As for Ludlow, within two years of riding out at Edgehill, he was promoted to major. By the time he was thirty-two, he had
helped organise the trial of the king, signed his death warrant and become a member of the government of a new republic. Two
years later he was an effective commander-in-chief in Ireland. As a firm believer in political reform and religious freedom,
Ludlow’s rite-of-passage carried him through from young squire to active republican. By the age of forty-three he was a pariah
and exile with a price on his head. In a period of two decades, Ludlow experienced and did more than most men could expect
to see or achieve in several lifetimes – and yet at the time of his enforced flight abroad he still had thirty-two years ahead
of him.
In Switzerland, he sat down to write a history of all that had occurred between taking up arms in 1642 and the end of his
religious and republican dreams. When Ludlow and his fellow life guards joined up, most thought the war would last a few months
at most. Two years later it was bogged down in stalemate. On the parliamentary side, the aristocratic commanders did not wish
to inflict an outright victory over the king, thinking the conflict would quickly be resolved in a negotiated settlement.
Essex had been appointed supreme commander by Parliament to exercise its cause on the battlefield while also preserving the
life of the king.
12
Ludlow watched as the war progressed and the old aristocratic generals were replaced by the ‘middling sort of men’, Cromwell’s
appointees to run the New Model Army that would ultimately crush the royalist forces. He saw how the main protagonists who
had entered the war on the parliamentary side were replaced by a generation of more radical figures who no longer adhered
to the old system of royal favour and inherited influence.
In the evenings by Lake Geneva, after a day’s labour at his history, Ludlow’s mind would be crowded with the ghosts of the
dead and
the memories of the living. Among the ghosts that visited most was that of John Cook, the brilliant young lawyer who wrote
the prosecution case against Charles I. When brought to the Tower, Cook had requested that his life should be taken so that
Ludlow’s should be spared. What a man that was – no truer friend or colleague could any man have had. Shortly after Ludlow
had made his escape, Cook was executed for treason.
When he did not dwell upon the terrible fate of his friend John Cook, Ludlow thought of the fate of many others, including
his fellow exile, John Lisle, recently murdered in a Swiss churchyard barely twenty miles from Ludlow’s own hideaway. The
old soldier was in little doubt that the same assassins plotted to come for him, too.
And what of the ghost of Oliver Cromwell, that brilliant man who, in the eyes of Ludlow and others, betrayed the Commonwealth
by becoming a king in all but name? Hated though the memory of Cromwell was, the face that leered most malevolently in Ludlow’s
imagination was that of George Monck, the parliamentary general who had become a turncoat and secretly plotted to install
Charles II as king.
Fifteen years later, the republic was only a broken dream. General Monck, who had started out as an impoverished soldier for
hire, was living in luxury with a dukedom and a fortune from a grateful king. Ludlow, who had lost everything, lived quietly
with his wife Elizabeth, who had managed to join him in exile. She was his only comfort as he spent his days writing his memories
of the great events he had taken part in. On his desk lay a brace of exquisite pistols, a present from a fellow exile who
would later die for his convictions. The pistols were a talisman, a call to arms, to join a new army of revolutionaries and
overthrow Charles II. But Ludlow was no longer the young firebrand who had handled weapons and directed men on the battlefield.
He was nearing sixty and the fire had gone out in him.
From his fortified house, Ludlow could see the light shift on the
waters of Lake Geneva. It held no charms for him. He longed for the fields of England. He dipped his pen in ink and tried
to conjure up the earthly paradise that England should have been, the paradise he thought he could help create. The light
across the lake looked alien and unwelcoming. There was no beauty in this scene; God had turned against him. He entitled his
work
A Voyce from the Watchtower
, the words taken from the book of Isaiah:
My Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower … And behold there cometh a chariot of men … And he answered and said, Babylon
is fallen, is fallen.
13
In the evening light, the mountains turned ultramarine and sapphire, their images reflected in the still waters of the lake.
Ludlow wrote of his flight from England and journey to Switzerland. His description of the city of Paris said as much for
his view of life as for the French capital:
I saw the King’s stable of horses, which, though not extraordinarily furnished, gave me more pleasure than I should have received
by seeing their master, who thinks fit to treat them better than his miserable people. But I loathed to see such numbers of
idle drones, who in ridiculous habits, wherein they place a great part of their religion, are to be seen in every part, eating
the bread of the credulous multitude, and leaving them to be distinguished from the inhabitants of other countries by thin
cheeks, canvas clothing, and wooden shoes.
14
In these words the old soldier spelled out his creed: his hatred of inequality, of priests and poverty – the Puritan credo
wrapped up in words that might have been written by any young Englishman on his grand tour. As for mention of his nemesis,
Charles, Ludlow could not bear to write the name, preferring to use terms like ‘usurper’ and ‘enemy of the people’.
As the shadows lengthened across the lake, Ludlow tried not to think of the shadowy figures moving across Europe and North
America, searching for him and his fellow regicides – men who had dared to sit in judgment on a king.
January 1647—January 1649
On the gloomy afternoon of 30 November 1648, two hundred foot soldiers and forty cavalry disembarked on the Isle of Wight
after a choppy sea crossing from the mainland. With darkness falling, they set off in driving rain for the town of Newport,
lying about four miles up the River Medina. On arrival, they set up a ring of road blocks around the town, cutting it off
from the outside world and sealing in its most illustrious inhabitant – Charles Stuart, king of England, Scotland and Ireland.
The soldiers had orders to take the king to Hurst Castle on the mainland.
The arrival of the detachment took everyone by surprise, including the town’s military commander, who had not been informed.
One thought reverberated through the town: that the persistent rumours that the king would be assassinated were true – and
that he would be killed that very night. This was not the only time such fears had circulated around the king. Fear of assassination
was what had driven him to the Isle of Wight in the first place.
When the first Civil War had ended following major parliamentary victories at Marston Moor and then at Naseby, the king decided
that rather than surrender to the New Model Army, he would give
himself up to the Scots. He hoped to make a deal whereby he would lead a Scottish invasion of England to regain his throne.
The Scots and the king could only agree to differ and in January 1647, they handed him over to the English Parliament. Charles
then lived under informal house arrest at Holmby House, an enormous Renaissance palace in Northamptonshire. He was guarded
by troops answerable to the Presbyterian faction in Parliament, which was hovering on the verge of a deal with the king. In
June, fearing that Parliament was about to allow the king to move back into Whitehall Palace and take up the trappings of
power once more, the army decided to take the king into its own custody. A detachment of five hundred troopers was sent to
Holmby House. They were led by a keen young officer, Cornet George Joyce, a political radical who had been in Cromwell’s own
regiment. The source of his orders is unclear, though he claimed that his authority came from Cromwell. When the king asked
for his authority, Joyce indicated the five hundred Ironsides, or cavalry, massed behind him.
Later in the summer, the army moved the king to the palace of Hampton Court in Surrey. Here, Charles lived in opulent captivity,
attended by a full retinue of servants and courtiers and surrounded by part of his famed art collection. Among his most precious
masterpieces was the great series of nine paintings by Andrea Mantegna,
The Triumphs of Caesar
, depicting the fruits of military success. For a king who had lost control of his kingdom, the series was a mocking rebuke.
In this gilded cage echoing with failure, Charles continued to reject all efforts to reach a negotiated settlement either
with Parliament or the army. Cromwell and his fellow generals, Henry Ireton and Sir Thomas Fairfax, all came and left without
agreement. The army had suggested a detailed settlement. Written by Ireton and another parliamentary general, John Lambert,
this proposed a constitutional monarchy with reduced powers for the king. Charles rejected it outright. His
modus operandi
was one of non-cooperation, banking on his adversaries squabbling and burning themselves out, after which his powers would
hopefully be restored.
1
In the autumn, rumours spread that various revolutionary or radical elements – army agitators and Levellers
*
– planned to murder the king. When the stories reached Hampton Court, Charles took them seriously. On the evening of 11 November,
his jailer, Colonel Edward Whalley (a cousin of Oliver Cromwell), went to check on his prisoner to find he had vanished, having
escaped down the back stairs, leaving behind only his cloak. Under cover of darkness, Charles and several courtiers took a
boat down the Thames.
In exasperation, the influential religious radical Colonel Thomas Harrison called for the king to be prosecuted for treason,
in the process famously referring to him as a ‘man of blood’.
2
Two days later, Charles resurfaced on the Isle of Wight. He believed the island’s garrison commander, Colonel Robert Hammond
(another of Cromwell’s cousins), was wavering in his allegiance and might come over to the royal side. Although conflicted,
Hammond thought it best to take the king into captivity once more and locked him up in Carisbrooke Castle. The one positive
aspect of this arrangement for Charles was that Hammond felt he had to answer to the will of Parliament, which was better
disposed towards the king’s restoration without root-and-branch reform than many in the army.
At Carisbrooke, Charles retained a retinue of servants and courtiers and was allowed regular contact with the outside world.
He was, after all, still the king, even if he was not allowed to rule. He used his time and relative freedom to do clandestine
deals and plot with the Scots for them to send an army to invade England. Politics and the restoration of his throne were
not the only matters on his mind. He had not seen his queen, Henrietta Maria, for four years and he was lonely. For comfort,
he took up with Jane Whorwood, the stepdaughter of a courtier. In code, he wrote to her suggesting how she could come to him
secretly and how he wished for a ‘swiving’ (crude slang for sexual intercourse).
3
The king’s plotting bore fruit. In the spring, there were royalist uprisings around England and South Wales. Much more seriously,
in July 1648 the Scots invaded and the second Civil War was under way. Gradually, the English uprisings were put down. In
August, Cromwell defeated the Scottish army in a brilliant victory at Preston. Up to this point, Cromwell, Ireton and the
other army leaders had continued to be monarchists, believing in a settlement which allowed the king to rule the country while
increased powers were granted to Parliament and wider freedom to worship was permitted. Now, hearts had been hardened. Wild
rumours circulated that Charles was about to be killed. Theories abounded, including one that he would be shot as the leader
of an enemy force (i.e. the Scottish army), another that he would be tried in a kangaroo court, and yet another that he would
be assassinated.
These rumours marked a significant change in the views of the king’s opponents: many influential figures in the army and a
few in Parliament were beginning to consider whether constitutional monarchy was any longer the only way forward – at least
if it included Charles Stuart as its representative. Experience had changed Henry Ireton from a conservative thinker to a
much more radical one. Where once he had believed in evolution, he now saw the necessity for a complete break with the past.
Edmund Ludlow was another of those convinced that the future lay in a clean break with the past. Ludlow rode from London to
Colchester, where the supreme commander of the New Model Army, General Sir Thomas Fairfax, was engaged in besieging one of
the last royalist strongholds. Fairfax came from one of Yorkshire’s oldest families, which had supported Parliament’s side
since the beginning of the war. He was a brave and capable soldier who had – as is so often the case in time of war – been
promoted to senior rank at a very young age. The transition from warfare to the subtler arts of negotiation and deal-making
was proving difficult for Fairfax’s traditional mind.
Like the majority of people in the land, Fairfax envisaged a return
to something like the old order, with a few constitutional changes to make the king more of an instrument of Parliament. His
worry was what part the army should play in reaching a settlement. Ludlow was in no doubt. He wanted the army to move to forestall
the majority in Parliament who now seemed bent on reinstating the king without any real concessions. Ludlow informed Fairfax
that the agreement which was ‘being pressed with more heat than ever’ would ‘render all our victories useless thereby’.
4
He pressed Fairfax for the army to take action but found him ‘irresolute’.
A few weeks later, Parliament selected fifteen commissioners to begin a new round of negotiations with the king later known
as the Newport negotiations. The eminent lawyer and politician Bulstrode Whitelocke was rightly sceptical about the talks,
saying he was glad not to have been chosen, ‘all the previous treaties wherein I was a commissioner having proved so ineffectual’.
5
His misgivings were prophetic.
The king was moved to a private house in Newport, a more fitting venue for talks than Carisbrooke’s Norman keep. When negotiations
opened on 19 September, Charles reverted to form, dragging his feet and agreeing to little. The role of the bishops was a
major stumbling block. Charles emphasised that the bishops were – like himself – divinely appointed and so could not be swept
away. For Puritan negotiators like the republican Sir Harry Vane, a persistent critic of the Stuarts’ rule, the bishops were
a key element in the king’s arbitrary power over his subjects and a symbol of religious intolerance. The two sides circled
around this impediment for weeks but made little progress.
After many weeks of negotiation, the king made several concessions, agreeing that certain powers could pass to Parliament
– as long as the arrangement was open to revision after a specific number of years. He also agreed that Presbyterianism would
become the official state religion. The Church would no longer be run by bishops but by elected elders. This was not what
religious dissenters wished to hear, for, unlike the Presbyterians, they were wary of the crown’s
arbitrary powers; neither were the temporary shifts in power sufficient to placate those like Ireton and Cromwell who sought
more permanent constitutional reform. It became clear that Charles was not negotiating in good faith; he continued to talk
secretly with the Scots and he also entertained plans to escape to France.
On 18 October, Henry Ireton’s regiment sent a petition to the House of Commons demanding that those responsible for the second
Civil War should be brought to justice. After much heart-searching, Oliver Cromwell had finally come round to the same position.
The petition stipulated that ‘the same fault may have the same punishment in the person of the king or lord, as in the person
of the poorest commoner’.
6
Bulstrode Whitelocke recalled afterwards that it was the ‘beginning of the design upon the king’s person, but not discerned
till afterwards’.
7
To add to the controversy, Parliament ignored the army petition and agreed that once negotiations ended, Charles would be
allowed to live in London, with his property and income restored. It looked as if Parliament was getting ready to restore
the king to the throne no matter what. Inside the army, debate raged on how to proceed. While hardliners felt that all negotiation
with the king was now fruitless, others believed there was still the chance of a deal.
*
It was decided to move Charles to Windsor Castle, a step nearer London. To begin with, he would be brought back across the
Solent to Hampshire. A trusted, battle-hardened colonel named Isaac Ewer was given the task.
The process that led to the king being snatched from Newport had begun only two weeks before in St Albans. Army radicals had
demanded a meeting of the Army General Council, to which General Fairfax unenthusiastically agreed. Meeting in the ancient
abbey on 16 November, the council discussed sending another petition to Parliament, setting out why the army was against the
king’s reinstatement. The prime mover of the petition was Ireton, with Fairfax much opposed. The petition began by recalling
the words of Cicero: ‘
Salus populi suprema lex esto
’ – ‘let the good (or safety) of the people be the supreme law’.
8
Before the century was out, John Locke, the Whig philosopher, would use this phrase as a key tenet of his treatise on constitutional
government. In the middle of the seventeenth century, however, it was a contentious proposition, striking at the very heart
of the idea of the divine authority of a king.
After much discussion, Fairfax was reluctantly won over. The army council agreed to back Ireton’s proposal that all negotiations
should be broken off and the king brought to trial. Fairfax agreed the manifesto could go out under his name.
9
It was presented to Parliament on 20 November. Fatefully, Parliament ignored it and continued with the Newport proposals.
Cromwell, who was still travelling south from Scotland with his army, wrote to Fairfax, saying that ‘all the regiments’ in
his army were against the treaty at Newport: ‘My Lord, I find a very great sense in the officers of the regiments of the suffering
and ruin of this poor kingdom, and in them all a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon offenders; and I must
confess, I do in all, from my heart, concur with them.’
10
By now Cromwell had reached a shattering conclusion – that the views of the people were only truly represented by the army,
by virtue of its composition of thousands of soldiers who had fought two wars in which a hundred thousand had died. According
to Cromwell, these soldiers now wanted ‘justice done upon offenders’ – which could only mean upon the king. A revolution was
growing and Parliament remained largely oblivious. The majority of MPs were fixated on the discussions in Newport, while the
flow of history was turning towards the army in St Albans, its political supporters in Westminster, and the steady, southern
march of Oliver Cromwell.
With no positive response from Parliament, Fairfax ordered the army to leave St Albans and move to Windsor on 25 November
– sending out the signal that while the army was officially the tool of Parliament, it had in fact become an autonomous force
that could, if necessary, impose its will on Parliament.
That day, Cromwell wrote to his cousin Robert Hammond, the garrison commander of Carisbrooke. He argued that the people’s
victories over the king’s forces meant that God was with them rather than with Charles: ‘My dear friend, let us look into
providences; surely they mean somewhat. They hang so together; have been so consistent, so clear and unclouded.’ Furthermore,
if Cicero’s argument were followed, then the people counted for more than a king. Cromwell concluded by calling the Treaty
of Newport a ‘ruining, hypocritical agreement’.
11