A History of Britain, Volume 2 (22 page)

Even without the New Model Army forces, Charles was outnumbered by Fairfax. But again over-ruling Rupert's caution, he decided to give battle anyway. By the time they deployed on two facing hilltops with a marshy little vale between them, the two forces were massively disproportionate. Cromwell and Fairfax had about 14,000 men, the king only half that number. And numbers counted. Remembering his mistake in waiting at Marston Moor, Rupert took the initiative, charged right away down his hill and, carried by the momentum up the facing slope, sliced through the cavalry on the left flank, commanded by Cromwell's future son-in-law, Henry Ireton, who was wounded in the onslaught. But only about half of Ireton's cavalry strength broke from this initial hit. Yet again, Rupert's horse was soon off plundering the baggage train, leaving the royalist infantry in the centre to push pikes with Fairfax's foot soldiers and the Scots. At just the moment when it looked as though Fairfax's numbers would inevitably take their toll, Cromwell charged, his tight lines of horses crashing into the royalist cavalry that remained on the left flank. At the critical moment Charles, dressed in a gilt suit of armour, tried to charge Cromwell's victorious troopers with his Life Guard. Horrified aides took the reins of his Flemish horse and led it away, a move that was misread in the field as a command for tactical withdrawal. The crumbling became a collapse. In two hours it was all over. Seeing his men exposed to a slaughter, Astley surrendered 4000 foot and 500 officers, as well as the complete royalist artillery train and thousands of muskets and arquebuses.
Virtually nothing was left of the royalist army except its dead on the field of Naseby. In the captured baggage train were the king's correspondence, personal and military, as well as £100,000 worth of jewels, coaches and plate. A troop of Welsh women, called ‘Irish whores' by the victorious troopers, were, needless to say, mercilessly butchered or mutilated.

Within a month or two there was almost nothing left of the royalist war machine in England. Another decisive victory by Fairfax over Lord Goring at Langport in Somerset destroyed its surviving western command. One by one the major centres – Bristol, Cardiff, Carlisle – fell. Garrisons that held out were besieged with the utmost ferocity. When, after a massive siege in October, Cromwell's army finally took the heavily fortified Basing House built by the Catholic Marquis of Winchester (Mary Tudor's Lord Treasurer) and still owned by his heir, they were convinced they were rooting out a nest of filthy idolatry and put to the sword everyone they could find in the burning ruins, civilians as well as soldiers, women as well if they offered any resistance. The great architect and orchestrator of the court masques, Inigo Jones, fled with only a rough blanket to protect him from naked indignity. Paintings and books were taken to London to be burned in a great public bonfire, and whatever was left of the furniture or jewels found there was the soldiers' to sell.

On 26 April 1646 Charles left Oxford. He had cut his hair; wore a false beard and was dressed without any of the trappings of a gentleman, much less those of a king. Only his chaplain and a single manservant went with him. For a while he hid in disguise in Norfolk, hoping he might yet escape by sea and perhaps join the queen in France. But this was the heart of Cromwell country, and the ports were being watched. His better chance lay with the Scots, even the Covenanter Scots, for he knew that, Presbyterian though they were, their vision of the future assumed the continuing presence of a king. Exactly what sort of king, however, was evidently open to dispute.

And dispute the nations of Britain did, in words and fire for another three years, which were almost as ruinous and certainly as divisive as the previous three. For if peace had broken out in 1646, it was only in the sense that sieges and battles had, for the time being, ended.

Just what the new England, what the new Britain, was supposed to be, what the prize was for which so many had laid down their life, was unresolved. So many of the principles for which parliament had gone to war in the first place in 1642 had been made redundant by the transforming brutality of the conflict. The one thing that had not changed was the conviction, shared by a majority of parliament, that they needed some sort of king, chastened, emasculated, restrained and reformed, but a king
none the less, as an indispensable element in the constitution. So the traditional political fiction that the king had been ‘led astray' into the war by wicked and malignant ‘men of blood' was maintained, the better to cleanse the Crown of permanent, institutional guilt. By the same token, those held responsible for the crime of civil war and who were exempt from any kind of pardon and indemnity – and who therefore might well be brought to trial – were no fewer than seventy-three, starting with Prince Rupert. Equally, anyone who had fought for the royalist side or aided or abetted them in any identifiable way was to be excluded forever from holding any kind of local office or trust. This, in effect, was to perpetuate the painful division of the governing and law community that had opened up in 1642. And since the king had shown such contempt for what, in retrospect, seemed like the modest proposals for his restraint set out by parliament five years before, he now had to be fettered with bands of steel. Control of the militia and armed forces was to be transferred to parliament for twenty years, and it went without saying that neither high officers of state nor his council could be appointed without parliament's consent, nor foreign policy action taken without its approval. While Presbyterianism was the order of the day, the eventual fate of England's Church was left, for good political reasons, to future settlement.

What kind of Britain did this augur? The Marquis of Argyll, for one, believed that at last a ‘true union' of Scotland and England – unforced, sympathetic in godly amity, the opposite of James VI and I's marriage of high Churches, and certainly the opposite of Charles's Arminian coercion – was now at hand. But then, of course, with the Clan Donald still torching his villages and murdering his clansmen, and with the Catholic-Irish Confederacy unsubdued and capable of supplying new armies to make his people wretched, Argyll had very practical reasons to sound so fraternal. The war that at the beginning had been fought to keep the several nations of the British archipelago apart was now pulling them together, although on terms that were often mutually at odds. Driven by the imperatives of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Irish revolt had now accepted a view of itself that had once been only the fantasy of its enemies: that the restoration of the old Church was the prelude to the destruction of heresy in England and Scotland. Conversely, the Presbyterians in Ulster now thought there would never be any peace or safety for themselves in Ireland without the active military involvement of the rest of Protestant Britain. We are still living with the consequences of that assumption.

Oddly enough, in 1646–7 it was England that rather wanted to be left alone and paid the Scots army £400,000 to go away, leaving the king behind. (The Scots, Charles remarked with grim irony, had bartered him
away rather cheaply.) To be left alone, though, was not the same as to be left in peace. Militarily pacified, politically England was a vacuum filled by an uproar. The old polite community of law and government that had ruled since the Reformation had been shattered, some thought (wrongly, as it would turn out) beyond repair. In counties ravaged by war, justices of the peace were partially replaced by county committees empowered to mobilize money and arms, while JPs survived to look after traditional administration and crime. The county committees were hated by civilians for billeting soldiers and levying taxes, and they were hated by the army for failing to pay them adequately and reducing them to either beggary or theft. By 1646–7, however, as parliamentarian control was established throughout England, JPs everywhere started making a comeback. The wielder of power in England now was not, as everyone had imagined when the war began, parliament, but the army: a massive military machine the likes of which had never before been seen in Britain. And when the fighting was more or less done, the men of this hungry, angry and poorly paid army were perfectly prepared to mutiny, seize their officers, march to new quarters without permission or refuse to decamp. In the last years of the war, the New Model Army at least had also been socially transformed, with the officer corps drawn from sections of society that were much broader and lower down in the pecking order than anything thought possible before 1645. This did not necessarily mean that its opinions were more radical – the startlingly proto-democratic Levellers, such as John Lilburne, were still an influential minority. But it did mean that something new had been unloosed on the English polity: a reading, debating soldiery with a burning desire to settle accounts with its parliamentary paymasters. And while they were at it, an extremely important element in the army, beginning with Cromwell and Ireton, was becoming increasingly hostile to the ‘Scottish' Presbyterianism that had been imposed on England by the Solemn League and Covenant. Let the Scots have a Kirk, said the Independents, and let godly English congregations elect ministers according to their own understanding of faith and desired forms of worship.

In the summer of 1647 this perilously volatile mixture of religious hostility and economic anger brought England very close to another civil war, this time between parliament and the army. But it was a contest in which only one side had the guns. Parliament's idea of neutralizing its problems with the army had been to demobilize it, even before it had come to terms with the king. For its part, the army was hardly likely to agree to its disbandment before its grievances had been properly addressed. Indignant that their orders were not being obeyed, parliamentary leaders, especially Denzil Holles, began to wax constitutional. They
claimed (with some reason) that the protection of parliament's authority was the reason for which the war had been fought in the first place and that threats against the integrity and independence of the ‘representatives of the people' were a kind of tyranny no less mischievous than that of the king. But in 1647 the army not only had the guns; they also had ideologues – although they did not always share the same ideology – such as Ireton or Colonel Rainborough, who ventured to argue that parliament was in fact a ‘decayed' body and that the army was a great deal more representative of the people than was the genteel body at Westminster.

On 3 June the quarrel over sovereignty turned literal when a detachment of Fairfax's soldiers, led by Cornet George Joyce, seized the king himself from Holmby House in Northamptonshire. Two days earlier they had hijacked the bullion intended for their disbandment. In the same week Fairfax agreed to the establishment of an unprecedented institution, a General Council of the New Model Army to consist of both officers and elected men from each regiment. With money, force and the king in hand, the army could now literally call the shots. It began to demand the impeachment of Holles and ten other members of the Commons, including Sir Robert's son, Edward Harley, who resisted the redress of their grievances, in particular their arrears of pay, indemnity for conduct during the war and adequate pensions, all genuinely matters of life and death for the battle-hardened soldiers. The army also wanted the kind of religious regime dear to Cromwell, one that respected the independence of congregational preference rather than one that surrendered to Presbyterian enforcement.

There were no heroes (and perhaps no villains) in this sorry showdown. The summer of 1647 witnessed the peculiar spectacle of a professedly apolitical commander, Fairfax, leading (out of conscience for the welfare of his men) a highly politicized army prepared to impose religious liberty at the point of the sword. If that were not paradoxical enough, the men they hated, the parliamentary Presbyterians, were defending the right of the elected representatives of the nation to impose a Calvinist Church on England by virtue of their votes! Holles and his friends, including Edward Harley, the champions of parliamentary sovereignty against the army (as they had been against the king five years before), were prepared, if necessary, once more to use the pressure of the crowd (another tactic revived from 1642) to get
their
own way. Mobs were excited, ‘monster petitions' drawn up. The London apprentices and soldiers who had already disbanded from armies other than the New Model mobilized for their protection. When, at the end of July, a vast and heavily armed demonstration forced both houses of parliament to support
the Holles Presbyterian line, bloodshed seemed inevitable. MPs and peers on the losing side, including Manchester, escaped from London to Fairfax's camp and the Lord General began a march on London, making it clear that if the city did not open its gates he would blow them open. On 2 August the New Model Army was peacefully admitted. London – and by extension England – was now under the gun.

In its turn, the army now set out terms for settlement with the king in its Heads of the Proposals. Needless to say, Charles was delighted to be able to play one lot off against the other, especially as the army's conditions turned out to be a good deal more lenient than those currently on the table from parliament. Only four, not seventy-three, royalists were to be exempt from a general pardon. Parliament, called biennially, would exercise control over the armed forces for just ten, not twenty, years, and royalists could be eligible to return to local office after five years. Charles was now in the agreeable and unlooked-for position of watching a Dutch auction for his signature. He waited for the bids to go ever lower.

Amid the debris of the English state were survivors who were desperately trying to put the pieces of their lives back together and attempt to make some sense of what had happened to them, their beliefs and their country. For some, this was close to impossible. In 1647 Nehemiah Wallington's sister-in-law, Dorothy Rampaigne, the widow of Zachariah, came back to England to see what she could recover of her deceased husband's estate. But the Wallingtons were horrified to learn that since Zachariah's death Dorothy had taken an Irish Catholic as her lover and protector. This turned upside down everything the Wallingtons had ever believed. ‘Oh, my sister,' moaned Nehemiah, ‘my heart aches and trembles to consider of yoiur sad and miserable condition . . . in regard to your poor soul.' Dorothy had not only lain ‘with that Irish rebel' and hidden her pregnancy but had carried on with her ‘sins and wicked ways' with such shamelessness as to guarantee a terrible judgement from heaven. Nehemiah's wife, Grace, implored her sister to send her only remaining child by Zachariah, a boy called Charles, to London to be protected from the infections of the Antichrist and to be brought up in a proper godly household. For whatever reasons, Dorothy did, indeed, send Charles to the Wallingtons, where he was trained as an apprentice turner by Nehemiah, becoming a master himself in 1655.