Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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proceeded to reinforce it with further provocations. They granted requests

from the City corporation for the right (which it had lost in 1643) to nom-

inate the members of its powerful Militia Committee, and for the trained

bands of Southwark, Westminster, and the Tower Hamlets to be placed under

its control. The result was that the committee became a solidly presbyterian

body, which promptly carried out a purge of independent ofﬁcers from the

militias of the City and its principal suburbs. The threat to create a counter-

force to a diminished New Model would soon become obvious, if it was not

so already. Instead of giving a hearing to the ofﬁcers’ Vindication when it was

presented on 27 April, the Commons summoned Colonel Robert Lilburne to

the bar for discouraging his men from enlisting for Ireland and two other

ofﬁcers for distributing pro-army pamphlets; a fourth ofﬁcer they imprisoned

without a hearing. But their crowning folly was to carry a vote, also on the

27th, that the disbanded soldiers should receive only six weeks’ pay.

Even before that, the men of the eight cavalry regiments in Essex and East

Anglia had begun to take spontaneous action of their own. From about mid-

April they met to elect agents or ‘agitators’—both words then had the same

neutral meaning—to formulate and represent their grievances. The move-

ment seems to have started at grass-roots level, in individual troops, which

were units of a hundred men, but the pattern of two agitators to represent

each regiment soon became general throughout the cavalry, and during May

the infantry regiments followed suit. The original agitators had no mutinous

intentions, for they looked for and in many cases received the support of their

ofﬁcers, but they felt that they needed the means to act independently if cir-

cumstances should warrant it, and they had leaders of their own. Three of

them, Edward Sexby, William Allen, and Thomas Shepherd, presented Fairfax

on the 28th with a paper signed by the sixteen agitators of the eight cavalry

regiments, and the same three took it to Westminster two days later. It was

shortly to be published as The Apology of the Common Soldiers of Sir

Thomas Fairfax’s Army. It denounced the attempted recruitment for Ireland

as ‘but a design to ruin and break this army in pieces’, and ‘a mere cloak for

some who having lately tasted of sovereignty, and being lifted beyond their

ordinary sphere of servants, seek to become masters, and degenerate into

tyrants’.

The Commons were belatedly considering the ofﬁcers’ Vindication

when this ﬁery piece came before them, and they reacted with mingled anger

and consternation. They immediately called in the agitators who had brought

it, but the three gave nothing away about its authorship and stood up to a

sharp interrogation with maddening aplomb. The House sat till ten that night

and met again next morning, though it was a Saturday. It then ordered

358 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

The Apology of the Common Soldiers (1647), quoted in Woolrych, Soldiers and

Statesmen, p. 58.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 358

Skippon, Cromwell, Ireton, and Fleetwood, all ofﬁcer-MPs who (unlike its

previous commissioners) would command the soldiery’s respect, to repair to

the army immediately, in order to investigate its ‘distempers’ and assure all

ofﬁcers and soldiers that an ordinance for their indemnity would be passed

very shortly. The four were indeed respectfully received at headquarters, but

the ofﬁcers who had assembled in Saffron Walden church to hear them

requested time to consult their men before they reported on what they pre-

ferred to call their grievances. A week’s interval was therefore allowed before

further meetings were held on 15 and 16 May.

All this time the agitators were developing and reﬁning their organization.

They had a kind of central council to concert policies and ﬁnd printers for

their pamphlets and petitions, and they acted in close liaison with a number

of junior ofﬁcers. They played a large part in preparing many regiments’

statements of their grievances and desires for the next meetings with the par-

liamentary commissioners; indeed a central committee of agitators at Bury

St Edmunds seems to have prepared a model version which a number of regi-

ments adopted in whole or in part. Some of the agitators’ pamphlets were

already showing hints of radical political attitudes, and indeed the Levellers

were not slow in trying to make use of their organization as a means of politi-

cizing the army. But hostile allegations that the army was ‘one Lilburne

throughout’ and that the soldiers took his tracts as statute law were wildly

untrue at this stage. In all the regimental submissions that survive, only two

or three show a distinctively Leveller cast, and they do so in only two or three

articles. There was not a trace yet of the republicanism that was to emerge in

parts of the army in the late autumn; indeed there was some concern about the

amount of goodwill that some of its members were showing towards the king.

There is evidence that some senior ofﬁcers took soundings in mid-May about

the possibility of sending propositions to him from the army, though nothing

came of it. At a different level, soldiers in Norfolk and Suffolk were reported

as saying that they had fought to bring the king to London, and to London

they would bring him; nor was this the only testimony that most of the rank

and ﬁle felt no personal animosity towards him.

There was no truth in a mis-

chievous allegation which the Earl of Pembroke made in a speech to the Com-

mon Council early in May, when parliament sent him to request a City loan

to help pay for the army’s disbandment, to the effect that there were 4,000 (or

by one report 7,000) cavaliers in its ranks, bent on restoring the king to his

throne; indeed Pembroke’s speech aroused great indignation in it. But since

nobody was seriously contemplating a peace that would exclude the king, it

was not unnatural for some in the army to speculate on whether the

captive monarch might not prove a better line of approach to a settlement

Between Two Wars 359

Ibid., pp. 69–71; Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 153–4.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 359

than the presbyterian politicians. Soldiers have a way of thinking better of a

brave former enemy than of present political masters whose honour they

doubt. There was certainly a strong fear in the army, especially among the

agitators, that the presbyterians were planning to make a quick peace with

him that would secure their own interests and hasten the New Model Army’s

demise. This was strengthened when on 20 May the Lords invited the king to

Oatlands, a mere sixteen miles from Westminster, though this was not sup-

ported by the Commons.

While the statements of the individual regiments’ grievances were being

digested at headquarters, the Commons made some conciliatory moves, pass-

ing an indemnity ordinance and increasing the pay to be given on disband-

ment from six weeks to eight. But this was nothing like enough. What they

utterly failed to realize, or chose to ignore, was the affront that they had given

to the army’s sense of honour with their hostile votes and above all their Dec-

laration of Dislike. If they had paid any attention to A Second Apology, which

the agitators published on 3 May, they might have seen what a hornet’s nest

they were stirring on this account. Offended honour, and demands for a vin-

dication of it, bulk large among the regimental statements drawn up between

7 and 15 May—even larger than the material grievances regarding pay,

indemnity, and so on that we have met already. The political content in them

was relatively slight, though two regiments urged that the army should resist

disbandment and decline service in Ireland ‘till the real freedom of the free

people of England be established’. Surprisingly few statements touched on

religious matters such as liberty of conscience or the imposition of the

Covenant; taken together they show the soldiery to have been still over-

whelmingly preoccupied with their speciﬁc concerns as soldiers, and as yet

little subject to outside inﬂuences.

After the regimental returns had been discussed in the adjourned meeting

at Saffron Walden on 15 May, a committee of seven ofﬁcers was entrusted with

digesting them into a consolidated statement that could be presented to par-

liament in the name of the whole army. The presbyterian minority gave it a

stormy passage when it came before the assembled ofﬁcers, but it won the

approval of much the greater number. It deserved to, for it conveyed in ﬁrm

but respectful tones the substance and the spirit at the heart of the regimental

submissions, only eliminating what did not concern them as soldiers and

moderating their more extravagant and provocative expressions. It particu-

larly praised the way in which ofﬁcers had joined with the soldiers in most

regiments, helping them to put their requests into acceptable words, and so

360 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

The regimental statements, which are in the Clarke MSS in Worcester College, Oxford, and

have as yet not been printed, are discussed in Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army,

pp. 210–16; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 73–94; and Gentles, New Model Army,

pp. 161–4.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 360

counteracting their increasing tendency to act and organize on their own.

Cromwell himself read it to the Commons on 21 May. He is said to have

assured the House that the army would disband if so commanded by parlia-

ment, though this rests on the none too certain testimony of a royalist

newswriter who was not personally present. But he also warned the members

that the temper of the soldiers was passing beyond their ofﬁcers’ control, and

that they were moving beyond their military grievances into broader political

territory. Skippon and his fellow-commissioners had already reported that

they had ‘found the army under a deep sense of some sufferings, and the com-

mon soldiers much unsettled’.

The army was indeed on the very brink of a

revolt that was to give the whole course of political events a new direction, yet

it might yet have been persuaded to draw back from it. If the Declaration of

Dislike had been revoked, if parliament had paid public tribute to the honour

of the army that had won the war for it, if it had postponed disbandment until

more of the soldiers’s material grievances had been met and promised them

much more of their overdue pay when in due course they were disbanded, and

if it had agreed to reconsider the provision for an expeditionary force for

Ireland, the situation could almost certainly have been saved.

Instead, the presbyterian politicians reckoned that they could dispose of

enough force to take on the New Model Army if need be, and decided to dis-

band it immediately. They had not far short of 20,000 trained bands in Lon-

don and its environs, now under safe presbyterian commanders; they had

Poyntz’s northern army and the troops (admittedly few) already detached

from the New Model for service in Ireland, and there were large numbers of

disbanded men, called ‘reformadoes’, who were swarming in and around

London in quest of their arrears of pay, and would readily re-enlist. On

23 May they talked with Lauderdale and the French ambassador about the

possibilities of bringing a Scottish army back into England if it were needed,

and of removing the king to Scotland if the English army threatened to seize

him. Two days later the Commons approved orders for the disbandment of the

entire New Model infantry between 1 and 15 June, directing the regiments to

widely separate rendezvous so as to forestall any concerted resistance.

Skippon, whose men they had been, was deeply troubled. He wrote to the

Speaker:

I doubt [i.e. fear] the disobliging of so faithful an army will be repented of; provoca-

tion and exasperation makes men think of that they never intended. They are pos-

sessed as far as I can discern with this opinion, that if they can be thus scornfully dealt

withal for their faithful services whilst the sword is in their hands, what shall their

usage be when they are dissolved?

Between Two Wars 361

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 446.

Clarke Papers, I, 101–2. For the identiﬁcation of writer and addressee see Woolrych,

Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 98–9.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 361

Fairfax too was riven between a deep reluctance to disobey parliament and

the strong corporate loyalty that he shared with his ofﬁcers and men. Perhaps

the strain contributed to the illness which kept him in London for a month

from 21 April, and which despite the sneers of his enemies (including Holles)

was genuine. He was still under treatment when at parliament’s request he

returned to headquarters, which he shortly moved to Bury St Edmunds. He

wrote to every regiment on 24 May, ordering that soldiers should stop acting

independently of their ofﬁcers, and in particular that the agitators should

hold no more central meetings. He was not obeyed; indeed the agitators were

never more active than in late May and early June. They were well supplied

with vital intelligence from London, notably by Lieutenant Edmund Chillen-

den of Whalley’s regiment. Young Cornet Joyce, another of their close col-

laborators, was already organizing the cavalry force that was shortly to

abduct the king. Rainborough’s regiment set off without its colonel’s know-

ledge to secure the army’s train of artillery in Oxford, in case parliament

should try to move it. Fairfax could not know all this, but he did receive a

‘Humble petition of the soldiers of the army’, signed by the agitators of ten

regiments of horse and six of foot, calling upon him to summon a general ren-

dezvous of the army, and more than hinting that the agitators would hold one

anyway if he did not.

On 29 May he held an enlarged council of war of about a hundred ofﬁcers

at Bury St Edmunds, and there the crucial decisions about the future conduct

of the army were taken. After the parliament’s votes and the agitators’ peti-

tion had been read and considered, he had two questions put to each ofﬁcer

individually. The ﬁrst was whether enough had been done to satisfy the men’s

grievances for the proposed disbandment to be carried out without danger of

disturbance, and an overwhelming eighty-six voted ‘no’; there were only

three ayes, though four ofﬁcers reserved their position. Next they were asked

whether in the light of the ﬁrst vote they favoured a general rendezvous.

Eighty-four were for it and only seven against, though nine left the meeting

rather than commit themselves. He had now to decide between concurring

with his army’s decisively expressed wishes, or resigning his generalship

because it would otherwise pass out of his control. He had probably made up

his own mind, but he characteristically resorted to consultation, conﬁdent no

doubt that it would bind his ofﬁcers more closely to the course he wanted to

pursue. He ordered the desired general rendezvous, which was to be held on

Kentford Heath near Newmarket on 4 and 5 June, and his post-Restoration

memoirs are not reliable evidence that he did so unwillingly.

Before the regiments marched to Newmarket, Cornet Joyce set off on his

momentous exploit. He was the most junior ofﬁcer of Fairfax’s own life

guard, but according to a plausible contemporary report the party of at least

500 horse that he commanded were drawn largely from the very three

362 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 362

cavalry regiments that Derby House had chosen to guard the king—because

their colonels were presbyterians. That choice backﬁred, for their men were

by now far readier to obey the emissaries of the agitators than their own

senior ofﬁcers. Joyce and his force seem to have been acting under instruc-

tions from some central committee of the agitators’ organization, and he and

they were almost certainly engaged with the men of Rainborough’s foot

regiment, who were directed from the same source, in securing the artillery

train in Oxford. While on that mission he received intelligence—we do not

know whether or not it was true—that orders were being issued from West-

minster to remove the king from Holmby. Fearing, as many in the army did,

that Charles was to be brought nearer to London so that the presbyterians

could strike a swift deal with him, he resolved to prevent it. But it was a heavy

responsibility for a very junior ofﬁcer to assume, and he might need more

help, so on 31 May he left his men and rode up to London to talk to

Cromwell. That evening he obtained Cromwell’s approval for his plan to pre-

vent the removal of the king, but it was probably not in the mind of either man

that Joyce himself should abduct him. It was not long, however, before

Cromwell’s enemies were saying that Joyce and his party acted under his

orders throughout the whole operation. But Cromwell consistently denied

afterwards that he had authorized, let alone instigated, the removal of the

king, and the charge is inherently implausible. It is surely inconceivable that

Cromwell should on his own initiative have ordered an operation which

involved the army so deeply, on the eve of its general rendezvous, without

informing its commander-in-chief. His respect for Fairfax’s authority as

general had always been impeccable, and the relationship between the

two men was reinforced by friendship and mutual trust. There can be no

doubt about Fairfax’s shock and consternation when he learnt that the king

was on his way to Newmarket; his ﬁrst reaction was to have Joyce court-

martialled, though when he came to appreciate the cornet’s motives he

relented and promised him the captaincy of the ﬁrst troop that became

vacant.

After leaving Cromwell, Joyce sent orders to his troops to make their way

to Holmby as fast as they could and set off on his own seventy-mile ride thith-

er. He arrived a few hours ahead of them on 2 June, to ﬁnd the king away

playing bowls at Althorp. When his men caught up with him late that

evening, the soldiers of Major-General Browne’s garrison welcomed them as

comrades; Browne found himself powerless. Joyce secured the house next

morning, and after setting his guards dismissed the rest of his troops to their

quarters. He still had no thought but to prevent the king from being moved,

but he became worried when he learnt that Colonel Graves, who command-

ed one of the regiments that had been guarding him, had ridden away during

the night, probably for London; some of his ‘damming blades’ were

Between Two Wars 363

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 363

swearing that he would ‘fetch a party’, no doubt to conduct Charles there too.

Joyce summoned his men for an urgent consultation—all their decisions were

collective ones—and they unanimously advised that he and they should move

the king, to prevent his removal by hostile forces. Joyce then had to talk his

way past the parliamentary commissioners who were still in attendance at

Holmby, but he entered the royal bedchamber at ten that night and warned

Charles to be ready to depart early next morning. Charles was understand-

ably alarmed and reluctant, but he was disarmed by Joyce’s civility, and

reassured when he willingly gave three promises: that no hurt would come to

him, that he would be made to do nothing against his conscience, and that he

would continue to be treated with the same respect as under parliament’s cus-

tody, retaining his own servants. All these promises were kept.

Before they set out at six next morning, Charles pressed Joyce to tell him

whose commission he had for what he was doing. ‘The soldiery of the army’,

Joyce replied, quite truthfully. But had he no document, signed by his gen-

eral? Finally under pressure Joyce said ‘Here is my commission.’ ‘Where?’, the

king asked. ‘Behind me’, Joyce replied pointing to the ranks of his troopers

drawn up for the march. ‘It is as fair a commission,’ Charles acknowledged,

‘and as well written as I have seen a commission written in my life: a com-

pany of handsome proper gentlemen as I have seen a great while. But if I

should refuse yet to go with you, I hope you will not force me.’ Joyce replied

that force was not their wish; they humbly entreated his majesty to go with

them. But where, the king asked? By his own account Joyce suggested ﬁrst

Oxford, then Cambridge, but Charles himself proposed Newmarket, because

its air agreed with him, and Joyce concurred.

There is no need to doubt his

version, and it is further evidence that his abduction of the king was

unpremeditated, since any pre-conceived plan would have speciﬁed his

destination. Charles cannot have known that even as they set off most of the

New Model Army was converging on Newmarket for a general rendezvous in

deﬁance of parliament’s orders.

Another rider on his way to Newmarket that day was Cromwell. Since the

end of the war he had been putting his parliamentary duties ﬁrst, and striving

(except when prevented by illness) to counter the policies of the presbyterians

on the ﬂoor of the House. But as soon as it became known that the army was

resisting parliament’s orders for disbandment there was talk of impeaching

him, and if he had stayed until the seizure of the king became known he could

not have been safe from arrest. The choice between his two commitments

364 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Joyce’s narrative is in Rushworth, Historical Collections, VI, 513–19. For appraisals of the

evidence see C. H. Firth in Clarke Papers, I, pp. xxiii–xxi, Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen,

pp. 106–12, and Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 169–71. Gentles puts Joyce’s force at 1,000

men, but 500 is Joyce’s own ﬁgure, and I doubt whether as many as 1,000 could have been

detached from their regiments without serious repercussions.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 364

cannot have been an easy one, but he must have felt as a soldier that with the

rendezvous in progress his place was at Fairfax’s side, and as a politician that

the army was a necessary safeguard against a partisan and unsafe peace. He

had had nothing to do with the army’s revolt, but his best service as he saw it

now lay in helping to keep it on statesmanlike courses.

Between Two Wars 365

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twelve

Climacteric II:

‘not a mere Mercenary Army’

The general rendezvous on Kentford Heath opened not only a dramatically

new chapter in the army’s history but one of those phases of discontinuity and

accelerated change that I have called climacterics. The next nineteen months

witnessed repercussions that neither the soldiers nor most of the politicians

had either foreseen or desired: an attempted conservative coup in London, a

resultant military confrontation, the army’s assumption (improvised step by

step) of a dominant role in British politics, a second civil war in which the

Scottish army fought against the English parliament, and ﬁnally the execution

of the king and the abolition (in England) of the monarchy. In June 1647,

however, the aims of the parties that precipitated the crisis were still largely

negative. The presbyterian politicians wanted to eliminate the army as an

obstacle to their own plans for reinstating the king, while the army sought

only to avert its own destruction, secure its soldiers’ rights, and prevent a par-

tisan peace that would betray much that it thought it had fought for. Neither

side was seeking drastic political change; they differed not as to whether the

king should be restored to his regal authority but over the constitutional

terms upon which he should be allowed to resume it.

This was in origin very much an English crisis, though its outcome would

have profound implications for both Scotland and Ireland. The Scots

watched it with acute concern, and its progress would determine whether

Argyll and the strict Covenanters continued to dominate the political arena or

whether the threat to their king would shift the initiative to the Hamiltons and

their party, who were prepared to come to his rescue on less stringent terms.

For the Irish, the new breach in England postponed the nemesis that awaited the

Confederates, but they were powerless to affect its outcome—more powerless

than they had appeared to be towards the end of 1646. If the situation in

Ireland had remained as threatening as it looked then, the parliamentary

presbyterians might have thought twice about provoking the army as they did

in the spring of 1647, and the army leaders might not have felt free to defy

them. The factions among the Irish themselves, however, largely neutralized

ch12.y8 27/9/02 11:24 AM Page 366

the threat posed by their rebellion until a radically changed English govern-

ment was ready to deal with it.

The peace treaty which Ormond, as the kings’s Lord Lieutenant, had con-

cluded with delegates of the Confederates’ Supreme Council in March 1646

had (as we have seen) been vehemently opposed by O’Neill, the clerical

party, and most of all Rinuccini, who had engineered the establishment of a

new Supreme Council dominated by his own faction. But Ormond was not

without his supporters, and the treaty had not yet come before a General

Assembly. Under pressure from the royalists within the Confederation,

Rinuccini agreed that one should be summoned to meet in January 1647,

expressly to consider it. It proved to be deeply divided over the treaty, but in

the end the majority rejected it on 2 February. By now the rifts in the Confed-

eration were threatening it with dissolution, and Plunkett and his middle

group could not bridge them. On the one hand were those who maintained

their loyalty to the crown, even in its present defeat, provided they could prac-

tise their faith openly, have access to ofﬁce and enjoy undisputed title to their

property. On the other hand were those who sought a total Roman Catholic

ascendancy, and if Charles was not willing to grant it were prepared to bid for

independence under the protection of a foreign power—perhaps also under a

king to be chosen by themselves. O’Neill was rumoured to have his eye on

the title.

Ormond, after the assembly’s repudiation of his treaty, felt justiﬁed in

renewing his application to Westminster, since his opponents were now not

merely indifferent to his master’s interests but ready to oppose them. He

offered to surrender his ofﬁce of Lord Lieutenant to the parliament, which

now realized that it must take full responsibility for England’s interests in Ire-

land and sent over a force of 2,000 men under Colonel Michael Jones. They

landed at Dublin in June; Ormond handed over his military command to

Jones, signed a treaty with the parliamentary commissioners and surrendered

his regalia. By the terms he agreed, all protestants were to be secured in their

estates, catholics who had remained loyal were to be favourably treated, and

all noblemen, gentlemen, and ofﬁcers who wished to leave Ireland with him

were to have free passes. His action was not a betrayal, and Charles never

reproached him for it. He sought an interview with the king at Hampton

Court as soon as he arrived back in England, and received the full royal

approval of his conduct in Ireland. Not long after that, when the negotiations

that would lead to the second Civil War were taking shape, his royalism was

so unmistakable that he took ship for France to escape probable arrest by the

parliament. It would not be long before he was serving the house of Stuart

again in Ireland.

Nevertheless Ormond’s capitulation divided his Old English adherents,

and some of them joined Preston, who with the army of Leinster set out again

Climacteric II: ‘not a Mere Mercenary Army’ 367

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