Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (55 page)

Barely two months later, on 17 March 1649, the House of Commons passed an Act stating ‘That the Office of a King, in this nation … is unnecessary, burthensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people of this nation; and therefore ought to be abolished.’ An attempt was made to eradicate the very word ‘king’ from the language, and all the images and icons of monarchy were removed. After almost two centuries, the supreme symbol of monarchy – the Imperial Crown itself – was smashed. The Commonwealth of England, ruled by the Rump Parliament, was established.

But getting rid of kings was easier said than done. There had been kings in England since before England itself had existed. Kings had made England and had forged the Imperial Crown with its claim to rule Church as well as state, and Scotland as well as England. Could this king-made, king-centred country successfully become a kingless republic? In eleven years of audacious political experiment, the parliamentarians tried every means possible and every bold constitutional experiment to transform England into the kingless society of their dreams.

The parliamentarians’ first problem was that in killing one king they had created another. Charles II, the eldest son of Charles I, had spent part of the war fighting for the royalist cause, most notably at the battle of Edgehill. But defeat had forced him into exile in France. Monarchs and rulers throughout Europe all expressed their horror of the English regicide, but none was willing to supply a single soldier to help Charles regain his throne.

Only the Scots were ready for that, and then only on terms that Charles II found profoundly distasteful both personally and politically. For, the Scots demanded, Charles must not only accept the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland itself, he must also promise to impose the Presbyterian system in England and Ireland as well. For eighteen months Charles wriggled until finally he was forced to accept the inevitable, swear the Covenant and give the undertakings the Scots demanded. The result was that in 1650 a Stuart once again rode at the head of an army on British soil. But it was a Scots army dedicated to the imposition of a Scottish Presbyterian empire by force throughout the British Isles.

Convinced of the holiness of his cause, and that he would find a large number of royalists who had been horrified by the murder of his father, Charles II took on the New Model Army once more. But as he travelled through Scotland and later England, he found a population eager to come out and cheer his ragged army, but reluctant to lay down their lives for the royalist cause. His plans of invasion and a glorious restoration of the Stuarts now ended in humiliation. Once again the Scots faced Cromwell’s New Model Army. At Dunbar, despite mustering a force twice the size of Cromwell’s, the Scots suffered a crushing defeat. And in 1651, Charles’s invasion of England also ended in defeat at Worcester.

Charles, who had been crowned king of Scots on New Year’s Day, became a fugitive, hunted throughout England for forty days. It was a remarkably long time, for Charles was unusually tall and had a dark complexion. The government had put out a description, but the young king was able to evade capture with the help of a few loyalists and his own playacting skills. He fled the Commonwealth’s troops under the name of Will Jackson, a servant. Stopping to reshoe a horse, he made pleasant conversation with the blacksmith. ‘What news?’ he asked. The man told him of the defeat at Worcester, adding that the king was still at large. Charles replied amiably ‘that if the rogue were taken he deserved to be hanged, more than all the rest, for bringing in the Scots’. Charles said that the blacksmith replied ‘that I spoke like an honest man’. As he continued through England, the king saw bonfires and heard church bells pealing in celebration of his defeat. At last the king was able to slip across the Channel in a fishing boat.

Otherwise Cromwell’s victory was complete. The English, as Charles II found, would not rebel against the Commonwealth in favour of the Stuart cause. Scotland, too, was conquered and occupied by the English army, and the General Assembly of the Kirk dissolved by force. It was Cromwell’s last battle as an active commander. Now, leaving others to mop up in Scotland, he started the journey back to London.

Cromwell, like Julius Caesar before him, now bestrode the world like a colossus. He had outdone the greatest of the medieval kings and had succeeded where even King Edward I, the hammer of the Scots, had failed. He had conquered Ireland, Scotland and, in a series of coruscating victories, had forged a new united Britain. Except, curiously, in England. For the government of England remained in the limbo that had followed Charles’s execution. The monarchy had gone, but it was unclear what would replace it.

Having won the war, the new republic now had little idea what to do with the ensuing peace. By 1653, Britain had been without a king for nearly five years and a decade of war had left the country economically drained. But the remaining Rump Parliament proved incapable of producing a new reformed constitution or providing effective leadership. There were calls that every adult male should be given the vote, that land should be redistributed and that the government should adopt a fully republican constitution. But radical proposals such as these were fiercely rejected as the English Republic became increasingly conservative. Indeed, by refusing to stand for re-election and meeting in continuous session the members of the Rump threatened to become a permanent and self-perpetuating oligarchy. Was it for this that the army had brought down Charles I? Parliament and the army were locked in mutual hatred, and only Cromwell was strong enough to hold power without the two coming to blows. But, after all, he owed his position to the army. As Parliament tried to take more power, his dominance was being challenged. The last straw came when the Rump began moves to deprive Cromwell of his position of Commander-in-Chief.

On 20 April 1653, Cromwell entered the Commons dressed as a mere citizen, in a plain black coat and grey worsted stockings. He rose to address the House, putting off his hat as was then customary and speaking moderately in praise of parliaments. But, as his passion and his confidence rose, he began to pace up and down, put his hat back on his head and thundered, ‘You are no Parliament. I say, you are no Parliament. I will put an end to your sittings.’ He looked down at the mace and said, ‘What shall we do with this Bauble? here, take it away.’ He then moved towards the Speaker’s chair and told the assembled members that ‘some of them were Whoremasters. That others of them were Drunkards, and some corrupt and unjust men, and scandalous to the possession of the Gospel, and that it was not fit they should sit as a Parliament any longer.’

‘Call them in,’ he cried, ‘call them in.’ Members of Cromwell’s regiment burst into the Commons, the Speaker was removed from his chair, the mace from the table and the members of the Rump dispersed. England had already lost her king; now it had lost its parliament. Cromwell managed to do what Charles I had so humiliatingly failed to do when he came in 1642 to arrest just five MPs. Power flowed unmitigated and undisguised from the barrel of a musket.

III

Now Cromwell, with the backing of the army, ruled England without Parliament as Commander-in-Chief. A portrait of him, painted shortly after Charles I’s execution, shows how far Cromwell – the erstwhile gentleman farmer – had transmuted into a princely figure, in armour, attended by his faithful page, wielding the field marshal’s baton and able to exercise supreme power in civil as well as military affairs.

But Cromwell was a reluctant revolutionary and eager to cloak his military dictatorship in decent constitutional garb. Surveying the post-war situation, he mused on what form of government was suitable for England now the Stuarts were gone. He admitted that for ‘the preservation of our Rights, both as Englishmen, and as Christians … a settlement, with somewhat of Monarchical Power in it, would be very effective’. But he would not say as much, in public at least. Neither Parliament nor the army wanted another king, but they did recognize the need for a new kind of authority and so, under a new constitution, the office of king was renamed Lord Protector (the then usual English name for a regent) and offered to Cromwell, who accepted it.

Cromwell then summoned a parliament as provided for by the constitution. But the parliament of Cromwell immediately picked up where the parliaments of Charles I had left off, by arguing about the Lord Protector’s control of the army, his income and his right to appoint advisers. And Cromwell responded by behaving like Charles I, first denouncing Parliament, then dissolving it.

As Lord Protector (and now untrammelled by Parliament), Cromwell was invested with all the authority of a dictator. And, having come into power as the nominee of the army, he set himself to carry out that which the army had set forth in its petitions and manifestos. Cromwell’s most dramatic concession to the army came in 1655 with his agreement to the appointment of eleven major generals as military governors of the English regions. The major generals were doubly unpopular. First, because they were responsible for the enforcement of the Protectorate’s programme of social reform. This showed that the Puritans really were puritanical since it not only involved an assault on swearing, drunkenness, gaudy female fashions and fornication, but also attempted abolition of such staples of English life as horse races, theatres, casinos and brothels. Not even pubs were exempt. Still worse, from the point of view of the constitutionally minded, was the fact that the major generals were to be paid for by a 10 per cent income tax on ex-royalists, known as the ‘decimation’ and levied purely on the authority of the Lord Protector.

But the decimation tax was seen as taxation levied without parliamentary consent, and it came under remorseless attack when a revised version of the Rump Parliament finally returned in September 1656. Concerned by what they saw as Cromwell’s arbitrary use of power, and unable to recognize this new form of republican authority, Parliament now sought a return to the kind of constitutional government it had been used to in the past – working not with a Protector but a king.

They set out their claims in ‘The Humble Petition and Advice’, hoping that Cromwell would exchange the title of Protector for that of king. The title and office of a king, they argued, had been long received and approved by their ancestors. And had not Cromwell always wondered whether he might not be the Lord’s anointed? What if a man, even a humble God-fearing man like himself, were king?

Cromwell was obviously fit to be king, but why should Parliament, which had just killed one king, now seek to create another? The reason was that the powers of the king, unlike those of the Lord Protector, were known and limited. A king had to respect ancient custom, and to seek the consent of Parliament to make laws and to raise taxes. King Oliver would have been an altogether more circumscribed figure than Lord Protector Cromwell.

But the army was aghast that its godly revolution might amount to no more than the replacement of the House of Stuart by the House of Cromwell. So they lobbied hard against the title of king, and Cromwell himself, after weeks of agonized indecision, decided that God had ‘blasted the title and the name of King’. He would accept the powers and indeed more than the powers of a king, but not the title. Cromwell, asserting that he was ‘not scrupulous about words or names or such things’, brushed over the implications of his decision.

Cromwell’s second inauguration as Protector took place on 26 June 1657 in Westminster Hall. The first had been modest; this was virtually regal. Edward I’s Coronation Chair was brought from Westminster Abbey. Cromwell was invested with an imperial robe of purple velvet lined with ermine. He was presented with a gilt-bound and embossed Bible, a golden-hilted sword and a massive solid gold sceptre. He swore a version of the Coronation Oath and finally, seated in majesty in the Coronation Chair, he was acclaimed three times to the sound of trumpets and the cry ‘God Save the Lord Protector’.

All that was missing was the crown itself, and that appeared on his coinage and Great Seal. Oliver was now indeed king in all but name. Cromwell had rid Britain of its king but as Lord Protector he now held more power than any king of England had ever held. His achievements rivalled those of any English monarch.

But just one year after his investiture, Cromwell fell ill, and on 3 September 1658 he died at the royal palace of Whitehall. In Cromwell’s magnificent funeral ceremonies, which stretched out over fifteen weeks, any coyness about his royal status was finally abandoned. Cromwell had ruled like a king. He was buried as a king with solemn ceremony, a vast cortège, which included no fewer than three state-salaried poets, and at enormous expense. Presiding over it all, as was traditional in royal funerals, was a lifelike effigy of Cromwell himself, which wore in death the remade Imperial Crown that he had first destroyed and then refused in life. Few British rulers have left a grander legacy or one that seemed more stable.

But if Cromwell had taken on the forms of a king without the name, one very important thing was missing. Did the laws and constitution die with him? Was the Protectorship hereditary or elective? These matters were never cleared up, despite pleas that Cromwell should make the office hereditary to preserve the good order and stability of the Commonwealth after his death. But Cromwell, as usual, refused to antagonize the regicidal army by restoring a full hereditary monarchy. He acted at the very end, however, when he was beyond the jealousy of the generals. On his deathbed Cromwell nominated his eldest surviving son Richard as his heir, and within three hours of his father’s death Richard was, to the sound of trumpets, proclaimed Lord Protector by the grace of God. Loyal addresses flooded in from the counties and towns, and messages of condolence and congratulations from foreign sovereigns. Few royal successions have been as smooth.

Richard was not without his personal qualities either. He had been brought up to be a simple country gentleman, spending part of his youth in Ely at his father’s modest house. Perhaps fearing that if he were seen to be grooming an heir the army would object, Oliver had kept his son out of the way. Nonetheless, as Lord Protector Richard went on to display charm, dignity and even an unexpected eloquence. But he lacked the killer instinct for power on the one hand and a secure power base in the army on the other. Richard also inherited the unresolved political dispute between the army and Parliament. His father had been strong enough to control it, but it quickly threatened to overwhelm the son.