Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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Another source of concern in the middling ranks of the army and among

the gathered churches lay in a crop of rumours from February onward that

this parliament intended to revive the last one’s attempt to make the Pro-

tector king. There was probably very little behind them, though a few conserva-

tive members spoke openly in the House of their preference for the old

monarchical constitution. But such talk of kingship fostered a suspicion

among the discontented army ofﬁcers that ‘this gentleman, who they would

have made so much haste to dress and set on horseback, was but to warm the

saddle for another whom they better loved and liked’.

The openly expressed

hope of presbyterian and crypto-royalist MPs that the army would shortly be

much reduced, if not disbanded, and give way to a territorial militia, encour-

aged a whisper to circulate among the junior ofﬁcers ‘That the Protector did

intend to cast them out of their places, and put the army into the hands of the

nobility and gentry of the nation, thereby to bring in the king, and destroy

that liberty of the gospel they had so long contended for’.

A little earlier, on 22 March, Thurloe had written to Henry Cromwell: ‘It

is a miracle of mercy that we are yet in peace, considering what the debates

are, and what underhand working there is to disaffect the ofﬁcers of the army:

but for ought I can perceive, they remain pretty staunch, though they are in

great want of pay.’ A week later Fauconberg thought that the prospects were

improving, but both men were over-optimistic. The senior ofﬁcers who met

at Wallingford House decided late in March to seek an entente with the par-

liamentary republicans, and through Colonel Kelsey they invited Ludlow,

currently MP for Hindon and one of the inner ring of their policy-makers, to

come and meet them there. Whether their primary motive was to take some

of the sting out of the republicans’ subversion of their own juniors, or to

strengthen their own position vis-à-vis Richard’s civilian advisers, it was cer-

tainly not loyalty to the Protector. They seem not to have realized that the

republicans could hold a stronger hand than they did. Ludlow told them that

an alliance must be based on their commitment to restoring a republic and

going all the way with the commonwealthsmen in the army; to start with they

should back Ashﬁeld in his quarrel with Whalley. They jibbed at that, as well

they might. Vane and Haselrig approved the line he had taken, but would not

meet the ofﬁcers themselves; all they would say was ‘that when they saw it

seasonable they would be ready to assist them in all things tending to the

public service’.

If, on a charitable appraisal, Fleetwood and his fellow-commanders acted

more out of misjudgement than disloyalty in making overtures to Richard’s

718 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Clarke Papers, III, 211.

Sir Richard Baker (continued by E. Phillips), Chronicle of the Kings of England (1670),

p. 659.

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 63–5.

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republican enemies, it is harder to offer the same defence of their second

injury to him within a week or so. They persuaded him to sanction the sum-

moning of a General Council of Ofﬁcers, including all of commissioned rank

who were in and about London. These numbered about 500, and many if not

most of them belonged to regiments stationed far from the capital. One might

think that commanders worth their salt would have ordered a large part of

them back to their units, but these ones persuaded Richard that they could

not keep the army under control unless they gave them a hearing in a General

Council. They would have been shocked if accused of deliberate treachery;

they probably had in mind the precedent of 1647, when the army had united

against the Long Parliament’s threat to its very existence. But there was no

Fairfax and no Cromwell now to keep the army’s protest within bounds and

its discipline intact, and no Ireton to help guide it towards responsible, con-

structive goals. Fleetwood and his fellow commanders had much lower aims,

and they grossly overestimated their inﬂuence over their unruly juniors. They

probably hoped to enlist republican support just far enough to make Richard

give up his preferred counsellors and bring the army back to its political emin-

ence of earlier years, but they soon found that they could not ride the tiger.

When the General Council met on 2 April, it agreed to submit a petition to

parliament and appointed a committee to draft it. The commonwealthsmen

were in the ascendant; the committee was dominated by their leaders, includ-

ing Ashﬁeld, Robert Lilburne, and Mason, and it omitted not only all

Richard’s personal supporters but even Fleetwood and Desborough. The

resultant petition ‘smelt of gunpowder and ball’

and deeply shocked the

ofﬁcers still loyal to the Protector, who managed to tone it down somewhat

in the next General Council. It was naturally much concerned about the

army’s arrears of pay, but it lamented that ‘the good old cause is very fre-

quently and publicly derided’ and that ‘its implacable adversaries were show-

ing themselves in the highest places’. Ominously, the ofﬁcers collectively

resolved ‘to stand by and assist your highness and parliament, in the plucking

the wicked out of their places, wheresoever they may be discovered, either

amongst ourselves or any other places of trust’.

When a delegation of ofﬁcers presented the petition to Richard on the 6th

he received them most cordially, greeting them as the old friends of his father

and the faithful servants of the public interest. His words were well taken, and

serious trouble might yet have been averted if the parliament had taken pro-

per notice of the points that the petition legitimately raised, concerning the

army’s pay, the signs of resurgent royalism, the law suits brought against sol-

diers for acts committed under orders, and the apparent threats to freedom of

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 719

[Arthur Annesley], Englands Confusion (1659), reprinted in Somers Tracts, VI, 518.

Text in Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, XXI, 340–5.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 719

worship. But after the petition was read in the Commons on the 8th the

House gave it no more consideration for the next ten days, and proceeded

instead to give the army further provocation. It stalled on a move to make the

farmers of the excise pay up their arrears, and showed no inclination to raise

the monthly assessment above £50,000, its lowest level since the Civil Wars,

despite the government’s total debt having risen to about £2,000,000. It

engaged in a sharp attack on Major-General Boteler for his activities when he

had been major-general of four Midland counties in 1655–6—chieﬂy for his

seizure of a certain delinquent’s property. Boteler’s plea that he had acted by

the Protector’s orders won him no sympathy; a very hostile House voted to

strike him out of the commission of peace, and a motion to debar him from

all employment might have passed if Thurloe had not ﬁrmly argued that he

should at least be heard before being punished. If the Commons were intent

on pursuing the case, Thurloe rightly said, their proper procedure was to hear

witnesses, draw up articles of impeachment, and send them to the Other

House. A committee was appointed to act accordingly, and the reaction at

Wallingford House can be imagined. In the same interval the offensive declar-

ation for a fast was approved and carried to the Other House on the 14th,

and the Commons’ bitter reaction to the Quaker petition followed two

days later.

Events in both parliament and army were moving fast toward a crisis.

Richard and his councillors, together with some senior ofﬁcers, held tense

consultations between 16 and 18 April. He still had some totally loyal friends

in the army; indeed Howard, Goffe, Ingoldsby, and others, along with Fau-

conberg, even offered to seize the chief men at Wallingford House so that he

could place himself at the head of his troops. Thurloe and others advised him

against such a coup, and he wisely rejected it, but it seems that a dissolution

of parliament was seriously discussed. It was indeed coming to be a question

whether parliament’s provocations or the General Council of the Army’s

febrile temper posed the greater threat to the Protectorate’s survival.

The Commons precipitated the parliament’s fate late in the afternoon of

18 April, when sitting behind locked doors they passed two resolutions that

had no chance of being enforced. One was that there should be no further

meetings of ofﬁcers without the consent of the Protector and both Houses, the

other that no ofﬁcer should retain his command unless he pledged himself not

to interrupt the free meetings of parliament. That same day Richard sum-

moned all the ofﬁcers about London to Whitehall, and before the Commons

passed their fateful votes he ordered that the meetings of the General Council

should cease and that all ofﬁcers should return to their regiments. Not only

Ashﬁeld (whose regiment had not seen him for two years) but Desborough

too deﬁed him openly; yet when the General Council tried to convene for its

next scheduled meeting on the 20th Fleetwood dismissed the ofﬁcers and

720 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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took his seat in the Other House, where the Commons’ votes of the 18th were

meeting strong opposition. Probably that same evening, Richard assured

Fleetwood and Desborough of his goodwill to the army, and gave them to

understand that he would not countenance any move by parliament to assert

his own generalship at the expense of their authority.

He probably meant it, for on the 21st he consulted with his closest conﬁ-

dants, including Broghill, Fiennes, Thurloe, Wolseley, and Whitelocke, as to

whether he should dissolve parliament as the ofﬁcers wished. Most were in

favour, but that same day the Lord Mayor and aldermen brought him the

City’s promise to stand by him and the parliament to the last. Much of the

City militia, however, declared for the army and its petition. The Commons,

having at last taken the soldiers’ pay into consideration, spoilt the brief good

impression on the 21st by debating the control of the national militia at length

and showing a strong bias towards putting all the forces, army and militia

alike, under the immediate joint authority of the Protector and parliament.

The result was that the ofﬁcers at Wallingford House took Richard’s pledge to

be worthless, and word soon spread among the lower ranks that he meant to

disband them and trust instead to a militia commanded by the nobility, as a

step toward restoring the house of Stuart.

Fleetwood was persuaded that it was time for a trial of strength, and late on

the 21st he gave orders for a general rendezvous of all the regiments about

London, to take place next day at St James’s. Richard ordered a counter-

rendezvous at Whitehall, but when the colonels loyal to him tried to comply,

most of their own subordinate ofﬁcers took their men to St James’s instead.

Only two troops of horse and three foot companies obeyed his call; the rest

rallied to Fleetwood. That night Desborough came to him and demanded that

he should dissolve parliament and entrust himself to the ofﬁcers, who had

promised to take care of him, which they signally failed to do. One wonders

what Mrs Desborough, who was Oliver’s sister, thought of the betrayal. Per-

haps her thick-skinned, thick-skulled husband persuaded her not to see it that

way. Richard at ﬁrst refused, but seeing the hopelessness of resistance he

bowed to pressure and signed a commission for the dissolution. Next day the

Commons thrice refused to let Black Rod deliver his summons to attend the

Other House for the ﬁnal ceremony, but he broke his emblem of ofﬁce at their

door to signify that their sitting was at an end.

It was the second time that the army had broken a parliament without

knowing what it was going to put in its place, and the parallels with 1653, as

well as with the army’s ﬁrst deﬁance of parliament in 1647, were in many

people’s minds. Both those earlier actions had inaugurated one of those phas-

es of accelerated political change, resulting in unforeseen consequences, that

I have called climacterics. So did the current crisis. The ofﬁcers at Wallingford

House who precipitated it had no desire to bring the Protectorate to an end,

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 721

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but only to manipulate Richard and ensure that he exercised his authority

through councillors of like mind to themselves. They wanted to consolidate

their power over the army, but they found themselves having to share it with

the men whom Oliver had wisely purged, and to bow to the pressure of sub-

ordinates whom they could no longer control. What those subordinates

wanted cannot be stated with any clarity, so befuddled were they with the

foggy rhetoric of the Good Old Cause. It was surely something better than a

return to the unsolved problems of the early 1650s, and it was certainly not

the almost unconditional restoration of the king, which their conduct

brought so much nearer. The only group who achieved their aims in the short

term were the parliamentary republicans, and they seem to have failed utter-

ly to grasp how low their stock lay in the country at large, and hence how

little able they were to impose any kind of acceptable settlement upon it. All

those involved in the forced dissolution on 22 April 1659 would have been

dismayed to learn that just over a year later, on the orders of a freely elected

parliament, Charles II would be proclaimed king in London, with no con-

ditions but such as he himself had offered.

As in April 1653, it was a restricted Council of Ofﬁcers, not the all-inclu-

sive General Council, which took up the reins after the dissolution of parlia-

ment. It immediately acclaimed Fleetwood as commander-in-chief, but

restored the powerful ﬁgure of Lambert to his command. It removed Ingolds-

by, Fauconberg, and other loyal supporters of Richard from their colonelcies,

and reinstated Okey, Saunders, Rich, Overton, and other old common-

wealthsmen whom Oliver had cashiered. Thus the whole political balance in

the army’s upper ranks was altered, and Fleetwood’s and Desborough’s

promises to look after Richard’s interests became mere empty words. More-

over, even this refashioned Council of Ofﬁcers had nothing like the freedom

of action that its predecessor in 1653 had enjoyed, for it was under vociferous

pressure from a large mass of junior ofﬁcers, who held their own packed

meetings at St James’s, where impassioned preachers exhorted them to be

true to the Good Old Cause. A medley of emotions went into the potent brew

that they imbibed there: an exaggerated sense of apostasy in high places,

resentment at parliament’s hostility towards them and undervaluation of

their service, nostalgia for the heroic years when ideals had been brighter, a

fear that the cause of the people of God was being betrayed, and a strong

strain of the populist republicanism of which the Levellers had been the main

exponents. There were indeed meetings in London of soldiers and NCOs who

called themselves the Army’s Agitators, but it was the captains and cornets at

St James’s who were making the running.

The masterpiece of republican propaganda was to persuade them to

identify the Good Old Cause with the Good Old Parliament, and look to

the restoration of the Rump as the one way of redeeming the nation’s

722 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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‘backsliding’. A barrage of pamphlets and petitions, directed to that end and

aimed mainly at the army, appeared in late April and early May, and the

weekly Faithful Scout, the army newspaper of 1650–5, now revived, re-

printed many excerpts from them. Some Reasons Humbly Proposed to the

Ofﬁcers of the Army, for the Speedy Readmission of the Long Parliament

denounced the Petition and Advice as ‘a mere Chimera’, and urged the army to

renew its old partnership with the Rump, whose political skill and experience

were now essential; only by restoring it could they avoid further faction and

bloodshed, revive the Good Old Cause, restore trade, terrify the Common-

wealth’s enemies, and of course provide for the army’s pay. ‘Cleanse there-

fore and purge your councils and commands’, urged the commonwealthsmen

of Southwark; ‘root out those Canaanites, those court-parasites and apos-

tates . . . if once you touch or give any way to their politics, farewell, Good Old

Cause’. Nearly four hundred men of Goffe’s regiment, who had deﬁed their

colonel’s call to rally to Richard on the night of 21 April, published a

Humble Remonstrance demanding the recall of ‘the Good Old Parliament’.

‘Our camp-court creatures going about to bridle the army, have given them

just occasion to take the bit into their own teeth’, wrote A Perambulatory

Word to Court, Camp, City and Country. All these pieces appeared on the

bookstalls between 26 April and 4 May, and many more could be quoted.

They effectively prevented the Wallingford House party from maintaining

the Protectorate in any form.

Although this well orchestrated burst of propaganda called overwhelming-

ly for the restoration of the Rump, it was not the only voice to be heard. The

Fifth Monarchist Christopher Feake, who was at least consistent, fulminated

that the Rump was still the accursed thing that it had been when it was

expelled, in 1653 and urged the faithful remnant to proclaim ‘the name and

interest of the approaching King of Saints’.

Some millenarian congregations

tried to persuade the junior ofﬁcers at St James’s to stand up for a Sanhedrin

of seventy godly men, but they were cried down. No more heed was given to

a couple of tracts that called for a new nominated assembly, after the pattern

of Barebone’s Parliament.

After the dissolution, two weeks passed before Britain again had a settled

government. It was soon clear to informed observers that the question was

not whether the Rump would form it, but on what terms. John Owen, whom

Oliver had so trusted and whose career he had so greatly advanced, played an

equivocal part in the negotiations that ensued; he obtained a list of the

surviving Rumpers from Ludlow and took it to Wallingford House. Early

in March he had formed a gathered church from the senior ofﬁcers about

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 723

British Library press-marks for all the tracts quoted above, together with further similar

quotations, are in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII, 67–9.

C. Feake, A Beam of Light (1659), preface and pp. 47–8.

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London, including Fleetwood, Desborough, Berry, Goffe, Whalley, and also

Sydenham and Lambert. He had probably intended to try and heal the breach

that had opened between Richard’s supporters and the Wallingford House

faction, but he took part in the great meeting of ofﬁcers on 13 April for fast-

ing and prayer which did so much to fan the army’s rising temper against the

parliament, and during the subsequent crisis he joined in the devotions of the

junior ofﬁcers at St James’s as well as those of the commanders at Wallingford

House. There is no evidence that Owen did or said anything positive to

Richard’s prejudice, and indeed it is unlikely, but the fact that he preached

before the Rump on the day after it returned to power made it appear that he

at least condoned the change of government. He had in fact been literally sick

with worry while the coup was imminent, but as his biographer has remarked

he might have been better in Oxford, attending to his duties as Dean of Christ

Church, where he was missed.

Two crucial conferences took place at Vane’s house on 2 and 5 May, at

which Haselrig, Ludlow, Salwey, and Vane himself met representatives of the

Council of Ofﬁcers, including Lambert, Berry, Kelsey, and John Jones, but

apparently neither Fleetwood nor Desborough. The ofﬁcers tried to set three

conditions to the re-instatement of the Rump: an act of indemnity to cover the

army’s past actions; some face-saving place of authority and a generous sub-

sistence for Richard; whatever measures were necessary for the reform of the

law and the clergy; and ‘That the government of the nation should be by a re-

presentative of the people, and by a select senate’. The ﬁrst and third were

agreed without difﬁculty. The second was rejected outright; the Rump would

honour Richard’s public debts, but would not preserve any shred of his

authority as Protector. The select senate was the most controversial proposal,

and it would remain so all through the summer and autumn. After four or

ﬁve hours’ argument the former Rumpers declined to commit their fellow-

members in advance, but promised the ofﬁcers a sympathetic hearing for any

proposals that the army put to the parliament after it had reconvened.

That had to satisfy the ofﬁcers, and when they returned to Vane’s house on

the 5th they not only agreed to restore the Rump but urged that it should meet

as soon as possible. There was now no other way they could provide for the

country’s government, and their own subordinates would stand for nothing

else. Next day the Council of Ofﬁcers published a declaration lamenting the

failure of all the army’s attempts at settlement, and the daily decline of

‘the good spirit which formerly appeared amongst us . . . so as the good old

cause itself became a reproach’. Searching for the reason why the Lord had

724 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (Exeter, 1971),

pp. 109–14.

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 74–7. The marginal date on p. 74 should be 2 May, not

29 April.

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withdrawn his presence from them, and ‘calling to mind, that the Long Par-

liament, consisting of the members which continued there sitting until the

20th of April, 1653, were eminent asserters of that cause, and had a special

presence of God with them’, they judged it their duty to invite them to return

to their trust.

Richard did not go down without a ﬁght. Helpless at Whitehall, he wrote

to Monck in Scotland, Henry in Ireland, Montagu as General at Sea and the

commander in Flanders, appealing for armed support. But he failed to contact

the last two, and the ﬁrst two could not help him; Monck’s ofﬁcers, as he

privately explained to Richard, sided so strongly with the Council of Ofﬁcers

in London that he had to fall in with it himself, and the forces in Ireland were

so divided that Henry could do nothing.

On 6 May just forty-two Rumpers—barely a quorum—took their seats

again in the House of Commons. One of the hardest to persuade was old

Speaker Lenthall, now in his late sixties, no friend to the Wallingford House

party, and reluctant to relinquish his ‘lordship’ as a member of the Other

House. But within days the chamber ﬁlled up a little more, and on 13 May it

was given something to chew on in the Humble Petition and Address of the

Ofﬁcers of the Army. Signiﬁcantly it was Lambert who presented it, not Fleet-

wood, though perhaps that was because Fleetwood was a member of the

House. Most of its requests relate to the settlement of the restored Common-

wealth, so the debate on it will be described in the next chapter. But it asked

that generous ﬁnancial provision should be made for Richard and his heirs,

and though the Protectorate was virtually at an end it could not be totally

written off until he accepted the fact. Accordingly the Rump appointed a com-

mittee to consider his ﬁnancial circumstances, he being quite heavily in debt,

and to receive his submission. From one or two royalist sources there are alle-

gations that he came to the brink of offering to work for the restoration of the

king but drew back from it, but in the absence of ﬁrmer evidence they are best

discounted. The Rump accepted its committee’s recommendations that

Richard’s debts should be paid and his future ﬁnancial independence quite

handsomely assured, and on 25 May he signed a digniﬁed submission to the

restored Rump’s authority that came as close as need be to a resignation. The

new government, however, being itself in severe ﬁnancial straits, failed to

honour its promises to him, and he hung on in Whitehall until far into July,

not because he still entertained any political pretensions but in order to escape

arrest by his creditors. In that month the Rump ﬁrst gave him six months’

immunity from them and then made his debts a charge upon the public purse.

But again the promise was not kept, and in the spring of 1660 he was still ﬂit-

ting from one hiding-place to another to avoid arrest. In May Richard sailed

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 725

Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, XXI, 367–8.

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for France, and for years he lived in Paris, helped by subventions from his

friends, under the name of John Clarke, which he kept for the rest of his life.

Later he moved to Geneva, but in or around 1680, having inherited an inter-

est in his mother’s estate, he returned to England and made his home in

Cheshunt. There he died in 1712, not far short of his eighty-sixth birthday,

having seen another revolution rescue and consolidate much that his father

had fought for. His only son predeceased him, so Oliver’s descent in the male

line passed to the sons of his brother Henry, who died in 1674.

726 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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twenty-six

The Commonwealth Restored

Once back in power, the Rump faced two obligations that would be difﬁcult

to reconcile: to content the army that had restored it, and to provide for the

political needs of the nation (or nations) that it purported to represent. It failed

to do either; but just whom did it represent? It recognized only seventy-eight

members as entitled to sit, less than a seventh of the Long Parliament’s original

strength. Some even of these did not take their seats. It contained no represen-

tatives of Scotland or Ireland, and though it claimed authority over both coun-

tries it did not recognize the terms of the Cromwellian union with Scotland.

Yet for the present it seemed secure enough. There were some doubts as to

how the ﬂeet would react, in view of the strong attachment of its commander,

Edward Montagu, to the house of Cromwell, but he called his ofﬁcers to a

council of war and they resolved to obey the parliament’s commands. He was

holding his ﬁre, as would soon be seen. Monck sent the Speaker a rather ful-

some assurance of the loyalty of the forces in Scotland, and Lockhart pledged

that of those in Flanders. From Ireland, Henry Cromwell responded with

honesty and dignity. He could not profess to welcome the change of govern-

ment, he wrote, but since his brother had submitted to it he did so too. The

army in Ireland would concur with their comrades in England and render

obedience to the parliament, but he himself felt unable to continue serving, so

he stood ready to hand over his charge.

The Rump accordingly vested the

government of Ireland in ﬁve commissioners, and sent Ludlow over as com-

mander-in-chief, to take over six regiments of horse, one of dragoons, and

eleven of foot, besides sundry detachments—a formidable army.

At home it set up a new Council of State, consisting of twenty-one MPs and

ten non-members. Haselrig, Vane, and Ludlow got the most votes in the for-

mer category, and the latter included Lambert, Desborough, and Berry to rep-

resent the army. Among the others nominated by the Rump were Bradshaw,

who was mortally ill and died on 31 October, and Fairfax, who maintained

his aloofness from current politics and never took his seat.

A statement by Sir Edward Hyde on 25 October 1659 that Henry had been on the point

of declaring for the king but lost his nerve is not to be believed; see Davies, Restoration of

Charles II, p. 244.

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