CHAP. III

ARMY DEBATES

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Only a fortnight before he had told the House of Commons that it was matter of urgency to restore the authority of monarchy, and Ireton had told the council of the army that there must be king and lords in any scheme that would do for him. In July Cromwell had called out that the question is, what is good for the people, not what pleases them. Now he raises the balancing consideration that if you do not build the fabric of government on consent it will not stand. Therefore you must think of what pleases people, or else they will not endure what is good for them. "If I could see a visible presence of the people, either by subscription or by numbers, that would satisfy me. Cromwell now (November) says that if they were free to do as they pleased they would set up neither king nor lords. Further, they would not keep either king or lords, if to do so were a danger to the public interest. Was it a danger? Some thought so, others thought not. For his own part, he concurred with those who believed that there could be no safety with a king and lords, and even concurred with them in thinking that God would probably destroy them; yet "God can do it without necessitating us to a thing which is scandalous, and therefore let those that are of that mind wait upon God for such a way where the thing may be done without sin and without scandal too."

This was undoubtedly a remarkable change of Oliver's mind, and the balanced, hesitating phrases in which it is expressed hardly seem to fit a conclusion so momentous. A man who, even with profound sincerity, sets out shifting conclusions of policy in the language of unction, must take the consequences, including the chance of being suspected of duplicity by embittered adversaries. These weeks must have been to Oliver the most poignant hours of the whole struggle, and more than ever he must have felt the looming hazards of his own maxim that "in yielding there is wisdom.”

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CHAPTER IV

THE KING'S FLIGHT

THE strain of things had now become too intense to continue. On the evening of the day when Harrison was declaiming against the man of blood (November 11), the king disappeared from Hampton Court. That his life was in peril from some of the more violent of the soldiers at Putney half a dozen miles away, there can be no doubt, though circumstantial stories of plots for his assassination do not seem to be proved. Cromwell wrote to Whalley, who had the king under his guard, that rumours were abroad of an attempt upon the king's life, and if any such thing should be done it would be accounted a most horrid act. The story that Cromwell cunningly frightened Charles away, in order to make his own manoeuvres run smoother, was long a popular belief, but all the probabilities are decisively against it. Even at that eleventh hour, as we see from his language a few days before the king's flight, Cromwell had no faith that a settlement was possible without the king, little as he could have hoped from any settlement made with him. Whither could it have been for Cromwell's interest that the king should betake himself? Not to London, where a royalist tide was flowing pretty strongly. Still less toward the Scottish border, where Charles would begin a new civil war in a position most favourable to himself. Flight to France was the only move on the king's part that

CHAP. IV

FLIGHT OF THE KING

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might have mended Cromwell's situation. He could have done no more effective mischief from France than the queen had done; on the other hand, his flight would have been treated as an abdication, with as convenient results as followed one-and-forty years later from the flight of James II.

We now know that Charles fled from Hampton Court because he had been told by the Scottish envoys, with whom he was then secretly dealing, as well as from other quarters, that his life was in danger, but without any more fixed designs than when he had fled from Oxford in April of the previous year. He seems to have arranged to take ship from Southampton Water, but the vessel never came, and he sought refuge in Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight (November 14, 1647). Here he was soon no less a prisoner than he had been at Hampton. As strongly as ever he even now felt that he held winning cards in his hands. Sir," he had said to Fairfax, "I have as good an interest in the army as you." Nothing had happened since then to shake this conviction, and undoubtedly there was in the army, as there was in parliament, in the city, and all other considerable aggregates of the population, a lively and definite hope that royal authority would be restored. Beyond all this, Charles confidently anticipated that he could rely upon the military force of the counter-revolution in Scotland.

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Cromwell knew all these favouring chances as vividly as the king himself, and he knew better than Charles the terrible perils of jealousy and dissension in the only force upon which the cause could rely. "For many months, says Fairfax, "all public councils were turned into private juntos, which begot greater emulations and jealousies among them." Cromwell was the object of attack from many sides. He was accused of boldly avowing such noxious principles as these: that every

single man is judge of what is just and right as to the good and ill of a kingdom; that the interest of the kingdom is the interest of the honest men in it, and those only are honest men who go with him ; that it is lawful to pass through any forms of government for the accomplishment of his ends; that it is lawful to play the knave with a knave. This about the knave was only Cromwell's blunt way of putting the scriptural admonition to be wise as serpents, or Bacon's saying that the wise man must use the good and guard himself against the wicked. He was surrounded by danger. He knew that he was himself in danger of impeachment, and he had heard for the first time of one of those designs for his own assassination, of which he was to know so much more in days to come. He had been for five years at too close quarters with death in many dire shapes, to quail at the thought of it any more than King Charles quailed.

Cromwell in later days described 1648 as the most memorable year that the nation ever saw. "So many insurrections, invasions, secret designs, open and public attempts, all quashed, in so short a time, and this by the very signal appearance of God himself." The first effect, he says, was to prepare for bringing offenders to punishment and for a change of government; but the great thing was "the climax of the treaty with the king, whereby they would have put into his hands all that we had engaged for, and all our security should have been a little piece of paper." Dangers both seen and unseen rapidly thickened. The king, while refusing his assent to a new set of propositions tendered to him by the parliament, had secretly entered into an engagement with commissioners from the Scots (December 26, 1647). Here we have one of the cardinal incidents of the struggle, like the case of the Five Members, or the closing of the negotiations with Cromwell. By this sinister instrument, the

CHAP. IV SECRET TREATY WITH SCOTS 213

Scots, declaring against the unjust proceedings of the English Houses, were to send an army into England for the preservation and establishment of religion, and the restoration of all the rights and revenues of the crown. In return the king was to guarantee presbytery in England for three years, with liberty to himself to use his own form of divine service; but the opinions and practices of the independents were to be suppressed. That is, presbyterian Scot and English royalist were to join in arms against the parliament, on the basis of the restoration of the king's claims, the suppression of sectaries, and the establishment of presbytery for three years and no longer, unless the king should agree to an extension of the time. This clandestine covenant for kindling afresh the flames of civil war was wrapped up in lead, and buried in the garden at Carisbrooke.

The secret must have been speedily guessed. Little more than a week after the treaty had been signed, a proposal was made in the Commons to impeach the king, and Cromwell supported it (not necessarily intending more than deposition) on the ground that the king, "while he professed with all solemnity that he referred himself wholly to the parliament, had at the same time secret treaties with the Scots commissioners how he might embroil the nation in a new war and destroy the parliament." Impeachment was dropped, but a motion was carried against holding further communications with the king (January 1648), thus in substance and for the time openly bringing monarchy to an end. From the end of 1647, and all through 1648, designs for bringing the king to justice which had long existed among a few of the extreme agitators, extended to the leading officers. The Committee of Both Kingdoms, in which Scots and English had united for executive purposes, was at once dissolved, and the new executive body, now exclusively