Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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another step that had no authorization from either Monck or the government
in Westminster: they revived the plan to hold a convention of representatives
of the Irish counties and towns, and summoned it to meet on 27 February.
Their object was partly to secure nationwide assent to the policies outlined in
their declaration of the 16th, which had covered more than just a free parlia-
ment for England, and partly to secure financial provision for their forces in
case they should fall out with the powers at Westminster, whoever they might
turn out to be. By one account the mayor and aldermen of Dublin petitioned
for such an assembly. Between the ordering of elections and its actual meeting,
however—it did not get down to business until 3 March—Monck readmitted
the secluded members and the whole situation changed. The Convention was
to have some slight influence on the Restoration settlement in Ireland, but it
had little or none on the train of events that was to bring the king back to
England.
Scotland too watched that train of events in outward calm, but with intense
anticipation. The attenuated forces in Scotland, mostly garrison troops and
now under the command of Major-General Morgan, had some difficulty in
preventing the nobles and gentry from exceeding their limited right to bear
arms and mount guards, but the large part of the nation that now wanted to
see their king restored had some confidence that Monck would do the busi-
ness, and refrained from distracting him from it by making trouble north of
the border.
He had most cause for concern in the reaction of the army in England after
he readmitted the secluded members, for there was still a strong current of
republican feeling within it, especially in those regiments that had been most
loyal to the Rump. They had been widely dispersed, but in at least nine major
provincial towns they clamped down on the popular celebrations. The most
dangerous officers still in post were Okey, Rich, and Overton, though the regi-
ments of the first two were divided into several quarters, and Overton was
now isolated in Hull. Rich was forced into submission, made to resign his
commission, and spent some weeks in confinement. Overton too was put
under intense pressure, but after days of hesitation he obeyed Monck’s sum-
mons to London, where he was cashiered. Yet even if he had wished to, which
he did not, Monck could not have carried out a wholesale purge of all those
officers who were disquieted by the Militia Bill and fearful that the forth-
coming general election would fill parliament with supporters of the king.
Considerable numbers of them held unauthorized meetings in London, from
which emerged a declaration which they desired Monck to present to parlia-
ment in the name of the whole army. It would have demanded that parliament
should pledge itself to maintain a commonwealth without a king or House of
Lords, and threatened that if it refused the army would take its own measures
to save the nation from destruction. Monck made his response known to a
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heavily attended General Council of Officers on 7 March, which Okey
opened with a long and bellicose speech. Clarges delivered the gist of
Monck’s reply, which was that if the army put such pressure on parliament it
would promptly dissolve itself and leave the country in a state of anarchy. His
argument that the act for the forthcoming elections debarred all who had
fought against the parliament since 1641 cut little ice, since it would be a dead
letter if the incoming House declined to enforce it. There was evidently a
party of officers, however, who wanted Monck to take the government upon
himself, for he declared in winding the meeting up that he would rather lose
his life than do so. ‘Nothing’, he told them, ‘was more injurious to discipline
than their meeting in military councils to interpose in civil things’, and he for-
bade them to do so in future.
10
To help defuse the situation he arranged a
meeting next day between ten officers and ten MPs, but immediately after
that he ordered all officers back to their stations. Meanwhile Lambert, who
had been lurking in London, had been removed from harm’s way. The Coun-
cil of State summoned him on 5 March and demanded £20,000 as surety for
his good behaviour. Predictably, he could not find so huge a sum, and was
committed to the Tower. There were slight stirrings in the army when parlia-
ment annulled the Engagement to be faithful to a commonwealth without a
king or House of Lords, which the Rump had imposed on all adult males in
1650, but they were safely contained.
The parliament at last enacted that it should dissolve itself on 16 March.
The past five weeks had been the trickiest phase in Monck’s whole operation,
and he had negotiated it with impressive skill. He had been abundantly justi-
fied in concealing his precise intentions, keeping his options open, and lying
stoutly when necessary. He not only managed the army but played his part as
joint General at Sea with Montagu in preventing any resistance by the navy.
Until their appointment on 6 March Lawson had been in effective command
of the fleet, and we have seen the vital part he played in restoring the Rump in
December, for which he was elected to the Council of State and given lands
worth £500 a year. But his well-known republican principles and his old asso-
ciation with Okey, Overton, and others of their kind made it very doubtful
how he would respond to the readmission of the secluded members. It did
indeed shake him, for he had trusted Monck as an old colleague, and by his
own later admission he was strongly tempted to join his republican friends in
open resistance. On Monck’s insistence, however, parliament kept him in the
service as vice-admiral, and royalist agents found him willing to listen to
them. He immediately wrote to Monck and Montagu, submitting to their
authority, and it seems that he went on hoping even now for a settlement
without the king. Self-preservation obviously played a part in his decision,
The Monarchy Restored 769
10
Baker, Chronicle of the Kings of England, p. 716.
ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 769
but he probably felt a genuine repugnance at the prospect of setting one part
of the navy against the others, and by March an orderly and conditional
restoration may well have struck him as a better solution than any other that
was then feasible. At any rate he responded gratefully to a letter of goodwill
from the king that he received early in April.
One man whom February’s turn of the tide caught sadly adrift was John
Milton. He had seen how dangerously the current was running as the quarrel
mounted between the army and the Rump in the autumn of 1659, and
between October and December he had twice taken up his pen to propose the
outlines of a constitutional settlement that would heal their rifts and guarantee
the future of the Good Old Cause. He was possessed by a heightened sense of
urgency, however, amid the clamour for a free parliament that followed upon
Monck’s arrival in London and his ultimatum to the Rump. In haste he set
about dictating a larger tract which he called The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth, though he knew the way would be far from
easy. What he proposed was by no means his ideal model of a republic, sup-
posing one could have been devised from scratch, but what in the straitened
political circumstances of February 1660 he thought might yet avert the
absolute evil of a return to monarchy. In his words, ‘to fall back, or rather to
creep back so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured
and detested thraldom of kingship, not only argues a strange degenerate cor-
ruption suddenly spread among us, fitted and prepared for new slavery, but
will render us a scorn and derision to all our neighbours’. The Rump had
voted to fill up the House, so if the people will elect ‘able men, and according
to the just and necessary qualifications decreed in parliament, men not addict-
ed to a single person or House of Lords, the work is done: at least the foun-
dation is firmly laid of a free Commonwealth’. Then comes the shock: once
chosen, let the resultant assembly be renamed the Grand or General Council
and empowered to sit in perpetuity, with full authority to dispose of the land
and sea forces, raise revenue, make national laws, control relations with for-
eign powers, take decisions of peace or war, and appoint a Council of State
for day-to-day administration. The only spheres that Milton would have
withheld from its sway were those of religion and civil justice. Matters eccle-
siastical, he held, should be outside the authority of the civil magistrate. In
civil affairs, his one concession to anything remotely resembling democracy
was a proposal that every county in the land should be made ‘a little com-
monwealth’ and its capital town a city, ‘where the nobility and chief gentry
may build houses or palaces, befitting their quality, may bear part in the gov-
ernment, make their own judicial laws, and execute them by their own elect-
ed judicatures, without appeal, in all things of civil government between man
and man’. From their ranks would be filled the vacancies in the Grand or Gen-
eral Council when they occurred, though he did not say how. An inveterate
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townsman, his vision was probably based partly on the urban palazzi that he
had seen on his Italian travels and partly on the example of the regent class in
the cities of Holland. Not loving Oxford or Cambridge, he anticipated the
civic universities of centuries later in his hope that the county elites would
have in their local capitals ‘schools and academies at their own choice, where-
in their children may be bred up in their own sight to all learning and noble
education, not in grammar only, but in all liberal arts and exercises’.
11
His
central proposal for a perpetual Grand Council was of course quite impractic-
able, and even Miltonists seem to have stopped supposing that his scheme as
a whole might conceivably have worked. But there is no inherent reason, pace
Shelley and his ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, for expecting a
composer of sublime poetry to be an infallible guide in practical politics, and
Milton deserves respect for deciding that in what he saw as a near-desperate
situation desperate remedies were better than none.
He deserves something rather more than respect for his courage, for besides
putting up with a great deal of ridicule and vilification from pamphleteers
who were swimming with the royalist tide he put out a second edition of The
Ready and Easy Way early in April, when the elections to the Convention
Parliament (of which more anon) were in full swing and the Restoration was
all but inevitable. The first edition had been overtaken by the readmission of
the secluded members, just after he finished dictating it but before it was
printed. The second was much more than a mere update, and in bringing out
so vehement an attack on monarchy at that moment he was putting not only
his liberty and perhaps his life on the line but also his supreme masterpiece,
for he had begun to dictate Paradise Lost in 1658 and it would be at least
three more years before he finished it. Taking what hope he could from the
fact that the writs for the current elections were issued not in the name of the
king but of the Keepers of the Liberties, and that they debarred the old royal-
ists and their sons from being returned, he proposed that the forthcoming
parliament should be constituted a perpetual Grand Council. This time, how-
ever, the powers that he would have accorded it were somewhat less sweep-
ing, and he was more prepared to consider that its membership should be
renewed by means of the sort of rotation advocated by Harrington. He still
disliked it, for, he said,‘I could wish that this wheel or partial wheel in state,
if it be possible, might be avoided; as having too much affinity with the wheel
of fortune’. He filled a gap in the first version by proposing the manner in
which elections to vacant places should be held, and his elaborate method, in
three or four stages, ‘not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude
multitude’, was clearly designed to keep out royalists rather than to give the
people their choice. Indeed the most striking features of the second edition,
The Monarchy Restored 771
11
Quotations from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII, 356–7, 362, 383–4.
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and perhaps his major objects in composing it, are its arguments that an
‘unfree’ majority has no right to dictate to a ‘free’ minority, and its passion-
ate denunciation of the moral degradation that the nation will inflict on itself
if it brings back monarchy. As to the first he asked:
Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government [i.e. free-
dom] should enslave the less number that would be free? More just is it doubtless, if it
come to force, that a less number compel a greater number to retain, which can be no
wrong to them, their liberty, than that a greater number, for the pleasure of their base-
ness, compel a less most injuriously to be their fellow slaves.
As for ‘the new royalized presbyterians’,
let them but hear the insolencies, the menaces, the insultings of our newly animated
common enemies crept lately out of their holes, their hell I might say . . . Let our
zealous backsliders forethink now with themselves, how their necks yoked with these
tigers of Bacchus, these new fanatics not of the preaching but the sweating-tub,
inspired with nothing holier than the venereal pox, can draw one way under mon-
archy to the establishing of church discipline with these new-disgorged atheisms.
12
Milton had a reason for addressing Presbyterians in particular, because in its
dying days in March the Long Parliament made an attempt to reinstate the
Presbyterian religious settlement that it had enacted in 1645–6. A series of
swiftly passed acts declared the Westminster Confession to be the public pro-
fession of faith of the Church of England, ordered that the Solemn League and
Covenant should be republished and read in every church in the country,
resumed the process of dividing the counties into classical presbyteries, and
appointed a Presbyterian-dominated body of commissioners to approve all
candidates presented to ecclesiastical benefices. These measures would very
soon prove to be little more than gestures, since no parliament can bind its
successor, and the chances that one elected in the spring of 1660 would
endorse them were nil. But they were bad news to the likes of Milton, and still
more to the much greater number of English men and women who trusted
that the return of the king would bring back the Church of England that they
or their parents had loved in pre-war times. Much more pleasing to such peo-
ple was the outgoing parliament’s vote that the House of Lords had a right to
form part of all future ones.
Intense speculation filled the interval of nearly six weeks between the dis-
solution of the Long Parliament on 16 March and the meeting on 25 April of
the Convention, as it came to be called, since strictly a parliament could be
summoned only by writs issued by the king. The two great questions before
the country were whether any conditions would be set to the now inevitable
772 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660
12
Quotations from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII, pp. 435, 452–3, 455; and for
the dates of both editions pp. 177–8, 204–6.
ch27.y8 27/9/02 12:19 PM Page 772
Restoration, and whether diehard republicans inside and outside the army
would make any attempt to resist it by force of arms. There was much talk of
resuscitating the so-called Newport treaty of nearly a dozen years ago, which
the presbyterian majority had been close to concluding with Charles I when
Pride’s Purge removed them. But though the Newport terms had their sup-
porters, several factors dashed their hopes. The tide of public opinion was
flowing too strongly now in the king’s favour to be held by such a break-
water, and men in public life must have thought of the massive patronage that
he would soon dispose of again, and felt reluctant to exclude themselves from
it: call it the bandwagon syndrome. Furthermore if there were to be any con-
ditions set, they would have had to be agreed by the incoming parliament, and
the outgoing one’s attempted disqualification of active royalists from sitting in
it was widely breached. But perhaps the decisive factor, thanks probably in
large part to Monck’s advice to Hyde, was that Charles himself offered
pledges which spiked the guns of those who might have tried to impose terms
on him. For the king and Monck were at last in touch. As soon as the Long
Parliament had dissolved itself, Monck allowed his kinsman Sir John
Grenville to deliver a royal letter that he had been nursing for nearly eight
months, and it was not until Grenville arrived in Brussels at least ten days
later that Charles knew for certain that the General was ready to sacrifice life
and fortune in his service. Monck also sent him the sound advice to get out of
Spanish territory, since England and Spain were still formally at war, and
Charles accordingly moved to Breda in the Dutch republic.
Monck, however, put nothing in writing, and announced no change of pol-
icy in public. He still had to be careful of the temper of his troops, and his
caution was justified when Lambert escaped from the Tower on 10 April and
tried to rally his former forces. His call now was to restore Richard Cromwell
to his Protectorship, he having done so much a year earlier to eject him from
it. But he found little response in London, and not much more when he
switched his efforts to the regiments in the Midlands and the north. Monck’s
strategy of splitting up their component troops and companies was paying
off, and the Council of State helped by promising their full arrears of pay to
all soldiers who stayed with their colours and by making judicious arrests.
Lambert eventually made his rendezvous at Edgehill, where he mustered the
equivalent of only four troops of horse and no infantry at all. There on the
22nd, Easter Sunday, Colonel Richard Ingoldsby caught up with him; Monck
may have chosen Ingoldsby for the task to help him redeem his past as a regi-
cide. There was much parleying and a few shots were fired, but Lambert and
his fellow-officers—they included Okey, Axtell, Cobbett, and Creed—had to
surrender. Lambert was made to stand under the gallows at Tyburn before
returning to an imprisonment that was to last until his death twenty-three
years later.
The Monarchy Restored 773
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Among the republican old guard, Ludlow had been girding himself and his
friends to support Lambert if his rising got under way, but Haselrig had fall-
en into deep depression and given up hope—not that he had much in common
with Lambert now except a detestation of Stuart monarchy. He had lately
thrown himself on Monck’s mercy, and Monck had genially offered to save
his life and estate for twopence, so long as he retired to his country seat and
lived quietly. Haselrig wrote to Monck again on 30 April, protesting his inno-
cence of any part of Lambert’s enterprise and enclosing two pennies. Honest
George was to be as good as his word.
Meanwhile England was enjoying the first general elections in all but
twenty years that were open to the whole body of traditional voters, for the
electorate (unlike the future members) was subject to no political disqualifi-
cations. They were contested by an unprecedented number of candidates, and
fought on great national issues to an extent never seen before the Civil Wars,
not even in 1640. A barrage of pamphlets, many of them overtly royalist,
offered advice to the electorate. The main issue at the hustings was between
those who favoured and those who opposed the setting of conditions to the
king’s restoration, though the candidates’ record over the past dozen or so
years generally had a large bearing on their success. There were naturally
some places where local rivalries of the traditional sort determined the result,
but generally speaking the more unqualified a candidate’s royalism was the
likelier he was to get in. It went very hard with the republican old guard.
Haselrig, as far as we know, did not even stand, while Ludlow and Scot were
unseated after disputed elections. Of all the Rumpers who had sat since their
return to power in May 1659 only sixteen were re-elected, and three of these
were soon expelled from the House. Lenthall was among those defeated,
despite two strong commendations from Monck. In defiance of the outgoing
parliament’s ban, at least 62 of those elected had been active royalists in the
wars or were the sons of such, including more than a quarter of the knights of
the shire; indeed Bordeaux wrote to Mazarin that the number of members
who should have been thus disqualified was between 100 and 120. No action
was taken against them, because the temper of the Convention House of
Commons, from the moment it met on 25 April, was overwhelmingly
royalist. Nearly half its members had never sat in parliament before.
There was much interest in the peers’ response to the outgoing parlia-
ment’s assertion of their right to a place in the new one. On the opening
day just ten of them, all former parliamentarians, took their seats in the
upper chamber, but the ‘young lords’ who had been minors or had not yet
inherited when the Rump abolished their House quickly asserted their right
to sit, and by the 27th the attendance was up to thirty-six. In the Commons
some members wanted a debate on whether to acknowledge the House
of Lords, but the majority welcomed its return as a step towards that of the
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king. The royalist peers soon came in and brought its numbers up to
about 145.
Three days after the Convention Parliament met Sir John Grenville
appeared before the council, bearing a declaration that the king had signed on
4 April. Its timing and content were perfectly judged. Hyde, who had been
Lord Chancellor since 1658, probably deserves the credit that he has usually
been given for it, though to a considerable extent it reflected the advice that
Monck had sent to the king, who also consulted Secretary Nicholas and
Ormond in the framing of it. The Declaration of Breda pulled the rug from
under the feet of those who still sought to set conditions to the Restoration.
In it, Charles promised a free and general pardon to all his subjects, however
guilty, who pledged their loyalty and obedience as good subjects within forty
days, with the exception only of those who should be excluded from it by
parliament. He further declared ‘a liberty to tender consciences’, promising
his assent to such an act of parliament as should ensure that none should be
troubled for differences of opinion in matters of religion, so long as they did
not disturb the peace of the kingdom. As for disputes over title to the vast
quantities of land that had changed hands as a result of the Civil Wars and
subsequent confiscations, he granted that they should be settled by parlia-
ment; and he finally promised his assent to whatever acts of parliament would
fully satisfy the arrears due to the officers and men under Monck’s command,
whom he would take into his own service on as good pay and conditions as
they currently enjoyed.
The beauty of the declaration was that for all its apparent magnanimity
and respect for parliamentary authority, most of it was shifting on to parlia-
ment’s shoulders the problems which were likeliest to raise animosities: the
decisions about whom to punish for Charles I’s fate and how to sort out the
conflicting claims to confiscated estates, and the raising of yet more taxes to
pay the army—or pay it off. As for the promise of religious liberty, it was par-
liament that would in due course have to take the responsibility for breaking
it, not the king. But in face of such voluntary pledges, so cordially phrased,
what hope was there of imposing further conditions on his return? The dec-
laration was read in both Houses on 1 May, and rapturously received. The
Lords passed a formal vote ‘That according to the ancient and fundamental
laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords and
Commons’. The Commons concurred that same afternoon, and the Restora-
tion can be dated from that moment.
That evening Monck summoned all the officers about London to hear the
Declaration of Breda and a letter that the king had addressed specifically to
the army. It was couched in the same gracious terms as those in which Charles
had written to the two Speakers, and it swiftly produced an address profess-
ing the army’s loyalty to the king and confirming its promise to conform to
The Monarchy Restored 775
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whatever parliament should enact. Montagu obtained an equally satisfactory
response from the fleet, whose captains and crews showed a positive enthu-
siasm for the restoration of monarchy that could not have been predicted
even a week or two earlier. Meanwhile London celebrated its happiest May
Day in living memory with a night of bonfires, bell-ringing and heaven knows
how many loyal toasts, and the rejoicing spread rapidly throughout the
provinces. There was a similar outburst, in this season of hangovers, when
Charles was formally proclaimed king, with all the old pageantry, on 8 May.
The Restoration was very much an English transaction. Scotland remained
quiet under the precautionary arrangements that Monck had made for keep-
ing the peace, and in March the Long Parliament, before it dissolved, named
a new set of judges for Scotland (four English and six Scots) and a new body
of five (subsequently four) commissioners for the government of the country.
As for the forthcoming parliament, Monck had recommended to the out-
going one that its constituencies should follow the reforms devised by the
Rump in 1653 and implemented in 1654 and 1656, but his advice was not
taken, so no Scottish or Irish representatives sat in the Convention. Powerful
men in Edinburgh pressed him to allow the Scots to elect commissioners to
attend it, but he firmly refused. The country as a whole awaited the inevitable
Restoration with more mixed feelings than the English did, largely because
the king’s intentions towards it, particularly regarding episcopacy, were so
little known. No declaration came from Breda to Scotland. Nevertheless
there were celebrations in Edinburgh on 7 May when the news arrived of the
Convention’s votes on May Day, and still more a week later when Charles II
was ceremonially proclaimed.
Ireland had its own Convention, for that was the name given to the repre-
sentative assembly summoned by the recently transformed council of officers
in Dublin. It met in the Four Courts on 2 March, slightly later than first
intended. It had little positive influence on the course of events, and it articu-
lated the interests of the protestant minority rather than those of the Irish
nation as a whole. But it is of considerable significance for the light it throws
on the aspirations of protestant Ireland on the eve of the Restoration, and of
the balance within that community, since a very large majority of the repre-
sentatives had roots in, or strong links with, the counties or towns that they
represented. There were supposed to be two each for every shire and for
Dublin, and one each for every town normally represented in the Irish parlia-
ment. That gave a nominal total of 158 members, though only 138 are known
to have attended. Of these at least 98 were ‘Old Protestants’, with roots in the
country stretching back to before the rebellion, often long before. Of the forty
newcomers, twenty-seven had come to Ireland with the English army and
chosen to settle there, though only ten had been in Cromwell’s expeditionary
force of 1649; the rest had fought in earlier campaigns. A longstanding
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tradition, repeated in respectable textbooks until quite recently, that the
Convention was dominated by Cromwellian settlers, even by Cromwellian
officers, is quite untrue.
13
Even in the Ulster contingent, twenty-nine of the
thirty-six representatives stemmed from the pre-1641 community, and only
two in the whole assembly were Scots.
This makes it comprehensible that the great majority of members found
common ground in opposing sectaries but were much divided as to whether
they wanted to see episcopacy restored. They were divided too on the polit-
ical front over whether or not the king’s restoration should be subject to con-
ditions, but understandably they were far more concerned about its
implications for Ireland than about constitutional arrangements in England.
They declared that Ireland had a lawful right to its own parliaments, and that
the successive English regimes that had imposed taxes on the country had
invaded the rights of the parliament of Ireland. Nevertheless they resolved
‘for ever to adhere to England’ and affirmed that the welfares of the two coun-
tries were inseparably interwoven.
14
Their declaration evaded the question of
episcopacy, but came out in favour of an established parochial ministry,
maintained by tithes, with no toleration of dissent. They also assumed execu-
tive authority, issuing instructions on 13 March that all those who had been
transplanted to Connaught should remain there, and that those who had
since left the province should be sent back. They ordered the suppression of
unlawful assemblies, especially those of priests, friars, and Jesuits, and banned
‘dangerous papists’ from within two miles of any city, garrison town, or fort.
Yet in the eyes of the government at Westminster it was more than doubt-
ful whether they had the authority to give such directions. Communications
between London and Dublin were slow, and made slower at the time by
adverse winds. The Convention did not know when it first met that the
secluded members had been restored, and it did not hear until 17 March that
on the 8th the Council of State had appointed new commissioners for ‘the
management of the affairs of Ireland’ in the persons of Broghill, Coote,
Clotworthy, and Sir William Bury. They took up authority in Dublin late in
March, and they did not defer to the Convention, though Broghill continued
to attend it, at least on occasion. The situation was complicated by the fact
that Broghill and Coote were at odds with each other, and both were inde-
pendently in correspondence with the exiled court. At any rate the Conven-
tion completed the representations that it wished to put before the
government in England, and after some disagreement as to whom to address
them sent them to the Council of State. Its emissaries passed through Chester
on 3 April, but they were not welcome at Westminster, for the council had
The Monarchy Restored 777
13
The personnel and transactions of the Convention are examined in fine scholarly detail by
Clarke in Prelude to Restoration in Ireland, chs. 6–8.
14
Ibid., pp. 249–50.
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