CHAPTER EIGHT
You have done your work, and may go to play; unless you will fall out among yourselves.
Lord Astley on being captured by Parliament in 1646
The twelve months that stretched forward from the summer of 1646 constitute one of those watershed periods of English history from which many rivers flow. In the life story of Oliver Cromwell it began with an outward decline into the obscurity of civilian life in contrast to the military glories of the last four years. One of Oliver’s first gestures towards his altered status was to bring his family up from Ely to London. Deserting the spacious street of Long Acre (in the course of his sojourn there his cost of living had risen, his rating for the poor ascending from 10s. to 14s.), he acquired a house in nearby Drury Lane. The precise site is unknown, but it was certainly close to the famous Red Lion Inn of Holborn which played much part in the annals of the time. Holborn was at the time the most respectable residential neighbourhood for a man of Cromwell’s station, a recent building development linking City and Westminster. And for family life it had something of the appearance of a garden city: country flowers still grew in profusion as John Gerard had noted in his Herball a generation earlier. The great English taste for gardening, observed in this period by the puritan philosopher Samuel Hartlib, ensured that nature was still further enriched by art: in London gardens grew freely the Musk, the Blush and theDamask Rose, peonies and even gooseberries for the more enthusiastic. Vines flourished in Leicester fields; there were great elms in the gardens of the Inns of Court, and roundabout in Holborn, mulberries, figs, horse-chestnuts and morello cherries.1
Oliver was now, in theory at least, a man of some substance in possession of a handsome income assigned to him by a grateful Parliament. But in practice there were many delays in the granting (by the spring of 1648 he said that he had received only a total of £1680) which may account for the anomalous continued presence of Cromwell’s name in the pay-books of the New Model Army despite his official disbandment in July. Recent research has brought to light various payments authorized by Fairfax, including one on 23 November to Cromwell as Lieutenant-General of the horse for one hundred and twenty days’ pay; on 2 December Cromwell even received the unusually large advance of £500 ‘being so much Money upon account to be abated out of my next Pay in the Army’.*Yet his commission had duly run out in July and, for all that he continued to bear the honorific title of Lieutenant-General, was not renewed. Under the circumstances his inclusion within the administrative framework of the Army for pay purposes probably helped to gloss over Parliament’s deficiency. Strange legends spring up round the Cromwell name. He is said, for instance, to have built Cromwell House, Highgate (now part of a hospital) and presented it to Bridget on her marriage. But Cromwell in 1646 would hardly have been in a position to indulge in such a scheme, nor did he do so.2 At the end of 1647 he moved the Cromwell family again, to King Street, Westminster, just by the modern Parliament Square. It is a point now eliminated by the widening of Parliament Street and covered by government offices, but then lying between Charles Street and Great George Street. It was obviously much closer to the House of Commons than Holborn and the move must be seen as a reflection of the growing intensity of Cromwell’s Parliamentary life.
London, rudely described by Thomas Hobbes as having ‘a great belly but no palate nor taste of right and wrong’, had at any rate shown sensibility enough in the recent conflict to take its own self-defence very seriously: fortifications, possibly part of a total circumvallation, and certainly including batteries at strategic points such as Tothill Fields and the present site of Buckingham Palace, then the Spring Gardens, were still to be seen in 1647; the modern name of Mount Street is said to have commemorated a huge lump of earth which formed part of these deployments.3 In other ways than the continued existence of now unnecessary bulwarks in a once peaceful and mercantile city, the state of London was confused. The enormous bewilderment of the multitude of the people of England during the Civil War was an obvious corollary of its regional character where big issues – whatever they might be – tended to be fought out by small battles between known local enemies. London was but a microcosm of the general unease, for with the peace had come no clearly defined return to the old values, or even the sort of recognizable continuity expressed in a royal Court. The poet Cleveland had expressed this melancholia, lamenting the lost graces of the vanished age in his poem of 1645, The General Eclipse:
Ladies that gild the glittering morn
And by reflection mend his ray …
What are you now the Queen’s away?
Puritanism was spreading across the city like a cold mist as a result of the various Parliamentary ordinances to disseminate it: Christmas came on the proscribed list as popish flummery and in 1646 the House of Commons dutifully sat through Christmas Day. The following spring the apprentices, finding themselves deprived of the many holidays implicit in the Church festivals, felt obliged to petition for substitutes in the shape of monthly ‘play-days’. London, in short, was full of malcontents of many sorts.
The lack of a Court only mirrored the lack of a King, a prisoner by his own choice in the hands of the Scots. It was almost ludicrous how little concerning his position had been settled by the past war – or the great rebellion as the King’s adherents preferred to term it. The political settlement remained to be furbished virtually from scratch, since nothing had emerged of any moment from the various attempts at peacemaking during its course: the exact rights of the King in relation to Parliament and of Parliament to the rest of the nation were still to be analysed with as much fervour as if Marston and Naseby had never been fought. The first effort at filling this political vacuum occurred in July when the so-called Newcastle Propositions were presented to Charles, now held by the Scots in that town on the borders of Scotland and England. The propositions, which would have fairly clipped the royal wings by placing the control of the Army under Parliament for twenty years, and punishing his leading supporters, also served to underline the fact that once back at Westminster, it was very much the Presbyterians who enjoyed the Parliamentary majority. The religious clauses included not only the swearing of the Covenant by the King and his subjects and the abolition of the episcopacy, but also the reformation of religion according to the wishes of Parliament in consultation with the Assembly of Divines at Westminster.
It was hardly a settlement which could have been palatable to Charles, even if he had felt himself to be in extremis. But the King, far from despairing, was ever mindful of the possibilities of dissension among his various opponents. Astley, on being taken prisoner on the way to Oxford, had told the Parliamentarians prophetically, ‘You have done your work, and may go to play; unless you will fall out among yourselves.’ It was the latter expectation which continued to interest his sovereign. Nevertheless Charles did not see fit to reject the proposals out of hand: he gave what Cromwell described as a very general answer, seeking as always to conceal with outward prevarication a real inability to compromise. Cromwell himself, having taken no part in the negotiations, showed that at the same period his Independent sympathies for toleration remained unabated. He intervened with one of his friendly appeals on behalf of some poor inhabitants of Hapton, south of Norwich over ‘the trouble I hear they are like to suffer for their consciences. And however the world interprets it,’ he wrote, ‘I am not ashamed to solicit for such as are anywhere under a pressure of this kind; doing therein as I would be done by …’4
But such petty kindnesses were small change for the man who had been hailed as Parliament’s most glorious General: as the Presbyterians in the Commons pressed home their own views, Oliver’s mood sank by degrees into a depression very different from the triumphant exaltation of the military campaigns. By August he was writing to his old commander Fairfax at Bath, back after reducing Raglan Castle, with real despair: ‘Things are not well in Scotland; would they were in England! We are full of faction and worse.’5Indeed Cromwell’s gloomy analysis of the two kingdoms could hardly be gainsaid in the summer of 1646, and for good measure he might well have thrown in Charles’s third dominion, Ireland. The position of the Scots was perhaps the simplest of the three: they still held the King prisoner inside England, but basically they wished to be paid off for their services and return home. Of the English, although there was general agreement that the disappearance northwards of these turbulent allies was highly desirable, the Presbyterians viewed the Scots from the angle of potential allies, the Independents from the opposite vantage of possible opponents. Meanwhile the long bubbling volcano of Ireland was showing signs of overflowing, in which case it would react on the English political situation once more in earnest.
During the prosecution of the Civil War neither King nor Parliament had shown much sign of concentrating on their respective Irish campaigns: the King had wanted peace in Ireland to beat Parliament, and Parliament peace to beat the King. But the existence of three other rogue armies within the island had successfully ensured that peace was the last thing anyone in Ireland enjoyed. By the summer of 1646 the five forces all rampant in Irish territory included that of the Earl of Ormonde, King Charles’s Protestant General, head of the great Anglo-Norman family of Butler, with vast estates in Kilkenny, a man of prodigious energy whose flaxen hair had earned him the sobriquet of James the White; looking at his portrait later Cromwell noted approvingly that he looked more like a huntsman than a soldier.6 Ormonde, whose natural qualities made his leadership one of the King’s most promising assets in Ireland, had managed to effect a tenuous link with a second army interested temporarily in a royal victory – that of the Irish Catholic confederates under their own equally colourful leader, Owen Roe O’Neill. The Irish Catholics sported a heroic motto, ‘Ireland united for God, King and Country’, but were themselves checkered with internal disagreements. The third army was equally Catholic, that of the papal legate Cardinal Rinuccini, armed with Roman gold, but much less inclined to be friendly to Ormonde, being more interested in the restoration of Catholicism than that of the King. The fourth and fifth armies were both Protestant: there was that of the Scots under Munro, defeated by O’Neill in June at the battle of Benburb; lastly there still existed the official Parliamentary army under Sir Charles Coote.
Ormonde managed to conclude a peace with the confederate Irish at the end of 1646, but the Cardinal, a man of much Italian subtlety but little understanding of Irish affairs, upset the union by seeing to it that the orders of King Charles’s Lord-Lieutenant received a ban from the clergy.7 It was at this point that Ormonde, fearing to lose Ireland altogether to the Catholic Irish now showing themselves so obdurate, and knowing that the King was in no position to help him, appealed to Parliament for aid. His request met with sympathy from the Independents who were quite willing that some regiments of the New Model should be sent to Ireland. In the vote as to whether the matter should be referred to a committee Cromwell, showing his habitual interest in Irish matters, acted as teller for the Yeas. Holles and Stapleton, those zestful representatives of the Presbyterian faction, told for the Noes. But the Independents, as happened not infrequently in this autumn of their discontent, lost: there was to be no Ireland for the New Model; instead quite a different force, raised separately, was to be despatched. England’s finest fighting machine was to continue to cool its heels while a job which both emotionally and militarily would have well suited its proclivities went elsewhere to an army not even in existence. It was no wonder that Cromwell wrote to Fairfax in a thunderous mood.
The death of the Earl of Essex in September did something to lift up the spirits of the Independents, because it robbed the Presbyterians of an estimable figurehead who stood for much in the popular mind. Despite his magnificent funeral in Westminster Abbey and a noble peroration by a Presbyterian minister, the solemnity of the occasion was not allowed to go undisturbed by the dissident spirits of London. During the night Essex’s wax funeral effigy, dressed up in the buff coat and scarlet breeches which he had worn at Edgehill, was slashed and cut; the sword was removed.8But in general the autumn for Oliver was a period of much Parliamentary activity, with only a few Independent triumphs to show for it. The affair of the Parliamentary Great Seal was one of them: the custody of the seal symbolized, in effect, the whole question of the supremacy of King or Commons. Cromwell and Vane wanted it placed in the custody of both Houses; when the two speakers were finally given authority to act as commissioners, their point was won.
In December an accommodation concerning the King and their own retreat homewards was finally reached with the Scots, and an official Agreement signed on the 23rd. Cromwell’s name came ninth on the list of the thirteen English signatures, between that of Haselrig and Stapleton: Sir Henry Vane’s name was conspicuous by its absence. Cromwell himself broke the news to Fairfax two days previously, taking the opportunity at the same time to describe the general malaise of the City towards the Army.9 A sum of £400,000 was to be paid to the Scots, in return for which the northern armies would withdraw. Implicit in the arrangement – although nowhere mentioned in its text – was the handing over of the King to Parliament, and for his renewed incarceration at altered hands proceedings were now set in train. After some discussion, it was decided that Holdenby Hall in Northamptonshire was the most suitable locality. To this weird pile, with its numerous and fantastic embellishments of turrets like chimneys, built by Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, Christopher Hatton, the King was brought on 16 February 1647.
The decision was not universally approved. At Newcastle, the people shouted taunts at the departing Scots soldiers and told them they were nothing but Jews, because they had sold their King and their honour; the English officers had to restrain the women of the town from throwing stones. Nevertheless the disappearance of the Scots, for all that the end of the previous year had seen a slight amelioration in Independent fortunes, meant that the helm was now right back in the hands of the Presbyterians. To those among them who combined optimism with determination – and they were not a few – there seemed only one remaining block in the path of a proper Presbyterian settlement of England, and that was the disbandment of the New Model Army. The obvious and, as it seemed to them, almost the happy solution, was to persuade the disbanded Independents to betake themselves to Ireland in a new form. Here, since early in the New Year, Ormonde had abandoned his hopeless plans to conciliate Catholic Papal Nuncio and Protestant English Parliament. In a letter of 20 February he finally offered to resign his Lord-Lieutenantship, received from the King, to Parliament on no conditions except his own safety. The war in Ireland was now fairly and squarely the responsibility of Parliament, but fortunately the appropriate instrument of conquest seemed to lie within their own hands.
This Irish expeditionary force was not however to be allowed the luxury of those rampant Independent opinions which had made the philosophy of its members so odious to many Presbyterians during the war. For one thing all officers were to take the Covenant. But this projected emasculation of the Independent army sounded better on paper than in practice. It did not seem to strike the Presbyterian clique within Parliament that since the mood of the men themselves was getting increasingly ugly, and the heroes who had cried ‘God and our Strength’ so lustily, were turning to other less spiritual cries in peacetime, more attention should be paid to their paramount needs, principal among them pay. With ugly incidents galore – such as threats of blood-letting made by some soldiers at Covent Garden – an order was given to Fairfax on 17 March that the rule which forbade his men to approach nearer than a twenty-five-mile radius of London must be more strictly enforced. But in the meantime any pacific intention of such an order had been quite undone by the fact that already by early March a multitude of troops had become concentrated at Saffron Walden in Essex. The idea was that disbandment and reorganization for the Irish expedition should proceed from this point; but such large congregations of disaffected men were undoubtedly ripe breeding-grounds for more tumultuous decisions.
In all this rising crisis between the Army and Parliament, where was the one man who had successfully straddled both, and whose mediatory powers were surely much needed? But after some Parliamentary work in January, Oliver Cromwell had vanished from the scene at Westminster altogether in the throes of a severe illness. Of its primarily physical nature there can be no doubt: Cromwell told Fairfax afterwards that he had suffered a dangerous sickness from which he had nearly died, and the official story was ‘an impostume in the head’ (an infected swelling which we should now call an abscess).10 But as always with Cromwell’s health in these early days up until the incontrovertible pressures of old age, there must be some question whether psychosomatic pressures did not at least add to his collapse. The autumn had seen the slow falling-off of those high ideals for which Cromwell imagined, in his prayers at any rate, that the war had been fought. The spring only seemed to confirm the lack of understanding in Parliament of the very real nature of the claims of those honest men who had fought for them. The delicate relationship between psychosomatic illness and physical disease is of course famously difficult to analyse with any precision. It is clear that Cromwell’s ill-health had an original nervous strain in it, hence the early crisis at Huntingdon, the breakdown and the consultation with Sir Theodore Mayerne. Later, with equal certainty, he suffered from a series of physical complaints including low malarial fevers and the stone. It is the borderline between the two which needs to be trodden with care by the historian. But we can believe with safety that these troubles, showing every sign of worsening as the year wore on, worked heavily on one of Cromwell’s nervous temperament and produced at least a disturbed and run-down condition in which he was highly prone to receive infection.
What is more certain is that Cromwell remained extremely depressed for a long while after the course of his illness was theoretically over. Describing his symptoms to Fairfax, he wrote: ‘And I do most willingly acknowledge that the Lord (in this visitation) exercised the bowels of a Father toward me. I received in myself the sentence of death, that I might learn to trust in him that raiseth from the dead, and have no confidence in the flesh.’ More significant for the future was his comment on his own mood in such travail: ‘It’s a blessed thing to die daily, for what is there in this world to be accounted of …’11 It was in this state of gloom and resignation, in marked contrast to the confident hilarity of wartime, and much debilitated in health, that Cromwell embarked on that critical period of his career from which afterwards so many accusations of treachery and double-dealing flowed. The charges were of course inflamed by the subsequent course of events which fell out so favourably for Cromwell: yet no one at the time, not even Cromwell if he had been feeling in his full vigour, could have predicted such an outcome with any certainty. As it was, the very last picture Cromwell presented in the spring of 1647 was that of a man confident enough of himself to embark on what would surely have been the most elaborate conspiracy in British history.
Far more evocative of his overcast state of mind was a conversation he probably had about this time with Edmund Ludlow. Encountering Ludlow as he strolled in the Westminster gardens which had formerly belonged to the great antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, Cromwell revealed to him the depths of his unhappiness. What had once been a glorious outing of crusaders in the cause of the Lord had now relapsed into something much more like a pack of hounds squabbling over the meat of power. How simple life had been in the Army days! Or indeed in the days before the outbreak of the Civil War when at least Parliamentarians had been united in contrast to today’s bickering members: ‘If thy father were alive,’ he sighed to Ludlow (Sir Henry Ludlow had been an extreme member of the Long Parliament who in May 1642 had been rebuked by the Speaker for saying that the King was not worthy of his office), ‘he would let some of them hear what they deserved; that it was a miserable thing to serve Parliament to whom let a man be never so faithful if one pragmatical fellow amongst them rise up and asperse them, he shall never wipe it off. Whereas, when one serves under a General, he may do as much service and yet be free from all blame and envy.’12
As Cromwell convalesced, his sour mood with those who failed to understand the justice of the Army’s cause continued: in a letter to Fairfax on 11 March, before he was well enough apparently to return to the House of Commons, he talked of men in all places who had so much malice against the Army that it besotted them. In general, never had the spirits of men been more embittered than they were now. On the other hand Cromwell himself, as he also confided to Fairfax, was only too well aware that the disaffection within the Army’s ranks was spreading apace, and for all his sympathies with their grievances, he did not care to see discipline undermined; for example he approved the keeping of the twenty-five-mile rule. The truth was that the complaints of the soldiers now gathered in unhealthily large numbers at Saffron Walden were in most respects fully justified: it has been calculated that a total of over £300,000 was now owed to the New Model Army in terms of arrears of pay.13 Of course money troubles were nothing new: the previous year the soldiers at York under Major-General Poyntz had mutinied, shouting plainly and unequivocally ‘Money, money, money’ as they held cocked pistols to his chest. But now infantry regiments were eighteen weeks in arrears, and those of the cavalry forty-three; while Parliament only offered a beggarly six weeks of what was owed at disbandment.
At the same time the disgust of the Army with their lack of pay was paralleled by the resentment of much of the country that they should continue to exist under arms – an illogical reaction perhaps, but not unexpected from a civilian population who in many cases felt themselves plagued by the habitual turbulence of the military. At Saffron Walden, for example, quite apart from sporadic outbreaks of mutiny in other parts of the country, the influence of the more orthodox officers over their men was waning. Two separate forces were seen to be sprouting up among the Army ranks: on the one hand, a politically extremist sect known as the Levellers, originally formed outside the Army, was beginning to find recruits within its ranks; on the other hand, groups known as ‘Agents’ or ‘Agitators’ were being formed from within the Army to lobby Parliament over the subject of disbandment.
On 21 March commissioners from Parliament instructed to discuss the disbandment preliminary to the formation of the Irish army met a body of officers at Saffron Walden. The officers responded not so much with an agreement to disband, but with a petition, signed by among others Independents such as Okey, Pride, Robert Lilburne, brother of John, and Ireton, demanding further enlightenment on vexed subjects such as future pay, past arrears and indemnity for services made hitherto. At the same time the ordinary soldiers weighed in with further demands for the payment of arrears, exemption from impressment in the future, indemnities and fair treatment for the widows and orphans of soldiers. Although such requests in no way transgressed the line drawn by common humanity, it is interesting to notice that Cromwell was of the number who felt that the common soldiers had nevertheless gone distinctly too far in presenting their own petition.
Yet it is about this date – most probably at the time of the vote of 22 March – that Cromwell must have stood up in the House of Commons, placed his hand on his heart and as Clement Walker testified later in his History of the Independency swore that the Army would consent to peaceful dismantlement: ‘In the presence of Almighty God, before whom he stood, that he knew that the Army would disband and lay down their Arms at their door, whensoever they should command them.’ To those contemporaries who believed afterwards in the conspiracy theory of Cromwell’s career, it was this public avowal, afterwards proved so singularly false a prophecy, which more than anything else lingered in the mind as proof of his hypocrisy. But Cromwell’s ill-fated prediction, while it serves to show him up as a bad political prophet, does not make him a devious rascal. He genuinely believed his own assurances based on the fact the Army’s grievances would be met. John Lilburne, who reacted hysterically to Cromwell’s rejection of the soldiers’ petition, accused him of thwarting it ‘because forsooth you had engaged to the House they shall lay down their arms whensoever they shall command them’. He also thought Cromwell was led astray by those ‘two unworthy covetous earthworms’ Vane and St John.14
Of all his many capabilities, political foresight was one that Cromwell never did show much sign of possessing although at times he displayed a lucky knack for political opportunism which his angry opponents sometimes confused with conspiracy. Clarendon later detailed the charges against him: he pretended disgust at the insolence of the soldiers, inveighed bitterly against their presumption and suggested that their mutinous spirits should be quieted by the imposition of penalties; most hypocritical of all, ‘when he spake of the nation’s being to be involved in new troubles, he would weep bitterly, and appear the most afflicted man in the world’.15 Most of this can be read as a reliable report of Cromwell’s behaviour. No doubt he did weep – he was prone to tears at such moments and although as Protector he was to be accused by rumour of producing ‘tears at will’ and weeping in Council to get his own way, the real truth seems to have been that even at this early stage Cromwell was a naturally emotional orator. No doubt Cromwell did also feel both lost and afflicted, and disgusted with the Army’s sullen attitude. It was the dissimulation which Clarendon insisted in adding into the equation which was the mistake: Cromwell in the spring of 1647 was genuinely unhappy.
Meanwhile a stormy debate in the House of Commons on 29 March gave further proof of how little sympathy existed in the breasts of the Presbyterian members for even the most manifest grievances of the soldiers. They declared their furious dislike of the soldiers’ petition; the next day Holles carried an even more aggressive resolution which declared that all those who continued in their present distempered condition should be proceeded against as enemies of the State. The future of the Army in Ireland was however decided by a type of compromise, with Skippon elected as Field-Marshal and Sir Edward Massey as Lieutenant-General of the horse, a post for which the Independents had not unnaturally nominated Cromwell. Cromwell’s own regiment was however among those designated to stay in England under Major Huntington.
But while Parliament proposed, the Army on the contrary saw its role as disposing: when the news of the new arrangements was broken to them at Saffron Walden on 15 April by commissioners sent down from London there was no meek acceptance. Two hundred officers gathered in the fine Perpendicular church there to put their own counter case, under the tacit presidency of Fairfax who, while he personally disapproved of their conduct, did not actively resist it, to the annoyance of the commissioners. How much better it would be to enjoy in Ireland the same ‘conduct’ or leadership as before: ‘All! All! Fairfax and Cromwell and we all go!’ was the disconcerting cry. The next day most of the cavalry officers and many of the infantry officers signed an appeal to Parliament to this effect.
As the breach between Army and Parliament widened, it was a measure of Cromwell’s disgust with the mismanagement of the Presbyterian clique that his visits to the House of Commons during April were noticeably infrequent, as also were those of Vane. Nor had his deep inner depression, his dissatisfaction with the whole progress of his life, lifted. It seems that about this time Cromwell took an interest in yet another scheme for leaving England, this time in order to serve abroad in the cause of King Charles’s Protestant nephew, the Elector Palatine.16 Although the Elector himself was a poor-spirited creature compared to his younger brother Rupert, his strongest determination being to remain on the winning side regardless of honour or family loyalty, nevertheless his present predicament was one that might well have appealed to Cromwell’s religious sympathies. It was a moment when the Lutherans were trying to exclude the Calvinists from the European peace even then being negotiated to end the Thirty Years’ War, and the Elector wanted a Parliamentary army to help him recover his German estates. The French Ambassador reported that the Elector had had long conferences with Cromwell on the subject. Since the cause was just and Cromwell’s frustration inside the confines of England considerable, he may well have weighed up whether the Elector’s need did not constitute the newest sign from the Lord indicating at least a temporary retreat from England’s shores. Once again the impression is of a bewildered seeker after guidance rather than a single-minded machinator.
At the beginning of May Cromwell was among the commissioners including Ireton, Skippon and Charles Fleetwood sent down by Parliament to cool the boiling Army. All four commissioners were of course in the extremely delicate situation of senior Army officers who were also members of Parliament. Fleetwood had begun the war in the Earl of Essex’s life-guard, but his regiment in Manchester’s army had quickly become notorious for sectaries, and was among those which had refused to go to Ireland; like Ireton, who had become MP for Appleby in 1645, Fleetwood had recently joined the House of Commons as MP for Marlborough. They now heard from the officers of an unsatisfactory conference earlier in which Skippon had entirely failed to persuade the regiments to take off for Ireland. It was decided that the officers should first take the opportunity to confer with their regiments, and then return to make a further report. In this manner a meeting of some two hundred officers was convened in the church at Saffron Walden on 15 May, presided over by Skippon, with Cromwell sitting beside him. The intention was to hear the true voice of the Army, delegated to their immediate superiors.
The demands thus made were in fact astonishingly reasonable, although Skippon several times had to admonish the more junior officers such as Lambert, Whalley and Okey for their hectic style in making them and suggest that they listened to one another with more sobriety. The first request was that more of their own pay – the arrears – should be made available than the miserable six weeks’ worth hitherto promised by Parliament. Then they should be allowed to petition their General, Parliament should consider their original petition of March, they should be permitted to publish a vindication of their conduct, and Parliament should no longer tolerate attacks made upon them (the Army). These were hardly revolutionary claims, whatever the language in which they were couched. The commissioners, when they reported back to Parliament the next day that they had to acknowledge they found the Army under a deep sense of grievance and the common soldiers much unsettled, must have sympathized in their hearts with the sufferings, if not the unsettlement.
Before the meeting broke up, Cromwell himself made a significant speech in the church; beyond announcing, at Parliament’s orders, an extra two weeks’ pay to be granted out of the arrears making a total of eight, he also urged the officers to make the best use of their position at the head of their men. They should see to it that their consultations led to a general support of Parliament, otherwise much worse might follow. The officers’ duty was to bring their men to a good opinion of the authority which was over them all: ‘If that authority falls to nothing, nothing can follow but confusion.’ In May at least, for all the Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons, Cromwell still saw Parliament as the true repository of the peaceful order which all desired. On 21 May Cromwell and Fleetwood returned to London and at Parliament’s request presented to them a full account of proceedings at Saffron Walden. Particular care was taken by the two commissioners to acquit the officers of any possible charge of conspiracy with their men: the officers had merely tidied up the soldiers’ language which was full of ‘tautologies, impertinences or weaknesses’, and had persuaded them to lay aside many more offensive charges.17 In all this good work their laudable intention had been to avoid giving further offence to the Parliament, so that Army and Parliament might get on better together in the future.
Although on the presentation of this petition it was agreed to have Ordinances prepared which might meet the main demands of the Agitators, the situation had really gone too far for the Presbyterians to come to any true accord with the Army, since they no longer trusted Cromwell’s assurance on the subject of the disbandment. New wild thoughts were crossing their minds to return King Charles to the Scots. From that vantage point, he might be restored to his throne by a combined force of Scots, English Royalists and Presbyterians; the desired Church reform would at last be carried through in England. Of course such a scheme was impossible of enactment so long as the Army loomed so large and menacing in Essex. So it was that on 25 May the Presbyterians put up a fatal proposal by which the Army was to be disbanded, piecemeal, to avoid united disruption and with none of the satisfactions hitherto guaranteed. From the point of the vocal dissentients at Saffron Walden such a move of course smelt at once of robbery and treachery. By 1 June – the date set for the disbandment of the first regiment (the General’s) – the Army had already taken matters into its own hands and assembled at a general rendezvous at Newmarket, not far from Saffron Walden but over the borders into Suffolk. Both parties bristled like hedgehogs with suspicion of each other. King Charles, who stood outside either commitment, had once again become the key to the situation. It was indeed a strange if welcome reversal of the royal fortunes, for it was only a year since both sides had been combining to fight him. Now, wrote Fairfax, the King had become ‘the Golden Ball cast between the two parties’.18 The question was, in which direction the ball would roll.
As early as February, Sir Lewis Dyve, a percipient correspondent, had noticed a novel mildness in the attitude of the Independents to the King. The Royalist commander at Sherborne, Dyve had been brought to London as a prisoner after its fall, and had been committed to the Tower for treason; here however he had sufficient liberty – and sufficient visitors – to be able to instruct the King secretly of the turn of events in the capital. He passed on to Charles the warming news of the Independents’ relaxation: the very men who had up till now been most bitter in their expressions against him were beginning to admire the King. If only their liberty of conscience could be assured under his protection, they might well devote to him their support, realizing how far the Presbyterians were now conniving at their ruin. On 24 May Sir Lewis informed Charles further that although Cromwell had previously been the principal man labouring to reconcile the differences between the Army and Parliament due to his dual position in both camps, he was now finding this task beyond him. Sheer self-preservation was making him adhere to the Army, since suspicions of him were growing daily inside the House itself. As to Cromwell’s feelings for the King, Sir Lewis believed – and he had confirmation of it from a bosom friend of Cromwell’s – that if only he could be secured from fear of the King’s personal vengeance for his trespass against him during the war ‘he may yet happily prove an instrument of great service to you in the army, the better whereof I understand is well inclined already’.19
If Cromwell’s attitude, and that of his fellow Independents, to the King was improving for lack of alternatives, Charles himself in his long delayed answer to the Newcastle Propositions did not display much concern for tender consciences. He agreed to the establishment of Presbyterianism for a period of three years, so long as both he and his household could use the Book of Common Prayer; he would also name twenty divines to sit in the Westminster Assembly to negotiate the Church settlement. As to the Covenant, he refused to give a more than vaguely soothing definite answer until he had come to London and been advised by his own chaplains. So Charles continued to play out his cards according to his own style; he was cheered no doubt by such proofs of his popularity during his captivity at Holdenby as the people crowding round their sovereign to touch him, in order to be cured of scrofula, known as the King’s Evil. In vain the House of Commons tried to inform them that this was mere idle superstition: ancient loyal – and credulous – ways died hard.
For all such warning signs of the equivocating nature of the man they had to deal with, it was still clear to the Independents that the seizure of the King by the Presbyterians could be a fatal blow to their future. Fear of such a dangerous development was uppermost in the minds of the little group of Army politicians who started to meet at Cromwell’s house in Drury Lane. Mrs Cromwell of course found her home and hospitality thrown into the cause, but the habits of a lifetime were not so easily discarded: ‘No men of more abstemiousness ever affected so vile and flagitious an enterprise upon so just a government,’ wrote one who admired neither Mrs Cromwell’s menus nor her husband’s plans: ‘small beer and bread and butter’ were served. Because she was at one and the same time accused of taking bribes, her house was said to be like that of King Midas, with nothing in it except gold. Mrs Cromwell’s critics also rather illogically suggested that even so she was so much out of pocket as a result of this unlavish entertaining that she was obliged to sell a commemorative piece of gold plate given to her husband to balance her books.20 One or other of the charges might be true but not both. Under the circumstances one is tempted to suppose that of the two courses open to her, Mrs Cromwell did perhaps keep a comparatively modest table for her husband’s conspiratorial friends – reflecting the natural disgust of the housewife through the ages at having her house turned into a political headquarters.
Exactly what was decided upon in the course of these urgent discussions, as in another meeting at the Star Tavern at Coleman Street when Cromwell, the leading Independent minister Hugh Peter and others discussed the question of the King, remains a mystery although it has been much pondered upon. Obviously the Presbyterians could not be allowed to seize the King and post him, as it were, to the Scots, so long as there were Independent soldiers capable of obstructing them. On the other hand there was a considerable difference between action taken by the Independents merely to keep the King safely out of alien hands, and a most positive move to take him into their own keeping, elsewhere than at Holdenby. On balance, the evidence points to the Army plotters headed by Cromwell having proposed some sort of securing action; but of course over the question of the King the two parties were both chiefly inspired by fear of each other, like two blindfolded men who back into each other in a room while trying to avoid contact. In suchcircumstances it was only too easy for some violent reaction to be seemingly provoked.
What was undisputed was that acting under the instructions of this London-based group, a certain Cornet Joyce was sent down to Oxford on 1 June to secure the magazine there. Joyce, one of those interesting minor but crucial figures in English history, had started life as a tailor before becoming a soldier in the Eastern Association, apparently in Cromwell’s regiment; more latterly he had acted as Cornet in the cavalry regiment of Fairfax – who subsequently described him in his Memorials as ‘an Arch-Agitator’. Having performed the first part of his mission, the next day he moved on from Oxford to Holdenby together with five hundred troopers he had gathered. When asked what his unexpected arrival at the royal prison signified, Joyce replied that he had come with authority from the soldiers to seize Colonel Graves, officer in charge of Charles, ‘to prevent a plot to convey the King to London’. Thus far we may believe he was acting on instructions. The letter he wrote at eight o’clock the next morning, 3 June (but wrongly dated 4 June – he was evidently in haste), confirms this impression. It was addressed to Cromwell or in his absence Haselrig or Fleetwood: ‘Sir, We have secured the King, Graves is run away … You must hasten an answer to us, and let us know what we shall do. We are resolved to obey no orders but the Generall’s; we shall follow the Commissioners directions while we are here, if just in our Eyes.’ But the actual ending of the letter provides a strong indication that he had no explicit instructions beyond the point of seizure. ‘I humbly entreat you to consider what is done and act accordingly with all the haste you can,’ he wrote. ‘We shall not rest night nor day till we hear from you.’21
In fact long before Joyce did hear from London, or receive any further enlightenment, whatever direction it might have taken, he had lost his nerve and decided that Charles ought to be moved somewhere closer to the Army rendezvous. Joyce sought an interview with the King to that effect, and when Charles asked Joyce what commission he had to secure his person, showed up the confusion of his situation by pointing uncertainly backward to his troops behind him. To which King Charles gave his famous and charmingly ironical reply: ‘It is as fair a commission and as well written as I have seen a commission written in my life.’ Stopping a night at Hinchingbrooke en route, and watched in silence by the people as he passed, the King came first to a house in Newmarket – yet another proof that Joyce’s action had not been premeditated, since no royal habitation had been planned – but was taken ultimately to a house near Cambridge.
It was at this point, hearing the news of Joyce’s expedition but not, it should be emphasized, of its eventual outcome, that Cromwell seemed to emerge out of the half-dream of irresolution which had surrounded him all the year. Always at his best when the situation called for precipitate and decisive action, he was quick to take in the significance of Joyce’s action for his own safety in London. The sign had come that he should finally throw in his lot with the Army. When the news reached him that the Presbyterians planned to arrest him the next day when he appeared in the House of Commons (‘which he seldom omitted to do’) and send him to the Tower, Cromwell abandoned his megrims of self-examination. Leaving London in the very early hours of the morning of 4 June with Hugh Peter, he was already at Ware in Hertfordshire by the time they breakfasted. About the same time as the King was being installed in a house at Childerley, north-west of Cambridge, Cromwell arrived at Kentford Heath, just beyond Newmarket, the scene of the general rendezvous of the Army.
That Cromwell was right to flee, if he valued his liberty, is made clear by Clarendon: the plan of his opponents was to remove from the Army councils the cleverest man among them, since it was believed that Fairfax would prove adequately amenable once deprived of Cromwell’s stiffening. It was Joyce who later, and understandably, tried to blame the whole incident and both sets of orders upon Cromwell. According to the later testimony of Major Huntington, a hostile witness to Cromwell, when Joyce was told that Fairfax was highly displeased with him for bringing the King out of Holdenby, he replied that ‘Lieutenant-General Cromwell had given him orders at London to do what he had done, both there and at Oxford’. Huntington however also reports Ireton’s version, ‘that he gave orders only for securing the King there and not for taking away’, which leaving aside Joyce’s self-justification is surely more plausible. Even Cromwell’s own alleged comment on the move – also given by Huntington – was more of a judicious assessment of it all after the event than an assumption of personal responsibility: ‘if this had not been done, the King would have been fetched away by order of Parliament, or Colonel Graves, by the advice of the Commissioners, would have carried him to London, throwing themselves upon the favour of Parliament for that service’.22
The Commons, frightened into retraction by the ominous news of Joyce, had on 3 June voted full arrears for the Army; it even expunged from its records Holles’s venomous resolution stating all those who had protested in March to be enemies of the State. But it was too late to avoid reaping the whirlwind. On 5 June the Army at Newmarket issued a declaration of which the basic theme was the stirring up of war by the Presbyterian leaders – it asked for the names of all those who had evolved Holles’s resolution – but which ended with two more potentially helpful clauses, put in at Cromwell’s instigation. The first of these established an Army Council of Generals and senior officers, also to include two commissioned officers and two other representatives from each regiment. Cromwell would therefore be a member as would Fairfax and Ireton. The second clause denied that the Army intended to overthrow Presbyterianism: it merely wanted liberty of conscience for its members.
At Childerley the King now received Fairfax and the other senior officers. Fairfax found him in an optimistic mood, outwardly quite ready to gamble on his chances with the Army: as Fairfax took his leave, the King confided to him, ‘Sir, I have as good an Interest in the Army as you.’ Cromwell and Ireton were reported to have behaved ‘with good manner’ towards Charles, although unlike Fairfax, they only bowed their heads in greeting and did not kiss his hand.23 But their treatment of Charles was carefully polite: and at his own strong desire, he was allowed to move to Newmarket, although Cromwell had instructed Whalley to use anything but force to persuade him to return to Holdenby. He was taken by the backways in case his presence should occasion a demonstration of popular enthusiasm.
It was understandable that the King should begin to take heart from his new situation, since the news which was percolating through from London described the capital in a grim and growing sense of disorder. Charles could be pardoned for believing that he might soon be the tertius gaudensbetween Army and Parliament. In London the pulses of those members of Parliament still remaining began to race as large numbers of former soldiers known as ‘Reformadoes’ poured into the city, intent on rioting. Crowding round the very doors of the House of Commons, they issued unpleasant threats against the members and generally, said Whitelocke, presented ‘a very rude address’.24 But of course there might be a silver lining to such an unwelcome thundercloud: when Parliament voted a hasty £10,000 for this noisy crew, it was not unmindful of the fact that they might be employed usefully at some later stage against the brooding mass of the official Army.
This body was now drawn up at Thriplow Heath, about seven miles from Cambridge – ten miles in the direction of London, whither it was the intention of the fiercer spirits of the Army that they should march. It was now of course in possession of a properly organized assembly, in the shape of the newly instituted Army Council, with which to confront any overtures from outside; the transformation from a loose collection of wayward soldiers making up at best an angry rabble which had been taking place in stages since the spring was complete. Even so, Cromwell by no means felt himself turned overnight into the Army’s creature. He retained extremely ambivalent feelings to that section of the soldiery whose aims and language were so revolutionary as to threaten the mere existence of peace and order. Sir Gilbert Pickering gave an interesting sidelight on his hesitations, and the quandary in which he found himself, ten years later. He revealed that Cromwell had been extremely unwilling to be drawn to the head of the violent and rash party of the Army at Thriplow Heath when they would not disband, and did not in fact do so until he had received three letters demanding his leadership. He was thus morally certain that the Army would march on, even if he was not there to head them, and could envisage himself not as a firebrand but as one who would exercise a restraining influence.
As it was, under pressure from Fairfax, the soldiers were persuaded to behave politely to the commissioners from Parliament who came to Thriplow Heath to visit them, since he had directed that they should be ‘very silent and civil’. There was however no softening in their immediate policy towards Parliament; when the Army’s voice was uplifted it took the form of cries of ‘Justice, Justice’ shouted raucously in the ears of the commissioners (a note that Cromwell and Ireton had taught them to sing, observed Holles grimly in his memoirs). The Army now moved forward. The night of 10 June was spent at Royston whence a minatory manifesto was sent to the City of London authorities, of which Parliament was intended to take good note. Under its newly organized leadership, the Army proclamations were becoming more sophisticated, and in many of the phrases, Cromwell’s own preoccupations can be discerned. It was Parliament who aimed to engage the kingdom in a new war to protect themselves ‘from question and punishment’; the Army on the other hand ‘as Englishmen’ continued to desire a proper settlement. Even so, the Army still stressed its innocence of any desire to alter the present constitution: ‘We have said it before, and we profess it now, we desire no alteration in the Civil Government …’25
From Royston the Army moved on to St Albans, which was within the twenty-five-mile limit hopefully prescribed for them by Parliament. In vain the City called out the trained bands to their defence; they refused to co-operate. And the new declaration put forward by the Army on 14 June – in which Ireton was able to give the first flavour of his political thinking – warned Parliament in turn of the sort of lines along which the Army were now moving. It contained the first suggestions for purging Parliament as well as a plan for choosing a fresh House of Commons. Later it was said that the eleven Presbyterian members, headed by Holles, should be impeached not only for plotting the disbandment of the Army, but also for setting in train a new war. It was, wrote Holles later, the Army’s first open attempt to meddle with the affairs of the kingdom, on the grounds that they were ‘not a mercenary power to serve the arbitrary power of the State but that they took up Arms in judgement and Conscience’.26 As MPs began to tremble for their lives or at least their property at the prospect of the soldiers’ arrival, a further broadside from the Army to Parliament of similar nature – the Humble Remonstrance – followed on 24 June.
Lilburne, now in the Tower for a series of offences including a violent attack on Manchester, and delighted with the turn matters were taking, hastened to congratulate his dear Cromwell for the ‘active pains’ he was now taking for the right cause. But Cromwell was worrying less over his left wing, if we may so term Lilburne, than the problem of the King who had now arrived at Royston from Newmarket. While Dyve predicted real possibilities of Charles winning over Cromwell if he showed him enough favour,27Cromwell took a middle path: he warned Whalley neither to let the King go free, nor to antagonize him unnecessarily over personal religious matters. He suspected with reason that the Parliamentary commissioners who had accompanied him could be relied upon to do that, and indeed the moment Charles celebrated an Anglican service, they insisted on having his chaplains removed. The Army headquarters had advanced still further to Uxbridge, a very short distance indeed from the capital. Here on 1 July Fairfax appointed ten of the chief officers including Cromwell to discuss the Humble Remonstrance with the commissioners at the Katharine Wheele Inn. The Army then fell back a little to Reading, and the King himself was brought first to Windsor and then to Lord Craven’s house at Caversham, just across the river from the Army’s new position. The scene was set for a sincere attempt on the part of the Independent Army leaders to reach settlement with the King. After all, dealings with the Presbyterians had proved so acutely unsatisfactory that it was just possible they had misjudged the King, attributing to him some of the chicanery which rightfully belonged to their political opponents.
Fairfax’s first interview with Charles should have warned him of the hopelessness of any plan which entailed the King’s adherence to an open and steady course. Throughout, understandably if fatally, Charles reserved to himself the right to change directions and allies in so far as the ultimate interests of the Crown, as he saw them, might require it. ‘Sir, you have an intention to be an arbitrator between the Parliament and us,’ exclaimed Ireton. ‘And we mean it to be between your Majesty and the Parliament.’ Nevertheless the negotiations proceeded. Intermediaries were necessary. The choice of the Independents fell upon Sir John Berkeley, the former Governor of Exeter, and a diplomat before the war; he was a favourite of Queen Henrietta Maria and had come from her side in France to try and use his influence with the Army chiefs. Time would show that Berkeley was a man of honour but unfortunately also rather naïve in a situation where extreme subtlety rather than a streak of the ingenuous, was called for. On his way back through England at Tonbridge in Kent, Berkeley was met by Sir Allen Apsley, formerly Royalist Governor of another Western stronghold, Barnstaple. Berkeley in his memoirs revealed that Apsley there entrusted to him letters, a cypher and instructions from Cromwell and the other Army officers. The main tenor of these was that the King should expect to find the Independents much disillusioned with the Presbyterians, and therefore in a mood to make good ‘what the Presbyterians had only pretended to do, that is, restoring the King and People to their just and ancient rights’.28
The first steps of this delicate process went suspiciously smoothly; so swift indeed did the pace appear to some, that Oliver St John felt it necessary to warn his cousin Cromwell that he was doing ‘the King business’ altogether too fast. An interview between Cromwell and the King on 4 July, authorized by Fairfax, went so well that many believed an understanding between the King and the Army would be reached within fourteen days. Major Huntington reported afterwards that Cromwell and Fairfax were prepared to shower the King with offers of goodwill – ranging from access to his chaplains to contact with his younger children. Another interesting earnest of their genuine intentions to restore the King was provided by the serious discussions now instituted to give toleration to the Roman Catholic community. Rumours of this development reached the French Ambassador on 9 July. It was an amazing change about for such dedicated Puritans as Cromwell and Ireton, if one remembers the old anti-Catholic attitudes of the 1630s, and an example of the growth of belief in toleration among the soldiers with the coming of Independency. But of course, as has been mentioned, the Catholics had by no means showed themselves the lethal Cavaliers of popular imagination during the recent war.29 If they could now consent to terms which brought them firmly within the English polity, and did not for example adhere to the notion of any foreign civil jurisdiction in England, perhaps they too could be allowed to join up with the forces of light – and tolerance – in a new peaceful England under the King.
These negotiations probably began with secret approaches from the English Catholic community led by Henry More, acting Vice-Provincial of the Jesuits.30 More pointed out how Catholics in Germany and Holland managed to live peaceably under non-Catholic régimes. Lord Brudenell, a Catholic in the Army, was also influential in assuring the Army Council that there was nothing in the Catholic doctrines to prevent some satisfactory agreement being reached; this was despite such practical problems as the amount of Catholic property which had been confiscated during the war. The conditions drawn up to which the Catholics should subscribe if they wished to enjoy the common liberty of conscience were not harsh by the standards of the time: Catholics were allowed to exercise their religion in their homes, but were not to carry arms, and were specifically excluded from having intelligence with foreign powers. Eventually the nub of the difficulty was found in the prospect of an oath of civil allegiance, contained in Article IV. Among other doctrines which it was forbidden to promulgate was the Pope’s right to dispense a Catholic from his oath, including an oath of loyalty to the civil power. But after some acrimonious discussions among the Catholic community, and some theological soul-searchings, it was decided that even Article IV was acceptable since the matters touched on by it were not necessitate medii – necessary to salvation.
The Propositions, which were finally dated 1 August, were signed by representatives of the clergy, and the Catholic community. A preface added by Henry More took care to emphasize that this was in essence merely an arrangement with the civil power: to the disgust of Lord Brudenell who feared that the whole negotiation would be imperilled, it stated: ‘We do not acknowledge the above-mentioned proposition as articles of our faith or as things taught us by our pastors.’ In this form the Propositions were forwarded to Rome via the Papal Nuncio in Paris. Here their subsequent fate was less fortunate: the Propositions, possibly put forward in a slightly different form due to alterations en route which may have been accidental,31 were condemned by the Pope in January 1648. More, who felt he had signed a conditional agreement rather than an absolute one, left England. But in any case by this time, political implementation of the Propositions had been refused by the House of Commons in England. Various Catholic petitions for toleration were prepared for Parliament in the early autumn, but when the House of Commons in mid-October discussed the possibility of Presbyterian government with all others given freedom of worship, the Catholics were deliberately exempted. At this point Henry Marten, with his usual independence of judgement, spoke up unexpectedly for the Catholics. Why tolerate the Presbyterians and deny the Catholics? he enquired acidly. Surely it was far better to have one tyrant whose power was limited to spiritual things, and anyway lived outside the realm, than a tyrant in every parish. In the end the whole project fell victim to the growing complication of England’s political squabbles, and ended for ever when Cromwell parted company with the King.*
But this is to anticipate: in the meantime, while this praiseworthy if short-lived attempt to integrate the Roman Catholics into the structure of England was still in progress, the illusionary love affair of the Army and the King also proceeded. Perhaps Charles should not be judged too harshly for failing to understand the mentality of the men who had confronted him: believing as he did so unalterably that ‘a sovereign and a subject were two quite different things’ no doubt it was virtually impossible for him to concede that they should negotiate together on equal terms. Nevertheless his private words to Berkeley – the fact that none of the Army officers asked anything for themselves made it so hard for him to trust them – shocked even his own servant. On 12 July Berkeley met Cromwell together with two others, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough and Sir Hardress Waller, and told them that Henrietta Maria wanted Charles to agree to the Army’s demands in so far as conscience and honour would allow. Cromwell’s reply stressed that altruism which so disquieted the King: the Army officers wanted no more than to live as subjects, and he added a sentence which raised Berkeley’s hope of a speedy restoration to a new peak: ‘they thought no men could enjoy their lives and estates quietly without the King had his rights’.32 They had already declared this in general terms, and would soon do so in greater particular to include all the various interests of the Royal, Presbyterian and Independent parties.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of what now seemed to have turned into a real honeymoon between Independents and King. Three days later Cromwell described to Berkeley in moving terms a scene he had witnessed between the King and his three youngest children; the sight of such paternal tenderness, so close to his own deepest emotions, had brought tears into his eyes.33 The King, he told Berkeley, was ‘the uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms’ and the Independents were for ever indebted to him for rejecting the Newcastle Propositions of 1646, which would have resulted in the establishment of Presbyterianism.
The truth was that while the London pamphleteers snapped at Cromwell’s heels in print, enraged at his union with the Army, like mastiffs baiting the contemporary bears at Bankside, an agreement with the King presented quite genuinely the most hopeful outcome of an extremely tangled situation. Cromwell did not need to be a hypocrite to expound such a view; if the character of Charles had been different there might have been a real possibility of such a settlement. But Cromwell’s upright and conscientious sovereign was even now taking hope from another direction: secret messages from the Scottish Earl of Lauderdale encouraged him in the belief that the Army were not his only possible supporters. In the meantime the Presbyterians in London were threatening in earnest to invoke the Scottish army themselves; there were ugly rumours that Colonel Poyntz at York intended to betray the Northern army to the Scots; while the Agitators within the English Army’s ranks were raising an increasing furore that they should march on the capital and settle the whole situation by brute occupation.
It was against this fermenting background that a General Council of War was called at Reading on 16 July to consider the Agitators’ request. Between fifty and one hundred officers were present – accounts vary – and for the first time a number of Agitators were ‘in prudence’ admitted, as a newsletter euphemistically put it.34 The Agitators’ demands, from the banning of the infamous eleven members from sitting in the House of Commons to the freeing of such prisoners as John Lilburne, all pointed to one urgent desire that the Army should be immediately marched to London or near it. Cromwell on the other hand, who made frequent speeches, from the first put forward sweet reason not blind force as being the passion which must sway them: ‘Marching up to London,’ he began, ‘is a single proposal, yet it does not drop from Jupiter, as that it should be presently received and debated without considering our reasons.’ Again and again, most interestingly for one who was later with reason accused of setting aside Parliament by sheer strength, Cromwell showed himself anxious to settle matters lawfully: ‘Whatsoever we get by a treaty … it will be firm and durable, it will be conveyed over to posterity. We shall avoid the great objection that lies against us that we have got things of the Parliament by force, and we know what it is to have that stain lie upon us …’ Much of Cromwell’s argument concentrated indeed on the use of Parliament, where not only was their own party steadily gaining ground, but if it was reformed and purged would soon be full of high-minded men working only for the public interest. That surely had been the principle for which they had marched at Uxbridge and St Albans, and a wise, honourable and just principle it was too. ‘Really, really,’ he expostulated in another intervention, ‘have what you will have, that which you have as force I look upon it as nothing. I do not know what force is to be used except we cannot get what is good for the kingdom without force.’35
It was Ireton, however, his father-in-law’s political familiar, who from his first speech pointed out what should be the true subject of debate, rather than the march on London. The great point he said was not to get power into one man’s hands more than another, but to settle the liberties of the kingdom and to show what the Army would do with power when they got it. And he announced his intention of setting out a few proposals, with the help of Lambert, which would lay a proper foundation for the common rights and liberties of the people and an established peace. The meeting finally broke up after midnight, with the march on London temporarily abandoned; the Army’s proposals were to be submitted in the form of a manifesto to the commissioners who would pass them on to Parliament; in the meantime they were to be considered by the council and then by a committee of twelve officers and twelve Agitators. These Heads of the Army Proposals were later to be of crucial significance as a basis for Army thinking. For measures undeniably concocted in haste by a group under pressure who were most of them, as an Agitator put it, ‘but young statesmen’, they were comparatively temperate, although rather rambling and at times confused in the text. Berkeley when he heard them even told the King that he found the outcome surprisingly moderate – ‘never was a Crown so near lost so cheaply recovered as his Majesty’s would be if they agreed upon such terms’.36
Parliament was to have biennial sessions of at least one hundred and twenty and not more than two hundred and forty days; there was to be an important Council of State, more authoritative than the old Privy Council; there was to be a better distribution of Parliamentary seats and free elections; members of the House of Commons were to be allowed to dissent with both King and Lords freely, and the King was not to protect officials from Parliamentary judgement. With the militia in the hands of Parliament for ten years, and the Council of State controlling the armed forces and foreign affairs, they turned to the Church settlement. Here, although the bishops were to be swept away and the Book of Common Prayer no longer legally enforced, there were other acts for repealing the disabilities of the papists; nor was the Covenant to be legally enforced. Then there was a long list of grievances to be redressed from inequalities of taxation to the forest laws. But at the end of it all the Crown was not forgotten: the King and his family were to be restored to a condition of safety, honour and freedom, without diminution to their personal rights or further limitation to the future exercise of the royal power.
Unfortunately, before King Charles was able to make any public pronouncement on these proposals – they were probably first shown to him unofficially on 23 July – the violence in London had erupted beyond recall. The London mob, not a pretty sight, pressed in on both Houses of Parliament, and holding down Speaker Lenthall, forced him to rescind Parliament’s control of the militia. Thereafter Lenthall with upwards of sixty remaining Independent MPs, including even the once hostile Manchester, saw that the hour for flight had come, and promptly took themselves off to the Army, for fear of something worse at the hands of the Presbyterians. The eleven members returned, and with more confidence than wisdom, started to prepare the defences of London. It was of course exactly the sort of news for which the bold spirits in the Army had been waiting. Surely it would soon be their positive duty to rescue London from the chaos into which it was falling. It was at this critical juncture that Charles, much encouraged by the signals he was receiving from Scotland and hearing the noise of riot afar off as music to his ears, chose with mad confidence to rebut the Army’s proposals publicly to their faces. As Ludlow recorded, John Maitland Earl of Lauderdale, the Scottish emissary, was at the King’s side and with others of the City of London assured Charles that they would oppose the Army to death.
The scene at this official renunciation, on or about 28 July, was a traumatic one for those Army officers such as Ireton who witnessed it. From the start, King Charles’s language revealed the heady mood into which undue optimism had betrayed him. To his own men he had already commented on the proposals airily that since the Army could not get by without him, ‘I shall see them glad ere long to accept more equal terms.’ Now he excelled himself by crying, as he brushed the Heads of Proposals aside, ‘You cannot do this without me! You fall to ruin if I do not sustain you,’ in what even Berkeley described as a series of ‘very tart and bitter discourses’. In vain the faithful Berkeley tried to hush him, whispering that the King must possess some secret source of strength to behave so confidently, and as it was something whose existence he had concealed from him, Berkeley, it would be as well if he hid it from the Army too. Colonel Rainsborough was quick to steal away and spread the news of the King’s immoderate reaction among the soldiers.*37
It was no wonder, as Clarendon wrote afterwards, that Cromwell’s attitude to the King was noticeably cooler after this episode,38 and in the strange patchwork of Cromwell’s relations with Charles Stuart, this particular incident must certainly have made a striking effect upon him. But now events were moving too fast in London for too much further introspection. It was mob rule, or something very little short of it, which was approaching. Apprentices broke into the very buildings of Parliament to demand the repeal of the militias ordinance and the recall of the King to the capital. Not only the Speaker but members of both Lords and Commons including Ludlow and Haselrig decided that the moment had come to cast themselves upon the mercies of the Army for protection. And as the uncouth Reformadoes began to talk of plundering that wealthy prey, the City of London, the borough of Southwark extended an invitation to the Army to return. The fact that the Army, now at Hounslow Heath, could count on the Speaker to head its ranks, provided it with the last spur to action since there was now a gloss of legality to their march. The soldiers as they threw their hats in the air were able to cry ‘Lords and Commons and a free Parliament’ with real conviction.
At 2.00 a.m. on 6 August, some regiments were entering the City through the opened gates of the rebel borough of Southwark. The main body of the Army surged forth on the heart of London, sprigs of conquering laurel in the hats of the soldiers. Cromwell rode his horse at the head of his own regiment, which preceded the main body of the cavalry under Fairfax. At Hyde Park the Lord Mayor and Aldermen met them with hasty speeches of welcome, and at Charing Cross they were greeted by the Common Council. Before the end of the day, the Speaker was restored to his proper place in Parliament, a day of public thanksgiving had been ordered, and a month’s pay for the rank and file. The Commons passed a speedy if scarcely sincere resolution: ‘This House doth approve of the coming up of the General and the Army for the safe sitting of the Parliament, and that Thanks be given to the General and the Army for the same.’ The eleven members, those symbols of the counter-revolution, vanished once more. The next day the entire Army, some eighteen thousand of them, swaggered through the City on their way to taking up a position at Croydon, leaving both the Tower and Parliament guarded. Fairfax, who had been ill, sat placidly in a carriage with his own wife and Mrs Cromwell, the perils of a political hostess quite forgotten in the glories of a conqueror’s wife. But Oliver Cromwell rode on at the head of the cavalry. The prediction of Jacob Astley made a year previously that the Parliamentarians might well wreck their own peace if they fell out with themselves had come home to roost with a vengeance.
About the time of the negotiations with the King, the French Ambassador had a significant conversation with Cromwell, which he repeated several years later to the Cardinal de Retz when Cromwell was Protector because it had stuck in his memory. What were Cromwell’s real aims? To which Cromwell replied enigmatically: ‘None rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going …’* Remembered later such words acquired easily the connotation of a sinister ambition, but at the time they were more probably spoken in the sheer bewilderment and doubt which as we have seen dominated so much of Cromwell’s mood this perplexing summer. At the same time, during one of his speeches at Reading, Cromwell had spoken frankly of the other side to his dual nature, that impulsive streak which often succeeded these periods of uncertainty. He was one who was apt on occasion to be very swift in his affections and desires, believing dangers to be imaginary rather than real, ‘and truly I am very often judged for one that goes too fast that way’.40In his first mood, Cromwell had hung back, and persuaded others to hang back, from the march on London for as long as he could humanly believe another solution to be possible. He was never on the side of the undisciplined hotheads of the Army and still hoped the soldiers would turn out to be, as Baxter heard he called them, ‘his obedient lambs’. But for one who studied the ways of Providence among men, the behaviour of the relict of the Parliament had surely indicated beyond doubt that it was the time for some more precipitate action.