Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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and its garrison, with the warm support of its governor, magistrates, and citi-

zens. They had been sent by the still active members of the Council of State,

and their success meant that the champions of the Rump now had a substan-

tial power-base only seventy-ﬁve miles from London.

On the 5th, unable now to trust the City authorities, the Committee of

Safety sent the parliament’s serjeant-at-arms, backed by a squadron of horse,

to read its proclamation against the apprentices’ petition at the Royal

Exchange. The young men were out in force against him. They beat the troop-

ers into disorderly retreat, while others pelted them from the roof-tops with

tiles and blocks of ice from the gutters. As the riot became general, all the

shops were shut, and angry citizens closed the gates at Temple Bar. The Com-

mittee sent in stronger forces under Colonel Hewson to break them open and

restore order, but as they advanced towards the Exchange they were met with

a hail of stones and cries of ‘a cobbler! a cobbler!’, alluding to Hewson’s pre-

war occupation as a shoemaker. Cavalrymen of the old New Model Army

were not used to such humiliation and they eventually opened ﬁre, killing at

least two young men and wounding more. While the riot raged, the Common

Council met and received a delegation from the apprentices, bearing a mass

petition calling for either a new parliament or the restoration of the present

one as it had been constituted before Pride’s Purge. Either course would have

brought back the monarchy, and by now everyone knew it. The Common

Council appointed a committee to consider the petition, but ordered all

householders to keep their sons and apprentices from raising tumults. Late in

the evening it sent a deputation to Fleetwood, requesting that he withdraw his

troops from the City. He agreed to do so in return for an order from the Lord

Mayor commanding all citizens back to their homes. Next day, however,

when the Committee of Safety summoned the Court of Aldermen to White-

hall it ﬂatly refused to attend, and on the 9th the Common Council entrusted

the keeping of the peace in the capital to a committee of safety of its own. A

coroner’s court returned a verdict of wilful murder on the citizens killed in the

riot, and Hewson was indicted. On the 12th Desborough was only just in time

to take over the Tower of London, whose Lieutenant was in league with Scot,

Ashley Cooper, Okey, and others in a plot to bring it out in support of the

forces in Portsmouth.

These developments in Portsmouth and London had repercussions in the

ﬂeet, in Ireland, and in northern England that were to contribute much to the

overthrow of the Committee of Safety, and they overshadowed the deliber-

ations of the specially constituted General Council of Ofﬁcers that convened

on 6 December. Broadly representative though it was intended to be, only

thirty-seven members were attending it after six days’ sitting, and none came

to it from Scotland, Ireland (apart from several already in England), or even

from Lambert’s forces in the north. It was deaf to Ludlow’s and Rich’s pleas

748 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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for the recall of the Rump, and it took little notice of the ‘model or form of

civil government’ drafted for it by the Committee of Safety’s sub-committee

on the constitution. It soon decided instead that a new parliament should be

called, consisting of two assemblies, one of the nature of a senate, the other a

version of the House of Commons. Both to be elected by those of the people

who were ‘duly qualiﬁed’. Besides these two chambers there were to be twenty-

one Conservators of Liberty, who were to determine any disagreements

that might arise between the army and the parliament, and whose consent

was required to any disbandments or changes of command in the army as it

stood. These conservators were immediately elected by the General Council,

and since it rejected not only Haselrig, Walton, Morley, Neville, Wallop, and

Rich but also Monck himself, their chances of acting as umpires between the

now irreconcilable factions were nil. The sub-committee also approved a set

of seven predictable ‘Fundamentals’, which among other things ruled out not

only kingship, or any single chief magistrate, but a House of Lords. Next day,

before it had been decided how either assembly should be constituted or who

was to wield executive authority, the Committee of Safety drafted a proclam-

ation announcing that writs would be issued for the election of a parliament,

to meet on 24 January. Weeks before then both the Committee and its

General Council were to vanish from the scene, but such were the depths of

political incompetence that they plumbed before they ﬁnally disintegrated.

The republicans’ securing of Portsmouth was doubly damaging to them

because of its impact on the ﬂeet. With Montagu in enforced retirement, Vice-

Admiral Lawson was in effective command. Lawson’s sympathies lay ﬁrmly

with the Rump, as did those of his senior subordinates Goodson and Stayner,

and his hostility towards the ofﬁcers who had interrupted it was increased

when money earmarked for his unpaid seamen was diverted by the Commit-

tee of Safety to sweeten the soldiery on whom it so much depended. But in

mid-October there was little he could immediately do, because at that point

nearly all his ships were disposed on convoys and other duties, and he was

persuaded by Vane and Salwey, in their capacity as Admiralty Commission-

ers, to go on taking orders from the still active members of the Rump’s Coun-

cil of State. Most of Lawson’s captains, little as they loved the Committee of

Safety, regarded it as a lesser evil than a restoration of the king and were

deeply distrustful of Monck’s intentions; Goodson, Stayner, and twenty

others of them signed a letter to him early in November, bluntly telling him

so. When the naval ofﬁcers around London were asked to elect representa-

tives to the General Council of Ofﬁcers due to meet on 6 December they chose

both Lawson and Montagu, as well as (among others) Goodson, Stayner, and

Bourne. Montagu, however, held aloof and stayed at Hinchingbrooke.

This election showed that there was quite a wide range of political feeling

in the ﬂeet, but Lawson had a strong hold on the loyalty of the seamen, and

The Commonwealth Restored 749

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 749

on most of the ofﬁcers too. His choice of action was not easy. As a republican

and a Baptist he was sincerely opposed to the restoration of the monarchy,

and as a believer in the rule of law he was quite out of sympathy with the army

chiefs who had usurped power. He might have seen the way forward, as his

friend Vane did, in the election of a new parliament with a senate as a guar-

antor of agreed ‘fundamentals’, including the rejection of monarchy or any

one-person rule, but the dependence of such a scheme on army dominance,

and (by December) the crumbling of the Committee of Safety, put it out of the

question. He consistently saw the reinstatement of the Rump as the essential

ﬁrst step to a settlement, but he feared that if he allied with Monck, who was

outwardly its strongest champion, he would be aiding those whose secret

agenda included the restoration of the king. What probably tilted him into a

public decision were the persuasions of Okey and Scot and their companions,

who sought refuge in the ﬂeet after they had failed to seize the Tower. On

13 December Lawson and his captains addressed an open letter to the Lord

Mayor and corporation of London, announcing that they would back the

recall of the Rump by force if necessary and calling for the City’s support.

They also published a seven-point programme of reform which they hoped

the parliament would take in hand. The City fathers, who were mostly no

friends now either to republicans or to radical reform, ignored his appeal. A

day or two later he set sail from the Downs with twenty-two ships and

headed for the Thames, to play his vital part in bringing about the Restor-

ation, but before describing it we must catch up with events in Scotland,

northern England and Ireland.

Monck’s main difﬁculties were that it would be hard for him to leave Scot-

land undefended without laying the country open to the common enemy, and

that the forces that Lambert had mustered in northern England considerably

outnumbered his own. If he could create a diversion in Lambert’s rear it could

enormously help his own march south, when he was ready to make it, and

greatly encourage his supporters in England. Early in November, his trusted

former second-in-command Major-General Morgan, who was laid up in

York with the gout, visited Fairfax of his own accord at his Nun Appleton

seat, showed him Monck’s declaration for the Rump and sought his support

for it. Fairfax, as we have seen, had hitherto resisted all overtures by the roy-

alists, but the latest exclusion of the Rump was evidently the last straw for

him, not only because it threatened his own ideals of representative govern-

ment and the rule of law but because it dishonoured his once heroic army.

Through Morgan he returned a friendly message to Monck, along with a

letter from his inﬂuential Presbyterian chaplain Edward Bowles, saying that

many like-minded gentry in Yorkshire were well-disposed towards Monck’s

stand, but troubled that he had pledged himself to support no government but

a republic and to restore only the Rumpers, rather than all the surviving

750 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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members of the Long Parliament. Monck at once sent Clarges to explain that

in the current circumstances he could not publicly declare all that he had in

mind, and from then on plans went cautiously ahead for a rising of the York-

shire gentry, including all but the extremes of the political spectrum, in sup-

port of his intended march into England. By this time one can assume that he

was well aware of what it would probably lead to, though he was prepared to

lie stoutly about his objectives in public. He certainly kept the royalists in the

dark about them; even in mid-January, when he was well on his way to Lon-

don, Mordaunt wrote to the king: ‘He is a black Monck, and I cannot see

through him’.

He was probably intent on keeping his own options open for

as long as possible, and the fact that the Restoration was bloodless owed

much to his coolness and inscrutability.

In preparation for his march into England, he set up his headquarters on

8 December at Coldstream on the Tweed. Today’s Coldstream Guards descend

directly from his own regiment of foot, and they wear white facings in remem-

brance of the undyed woollen coats that kept his soldiers warm in the harsh

border winter. His reorganized army numbered four cavalry and six infantry

regiments, with a nominal total of 8,400 men, though they were probably

under strength. Lambert, when he ﬁrst moved north to face him, had had not

far short of 12,000, including the troops already in the region and the brigade

that had been brought over from Ireland to counter Booth’s rising, but so few

of Lambert’s men were willing to ﬁght Monck that numbers soon became

meaningless. On 12 December Monck met representatives of the Scottish

shires as arranged at Berwick, thirteen miles from Coldstream. They chose

ﬁve delegates to present their proposals to him, and signiﬁcantly four of the

ﬁve were nobles, Glencairn again being the chief of them. Monck granted

some but not all of their desires. He allowed each shire to appoint a commit-

tee to regulate its own affairs, subject to its engaging not to act against the

Commonwealth’s interests or in favour of Charles Stuart’s. He agreed that

the shires adjacent to the Highlands should raise armed guards for their own

defence, and promised to reconsider the case of the others if and when he took

his army out of Scotland. Noblemen and gentlemen who pledged themselves

to live peaceably regained the right to wear swords and have armed attend-

ants. But he stalled over the Scots’ proposal to raise men in arms to assist him

actively in his campaign, saying he would allow it only if Lambert defeated

him in battle. This was a typically shrewd handling of the situation, and it tes-

tiﬁes both to the trust that Monck had won from the leaders of the Scottish

people, at least south of the Highland line, and to the trust that he in turn was

prepared to repose in them. Such threats as there were to the peace of

The Commonwealth Restored 751

Clarendon State Papers, III, 651. ‘All the world is at a loss to think what Monck will do’,

wrote Pepys in his diary on 18 January.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 751

Scotland probably came more from robbers and other lawless men than from

conspirators against the Commonwealth, while those who did hope strongly

for the king’s return probably guessed that Monck would be the likeliest

means of bringing it about.

In Ireland, the senior of the commissioners whom the Rump had placed in

charge after Henry Cromwell’s resignation and return home was Colonel

John Jones. Under his guidance the ofﬁcers of the army there responded to the

coup in October with a very cool and non-committal acceptance of the

change of regime, and dispersed to their commands to frustrate any possible

attempt by the royalists. Ludlow had named Jones as acting commander-in-

chief of the army in Ireland when he returned to England in October 1659,

and he was disgusted that Jones submitted to the English army’s usurpation

and rejected Monck’s appeal to support him in demanding the reinstatement

of the Rump. But only ﬁfteen ofﬁcers had signed Jones’s letter to Fleetwood,

and it was soon clear that his basis of support was narrow. Monck had had

assurances that Sir Charles Coote, Sir Theophilus Jones, and a considerable

part of the army were resolved to assist him, and that they hoped to win over

Sir Hardress Waller. On 20 October he wrote to Ludlow, as nominal com-

mander-in-chief in Ireland (though he had just returned to England) and as

his fellow-commissioner under the recent act for the command of all the land

forces, calling on him and the Irish army to assist him in restoring the Rump.

The letter was replied to by Jones and just four other ofﬁcers in Dublin, who

professed themselves ‘very much troubled and startled’ by Monck’s stand,

which they feared would open the way to the common enemy.

Jones was unhappily aware, however, of serious divisions within the army

in Ireland. Ludlow had submitted it to quite a drastic purge during his brief

period as commander-in-chief under the restored Rump. Besides removing

ofﬁcers with strongly Cromwellian sympathies, he got rid of others on the

grounds of loose morals, heavy drinking, or corruption; but many of those he

put in their place were Baptists or other sectaries, so the lines of division that

had troubled Henry Cromwell when he faced Fleetwood in the mid-1650s

were opened afresh. When the call came to elect delegates to the representa-

tive General Council of the Army and Navy, there was no time to get ofﬁcers

serving in Ireland to it by 6 December, and the only members of the Irish army

who sat on it were drawn from the Irish Brigade that had been sent over to

help suppress Booth’s rising. Elections were held, however, but only the more

radical ofﬁcers co-operated, and they were ﬁnding themselves increasingly

threatened and isolated. The opposition to them came mainly from men with

752 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Here I follow the excellent discussion by Dow in Cromwellian Scotland, pp. 254–7.

Quoted by Aidan Clarke in Prelude to Restoration in Ireland (Cambridge, 1999), p. 98.

Clarke provides the fullest and best account of these transactions.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 752

their roots in Ireland whose authority did not rest wholly on their military

commissions, and in particular from Sir Charles Coote, Sir Hardress Waller,

and Sir Theophilus Jones, though Jones had been displaced from the gov-

ernorship of Dublin by Ludlow. By the autumn of 1659, if not before, they

cordially wanted the king back, and they had an ally in Lord Broghill. In the

current quarrel they sided with Monck against the Committee of Safety.

There had been coolness and rivalry between Coote and Monck, but they

were prepared to sink their differences now in a common cause. That cause

was supported also by the Scots in Ulster, who were giving the commission-

ers in Dublin an increasingly difﬁcult time.

This old Cromwellian party organized a clever coup against Dublin Castle

on 13 December. While two former ofﬁcers diverted a sentinel, a mere thirty

or forty infantrymen jostled their way in, took the hundred-strong guard by

surprise and disarmed them. Troops of horse then rode through the streets

with drawn swords, shouting ‘A parliament! A parliament!’, while others

arrested John Jones and his two fellow-commissioners. Those of the garrison

who did not go over to the conspirators were disarmed, and the new masters

of Dublin acclaimed Sir Hardress Waller as their commander-in-chief. The

citizens lit bonﬁres to express their joy at the overthrow of the unpopular

commissioners. Next day Waller and twenty-one other ofﬁcers issued a dec-

laration condemning the ‘sinful interruption’ of the parliament, which they

sent out to all garrisons in Ireland, as well as to Speaker Lenthall and the par-

liamentary commissioners in Portsmouth. Waller wrote privately to Monck,

pledging his support, and (with tongue in cheek) professing conﬁdence that

he would not ‘betray this good old cause to the Cavalier party’.

In the provinces, Leinster fell into line after Captain Lisle was sent to seize

Drogheda from its governor, Lieutenant-Colonel John Desborough (presum-

ably a kinsman of the major-general). Ulster took a little longer to secure, but

there was no serious resistance to the new order. Sir Charles Coote and his

three brothers made sure of Connaught, where Athlone was the only place to

show any resistance. In Munster, Clonmel and Limerick were gained by

strikes clearly linked with the one in Dublin, and Broghill played his part

behind the scenes in helping to overcome other pockets of resistance. There as

elsewhere, the military adherents to the Committee of Safety, especially the

Baptist element among them, were cordially detested by the local magistrates

and people. A new council of ofﬁcers was constituted to represent the over-

whelming majority of the forces in Ireland that now supported the parliament

against the committee. It scathingly criticized Ludlow’s exercise of authority

as commander-in-chief, and formally resolved on 26 December, without a

dissenting voice, not to allow him back into Ireland unless the Council of

The Commonwealth Restored 753

Clarke Papers, IV, 202–3, quoted in Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, pp. 113–14.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 753

State or parliament should order his return. Two days later it addressed

letters to all the counties and major towns, requiring their well-affected

protestant inhabitants to elect representatives to an assembly in Dublin, to

meet on 24 January, subject to parliament’s approval. It was following the

precedent set by Monck in his summoning of representatives of the Scottish

shires and burghs on 15 November and 12 December. It was indeed report-

ing to Monck in Scotland as well as to the Council of State in London and the

parliamentary commissioners in Portsmouth. What it did not yet know was

that the Rump had just been restored to power.

As December advanced, the Committee of Safety’s authority fell away

week by week, and latterly day by day. The City corporation kept up its own

committee of safety to maintain order in the capital, but the apprentices and

younger citizens were furious at its failure to secure the expulsion of Fleet-

wood’s troops and to entrust London’s defence solely to its own militia. Some

of them stoned the Lord Mayor’s coach, and despite posting large guards at

the City gates and other key points the army could barely keep order. Sentries

were shot at after dark, soldiers took their lives in their hands if they wan-

dered off the main thoroughfares, and ofﬁcers off duty dared not wear their

swords. As late as the 14th the Common Council was sufﬁciently molliﬁed by

the Committee of Safety’s promise of a new parliament to order all house-

holders to keep their sons and servants and apprentices off the streets, but on

the 20th it utterly rejected the seven ‘fundamentals’ by which it was to be

limited, and pledged the City to support the speedy summoning of a fully

free parliament. Next day came the annual elections to the Common

Council, and the result was a turnover in which more than a third lost their

seats to newcomers, most of them hostile to republicans and sectaries and

ready to welcome the king back to his throne. The new Common Council

promptly set about reorganizing the militia and taking over the defence of

the capital.

A few days earlier a force that the Committee of Safety had sent to recover

Portsmouth went over to its republican defenders, and Haselrig got ready to

march on London with 1,500 horse. On the 21st two regiments on guard near

Whitehall deﬁed their colonels and declared for the Rump, and over large

parts of southern and Midlands England and in south Wales other military

units and garrisons were doing the same. Lawson and his ﬂeet, whom we last

saw setting sail from the Downs in mid-December, dropped anchor at

Gravesand on the 17th, cutting London off from the sea. Before he got there

Lawson was met by Vane and Salwey and other delegates from the Commit-

tee of Safety, who tried to persuade him that the best hope for the future lay

in the new parliament that it had decided to summon for 24 January. But

Okey and Scot were still with him, and they helped to hold him and his

captains ﬁrm to their resolve to support the Rump. He really needed no

754 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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persuading, for the ﬂeet was not prepared, he said, to allow a pseudo-parlia-

ment ‘to be a mask to the army’s tyranny’.

Whether that parliament would ever materialize was now in doubt. Writs

for elections were sent to the City on the 21st, but countermanded on the

22nd. That day Whitelocke went to see Fleetwood, on the personal advice of

Lord Willoughby of Parham, Major-General Browne, and several other

prominent presbyterians, who had called to conﬁrm his suspicions that

Monck intended to bring back the king, and to suggest that Fleetwood should

immediately send Charles an offer of good terms and so get in ﬁrst. After

much thought, Whitelocke put it to Fleetwood that he should choose between

two courses: either to draw all his forces together and put himself at the head

of them, so as to gauge his strength, and then if it proved as small as he expect-

ed to join with the City corporation and declare for a free parliament; or to

send to the king as his presbyterian friends suggested. Fleetwood asked

Whitelocke if he would act as his emissary to the king, and on getting a

favourable answer told him to prepare himself to begin his journey that

evening or early next morning. But Vane, Desborough, and Berry came to see

him just as Whitelocke was leaving, and after a quarter of an hour with them

Fleetwood came out, and in much passion said to Whitelocke “I cannot do it!

I cannot do it!”

The three had reminded him that he had promised Lambert

not to do such a thing without his consent.

The active nucleus of the old Council of State now judged the Committee

of Safety’s authority to have collapsed, and seized their chance. They called at

Speaker Lenthall’s home in Chancery Lane on the 23rd and obtained his

authority to order all the troops in London to parade in Lincoln’s Inn Fields

next day under their supporters, Colonels Okey and Allured. Fleetwood,

summoned by the Speaker to surrender the keys of the Commons’ House,

confessed as he handed them over ‘that the Lord has blasted them and spit in

their faces, and witnessed against their perﬁdiousness’.

The troops who had

refused to recognize Lenthall as their general in October now marched from

Lincoln’s Inn Fields to his house to acclaim him as such with happy shouts

and volleys of shot. It was a problem, however, to ﬁnd enough Rumpers

about town to constitute a quorum, and what would soon be called Christ-

mas Day again was spent in rounding them up. They had announced that they

would sit on the 27th, but they heard that the members secluded in Pride’s

Purge were planning to take their seats too; so Lenthall led them quietly by

back ways from Whitehall to their chamber on the evening of the 26th, to

hold a brief pre-emptive session.

So began the third incarnation of the Rump. Only forty-two MPs were

The Commonwealth Restored 755

Quoted in Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, p. 349.

Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, pp. 552–3.

Clarke Papers, IV, 220.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 755

present on the 27th, but Haselrig, Morley, and Walton got back to London

two days later and went straight to the House without changing their riding

clothes. Haselrig, unused to being cheered by the citizenry, was in a state of

almost manic euphoria, but he refused to enter the chamber until Vane left it.

Vane was in deep trouble for having sat on the Committee of Safety, and there

was an attempt to impeach him, but after debate the House was content

merely to expel him. It was on the point of electing a new Council of State

when Haselrig rejoined it, and he topped the poll. But its choice of members

put paid to any lingering hopes that the Rump would, without further pres-

sure, offer any kind of settlement that the country could accept. Among

the members who lost their seats were Vane, Salwey, Ludlow, Whitelocke,

and Algernon Sidney, as well as the army chiefs Fleetwood, Lambert,

Desborough, and Berry. A phalanx of Haselrig’s henchmen took their places,

along with a few republican army ofﬁcers and City aldermen. So narrowly

based a body could scarcely keep London quiet from day to day, let alone

govern three nations and provide for the future. The Common Council

showed its quasi-independence by meeting nine times between 20 December

and 4 January—more often in two weeks than in a typical peacetime year. It

approved a petition to parliament for the readmission of the secluded mem-

bers and for free elections to the vacant seats, and was only just persuaded by

Haselrig, Morley and Walton, in a meeting with its own committee of safety,

to suspend it. But throughout England and Wales, in most of Scotland and

among those of the people of Ireland who had a political voice the pressure

for a free parliament had become irresistible. The great question was whether

the political nation could move towards its desired end peacefully, or whether

a further descent towards anarchy would plunge it once more in civil war.

One man more than any other held the answer in his hands: George Monck.

756 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

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twenty-seven

The Monarchy Restored

It is not often that historical turning-points fall on neatly memorable dates,

but in a real sense the story of the Restoration can be said to have begun on

1 January 1660, for that was the day on which Monck’s army began its march

on London. The return of the monarchy had been inevitable for the past two

months or more, but how and when it would come about were wide open

questions. Monck held the key to the answers. He alone now commanded a

coherent and obedient army, partly because he had recently purged and re-

organized it, partly because his ofﬁcers and men—those he had not dis-

placed—felt a personal loyalty to ‘honest George Monck’ (their own name

for him), and partly because he had shrewdly obtained enough money to keep

them in regular pay, while Lambert’s and Fleetwood’s soldiers went

penniless. Yet his intervention was not a foregone conclusion, for he knew

perfectly well before he set forth that the Rump had already been restored,

and the letter it sent to thank him for his support said nothing about march-

ing into England. Haselrig and his party, now they were back in the saddle,

would surely have much rather he stayed quietly in Scotland. He had indeed

written to the Council of State on 29 December, promising absolute

obedience to parliament’s orders, and saying that while he was ready to

march ‘I shall attend your farther commands’.

So it is not idle to ask why he did march three days later, without any fur-

ther commands. It is no use looking to his own utterances, for he gave no

encouragement to the addresses in favour of a free parliament, whether

through the election of a new one or by readmitting the secluded members to

the present one. On 23 January, from Leicester, he wrote a reply to one such

declaration, published by the gentry of his native Devon, which was printed

and avidly read. ‘Monarchy’, he wrote, ‘cannot possibly be admitted for the

future in these nations, because its support is taken away’, and because it was

incompatible with the variety of new interests begotten by the Civil Wars:

vast diversity in religion, and on the material plane the rights of the pur-

chasers of crown lands, church lands, and delinquents’ estates. The secluded

Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, XXII, 40–1.

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