Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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pressure during August to call a Court of Common Council, and he even had

to get troops posted at the Guildhall to prevent it from meeting without his

summons. The annual election of a new Lord Mayor was due in September,

but the Rump voted on the 2nd to override the City’s historic right and to

keep Ireton in ofﬁce for another year. This aroused such a storm of protest

that the House gave way later in the month, and the City gratefully elected

one Thomas Allin, who could be relied upon not to make waves.

Meanwhile the government’s ﬁnancial difﬁculties deepened. The special

militia raised against the August risings was stood down, but it took many

weeks to ﬁnd the money to pay the men off; in Suffolk and Staffordshire they

seized the militia commissioners as hostages for it. The forces called back

from Ireland and Flanders and the men of Montagu’s ﬂeet were extra burdens

on the Exchequer, and the old evil of free quarter bore heavily again on the

civil population. Belatedly, on 18 August, the Rump decided to raise the

monthly assessment, but a bill to double it was still just short of passing four

weeks later when the parliament was again interrupted.

If ﬁnance was one intractable problem, the settlement of the constitution

was another. Since the House had made so little progress in grand committee,

it set up a select committee on 8 September, with instructions to sit every day

and present a draft by 10 October at the latest. But with twenty-nine members

of very diverse views—with Haselrig and Scot pitted against Vane and Sal-

wey, with Fleetwood confronting the anti-militarist lawyers St John and

Whitelocke, and with the Harringtonian Henry Neville differing from them

all—the committee was unlikely to deliver the wisdom of either Solomon or

Solon; nor did it. In parliament itself, there was debate early in October on

how to ﬁll the vacant seats in the House. This can only mean that Haselrig’s

faction was still pursuing the same design that had brought it into disrepute

seven or eight years ago, namely of holding only ‘recruiter’ elections and

trusting to a compliant army to keep out undesirable candidates. Since the

army’s current mood was far from compliant, quite a small provocation

could set it and the parliament on collision course again.

This arose in the shape of a petition from the brigade that Lambert had led

against Booth. It was signed on 16 September, addressed to parliament, but

quite properly sent to Fleetwood for prior consideration by the General

Council of Ofﬁcers. It became known as the Derby Petition, since that was

where the brigade—only one small part of the military forces in England—

was stationed when it was composed. Lambert had left Derby for London

before it was drafted, and there is evidence to support his strenuous subse-

quent denials that he had had any part in it. It asked for action on the ofﬁcers’

Humble Petition and Address of May 12, whose main unfulﬁlled request had

been that for a select senate. Its only really new proposals were that Fleet-

wood’s appointment as commander-in-chief should be made permanent and

738 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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that general rank should be conferred on three other ofﬁcers: on Lambert as

second-in-command and on Desborough and Monck as chief ofﬁcers of the

horse and foot respectively. It was provocative of the ofﬁcers at Derby to

send their petition to Monck in Scotland and to the acting commanders in

Ireland, asking them to invite their ofﬁcers to subscribe it, but this did not

warrant the explosive reaction that it aroused at Westminster. On receiving

it, Fleetwood was inclined to suppress it, but indecisive as always he showed

it to Haselrig, suggesting that they should meet with Vane and Salwey and

discuss what to do about it. Instead, Haselrig took it straight to the House,

had the doors locked, and denounced it with all the inﬂammatory rhetoric at

his command. Assuming without any positive evidence that Lambert was

responsible for it, he moved that he should be committed to the Tower for

high treason. This was monstrous; Lambert was so shocked by the suspicion

that had fallen on his subordinates that he asked Fleetwood for leave to resign

his commission, but Fleetwood, who believed him innocent, would not hear

of it. After a second day’s heated debate the motion to commit Lambert was

dropped, but Fleetwood was ordered to reprimand the ofﬁcers of his brigade,

who were now back in London. Furthermore the House voted ‘that to have

any more general ofﬁcers than are already settled by the parliament, is need-

less, chargeable and dangerous to the Commonwealth’.

Those last four

words were utterly gratuitous; did no one in the House remember what had

happened when it had branded an earlier body of army petitioners as

‘enemies of the state’ in 1647?

The ofﬁcers about London were now meeting daily again, as they had done

in April when the last coup was brewing. They appointed a committee to

draft an address that would clear the army’s reputation by publicly reafﬁrm-

ing its loyalty to the Commonwealth, but what Fleetwood had hoped would

pour oil on troubled waters had the opposite effect, as the document emerged

from the ofﬁcers’ debates. Those debates were heated; Haselrig, having been

made colonel of a regiment again in the summer’s reshufﬂe, asserted in the

Council of Ofﬁcers that absolute power lay in the parliament, whereas most

of the ofﬁcers were equally positive in claiming that they were employed

against arbitrary government in any form whatsoever. Fleetwood tried to

persuade them all ‘to sleep upon the whole business’, and Lambert sat silent,

wisely (at this stage) declining to engage himself. The address that emerged,

and was presented to the House by Desborough on 5 October, was styled The

Humble Representation and Petition of the Ofﬁcers of the Army, but humble

it was not. So far from disowning or even qualifying the Derby Petition, it vin-

dicated it, and blamed the current tension on those who had misrepresented

The Commonwealth Restored 739

Commons Journals, VII, 785, where the repetition of ‘dangerous’ is surely a clerical error;

‘needless’ is supplied from Baker, Chronicle of the King’s of England, p. 678.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 739

its authors’ intentions. It vehemently denied that the army intended to inter-

rupt the parliament’s sitting, or to ‘set up a single person, or another Gener-

al’. It urged the Rump to get on with settling the constitution and reminded it

again of the ofﬁcers’ address in May, whose proposal of a select Senate had

been allowed to sleep. It repeated the dangerous demand that no ofﬁcer or

soldier should be dismissed unless convicted by a court-martial, though it did

make an exception of cases in which they lost their employment because their

regiments were disbanded. And there were new requests, in particular that

soldiers should have the same right as other citizens to petition parliament,

and that those who wrongfully aspersed the army should be tried and pun-

ished. Yet it did pledge the army’s ﬁdelity to the parliament and the

Commonwealth, and expressed hopes for ‘a cordial and affectionate union of

the parliament and army, and an uninterrupted good understanding of each

other’.

At ﬁrst the Rump responded temperately to the army’s petition, debating

its requests one by one and framing conciliatory answers to the ﬁrst ﬁve of

them. But on 11 October Colonel Okey divulged to Haselrig a letter signed by

Lambert and eight other senior ofﬁcers, inviting himself and the ofﬁcers of his

regiment to sign the Humble Representation and Petition. It transpired soon

afterwards that similar letters had been sent to other commanders of regi-

ments and garrisons and to the armies in Scotland and Ireland. To canvass

thus for signatures to an essentially political petition after it had been pre-

sented, and before parliament had responded to it, was inexcusable, but the

Rump fully shared the responsibility for the breach that followed. Upon

Okey’s revelation, it rushed an act through all its stages in a single day, declar-

ing all legislation passed since April 1653 to be null and void unless the pre-

sent House conﬁrmed it, and making it high treason to collect any taxes,

including customs and excise, without parliament’s consent. The obvious

purpose was to make lawful government impossible if the army should again

dissolve the Rump, but this was almost daring it to do so.

Worse was to follow, and on the very next day. Early that morning, Hasel-

rig, Scot and Valentine Walton received a secret message from Monck that if

the parliament was resolute in standing up to the army he would if necessary

bring the army in Scotland to its support. At this stage there is nothing to con-

nect Monck with any design to bring back the king, whose chief agents in

Britain were quite in the dark as to his intentions. He was making a reasoned

judgement that Lambert and the leading ofﬁcers in England were posing a

greater threat to ordered government than the Rumper politicians, and he

cannot be blamed for the latter’s self-destructive response to his pledge. As

soon as the House met on the 12th, Haselrig, Scot, and Walton caused its

740 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Text in Baker, Chronicle , pp. 679–81.

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doors to be locked and had the letter from Lambert and his colleagues to

Okey read out. After a long debate the House voted to cashier Lambert and

his eight co-signatories, who included not only Desborough, Berry, and

Kelsey but such staunch commonwealthsmen as Ashﬁeld, Packer, and Creed.

No less rashly, it revoked Fleetwood’s commission as commander-in-chief

and vested the command of the army in seven commissioners. Although

Fleetwood was one and Monck another, all the rest were republicans:

Haselrig, Scot, Ludlow, Walton, Morley, and Overton. This cannot have

been what Monck wanted. He had offered to defend the parliament against

the army if need be, but not to launch it upon a suicidal frontal attack.

On the evening of this same 12 October, Haselrig, Walton, and Morley

used their new military authority to order two regiments (one being Morley’s

own) to occupy Westminster Hall and the precincts of the House, where some

members camped for the night. But the majority of the regiments about Lon-

don chose to obey Lambert rather than the new commissioners, and he posted

them so as completely to surround the parliament’s defenders. Through that

night and all next day the opposing forces faced each other with muskets

loaded and matches lit, but more and more of the defenders went over to

Lambert, including the parliament’s life guard. His blockading forces pre-

vented any members from entering the House, including Speaker Lenthall.

‘I am your General’, he told them, and demanded obedience, to which they

replied that they would have known him as such if he had marched before

them on Winnington Bridge. The members who had spent the night in the

House sent for help to the City militia, but it declined to meddle in the quar-

rel; indeed the citizens generally took the whole confrontation very calmly

and went about their business as if unconcerned.

They had seen violent changes of government enough in the past dozen

years, and by now they had little to hope for from either warring party. It was

the second time within ﬁve months that the army had forcibly interrupted a

political regime that it had been largely responsible for establishing, and in

October it had even less prospect of settling the civil government of the three

nations than it had had in April. Then, it had confronted and destroyed the

Cromwellian Protectorate, and pinned its faith on putting the clock back to

1653. Now, though provoked almost beyond endurance by the incorrigible

leaders of the restored Rump, not even its own generals had any clear idea of

what they could set up in its place. In earlier years, between 1647 and 1648

and again in 1653, the army’s incursions into politics had been ﬁred by posi-

tive ideals and accompanied by constructive proposals for what it truly hoped

would be a better political order, but in 1659 it was sinking into political

bankruptcy.

No one, not even the army leaders themselves, knew whether their latest coup

was meant to signify the dissolution of the Rump or merely an interruption,

The Commonwealth Restored 741

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designed to bring it to terms. The indications are that if Lambert and his col-

leagues had been given assurances that the House would rescind the hostile

votes of 11 and 12 October, and give serious attention to the army’s requests,

they would have restored it. But there was no chance that Haselrig and his

party would agree to such terms, now that they had the secret promise of

Monck’s support. Two whole weeks went by before the Council of Ofﬁcers

gave any clear indication of its intentions, and the delay was probably due

more to a lingering hope of striking a deal with the Rumpers than to a total

inability to decide what to do next. A remnant of the Council of State sat on

until 25 October, and ﬁve of its members, including Vane and Whitelocke,

engaged in negotiation with ﬁve army spokesmen—Fleetwood, Lambert,

Desborough, Sydenham, and Berry—as to how best to carry on the civil gov-

ernment. Not surprisingly, the councillors insisted that the ﬁrst move must be

the readmission of the Rump, and the generals adamantly opposed it. Faced

with deadlock, the Council of Ofﬁcers set up a Committee of Safety as a pro-

visional government. It consisted nominally of twenty-three members,

including the ten who had been treating during the past two weeks, but the

ofﬁcers had difﬁculty in ﬁnding as many men of experience who were willing

to serve; Ludlow, Vane, Salwey, and Whitelocke were among those who were

persuaded only with difﬁculty. Not more than twelve are certainly known to

have ever taken their seats, and those who did attend found agreement very

difﬁcult. They did, however, appoint a sub-committee ‘to prepare a form of

government’.

Nothing came of it, for its members were as divided as the Committee of

Safety itself, and the centre of political gravity very soon shifted elsewhere.

But the intermission of regular government, which lasted until almost the end

of the year, witnessed a spate of pamphleteering, which offered remedies for

the commonwealth’s ills that ranged from the restoration of monarchy to our

old friends an Agreement of the People and a rule of the saints. Harrington’s

proposals continued to be vigorously discussed; indeed the Rota Club was

established in October for that very purpose. Its regulars included Harrington

himself, his close friend the Rumper Henry Neville, the former Levellers John

Wildman and Maximilian Petty, the Cromwellian councillor Sir Charles

Wolseley, the Earl of Dorset, the diarist Samuel Pepys, John Aubrey of the

Brief Lives, and such early lights of the soon-to-be-founded Royal Society as

Dr William Petty and Sir John Hoskins. Miles’s coffee-house in New Palace

Yard, where it met, was crammed every evening, and according to Aubrey

‘the arguments in the parliament house were but ﬂat to it’.

A balloting-box

was a central feature, and each proposal was subjected in true Harringtonian

fashion to its verdict. But for Harrington himself the urgency seems to have

742 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (1949), p. 125.

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gone out of the passionate promotion that he had given to his model of an

ideal commonwealth during the spring and summer, when he had thought it

had a real chance of being adopted. What had then seemed serious proposals

for an actual political settlement had been relegated by the follies of both sol-

diers and politicians to an intellectual entertainment for the wits and virtuosi

of the town.

Although the Committee of Safety remained the nominal governing body

in England until late in December, its authority was fatally compromised

almost from the start by General Monck’s reaction to the English army’s lat-

est coup. There has been much disagreement about Monck’s political stand-

point at this stage, and in the face of conﬂicting evidence it is impossible to be

completely certain about it. What is beyond doubt is that his loyalty to the

Protectorate had been impeccable throughout, and that he felt no sympathy

or solidarity with the army leaders in England who overthrew it. But he had

little reason to love the restored Rump either, not only on account of its dubi-

ous credentials and the intransigence of Haselrig’s faction, but because it pro-

ceeded to remove and replace ofﬁcers in the regiments under his command

without consulting him. The king and his ministers were aware that with his

disciplined army Monck was in a unique position to serve the royal cause, and

early in August they employed his younger brother Nicholas, a Cornish rec-

tor with royalist afﬁliations, to carry a letter offering him the huge sum of

£100,000 a year for life if he would do so. The general received his brother

with extreme caution and declined to accept the letter, though Nicholas

divulged its contents to him. According to his chaplains Thomas Gumble and

John Price, he nevertheless decided at this point to work for the king’s restor-

ation, and was preparing to give his support to Booth’s rising when he heard

of its defeat. But Booth had declared for no more than a full and free parliament,

and that is what Monck himself would have preferred to either a military dic-

tatorship or the self-perpetuation of the Rump—or so his brother reported.

Gumble and Price wrote their accounts after the Restoration, when it was

in their interest as well as Monck’s to antedate his commitment to the king’s

cause. They are not to be trusted, and the narrative by Edward Phillips in his

continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle of the Kings of England, pub-

lished in 1670, should be received with equal caution. There are at least three

strong indications that Monck was not yet committed to restoring the king

when he reacted to the news of the army’s interruption of the Rump by imme-

diately demanding its reinstatement and preparing to use his forces to bring

this about. One is his refusal to receive the letter that his brother brought him

in August, or to be lured by the immense reward that it offered. Nicholas

would have loved to give his royalist contacts some assurance of George’s

good intentions, but he could not. Another is his reaction to the Rump’s tam-

pering with his army: he wrote to the Speaker on 3 September, asking leave to

The Commonwealth Restored 743

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resign his commission and retire into private life. His brother-in-law

Dr Thomas Clarges, another clergyman, managed to intercept the letter and

gained Lenthall’s collusion in withholding it from the House for ten days, by

which time Monck had changed his mind about resigning, but it is surely

inconceivable that if he had had as yet a ﬁrm intention to serve the king he

would have deprived himself of the means of doing so. The third testimony to

his non-commitment is the total mystiﬁcation of the king’s most trusted

agents as to what he was aiming at, even as late as January 1660.

Monck’s own explanation of why he took the stand he did in October is

probably the true one. He thought that the army’s seizure of power was

wrong in itself and would deliver the country over to anarchy. He had a low

opinion of the Rump, but he saw it as still the most likely channel through

which the three kingdoms could be brought back to constitutional rule. On

31 October, however, before he knew that it had been turned out again, he

wrote to remind it of the need ‘to hasten the settlement of the government of

these nations in a commonwealth way, in successive parliaments, so to be reg-

ulated in elections as you shall think ﬁt’.

He almost certainly had an open

mind as to what form that government might take, so long as it could reason-

ably claim the sanctions of law and consent. He must have contemplated the

possibility that the outcome of his intervention would ultimately be the

restoration of the monarchy, but there is no strictly contemporary evidence

that he intended to push it that way, and he seems genuinely to have wished

to give the Rump at least one more chance. His preference was for a regime

with a broad basis of support among sober, non-partisan, propertied people,

and though he was not a strongly religious man he ﬁrmly supported a nation-

al church. He probably shared in an undogmatic way the beliefs of his Pres-

byterian wife. Fanatics were anathema to him, whether in church or state;

indeed, it has been suggested that what chieﬂy moved him to stand up for the

Rump against the English army in October was the ‘Quaker terror’ that swept

through the ranks of the gentry in 1659.

This was no doubt one factor in his

response, but his main concerns were surely to counter the drift towards anar-

chy and to set his country back on course towards ordered and acceptable

government. He was widely misunderstood, and it suited his purpose to keep

people guessing about his intentions, but behind his bull-like appearance,

his blunt speech, his coarse humour and rough temper—behind his whole

744 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

A True Narrative of the Proceedings in Parliament (1659), pp. 22–3; his public declaration

for the Rump, dated 20 Oct., is printed in ibid., pp. 24–5. The case that Monck was not yet com-

mitted to restoring the king is argued by Davies in Restoration of Charles II, by myself in Com-

plete Prose Works of John Milton, VII, and by Hutton in Restoration. Maurice Ashley stands by

the more traditional belief that he made his decision for the king in August 1659 in General

Monck (1977), ch. 12.

Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (1985), ch. 5, esp. pp. 97–8; Hutton,

Restoration, pp. 71, 74–7.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 744

cultivation of the persona of a plain, tobacco-chewing, aleswilling profes-

sional soldier—lay a shrewdness, a seriousness of purpose and a sense of hon-

our that have often been underrated. A superﬁcial reading of his career

between 1640 and 1660 could suggest a series of self-interested tergiversa-

tions, and that is what his enemies portrayed. But every choice of allegiance

that he made in those two decades can be justiﬁed on grounds of principle,

and he never betrayed a cause to which he committed himself unless the cause

itself disintegrated.

His ﬁrst step, on hearing that the Rump was shut out again, was to institute

a purge of his own forces, removing all those ofﬁcers who he thought might

side with those in England. But he made great efforts to cement the loyalty of

the rest, and not only that of the ofﬁcers. He addressed many regiments in

person, and summoned a great council of all the ofﬁcers within reach, patiently

explaining and debating the reasons for his stand, and countering their mis-

givings about his setting of one army against another. He made it clear that

those whose consciences forbade them to serve would be allowed to with-

draw into England. One way and another he lost ninety-seven ofﬁcers within

a month, but he ﬁlled their places by promoting men of junior rank from

within his forces and recruited as many as he could to plug the gaps left there-

by. He had to conduct a large-scale reorganization of his army before he

marched into England, but he lost no time in sending considerable numbers

of his most loyal units towards the border.

In London the Committee of Safety soon decided to send all the forces it

could spare against him, keeping only two infantry regiments and eight

troops of horse in the capital. Robert Lilburne, who commanded in the north,

supported the committee and secured Carlisle and Newcastle, though Over-

ton in Hull distrusted both parties and stayed neutral. Lambert set off on

3 November to take overall command of the forces ranged against Monck’s,

and soon outnumbered them by at least three to two. But neither side was

keen to ﬁght, and Monck willingly accepted a proposal from Fleetwood that

each should send commissioners to negotiate. Each appointed three, and on

the 15th they agreed on the terms of a treaty. But Monck’s commissioners

breached their instructions, which (though secret) one of them betrayed to the

other party. They were directed to insist that the Rump should be readmitted

and that ‘no form of government be established over these nations but by par-

liament, unless they shall refuse to sit’.

Instead, the draft treaty provided

that a new parliament should be speedily summoned, but that its constitution

and manner of calling, along with the whole form of future government,

should be determined by a specially constituted General Council of the Army

and Navy, consisting of two ofﬁcers from each regiment in England, Scotland

The Commonwealth Restored 745

Clarke Papers, IV, 98.

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and Ireland, the commanders of garrisons, and ten ofﬁcers of the ﬂeet. It was

to meet on 6 December. The qualiﬁcations of MPs, however, were to be

decided by a special committee of nineteen, chosen from the Committee of

Safety and the three armies. These arrangements were calculated to ensure

that even if this General Council succeeded in getting a new parliament elect-

ed, its composition and its powers would be heavily subject to the dominant

military faction. Its chances of securing the conﬁdence of the political nation

would have been small, and its authority would have been strongly chal-

lenged by the surviving members of the Long Parliament, both the Rumpers

and those secluded in 1648.

Whether or not Monck had ever hoped for a successful negotiation with

the Committee of Safety, he certainly could not accept the treaty that his com-

missioners signed. He had already summoned commissioners from the Scot-

tish shires and burghs to meet in Edinburgh on 15 November to consider how

the peace of Scotland should be secured if he had to march his army into Eng-

land. He was evidently expecting at the end of October that he would have to

do so, for his letters of summons requested each shire to send a quota of bag-

gage horses and packmen to Edinburgh by 20 November. On convening

there, the nobles and lairds of the shires chose as their president the Earl of

Glencairn, the leader of the royalist rising ﬁve years earlier, while the burgh

commissioners elected a Remonstrant, Sir James Stewart; but all accepted

Monck’s authority. In his opening speech on the 15th, he charged them and

all the JPs to preserve the peace, suppress all tumults, counter any signs of cor-

respondency with Charles Stuart, and support the godly ministry in the land.

Next day the commissioners agreed to comply with his desires, but they asked

for some direction as to how they were to prevent disorder or worse in their

territories, in the absence of his forces. Behind this lay the difﬁcult question

of whether the Scots should be allowed to bear arms for their own defence,

against both raids from the Highlands and enemies of the Commonwealth.

Monck must have known this, but he said he had not had time to consider

speciﬁc provisions, and would welcome suggestions. These would be dis-

cussed at a further meeting at Berwick on 12 December, to which he asked

each shire to elect one representative.

His purpose in deferring the hard decision about arming the Scots may

have been to gain time and see how the situation developed, for in England it

was becoming increasingly ﬂuid and unpredictable. There was great dismay

and resentment in the Committee of Safety and at Wallingford House when

he repudiated the draft treaty that his commissioners had signed. He pro-

posed that the negotiation should be resumed at York or Newcastle with two

additional commissioners on each side, and this was agreed, on condition

that the new treaty should contain nothing directly contrary to that signed

on 15 November, and that the representative General Council of Ofﬁcers

746 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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scheduled for 6 December should go ahead. In mid-November, however,

some members of the Rump’s Council of State, including Haselrig, Scot, Wal-

ton, Morley, Neville, and Ashley Cooper, began to meet again in private, and

on the 24th they sealed a commission to Monck as commander-in-chief of all

the land forces of England and Scotland. It empowered him to march into any

part of either country and to ﬁght all who were in hostility to the parliament

or opposed its sitting.

The Committee of Safety was facing a rapidly worsening situation. France

and Spain had concluded the Treaty of the Pyrenees on 28 October, and there

were fears—groundless, as it turned out—that they would combine to help

Charles II to his throne. The temper of the citizens of London, and that of the

regiments hitherto loyal to Fleetwood and Lambert, gave more genuine cause

for concern. The period between Cromwell’s death and the king’s return has

often been loosely labelled as one of anarchy, but the description just does not

ﬁt the ﬁrst twelve of the twenty months concerned. There had been a breach

of continuity when the Protectorate was overthrown, but the civil population

had not taken much notice of it; JPs had continued to hold their sessions, the

courts at Westminster went on dispensing justice, and though trade was

depressed merchants and shopkeepers carried on their businesses much as

usual. But a dramatic change came about after the second exclusion of the

Rump. Some judges at Westminster ceased to sit immediately; the rest closed

their courts on 20 November because their commissions from the parliament

expired that day. An organized movement sprang up amongst the citizenry of

London to call for a full and free parliament and to refuse to pay any taxes

that lacked parliament’s sanction. A series of associations were formed in the

provinces to the same end. Troops had to be used to help levy the assessment

and other dues, and they were made to fear for their lives. Their morale was

all too plainly wilting; it was at this point that they were heard saying that

‘they will not ﬁght, but will make a ring for their ofﬁcers to ﬁght in’.

The City apprentices were specially busy in canvassing for signatures to a

petition of their own for a free parliament, with enough success for the Com-

mittee of Safety to issue a proclamation forbidding such agitation, and order-

ing the Lord Mayor to publish it. By this time the City fathers were very

ambivalent; the Court of Aldermen, which typically regarded any govern-

ment as better than none, so long as it enabled trade to be carried on, was sup-

portive, but the Lord Mayor asked for time to consult the Common Council,

which was more in tune with the movement for a free parliament. Encour-

aged by a letter from Monck, appealing for its support, it had just refused

the Committee’s request for a loan point-blank. Then came news that on

3 December Haselrig, Morley and Walton had gained control of Portsmouth

The Commonwealth Restored 747

Clarke Papers, IV, p. 300.

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