departure was prompted by a point of principle. He retired to his estates in Yorkshire, never to return to the political or military fray, his reputation intact.

Cromwell, the champion of religious toleration and opponent of Presbyterian fanaticism, had no such qualms. Promoted to Lord General by the Council, he was provided with an army of 16,000 men, a third of which was cavalry. It was a strong force but as importantly was the calibre of the officers Cromwell had recruited to his staff: Charles Fleetwood, John Lambert, Thomas Pride and George Monck were some of the best military men in the New Model Army, battle-hardened by the fighting in the two previous civil wars and in Ireland. Cromwell still hoped a peace could be negotiated and, once he reached Berwick, called on the Scots to renounce any attempt to invade England. The Scots, with an English army at their gates, unsurprisingly refused. Cromwell crossed the Tweed and into Scotland on 22nd July.

The Committee of Estates put an army of 20,000 in the field under the command of the experienced and capable David Leslie, a veteran of Marston Moor and Philiphaugh. His defence of Edinburgh, organised in a fortified line between the capital and Leith, proved effective against an initial English assault and Cromwell broke off hostilities, but this apparent strength was deceptive. The effective civil war that had overthrown the Engagers following the battle of Preston had led to much purging of Scottish military forces by the Kirk party and the replacement of experienced men with godly and enthusiastic, but poorly trained, replacements. The contradictions of Covenanter policy were also underlined when a visit by Charles to Edinburgh was enthusiastically received by many of the soldiers led to a further purge of 4,000 of the troops, suspected of recidivist Royalism, organised by the radical Presbyterian ministers embedded in the Scottish army.

Nonetheless, Cromwell still found it difficult to bring the cautious Leslie to battle. After a number of inconclusive skirmishes, the general withdrew to Dunbar. His army was wracked with dysentery at this point and by the end of August, his force had been reduced to no more than 12,000 effective fighting men. It began to look as if the Commonwealth’s pre-emptive action may well fail. Leslie sensed weakness and therefore moved his much larger force out of Edinburgh and looked to a pitched battle to defeat decisively the English invasion. Leslie occupied a strong defensive position overlooking Cromwell’s troops on Doon Hill, but urged on by his officers and the Presbyterian ministers, convinced the English were fatally vulnerable, the Covenanter general ordered an advance. As the Scottish forces streamed down Doon Hill towards him, Cromwell allegedly murmured to his officers: ‘God is delivering them into our hands, they are coming down to us.’ However at a subsequent council of war on horseback, Cromwell’s officers recommended that battle be avoided: that the infantry and artillery should be evacuated by sea and the cavalry should force its way south and both should then regroup in England.

Cromwell was not happy to take this advice. He had noticed that as it formed into position, the Scottish right flank was over-extended. In discussion with Lambert, he decided to reorientate his own army by focusing its strength, both cavalry and infantry, on the Parliamentary left, thereby dispensing with the traditional formations of strong infantry flanked by cavalry. This manoeuvring took place under cover of a rainy night, unobserved by a soaked Scottish enemy, confident that victory was already theirs. At dawn on 3rd September, the Commonwealth left, supported by artillery who had also moved into position overnight, assaulted an unsuspecting Scottish right flank, led by Lambert’s cavalry. This caused disarray until Leslie reinforced his right with cavalry and pikemen. Monck’s infantry were hard pressed and began to retreat back across the Broxburn River. Cromwell decided to throw in his reserves not to reinforce Monck, but to attack the stretched Scottish left. This caused complete confusion as Cromwell’s personal mounted guard crashed through the Covenanter ranks. When the Scottish cavalry broke, the battle was essentially over. In the rout that followed some 3,000 Scots were killed where they stood or in flight and some 10,000 were eventually made prisoner, offered the choice of military service in the army of their enemies or enslavement in the Caribbean. Cromwell had won possibly the greatest military victory of his career: it is little surprise that the Lord General took his extraordinary reversal of fortune at Dunbar as a sign of divine providence.

The battle of Dunbar, although ultimately decisive, was not the end of this third British civil war. Although Cromwell occupied Edinburgh on 7th September, Leslie, whose offer of resignation was rejected by the Committee of Estates, regrouped his surviving forces, numbering approximately 4,000, and took up strong defensive positions at Stirling. Cromwell, meanwhile, master of much that he surveyed, determined to finish the menace of the Solemn League and Covenant once and for all, by negotiating an end to militant Presbyterianism in Scotland, thereby also ending Scotland’s attempt to restore Charles II to his throne and any further threat to the integrity of the English Commonwealth.

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Montrose Betrayed: ‘We require and authorise you therefore to proceed vigorously and effectively in your undertaking;’

Charles Throws in his Lot with the Covenanters

Charles II of England c1653. Source: Wikipedia

THE MARQUIS of Montrose, probably one of Charles I’s most steadfast supporters had, after his extraordinary campaigns in Scotland in 1644-45, fled to the continent following his ultimate defeat at Philiphaugh. There he toured the courts of Europe, feted as a defender of monarchy and the ultimate cavalier general. The execution of the King hit the fervently Royalist Montrose particularly hard and the Marquis, vowing hot vengeance on the Commonwealth who had carried out the vile deed, immediately offered his unconditional support to the new King Charles II at his court in Breda in the Dutch Republic. Charles accepted the offer and made Montrose Lieutenant-Governor of the Royalist forces in Scotland in February 1649.

There were of course no Royalist troops as such in Scotland, but the country remained contested. Hamilton’s Engagers had been ousted, but the Covenanter government that had resumed control under Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, ultimately began to assume a similar stance towards the English Commonwealth and the new King, as had its predecessor. Despite the religious dispute that had led the Scots to take up arms against Charles I on at least three occasions, there was no support for republicanism in any part of Scotland. The Commonwealth, dominated as it was by the New Model Army, was viewed by the Covenanters as sectarian, radical and revolutionary and despite the wartime alliance with the English Parliament, as less trustworthy a partner than the new King. Therefore commissioners were duly despatched to Charles’ court in Breda to see if the young monarch could be persuaded, as had theoretically been his father, to adopt the Solemn League and Covenant across the Kingdoms in return for Scottish military help to overthrow the Rump Parliament.

As the Irish Rebellion began to falter, Charles did indeed begin to place more faith in a Scottish alliance as the means by which he could reclaim his father’s throne. Although this effectively meant leaving Ormrond to his own devices in Ireland, the spontaneous eruption of some small scale Royalist rebellions in the north of Scotland, quickly put down, made Charles realise he did not have to put all his eggs into one basket. Montrose was summoned and asked to gather a force of mercenaries to attack northern Scotland and seek to establish a Royalist presence there that could threaten Covenanter and Commonwealth alike.

In March 1650, Montrose landed in Orkney with a small force of 200 German and Danish mercenaries. He found a measure of Royalist support here but little in the way of meaningful military manpower or supplies. Montrose’s planned tactics were again to be the formation of a tough guerrilla force that could undermine Covenanter resolve and inspire a more general rallying to the Royalist cause. However, Montrose remained a figure of fear and hatred to Scottish Presbyterians due to the ferocity of his campaigning during the First Civil War and with negotiations with Charles proceeding, the Covenanters saw no reason to seek compromise with the cavalier Marquis. Unfortunately for Montrose, Charles would use his presence in Scotland as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with the commissioners and no more, and that that was the main value of the Marquis’ quixotic adventure to the King.

In the meantime the commissioners drove a hard bargain. Like the Engagers before them, they insisted that Charles sign the Solemn League and Covenant and in so doing, agree to the introduction of Presbyterianism throughout England. They also required Charles to renounce episcopacy, personally convert to Presbyterianism and ensure his children were raised in the Calvinist Protestant religion. Finally, the King should disavow the campaigns being fought in his name by the Irish Confederates and by Montrose’s small band of fighters in Scotland. Then and only then, would the Covenanter army be prepared to embark on a war to defeat Cromwell and the New Model Army, overthrow the Commonwealth and restore the monarchy in England. Charles hated these terms but he had to face reality: Cromwell had reduced the Irish Rebellion to no more than a series of sieges whereas Montrose’s campaign, although his forces had grown to over 1200 men, was never going to secure significant victory in Scotland. The Puritan Covenanters, anathema though they be to the Anglicanism of his father, offered the surest hope of military and political success in England. On 19th April, 1650, Charles signed the Treaty of Breda with the Scottish commissioners. From that moment, Montrose was on his own.

Whether he appreciated his isolation or not, Montrose continued to carry out his King’s wishes as he understood them. He landed his small force in the Highlands and raised the Royal standard. Montrose then traversed the Highlands trying once again to secure a rallying of clans to the Royal cause, but he was met in the main with indifference. The Marquis took his force further south, pausing near Carbisdale to await what he hoped would be reinforcements. However, a small Covenanter cavalry force, led by Colonel Archibald Strachan, a capable officer with experience of the Scottish civil conflict with the Engagers, attacked Montrose’s men. Although outnumbered, Strachan’s cavalry took Montrose’s inexperienced infantry force by surprise and routed them in a single charge. Montrose escaped from the battlefield and sought refuge with Neil MacLeod of Ardvreck, a former Royalist supporter who promptly handed him over to the Covenanters. Charles, on signing the Treaty of Breda, did send a letter to Montrose, instructing him to disarm, but it never reached him. Even if it had however, it was now too late.

Montrose was taken to Edinburgh in chains on 18th May and was put on trial the following day. The result was a foregone conclusion. Although Montrose defended himself by pleading loyalty to his rightful King, the vengeful Presbyterians were not interested and the Marquis accepted the inevitable sentence of death with a degree of equanimity. But it was an horrendous death: Montrose was hung, drawn and quartered, the fate of traitors and Papists, with his head displayed at Edinburgh and his limbs despatched to Stirling, Perth, Glasgow and Aberdeen, so all Scotland could see the fate of the man who had so infuriated and terrified his enemies. Montrose was an impetuous romantic, guilty of much brutality in the war he waged against the Covenanters in the 1640s, but his loyalty to his monarchs could not be doubted and he deserved better than to be deserted so casually by the King he had served so unstintingly. It was a poor end for the ultimate Cavalier.

As for Charles, his die was cast. In June he set sail for Scotland in fulfilment of his Faustian pact, and with this, his attempt to regain his father’s throne and therefore the commencement of a third civil war, were put in train.