Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (54 page)

This was the paradox of Parliament’s war aims. Parliamentarians saw themselves as ‘watchmen’ over the constitution, who wanted to preserve the essentials of the ancient monarchy. Indeed, in 1645 only one MP voted for a republic while the vast majority still saw kingly government as the best of all the possible alternatives. But there was no sign that Charles would ever compromise with them. As the king bluntly stated, ‘There are three things I will not part with – the Church, my crown, and my friends; and you will have much ado to get them from me.’ He would fight to the end. Where did that leave Parliament?

Confronted with these realities, the original aims of Parliament were coming under attack. John Pym and John Hampden, its earliest leaders, had both died in 1643, while their manifesto, the Grand Remonstrance, with more than two hundred demands, offered no coherent, unifying war aim. But beneath the surface of the parliamentary armies were brewing new forces, and Manchester’s moderate conservatism was met with fierce resistance from one of his officers, General Oliver Cromwell. For Cromwell, a Puritan, a radical and now a rising parliamentarian, rejected not only the king’s authority in religious matters but also any accommodation with the crown. If he were so defeatist, he asked Manchester, why was he bothering to fight at all?

Cromwell, despite his rank, belonged to the wilder shores of religious belief. He and his fellows repudiated all human authority in religion and all fixed outward forms of belief. Instead they believed in their Christian liberty to seek after truth and to follow it wherever it led them personally and individually.

Born in 1599, Cromwell had Protestantism in his blood, and it was further drummed, indeed beaten, into him at school and university. Like many religious men, Cromwell experienced a crisis of faith in his thirties from which he emerged with a burning confidence in his own salvation. But there was nothing otherworldly about Cromwell’s faith. He was a big, bony, practical, rather awkward man – hands-on, sporty, unscholarly despite his Cambridge days, but with the gift of the gab and a knack for popular leadership. Fearless, with no respect for persons however grand or institutions however venerable, Cromwell was a man waiting for God to reveal Himself to him in actions. But as the war ground into stalemate, there were few obvious signs of divine favour. Cromwell noticed early in the Civil War that the royalists fought with fervour and almost religious conviction. They truly believed in kingly government and the righteousness of their cause. Parliamentarian soldiers, on the other hand, bogged down in constitutional quibbles, lacked inspiration.

The New Model Army, filled with men who were seekers like himself, proved to be the answer to his prayers. Created in February 1645 by a Parliament that was increasingly despairing of victory, the New Model Army was England’s first truly professional fighting force: a meritocracy founded on strict discipline, thorough training and ability rather than social rank. It was said that they fought with a pike in one hand and a Bible in the other. Cromwell, for these men, seemed to epitomize the Christian warrior. As a contemporary said after one of Cromwell’s early victories, ‘It was observed God was with him, and he began to be renowned.’

The first great test of the New Model Army came at Naseby on 14 June 1645. On one side were the royalist forces led by King Charles himself in gilt armour and mounted on his beautiful Flemish horse. On the other a company of ‘poor prayerful men’, many of whom were new to battle but who nevertheless outnumbered the more experienced royalist forces. During the course of the day, the solid ranks of Cromwell’s New Model cavalry and Cromwell’s own generalship proved decisive. By one o’clock in the afternoon, Charles had lost his infantry, his artillery and in effect the kingdom. ‘God would’, Cromwell wrote after the battle, ‘by things which are not bring to nothing things that are.’ It was a biblically inspired, messianic confidence which Cromwell shared with his troops.

The New Model Army proved to be the decisive weapon in Parliament’s struggle with the king. But in forging this weapon, Parliament had called into being a new power in the land, one whose strength would grow with each victory that it won. Indeed, Cromwell’s victory with the New Model Army at Naseby was not only the beginning of the end for the royalist forces; it was also the beginning of new ideas about the role of the monarchy – indeed, about its very existence.

After the battle, the army was visited by a clergyman, Richard Baxter. Baxter was a noted Presbyterian who had preached against the king’s religious policies. Instead, like all Presbyterians, Baxter believed in an austere authoritarian national Church run not by king and bishops but by committees of zealous clergy and laymen known as presbyteries. Nevertheless, like most Englishmen, he anticipated that the king would eventually agree to a negotiated settlement and consent to a reformation of the national Church.

But Baxter now encountered in the New Model Army a body of men among whom radical ideas were eagerly embraced. They were fed on a diet of tracts and pamphlets that cast Charles as an evil tyrant and godly MPs and soldiers as God’s true ‘Vice-regents’ on Earth. They believed that kingly government was ordained by God, for they read in Deuteronomy: ‘one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee’. But if kings were ordained by God, it did not mean that all kings were godly. Some monarchs did God’s work, while others, like Pharaoh, were scourges that the pious were charged with fighting as a religious duty. Charles, it was clear to them, was akin to an Old Testament tyrant who set up false idols and oppressed the people of God. Such a man must be resisted, lest Englishmen commit blasphemy themselves by acquiescing in the sacrilege of a latter-day king of Babylon. It was not that Charles was just a secular despot: he was a tyrant over Christianity itself. One writer described the parliamentarian forces as a ‘quiver so full of chosen and polished shafts for the Lord’s work’. And another urged them: ‘let us proceed to shed the blood of the ungodly.’

These tough, Bible-quoting, disputatious soldiers were agreed on two things – that the state had no right to interfere in their religion and that Charles was a tyrant and a traitor who must be defeated and brought to account for his crimes. For the Presbyterian Baxter, who believed in a God who ordained order and discipline, this was a nightmarish vision of un-Christian anarchy. But it was also a vision, Baxter realized, that the men of the New Model Army were determined to turn into reality.

To Baxter’s horror these religious extremists were to have no qualms in calling for the trial, and eventually the execution, of their monarch.

II

After his defeat in the Civil War, King Charles had been prisoner first of the Scots, who handed him over to Parliament for money in January 1647; then he was seized by the New Model Army in April. For most parliamentarians, the thought that Charles should be put on trial, let alone executed, was abhorrent. Moreover, as Charles travelled through the country as Parliament’s prisoner, he was met by cheering crowds everywhere, even in Puritan Cambridge, which was the constituency of Oliver Cromwell himself. The majority of the people, it was clear, were not ready for a revolution, and might even support the king if things were pushed too far. Sensibly, in view of this sentiment, Charles was offered a generous settlement to end the war.

But characteristically, Charles overplayed his hand, rejecting the astonishingly lenient political terms he was offered by Cromwell and the other army leaders in order to guarantee religious toleration. Instead, in a cynical
renversement d’alliance
, the king joined forces with his original enemies – the Scots Covenanters. In return for the king’s promise to impose Presbyterianism throughout the British Isles, which he had no intention whatever of keeping, the Scots were to invade England to restore King Charles I and wipe out the New Model Army.

In 1648 the Scots army invaded England, initiating what became known as the Second Civil War, which was finally decided in a wet and bloody three-day-long battle at Preston in Lancashire. By a masterpiece of strategy, Cromwell and his New Model Army turned the Scots’ defeat into an annihilating rout. The parliamentarians were indeed victorious. But it was the New Model Army which had won the war and was now determined to dictate the terms of peace.

They were decided at a three-day prayer meeting in Windsor in April 1648, when the army claimed to be fighting ‘in the name of the Lord only’. The ultimate war aim now was ‘to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord’s cause and people in these poor nations’. But they were at odds with Parliament, which was terrified by the army’s radical religious views. In November, MPs rejected the ‘Remonstrance of the Army’, a demand that Charles be brought to trial for treason because he had started the war and called in the Scots. Parliament was prepared to make yet another deal with the king.

But the army wasn’t prepared to concede again. Its officers now moved with lightning speed. On 1 December it seized the king, who had escaped into light, protective custody on the Isle of Wight; on 6 December Colonel Thomas Pride entered the House of Commons and purged it of the Presbyterian majority. One hundred and eighty-six members were turned away, forty-one were arrested and eighty-six didn’t turn up. Cromwell left the north for London, making known his support for the purge. And on 4 January what remained of Parliament, a group known as the Rump consisting of 150 MPs, proclaimed itself the Supreme Power in the nation. It was a military coup fronted by a pseudo-parliamentary dictatorship.

The Second Civil War and his great victory at Preston had produced a marked hardening in Cromwell’s attitudes, especially towards the king. Until Pride’s Purge he had kept his opinions secret. Henceforward, he, too, saw Charles – who had engineered war on his own initiative and for his own selfish ends – as a man of blood who must be punished for his crimes. Convinced as always that God revealed Himself in events, he quickly shifted ground to take a leading part in the decision to put King Charles on trial for his life.

The army and remaining parliamentarians knew full well that Charles, for all his blunders and obstinacy, retained significant support in his kingdoms. Even some radical elements in the army were objecting that the purge of MPs was an act of tyranny. The officers and remaining MPs had to act quickly. A High Court of Justice comprising 135 Commissioners was set up to try Charles. Opposition was bulldozed, as were constitutional niceties. When one Commissioner said that there was no known, legal way to try a monarch, Cromwell shouted him down: ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it!’

On 20 January 1649, King Charles was brought to Westminster Hall to be tried for high treason. According to the indictment, Charles was ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public and implacable enemy to the commonwealth of England’. The unthinkable act of killing the king was drawing even closer. Charles’s strategy, which he stuck to with remarkable persistence, was to refuse to recognize either the authority or the legality of the court, and throughout the week-long trial both the king and his judges sat with their hats firmly on their heads in a stand-off of mutual disrespect.

Charles laughed openly at the charges and questioned the right of a minority of Parliament to try him. ‘Is this the bringing of the King to his Parliament?’ he asked. ‘… Let me see a Legal Authority warranted by the Word of God, the Scriptures, or warranted by the Constitution of the Kingdom.’ He warned that a parliamentary or military tyranny would be a disaster for England. After him there would be anarchy or oppression when the known constitutional landmarks were torn away.

Charles was correct in saying that he was not being tried by the Parliament that had initiated opposition to his style of government. Under Cromwell’s leadership, the radicals had grown from a fringe element to control not just the army but also the Parliament that now sat in judgement on the king, preparing for the almost inconceivable step of killing their anointed ruler. The death warrant of Charles I was signed and sealed by fifty-nine of his judges, ordering his execution by the severing of his head from his body on 30 January 1649, with the requirement that the execution should take place in the open street before Whitehall. It is a bold and brave document.

But it also highlights the titanic effort of will that was needed to bring even this panel of committed parliamentarians to take the terrible, irrevocable step of publicly executing the king. Both the date of the warrant itself and the date of the execution are inserted over erasures. The names of two of the men who were in charge of the execution have been changed following the refusal of the original nominees to act, and many of the signatures, we know, were obtained only after long, hard lobbying. Overseeing it all, driving it all and allegedly even guiding the pens of the reluctant signers was the third man to sign, Oliver Cromwell.

The day of the execution, 30 January, was bitterly cold. Charles put on two shirts: he did not want to be seen shivering lest onlookers mistake it as a sign of fear. At about noon the king drank a glass of claret and ate a little bread, and then he was escorted through the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the scene of the gaudy triumphs of the Stuart court, and stepped through one of the windows on to the high, black-draped scaffold in the street below. ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown,’ the king said to his chaplain, Bishop Juxton, ‘where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ And then the king removed the garter jewel of St George, made of a single onyx encircled with diamonds, from round his neck, and handed it to Juxton with the instruction that it was to be given to the prince of Wales with the single word, ‘remember’.

Charles’s most valuable legacy to his son was the manner of his death. Sixty years before, Charles’s grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had died flamboyantly as a passionate martyr to the Catholic faith. Charles instead offered himself up with quiet dignity as a sacrifice to his vision of Christian kingship.