Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

members, he went on, were monarchists who wanted to annul all laws passed

since 1648, and to recall them would outrage the army and lead to a new and

bloody civil war.

Two days earlier he had written to congratulate St John on

his ‘noble resolution to endeavour the just settlement of these nations in a

Commonwealth way’.

There is always an element of speculation in gauging a person’s unspoken

motives, especially in one as secretive as Monck. The prospect of high rank

and a princely income must have counted, but he was never purely mer-

cenary. On a higher level he must have rightly judged that a government dom-

inated by Haselrig’s faction and propped by Fleetwood’s remnant of an army

would never have given the nation the settlement that it so badly wanted and

needed, and he knew that he, almost uniquely, possessed the means of setting

it on course towards that goal—moreover without bloodshed. He also had a

perfect pretext for marching when he did. He had engaged Fairfax to raise the

gentry of Yorkshire in support of his advance into England, and the same

messenger who informed him of Fleetwood’s submission to the Rump

brought him news that Fairfax’s friends were already on the move. It would

have been too late to cancel the rendezvous, even if he had wanted to. In fact

Fairfax’s supporters moved a day or two earlier than they had at ﬁrst intend-

ed, because Colonel Lilburne got wind of their intentions and set off from

Newcastle with reinforcements for the garrison of York. Fairfax had under-

taken to appear with his forces before that city on New Year’s Day, but the

various local rendezvous of the gentry mostly took place two days earlier. He

himself was so crippled by gout and in such pain from the stone that he had

to ride in his coach, but the charisma that clung to his name enabled him to

create a powerful diversion in Monck’s favour. It was all the stronger because

he excluded committed royalists from his company; he sent his own son-

in-law Buckingham home, much to the latter’s disgust. Nevertheless when he

ﬁnally mustered his forces on Marston Moor—what resonances that scene

must have had for him!—for the march on York they numbered about 1,800.

Among them was the Irish Brigade that had been brought over to ﬁght Booth,

and some of Lambert’s and Lilburne’s own units came in to him. So far he had

made no public declaration of his intentions, and it seems that he rather

deftly avoided doing so now, but the whole company on Marston Moor

acclaimed him with loud shouts before they marched off together towards

York.

On arriving before its walls at about midday, Fairfax summoned the city to

surrender, threatening to assault it if Lilburne and its defenders did not open

its gates. Lilburne’s garrison was small, and the citizenry were becoming

758 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Text in Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, XXII, 68–70, where Monck’s

letter is misdated 21 January.

Clarke Papers, IV, 249.

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 758

more vociferous in support of Fairfax by the hour. But he still hoped that

Lambert might send him reinforcements, and he resourcefully bought time

and divided his opponents by agreeing to admit only those who engaged

themselves to support the present parliament as it had sat on 10 October (i.e.

without the secluded members) against a king or any other single person

whatsoever. Fairfax indignantly tore up this engagement, so York was held

that night for the Rump by the Irish Brigade and some of Lilburne’s men,

while Fairfax and the gentry and their men quartered in neighbouring villages

as best they could. Lambert was indeed at Ripon, thirty-seven miles away,

and some of his cavalry did appear before the walls of York during the night,

but he was by now in no condition to help Lilburne, let alone to resist Monck.

His forces, miserable in their northern quarters and without pay, had been

disintegrating since late December, when they got news of the collapse of the

Committee of Safety. Most obeyed the Rump’s orders to return to their for-

mer quarters, but many just melted away and made for home, and some

rallied to Fairfax.

When Monck followed his forward units across the Tweed on 2 January,

he did not have to fear resistance by any part of the army in England. Lilburne

made his submission to parliament that day, and admitted Fairfax and his

levies into York. Overton held out obstinately in Hull, but he was totally isol-

ated and quite unable to take the offensive. Monck was able to choose his

own pace for his advance southward, and he did not hurry it. There was no

point in exhausting his foot soldiers, who had to contend with short days and

snow-covered roads. He gave them a rest after he made a triumphal entry into

York on the 11th, for he stayed there for ﬁve days, on one of which Fairfax

entertained him and his staff at Nun Appleton. Back in Westminster the

Rump, faced with the fait accompli of his southward advance, put the best

colour they could on it by writing on 7 January to request him to come to Lon-

don with such forces as he thought ﬁt, to confer about the organization of the

Commonwealth’s armies. He had other business in mind, and the church

bells that rang for him as he made his steady progress through the Midlands

showed that most of England guessed it.

Haselrig’s party did their best to frustrate the purpose of which they sus-

pected him, but despite the expulsion or withdrawal of all the members who

had acted with the Committee of Safety their hold on the House was very

uncertain. On 2 January they managed to add a clause to the oath to be taken

by members of the Council of State, requiring them to renounce totally the

pretended title of Charles Stuart and to abjure the setting up of any single per-

son or House of Lords. Next day Haselrig introduced a bill requiring all MPs

to take the same engagement. It gained a ﬁrst reading by twenty-four votes to

ﬁfteen, but after long debate, in which the member’s language became so

bitter that the Speaker threatened to leave the chair, it was dropped. Only

The Monarchy Restored 759

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 759

thirteen councillors ever took the oath. Narrow as the basis of government

now was, some of its members were preparing themselves to abandon the

sinking ship, in order to swim with the tide that was bearing Monck towards

his impending triumph. But the intransigents clung on. The Rump sent two of

its members, Thomas Scot and Luke Robinson, to attend him on his march,

ostensibly to bring him its thanks but in reality to watch over him in the man-

ner of latter-day political commissars. He seems not to have been embar-

rassed; indeed he may have been quite glad to leave it to them to respond to

the addresses for a free parliament that he kept on receiving. How little the

Rump was prepared to grant one was shown when it voted on 5 January that

the members excluded by Pride’s Purge were now expelled and that writs

should be issued for elections to ﬁll the vacancies so created, though it did not

make public its plans for the future of parliament until after Monck’s arrival

in London.

When he reached St Albans, only twenty miles from Westminster, Monck

wrote to the Speaker to propose that all the regiments currently quartered in

and around the capital, except for those of Morley and Fagg, whom he trust-

ed, should be moved out to make room for his own three regiments of horse

and four of foot. He further proposed that the outgoing regiments, whose

colonels included such friends of the Rump as Okey, Rich, Streater, and

Haselrig himself, should have their constituent troops and companies scat-

tered over widely separated quarters. His intention to ensure military dom-

inance for himself if he and the Rump fell out was transparently obvious, and

the House debated his letter furiously for four hours. Eventually a compro-

mise proposed by Haselrig was defeated, and Monck’s requests were granted

to the letter. He had a valid pretext for wanting his own troops about him, for

the discipline and morale of those already in London were cracking. One regi-

ment, when paraded prior to going on guard on 1 February, refused to march

without its pay; the men threatened to strip and hang their ofﬁcers, and drove

them out of St James’s Fields. Next day the troops in Somerset House tore up

their colours and ﬁred their guns, demanding pay before they would move,

and so many companies came in to join them that there were soon well over

2,000 in full mutiny. Some called for a free parliament, some for the king,

some for Lambert and their old ofﬁcers; others said they would serve anyone

who paid them. The Council of State was so scared that it sent Scot posting to

Monck’s headquarters at Barnet, to rouse him out of bed (it was past mid-

night) and urge him to march into London immediately. But Monck soon

went back to bed again, saying he would make his entry next day as planned.

By the time he did so, most of the mutinous troops had accepted their ofﬁcers’

promise that they would be paid on reaching their next quarters.

He rode into the City at noon on 3 February at the head of his life guard,

soberly clothed but ﬁnely mounted. About a hundred notables followed him

760 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 760

in coaches, and behind them came his cavalry. There were few manifestations

of the popular enthusiasm with which he had often been greeted earlier in his

march, but many cries for a free parliament. Relations between the City and

the Rump were very tense, and the citizenry must have been unsure which side

Monck was on, especially if they saw him embracing the Speaker, who met

him before Somerset House, and being greeted at Whitehall by most of the

members. On the very day after his entry, the House voted that it should be

‘ﬁlled up to 400 members’, on the basis of the apportionment of seats that it

had approved in 1653, and that a committee should decide which seats were

vacant and how they should be elected to. Nothing seems to have been heard

of its vote, when ﬁrst restored, that it would not sit beyond 7 May 1660. This

massive recruitment, which could not have been completed until far into

April, suggested that it meant to go on sitting at its pleasure.

For all the compliments that passed between Monck and the Rump during

his ﬁrst few days in London, there were tensions in their relationship. When

he was invited to take his place on the Council of State, he declined the new

oath abjuring the king’s title and the House of Lords. It had not escaped him

that parliament had recently been styling him Commissioner-General

Monck, as if he was still just one of the seven placed over the army by the act

of 12 October, despite his having asked and obtained its conﬁrmation of his

commission from the former Council of State as commander-in-chief. Hasel-

rig had angrily said in parliament that Monck ‘was no more General than

himself was’.

When he attended the House in state on the 6th to receive its

formal thanks, the speech that he made in reply to the Speaker’s rhetoric,

though totally respectful, contained blunter advice than many members were

prepared to take from him. With an obvious allusion to the oath he had just

declined, he said ‘That the less oaths and engagements are imposed, . . . your

settlement will be the sooner attained to’. He urged them to cultivate ‘all the

sober gentry . . . as knowing it to be the common concern to amplify, and not

to lessen our interest, and to be careful that neither the Cavalier nor fanatic

party have yet a share in your civil or military power’. He gave them similar

advice about Ireland (‘there as here, it is the sober interest must establish your

dominion’) and Scotland, where he entreated them to provide for the civil

government; indeed he submitted the names of the commissioners and judges

whom he recommended. Scot and other members only just managed to

refrain from interrupting him.

They could not afford to antagonize him, because London seemed to be on

the brink of a tax strike, and if that happened the domino effect upon the

counties and cities of provincial England could be disastrous. If it came to

The Monarchy Restored 761

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Leyborne-Popham MSS, p. 210.

Text in Baker, Chronicle of the Kings of England, pp. 705–6.

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 761

open deﬁance, only Monck’s forces could protect the government. In an

excited meeting on 8 February the Common Council seriously debated

whether London should continue to pay any taxes voted by the Rump, but

though a majority seemed in favour of refusing them no such decision was

taken. It seems likely that the Lord Mayor invoked the Court of Aldermen’s

right of veto. The Council of State, however, reacted as though the City was

openly defying parliament’s authority. It sent urgently to Monck and ordered

him to occupy the City with his army, take down its gates, wedge its

portcullises open, and arrest eleven leading members of the Common Coun-

cil. Long after the Restoration, Ludlow alleged that Monck himself proposed

these severe measures with the object of luring the Rump into its own ruin,

but this is even less plausible than the earlier allegations that the parliament-

men set him upon an odious task in order to deﬂate his dangerous popular-

ity. The probability is that the council genuinely overreacted, and that Monck

obeyed because he had not yet given the Rump quite enough rope to hang

itself (if you can hang a Rump), and because he had not yet had a chance to

meet the secluded members and agree terms with them.

At any rate he marched his regiments into the City at daybreak on the 9th.

His ofﬁcers protested against the tasks imposed on them, but carried them out

nonetheless, while great crowds of citizens watched in silence. The House

when it met not only conﬁrmed the council’s orders but added that the City’s

gates and portcullises should not just be put out of action but totally

destroyed. Then it listened to an address presented by Praise-God Barebone

on behalf of London’s gathered churches, deploring the advancement of the

king’s interest under the guise of demands for a free parliament or the read-

mission of the secluded members, and praying that no one should be admit-

ted to parliament, civil ofﬁce, military command, or church living unless he

solemnly abjured the house of Stuart and the promotion of any single person,

senate or House of Lords. It was to rankle greatly with Monck that the Rump

thanked the petitioners for their constant good affections.

Haselrig was exultant when he heard that Monck was carrying out his

orders, exclaiming ‘All is our own, he will be honest’.

But his tune changed

that afternoon when the Speaker read out a letter from Monck, asking for a

respite from the House’s orders. He had arrested nine of the eleven designa-

ted common councilmen and made the City’s defences unusable; to totally

destroy the gates and portcullises would merely exasperate it. He believed

that the Common Council would prove compliant over the taxes when it met

next morning, and he begged parliament to decide quickly about the qualiﬁ-

cations of members so that elections to the vacant seats could go forward

soon. Haselrig’s faction was deeply incensed; led by it the House not only

762 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, II, 219.

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 762

ordered Monck to destroy the gates and portcullises but declared the City’s

Common Council dissolved.

Next day Monck duly burnt some of the gates, even though some of his

most loyal ofﬁcers were begging to resign their commissions rather than carry

out such odious orders. But he conferred long and earnestly, not only with his

senior ofﬁcers but with Clarges, his trusted chaplains, and other conﬁdants.

That morning the Rump gave a ﬁrst reading to a bill to put the command of

the army into commission, as it had done just before the army had interrupt-

ed it in October. He was not going to put himself in the wrong by expelling it

himself, but if parliament was going to deprive him of the command of the

forces that it had so recently entrusted to him he needed to defend himself.

Further close conferences ensued that evening, at the end of which he ordered

fourteen of his senior ofﬁcers to meet him at six next morning. All this con-

sultation may carry a suggestion of indecision, and perhaps he partly intend-

ed it to. After the Restoration quite a number of men claimed the credit for

persuading him to work for the king, but one can be fairly certain that he

remained his own man throughout. He had the sense to listen to advice, and

his decisions were all the more effective for carrying the concurrence of a wide

range of associates.

At that early morning meeting on 11 February he put to his chosen ofﬁcers

the gist of a letter he proposed to send to the Rump. They gladly agreed to its

terms, and as soon as it was drafted they all signed it. It was in effect an ulti-

matum. It complained that the use of force against the City was grievous to

the army, which had acted not only to restore the parliament but to uphold

the people’s liberties. It protested at the retention in military commands of

men who had acted with the Committee of Safety, at parliament’s tolerance

of Lambert’s and Vane’s continuing presence in London, contrary to its

orders, and at its friendly reception of Barebone’s pernicious petition, which

would have forced a new oath on the nation and thereby excluded ‘the most

conscientious and sober sort of men’ from civil and military employment. All

this, however, was merely prefatory to the letter’s main demand, which was

that the Rump should issue writs for the promised elections by 17 February—

just six days ahead. On hearing it read, Haselrig stormed out of the House in

a fury, but he was back in the afternoon to help push through the bill to

entrust the command of the army to commissioners. There were to be ﬁve,

including of course Haselrig, and a motion that Monck should always be one

of a quorum of three was defeated.

But while this was under way Monck was attending a packed meeting of

the full City corporation at the Guildhall and explaining what he had done.

Word soon spread abroad that he had come out on the side of the City and a

free parliament, and when he came out Pepys heard the crowd greet him with

such a shout as he had never in his life heard before. Monck and his soldiers

The Monarchy Restored 763

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 763

were suddenly heroes, and that evening all the church bells rang and bonﬁres

blazed in every street. Rumps were sacriﬁced at dozens of impromptu barbe-

cues; boys begged passers-by for pennies for ‘the roasting of the Rump’, or

invited them to ‘kiss my parliament’, and some citizens dared to kneel in the

street and drink the king’s health. Monck and his army stayed within the City,

and he himself was happy to be put up by an alderman of known royalist sym-

pathies. On both the next two days the Council of State requested him to come

to Whitehall and take his seat, but he respectfully declined. The councillors’

oath still stuck with him, and though the Rump tried to lure him with a series

of concessions he maintained that the presence of ‘fanatic and disaffected

persons’ necessitated his stay in the City.

The parliament did make some attempts to meet his wishes during the week

following the receipt of his letter. It modiﬁed the councillors’ oath. It ordered

Vane’s expulsion from London, summoned Lambert before the council, and

ordered other members of the Committee of Safety to appear before the

House itself. It ordered a month’s pay for all the forces about London, though

it could only ﬁnd £5,000 of the £16,500 needed. Above all it went steadily

ahead with the bill for elections to the vacant seats, and had it ready for print-

ing by the 18th. But it never was printed, and its text has not survived. The

amendments recorded in the Commons’ Journal, however, reveal that it

would have debarred anyone whose father had been sequestered, or had ever

advocated a single person as chief magistrate, or refused to take the council-

lors’ oath or was married to a papist—not to mention drunkards and blas-

phemers. Monck was clearly preparing himself to be dissatisﬁed with the

Rump’s response. He made no secret of being in contact with the secluded

members; indeed he arranged two meetings between representatives of them

and of the Rump at his headquarters, the ﬁrst on the 14th. Among the many

addresses that he received calling for their readmission, one that was most

widely remarked came from Fairfax and a select band of the leading York-

shire gentry; four of them presented it to him personally on the 17th, though

it had been agreed a week earlier and had already been printed in both York

and London. The council of ofﬁcers in Ireland declared for their readmission

on the 16th, though Monck cannot have known this before he took his cru-

cial decision.

When did he take it? Historians still do not agree, and only a rash one

would set a precise date. He had several good reasons for moving slowly and

keeping people guessing as to his intentions. He genuinely wanted to avert the

kind of uncontrolled royalist reaction that would undo all that the Long Par-

liament had fought for in church and state; his professed preference for ‘a

commonwealth way’ was not wholly insincere, even though the Common-

wealth’s professed champions seemed intent on political suicide. He had to

make sure of carrying his own ofﬁcers with him, for some of them must have

764 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 764

been uncomfortable about assisting in any way at the restoration of the king.

He needed to cement his newly established friendship with the City corpor-

ation. He had given the Rump an ultimatum, and honour required that he

should allow it the stipulated time to meet his demands. It was only one day

late in settling the conditions and qualiﬁcations for the promised elections,

and we know enough about them to be conﬁdent that they were too restrict-

ive to satisfy—as he doubtless expected them to be. According to White-

locke’s diary, Monck decided on the 19th, the day after the ‘act of

qualiﬁcations’ was passed, to admit the secluded members on the 21st.

But

while all these considerations must have counted with him, surely his over-

riding reason for giving himself time before he took the crucial step was to

reach agreement with the secluded members themselves and make certain

that they would do what he expected of them. He had to guard on the one

hand against generating an unrestrained and possibly violent royalist re-

action that would lead to a totally unconditional restoration, and on the other

against the possibility that once the secluded members were restored the Long

Parliament would avail itself of the 1641 ‘own consent’ act to go on sitting

indeﬁnitely. What we can surely discount is the view that he spent his ﬁrst

eighteen days in London in a state of dithering uncertainty until his more

politically sophisticated conﬁdants, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper being the

loudest-mouthed claimant, persuaded him that readmitting the secluded

members was the only way forward.

On Monday 20 February the Rump ordered the Speaker to sign a warrant

for the issue of writs for the promised elections, but he stubbornly refused to

do so, saying that every secluded member whose seat was thereby ﬁlled might

sue him at law. It is quite likely that Monck tipped him to do so; it is not the

only sign of collusion between the two men. At any rate seventy-three se-

cluded members met Monck at Whitehall early next morning and gave their

assent to a declaration that his secretary read to them. In it he charged them

to settle the command of the armies (implying his reinstatement as commander-

in-chief ), to provide for the pay of all the forces, to appoint a new Council of

State, to cause writs to be issued for elections to a new parliament to meet on

20 April, and to enact the legal dissolution of the present one. They readily

signed this paper, and Monck’s Adjutant-General then escorted them straight

to the House, where their arrival took most of the Rumpers (though not, we

can be sure, the Speaker) completely by surprise. Their dismay can be imag-

ined, but that evening the citizens of London celebrated as jubilantly as

The Monarchy Restored 765

Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, p. 571.

For this version see K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968),

pp. 129–32. Aidan Clarke in Prelude to Restoration in Ireland, pp. 153–4, sees Monck as chan-

ging course twice between 10 and 21 Feb. My disagreement on this particular point implies no

lack of general admiration for Haley’s and Clarke’s ﬁne books.

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 765

they had done ten days earlier. Pepys sat in a Thames-side café with the com-

poser Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell of the Chapel Royal (father of the

composer), and marvelled ‘to see the City from one end to the other with a

glory about it, so high was the light of the bonﬁres, and so thick round the

City, and the bells rang everywhere’.

Many a provincial town kept holiday

the same way, if on a smaller scale.

The political situation was indeed transformed, for the secluded members

far outnumbered the Rumpers. They lost no time in voting to hold general

elections at an early date and in choosing a new Council of State. This was

dominated by presbyterians whose attachment to monarchy was no secret; its

wisely chosen president was Arthur Annesley, whose moderation and lenity

matched Monck’s own. Monck was not only conﬁrmed as commander-

in-chief but was made General at Sea in partnership with Montagu. A poten-

tially embarrassing bill to settle Hampton Court on him was laid aside, but he

was voted a grant of £20,000 in lieu. Parliament made sweeping changes in

the militia commissioners throughout the country, to make sure that the

trained bands complied with whatever political changes lay in store. One of

those appointed for Cheshire was Sir George Booth, who had so recently been

in arms against the Rump. The main danger that the now inevitable restor-

ation might be resisted lay in the remaining regular forces. We shall shortly

see how Monck kept those in England in obedience, but a bigger question

mark lay over those in Ireland.

After the coup in Dublin in mid-December most of the army in Ireland had

declared for the Rump against the Committee of Safety, but though Monck

was in contact with Coote and Broghill there was no certainty as to how it

would react to the readmission of the secluded members. Ludlow muddied the

waters by returning to Ireland as soon as the Rump was restored, hoping to

resume his command there. He arrived before Dublin on 31 December, but

on learning that Waller and the ofﬁcers there intended to arrest him if he land-

ed he made for Duncannon, where adherents to the old army interest repre-

sented by Fleetwood were holding out. He did not stay there long, for Waller

and his Dublin colleagues framed articles of impeachment against him. These

were presented to the Rump on 19 January, and Ludlow hastened home to

defend himself. Meanwhile, on hearing of the Rump’s reinstatement, the ofﬁ-

cers in Dublin had cancelled the meeting of representatives that it had called

for 24 January. The Rump for its part formally annulled its former commis-

sion for the government and issued a new one, whose ﬁve recipients

included Coote and Waller. The latter pair and their friends were already carry-

ing out large changes in the command of the regiments in Ireland. Waller and

Coote were given two each, while Coote’s three brothers got one apiece and

766 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Diary of Samuel Pepys, I, 61.

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 766

a cousin of his a third. Monck, when he addressed the Rump on 6 February,

assured it that these and other alterations in the Irish army were necessary to

correct recent abuses of the power to appoint ofﬁcers; but when, ﬁve days

later, the House turned on Monck and put the command of the army in Eng-

land and Scotland into commission, Marten at Ludlow’s prompting moved

that that in Ireland should be included, and so it was carried. This put all the

recent changes in command there into the melting-pot.

During the tense days between Monck’s ultimatum to the Rump and his re-

admission of the secluded members, the ofﬁcers in Ireland were sharply divid-

ed. While Coote and his party were enthusiastically in favour of ﬁlling the

House up and opening the gates to the king’s return, possibly by way of Ire-

land, Waller was a regicide and a ﬁrm republican, deeply suspicious of

Monck’s intentions. At a meeting of the Council of Ofﬁcers early in February

he presented an ‘engagement’ opposing the readmission of the secluded, and

on ﬁnding the majority against him he formed a plan to arrest their leaders

and conﬁne them in Dublin Castle. It was betrayed, and on the 15th Coote,

Sir Theophilus Jones, and others rode through the city streets with a trumpeter

and a party of horse, calling for a free parliament, and followed by a cheering

crowd. Next day the council of ofﬁcers formally approved a declaration for a

full and free parliament through the readmission of the secluded members

and the ﬁlling of the vacant seats by new elections. They sent it to Monck with

ﬁfty-ﬁve signatures, eighteen of them being those of colonels or lieutenant-

colonels. Waller, now under siege in Dublin Castle, wrote to Monck to

explain his opposition to readmitting the secluded, claiming quite rightly that

he had been upholding the General’s own publicly declared policy. But with

the active help of the citizenry the Castle was swiftly brought to surrender,

and Waller and his associates were packed off to Athlone as prisoners. On the

17th an extraordinary assembly of Dublin citizens gave its support to the

council of ofﬁcers’ declaration.

These events meant that neither Monck nor the restored Long Parliament

had anything to fear from the forces in Ireland, but on the political front the

situation might not have been as simple as it looked. Whether still uncertain

of Monck’s intentions or simply hoping to steal a march on him, Coote had

sent a messenger to the king earlier in February, assuring him of his service

and inviting him to come to Ireland. But Hyde wisely foresaw the adverse

effect that this would have on the rising tide of support for his master in Eng-

land, as well as the practical difﬁculties of using Ireland as a springboard. One

reason why Broghill held aloof from the Dublin ofﬁcers’ declaration of

16 February, but sponsored another on the same lines from Munster, was

that much as he wished now for the king’s restoration he did not want it to be

on terms dictated by the old royalists, as might well have happened if Charles

had been swept back to power by force. Coote and his fellow-ofﬁcers took

The Monarchy Restored 767

ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 767