The New World: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume II (The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading Series)

IT PROVED IMPOSSIBLE TO FILL THE VOID WHICH THE DEATH OF THE Lord Protector had created. In his last hours Cromwell had in terms “very dark and imperfect” nominated his eldest son, Richard, to succeed him. “Tumbledown Dick,” as his enemies nicknamed him, was a respectable person with good intentions, but without the force and capacity required by the severity of the times. He was at first accepted by the Army and duly installed in his father’s seat; but when he attempted to exercise authority he found he had but the form. The first appointment Richard Cromwell sought to make in the Army, of which his own brother-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, was Commander-in-Chief, was objected to by the Council of Officers. Richard was made aware alike that the command of the Army was not hereditary, and also that it could not remain unfilled. His brother, Henry, who was both able and energetic, strove like Richard to strengthen the civil power even at the expense of the monarchical attributes of the Protector’s office. Upon Henry Cromwell’s advice Parliament was summoned.

It was of course a Parliament from which all Royalists were formally excluded, and one which the ever-active Thurloe made a supreme effort to pack with Protectorate supporters. Nevertheless it immediately raised the large issues of government. After Richard had opened it in due state and delivered his “speech from the throne” the Commons set themselves without delay to restore the principles of the Commonwealth and to control the Army. They questioned the validity of all Acts since the purge of 1657 had robbed Parliament of its representative integrity. They sought to transfer the allegiance of the Army from the Protector to themselves. The Army leaders were however determined to preserve their independent power. They complained of the conduct of the Commons and that the “good old cause” was endangered. “For this cause,” they said, “we have covered ourselves with blood; we shudder when we think of the account which we must one day give if we suffer the blood-bought liberties of the people to be again destroyed.” The Commons thought it unbearable that the Army should establish itself as a separate Estate of the Realm. They called upon the assembled officers to return to their military duties. “It would fare ill with Parliament,” they declared, “if they could no longer order them to return to their posts.” They resolved that every officer should pledge himself in writing not to interrupt the sittings and debates of Parliament.

In their conflict with the Army they became willing to entrust the chief command to the Protector. This brought the dispute to a head. Both sides marshalled their forces; but although at first it seemed that both the Protectorate and Parliament had a proportion of the officers and a number of the regiments at their disposal, the will of the inferior officers and the rank and file prevailed over all. Within four months of succeeding to his august office Richard Cromwell found himself deserted even by his personal guard. The immediate dissolution of Parliament was demanded, and a Committee of Officers waited all night for compliance. In the morning they were obeyed. The Commons Members who sought to assemble were once again turned back by the troops. The Army was master, with Fleetwood and Lambert rivals at its head. These generals would have been content to leave Richard a limited dignity, but the spirit of the troops had become hostile to the Protectorate. They were resolved upon a pure republic, in which their military interest and sectarian and Anabaptist doctrines should hold the chief place.

Even in this hour of bloodless and absolute triumph the soldiery felt the need of some civil sanction for their acts. But where could they find it? At length an expedient was suggested to them. They declared that they recollected that the members of the Parliamentary assembly which sat in April 1653 had been “champions of the good old cause and had been throughout favoured with God’s assistance.” They went to the house of the former Speaker, Lenthall, and invited him and his surviving colleagues of 1653 to renew the exercise of their powers, and in due course, to the number of forty-two, these astonished Puritan grandees resumed the seats from which they had been expelled six years earlier. Thus was the Rump of the Long Parliament exhumed and exhibited to a bewildered land.

A Council of State was formed in which the three principal Republican leaders, Vane, Hazelrigg, and Scott, sat with eight generals and eighteen other Members of Parliament. Provision was made for Oliver Cromwell’s sons, whose acquiescence in the abolition of the Protectorate was desired. Their debts were paid; they were provided with residences and incomes. Richard accepted these proposals at once, and Henry after some hesitation. Both lived unharmed to the end of their days. The Great Seal of the Protectorate was broken in two. The Army declared that they recognised Fleetwood as their Commander-in-Chief, but they agreed that the commissions of high officers should be signed by the Speaker in the name of the Commonwealth. A Republican Constitution based on the representative principle was set up, and all the authorities in the land submitted themselves to it. But the inherent conflict between the Army and Parliament continued. “I know not why,” observed General Lambert, “they should not be at our mercy as well as we at theirs.”

While these stresses racked the Republican administration in London a widespread Royalist movement broke out in the country. The recent changes at the centre of government had brought to power inveterate opponents of the Stuart house. There seemed good reason for an appeal to force. In the summer of 1659 Cavaliers, strangely consorting with Presbyterian allies, appeared in arms in several counties. They were at their strongest in Lancashire and Cheshire, where the Derby influence was lively. Sir George Booth was soon at the head of a large force. Against him Lambert marched with five thousand men. At Winnington Bridge, on August 19, the Royalists were chased from the field, although, as Lambert said in his dispatch, “the horse on both sides fought like Englishmen.” Elsewhere the Cavalier gatherings were dispersed by the local militia. The revolt was so swiftly crushed that Charles II, fortunately for himself, had no chance of putting himself at its head. The Army had with equal ease overthrown the adherents of the Protectorate and of the monarchy. The clatter of arms reminded the generals of their power, and they were soon again in sharp dispute with the truncated Parliament they had resuscitated.

At this moment Lambert became the most prominent figure. He had returned to London from the victory at winnington Bridge with most of his troops. In October, when Parliament, offended at his arrogance, sought to dismiss him and his colleagues from their commands he took the lead in bringing his regiments to Westminster and barred all the entrances to St. Stephen’s Chapel. Even Speaker Lenthall, who had signed the generals’ commissions, was prevented from entering. When he asked indignantly “did they not know him” the soldiers replied that they had not noticed him at Winnington Bridge. No blood was shed, but the chief power passed for the moment into Lambert’s hands.

Lambert was a man of high ability, with a military record second only to Oliver Cromwell’s and a wide knowledge of politics. He did not attempt to make himself Lord Protector. Far different were the ideas that stirred him. His wife, a woman of culture and good family, cherished Royalist sympathies and family ambitions. A plan was proposed, to which she and the General lent themselves, for the marriage of their daughter to Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York, as part of a process by which Lambert, if he became chief magistrate of the Republic, would restore the King to the throne. This project was seriously entertained on both sides; and the extreme lenience shown to all the Royalists taken prisoner in the recent rising was a part of it. Lambert seems to have believed that he could satisfy the Army, both in politics and religion, better under a restored monarchy than under either the Rump or a Protectorate. His course was secret, tortuous, and full of danger. Already Fleetwood’s suspicions were aroused, and a deep antagonism grew between these two military chiefs. At the same time the Army, sensing its own disunity, began to have misgivings about its violent actions against Parliament.

Sternest and most unbending of the Republican Members was Hazelrigg, whose pale face, thin lips, and piercing eyes imparted to all the impression of Brutus-like constancy. Hazelrigg, barred from the Commons, hastened to Portsmouth, and convinced the garrison that the troops in London had done wrong to great principles. When Fleetwood and Lambert, themselves divided, sent a force to invest Portsmouth Hazelrigg converted the besiegers to his views. This portion of the Ironside Army presently set out for London in order to take a hand in the settlement of affairs. The schism in the rank and file was beginning to destroy the self-confidence of the troops and put an end to the rule of the sword in England. At Christmas the Army resolved to be reconciled with Parliament. “Let us live and die with Parliament,” they shouted. They marched to Chancery Lane and drew up before the house of Speaker Lenthall. Instead of the disrespect with which they had so recently treated him, the soldiers now expressed their penitence for having suspended the sittings of the House. They submitted themselves to the authority of Parliament and hailed the Speaker as their general and the father of their country. But obviously this could not last. Someone must set in train the movement which would produce in England a Government which stood for something old or new. It was from another quarter that deliverance was to come.

The Cromwellian commander in Scotland, though very different in temperament from Lambert, was also a man of mark. Once again England was to be saved by a man who was not in a hurry. George Monk, a Devonshire gentleman, who had in his youth received a thorough military training in the Dutch wars, had come back to England at the beginning of the Great Rebellion equipped with rare professional knowledge. He was a soldier of fortune, caring more for plying his trade than for the causes at stake. He had fought for Charles I in all three kingdoms. After being captured and imprisoned by the Roundheads he went over to their side, and soon gained an important command. He fought in Ireland, and at sea against the Dutch. He had steered his way through all the hazardous channels and storms, supporting in turn and at the right moment Parliament, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. He brought Scotland, in Oliver Cromwell’s day, into complete subjection, but without incurring any lasting animosity. He ranged himself from the first against the violence of the Army in London. Moving with the sentiments of the Scottish people, he gained from a Convention supplies to maintain his army without causing offence. He purged his command of all officers whom he could not trust. Lambert, still pursuing his ill-assorted designs, now found himself confronted by Monk. Monk used the watchwords of Parliament and Law; he commanded the sympathy of the English Republicans and the complete confidence of the Scots, whose interests he promised to safeguard. Lambert, who had marched North from London in November 1659 with a powerful army, was devoid of any acknowledgeable cause, seemed to stand for nothing but military violence, and had to maintain his troops by forced contributions from the countryside, to its extreme disgust and scandal.

Monk was one of those Englishmen who understand to perfection the use of time and circumstances. It is a type which has thriven in our Island. The English are apt to admire men who do not attempt to dominate events or turn the drift of fate; who wait about doing their duty on a short view from day to day until there is no doubt whether the tide is on the ebb or the flow; and who then, with the appearance of great propriety and complete self-abnegation, with steady, sterling qualities of conduct if not of heart, move slowly, cautiously, forward towards the obvious purpose of the nation. During the autumn of 1659 General Monk in his headquarters on the Tweed with his well-ordered army of about seven thousand men was the object of passionate solicitations from every quarter. They told him he had the future of England in his hands, and all appealed for his goodwill. The General received the emissaries of every interest and party in his camp. He listened patiently, as every great Englishman should, to all they had to urge, and with that simple honesty of character on which we flatter ourselves as a race he kept them all guessing for a long time what he would do.

At length when all patience was exhausted Monk acted. Informed of events in London, he crossed the Tweed from Coldstream on the cold, clear New Year’s Day of 1660. In spite of all his precautions his anxieties about his troops were well founded. In the general uncertainty he held them only from day to day. The Roundhead veteran Thomas Fairfax now appeared in York, and rallied a large following for a Free Parliament. Monk had promised to be with him or perish within ten days. He kept his word. At York he received what he had long hoped for, the invitation of the House of Commons, the desperate Rump, to come to London. He marched south through towns and counties in which there was but one cry—“A free Parliament!” When Monk and his troops reached London he was soon angered by the peremptory orders given him by the Rump, including one to pull down the City gates in order to overawe the capital. For the City was now turning Royalist and collecting funds for Charles II. Unlike Cromwell and Lambert, Monk decided to tame the Rump by diluting, not by dissolving it. In February he recalled the Members who had been excluded by Pride’s Purge. These were mainly Presbyterians, most of whom had become at heart Royalists. The restoration of the monarchy came into sight. On the night of the return of the excluded Members Samuel Pepys saw the City of London “from one end to another with a glory about it, so high was the light of the bonfires and so thick round it, . . . and the bells rang everywhere.” The restored Parliament as their first act declared invalid all Acts and transactions since Pride’s Purge in 1648. They had been ejected by one general. They were restored by another. The interval of twelv years had been filled by events without name or sanction. They declared Monk Commander-in-Chief of all the forces. The Rump of the Long Parliament was dissolved by its own consent. Monk was satisfied that a free Parliament should be summoned, and that such a Parliament would certainly recall Charles II. He was genuinely convinced after his march from Scotland that the mass of the English people were tired of constitutional experiments and longed for the return of the monarchy.

But there was a vast pother of matters which must be settled. This was no time for vengeance. If the Parliamentary Army was to bring back the King it must not be by any stultification of their vigorous exertions against his father. But here the latent wisdom of the Island played its part. In the hour of victory there had been excesses, and the principles of the Great Rebellion had been unduly extended. It was necessary to recur to the original position in theory, but not in practice. Monk sent word to Charles II advising him to offer a free and general pardon, subject only to certain exceptions to be fixed by Parliament; to promise full payment of the soldiers’ arrears, and to confirm the land sales. Here was an England where a substantial part of the land, the main source of wealth and distinction, had passed into other hands. These changes had been made good in the field. They could not be entirely undone. The King might enjoy his own again, but not all the Cavaliers. There must be a full recognition that men should keep what they had got or still had left. There must be no reprisals. Everyone must start fair on the new basis.

But sacred blood had flowed. Those living who had shed it were few and identifiable. If everyone else who had profited by the Parliamentary victory could be sure they would not be affected or penalised there would not be much objection on their part to punishing the regicides. The deed of 1649 was contrary to law, against the presumptive will of Parliament, and abhorrent to the nation. Let those who had done it pay the price. This somewhat unheroic solution was found to be in harmony with that spirit of compromise which has played so invaluable a part in British affairs.

Monk’s advice was accepted by Charles’ faithful Chancellor, Hyde, who had shared his master’s exile and was soon to be rewarded with the Earldom of Clarendon. Hyde drafted Charles’ manifesto called the Declaration of Breda. In this document the King promised to leave all thorny problems for future Parliaments to settle. It was largely due to Hyde’s lawyerly concern for Parliament and precedent that the Restoration came to stand for the return of good order and the revival, after Cromwell’s experiments, of the country’s ancient institutions.

While the negotiations reached their final form the elections for a new Parliament were held. Nominally those who had borne arms against the Republic were excluded, but the Royalist tide flowed so strongly that this ban had no effect. Presbyterians and Royalists found themselves in a great majority, and the Republicans and Anabaptists went down before them in every county. In vain did they rise in arms; in vain did they propose to recall Richard Cromwell who was about to seek refuge in France. They were reminded that they themselves had cast him out. Lambert, escaping from the Tower, in which he had been confined, prepared to dispute the quarrel in the field. His men deserted him, and he was recaptured without bloodshed. This fiasco sealed the Restoration. Monk, the bulk of his army, the City militia, the Royalists throughout the land, the great majority of the newly elected House of Commons, the peers, who assembled again as if nothing had happened, were all banded together, and knew that they had the power. The Lords and Commons were restored. It remained only to complete the three Estates of the Realm by the recall of the King.

Parliament hastened to send the exiled Charles a large sum of money for his convenience, and soon concerned itself with the crimson velvet furniture of his coaches of State. The Fleet, once so hostile, was sent to conduct him to his native shores. Immense crowds awaited him at Dover. There on May 25, 1660, General Monk received him with profound reverence as he landed. The journey to London was triumphal. All classes crowded to welcome the King home to his own. They cheered and wept in uncontrollable emotion. They felt themselves delivered from a nightmare. They now dreamed they had entered a Golden Age. Charles, Clarendon, Nicholas, the well-tried secretary, and a handful of wanderers who had shared the royal misfortunes gazed about them in astonishment. Could this be the same island from which they had escaped so narrowly only a few years back? Still more must Charles have wondered whether he slept or waked when on Blackheath he saw the dark, glistening columns of the Ironside Army drawn up in stately array and dutiful obedience. It was but eight years since he had hidden from its patrols in the branches of the Boscobel oak. It was but a few months since they had driven his adherents into rout at Winnington Bridge. The entry to the City was a blaze of thanksgiving. The Lord Mayor and Councillors of rebel London led the festival. The Presbyterian divines obstructed his passage only to have the honour of presenting the Bible amid their fervent salutations. Both Houses of Parliament acknowledged their devotion to his rights and person. And all around the masses, rich and poor, Cavalier and Roundhead, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Independent, framed a scene of reconciliation and rejoicing without compare in history. It was England’s supreme day of joy.

The wheel had not however swung a full circle, as many might have thought. This was not only the restoration of the monarchy; it was the restoration of Parliament. Indeed, it was the greatest hour in Parliamentary history. The House of Commons had broken the Crown in the field; it had at length mastered the terrible Army it had created for that purpose. It had purged itself of its own excesses, and now stood forth beyond all challenge, or even need of argument, as the dominant institution of the realm. All that was solid in the constitutional claims put forward against Charles I had become so deeply rooted that it was not even necessary to mention it. All the laws of the Long Parliament since Charles I quitted London at the beginning of 1642, all the statutes of the Commonwealth or of the Protectorate, now fell to the ground. But there remained the potent limitations of the Prerogative to which Charles I had agreed. The statutes to which he had set his seal were valid. The work of 1641 still stood. Above all, everyone now took it for granted that the Crown was the instrument of Parliament and the King the servant of his people.

Though the doctrine of Divine Right was again proclaimed, that of Absolute Power had been abandoned. The criminal jurisdiction of the Privy Council, the Star Chamber, and the High Commission Court were gone. The idea of the Crown levying taxes without the consent of Parliament or by ingenious and questionable devices had vanished. All legislation henceforward stood upon the majorities of legally elected Parliaments, and no royal ordinance could resist or replace it. The Restoration achieved what Pym and Hampden had originally sought, and rejected the excesses into which they had been drawn by the stress of conflict and the crimes and follies of war and dictatorship. The victory of the Commons and the Common Law was permanent.

A new conception of sovereignty had now been born. In their early conflicts with Charles I and his father the Parliamentarians had not aimed at abolishing the Prerogative altogether. The Common Lawyers had borne the brunt of the struggle, and the principles for which they had contended were in the main Common Law principles. They had struggled to ensure that the King should be under the law. This meant the law for which Magna Carta was felt to stand—traditional law, the kind of law which made Englishmen free from arbitrary arrest and arbitrary punishment; the law that had for centuries been declared in the courts of Common Law. Parliament had not striven to make itself omnipotent, nor to destroy the traditional powers of the Crown, but to control their exercise so that the liberties of Parliament and of the individual were safeguarded and protected. Coke had claimed that judges were the highest interpreters of the law. During the years without a King, and without the Royal Prerogative, the idea had emerged that an Act of Parliament was the final authority. This had no root in the past, nor was it part of the lawyers’ case. Power had passed from the lawyers to the leaders of cavalry, and they had left their mark upon the Constitution. Coke’s claim that the fundamental law of custom and tradition could not be overborne, even by Crown and Parliament together, and his dream of judges in a Supreme Court of Common Law declaring what was or what was not legal, had been extinguished in England for ever. It survived in New England across the ocean, one day to emerge in an American revolution directed against both Parliament and Crown.

Finance at the Restoration was, as ever, an immediate and thorny subject. Large sums were needed, apart from the ordinary charges, for paying off the Army and the debts contracted by the King in exile. The debts of the Protectorate were heartily repudiated. The King relinquished his feudal dues from wardships, knight service, and other medieval survivals. Parliament granted him instead revenues for life which, with his hereditary property, were calculated to yield about £1,200,000. This was keeping him very strait, and in fact the figure proved optimistic, but he and his advisers professed themselves content. The country was impoverished by the ordeal through which it had passed; the process of tax collection was grievously deranged; a settlement for life was not to be disdained. For all extraordinary expenditure the King was dependent upon Parliament, and both he and Clarendon accepted this. The Crown was not to be free of Parliament.

Such decisions of the united nation, which laid the scalpel on so many festering wounds, could not, however necessary, be received without pain and wincing by those affected. The Cavaliers were mortified that the vindication of their cause brought them no relief from the mulctings of which they had been the victims. In vain they protested that the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity was in fact one of oblivion for past services and indemnity for past crimes. They were scandalised that only those who had actually condemned the Royal Martyr should be punished, while those who had compassed and achieved his ruin in bloody war and wreaked their malice on his faithful friends should escape scot-free and even be enriched. Everyone however, except the soldiers, was agreed about getting rid of the Army; and that this could be done, and done without bloodshed, seemed a miracle. The Ironside soldiers were abashed by public opinion. Every hand was turned against them. After all the services they had rendered, the victories they had won in the field, the earnest efforts they had made to establish a godly Government for the realm, the restraints of personal conduct they had observed, they found themselves universally detested. They were to be thrust out into the darkness. But they yielded themselves to the tide of opinion. They were paid their dues. They returned to their homes and their former callings, and within a few months this omnipotent, invincible machine, which might at any moment have devoured the whole realm and society of Britain, vanished in the civil population, leaving scarcely a trace behind. Henceforward they showed themselves examples of industry and sobriety, as formerly of valour and zeal.

Of about sixty men who had signed the late King’s death warrant a third were dead, a third had fled, and a bare twenty remained. King Charles strove against his loyal Parliament to save as many as possible. Feeling ran high. The King fought for clemency for his father’s murderers, and Parliament, many of whose Members had abetted their action, clamoured for retribution. In the end nine suffered the extreme penalty of treason. They were the scapegoats of collective crime. Nearly all of them gloried in their deed. Harrison and other officers stepped upon the scaffold with the conviction that posterity would salute their sacrifice. Hugh Peters, the fiery preacher, alone showed weakness, but the example of his comrades and a strong cordial sustained him, and when the executioner, knife in hand, covered with blood, met him in the shambles with “How does that suit you, Dr. Peters?” he answered steadfastly that it suited him well enough.

The numbers of those executed fell so far short of the public demand that an addition was made to the bloody scene which at any rate cost no more life. The corpses of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were pulled out of their coffins in Westminster Abbey, where they had been buried a few years earlier in solemn state, drawn through the streets on hurdles to Tyburn, hanged upon the three-cornered gibbet for twenty-four hours, their heads spiked up in prominent places, and the remains cast upon the dunghill. Pym and twenty other Parliamentarians were also disinterred and buried in a pit. Such ghoulish warring with the dead was enforced by the ferocity of public opinion, to which the King was glad to throw carcasses instead of living men.

Only two other persons in England were condemned to death, General Lambert and Sir Harry Vane. Lambert had a wild career behind him, and in the last year of the Republic might at any moment have laid his hands upon supreme power. We have seen the plans which he had indulged for his daughter’s marriage. He had imagined himself as the Constable of the Restoration, forestalling Monk, or alternatively as a successor of His Highness the Lord Protector after destroying Monk. He was a man of limitless audacity and long experience in military revolution. But all just failed. Now Lambert, the Ironside general, hero of a dozen fields, humbled himself before his judges. He sought mercy from the King. He found in the King’s brother, the Duke of York, a powerful advocate. He was pardoned, and lived the rest of his life in Guernsey, “with liberty to move about the island,” and later in Plymouth, consoling himself with painting and botany.

Vane was of tougher quality. He scorned to sue for mercy, and so spirited was his defence, so searching his law and logic, that he might well have been indulged. But there was one incident in his past which now proved fatal to him. It was remembered that twenty years before he had purloined, and disclosed to Pym, his father’s notes of the Privy Council meeting, alleging that Strafford had advised the bringing of an Irish army into England, thus sealing Stafford’s fate. If debts were to be paid, this was certainly not one to be overlooked. Charles showed no desire to spare him. “He is too dangerous to let live,” the King said, “if we can honestly put him out of the way.” He met his death with the utmost alacrity and self-confidence, and the blare of trumpets drowned the cogent arguments he sought to offer to the hostile crowd.

Almost the only notable in Scotland to suffer death at the Restoration was the Marquess of Argyll. He came to London to join in the royal welcome, but was immediately arrested. Charles, wishing to be rid of the burden, sent him back to Scotland to be tried by his peers and fellow countrymen. The restored King had had a long fight to minimise these gruesome deeds. “I am weary of hanging,” he said. But the Scottish Parliament in the temper of the new hour made haste to send their former guide and mentor to the block. He too died with unflinching courage and with exemplary piety; but everyone felt it was quits for Montrose. In all therefore, through Charles’ exertions, and at some expense to his popularity, less than a dozen persons were put to death in this intense Counter-Revolution. By an ironic contrivance which Charles must have enjoyed, they were made to be condemned by some of the principal accessories to and profiteers by their crimes. Leading figures of the Parliamentary party, peers and commoners, high officers under the Republic or Cromwell, made ready shift to sit upon the tribunals which slaughtered the regicides; and it is upon these that history may justly cast whatever odium belongs to these melancholy but limited reprisals.