Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (22 page)

The case for the‘grandees’ — the established property-holders and others who held a‘fixed interest in the kingdom’ — was put
by Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton. But the army’s groundbreaking discussions were cut short. Ensconced upriver at Hampton
Court, Charles took fright at the reports reaching him from Putney, and on II November he escaped under cover of darkness,
riding south towards the Channel.

There is no telling what might have happened if, having reached the coast, Charles had then taken ship for France. But, not
for the first time, the King turned in the wrong direction, heading for the Isle of Wight, where he had been informed — incorrectly
— that the governor had royalist sympathies. In no time Charles found himself behind bars, in Carisbrook Castle, his abortive
escape bid the prelude to what became known as the Second Civil War. Royalists now rose in revolt in Kent, Essex, Yorkshire
and Wales, to be followed by an invasion by a Scottish army, lured south on a secret promise from Charles that he would introduce
Presbyterianism to England and suppress the wilder Puritan sects.

It was the last straw. Parliament and the New Model Army were reunited in their fury at Charles’s enduring intransigence,
and these risings of the Second Civil War were
put down with unforgiving savagery. When the King’s chaplain, Michael Hudson, was cornered on the roof at Wood-croft Hall
in Lincolnshire, parliamentary troopers refused his appeal for mercy, flinging him and his companions into the moat below.
As Hudson clung on to a drainage spout, his fingers were slashed off, and he was retrieved from the moat only to have his
tongue cut out before being executed.

The King was treated no less ruthlessly. Cromwell and the generals were now resolved to bring him to trial, and realising
that a majority of MPs still favoured some sort of compromise, they organised a
coup d’état.
Early on the morning of 6 December 1648, a detachment of horsemen and foot-soldiers under Colonel Thomas Pride surrounded
both Houses of Parliament and arrested or turned away all suspected compromisers and royalist sympathisers — more than 140
members.

’Pride’s purge’ made possible the final act of the drama. On New Year’s Day 1649, the hard-core of MPs remaining voted’to
erect a high Court of Justice to try King Charles for treason’, and on 20 January the trial began. The only judge who would
risk the terrible responsibility of presiding over the court was an obscure provincial justice, John Bradshaw. But even he,
despite being a committed republican, was so fearful that he wore armour beneath his robes and had had his beaver hat lined
with steel. The King, for his part, contemptuously declined to remove his own hat as he took his seat beneath the hammer-beam
roof of Westminster Hall. This contrived court, he maintained doggedly during one hearing after another, had no right to try
him: he, more than his judges, stood for the liberties of the people.‘If power
without law may make laws…’ he declared,‘I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life.’

It was to no avail. Witnesses were summoned to testify they had seen the King rallying his troops at Edgehill, Naseby and
on other battlefields, thus proving him guilty of waging war on Parliament and people. He was thus found guilty as a’Tyrant,
Traitor, Murderer, and Public Enemy to the good people of this Nation’. Death’by severing the head from his body’ was to be
his fate.

Ten days later, on 30 January, Charles walked out on to the raised scaffold outside his splendid Banqueting House that stands
to this day, just across Whitehall from Downing Street. It was a piercingly cold afternoon. The Thames had frozen, and the
King had put on an extra shirt so he should not be seen to shiver.

A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,’ he declared defiantly in a long oration in which he denounced the arbitrary
power of the sword that had made him‘the Martyr of the People’. Then, more prosaically, he asked the executioner,‘Does my
hair trouble you?’ — tucking his straggling grey locks into a nightcap to leave his neck bare.

The axe fell, severing the King’s head with a single blow, and the executioner leaned down to pick it up with the standard
cry —‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ But the crowd, estimated at several thousand, scarcely cheered. Instead, recalled one
seventeen-year-old boy later, the cry was greeted with such a groan as I have never heard before and desire I may never hear
again’.

T
HE EXECUTION OF CHARLES I WAS THE SINGLE
most remarkable event in the course of English history — and the person who brought it to pass has a claim to being England’s
most remarkable man. Until almost the last moment, Oliver Cromwell had shared the fears many felt at the enormity of cutting
off the King’s head. But when the death warrant was finally presented for signature to the apprehensive judges, it was Cromwell
who bullied the requisite number into signing. He shouted down the waverers, flicked ink at them, and, in one case, actually
held down a doubter’s hand to the page until he signed.

In a portrait by the painter Samuel Cooper we can study
the features of the fifty-year-old Cromwell at the moment he became the most powerful living Englishman. His nose is bulbous,
his eyes large and strikingly blue; a dusting of salt-and-pepper whiskers conceals a mole beneath his lower lip and there
is another, the size of a pea, dark and shiny, above his right brow.’The mirror does not flatter me,’ he told the painter.‘Nor
should you, Mr Cooper. I’ll have it warts and all.’

Cromwell was a curious mixture of arrogance and humility, ruthlessly sweeping aside obstacles, while also prey to depression
in the opinion of some modern historians — he was once treated for‘melancholy’ by the exiled Huguenot physician Turquet de
Mayerne. In addition, he suffered from bronchitis, though his wheeziness didn’t inhibit the eloquence full of fervour’ with
which he came to the attention of the House of Commons; the MP for Huntingdon was sometimes seen with a piece of red flannel
wrapped comfortingly around his throat.

His certainty of the rightness of his cause came from a deep and austere Puritan faith that set him on an inescapable collision
course with the High Church policies of Charles I. At one stage Cromwell contemplated joining the thousands of Separatists
who were seeking their religious freedom in the Americas. Instead he stayed, rising meteorically through the ranks of the
parliamentary armies to find himself charged with the task of creating a New World at home.

Following Charles I’s execution, a series of votes in the purged House of Commons abolished the House of Lords and the monarchy,
and on 16 May 1649 England was declared a‘Commonwealth’, ruled through Parliament by a Council
of State of which Cromwell was a member. He was appointed Lieutenant General of the Commonwealth’s armies, and in 1649-50
commanded ruthless campaigns against revolts in Ireland — where he massacred Catholics with a brutality that stirs resentful
memories to this day — and also in Scotland, which had briefly dared to crown Charles’s twenty-year-old son as Charles II.
These successes capped a military career that gave Cromwell a victory tally of won 30, lost o. As he returned triumphantly
from each campaign, he was feted like Caesar.

Like Caesar, too, he was drawn irresistibly towards political power.‘Take away this bauble!’ he angrily declared in April
1653, as he strode into the House of Commons with a company of musketeers and pointed at the symbol of parliamentary authority,
the ceremonial golden staff, or mace, which was set on the table in front of the Speaker.

Since 1648, when Colonel Thomas Pride had excluded those MPs likely to oppose putting Charles I on trial, the House of Commons
had been a wildly unrepresentative body. Derided as the‘Rump’, or remnant, its little clique of surviving members —just 140
or so — had only paid lip service to the problem, solemnly debating the surrender of their power for more than four years,
while greedily hanging on to its perks and profits.’You are no parliament, I say you are no parliament,’ declaimed the exasperated
Cromwell.‘I will put an end to your sitting.’

His alternative fared no better. The Nominated, or’Bare-bones’, Parliament (so nicknamed after the MP for London, the leather-seller
turned preacher, Praise-God Barbon) was an assembly of Puritan worthies selected by local churches
on such criteria as how many times the candidates prayed each day. First meeting in July 1653, this’Parliament of Saints’
dissolved itself after only five months, pushing Cromwell ever closer towards the option by which he had been tempted, but
had been resisting, for so long.

King Oliver I? Cromwell’s critics had long accused him of desiring nothing less; and his supporters urged him to take the
crown. A royal House of Cromwell was not an impossible concept in a society that found it difficult to imagine life without
a king. But Cromwell’s conscience would not let him. It would have betrayed everything he stood for — and the idea was, in
any case, totally unacceptable to the army. In December 1653 he was proclaimed Lord Protector of England, and when he accepted
this new dignity he was careful to dress in a plain black outfit with grey worsted stockings to emphasise that this was not
a coronation.

The new Lord Protector believed that government should be’For the people’s good, not what pleases them’, and for nearly five
years he force-fed England a diet of godliness. Since the start of the Civil War, Parliament’s Puritans had been legislating
for virtue, and now Cromwell put this into practice — particularly after July 1655 when he set up a network of military governors,
the major generals’. Sunday sports were quite literally spoiled: horseracing, cockfighting, bear-baiting, bowling, shooting,
dancing, wrestling — all were banned on the Sabbath. It was an offence on any day to dance around a maypole or to be caught
swearing: children under twelve who uttered profanities could be whipped. Fornicators were sent to prison, and for the only
time in English history (apart from the reign of King Canute), adultery was punishable by death.

Human nature won through, of course. In many localities these Puritan regulations were scarcely enforced. But they have rather
unfairly defined Cromwell’s place in history. He never became King Oliver, but he
was
crowned King Kill-Joy — and when he died of malaria in September 1658 there was dancing in the streets. It was‘the joyfullest
funeral that ever I saw’, wrote John Evelyn,’for there was none that cried but dogs’.

Today the statue of Cromwell — sword in one hand, Bible in the other — rightly enjoys pride of place outside the Houses of
Parliament. But the father of the great English Revolution actually proved how little revolution England could take, inoculating
us permanently against deposing monarchs, rule by armies or morality by decree. It is the measure of his achievement that
there are more roads and streets in England named after Oliver Cromwell than anyone except Queen Victoria — and none in Ireland.

M
ANASSEH BEN ISRAEL MADE IT HIS MIS
sion to secure freedom of worship for his fellow Jews. He was a rabbi living in Amsterdam during the years of the English
Commonwealth, and, like many in Europe, he was fascinated by England’s great experiment in the aftermath of killing its king.
He particularly pondered the burgeoning of cults and religions that followed the Civil War, for Parliament’s victorious Puritans
had wasted no time in abolishing the Church of England and its monopoly over worship. Bishops, prayer books and compulsory
churchgoing — all the mechanisms of an established state religion — were
swept away: people were free to work out their own route to salvation.

’After the Bible was translated into English,’ wrote the political theorist Thomas Hobbes,‘Everyman, nay, every boy and wench
that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty and understood what he said.’ An outspoken royalist, Hobbes
had spent the Civil War in exile in Paris. There he gave maths lessons to Charles, the teenage Prince of Wales, while writing
his great work of philosophy,
Leviathan.
Human life, said Hobbes, was‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. In his opinion, humans needed a strong ruler — a Leviathan
or giant — to impose order upon their unruly natures. A king was the obvious candidate, but England’s King had been destroyed,
and two years after Charles’s execution the inquiring philosopher went bravely back to England to investigate life in the
absence of the royal Leviathan.