Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

him off bravely for several hours, but they broke in the end, leaving (in

Cromwell’s estimate) a thousand dead and twice as many prisoners. From

Warrington Hamilton and Callander rode off with what was left of the Scot-

tish cavalry, leaving Baillie to make what terms he could for the infantry, of

whom fewer than 2,600 were still under arms. Hamilton (unlike Callander,

who got away to Holland), stuck with his ﬂeeing horsemen to the last, but he

and they had to surrender to Lambert at Stafford on the 25th. The army of the

Engagers was not merely beaten, it was annihilated; Cromwell had nearly

10,000 prisoners on his hands, and had lost fewer than a hundred men killed,

though many more were wounded. He had waged a brilliant campaign,

though Lambert deserves his share of the credit for it.

The news of his victory hastened the surrender of Colchester, whose

defenders were already preparing themselves for the inevitable. One may

wonder perhaps why Fairfax had not tried again to storm the town, for its

decaying walls offered no such challenge as Bristol’s fortiﬁcations had done.

One probable reason was that only three of his infantry regiments were old

New Model units; the rest were locally raised in Essex and Suffolk. Moreover,

he neither wanted nor needed to incur unnecessary casualties. Once all the

other royalist movements south of Trent had been suppressed the Colchester

garrison was isolated, and it posed no threat unless a Scottish army came to

its relief. Fairfax’s persistence with the siege shows that he had strong conﬁ-

dence in Cromwell’s capacity to deal with Hamilton. The terms of surrender

that he demanded were hard, and reﬂect the change in the army’s attitude

towards the royalist enemy between the ﬁrst Civil War and the second. Sol-

diers and junior ofﬁcers were granted quarter for their lives, but many of the

men were sent to the West Indies as indentured servants. Captains and above,

and gentlemen volunteers, had to surrender at mercy, and the stricken towns-

folk had to pay a ﬁne of £11,000 to save their city from being sacked. The fate

of the commanders was decided by a council of war. Norwich, Capel, and

Lord Hastings, being peers, were sent to London to be judged by parliament,

but Lucas, Lisle, and Gascoigne were sentenced to military execution.

Gascoigne was reprieved, probably because he was a foreigner, but Lucas and

Lisle were shot by a ﬁring squad that same evening. Fairfax has been much

criticized for their deaths, and it was not long before the blame was being laid

on Ireton, who was supposed to have talked him into a harsh decision. But

Fairfax was his own man in military matters, and he acted entirely within the

rules of war as they then stood. Not only had Colchester’s commanders

refused an earlier summons, but both Lucas and Lisle had been made prison-

ers in the ﬁrst Civil War, and when exchanged for parliamentarian prisoners

had given their parole not to ﬁght again. Lucas, moreover, was reported to the

council of war as having ordered between twenty and forty of a surrendered

garrison to be slaughtered in cold blood. Fairfax may have reckoned, at a time

418 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 418

when other royalist garrisons like Pontefract were contemplating desperate

resistance, that a stern example would save bloodshed in the long run, but he

does not need this kind of pleading. It should not be taken as a stain on his

character, as it often has been, that he accepted his council of war’s judgement

in the circumstances, for much as we may regret the execution of men who had

fought bravely for what they believed in, Fairfax’s decision must be judged in

accordance with the rules and conventions operative in his time. The fate of

Lucas and Lisle does not seem notably harsher than that of Hamilton, Hol-

land, and Capel, who after six months’ captivity were tried by an unconstitu-

tional High Court of Justice set up by the Rump and then publicly executed

in front of Westminster Hall; or of Poyer, who was tried by court-martial on

parliament’s orders nine months after he surrendered and was publicly shot

in the piazza of Covent Garden. Norwich was the lucky one; having been sen-

tenced to death by a High Court of Justice, the Commons reprieved him, but

only by the casting vote of the Speaker, who had allegedly received favours

from him in the past.

The immediate reaction at Westminster to the news of Cromwell’s victory

was to repeal the Vote of No Addresses. Both Houses did this on 24 August,

before Colchester had surrendered, while men were still in arms for the king

in Carlisle, Berwick, Pontefract, and other fortresses, and while the Prince of

Wales was still preparing to sail up the Thames. The repeal was avowedly in

preparation for the negotiation to which parliament had committed itself

while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance, but the army’s reaction

can be imagined. Cromwell may have wondered ironically why Charles was

thought to be ﬁtter to be treated with after all he had done to launch the

second Civil War than he had been before it started, but for the time being he

put his responsibilities as a soldier before his commitments as a politician. In

spite of the fact that his cavalry were, as he wrote, ‘so exceedingly battered as

I never saw them in all my life’, and that his infantry lacked clothing, shoes,

and stockings (‘these ways and weather have shattered them all to pieces’

he sent Lambert off with 3,400 men in pursuit of Hamilton and led the rest

of his forces in a vain attempt to cut off the retreat of Monro’s brigade into

Scotland. He also had to reduce Carlisle and Berwick, which were still held in

the name of the Scottish committee of estates, and on arriving in the border

country he judged the situation in Scotland to be so unsettled as to call for

military intervention.

On hearing the news of Hamilton’s defeat, those regions most hostile to the

Engagement, namely Ayrshire and Clydesdale, rose in open revolt, and

Galloway soon joined in. Loudoun and other noblemen of Argyll’s party led

the insurgents, in company with Leven and David Leslie, and Argyll himself

The Second Civil War 419

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 641.

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 419

was not long in joining them. Several thousand men were soon on the march

toward Edinburgh, and what became known as the Whiggamore Raid

threatened to develop into a Scottish civil war. But the Engagers had Monro’s

brigade and some other small forces with which to defend themselves, and on

12 September these fell on the westerners at Linlithgow and cut them up

badly. They then established themselves in Stirling.

It might be thought that since Cromwell and these western insurgents had

a common enemy in the Engagers they would make common cause, but the

situation was not so simple. The westerners had risen for king and Covenant,

and Cromwell and his heresy-ridden army were held in deep suspicion on two

counts: their opposition to the true work of reformation and their disturbing

attitude towards the king—Scotland’s king too, of course. The insurgents and

the Engagers preferred to negotiate with each other rather than have

Cromwell and his forces on Scottish soil, and in mid-September Argyll on the

westerners’ behalf begged him not to cross the border until they invited him.

Meanwhile, he promised, Berwick and Carlisle would be promptly surren-

dered. But in Cromwell’s judgement there were too many Engagers still under

arms for it to be safe to hold back, and he may have known that the royalist

nobility in the north were arming to support them. The Scottish committee of

estates was physically split now; the part dominated by Argyll sat in Edin-

burgh and on 4 October it renewed an act debarring all Engagers from public

ofﬁce. Cromwell entered Edinburgh that same day, and he evidently con-

vinced Argyll’s committee that it needed English support, for when he de-

parted three days later it actually requested him to leave some troops behind

for its protection. He entrusted the task to Lambert, with two cavalry regi-

ments and two companies of dragoons, who all spent a miserable month,

viliﬁed and robbed by the people of Edinburgh, before they were given

welcome leave to return home.

In England, meanwhile, the two major events of September were the open-

ing of the promised negotiation between the king and ﬁfteen commissioners

of parliament in the town hall of Newport on the Isle of Wight, and the return

of the Levellers to political activity after the truce that they had observed

while the war lasted. The treaty of Newport, as it came to be called, began on

the 18th and was scheduled to last no more than forty days, but in its anxiety

to come to terms parliament let it run well beyond its appointed limit. Its pace

was the slower because the commissioners differed much among themselves;

the archpresbyterians Holles and Harbottle Grimston were relatively easy on

the political terms but pressed Charles hard to accept the recently completed

parliamentary religious settlement, while the independents Saye and Vane

were stricter on the constitutional restraints but strove for the relative reli-

gious liberty envisaged in the Heads of the Proposals. Charles played his old

game of exploiting their divisions, but he was weary of being a prisoner and

420 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 420

aware of the danger he was under if he remained one much longer. As time

went on he made larger concessions than he had ever made before—larger on

his own admission than he hoped he would have to keep to. In a letter to a

conﬁdant on 9 October he wrote:

To deal freely with you, the great concession I made this day—the church, militia, and

Ireland—was made merely in order to my escape, of which if I had not hope, I would

not have done; . . . for my only hope is that now they believe I dare deny them nothing,

as so be less careful of their guards.

Among other things he surrendered to parliament his authority over the

armed forces and over the government of Ireland for twenty years, and gave

up his right to appoint the chief ofﬁcers of government. By mid-November an

agreement of a kind had been reached on everything except episcopacy, and

if the army had not intervened he would have been restored to a diminished

regal power—more reduced in fact than he could have had if he had closed

with the army commanders and the royal independents and accepted the

Heads of the Proposals more than a year earlier. But those offers were of

course no longer open, and when he had to face the fact that there was to be

no escape he suffered agonies of conscience, which he partly relieved by

throwing the blame on his advisers.

The Levellers opened their new campaign just before the start of the

Newport treaty (which they deplored) with a comprehensive petition To The

Commons of England in Parliament Assembled. It was more moderate in

tone than most of their previous manifestos—reproachful rather than denun-

ciatory—and it dwelt on the many things that the people had hoped for from

the parliament’s victory but had yet to obtain. Most of the familiar objectives

were reafﬁrmed: the removal of the king’s and the Lords’ power of veto, regu-

lar elections (this time annual, not biennial), freedom of religion, equality

before the law, abolition of tithes, enclosures, and the excise, and a good deal

more. But it was silent on the contentious question of the franchise, and in

wishing that the Commons had ‘declared what the duty or business of the

kingly ofﬁce is, and what not’ it seemed to envisage the continuance of the

monarchy in some attenuated form. It repudiated the common charge of

levelling by advocating a paramount and irreversible law against ‘abolishing

propriety [i.e. property], levelling mens’s estates, or making all things

common’.

In contrast with the extreme hostility with which they had received earlier

Leveller addresses, the Commons thanked the petitioners for their care for the

public good of the kingdom and promised to take their desires into early and

The Second Civil War 421

Quoted in Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, III, 480.

Text in Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, pp. 283–90; excerpts in Woodhouse, Puritanism and

Liberty, pp. 338–42.

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 421

serious consideration. Only a few members can really have meant it, but the

House was aware of the interest that the Levellers were fostering in the army,

for which the petition had a paean of praise. Fairfax soon received letters in

support of the petition from several outlying regiments, and from early Octo-

ber a wave of petitioning swept over the army. Between then and the end of

the year no fewer than thirty petitions came in, most of them from regular regi-

ments but others from local forces and garrisons. Not all were prompted by

the Levellers, but seventeen of them explicitly supported their programme.

The great difference between this campaign and their agitation a year earlier

was that the Leveller leaders were not trying now to divide the soldiery from

their ofﬁcers but to unite all ranks in making respectful and unexceptionable

representations to their general. They were aware of the common interest that

they now had with Ireton and most of the ofﬁcers in preventing a deal

between the parliament and the king which would have ended all prospects of

the reforms that they sought, and would doubtless also have led to the early

disbandment of most of the army itself. For his part Ireton (and many others)

no longer felt obliged to seek a settlement through the consent of the present

parliament, or within the bounds of the ancient constitution, and saw the

value of an understanding with the Levellers, not least for the sake of pre-

serving the army’s unity.

A great deal of responsibility fell upon Ireton during the autumn, because

Fairfax was often uncertain how to act in the circumstances and Cromwell

was far away, in Scotland until 10 October and then in the north of England

until the end of November. Edmund Ludlow, who had a footing in both army

and parliament and saw what was going on from inside the House, tried hard

to get the army to stop the Newport negotiations from proceeding. He rode

down to headquarters early in September to warn Fairfax that the projected

treaty was likely to betray the cause that they had fought for, indeed that

those who pressed it were aiming to destroy the army altogether, and that the

king would not feel himself bound by any promises that he made because he

would regard them as given under duress. Fairfax acknowledged what Lud-

low said to be true, but did not feel that he had a clear call to intervene. Lud-

low took him to be irresolute, but it would surely be truer to say that he was

torn between conﬂicting loyalties and duties. As always he felt obliged to

uphold the interests of his men, who as usual when parliament was in a hos-

tile mood were being starved of their pay; they got none all through Septem-

ber, October, and November. He kept up a steady pressure on the Commons

to remedy this, and advanced his headquarters from Colchester to St Albans

in order to make it felt. But he was unwilling to offer direct violence to par-

liament, and deeply unsympathetic to the rising demand in parts of the army

that the king should be brought to trial and the kingdom settled without him.

After failing to convince Fairfax, Ludlow talked with Ireton, who agreed that

422 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 422

the army would have to intervene but differed about the timing. Ireton

thought at the time that it would be better to wait until king and parliament

had come to terms and revealed their intentions; that way, he thought, the

army would get more popular support when it came to act.

He was soon to

change his mind.

Before the end of September Ireton became so frustrated by Fairfax’s

refusal to intervene against the treaty that he tendered the resignation of his

commission. But Fairfax would not accept it, and Ireton changed his mind

about leaving the army, though he did withdraw from headquarters for a time

to work out what he thought should be done. During October, if not earlier,

he became fully convinced that the army must take action to terminate the

negotiations at Newport, bring the king to trial, and secure the early election

of an entirely new parliament. He prepared a manifesto of these intentions,

soon to be famous as The Remonstrance of the Army, for signature by its

ofﬁcers. It was considered at a series of meetings of the General Council of

Ofﬁcers (which was still sometimes called the General Council of the Army,

though it included no agitators) at St Albans between 9 and 15 November. At

this stage there was no consensus in favour of forceful intervention, doubtless

because Fairfax, who presided, remained so much opposed to it. The Council

of Ofﬁcers voted in fact to acquiesce in the treaty, but to submit to the king

(and to parliament, if he accepted them) certain minimal conditions for his

restoration. On the 15th, however, the Commons voted ‘that the king shall be

settled in a condition of honour, freedom and safety, agreeable to the laws of

the land’.

This, it has been well observed, was just what those who had risen

for him in the spring and summer had declared for.

It was too much for most

of the ofﬁcers at St Albans, who now approved the ﬁrst draft of Ireton’s

Remonstrance.

This draft, however, contained expressions unfriendly to the Levellers,

who were seriously seeking a broad alliance with the army, the civilian Inde-

pendents of London, and the more radical MPs as a basis for action in the

political crisis that was clearly looming. Leading Levellers and independents

had been meeting in London at the Nag’s Head tavern, and had agreed on

15 November to aim for a constituent assembly consisting of representatives

of the army and well-wishers from every county. Its task would be to draft a

new constitution in the form of a revised Agreement of the People, and they

wanted to get it endorsed by the ofﬁcers at St Albans, who had already

received the outline of their proposals sympathetically. They were particu-

larly anxious that the army should dissolve the parliament before any consti-

tutional agreement had been reached, so some of them sought an urgent

The Second Civil War 423

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, I, 203–4.

Commons’ Journals, VI, 76–7.

Gentles, New Model Army, p. 272.

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 423

meeting with Ireton and a few fellow-ofﬁcers at Windsor. There they had a

tough negotiation, but they secured the amendment and expansion of the

Remonstrance in some signiﬁcant particulars. It now speciﬁcally commended

the programme of reform in the Levellers’ petition of September, and desired

that ‘matters of general settlement’, including either annual or biennial par-

liaments, so reformed as ‘to render the House of Commons, as near as may

be, an equal representative of the whole people electing’, should be legislated

for by the present parliament, or by the Commons alone if need be, ‘and to be

further established by a general contract or agreement of the people, with

their subscriptions thereunto.’

To frame such an agreement, Ireton and his

visitors agreed that a committee should be set up consisting of four represen-

tatives apiece of the Levellers, the army, the London independents, and the

‘honest party’ in parliament.

This ﬁnal version of the Remonstrance was approved by the Council of

Ofﬁcers on 18 November and laid before the Commons, to whom it was

addressed, with a covering letter from Fairfax two days later. He must have

winced at its central demand, which was for ‘exemplary justice . . . in capital

punishment upon the principal author and some prime instruments of our

late wars’. It argued at length, and rather speciously, that the pledge in the

Solemn League and Covenant to preserve the king’s person and authority had

ceased to be binding. It did not propose the abolition of monarchy, but stipu-

lated that no king should henceforth be admitted except upon the election of

the people’s representatives in parliament, and after subscribing the proposed

Agreement of the People. The same subscription was to be required of all

other holders of public ofﬁce. The House reacted by postponing any con-

sideration of the Remonstrance for a whole week, and turned instead to

debating the latest unsatisfactory answers from the king. Thereby it took a

long step towards sealing its own fate.

It may seem strange that vital decisions were being taken about the army’s

most fateful intervention in politics without Cromwell being involved in

them. His continued absence in the north is easily explained until early

November, but thereafter the reason for it becomes more problematical. For

at least two weeks after leaving Scotland he was busy stamping out the

embers of resistance and arranging necessary garrisons in northern England,

but by the end of October only Pontefract was holding out. Its siege had so far

been conducted rather dilatorily by Sir Henry Cholmley, who commanded

the local forces, and Fairfax had sent Colonel Rainborough (now back in the

army, after the ﬂeet had rejected him) with a foot regiment to take over the

operation. Cholmley was deeply resentful and appealed to the Commons to

uphold his authority as commander, but at Fairfax’s request they directed

424 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Substantial extracts from the Remonstrance are in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty,

pp. 456–65; the quotation is from p. 457.

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 424

him to obey orders. Rainborough, partly because the Yorkshire county com-

mittee was showing reluctance to provide his men with their needs, spread

them out widely in the surrounding countryside. The royalist garrison got

wind of the fact that he had left himself vulnerable and sent out a party of

horse to capture him in his lodgings in Doncaster. What ensued was more like

a modern hostage-taking attempt that went wrong than a cold-blooded mur-

der, as many have described it; the royalists wanted him alive, no doubt to

exchange for their own prisoners. But they gained access to him by pretend-

ing to be carriers of a message from Cromwell, which angered him, and brave

and intransigent as always he refused to come quietly. As he attempted to

escape, his captors ran him through and killed him. The impunity with which

they passed through the parliamentarian lines and the guards in Doncaster

raised the suspicion that Cholmley was in league with them, and it still

lingers. Rainborough’s death roused a sense of outrage throughout the army,

and most of the regimental petitions from then on called for vengeance on his

‘murderers’. His body was brought to London, and the Levellers mounted a

great funeral procession for him, followed by many hundreds of mounted

men—one estimate said 3,000—and ﬁfty or sixty coaches carrying their

womenfolk.

In these emotive circumstances it was appropriate for Cromwell to take

over the siege of Pontefract for a while, indeed Fairfax ordered him to do so.

But he did not need to stay there for a whole month after Rainborough’s

death, especially as Lambert and his detachment rejoined him before mid-

November; he could have left the operation in no more capable hands. He did

not return south until Fairfax sent him a direct order to do so on the 28th, and

even then he took a week over the journey. It is hard to escape the conclusion

that he still had doubts about Ireton’s efforts to commit the army to dissolv-

ing or purging the parliament and putting the king on trial for his life. It was

to be typical of him to go through a prolonged period of heart-searching, or

as he would put it waiting upon the Lord, before coming to a crucial decision;

it would happen again before he dissolved the Rump, and perhaps in 1657

before he ﬁnally refused the crown. He would have been expected to take his

seat in the Commons if he had returned earlier, and for that too he may not

have felt ready. We get a glimpse into his mind through two precious letters

that he wrote on 6 and 25 November to his friend and distant kinsman

Colonel Robert Hammond, who was carrying such a heavy responsibility as

governor of the Isle of Wight. The king had been enjoying greater liberty since

the Newport treaty began, and Hammond was known to feel a personal sym-

pathy for him. Could the young governor be trusted to take all necessary meas-

ures against his escape, or (if so ordered) to make him a close prisoner again?

Cromwell’s tortuous letters to his ‘dear Robin’ suggest that in trying to point

where the path of conscience should lead Hammond he was wrestling with

The Second Civil War 425

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 425

his own. He warned Hammond against letting his aversion to the Levellers

lead him into ‘meddling with an accursed thing’. The ﬁrst letter reveals that

Vane and other leading independents were concerned that his own agreement

with Argyll amounted to ‘a compliance with presbytery’, and wished he had

gone on to conquer Scotland. That, Cromwell wrote, ‘was not very unfeas-

ible, but I think not Christian’, and he was commanded to the contrary by

parliament. For himself, he had waited and prayed ‘for the day to see union

and right understanding between the godly people (Scots, English, Jews,

Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists), and all’.

The second letter, written after the Council of Ofﬁcers’ acceptance of The

Remonstrance of the Army, shows Cromwell coming to terms with the neces-

sity for the army to put a stop to the Newport treaty, ‘this ruining hypocrit-

ical agreement’, as he called it. Robin must not look for any good from it or

from the king—‘Good by this man, against whom the Lord hath witnessed’?

Cromwell bade him ‘seek to know the mind of God in all that chain of provi-

dence, . . . and then tell me, whether there be not some glorious and high

meaning in all this? . . . I dare be bold to say, it is not that the wicked should

be exalted, that God should so appear as indeed he hath done’. Invoking the

principle of salus populi suprema lex, and seeing that by the present treaty

‘the whole fruit of the war [was] like to be frustrated’, he asked ‘whether this

army be not a lawful power, called by God to oppose and ﬁght against the

king upon some stated grounds’, and whether as such it might not resist a cor-

rupted parliament as well as a king. As for the Remonstrance, he wrote that

he could perhaps have wished that it had been held back until after the treaty

was concluded, but he hoped for God’s blessing upon it.

Before he received this letter Hammond was under arrest. He had refused to

place the king under closer restraint, as Fairfax had commanded, without

direct orders from parliament, so on 21 November Fairfax summoned him to

headquarters (now at Windsor) and sent Colonel Ewer to escort him thither.

Two radical ofﬁcers, Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Cobbett and Captain John

Merriman, arrived in the Isle of Wight soon after and put the king under

heavy guard. They were acting under the orders of Ireton and his close asso-

ciates, and at daybreak on 1 December they roused Charles and removed him,

breakfastless, to Hurst Castle on the mainland. Before they arrived there a

sizeable part of the army was on the march for London. The Commons had

made it clear that they were not going to give any time to its Remonstrance

until they had fully considered the king’s ﬁnal answer to parliament’s propos-

itions, and that for Ireton was the last straw. A public declaration by Fairfax

and the General Council of Ofﬁcers

heralded the army’s advance, claiming

426 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 677–9.

Ibid., pp. 696–9.

Greater part reprinted in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 465–7.

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 426

that it was ‘necessitated to, and justiﬁed in, an appeal from this parliament, in

the present constitution as it stands, unto the extraordinary judgement of God

and good people’. It still aimed at a settlement based on a regular succession

of parliaments, and its best wish was that the present House of Commons

would expel its ‘corrupt and apostatized members’ and proceed to such a solu-

tion forthwith. If, however, that did not happen—and nobody expected it

would—the army called upon the ‘upright’ members to withdraw, and under-

took to recognize them as a provisional government until a new and reformed

parliament was elected, which was to be arranged as soon as possible. Ireton’s

was the mastermind behind this declaration and the army’s consequent

moves, and clearly he envisaged a forcible dissolution and not a purge.

The Commons remained deﬁant. On 1 December they did not go as far as

William Prynne, who urged them to cashier Fairfax and declare the army to

be rebels, but they totally rejected its Remonstrance by 125 votes to 58 and

ordered Fairfax not to bring his forces any closer to London. That was a futile

gesture, for by the time he received the Speaker’s letter Fairfax had 7,000 men

drawn up for review in Hyde Park. Ireton and his fellow-ofﬁcers did, how-

ever, listen to the pleas of members friendly to the army that they should purge

the parliament rather than dissolve it. On that same crowded day parliament

received the formal report by its recently returned commissioners on the

king’s ﬁnal answer to the propositions put to him at Newport. A thin House

of Lords voted without a division that it provided ‘a ground . . . to proceed

upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom’. The summer’s alliance

between Saye, the royal independents and the army leaders was in ruins. The

Commons put off their response, being much occupied with even more urgent

matters, the military threat above all. On the 2nd, a Saturday, the whole of

Westminster from Whitehall to Ludgate was crammed with troops; the City

itself was temporarily spared having to quarter them on condition that it

immediately handed over £40,000 of its assessment arrears. When the Com-

mons sat again on the Monday they argued their unhappy way through a

record sitting of over twenty-four hours, unable to agree on how to respond

to either the military presence or the king’s answer. Their numbers shrank

from over 340 to 214 before they ﬁnally voted, on the morning of the 5th, on

the same motion as the Lords had passed, and concurred that the king’s reply

furnished a sufﬁcient ground for proceeding to a peace settlement. Speaker

Lenthall is reported to have warned them that they were voting for their own

destruction.

He was right. Ireton and other ofﬁcers met friendly MPs later in the day,

and again tried to persuade them to agree to a dissolution rather than sit on

as ‘a mock parliament’. He failed, and a committee of three ofﬁcers and three

members was entrusted with deciding how a purge was to be conducted, who

should be excluded and who arrested. Marked out for exclusion were those

The Second Civil War 427

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 427