Events began to move towards a climax. Ireton, Ludlow and their allies held a secret meeting. They decided that if Parliament
restored an unrepentant king to the throne, all dissenting MPs should call publicly upon the army to come to their aid to
restore public trust in Parliament. This declaration would prepare the ground for a military coup against both Parliament
and king.
At the end of November, Colonel Hammond received orders to move the king from Newport to Hurst Castle on the mainland. Hammond,
a stickler for form, refused, saying he could only do so on orders from Parliament. Fairfax quickly wrote to Cromwell, telling
him to get to London immediately. Perhaps he thought his best general, like the king, was deliberately dragging his feet –
waiting to see what would happen.
Parliament then received another petition, this time from Henry Ireton’s regiment, stating that the king could no longer be
considered
to be above ordinary mortals and bore responsibility for the second Civil War. Parliament ignored it. When the parliamentary
negotiating team left the island, Colonel Hammond received orders calling him away from his command on a spurious mission.
Before the day was done, the army council had given orders for the military occupation of London.
Three days later, as the rain beat down on Newport, Colonel Ewer took a detachment of his Roundheads (Cromwellian foot-soldiers
wore their hair in rounded basin cuts) and marched through the town to the house of Sir William Hopkins, where the king was
billeted. With their musket fuses lit and smoking in the lantern light, the Roundheads entered the house. Searching for the
king, they moved from room to room, permeating the interior with the unmistakable whiff of saltpetre, the smell of the battlefield
and death. The king’s companions feared the worst.
When the soldiers opened the door to the king’s private room, Charles was seated by the fire. He turned to face his visitors
with a calm expression. Though he remained impassive, the king knew that the soldiers’ unannounced arrival late at night could
only mean they were acting on the orders of the army and not of Parliament. It could even mean they were acting not solely
on Fairfax’s orders but on those of sterner men like Henry Ireton.
12
Fearing for the king’s life, courtiers demanded that a messenger be sent to Carisbrooke Castle to find out whether there was
indeed a plot to kill the king. Meanwhile, they hatched a plan to smuggle Charles to safety. The Duke of Richmond dressed
up in a military cloak and demonstrated that he could walk straight past the guards at the door unchallenged. The king refused
to attempt an escape. He was heartened by news from Carisbrooke that there seemed to be no plot to do away with him that night.
He finished a letter to the queen, and went to bed.
13
In the morning, Charles was put in a coach and transported to the coast, where he was ferried across the Solent to Hurst Castle.
News that the king had been taken by the army caused outrage in
Parliament but its members could do little more than formally complain to Fairfax.
There was little cheer for Charles during his first night at Hurst Castle. The Tudor fort was built on a blighted spit sticking
out into the Solent and surrounded by a shingle beach exposed to the westerly winds blowing in from the Atlantic. Charles
no longer had his retinue of courtiers and friends about him for advice and solace. He was allowed only a few servants and
one or two companions chosen by Parliament, including Sir Thomas Herbert, who acted as his groom.
The day after the king arrived at Hurst Castle, the army marched into London. In its vanguard was a regiment commanded by
a man well known in the city, Colonel Thomas Pride, who had run a successful brewery in London before the wars. When war broke
out, he joined the parliamentary forces and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, returning to his adopted city at the head
of an occupying army.
Meanwhile, Parliament debated whether the king’s concessions in Newport were grounds for a settlement. Sir Harry Vane, one
of the Newport negotiators, reported that ‘the justice of our cause was not asserted, nor our rights secured for the future’.
Others felt there was the basis of an agreement: Edmund Ludlow was disgusted that some Members of Parliament argued the king’s
case, ‘as if they had been employed by him’. Late that evening, Parliament adjourned without a decision.
On Tuesday 5 December, 129 Members of Parliament voted for the treaty and 83 against. Radicals, including Edmund Ludlow, went
into secret consultations with their allies in the army. Henry Ireton was present, but Oliver Cromwell was still marching
south with his regiments, possibly taking it slowly to see which way events would turn out. He did not have long to wait:
the plotters decided on nothing less than a military
coup d’état
– the army would exclude from Parliament all MPs who favoured the terms of the Newport talks. There would be no waiting for
Cromwell and his famous powers of
persuasion. The deed would be done in the morning. It was the beginning of a revolution.
There is room for debate over who first proposed such a course, but there is little doubt that the man who gave the order
for the first act of the revolution was Henry Ireton. In the face of Fairfax’s continuing lack of resolve, Ireton was the
de facto head of the army in London. He knew he had to select a steadfast officer to carry out the purge of the pro-Newport
MPs. Colonel Pride had not only been a brewer before the war, he had also been a part-time soldier in the London militia.
Who better, reasoned Ireton, to ensure there was no popular uprising against their action? Pride was a many-sided man, who
in peacetime crusaded against corruption and courted unpopularity by campaigning against bear baiting and cock fighting. But
he would go down in history for directing the events that took place the next day, 6 December 1648, which became known as
Pride’s Purge.
The following morning, Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke and his fellow Commissioner of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Widdrington, arrived
in their legal finery for service in one of the courts held within the warren of buildings that contained Parliament. They
were surprised to find lines of troops drawn up in the yards. Two regiments had taken over the buildings and their surroundings.
The distinguished lawyers were even more surprised to be stopped and vetted at the door. It was what Sir Bulstrode had feared:
an army coup. Deciding to brazen it out, the two grandees explained they were on business at the Court of Chancery and were
allowed to enter.
Once inside, Widdrington and Whitelocke were advised by a clerk that despite the army coup developing around them, they should
take their seats in the Commons. No sooner had they done so than a clerk came up and told them not to sit. The two great office
bearers rose in confusion. Whitelocke was then invited to talk to the Lords. As he went down the corridor towards the Lords’
chamber, he came across Colonel Pride, who was directing his men to arrest various members of the Commons and prevent others
from entering. To his astonishment, Pride broke off from directing the coup to let
Whitelocke through. On his way back from the Lords, he was even more amazed when Pride ‘saluted him civilly’. In a strangely
understated judgment on so momentous an event, Whitelocke noted it was ‘sad to see such things’.
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By the end of the day, Whitelocke was one of about two hundred members left in what became known as the ‘Rump’ of the Parliament.
Colonel Pride’s men arrested 45 MPs and excluded 186 who they thought would not support the trial of the king, or who had
voted to support the Newport treaty. The next day, another fifty MPs were excluded and three arrested.
Realising the king’s situation was worsening by the day, close followers once again plotted his escape. Horses were hired
on which Charles could flee while taking his daily exercise on the beach beside Hurst Castle and a ship was chartered to wait
at anchor off the coast. The Duke of Lennox urged Charles to seize the moment but the king answered that he had given his
word and would not break it.
15
On 15 December, the army council decided to move Charles to Windsor. Shortly after, Thomas Harrison arrived to tell Ewer
the news. Harrison did not meet the king, who remained ignorant of his visit.
In London, discussions were under way about how to proceed against the king. Cromwell favoured a trial but he was unsure how
it could be done. The established laws of the land seemed to be an obstacle to putting the king on trial. If the king was
set above all other men by God, how could other men try the king? Wrestling with this headache, on 18 December he called his
friend and confidant Colonel Richard Deane – that ‘bold and excellent officer’
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– to a meeting with Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke and Sir Thomas Widdrington. We don’t know what advice the lawyers gave, but
we can deduce by subsequent events that it was not what Cromwell and Deane had hoped for.
Despite this setback, the army began to move the king to Windsor. The journey would take several days on horseback. The detachment
of troops together with their prisoner and his depleted entourage set
off for Winchester, where they spent the night before heading across the Downs to Alresford. People gathered along the roadside
and shouted, ‘God preserve Your Majesty.’
On the road out of the market town of Alton, the travellers came upon a troop of cavalry lined up along the side of the road.
The appearance of the handsome and finely dressed commanding officer impressed the king. According to Sir Thomas Herbert,
the officer was ‘gallantly mounted and armed; a velvet Montero was on his head’. He wore a new buff coat with ‘a crimson silk
scarf about his waist, richly fringed’.
17
The king asked Herbert the identity of this paragon of fashion. The answer chilled him to the bone. Of all the Roundheads
and Cromwellians Charles knew, or knew of, this was the one he least wished to meet. This was the man who wished to see him
dead in order that Christ could rule on earth in his place; this was the person who had called him ‘that man of blood’. It
was the dandy Puritan himself, Colonel Thomas Harrison.
And so it was that two of the most fanatical, headstrong and stubborn characters of the seventeenth century met one another.
Harrison’s extreme religious opinions were matched in rigidity by Charles’s view of himself as a king appointed by God to
rule with absolute powers.
*
At Fareham that evening, the two men dined together. Given his situation, Charles decided a little flattery would not go
amiss. He told Harrison that he could see by his physiognomy he was a valiant man. Having softened up his companion, he then
said he had heard that Harrison had plotted to murder him but that now he had met him and seen his noble appearance he knew
it could not be so. Harrison graciously replied that he hated all such ‘base, obscure undertakings’.
18
The next day, they headed to Bagshot, where the king was entertained to lunch by Lord and Lady Newburgh. The Newburghs were
royalist sympathisers and planned to help Charles escape. Their idea was that the king would complain that his horse had gone
lame, whereupon Newburgh would provide him with an especially fast animal and Charles would race off into the distance. After
lunch, Harrison spotted that the king’s retinue were being offered some fine horses. He immediately pointed out to Charles
that his own cavalry horses were of similar fine quality. Realising this was Harrison’s way of saying he knew what was afoot,
the king put all thought of flight from his mind.
As the troop approached Windsor, Charles passed within three miles of Runnymede, where King John had been forced into signing
a document granting liberties to his people four centuries earlier. Charles felt himself made of sterner stuff than John.
He would sign no agreement giving away his royal prerogatives. Among the clauses of the Magna Carta was one which Charles
approved of very much. This clause stated that every man had the right to be tried by his peers. As the king had no peers,
it followed he could not be put on trial. No matter how grave the misdemeanours of a ruling king, no matter how much he made
them suffer, he could not be held accountable by his subjects.
This very point had thoughtfully been made by Charles’s father. In an instruction manual on monarchy, James I had described
the condition of a king: ‘The absolute master of the lives and possessions of his subjects; his acts are not open to inquiry
or dispute, and no misdeeds can ever justify resistance.’
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Charles had taken this to heart. James had also given some good advice: be a wise king, know one’s subjects, don’t be a tyrant,
participate in the council of the land, choose a wife of the same religion, and rule in a Christian manner. Unfortunately
for him, Charles ignored almost all of this. Now he was about to pay the price for swimming against the tide of Reformation
England.
On the evening of 23 December, Charles completed his journey, passing under the portcullis of Windsor Castle in heavy rain.
By now he was resigned to whatever turn events might take; but he was
certain that he could not be put on trial, for he believed the laws of England did not allow it. A monarch was appointed by
God and no one was above the monarch. This was held to be the case across all European kingdoms and was well understood.
The Rump Parliament had not moved so far with its revolutionary intentions to be stumped by existing laws. It was determined
that a way would be found to try the king. On the same day that Charles arrived in Windsor, the Commons appointed a committee
of thirty-eight MPs and lawyers to draw up a charge against him. Whitelocke and Widdrington were not among its members. However,
when the committee called for them to attend on Christmas Day and again on Boxing Day, Whitelocke decided on what action to
take. The affable lawyer was famous for his clear-sightedness. He informed his friend Widdrington that his coach was ready.
The two friends made off as fast as Sir Bulstrode’s horses could gallop. Their swift departure provided Oliver Cromwell with
a clear message regarding their thoughts on any attempt to try the king.
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