Civil War: The History of England Volume III (46 page)

A defining moment of the debate arrived when Thomas Rainsborough, one of the representatives of the levelling movement, declared that ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he’ and should therefore be allowed the vote. It was a call that was not to be answered until 1918. Henry Ireton rejected the idea of manhood suffrage, however, and argued that the vote should be given to ‘persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies’. Only those with a financial stake in the country, in other words, should be allowed to determine its direction.

At one point in the proceedings Cromwell was moved to declare that ‘the foundation and the supremacy is in the people, radically in them’, but he also argued that the sovereign authority must be that of a parliament however constituted. In this uncertain time the force of power was absolutely required. He compared himself to a drowning man. ‘If it have but the face of authority, if it be but a hare swimming over the Thames, I will take hold of it rather than let it go.’ A more ominous note, for the king, emerged when Captain Bishop claimed that the woes of the nation came from ‘a compliance to preserve that man of blood’ by which he meant Charles. The captain was alluding to a passage from the second Book of Samuel: ‘Thou art taken in thy mischief because thou art a bloody man.’ The phrase soon became commonplace.

The final set of proposals that emerged from Putney did not
reflect the demands of the levellers or the debate about the future of the king; it was designed only to preserve the unity of the army. It recommended an extended franchise but maintained the ancient framework of king, Commons and Lords with the Commons in effective control. The commanders of the army then brought the debates to a summary close by ordering all of the participants to return to their regiments. A partial mutiny by some of the more radical troops was quickly put down. A restructuring of the army, in the following year, allowed its leaders to remove those soldiers of suspect sympathies.

The king now confounded everyone by escaping from Hampton Court. He had gone down some private stairs and, meeting with two associates, fled south. He seemed to have had no certain destination but eventually decided to make for the Isle of Wight where he had the sea at his back. He left behind some papers, one of which was an anonymous letter warning him of the danger of assassination. He also left a letter to parliament in which he asked to ‘be heard with freedom, honour and safety, and I shall instantly break through this cloud of retirement and show myself ready to be
pater patriae
’.

The governor of the Isle of Wight, Robert Hammond, received this father of the nation with no little apprehension; he was under the command of the army, and had no wish to disobey his superiors. But he was violently opposed to the levellers in the ranks and could guarantee the king’s safety from their attentions. It may also have suited Cromwell to leave the king on the island; he was far from the reach both of the more sanguinary levellers and of the Scots who might wish to negotiate with him. In the best possible circumstances the king might even take to the sea and journey to exile in France.

The king was now in Carisbrooke Castle under guard. He could set himself up as an object for auction, as it were, with many prospective bidders. Cromwell might still wish to come to an accommodation with him. Despite Robert Hammond’s best endeavours, the Scots might somehow be able to find a way of communicating with him. Almost as soon as he was ensconced in the castle he began to practise his subterfuges; he concealed messages in the lining of gloves, he engaged in secret conversations with his servants,
he drew up elaborate plans for sending and receiving clandestine letters.

This was the period in which Cromwell openly broke with the king and spoke bitterly against him in the army council. There is a story, never fully substantiated, that Cromwell intercepted a secret letter to the queen in which Charles announced that he would make an arrangement with the Scots rather than with the army. It was soon remarked at Westminster that, in Carisbrooke, Charles had thrown a bone between two spaniels and laughed at their enmity. That alone would have been enough to turn Cromwell against him. He now began to sympathize with the position of the more radical soldiers as resolute anti-monarchists. He observed that ‘if we cannot bring the army to our sense, we must go to theirs’.

Cromwell’s suspicions were soon confirmed. Towards the end of December the king, after secret negotiations with the Scottish commissioners, signed an agreement known as ‘the Engagement’. He promised to introduce Presbyterianism as the state religion for an initial three years; he would confirm the ‘solemn league and covenant’ in the English parliament, but would not oblige his subjects to take its oath. In return the Scots would support Charles’s demand for a personal treaty and the disbandment of all English armies; a Scottish army would then be dispatched to London to expedite ‘a full and fair parliament’. The document was sealed in lead and buried in the garden of the castle. He then refused to deal with a parliamentary deputation, at which point Colonel Hammond dismissed the king’s servants and doubled his guard.

Charles:
Shall I have liberty to go about to take the air?

Hammond:
No. I cannot grant it.

On 3 January 1648, the Commons passed the ‘Vote of No Addresses’ by a majority of fifty. No more communications, or proposals, would be put to the king. Cromwell fully supported the decision on the grounds that the people should not ‘any longer expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God has hardened’. The council of the army also pronounced that it would stand by the kingdom and parliament ‘without the king and against him’.

Yet at a subsequent dinner the army was still manifestly divided.
The commanders argued amongst themselves about the relative merits of ‘monarchical, aristocratical or democratical government’, but could come to no conclusion. At the end of the discussion Cromwell, in one of those fits of boisterousness or hysteria that punctuated his career, threw a cushion at one of the protagonists, Edmund Ludlow, before running downstairs; Ludlow pursued him, and in turn pummelled him with a cushion.

Colonel Hammond was soon informed that a treaty with the Scots had been signed while the king was in his safe-keeping, and he determined to find it. He entered the king’s chamber without warning; the king rose from his bed in alarm and put on his gown; Hammond proceeded to search its pockets, at which point Charles struck him. It was reported that, against all precedent, the colonel returned the blow.

The king’s incarceration incensed those who supported the royalist cause. Riots occurred in Ipswich and in Canterbury. A news-writer in London reported that ‘the counties are full of discontent, many insurrections having been lately made, even near this city’. The majority of the newspapers and pamphlets were strongly royalist and on the anniversary of the king’s accession, 27 March, celebratory bonfires blazed in the capital. Coach travellers, driven through the streets, were compelled to drink the king’s health. The butchers of the city declared that if they could catch Colonel Hammond ‘they would chop him as small as ever they chopped any of their meat’.

At the beginning of April the lord mayor sent some trained bands to disperse a crowd of apprentices in Moorfields; the crowd turned on the bands, captured their weapons and marched off shouting on behalf of ‘King Charles!’ Petitioners, seeking the rule of a king again, flocked to London from Kent, Essex and Surrey. The cavaliers were jubilant, and the Presbyterians once more gained a hold over parliament. In April the Commons passed a motion calling for a treaty with the king.

The signs of civil war were once more apparent. The first acts came from Wales where, in April, a royalist commander occupied Tenby Castle; soon enough the whole of South Wales had declared in the sovereign’s favour. The leaders of the army spent a day in tears and prayers. How could it be that blood and battle had returned
to the nation? Had the previous war been fought for no purpose? At a meeting of the New Model Army in Windsor it was concluded that ‘it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed’.

The army council then ordered Cromwell to enter South Wales with two regiments of horse and three of foot; it took him six weeks to defeat the rebels. Other anti-parliamentary forces had emerged throughout the country, guided not so much by zeal for the king as dismay at the taxes and county committees imposed by parliament. Berwick and Carlisle were taken by the disaffected; Pontefract was also seized in a surprise attack, and Scarborough declared for the king. The men of Essex marched under a banner raised by a royalist commander, General Goring. A section of the fleet off the Downs also declared themselves for the king, and joined with the men of Kent in their revolt. It had also become clear that the Scottish army was being assembled on the border in order to fight for the king.

This represented a serious challenge to the authority of parliament but this second civil war, as it became known, ended once more in victory for the New Model Army. The Scottish army did not cross the border until July, by which time most of the risings in England and Wales had been put down by the army’s superior military force; Cromwell dealt with the north, and Fairfax with the south. It had not been a war, but a series of scattered risings and outbreaks of fighting with no serious attempt to co-ordinate what might have been a successful rebellion. Without a coherent strategy the rebels were no match for the New Model. They had waited vainly for the Scots until it became too late to fashion serious resistance.

The second civil war had a bloody ending on its two principal fronts. The Scottish army, under the command of the duke of Hamilton, had made a slow progress southward through the rain and wind of an unseasonably cold summer; ill-trained, and much smaller than expected, it was sustained by no great cause, and as a consequence its morale was low. The New Model was at least bolstered by the knowledge that it was fighting an invasion force.

The two sides encountered each other at a pitched battle near the walls of Preston, on 17 August, in which the infantry of both
armies pressed hard upon each other. The Scots were eventually pushed back, with the loss of 1,000 men. Cromwell pursued the remainder of the Scottish army which, battered and broken, laid down its arms. It was the first battle in which he enjoyed overall command, and it was his most signal victory.

All the remaining royalists from the south-east had fled behind the walls of Colchester where, in the middle of June, Sir Thomas Fairfax prepared for a long siege against them. It was the most distasteful and inglorious event of the entire civil war. Fairfax had decided to starve the city into submission until there came a time when the inhabitants, having exhausted the provisions of cats and dogs, were forced to devour soap and candles; it was reported that the royalist soldiers had told the inhabitants to eat their children. The royalist commander, the earl of Norwich, then sent 500 women and children out of the town; Fairfax refused to receive them and with threats they were driven back behind the walls. By the end of August, reduced, as it was said, ‘by Captain
Storm
without and by Captain
Hunger
within’, the royalists surrendered; two of their commanders were then put in front of a firing squad. This second phase of the civil war was more harsh and intense than the first; there was no longer time for mercy.

After his victory at Preston Cromwell believed that he had seen once more the hand of God. He trusted that he was doing the work of the Lord; that is why he waited upon divine providence to guide his actions and to direct his way forward. He was a blind mole in search of grace, sometimes surrounded by darkness, yet his faith in providence was his rock and his refuge. He wrote to a friend and colleague, Philip Wharton: ‘I can laugh and sing in my heart when I speak of these things.’

The battle at Preston effectively marked the end of the second civil war, and of the turmoil that had mangled the kingdom since the king had first raised his banner six years before. It has been calculated that 100,000 soldiers and civilians died in the course of the conflict, and that a larger portion of the population perished than in the Great War of 1914-18. It has therefore justly been described as the bloodiest war in English history. One hundred and fifty towns, and fifty villages, suffered significant damage; 10,000 houses were destroyed.

In the course of the second civil war Charles made several attempts to escape from Carisbrooke Castle. He had never ceased to conspire, and to devise stratagems against his captors and his enemies; he would, for example, conceal coded messages in the heels of his servants’ boots. Some supporters managed to smuggle to him a cutting tool and a supply of nitric acid, then known as
aqua fortis
, to dismantle the iron bars of his window; but the design was forestalled and came to nothing. On another occasion he tried to squeeze through the bars but became trapped, stuck between his chest and shoulders, and could only extricate himself with difficulty.

Yet after the final victory parliament still wished to treat with him, against the wishes of the army whose leaders had denounced him as ‘a man of blood’ who had effectively instigated the second civil war. The majority of the members of the Lords and Commons, together with the large part of the population, now wished for peace at any price. The king was therefore taken out of confinement in the castle and lodged with his friends and servants in Newport, to which town the parliamentary commissioners came. He sat under a canopy of state with his advisers behind him; the parliamentary delegation sat before him.

He was in a more tractable mood, no doubt because the victory of the New Model Army brought an effective end to his resistance. He wished to come to an agreement with parliament on the very good grounds that he feared the army much more. So within a few days he had conceded thirty-eight of their propositions and in return was granted four of his own. He submitted in large part to the religious demands of the commissioners, and agreed to give up control of the militia for a period of twenty years. The parliamentary negotiators were no doubt aware that he might renege on these promises if ever he returned to full power.