Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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The nomination of Johnston of Wariston gave Scotland a token presence

in English government, and the late addition of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper

and the crypto-royalist Sir Horatio Townshend (who sought the king’s per-

mission to sit) introduced further elements of disharmony. The army ofﬁcers

made no secret of their dislike of the council’s overall composition. The most

conspicuous omission from it was Thurloe, whose skill and experience could

ill be spared, but his exemplary loyalty to Richard had earned him the enmity

of both the ofﬁcers and the republicans. One of his last acts was to respond

cordially to an offer from France to lend assistance in keeping the Protector in

power, but there was nothing by then to be done. His ofﬁce of Secretary of

State was left unﬁlled, and this and the council’s failure to set up a committee

for foreign affairs were signs that Britain was withdrawing from the inter-

national stage on which Cromwell had played so conspicuous a part.

Fortunately that stage was becoming a quieter place, thanks partly to Thur-

loe’s efforts to restore peace in the Baltic after Charles X’s attack on Copen-

hagen, and partly to England’s fortune in having a ﬁrst-class resident at The

Hague in the person of George Downing, who fully shared Thurloe’s aims. At

the same time France and Spain were moving towards an armistice, in the

negotiation of which England played no part, thanks to her preoccupation

with domestic strife in the spring of 1659. It was signed in the middle of the

hiatus between the dissolution of Richard’s parliament and the Rump’s

return to power.

The reaction of the nation to its recall is hard to gauge, but except among

the strident minorities of commonwealthsmen and radical puritans it was

muted at best. There were some addresses of loyalty—thirty-one at a gener-

ous count spread over three months—but they were far fewer than had

greeted Richard’s accession, and more narrowly based. Nearly all came from

south-eastern England, and many emanated from sectional groups rather

than whole communities. Others were mere covers for speciﬁc requests.

The

effect of the change on local government was mixed, but there were large dis-

placements of personnel in most counties. In a few the local bosses who had

ruled them before 1653 returned to power: John Pyne in Somerset and

Herbert Morley in Sussex, for example. But in most of the country the trend

in the social standing of JPs and militia commissioners was downward.

‘There is a strange contempt and hatred throughout the nation of this present

parliament’, wrote Wariston in his diary in July, and James Harrington, Bor-

deaux, and the Venetian resident all thought that the Rump was more widely

unpopular than the Protectorate had been.

728 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales,

1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 46–7, 51–2.

A. Woolrych, ‘Last quests for a settlement’, in Aylmer (ed.), Interregnum, pp. 195–6.

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The majority of its members faced the same problem that had confronted

them in the early 1650s. They were dedicated to the republican principle that

supreme power belonged of right to the chosen representatives of the sover-

eign people, yet most of the political nation did not want a republic at all.

Since they soon voted that they would not sit beyond 7 May 1660, they had

to ﬁnd, rather urgently, a form of government that would guarantee the con-

tinuance of the Commonwealth’s very being. They spent every Wednesday in

grand committee debating how to do it, and they never came to a positive

conclusion. The ﬁrst proposals to come before them were contained in the

Humble Petition and Address of the Ofﬁcers of the Army, which Lambert

presented a week after they resumed their sitting. These were in essence what

the Council of Ofﬁcers had put to them before readmitting them to power,

and most were uncontroversial. But the most interesting was this:

That . . . the legislative power may be in a representative of the people, consisting of a

House successively chosen by the people in such way and manner as this parliament

shall judge meet, and of a select Senate, co-ordinate in power, of able and faithful per-

sons, eminent for godliness, and such as continue adhering to this cause.

The words ‘co-ordinate in power’ imply that the senate’s assent would be nec-

essary to acts of parliament, to decisions of peace and war, and to the ultimate

control over the Commonwealth’s armed forces, among other things. At a

superﬁcial level it could be seen, and was seen, as a bid to compensate the

senior ofﬁcers for their lost ‘lordships’ in the Other House and secure them a

permanent voice in affairs of state, for it soon became clear that senators were

intended to be appointed for life. This was beyond doubt part of the senate’s

appeal to the Council of Ofﬁcers.

On a more altruistic plane, however, this was a serious attempt to protect

the fundamental principles of the Commonwealth against the vagaries of

future elected assemblies that might seek (as was all too possible) to bring

back monarchy or set undue limits to liberty of conscience. Something very

like this ‘select senate’ had been advocated by Vane three years earlier in A

Healing Question, though then he had called it a ‘standing council’. Vane

may well have been the source of its revival now, for he was drawing closer to

Lambert and further apart from Haselrig, Scot, and the majority of republican

Rumpers, who would brook no check upon the supreme authority of the

people’s representatives. Since the Council of Ofﬁcers kept up their advocacy

of a senate through the summer, and reiterated it when their relations with the

Rump were coming to another crisis in October, its intended role is a matter

of some interest. But evidence is scarce as to its intended size, and how it was

The Commonwealth Restored 729

Text in Baker, Chronicle of the Kings of England, pp. 662–4, and Parliamentary or Consti-

tutional History of England, XXI, 400–5.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 729

to be chosen, and just what powers it was to wield. Scattered references in

petitions and pamphlets suggest that it was to be instituted by some form of

election, that membership was to be for life, and that it should be consider-

ably larger than the Council of State, which the army petitions included in

their proposals as a quite distinct institution; seventy was a number canvassed

several times, no doubt for its biblical associations and consequent appeal to

millenarians. The chances that the Rump would accept a senate were

extremely small, for in late July Vane was reckoned to command only sixteen

or seventeen votes in the House.

The situation was complicated by the fact that James Harrington was taking

advantage of the constitutional hiatus to run a serious campaign in favour

of his own model of a commonwealth, as elaborated in Oceana. That model,

it will be remembered, included a senate of 300, elected by men of property,

and a popular assembly of 1,050, elected on a very broad franchise, with the

former having the sole right to frame and propose measures and the latter

restricted to balloting for or against them. Late in May (probably) Vane

published anonymously A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Gov-

ernment, which set forth his own version of a senate in the form of an open

letter to Harrington.

He agreed with Harrington in seeking a government of

laws rather than men and in deriving it from the people’s consent; but for him

the central problem was not to strike a balance between property interests but

to ensure that the corrupted and self-interested will of the people at large

should be guided so as persuade them ‘to espouse their true public interest’.

The depraved will of man needed ‘the balancing and ruling motion of God’s

Spirit to keep him steadfast’. In order that the ‘Ruling Senate or Body of

Elders’ should provide this guidance, it should be elected only by ‘such as are

free born, in respect of their holy and righteous principles, ﬂowing from the

birth of the Spirit of God in them’, or ‘else who, by their tried good affection

and faithfulness to common right and public freedom, have deserved to be

trusted with the keeping or bearing their own arms in the public defence’.

view of the difﬁculty of identifying the ‘saints’ in the ﬁrst category, this meant

in effect entrusting the choice of senators to members of the army and the

militia, which may well have been what Lambert and his colleagues wanted.

As for Harrington, he himself published ﬁve pamphlets between May and

August, and they spoke with a new directness, even passion. Pieces by his sup-

porters brought the number up to a dozen, and a club was formed in Bow

Street to debate his ideas. But not everyone shared his faith that perfectly

devised institutions would make people better citizens and guarantee that

730 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Thurloe State Papers, VII, 704.

I set out the evidence for Vane’s authorship and the probable date in ‘The Good Old Cause

and the fall of the Protectorate’, Cambridge Historical Journal XIII (1957), 154.

Quoted more fully in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII, 104–6.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 730

their political needs were met, while the Rumpers were never going to take

seriously his principle of rotation, which would have sent them into the

wilderness after three years, the maximum tenure both for representatives

and for ofﬁce-holders. The air was full of projects for reform in the summer

of 1659, but at Westminster there was much talk but little action. There were

mass petitions again for the abolition of tithes, but the Rump voted that they

should continue unless it devised a fairer and more acceptable maintenance

for the clergy. The word in the motion had been ‘until’; its change, without a

division, to ‘unless’ amounted to a rejection. As for the pressing problem of

the soaring national debt and the army’s lengthening arrears of pay, the

Rump’s failure to respond to the repeated promptings of its own revenue

committee conﬁrmed that in its six years in the wilderness it had not only

forgotten nothing but had learnt nothing either.

It continued to give offence to the army, not merely by neglecting its ﬁnan-

cial needs and cold-shouldering its requests for a select senate, but by more

positive means. It could hardly refuse its demand to conﬁrm Fleetwood as

commander-in-chief, but it did so only for the duration of its current session,

and it denied him the powers of appointment that normally went with such a

post. The selection and promotion of all ofﬁcers was entrusted to a Commit-

tee of Nominations, in which he had only one voice alongside those of Hasel-

rig, Vane, Ludlow, Lambert, Desborough, and Berry; moreover every one of

its recommendations was subject to parliament’s approval. As for ofﬁcers

already in post, the House ordered on 6 June that every one of them must

come and receive a new commission from the hands of the Speaker. There-

after it closely scrutinized the regimental lists, and a considerable purge of

known Cromwellians resulted. Another of the army’s requests, both before

and after it restored the Rump, was for an act of indemnity to protect its mem-

bers from prosecution for actions done in the course of their military duties.

The House took seven weeks to pass it, and in the course of long debates in

grand committee some outrageously hostile proposals were ventilated. The

act that ﬁnally emerged struck the ofﬁcers as insufﬁcient; Lambert com-

plained to Haselrig that it left them still at mercy. ‘You are only at the mercy

of the parliament, who are your good friends’, Haselrig replied; to which

Lambert retorted: ‘I know not why they should not be at our mercy as well as

we at theirs.’

A drastic remodelling of the militia in the counties and cities

caused further friction, especially since the House insisted on approving every

single ofﬁcer by name and requiring that his commission be signed by the

Speaker. The army suspected it of erecting a rival force of its own devotees,

prior to a large-scale disbandment of regular regiments. Nor was this implau-

sible, since the only means whereby Haselrig and the dominant faction in the

The Commonwealth Restored 731

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 100; Davies, Restoration of Charles II, pp. 112–14.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 731

Rump could hang on to power indeﬁnitely was by disposing of effective

military force.

Two considerations deterred the leading ofﬁcers from allowing their dis-

satisfaction with the Rump to swell to bursting-point: the sizeable number of

commonwealthsmen within the army, and the knowledge that the king’s sup-

porters were far advanced with plans for another rising. This time the royal-

ists posed a greater threat than in 1658 or even 1655, because the Rump’s rule

was much more widely unpopular than the Protectorate had been, especially

in its later years, and many more political presbyterians were now willing to

join them in arms. The man who gave his name to the rising in August, Sir

George Booth, had raised troops for parliament in 1642–3 and been elected

MP for Cheshire in 1646; and though secluded in Pride’s Purge he was a trusted

militia commissioner in the time of the major-generals. He was one of a

number of participants with a similar past. Even a few Cromwellians, loyal to

the Protectorate until the moment it fell, were ready to join the rising; Richard

Ingoldsby and some of his ofﬁcers did so, even though he himself was a regi-

cide. These were not turncoats; in their eyes England’s present masters had

destroyed the regime that had given the country its best prospect of stable

government, based on consent, and were incapable of providing it them-

selves. They were arguably more principled, and certainly braver, than the

majority of royalists, who stayed at home until they saw how things went. In

committing themselves they took great risks, for there was little sign yet of the

surge of popular royalism that would arise in the following winter and spring.

The risks were the greater because of the usual lack of unity and deﬁcien-

cies in organization on the royalist side. By far the most active and devoted of

the king’s friends in England was John Mordaunt, who had escaped execu-

tion in 1658 only by the casting vote of the president of the High Court of Just-

ice that sentenced Slingsby and Hewitt. He wrote to the king in November,

offering to resume working for him, and Charles responded with a warrant

for a viscountcy and a new empowerment entitled the Plenipotentiary or

Great Trust and Commission—henceforth (for convenience) the Trust. This

was addressed not only to Mordaunt but to ﬁve of the six members of the old

Sealed Knot, but they as always proved broken reeds. They rejected the new

commission because it infringed their original one and because Mordaunt

and his friends were too ready to bring presbyterians into their designs, but

underlying these objections was a strong reluctance to risk their own necks.

So Mordaunt looked elsewhere, and the eight men whom he certainly re-

cruited to the Trust by August 1659 included the presbyterian Lord Willoughby

of Parham as well as such tried and trusted royalist activists as the Earl of

Northampton, Sir John Grenville, Sir Thomas Peyton, and Will Legge. Close-

ly associated with them were the former parliamentarian generals Waller and

Massey, Silius Titus (who had written Killing No Murder), and of course

732 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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Sir George Booth. It was at least as much a presbyterian as a royalist enter-

prise, and its greatest weakness was that the great royalist nobles who could

have done most to make the rising a success held aloof from the Trust. This

was partly because they resented the authority assumed by and accorded to

Mordaunt, but as David Underdown has written, ‘underneath can be detect-

ed the continued preference of the peers for self-preservation rather than mar-

tyrdom’.

Northampton proved to be only a partial exception.

Unheroic though so many of the old royalists were, they did have much to

fear. Although the master-hand of Thurloe had been removed, Thomas Scot

was back in the council and he was well versed in uncovering conspiracy.

Thanks to assiduous intelligence and effective counter-measures, many parts

of the design were already scotched or doomed before 1 August, the appointed

date for the rising, came round. Secrets were certainly betrayed by men

whom the king trusted, though how far Sir Richard Willys of the Sealed Knot

kept up his role of informant after Thurloe left the stage is not clear. But the

active discouragement that Willys and others of the Knot gave to their friends

in the ﬁnal stages of preparation did much to condemn the enterprise to

failure.

As in 1655, the plans were for the rising to be launched simultaneously in

a number of centres spanning a large part of the country, but only one of these

got under arms with even temporary success. A major difference, however,

was that the Trust was so anxious to enlist the support of presbyterians and

other opponents of the Rump that its commission gave participants discre-

tion as to whether or not they should declare outright for the king. In fact

none of them did. Booth’s own manifesto accused the present government of

‘subjecting us under the meanest and fanatic spirits of the nation, under pre-

tence of protection’, and declared that its dependence on an army that had

twice already violated parliament, in 1648 and 1653, would have the result

that ‘A mean and schismatical party must depress the nobility, and under-

standing commons’.

What the Cheshire insurgents demanded was either a

freely elected new parliament or the restoration of the old Lords and Com-

mons, as they had sat before Pride’s Purge. Hereby they anticipated the gen-

eral call for ‘a full and free parliament’ which was to be a rallying cry in the

coming winter for all who wanted the old monarchy restored; but when some

of Booth’s supporters openly proclaimed Charles II he complained that it

would be their ruin. However, by contrast with Booth’s own printed declar-

ation, a broadsheet published a week later and claiming to emanate from the

The Commonwealth Restored 733

Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England 1649–1660, p. 238. Chapters 11 and 12 of

Underdown’s work give the fullest and best overall account of the Trust and of Booth’s Rising,

but J. S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society, during the English

Revolution (Oxford, 1974), pp. 300–25, has considerable independent value.

Quoted in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII, 108–9, and discussed there and in

Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660, pp. 318–22, and Davies, Restoration of Charles II, pp. 135–7.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 733

knights and gentry engaged with him in Cheshire (though probably con-

cocted in London), professed fellowship with the ‘gathered separate churches’,

opposed all coercion in matters of religion, and called among other things for

the annual election of all ofﬁce-holders and magistrates, drastic reform of the

law and the restitution of the enclosed common land to the poor. This was

patently incompatible with the real aims of Booth and his followers, which

were quintessentially conservative. One reason why they made a better show-

ing than would-be insurgents elsewhere was that they were drawn from the

main area of Presbyterian strength outside London, and the Presbyterian

clergy urged them to arms with tales that a Quaker uprising was imminent—

a scare that was also raised in Norfolk, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, and

Devon, though with less effect.

The main reason why the rising was nipped in the bud lay in the vigorous

counter-measures taken by the council, which set up a standing committee for

intelligence with Scot as its guiding spirit. As the appointed day approached,

the council itself sat all day and much of the night, sleeping at Whitehall and

grabbing meals as chance afforded. Many activists were arrested, including

three members of the Trust itself. Worst of all, the Knot sent out messengers

to intending participants on 30 July to tell them that the council had un-

covered the design and that it was therefore abandoned.

Some of the largest preparations had been made in Gloucestershire and its

neighbouring counties, and no one could have been more active in organizing

them than Edward Massey, the former major-general of the Long Parlia-

ment’s Western Association, who had since become an open royalist. But the

Rump’s supporters in Gloucester sent out several troops of horse to scour the

countryside on 31 July, and Massey and other leaders were arrested. Massey

himself escaped overseas, but the failure of his enterprise had a domino effect

on others in the West Country, and Devon and Cornwall did not even stir.

Grenville and his colleagues had agreed to rise only if Bristol and Gloucester

were ﬁrst seized and if the king or the Duke of York came to lead them in

person. All too many of the old royalists were prepared to join a rising only if

and when it was clearly on the way to success. Lord Falkland, son of Hyde’s

friend who had perished on Chalgrove Field, tried rather harder in Oxford,

but vigorous counter-measures made him call off the rendezvous at the last

moment, and he was soon in the Tower. There were elaborate plans to draw

the Commonwealth’s forces out of London by risings in all the home coun-

ties, but Mordaunt’s own design in Surrey and Sussex collapsed as feebly as

Peyton’s in Kent; the few who turned up at the appointed rendezvous at

Redhill, Blackheath, and Tunbridge Wells were easily taken prisoner. In

Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Bedfordshire very little happened at all. In

East Anglia, where the Knot was most inﬂuential, its active discourage-

ment killed the enterprise stone dead, and in Northamptonshire and the

734 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 734

neighbouring Midlands the Earl of Northampton abandoned it just before it

was due to begin. From Shropshire and Worcestershire ﬁfty or sixty men

gathered on the Wrekin in soaking rain, but they had ﬂed by early morning on

1 August. In the northern counties other than Cheshire and Lancashire the

Trust had done little to organize the king’s friends, who were still in disarray

after previous designs had failed, and little happened except the round-up of

some of the usual suspects. Such was the degree of enthusiasm for the king’s

cause nationwide, only months before he actually returned.

Why then did Sir George Booth manage to hold together a force of about

4,000 men in Cheshire and south Lancashire for nearly three weeks, while

everywhere else the attempted rising had collapsed within hours—if it was

attempted at all? For a start, Booth was exceptionally able and resolute; he

stood high among the elite of his county and was greatly respected. Equally

importantly, the council seems not to have had any such intelligence of prepar-

ations in Cheshire as it had from the other centres where it acted so prompt-

ly, and in recent years the county had not given it grounds for suspicion. It

made all the difference that Booth was able to hold his rendezvous at War-

rington on 1 August and at Rowton Heath near Chester next day without

interruption. Still unhindered on the 7th, he was recruiting in Manchester. He

had the support of the Earl of Derby, but more signiﬁcant was that of the Pres-

byterian clergy, who used their pulpits—31 July was a Sunday—to call their

ﬂocks to arms. He was dismayed when the Knot’s discouraging letter reached

him that day, but he was not deterred. His initial declaration for a free parlia-

ment was a popular one, though he was compromised when his ally Sir

Thomas Middleton, another former parliamentary commander, proclaimed

the king in Wrexham. For a fortnight or more Booth controlled all of

Cheshire and much of Lancashire, but his force did not grow in numbers after

the ﬁrst week, and he gradually became aware that he was utterly isolated.

Lambert was after him with a competent force, picking up reinforcements as

he rode north, and Ludlow had dispatched a brigade of horse and foot from

the forces in Ireland to Wales. Just in case the rising got off the ground, the

council had also recalled three regiments from Flanders. Lambert caught up

with Booth’s men near Northwich on the 19th, and though they put up some-

thing of a ﬁght at Winnington Bridge it was more of a skirmish than a battle.

Lambert lost only one man killed, Booth about thirty, but most of his men

just scattered. Booth made his escape southward, disguised as a woman, but

an innkeeper in Newport Pagnell became suspicious after his three compan-

ions, having called in a barber to shave them, tried to buy his razor. It was

soon discovered that ‘the Lady Dorothy’ was not what she seemed. Booth and

his fellow leaders spent the next six months in the Tower, but the obvious

imminence of the Restoration brought their release in February, and soon

a grateful king rewarded Booth with the barony of Delamere, to which

The Commonwealth Restored 735

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 735

parliament added a grant of £10,000. The handsome additions that he made

to his family seat at Dunham Massey testify to his prosperity, but he remained

a ﬁrm Presbyterian and was later a prominent Exclusionist.

We shall probably never know for certain how close his rising came to

receiving the support of a major part of the ﬂeet. When the news of Richard’s

overthrow reached Montagu and his squadron in the Sound, most of his cap-

tains shared his own dismay, though Vice-Admiral Goodson rejoiced in the

Rump’s return to power. But they all agreed to obey its orders, and they

accepted their new commissions signed by the Speaker, as the army ofﬁcers

had done. Among Montagu’s ofﬁcers, however, was a young cousin, also

called Edward Montagu, who was thought to be more positively inclined

towards the king’s cause. Hyde wrote to him in June, urging him to press his

kinsman to come over, and promising that if he brought his ships to Flanders

the king would embark for England at once. But Charles and Hyde spoilt

whatever chances they had by employing another agent in the person of

Thomas Whetstone, a nephew of Cromwell and former naval captain who

had been disgraced some months earlier. Whetstone persuaded them that he

could still wield great inﬂuence among the ships’ crews, and he set off from

Brussels for Copenhagen with letters from the king to Montagu and his ﬂag-

ofﬁcers Goodson and Stayner. Meanwhile the Rump, uncertain of Mon-

tagu’s loyalty, had sent new commissioners to the Sound to treat with the

Dutch and keep an eye on him. They were headed by Colonel Algernon Sid-

ney, a strongly republican MP and a member of the council, and they arrived

off Cophenhagen on 20 July. They found Whetstone behaving with extra-

ordinary indiscretion, and Sidney soon guessed what he was up to. Montagu

dared not meet him, and sent him hastily back to Brussels with only a vague

verbal message of goodwill towards the king. His young cousin wrote a frank

letter to Hyde on the 27th, probably unaware that the rising in England was

timed to start four days later, but perhaps knowing that plans for it were

afoot. If the moment had been seized when Richard was ﬁrst overthrown, he

wrote, something might have been done; but now that the captains had

received their new commission and were ‘not only forgiven but courted by the

present power’, only half of them at the most could be expected to follow the

General at Sea if he declared for the king, and if they did so the sailors might

deliver up their own ofﬁcers. Yet he hinted that if the army and the civil gov-

ernment fell out, and there was a party able and willing to stand for the king,

Montagu’s help could be hoped for.

In fact Montagu and his ships did

set sail for home on 24 August, when he knew that the rising had began but

not that it had failed. Shortage of victuals was the reason he gave to his

736 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

For his post-Restoration career see Douglas R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics

in England 1661–1689 (New Brunswick, 1969), esp. pp. 464–6.

Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 333–41.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 736

ofﬁcers, and afterwards to the Rump. His motives cannot be read with cer-

tainty. He would certainly have preferred a monarchy restored upon suitable

terms to an indeﬁnite continuance of the rule of the Rump, but he was a pat-

riot, and it is most unlikely that he would have turned his ships’ guns against

an English government still ﬁrmly in being, to the detriment of his country’s

standing in the world at large. If, however, he had found that that government

had already fallen he would have been happy to serve those who, like Booth,

put their trust in ‘a full and free parliament’, and he would probably have

been as glad as they if it had brought back the king. The council sent three

Admiralty Commissioners to interrogate him as soon as he dropped anchor

in English waters, and he was closely examined by the council. But there was

no solid evidence against him, and after some debate the Rump let him resign

his command and retire to his estate at Hinchingbrooke.

The most unhappy consequence of Lambert’s easy victory in Cheshire, for

both the Rump and the army, was that it removed the main check upon the

mounting quarrel between them. Both parties must be judged to have shared

responsibility for its escalation, but on balance the Rump was to a larger

extent the author of its own downfall. When the House heard the news of

Winnington Bridge, Fleetwood moved that Lambert should be restored to his

old rank of major-general. It would have been a politic recognition of his

recent services and his actual standing in the army, but Haselrig opposed the

motion strenuously and it was rejected. Lambert was voted £1,000 to buy a

jewel, but he preferred to distribute the money among his troops in Cheshire.

There was more friction, especially between Haselrig and Vane, when the

former’s party introduced on 3 September a new Engagement, to be taken by

all militia ofﬁcers, requiring them to abjure the pretended title of Charles Stu-

art and swear to be faithful to ‘this Commonwealth’, without a king, single

person, or House of Lords. Vane, who was now closely allied with Lambert,

opposed it sharply, partly because the form of the Commonwealth had yet to

be deﬁned, so that the oath could be used to prolong the power of one party

(Haselrig’s), and partly because it suggested a suspicion within that party that

Lambert was aiming at a role akin to that of Protector. Vane was also sensi-

tive to the scruples that many radical puritans felt against the multiplying of

public oaths, as a tempting of God.

Simultaneously a row had been developing between the parliament and the

City of London, partly generated by the former’s overriding of the corpor-

ation’s authority when it reorganized the City militia in July. The Lord Mayor

was Sir John Ireton, a brother of the late Henry Ireton, and he and most of the

aldermen supported the Rump. But most of the common councilmen and

very many citizens sympathized with Booth’s call for a free parliament, and

many Presbyterian ministers in London refused to read the government’s

proclamation of him as a traitor from their pulpits. Ireton was under heavy

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