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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, 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.

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The Defeat of Irish Royalism, 1650: ‘We are come to break the power of a company of lawless rebels who… live as enemies of human society,’

The End of the Confederate Rebellion

Source: Wikipedia

IN LATE 1649 Cromwell made overtures to the Irish Confederates, but they were couched in the language of uncompromising Puritanism. The Parliamentary general issued his declaration in response to a rallying cry from the Irish Church to the whole of Ireland to encourage resistance to the English invasion and to support the cause of the King. Cromwell proclaimed that the Irish would be treated leniently; that their lands would not be confiscated, and that there would be no judicial punishment for their rebellion. However, all the rebels heard was the unforgiving righteousness of the Calvinist godly: because Cromwell added that in order for there to be a peaceable end to the rebellion, the Catholics would have to give up their fight and their religion, their support for the king and to accept an imposed Protestant settlement on their country. Perhaps Cromwell thought his declarations reasonable in the context of a bitter civil war that had allegedly seen massacres of Protestant settlers by the rebels. However, to the supporters of a nine year nationalist rebellion rooted in the Roman Catholic religion, his words were those of conqueror to the vanquished.

So the war continued. In January 1650, a reinforced Cromwell continued his campaign of reducing Royalist and Confederate strongholds one by one. In contrast to the atrocities committed at Drogheda and Wexford, and to Cromwell’s subsequent baleful reputation in Ireland, he offered generous terms to defenders, permitting them to march out of surrendered towns and castles under arms and with banners flying. This way the Commonwealth forces were able to capture Fethard, Cashel and Cahir in quick succession. The route was then open for a march on Kilkenny, the capital of the Confederate rebellion. In March 1650, Cromwell invested the city. After five days of negotiations, the Confederate commander agreed to surrender the city and the garrison vacated Kilkenny, marching away with full honours and the centre of the rebellion was, rather suddenly, in English hands.

With the loss of Kilkenny, Ormond knew that the Royalist cause in Ireland was almost spent, but if Charles I’s former Lord Lieutenant despaired of now being able to aid his sovereign’s son to the throne, Cromwell himself was not so sanguine. He believed the danger of invasion from Ireland remained the greatest threat to the longevity of the upstart Commonwealth, for all Charles II’s rumoured courting of the Scots. Despite the absence of any rebel field army worth the name, the Confederates continued to hold several strongholds, all well garrisoned and therefore, from Cromwell’s perspective, comprising the core of a potential Royalist revival. The Parliamentary general resolved not to leave Ireland until each and every hold out had been reduced.

Cromwell began his campaign with Clonmel, a walled city in the south under the command of the formidable Hugh Dubh (“Black Hugh”) O’Neill, a veteran on the Catholic side of the Thirty Years’ War, known for both his military skill and his strategic cunning. O’Neill led an experienced garrison of 1500 rebels and had the support of the townspeople to resist the invaders and so when Cromwell arrived before the walls of Clonmel on 27th April and offered terms, Black Hugh refused to negotiate and a siege commenced. Cromwell concentrated artillery on the hills overlooking the city from the north and began a bombardment. Morale within the town however remained high and O’Neill sent several sorties out to attack the besiegers and disrupt their supply and communication lines. The rebel commander lived in hope that if he could tie down the Commonwealth forces long enough, Ormond may yet put a Royalist army into the field and come to his relief.

This was a folorn hope, but Black Hugh made the best of his situation. By the middle of May, the English gunners had made a major breach in Clonmel’s walls. It seemed the fall of the city was imminent and on the 17th, Cromwell ordered his infantry to advance into the breach. Unknown to the Parliamentary commander, O’Neill had turned this tactical disadvantage into an ambush. He had his men construct a makeshift wall around the edge of the breach, and secreted canon and sharpshooters within the new defensive line. As Cromwell’s forces surged forward, they were met by withering artillery and musket fire that cut them down in their droves. After an hour of one-sided combat, over a thousand New Model troopers lay dead or dying in the killing ground. When Cromwell arrived personally to oversee what he expected to be the final street by street battle for the town, he found his men in retreat and Clonmel still defiant. Black Hugh had arguably inflicted the only defeat suffered by Cromwell in his lengthy career fighting in the many and varied British Civil Wars.

However, O’Neill knew the chances of repeating this success were limited. With ammunition and food running low, and the continuance of the bombardment assured, he took the view that Clonmel was impossible to hold. That night he and his remaining soldiers slipped out of the city and made their way to Waterford. On the 18th a frustrated Cromwell took the surrender of the city from the town’s mayor - a victory perhaps, but one that probably felt like a defeat. Nontheless, however hard won, the taking of Clonmel effectively ended Royalist hopes in Ireland and Charles indeed gave up the slim hope that Ormond’s forces could be the vehicle for a restored monarchy. The Rump Parliament agreed. Their nervousness was focused entirely now on the danger from Scotland and they wanted their all-conquering general home, despite the fact the Catholic rebellion was not fully suppressed. On 29th May, Cromwell left Ireland and returned to London to a hero’s welcome. The task of stamping out the last of the Catholic rebellion, which would carry on for a further two years, fell to Cromwell’s fellow Grandee, Henry Ireton, who would eventually die in this, his last campaign in the Parliamentary cause.

Cromwell could count his Irish campaign a success. In just nine months he had destroyed Royalist hopes in Ireland and fatally crippled the Confederate rebellion but at lasting cost to his reputation. If the atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford were exaggerated and there is also evidence elsewhere of Cromwell’s leniency and political skill, there is no doubt the behaviour of the general and his army to the Irish was brutal and contemptuous in equal measure. And if there is little or no evidence of deliberate wholesale massacre of non combatants in the two notorious sieges, the cold-eyed killing of the entire garrisons of each city, whether the men were fighting or surrendering, is enough to justifiably condemn Cromwell as a callous military murderer for posterity.

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Cromwell in Ireland, August-November 1649: ‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches,’

Drogheda and Wexford

Cromwell in Drogheda. Source: GettyImages

THE SITUATION in Ireland which, since the initial eruption of the Old Irish rebellion in 1641, had stabilised into an armed truce between the Catholic Confederates on one side, and the Presbyterian Scots on the other, with the English garrisons under the Royalist Lord Lieutenant James Butler, Earl of Ormond, maintaining an uneasy neutrality. This state of affairs was completely altered by the execution of the King and the hasty establishment of an English Commonwealth under the Rump Parliament and the New Model Army. The Prince of Wales, now crowned King Charles II in Breda and in absentia in Edinburgh, cast his net wide in a search for allies to help him regain his father’s throne. Like Charles I, his exiled son hoped the Irish Confederates could perhaps provide him with the military resources he craved; equally, the Prince also made overtures to the Covenanter Scots, who had proved unexpectedly loyal to the House of Stuart; finally there was Ormond himself, an unequivocal English Royalist, whose small garrison forces also declared for Charles. Therefore in a matter of months, the various protagonists in the Irish rebellion found themselves effectively on the same side all, to a greater or lesser degree, proclaiming support for the exiled King, and opposition to the Commonwealth.

For Cromwell, the shifting alliances that had produced this unforeseen coalition, actually simplified matters. His task was now not simply to reconquer Ireland for the English Parliament, but to cleanse the country, not only of Popery, but also of Protestant schematics and recidivist King’s men. Cromwell’s sense of religious certainty and destiny was manifested in its purest sense during the Commonwealth assault on Ireland - with significant consequences for not only the immediate future of the country, but also for Ireland’s sense of itself in the centuries to come.

Cromwell led an army of 12,000 men into Ireland, mostly troops with experience of fighting in the two civil wars, and landed in Dublin on 14th August 1649. The fact he was able to do this with relative ease was not a given. Until recently, Dublin, garrisoned by soldiers loyal to the Parliament under the command of Colonel Michael Jones, had been besieged by Ormond’s Royalist forces. On 2nd August, Jones had led 4,000 of Dublin’s defenders on a daring sortie, catching the 19,000 strong besiegers completely by surprise and routed them at Rathmines, not only breaking the siege, but winning one of the most remarkable military victories of the British civil wars. For a delighted Cromwell, this scattering of the main Royalist army in Ireland was proof positive of divine favour and God’s support for his mission to extirpate the Catholic revolt and to avenge the atrocities of 1641.

From Dublin, Cromwell decided the next objective of the Commonwealth campaign would be the walled city of Drogheda, some thirty miles to the north. Drogheda was strongly fortified by Confederates and English Royalists, under the command of the veteran Royalist officer, the wooden-legged Sir Arthur Aston. It also straddled the River Boyne and in addition to being a major trading centre, also commanded the approaches to Ulster and the heartland of Scottish Presbyterianism in Ireland. Cromwell arrived before Drogheda on 3rd September. His invitations to the Irish/Royalist garrison to surrender were rejected after which Cromwell positioned his twelve field guns and eleven mortars, which had arrived by sea, on the rising ground surrounding the city. The bombardment began on 10th September soon after the refusal to surrender was received and by the end of the day, breaches had appeared in the walls. The following day, Cromwell ordered a full scale assault. The fighting was fierce and the New Model forces were initially repulsed, taking significant casualties. A second attack which Cromwell himself led personally, succeeded in entering the city. The gates were opened by the Commonwealth infantry and the New Model cavalry stormed in. Despite the fall of the city now only being a matter of time, the defenders, rallied by the indomitable Aston, refused to surrender and it was at this point an exasperated Cromwell ordered that no quarter be given to any men under arms. It was this order that sealed Cromwell’s reputation in Ireland as a cold-hearted killer and the taking of Drogheda as an atrocity.

There is no doubt that an order to give no quarter was highly unusual in the civil wars. Quarter was generally freely given in order to induce surrender and occasions where mercy was not shown were rarely as a result an official military order. Cromwell himself certainly viewed Catholicism as superstitious nonsense and the Irish as an uncivilised sub-species of humanity, guilty of massacres of Protestants, on whom clemency should not be wasted. It is also true that many of the New Model soldiers had been brutalised by seven years of near continuous fighting and needed little encouragement to kill their enemies. The lurid contemporary and later accounts of the slaughter of women and children by the attacking English soldiers are almost certainly false, but the killing of surrendering enemies was indefensible and a deserved blot on the character and reputation of Oliver Cromwell. The entire garrison, between 3,000 and 4,000 men, including Aston, was put to the sword.

Cromwell’s next target was the south eastern city of Wexford, chosen again for its strategic importance, particularly given its proximity to continental Europe and its potential as a rallying point for Royalists. The Commonwealth forces reached Wexford on 2nd October. The Irish garrison, emboldened by reinforcements sent by Ormond, refused terms and, like Drogheda before it, was subjected to heavy English bombardment. Negotiations between Cromwell and the city leaders however continued and it seemed likely at one point a settlement could have been reached, but this all changed when Captain James Stafford, commander of the castle at Wexford, dramatically surrendered, throwing open the gates to the Parliamentary besiegers. Fighting continued street by street, but the defenders were doomed. Unlike Drogheda no order to give no quarter was issued to the Commonwealth troops, but by then the precedent was set: all men under arms, including civilians and all Catholic priests caught, were killed. Over 2,000 men died, cut down by a remorseless enemy, or drowned trying to escape the massacre. Cromwell’s culpability for the extent of the death and destruction at Wexford is less easy to establish than at Drogheda, but he was unmoved by it, almost gleefully reporting later that ‘our forces… put all to the sword that came in their way.’

With the fall of Wexford, most of Munster and all lands between Cork and Dublin fell under Commonwealth control. The dreadful example of the two sacked cities led to many other garrisons surrendering without a fight or fleeing before Cromwell’s army reached them. The reconquest of Ireland was not complete, but the brutal taking of Drogheda and Wexford demonstrated the implacability of Cromwell’s mission in Ireland and ended any Royalist hopes that Ireland could be a realistic springboard for the return of the monarchy to England.

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The Contested Commonwealth: ‘Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down,’

Radical Challenge to the New Regime

Cromwell Suppressing the Mutiny. Source: Alamy Stock Photos

THE KING was dead, but so then was political legitimacy. In some respects, the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy was a product of Parliamentary frustration and Charles’ own obduracy. There had been no plan or programme on the part of Parliament to suppress royal rule: the motivation of the House of Commons had been to restrict the power of the King, not to destroy it. Charles was not a tyrant but he was unnecessarily inflexible in his determination to implement the Book of Common Prayer and anachronistic in his adherence to absolutism. Unable to understand, let alone control, the nascent democratic forces facing him, the King by his own actions, drove his opponents to the ultimate action of “cruel necessity”.

But if the killing of Charles was unplanned and a result of the logic of renewed war, this did not make the business of replacing the centuries-old English monarchy any more straightforward for the Rump Parliament or the New Model Army. The Rump had declared the establishment of a “Commonwealth” to replace the monarchy as early as 4th January 1649 although in truth, this was chiefly the means by which Parliament could claim an authority by which to execute the King. However the effective destruction of the monarchical regime thereafter was swift: first all pro-Engagement MPs were excluded by statute from the Commons on 1st February, and then on 7th February, the ‘useless and dangerous’ House of Lords was abolished. On 17th-19th March the office of King (and therefore the automatic succession of Prince Charles) was disbanded and then the English monarchy was declared to be no more. With the removal of the Lords and of all pre-existing offices of state, England no longer possessed a government in traditional terms, so a Council of State was formed, with John Bradshaw at its head, and sub-committees formed to administer the armed forces, foreign affairs and Ireland.

Meanwhile Prince Charles and what remained of the Royalist court had gathered in the Dutch town of Breda. The news of his father’s execution understandably caused the prince much personal distress, but also posed a constitutional difficulty for him: if the Commonwealth had indeed abolished the monarchy what status did Charles now have? Luckily for the royal exile, there were parts of his father’s realms that did not accept the regicide. In Scotland, the Parliament in Edinburgh crowned the prince as King Charles II in absentia on 5th February 1649, but made their loyalty contingent on the new king signing the Solemn League and Covenant. In Ireland, James Butler, Earl of Ormrond, still officially Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, maintained his truce with the rebel Catholic Confederates and declared for Charles. This gave the prince two options - either to embrace Ormrond and his Faustian pact with the Irish rebels as his springboard to attempt to claim his throne, or to accept the offer of Scottish support despite this meaning the end of Anglicanism if an assault on the English Commonwealth was successful. Prince Rupert urged linking up with Ormrond despite the price being the extension of religious toleration to Catholics, given that Ormrond’s Irish army was 2,000 strong. However Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland to suppress the rebellion soon put paid to the notion of an Irish alliance to propel Royalism back into contention. The crowned heads of Europe, appalled as they may have been by the execution of the English King, offered no more than warm words to the prince: after all the Thirty Years War had only just concluded. Therefore like his father, Charles was forced to look to Scotland for support, despite the court in exile’s aversion to Presbyterianism.

Royalism in England however was undeniably dead: Preston and the execution of the monarch both demoralised and frightened what remained of the King’s party. With the fall of Pontefract Castle, the last Royalist hold out was gone. In the country at large there was no love for the Rump and little support for the abolition of the monarchy, but the overriding wish of the common people was for peace and stability, and the opportunity to repair the shattered English economy. If the Council of State could bring that about, then most would be willing to at least accept the new regime. Opposition to the Commonwealth came not, therefore, from a revanchist Royalism, but from the Radicals within the former Parliamentary coalition itself. The Levellers remained strong within the New Model Army and were deeply suspicious of the Council of State which, as far as they were concerned, had failed to deliver the Agreement of the People and had simply created a new non-democratic Parliamentary settlement without even the counter-balances of the authority of the Lords and the King. On 26th February John Lilburne put together a further polemic called England’s New Chains Discovered that demanded the abolition of the Rump Parliament and called for new elections based on universal male suffrage. Lilburne’s tract found a ready audience in the Army, who remained disgruntled at the continued absence of wartime pay arrears and at the prospect of having to fight again, this time in Ireland. Lilburne was arrested but made a passionate defence of his principles to a sitting of the Council of State. Cromwell, fearing another Leveller-incited mutiny, saw the danger of “Honest John’s” oratory and urged Bradshaw to ‘break’ Lilburne and his followers ‘or they will break you’.

Leveller discontent swelled as the Council of State began to crack down on their leaders, and Cromwell was asked to lead a 12,000 strong force to Ireland to defeat the Confederates (Fairfax turned the commission down). He proposed selecting regiments by lot and this process provided the pretext for a second Leveller-led mutiny in the Army. On 17th April, two regiments rebelled and refused to serve in Ireland. Although the mutiny was driven primarily by grievances about pay, there was also a stated reluctance to fight the Irish who were seeking their own freedom - an astounding position of political solidarity in extremely sectarian religious times. Cromwell and Fairfax both addressed personally the mutinous troops and succeeded in turning them around, recalling their battles together of old. The following month however, rebellions recurred, possibly provoked by the putting of John Lilburne on trial (he was later acquitted) and efforts were made by mutinous junior officers to consolidate the discontented regiments into a single rebel army based around Bristol.This was Cromwell’s worst nightmare - a return of civil war to England, but this time fought between former comrades of the New Model Army itself.

Cromwell and Fairfax again worked together to defuse the situation. At the head of 4,000 loyal troops the two Grandees marched on Bristol but let it be known they would support the mutineers’ demands to see the end of the Rump Parliament and, crucially, would make good the pay arrears. The commitment to the radical cause therefore began to waver and after a brief night-time skirmish on 13th May between die-hard Levellers and Fairfax’s troops, the rebellion collapsed. The action represented the last military involvement of Fairfax, an increasingly war-weary commander-in-chief. Perhaps this fight against his own soldiers convinced the the general that the time had come to step aside. His last service to the Army he loved was to deliver on his promise to pay the soldiers their arrears in pay. Three Leveller ringleaders were brought to court martial and executed but the majority of the mutineers were pardoned. With the end of the mutiny, significant Leveller influence within the Army dissipated and the group never regained significant political stature.

Further opposition to the Commonwealth was to be found from two utopian groups, the Diggers and the Fifth Monarchists. The Diggers, a millenarian communist group, led by a visionary pamphleteer name George Winstanley, preached common ownership of land and the group established a series of “colonies” at St George’s Hill, Windsor and Cobham, effectively occupying a number of free holdings without their owners’ consent. These colonies were run as agrarian communes, with land and produce held in common, decisions made by democratically elected leaders and a welcome extended to the dispossessed and fugitives from justice. The Diggers were also pacifists and believed in sexual equality. It became easy therefore for local landowners to portray the groups as lawless heretics and sexual deviants and in time the Rump authorised militias to put the Digger collectives down, drive them from the land they had appropriated and cast their agrarian social experiment into oblivion.

The Fifth Monarchists were very different to the Diggers whose religious principles were comparatively lightly worn. The “Fifth Monarchy Men” as they became known, believed that the end of days was at hand, signalled by the execution of the King, and that a fifth realm of latter-day saints was prophesied to take over the world (after the previous monarchies of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Macedonians and the Romans). The Fifth Monarchists believed themselves to be the vanguard of this divinely ordained new order. This belief made them implacable opponents of the Commonwealth, which they viewed as worldly and corrupt and, with the demise of the Levellers, the group developed a strong presence in the Army from whence they became a thorn in Oliver Cromwell’s side.

As for Cromwell himself, with the suppression of the mutinies and the grant of the command to re -conquer Ireland, he now became the pre-eminent political and military leader in the country, eclipsing in influence both the official heads of government and army, Bradshaw and Fairfax. The forthcoming Irish campaign was to cement both Cromwell’s power and his notoriety.

[cromwellrex2]

The Trial of the King, January 1649: ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it,’

Revolution and Regicide

Judgement of Charles I by Ladislaus Bakalowicz (c1860)

EVENTS MOVED swiftly in the January of 1649. The ordnance appointing the High Court of Justice moved rapidly to the House of Lords where it was promptly rejected with many peers doubting the judicial or constitutional grounds on which Parliament could place the monarch on trial for treason. The Earl of Northumberland highlighted the difficulty in establishing which party had first declared war on the other, given the almost accidental commencement of armed conflict in 1642. Indeed, this lack of clarity as to the authority of the High Court of Justice to bring the King to trial at all dogged the proceedings throughout and questioned the legitimacy of its ultimate ruling. The Commons however were in no mood to brook dissent: claiming that ‘the Commons in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law,’ it rejected the Lords’ arguments and swiftly passed the ordinance into law on 6th January. The Rump then appointed 135 commissioners to act as judge and jury, although only sixty eight so appointed actually took up the role. The Grandees were also disunited. Thomas Fairfax was appalled by the whole business and publicly distanced himself from the trial, whereas Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell remained in the capital, symbolic support to the revolutionary enterprise.

The Lord President, effectively both prosecuting counsel and senior judge, was John Bradshaw, a republican barrister from Stockport who had not seen action in the wars, but was nonetheless convinced of the righteousness of the Parliamentary cause under God, and of the need to bring an end to the monarchy that had, in his view, brought England to the brink of ruin. Charles was brought from St James’ Palace to the Westminster Hall on 20th January. The King dressed in black for the occasion, including a cloak that clearly displayed the badge of the Order of the Star and Garter. He looked regal indeed, causing a last minute drop in confidence on the part of the commissioners and Cromwell himself, witnessing Charles’ arrival. When Cromwell urged the commissioners to be clear on the authority they held to try the King, they agreed that the Commons of England gave them authority enough: no other argument was ever made.

Westminster was fashioned into the appearance of a court house, with a stage erected to seat Bradshaw and his fellow judges, a table for clerks to record the proceedings, and a seat for the King, who kept his hat on his head throughout the trial, to face his inquisitors. John Cook, one of the prosecuting barristers, read the charge, that by pursuing war with his Parliament, Charles had sought to rule as an absolute monarch and was therefore condemned as ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy of the Commonwealth of England’. Charles laughed out loud at this and asked the question the commissioners had dreaded - by what authority did this court seek to put on trial their lawful king? Throughout the proceedings Charles continued to needle his prosecutors with this demand and never received a clear or satisfactory answer. For the next three days the trial continued in this vein. The King refused to enter a plea because to do so would be to confer legitimacy on the court and therefore to collude in their right to condemn him; Bradshaw flailed when faced by the King’s demands for precedent or sources of constitutional authority. His counters focused on Charles’ behaviour and the previous removal of unworthy monarchs in medieval times. All present knew this argument was weak: the usurpations associated with, for instance, the Wars of the Roses, were essentially coups within the ruling royal family. On no previous occasion had a rival source of authority to royal power sought the removal of a monarch.

The impasse remained unresolved. With Charles refusing not only to enter a plea, but also claiming that he represented the true liberties of England, a frustrated Bradshaw ordered the clerks to enter a plea of guilty on the King’s behalf. Witnesses, who could not be heard in court due to Charles’ refusal to plead, were therefore interviewed by a sub-committee of the court and their testimony accepted. The court was adjourned on 27th January and the commissioners retired to deliberate. There was much disquiet in the Kingdoms at the way events had transpired. Even the Parliamentary-loyalist Londoners were outraged to the extent Bradshaw himself feared to walk abroad without a guard of soldiers; the Scottish government denounced the trial of a Stuart King and the commander of the Army himself, Fairfax, was known to be deeply troubled. The job of Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton was therefore, in this febrile atmosphere, to impress on any wavering commissioners that they must finish what they had started.

So it was that on 28th January 1649 the sentence of death was passed by the court. The death warrant was signed by Bradshaw, Cromwell, Ireton and Colonel Thomas Pride, and just 59 of the commissioners. The show trial thus ended with a mockery of Parliamentary representation sealing the fate of Charles. One wonders what John Pym would have made of it all.

Charles was brought back to court the following day to receive the judgement. He made a last ditch plea to have his case heard before Commons and Lords and despite some sympathy amongst some of the commissioners to this request, Cromwell’s will prevailed and Charles was hustled away and back to St James’ Palace. He spent his last forty eight hours receiving spiritual sustenance from his personal chaplain, donating his personal effects and saying farewell to his distressed and terrified children, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry. On 30th January, the King was escorted under armed guard to the hastily constructed scaffold outside Indigo Jones’ Banqueting Hall in Whitehall. Soldiers kept a disbelieving crowd at bay as the monarch mounted the scaffold. He took prayers with his chaplain and made an unrepentant speech (characterised by the phrase ‘a subject and a sovereign are clean different things’) and finally lay face down to receive the death stroke. The executioner took just one efficient blow with the axe to sever Charles’ head from his body. When the head was shown to the watching Londoners in customary fashion, the crowd, according to witnesses present, let out an audible moan.

For the first time since the two realms came into being, England and Scotland were Kingdoms without a King.

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Pride’s Purge: ‘I verily think that God will break that great idol the Parliament and that old job-trot form of government,’

The End of the Long Parliament

Pride’s Purge. Source: Wikipedia

IT CANNOT be underestimated just how much fury now existed towards the King in the ranks of the New Model Army and the Independent faction within Parliament. By inciting a resumption of fighting in England, Charles had persuaded the radicals there was no point in further negotiations with him. He had visited war once again upon his Kingdoms, even encouraging an invasion of England by the Scots. In the eyes of the Army and the Independents, the events of the late summer of 1648 had demonstrated the veracity of the Biblical prophecy of the “Man of Blood” and there could be no further dealing with such a Satanic figure. However, the moderate Presbyterian faction in the House of Commons which still comprised the majority of MPs, had not yet despaired of reaching a settlement with Charles. In fact their suspicion of the intentions of the Army and its Parliamentary allies, which they saw moving further and further towards advocating a new democratic and republican constitution, meant they viewed an accord with the monarchy and its retention as a safeguard of land holding and the power of the gentry, as essential.

On 1st September 1648, therefore, Parliament once again resumed negotiations with the King. These took place at Newport on the Isle of Wight, and the fifteen commissioners appointed by Parliament represented the range of opinion within Parliament with the exception of Leveller-inspired democratic radicalism. The negotiations went well. Most of the Parliamentary demands mirrored that of the Engagement, concessions the King had already made. He acceded to surrender of the control of the militias to Parliament for twenty years; he agreed to relinquishing all interest in the governance of Ireland and crucially, he also agreed to a three year introduction of Presbyterianism as a new national Church, as agreed with the Scots. However, Charles could not bring himself to agree to the permanent abolition of episcopacy: the rule of bishops and the Book of Common Prayer were the essence of the King’s Anglican belief, and on this issue, which had divided the monarch from swathes of his people for fifteen years, there could no compromise. Charles knew this meant a settlement was probably impossible and exile in France, where many of his supporters had already fled, was appearing an attractive alternative to abdication or trial. The King again began to look for opportunities for escape.

In the meantime, opinion within the Army was hardening. The Levellers, who had been suppressed after the Putney Debates but not crushed, reasserted their influence amongst the rank and file with the publication of the Humble Petitions of Well-Affected Persons, a restatement of much of the previous tract, the Agreement of the People, which had been presented at Putney. A call for annual elections, universal male franchise, religious toleration, free trade and trial by jury was restated. However, the Grandees were not united in the face of Army discontent: Thomas Fairfax based himself at St Albans and declared himself against radical re-ordering of the constitution and restricted himself to demands for pay arrears for his soldiers; Oliver Cromwell busied himself in the north reducing Royalist hold outs, while Henry Ireton felt obliged to support the Army’s insistence that the Newport negotiations did not result in Charles resuming his throne in anything but the most symbolic manner. In November, Ireton produced the Remonstrance of the Army and submitted it to the senior officers of the Army Council in Windsor. The Remonstrance was uncompromising: it called for the end of the Newport negotiations, the abolition of the monarchy and the bringing of Charles himself to trial for waging war on his own subjects. The Remonstrance also called for an end to the Long Parliament and the election of a new House of Commons on a much wider franchise. The radicalism of the Remonstrance was surprising given its author, but Ireton was genuinely fearful that a Newport Treaty might place Charles back on his throne with a real possibility of a Royalist resurgence, accompanied by mutiny or insurgency by the New Model Army: supporting the Army radicals seemed the only way to safeguard the existing gains of the Civil War.

The Grandees debated the Remonstrance at the Nag’s Head Tavern in St Albans. Fairfax tried one final time to contrive the circumstances under which a constitutional monarchy could be created, and issued a position agreed by the Council of Officers to the Parliamentary commissioners which would create a settlement that maintained the monarchy but created a constitutional role for the Army: Charles rejected the proposal. Therefore on 20th November, the Army Council submitted the Remonstrance to Parliament. The House of Commons were disconcerted by the bill as the Remonstrance would have effectively abolished the existing Parliament. MPs tabled a four day debate by which time they hoped a Newport Treaty with the King would be concluded, and eventually rejected the Remonstrance altogether. However, the Army moved quickly. Loyal troops were sent to Newport and Carisbrooke to forestall any escape attempt by Charles, and troops occupied London, Fairfax installing himself in Whitehall itself. On 1st December, the King was removed from the Isle of Wight and brought back to the capital. The Newport negotiations were over.

The stage now seemed set for a military-led dissolution of Parliament, but events took a curious turn. A delegation of Independent MPs approached Ireton and suggested instead of the imposition of full military rule, a more constitutional solution to the conflict might be to bar all pro-Treaty MPs from the Commons and then they helpfully provided the general with a list of all Members who still favoured engagement with the King. On 6th December, Ireton ordered a troop of soldiers under Colonel Thomas Pride to bar the entrance to the Commons. As MPs arrived for the business of the day, their names were checked against the list. If they were on the list, they were arrested. This performative coup lasted six days. By 12th December, just 156 MPs of a total Commons of 450 representatives remained. The Long Parliament had effectively been dissolved: its successor became derisively known as the “Rump Parliament”. The Rump was indeed a wholly unconstitutional body. When one outraged barred MP demanded of Pride on what authority the purge was being carried out, he was told: ‘by the power of the sword, sir.’

Fairfax was furious at Ireton’s action, but as so often when a situation becomes revolutionary, events have their own momentum. The Rump MPs were fully supportive of both the coup and the Remonstrance, which was immediately passed. By 1st January 1649, Parliament had resolved that Charles should be brought to trial by a High Court of Justice for the crime of waging war on England. Cromwell returned to London and the Grandees met in an atmosphere of doubt and guilt. They had no assurance that the coup would be successful or how the country outside the capital might react at the news that the King was to be put on trial for his life. There was fear a third civil war could break out. Cromwell initially hoped a means of avoiding a trial could yet be achieved by persuading the King to abdicate in favour of his third son, Henry Duke of Gloucester, conveniently in Parliament’s custody. However Charles, now seemingly increasingly fatalistic, remained obdurate and refused to countenance the idea. Cromwell then decided there was only one course of action that would preserve the victory of the Army and Parliament and ensure no return to absolute rule : the King had to die and with his death, so must die the monarchy itself.

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The Battle of Preston, 17th-19th August 1648: ‘It is Scotland and Scotland Only that can Save the King and England,’

The Third Invasion of England

English Civil War by Chris Collingwood. Source: Blog Preston website

ALTHOUGH HAMILTON had been granted an army of 30,000 men to take the war into England once more, he never managed to recruit that number. Many Scots were outraged that the Engager government should consider rescuing a King whom they had fought for a decade, from their former English allies. They felt the Engagers were at best naive to trust the word of a recognised deceiver like Charles or, at worst, hopeless dupes of the King. Many ministers actively preached against the enterprise, claiming that Hamilton’s league with the English Royalists was a betrayal of everything the Scottish Covenant had stood for. As a result, recruitment avoidance and desertion was common, with many men seeking to avoid the campaign altogether. There was even some fighting between Engager troops and Scots who considered themselves true Covenanters. Hamilton was untroubled. As far as he was concerned, the imperative was to defeat the New Model Army and with it the English Independents. Once Charles was restored to his throne, the scourge of Leveller radicalism eradicated and Presbyterianism introduced to both Kingdoms by a chastened Charles, the dissenters would soon see the wisdom of the Engager position.

In the event, on 8th July 1648, Hamilton led just 10,000 men south of the border, but it was an army of the untrained and the unwilling - a shadow of the Covenanter force that had proved so proficient in the Second Bishops’ War and at Marston Moor. The English Royalists had however rallied in anticipation of the Scottish invasion, and it was the strength of returning commanders such as Sir Marmaduke Langdale, leading a reformed version of his old Northern Horse, and who established themselves in the north west, principally around Carlisle, which persuaded Hamilton to move his troops into Cumbria and Lancashire, rather than take the route south through the north east and Yorkshire, previously favoured by the Scots. This was also the direction anticipated by the Parliamentary commander defending against the invasion, Sir John Lambert. Although Hamilton reached Carlisle in early July and saw off the Parliamentary forces surrounding the town, his progress thereafter was slow. The summer of 1648 turned out to be one of the coldest and wettest in English history, turning roads into quagmire, destroying crops and creating a sense of intense misery on the part of the soldiers of both sides. It was 14th July before the Scots struggled into Penrith. By this time, Cromwell had relieved Pembroke and was intent on driving north to reinforce Lambert. Hamilton was aware that he needed to engage the Parliamentary army soon and defeat it, before the English Royalist rebellions were suppressed or fizzled out, and the opportunity for victory was lost.

Hamilton was reinforced by a detachment of Ulster Scots, battle hardened from the Irish rebellion. Instead of deploying these veterans into the heart of his army, Hamilton, unable to control disputes amongst his high command, in this case between the Ulster commander, the Earl of Callandar, and the Scots generals, principally William Baillie, instead asked the Ulstermen to garrison Penrith, which both infuriated Callendar and meant the most experienced men of the Engager force were not even properly deployed in the campaign. However, Hamilton did succeed in linking up with Langdale’s cavalry, creating a force of some 15,000 men. Lambert in the meantime was trying to second guess the Engager plans, unclear whether the Scots would head for Royalist Wales, take the more direct route south via Yorkshire, or to continue their slow progress through Lancashire. By early August, Cromwell had arrived to take charge of the Parliamentary force. He had only brought 4,000 men, so the two armies were evenly matched even though at this point neither knew where the other were. In the event, both forces, marching on opposite sudes of the River Ribble, began to converge on Preston.

On 15th August, Hamilton ordered his forces to enter the town, but soon heard from Langdale that his troops were under attack from Cromwell’s Ironsides on Ribbleton Moor. Both Langdale and Hamilton assumed these were speculative attacks by skirmishers, until it became clear that contact had been made with the whole of Cromwell’s army, now 8,600 strong, and that battle had effectively commenced. The fighting between Langdale and Cromwell was an intense affair, on sodden terrain distinguished by narrow roads and ditches. If Hamilton had reinforced Langdale at that point, the battle may have had a different outcome, but he was persuaded by Callendar that without the Scottish horse, now far to the south on a foraging mission under John Middleton, such an attack on seasoned New Model troopers could end in disaster. Hamilton took this advice, continued his advance into the town and left the heavily outnumbered Langdale to his own devices. After four hours of fighting, Langdale’s troops eventually retreated into Preston in disarray, marking the final defeat of the Northern Horse by the forces of Parliament.

Cromwell now pressed his advantage and sought to enter Preston by its two bridges, both now heavily defended by the Royalists. A huge “push of the pike” ensued in which the Parliamentarians gradually gained the advantage, until night fell, resulting in a stand off. The Royalist council of war, obsessed with linking up with Middleton’s cavalry, resolved to leave Preston and try to rendezvous with the Scottish horse at Wigan. To add farce to what was rapidly collapsing into a disaster for the Royalists, Middleton’s troopers were at that moment racing towards Preston via Chorley, and the two forces, on different roads, missed each other entirely. On 18th August, Cromwell’s cavalry at last encountered that of Middleton resulting in a hard fight from which no victor emerged. In the meantime, Baillie’s foot were pursued all the way to Warrington, where they were brought to battle at Winwick on the 19th. Wet, demoralised, and lacking in powder, having left most of their munitions in Preston due to the forced march south, the Scots fought with desperate courage, but ultimately they were surrounded thanks to a circling manoeuvre by Cromwell’s cavalry, and broke and fled. Alone in a foreign land the Scottish soldiers surrendered to Roundheads and the people of Warrington alike. 10,000 men of the Engager army were taken prisoner. The defeat of the invasion, and that of the Royalist cause, was complete.

Hamilton fled Warrington with the remnants of Middleton’s cavalry, but along with Langdale and Middleton himself, was eventually captured by Parliamentary forces. Hamilton was put on trial for treason under his English title of Earl of Cambridge, found guilty and executed: a sign, perhaps of the merciless times to come. The news of Preston brought all residual Royalist rebellion in England to an end and a wholesale insurrection against the Engager party in Scotland. This did not stop Cromwell from marching his New Model troops to the Scottish border and securing the return of Carlisle and Berwick from the restored Covenanter Scottish government. Cromwell nontheless wanted to ensure freelance Scottish negotiation with the King would end. In late September, his army entered Scotland and on 4th October it occupied Edinburgh without resistance. He imposed terms on the Covenanters, but they were not particularly harsh: all Engager military units were to be disbanded, all those who supported the Engagement were to be banned from public office, and all pro-Engagement ministers were to be removed from the Church of Scotland. Although there could be no real agreement between the Independent Cromwell, who believed in religious toleration as fundamental principle of his political and religious faith and the sectarian Presbyterians of what was now known as the “Kirk Party”, Cromwell left Scotland confident that its interference in English affairs, at least for now, was over. He and his army returned to England for a reckoning : not just with a recalcitrant Parliament but, ultimately, also with the blasphemous monarch who had recklessly unleashed war on his Kingdoms once again, against God’s will. For the radicals in the New Model Army, there could be no more negotiations with “the man of blood”.

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The Second English Civil War, April-August 1648: ‘The more is the pity, some of those parts are miserably bent to oppose the Parliament and the Army,’

Royalist Rebellions in Wales and England

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

THE INCREASING unpopularity of the New Model Army and the Army Council first manifested itself in what was essentially a military mutiny by unpaid troops, threatened with having their regiments disbanded by order of Parliament, in Pembrokeshire in late March 1648. The leader of what quickly became a Royalist revolt, was an unlikely enough figure. Colonel John Poyer, governor of Pembroke, had been a loyal and effective Parliamentary commander during the war, but, along with Colonel Richard Laugharne, strongly resented moves to disband the southern Welsh forces and barred the gates of Pembroke to the Parliamentary adjutant-general, Colonel Fleming, sent to execute the order. Some fighting then took place leading to the death of Fleming, possibly by suicide. With pro-Royal commoner uprisings taking place in the south of England and East Anglia, and Fairfax mobilising forces to bring the Welsh mutineers to heel, Poyer and Laugharne, perhaps feeling they had little left to lose, declared for the King. On 9th April Poyer mustered a force of 4,000 men, all wearing blue and white ribbons to demonstrate their new Royalist sympathies. Crystallising the deep dislike now felt for the New Model Army and the Independents Parliamentary faction in the country, Poyer and Laugharne soon found themselves leading a full blooded popular Royalist revolt in Wales: by the end of April, Brecon, Radnor and Monmouth were in open rebellion and Laugharne was soon in command of 8,000 men and began to march on Cardiff. The threat to south Wales galvanised Fairfax into action and he sent Cromwell to put down the rebellion with force.

The Second English Civil War differed markedly from its predecessor. The conflict of 1643-45 was characterised by regular armies facing off against each other, vying for territory and maintaining negotiations between themselves throughout. Even at its most fierce, there still remained a sincere belief amongst both Cavaliers and Roundheads that once the fighting was over, a settlement would be reached and that peace would return, albeit with new constitutional and religious arrangements in place. However, following Naseby, the complete collapse of the Royalist cause and the rise of a radicalised New Model Army to pre-eminence over Parliament, positions became entrenched. The disparate rebels now declaring for the King had come to regard Parliament and the Army as dominated by incomprehensible Puritan fanatics intent on destroying the very fabric of the Kingdom, whereas the Army were of the view that their victory over the King indicated divine favour, and those who sought to plunge the realm into war again were very literally, fighting against God. This made the second civil war a much more merciless affair, with quarter frequently not given by sides who viewed each other as morally repugnant.

Fairfax faced a war on several fronts. In addition to the Welsh revolt, rebellion also flared in Kent, where men newly converted to the Royalist cause, formed themselves into an army 10,000 strong and threatened to march on London. Meanwhile in Scotland, Hamilton’s Engager force was mustering to invade England from the north as part of its mission to rescue the King. Fairfax therefore broke up the New Model Army further, sending Colonel John Lambert into Yorkshire to defend against the Scots, while he himself remained in the capital to deal with the southern English rebellions. Meanwhile one of Cromwell’s officers, Colonel Thomas Horton, headed off Laugharne’s force at the village of St Fagans on 8th May. In a battle typical of the second civil war, Royalist enthusiasm and bravery on the part of the inexperienced volunteers was no match for the discipline and equipment of the Ironsides, and Laugharne’s men eventually broke. With the defeat of their sole field army, Royalist Welsh hopes centred on Poyer, fortified in Pembroke. Cromwell placed Pembroke under siege, and by early July, realising that Cromwell intended to storm the town, Poyer surrendered. The rebel garrison were treated leniently by the Parliamentary commander and he allowed the defeated troops to return to their homes, but Laugharne and Poyer were put on trial for their lives. Poyer was executed by firing squad and Laugharne was sent into exile. With the suppression of its leadership, the Welsh rebellion was over.

Meanwhile Henrietta Maria’s court in exile in France despatched the Earl of Norwich, a former member of the King’s household, to England to take command of Royalist insurrection there. Norwich was no great military man, but he was a charismatic individual and by 21st May, he had assumed command of the popular forces in Kent and prepared to march on London. Norwich’s strategy was to keep Fairfax distracted to enable the Scottish army to advance south and possibly to free the King from Carisbrooke. This latter aspiration was stimulated by an unexpected mutiny of the Parliamentary navy who had strongly objected to appointment of the Leveller commander Thomas Rainsborough as Vice-Admiral of the fleet. The sailors at Deal, Walmer and Sandwich rejected Rainsborough and declared for the King, placing Dover under siege and forcing the Vice-Admiral himself to seek refuge ashore. Recalling the former Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Warwick to his post, Parliament tasked him with stabilising the situation and ending the risk of the government losing control of the Channel. Warwick succeeded in persuading the key squadron at Portsmouth not to join the rebelllion on 4th June, thus preventing further spread of the naval mutiny.

Fairfax now turned his attention to the English Royalists, who, under former Royal commanders, had now occupied Maidstone, Rochester and Gravesend. After a skirmish with Norwich’s troops at Penenden Heath, Fairfax stormed Maidstone. The fighting was characterised by a street by street running battle that lasted five hours. The Royalists fought well, but ultimately Fairfax’s troops prevailed and the rebels eventually surrendered and were allowed to return to their farms. Norwich led a quixotic assault on London with 3,000 of his remaining men, perhaps hoping the citizens would rise in support, given the anti Parliamentary riots that had taken place in the capital the previous year. However, when the Earl reached Blackheath, he found the city gates closed to him. Many of his followers had deserted by now or refused to leave the familiarity of Kent. Norwich therefore slipped away with a small force of about 500 men and linked up with another Royalist commander, Sir Charles Lucas. The two combined their troops and planned to enter East Anglia where they hoped to stir up further rebellion in support of the King. However, Fairfax’s rapid pursuing march alarmed the Royalists and Lucas and Norwich occupied and fortified Colchester.

Fairfax commenced what turned out to be a brutal eleven week siege, characterised by blockade, sortie and savage fighting with no quarter given. Food ran short for the defenders and the besiegers were emiserated by constant rain and flooding in what was one of the coldest, wettest summers in English history. Lucas also turned out to be a tyrannical garrison commander. By the time the siege ended, the population of Colchester, formerly very opposed to the New Model Army who they viewed as ‘schematics’, longed for liberation from the oppressive military rule of Lucas by the very Roundhead soldiers they had professed to despise. Lucas nonetheless held firm and in the July of 1648 there were some grounds for Royalist optimism. The long awaited Scottish invasion had at last commenced; Royalists were rallying to the Earl of Holland who had raised the King’s standard in Kingston-upon-Thames, and most dramatically of all, Charles Prince of Wales had been collected by the rebellious fleet and was on his way to England.

However Holland’s attempts to raise another Royalist field army failed. He managed to recruit a mounted troop of experienced and motivated men, but they never numbered more than 500. An attempt to take Reigate Castle was unsuccessful and Holland’s force was eventually brought to battle at Surbiton Moor by the Parliamentarians and defeated and Holland was captured. At the same time the Kentish revolt had effectively fizzled out. As the summer reached its end, the situation in Colchester became desperate as hunger became starvation. Ultimately Lucas agreed to terms and the Army occupied the city on 27th August. Norwich was imprisoned, but Lucas, a veteran of Marston Moor and two other non-aristocratic Royalist officers, were sentenced to death and shot. It was a sign of how bitter and vengeful the war had become and how even the normally lenient Fairfax wished to demonstrate by example, the wrongness of the Royalist cause, that enemy commanders should be executed simply for fighting. Fairfax clearly sought to indicate that the civil war was over: any further resistance was the work of rebels resisting divine will, not enemy combatants.

The renegade fleet reached the Thames estuary but Charles Prince of Wales elected not to land. By now the Royalist cause seemed defeated everywhere once more and the hope his father’s subjects would rally now, after the failure of the uprisings was a folorn one. On 30th August a storm scattered the fleet and Charles retreated to Holland. The King meanwhile had distanced himself from the rebellions, perhaps sensing their lack of co-ordination and integrated strategy would doom them to failure. However, Charles’ faith in the Engagement remained strong. With the New Model Army now spread across the country, the King entertained high hopes that Hamilton’s forces, advancing south, could yet transform his fortunes.

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The Engagement: ‘we have resolved to put the Kingdom presently in a posture of defence as it was in Anno 1643.’

The Road to Renewed War

Charles at the Phoenix Tower. Source: chestershoutwiki.com

CHARLES’ ESCAPE from Hampton Court was characteristically ill thought through and its motivations are not entirely clear. Word had certainly reached the King of the tenor of the Putney Debates and of the increasing republican sentiment abroad in the New Model Army, accompanied by frequent references to the Charles as the “man of blood” and calls for him to be put on trial for starting the civil war, even for his life. A desire to be away from the hothouse of London for reasons of self-preservation was likely a strong incentive to flee. Hampton Court had also become very claustrophobic and Charles was daily assailed by Ireton and Cromwell wishing him to reach a settlement and thwarting his attempts to deal openly with the Scots. On 11th November 1647, aided by two courtiers, Charles slipped out of Hampton and crossed the Thames south. Some of Charles’ followers urged him to head to Cornwall, where Royalist sympathies remained strong and the Channel ports were close for a possible flight to France; others suggested the King go to the Isle of Wight, whose Parliamentary Governor, Colonel Robert Hammond, had recently made anti-Leveller statements and might therefore be considered sympathetic to preserving the King. Charles ultimately decided on the latter course of action. The Isle of Wight was far enough removed from the capital to give him a measure of personal safety, but still within the Kingdom; Charles was nervous that if he fled to France he would be seen by his subjects as effectively renouncing his throne.

Hammond greeted the news that Charles wished to reside in Carisbrooke Castle with consternation, but felt he had little choice but to agree. Although a young man, the colonel had seen much war service and was astute enough to advise Fairfax immediately his unwelcome guest arrived. Charles was treated with due deference, but Hammond nonetheless placed a light guard on the King confirming his status as prisoner, albeit a well cared for one. In London, the mood was turning decidedly against the King. Charles’ obstinacy in refusing whatever settlement the Independents came up with, meant the House of Commons was increasingly of the view a settlement was impossible. Cromwell’s own attitude was hardening: he still believed a lasting settlement could only be achieved with the monarchy intact but he was no longer of the view that Charles I had to be that monarch. Parliament ignored a letter from Charles requesting a resumption of negotiations and instead passed the Four Bills - legislation that sought to impose a settlement on the King, comprising Parliamentary control of the militias for twenty years, the abolition of episcopy, payment of the Army and regular sessions of Parliament. The bills however required Royal Assent which Charles, on 28th December, contemptuously refused to give. This led directly to Parliament passing of a Vote of No Addresses on 3rd January 1648, which stated that there would be no more negotiation with Charles and that any attempt to do so would be viewed by the Commons as a treasonable act.

Charles was unlikely to have been pleased at this effective ending of talks with Parliament, but by this stage, helped by his new location at Carisbrooke, the King was making significant headway in reaching an agreement with the Scots. Finally realising that the English Parliament would never enact the Solemn League and Covenant, the Scots put forward a proposal to Charles termed “The Engagement”. Under these arrangements, Charles would agree to accept personally Presbyterianism for a period of three years; would work to achieve religious union between the two Kingdoms, in other words attempt to make Presbyterianism the official religion of both; and, crucially, to suppress all ‘sectarian’ beliefs now freely abroad in both Parliament and the English Army, which would include putting down the Independents. Compared to the humiliating requirements of the Four Bills, the Engagement was more than acceptable to Charles, particularly because the Scots committed to invade England and restore Charles to his throne by force in return. Charles agreed to these terms with Scottish commissioners who visited him at Carisbrooke in early January.

The deal however was not done. The commissioners had to gain the agreement of the Scottish Parliament and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Whatever their frustration with the English, plenty of Scots balked at the idea of resuming war in support of the King the Covenanters had been so instrumental in deposing, and others were deeply unhappy at the equivocation of the full introduction of Presbyterianism to both Kingdoms contained in the Engagement. James, third Marquis of Hamilton, remained hugely influential in the Scottish government and soon assumed leadership of the so-called ‘Engager’ faction when the contents of the proposals became public in February 1648. He was opposed by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, but Campbell did not have the aristocratic numbers in Parliament to prevent the Engagement being passed and a vote for an army of 30,000 to be raised to enter England to rescue the King from the control of the ‘sectarians’. The final breach with the Covenanters’ former Parliamentary English allies came on 20th April, when the Scottish Parliament issued a declaration to its English equivalent that demanded the immediate implementation of the Solemn League and Covenant; the restoration of the King to his throne to oversee this implementation, and the break up of the perfidious New Model Army. These demands were completely unacceptable to the English. The Scots therefore began mobilising for war.

However, the reason that the conflict that was about to break out is called the Second English Civil War rather than an Anglo-Scottish war, is because during 1647 and 1648, public opinion in England had been turning decisively against Parliament and the Army. Taxation, principally to maintain the Army in the field, was higher than during Charles’ Personal Rule; the behaviours of the Parliamentary government had become increasingly arbitrary and intolerant; there was much discontent about the role of the Army Council in the governance of the Kingdom, and many people felt the promised indemnity to the Parliamentary troops for wartime actions would create an alarming precedent for military atrocity in the event of further fighting. Many yearned for a return to the gentle Anglicanism of Elizabeth I and James I, without widespread episcopy and the Book of Common Prayer. The religious views of both Presbyterianism and the Independent and Puritan low church sects were viewed by much of the population as alien as Popery. An early warning of the insurrections to come occurred in late December 1647 when there was widespread rioting at the attempts of the Puritans to suppress the Christmas holidays on the grounds it was in reality a pagan festival. Discontent with the Parliamentary government was running high, and as former Royalist commanders began to join Hamilton and his army in Scotland, the stage was set for the return of civil war to England

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The Putney Debates: ‘Sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government, ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government.’

The Levellers Put Their Case

General Sir Thomas Fairfax heads the New Model Army Council meeting, 1647. Source: The Guardian

IN JULY 1647, London was suddenly, and unexpectedly hit by a series of riots by the citizenry. The immediate cause of the unrest was anger at a continuing high tax rate that was associated with keeping the New Model Army in the field. However, it also denoted a general weariness with war and a wish to see an early settlement with the King. The insurgency was also gently encouraged by the Presbyterians, worried that the King and the Army would soon agree to the Heads of Proposals and the scrapping of the Newcastle Propositions altogether. An angry mob entered the House of Commons which led ultimately to the flight of almost all the Independent MPs, including the Speaker of the House, to the Army encampment at Hounslow Heath. In the meantime, Henry Ireton, still locked in discussions with Charles, offered to restore the King to his throne, and escort him to the capital to do so, under the protection of the New Model Army. The ironies of this situation are rich: Charles was on the verge of being made king again by the very force that had destroyed him militarily, such was the collapse of Parliamentary unity. But, as was his wont, Charles ruined his last and best hope of regaining his realm. Encouraged by the rioting in London and the evident mutual antagonism of the Presbyterians and Independents, Charles rejected the Heads of Proposals, and continued his clandestine discussions with the Scots, convinced he could yet persuade a Covenanter army to come south and restore him to his throne with no concessions having been made.

Sir Thomas Fairfax was no revolutionary, but he was a man of duty. Legitimised by the presence of the Speaker, and with the King refusing compromise, Fairfax felt he had little choice but to enter London and restore order. On 6th August 1647, he ordered Cromwell to lead his troops into the city. No resistance was offered by the Trained Bands, the London mob, or the Presbyterians. The following day, the Army paraded in Hyde Park. No blood was spilled and no arrests were made, with the eleven MPs who had signed the Army disbandment order being allowed to slip away to the continent. However there was no doubt that what had just occurred was a military coup. The King was installed at Hampton Court where he did indeed reassemble his actual court from his years in Oxford. Charles continued to give the impression he was willing to negotiate, but both Ireton’s and Cromwell’s patience was growing thin, faced as they were by an increasing surge of radicalism within the Army, brought to the fore by the soldiers’ appreciation that they were now the only power in the land.

This radicalisation happened rapidly over the summer of 1647. As older and experienced land owning Parliamentary officers retired to their estates, understandably believing the war to be over, they were replaced by new, urban radicals, many of whom were Levellers from London itself, who joined the army with an explicit intention to use its power to establish a new constitution for England. Convinced that Fairfax, Cromwell and Ireton (now collectively known as “The Grandees”) would reach an accord with the King, five Leveller “New” Agitators presented Fairfax with a document which they claimed represented the views of the Army’s junior officers and common soldiers, entitled The Case of the Army Truly Stated, on 18th October. The proposals contained therein, in the context of the time, were wholly revolutionary. The document called for the abolition of the House of Lords; the dissolution of the Long Parliament, and its replacement with a new House of Commons elected through an expanded male suffrage ‘of all the freeborn’, with no requirement for voters to be property owners. The Case also demanded an end to all negotiations with the King, although stopped short of calling for the abolition of the monarchy. Fairfax took the New Agitators’ challenge seriously. He therefore declared that the proposals in the Case be openly and freely discussed by the Army Council and, on 28th October, in the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Putney, the so-called “Putney Debates” commenced.

The New Agitators seized their moment. When summoned by the Council to explain the Case, the five officers produced a new document, An Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace, authored by a Leveller lawyer named John Wildman, which comprised a manifesto for an entire reordering of the Kingdom of England. In addition to the Case’s demands for male suffrage, the Agreement called for full religious toleration, equality before the law, biennial elections from constituencies with similar population sizes and, crucially, the vesting of full sovereignty away from the monarch and into the House of Commons. The leading advocate of the Agreement at the debates was an experienced colonel named Thomas Rainsborough, who argued strongly for an end to property qualifications for the right to vote. Rainsborough was opposed equally fervently by Ireton , for whom the ownership of property was the equivalent to citizenship, giving landowners a literal stake in the communities they sought to represent. In truth, both Ireton and Cromwell were conflicted. As property owners themselves, they had little time for the idealism of the Levellers and also believed if the Agreement was forced through by the Army, further civil war would be an inevitable consequence. Equally, they understood their soldiers’ wish for a greater say in the running of the realm after having suffered the privations of war, and their antipathy to the King and the Lords.

However, the radicals’ explicit criticism of the Grandees proved too much for Cromwell and Fairfax. Both commanders chaired sessions of the debates and although gave every impression to listening to all sides, and allowing all views to be expressed, they were determined to see the Agreement dispensed with, viewing its nascent republicanism as not only impractical, but also ungodly. It was indeed at the Putney Debates that the Levellers first advocated that the King should be punished for making war on his own subjects and was described, in a Biblical reference by Major Thomas Harrison, as “a man of blood”.* At this stage, the Grandees had every intention of retaining Charles on his throne within a settlement based on the Proposals which would end episcopacy and establish a system of genuinely shared governance between monarch and Parliament: the notion that the King should be judicially held to account for the war was an alien, even dangerous, concept to them. Fairfax therefore ruled the debates, which were not concluding, to be at an end on 8th November, and that the Army should re-muster in a week’s time when discussion could resume. In truth, Fairfax had determined to put down the Leveller insurgency, which he felt was little short of mutinous. He declared that he would resolve all the soldiers’ outstanding grievances concerning back pay and war time amnesty and promised to work to secure the right to vote for all who had served in the Parliamentary ranks during the war. These promises from their trusted general were enough to turn the majority of troops away from the New Agitators and back to their loyalty to the Grandees. At the first of three separate musters in mid November, Fairfax arrested the officers of two regiments with known Leveller sympathies, and condemned to death four common soldiers viewed to be troublemakers (only one was actually executed after being chosen by lot). The insurrection was nipped in the bud: copies of the Agreement were destroyed and the Putney Debates were never reconvened. It would be another 150 years before the cause of non property owning universal suffrage would be seriously taken up in England again.

The New Model Army was once more united and firmly in control of the government of the realm. The Grandees however had been alarmed by the sudden rise of radical and republican sentiment amongst their own soldiers. In consequence, they resolved to cease negotiations with the King and to impose the Proposals on him. They were therefore somewhat startled to learn in late November that Charles had disappeared from Hampton Court.

*2 Samuel 16, verses 7-8

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The New Model Army Defiant: ‘What were the lords of England but William the Conqueror’s colonels or the barons but his majors?’

Cromwell and Fairfax Choose Sides

The Farmer Who Ruled England by Ron Embleton. Source: Look And Learn magazine #51 (5th January 1963).

BY THE SPRING of 1647, the split between the Presbyterian faction that dominated Parliament and the New Model Army had widened into a chasm. The Army was fundamentally opposed to Parliament’s intention to disband most of its units, save for an expeditionary force to be sent to Ireland, with its months of wage arrears unpaid and with no indemnity granted to soldiers for actions taken during the war. The Army was also suspicious at what it perceived as the marginalisation by the Presbyterians of its popular leading commanders, Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, and nervous at the apparent negotiations between Parliament and the King which they believed could see Charles re-established with full royal authority on his throne, with potentially dire consequences for those commoners who had raised arms against him. The Independents were therefore assuming more and more influence amongst the middle ranking officers and the ordinary soldiery, leading to an increased militancy, not just against a Parliamentary faction that the men believed sought to swindle them out of their due, but also against an aristocratic ruling order they saw being reimposed and which many had hoped the war had rid them of. This led to the soldiers to begin to elect so-called “Agitators” to represent their interests to Parliament. The Agitators were more akin to shop stewards than the term’s modern connotation of persuasive political radicals, and indeed one of the first actions of the new militancy was for the Army to go on strike in April 1647.

The strike manifested itself as a refusal to serve in Ireland without the soldiers’ back pay being met, legal indemnities for their actions during the fighting being issued and, significantly an insistence that the Irish expedition be led by Cromwell and Fairfax. The two commanders were in an invidious position: Fairfax remained Parliament’s commander-in-chief and Cromwell was a sitting MP. Both men privately sympathised with the strikers. Cromwell attempted to broker an agreement between Parliament and the Agitators, but the situation spiralled out of control when on 25th May, Parliament announced the disbanding of the New Model Army with the exception of the force to travel to Ireland. The Army’s response was to muster in Newmarket, a show of strength that took the Presbyterians aback who, apart from the Trained Bands in London, had no military forces of their own to deploy against what was beginning to look like an organised mutiny. The Agitators then issued their own demand that the eleven MPs who had signed the disbandment order should themselves be removed from the Commons.

This development led to Cromwell’s moment of truth. Instinctively, he was a social conservative, very wary of the radical elements of the Army, but equally he owed a debt of blood to the soldiery whom he had commanded, fought with and led to extraordinary victories. His ultimate decision was made easier by his enemies in Parliament who believed him to be, at best, tolerant of the radical Independents in the Army and at worst, their cynical manipulator. As the Presbyterians’ negotiations with Charles threatened to being Scottish troops back into England to take on the New Model Army, Cromwell resigned his Parliamentary seat and cast his lot in with the military. What followed was the most audacious move in an extraordinary career that would one day make Cromwell king of England in all but name. Following a shadowy and never proven meeting between Cromwell and his immediate officers over lunch at an inn in Drury Lane, on 2nd June, a relatively junior Agitator named George Joyce, a second lieutenant, or “Cornet” in the New Model Army cavalry, led a troop of 500 horse to Holdenby House.

Joyce was met with suspicion by the military force guarding the King at Holdenby and they refused his demands to release Charles into his custody. The enterprising Joyce then forced his way into the startled King’s bed chamber and insisted Charles accompany him to London. The King, sensing something was afoot, and having obtained assurances from Joyce he would not be harmed or compelled to do anything against his conscience, agreed. The Parliamentary guard, unwilling to take on a numerous force of New Model troopers stood down and Joyce took charge of the King. An intrigued, and quite possibly amused, Charles enquired by what authority Joyce was taking him into custody. Joyce, clearly discomfited by Charles’ persistence, obfuscated, and replied transferring the King to the care of the Army, was necessary to secure peace in the Kingdoms. When Charles continued, asking Joyce “by what commission you have” to take his action, the exasperated officer turned and indicated his mounted soldiers. “By this commission, sir,” he replied. The King acknowledged the new reality under which his realm was now ruled. “It is as fair a commission and as well written as I have seen a commission written in my life.” he allegedly remarked. On 7th June, Joyce handed Charles into the charge of Fairfax and Cromwell. The rebellious New Model Army not only now had the unequivocal support of its much loved wartime commanders, it had the King as well.

Cromwell, Fairfax and the King all now proceeded to Newmarket where the Army remained under arms. Cromwell encouraged the formation of an Army Council to, in effect, administer the rebellious force, independent of any form of Parliamentary control. Parliament quickly realised the seriousness of the situation it was faced with: failure to compromise could lead to its overthrow by the Army. They quickly conceded the Army Council’s demands : the disbandment order was rescinded, the hated eleven signatories resigned their seats and pay arrears were agreed to be met in full. Cromwell now found himself in the position of being able to seek a settlement to bring the civil war to a conclusion but mandated by neither King nor Parliament to do so. There followed a period of intense negotiation with Charles under which Cromwell and Henry Ireton were prepared to reject the Newcastle Propositions and the Solemn League and Covenant, restore Royal privilege and crush the radicals in the army in return for religious toleration, biennial Parliaments and an amnesty for the those who had fought for Parliament. The only significant concession the Independents asked of Charles was his agreement to end episcopacy. An unlikely partial Royalist victory was within Charles’ grasp if he could bring himself to agree to the generous terms, known as the Heads of Proposals, on offer.

At the same time as, crab like, a settlement of England’s constitutional crisis seemed at last possible, political opinion was hardening not only within the ranks of the New Model Army, but also within a series of disparate low church groups for whom “toleration” was simply the start. They were spear headed by a remarkable group of radical egalitarians known as “The Levellers”. These proto socialists rejected monarchical and aristocratic privilege; sought the break up of aristocratic-owned estates and their redistribution to yeoman farmers; wished Parliament to be the depository of popular as opposed to kingly sovereignty, and promoted sexual equality and the rights of women. The Levellers also believed in the intrinsic correctness of social equality under God, and advocated for commerce and small business at the expense of inherited wealth and land ownership. It is possible that the Levellers could have ultimately been dismissed as one of several short lived seventeenth century utopian and extreme religious groups such the Diggers, the Ranters, the Quakers and the Proclaimers, but, crucially, they possessed intellectual heft in the shape of their leaders, William Welwyn, Richard Overton and “Honest” John Lilburne, and a power base within the Army which could not be ignored. In the autumn of 1647, the Levellers were to be one of the most influential elements in a fascinating episode in England’s radical history: the so-callled Putney Debates.

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Friends Fall Out, 1646-1647: ‘therefore let us be rid of them with due diligence’

The King’s Enemies Divided

King Charles Meeting the Scottish Covenanters. Source: Alamy Stock Photos

KING CHARLES entertained great hopes of military rescue from Ireland. If he could reach an agreement with the rebel Confederates, he estimated he could obtain military resource from two quarters: his remaining garrison troops in the country, under the command of his Lord Lieutenant, James Butler, Earl of Ormond and currently enjoying an uneasy truce with the rebels, and from the Confederates themselves, by promising an end to any further Scottish settlements and any attempts to introduce Presbyterianism to Ireland; Charles even hinted at Catholic toleration. However negotiations, such as they were, became bogged down, and Charles had neither the time nor the patience to wait for resolution. A siege of Oxford by the New Model Army could only be weeks away and so the King opened discussions with the Covenanters, facilitated by the French agents of Cardinal Mazarin, keen to keep England weak and divided. The notion of the King negotiating with the very people who had introduced civil strife to his two Kingdoms over a decade before, was not as folorn a hope as might be imagined. The Scots were very frustrated with their English Parliamentary allies, who had failed to deliver, or even to agree to, the introduction of Presbyterianism throughout the United Kingdom. In fact, Parliament’s own factionalism saw the rise of the Independents as a bloc within the Commons and their influence spread rapidly within the New Model Army. The Independents, who represented a range of low Church Protestant religious groupings, were opposed to any form of imposed or unified Church and sought religious toleration for all but Roman Catholics. To compound matters, the Scottish Commissioners remained infuriated that Parliament had still made no attempts to recompense the Covenanters for the costs of their crucial military contribution in the north of England, which now ran to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Therefore Charles and the Covenanters did indeed have potential common ground thanks to their mutual antipathy to the English Parliament.

Unfortunately, the King, despite his own self belief and optimism, was a poor negotiator. The Scots had been explicit about their wish to see Presbyterianism installed throughout the realm for over ten years: this was not negotiable, especially given the amount of blood and treasure now expended trying to achieve that aim. The only concession the King was willing to make however, was to “tolerate” Presbyterianism within, by implication, an Anglican settlement. The negotiations nearly foundered before they had begun. Perhaps for reasons best known to himself, Charles determined matters needed the personal touch and on 27th April 1646, he abandoned his court at Oxford and, disguised as a servant and accompanied by just two retainers, headed to Newark, one of the last Royalist hold outs and enduring a Covenanter siege. Despite having made no intimations to the King that they were open to an anti Parliamentary alliance with him, the Scots were astounded when on 7th May, Charles entered the besiegers’ encampment and gave himself up. The King was to remain a prisoner for the rest of his life.

Charles’ voluntary surrender to the Scots does, on the face of it, seem curious, but the King, after four years of increasingly bloody civil war, trusted a potentially vengeful English Parliament less than he did the Covenanters. He was convinced he could yet strike a deal with the Scots and use their forces to defeat his English enemies. In the meantime, as a highly valued prisoner, he knew he had their protection. The Scots moved Charles to their stronghold in Newcastle and made it clear to Parliament that, now the war was won, they expected the Solemn League and Covenant to be honoured and for the money owed them by the English to be paid.

The fact was that the coalition that had defeated the King was rapidly falling apart. The split between the English Presbyterians in Parliament and the Independents was becoming fundamental. The Scots sensed that their best route to achieving their prime religious aim was to make common cause with the Presbyterians in Parliament and see off the Independents. This situation offered possibilities to Charles as the Scots and Presbyterians hoped for Charles’ agreement to help introduce such a settlement. A more wily and pragmatic monarch could have made much of these divisions. In the event, the Presbyterian faction went so far as to offer the King and the Covenanters to break up the New Model Army altogether and to dissolve the Independents. Their demands in return however - formulated in the so-called “Newcastle Propositions” - were severe. Under these terms, not only was the King to agree to the end if episcopacy and to introduce unified Presbyterianism to England, he was also to agree to ceding control of the armed forces to Parliament for twenty years, the consent of the Commons to all new entrants to the House of Lords and to allow the confiscation of the property of his supporters and the prosecution of prominent Royalists; the King himself was to convert to Presbyterianism.

Even a pragmatic king would have struggled to sign up to the Propositions which the Presbyterians also made clear were not subject to negotiation. The King did not even pretend to engage with the proposals. Instead, he secretly reopened discussions with the Irish Confederates before making an abortive attempt to escape his Newcastle captivity at Christmas 1646. He was swiftly recaptured, but the Scots despaired both of the King and his Parliament. Giving up hope of ever seeing the Solemn League and Covenant implemented, they instead offered to “sell” Charles to the Presbyterian faction in return for a payment of £400,000 in war debts, actually less than half of what they were owed. Parliament agreed and on 27th January 1647, Charles was escorted by Presbyterian aligned Parliamentary troops to Holdenbury House in Northamptonshire where he was held in a comfortable house arrest. In February, the Covenanters duly withdrew their forces north of the border and demobilised, leaving the English to work out their own political settlement with the King. As far as the Covenanters were concerned after five years of warfare, their involvement in English affairs was over.

The collapse of the English Parliamentary alliance into full fledged factional conflict now accelerated apace. With the end of the war and the withdrawal of the Scots, the need for the Committee of Both Kingdoms was obviated. Command of the Army now devolved to the Committee of Irish Affairs, a new body dominated by Presbyterians. It resolved to use the requirement to put down the Irish rebellion as the opportunity also to break the power of the New Model Army. It was decided to reduce the Army to an expeditionary force of no more than 12,000 men and to send it to defeat the Irish Confederacy. The rest of the army units would be disbanded, with no payment of outstanding wages or the grant of indemnity against acts committed by the soldiers during the war. This transparent act to break the power of the Army and the Independents, whom the Presbyterians viewed as essentially one and the same, was to have fateful consequences for both Parliament and the King: it was to lead to the radicalisation of the New Model Army and the emergence of an increasingly influential new egalitarian group, known as the Levellers.