The Life of General George Monck: For King & Cromwell

By Peter Reese

General George Monck is famous for the key role he played in the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. His actions changed the course of British history, but his statesmanship in the dangerous time between the death of Cromwell and the bloodless return of Charles II distracts attention from his extraordinary career as a soldier and general, admiral, governor and administrator. During the confused, often bloody era of the English Civil Wars and the Protectorate he was one of the great survivors. Peter Reese, in this perceptive new study, follows Monck through his long, varied career, from his impoverished upbringing in the West Country and his military apprenticeship on the Continent, to his experience as a commander on both sides during the civil wars. He distinguished himself on the battlefields of Ireland and Scotland, and as a general-at-sea for both Cromwell and Charles II. His shrewdness and firmness of character, his skill as a leader, his high popularity with his troops and his occasional ruthlessness gained for him a formidable reputation. On Cromwell's death he was one of the few men in England with the power, personal authority and political skill to secure the restoration of Charles II and to bring to an end twenty years of conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 23, 2008
• ISBN: 9781844686445

Peter Reese

Peter Reese is well known as a military historian with a particular interest in Scottish military history. He concentrated on war-related studies whilst a student at King's College London and served in the army for twenty-nine years. His other books include a biography of William Wallace and a study of the Battle of Bannockburn. He lives in Aldershot.

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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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Copyright © Peter Reese 2008

ISBN 978 1 84415 757 0

Digital Edition: ISBN 978 1 84468 644 5

The right of Peter Reese to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Preface and Acknowledgements

Prologue – Under Lock and Key

Part I – The Formative Years

1 The Mercenary Soldier 1625-38

2 The King’s Soldier: Scotland 1639-40

3 The King’s Soldier: Ireland 1641-3

4 Imprisonment and Military Theory

5 Parliament’s Soldier: Ireland 1647-9

Part II – Cromwell’s General

6 The Dunbar Campaign 1650

7 Completing the Conquest of Scotland

8 General at Sea

9 The Highland Campaign

Part III – Opponent of Military Dictatorship

10 Military Governor in Scotland

11 Split with the Army Leaders

12 The March South

13 Making Straight the King’s Path

Part IV – Restoration Britain

14 Duke of Albemarle, The King’s Protector

15 Return to Sea

16 The Dutch in the Medway

17 Final Days and Appraisal

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

King Charles II. By an unknown artist.

Oliver Cromwell. After Samuel Cooper.

George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle. After Samuel Cooper.

Anne, Duchess of Albemarle. By Richard Earlom, published by Samuel Woodburn, after an unknown miniaturist.

William Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons. By an unknown artist.

William Craven, 1st Earl of Craven. Attributed to Louise, Princess Palatine.

The old palace of Dalkeith, which Monck used as his official residence while Governor of Scotland.

Tantallon Castle’s massive front wall.

Stirling Castle, captured by George Monck late in 1651 following a whirlwind siege.

The remote battlefield of Dalnaspidal in the heart of the Scottish Highlands.

The memorial plate to Monck’s son George in St Nicholas Buccleuch Church, Dalkeith.

Monck’s imposing fortress at Inverness, built to help keep the Highlands under control.

View of Monck’s citadel from above, showing its star shape and its coastal location.

The stone at Coldstream marking the point where George Monck commenced his historic march to London.

The original clock-tower of Monck’s seventeenth-century citadel at Inverness.

The Albemarle family monument in Westminster Abbey.

List of Maps

Ireland at the time of Monck’s campaigns during 1641–3 and 1647–9

The Battle of Dunbar, 3 September 1650

Monck’s conquest of Scotland, August 1651–February 1652

Battle of Scheveningen, 31 July 1653, Monck’s first pass

Monck’s Highland campaigns April–September 1654

Monck’s march south, 2 January–3 February 1660

Monck’s sea battles, June–July 1666

The Dutch in the Medway, June 1667

Preface and Acknowledgements

For all George Monck’s eminence in his own age and his enduring achievements, he has not attracted anything like the number of biographers of his military successor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, or of his one-time chief, Oliver Cromwell. Elizabeth Longford, biographer of the Duke of Wellington (another favourite military commander), has famously observed that ‘the search for national heroes does not generally lead far from the fighting’, instancing ‘Drake, Marlborough and Nelson as shining forth under the floodlights of a nation saved by war’. Who can argue with her when Marlborough has attracted fifty biographers, including his kinsman Winston Churchill and David Chandler, with 110 associated publications,¹ while Oliver Cromwell is the subject of even more, some fifty-seven biographies, including those of John Buchan, Christopher Hill and Antonia Fraser, plus 150 other associated writings.

Why, one might ask, has Monck been comparatively neglected, who, with the exception of Cromwell and just possibly Prince Rupert, was not only the outstanding soldier of his time but certainly the most professional? The answer is surely that, unlike Elizabeth Longford’s hero, whose greatest hour came at Waterloo, Monck, having spent a lifetime fighting, had his crowning moment when his indomitable army emerged from Scotland to spearhead the chain of events that would bring back Charles II in a bloodless transference of power. Not for Monck the sweeping European campaigns that led Marlborough to victories at Blenheim and Oudenarde, nor to share with Cromwell the early major battles of the civil war, like Marston Moor and Naseby. However, when Cromwell was solely responsible for a battle – at Dunbar against the Scots – he owed much of his success there to Monck, who then went on to conquer the rest of Scotland. Notwithstanding, Monck was not a commander-in-chief until after Dunbar and for much of the time he fought against the enemies within, rebellious Irish, Scots and despotic Puritan generals; only at sea when fighting the Dutch could his military skills catch the national imagination in the same way as Marlborough’s and Wellington’s great foreign victories.

He also left virtually no private letters or accounts, going to considerable lengths to preserve a degree of anonymity, although there are still copious amounts of official correspondence (much of it made readily accessible through the outstanding editorial work of C H Firth). Also in existence is Monck’s credo on war, his Observations upon Military and Political Affairs, written while he was imprisoned in the Tower.

Apart from such less celebrated encounters for his sword, the pattern of the biographies about him might have deflected other would-be writers. Three appeared very shortly after his death. That of his chaplain, Thomas Gumble, was a major, if highly uncritical, account published in 1672, with a second by his domestic chaplain, John Price, which was much dependent on Gumble, coming out in 1680. The third of these ‘early period’ biographies was by Monck’s physician, Thomas Skinner, which, although not published until 1723, was largely a rehash of the evidence provided by Gumble. Other aspiring biographers might well have come to ask whether Gumble had, in fact, said nearly everything there was to say about his master.

Fuel for such a theory came after an interval of some 125 years, when another account appeared, by the French historian François Guizot. His Monk, or the Fall of the Republic and the Restoration of the Monarchy in England in 1660 once more owed a great deal to Gumble, although it also used the despatches of Antoine de Bordeaux, the French ambassador in London at the time, and considered Monck’s achievements in the light of his earlier service as a mercenary.

The first English biography after those of the ‘early period’ came in 1889. This was by naval historian and military commentator Sir Julian Corbett; it was published in Macmillan’s popular English Men of Action series and was reprinted three times. Corbett’s Monk was a short and affectionate work that much favoured his subject, putting his military accomplishments above those of Oliver Cromwell. This was followed five years later by a brief monograph (67 pages) on Monck’s life by eminent scholar and editor Charles Firth. In 1936 came two more books on Monck, a relatively short one by specialist naval historian, Oliver Warner, entitled Hero of the Restoration, and a longer, colour-fully written, more personal study by J D Griffith Davies, Honest George Monck. In spite of the undoubted quality of their writing, neither offered many new facts nor fresh insights.

Whatever the merits of the few books written up to this time, an establishment figure like Monck who, when written about by Corbett, could capture the popular imagination arguably needed a major biographer who would make full use of the wealth of documents on the Commonwealth period, including the papers of Monck’s secretary, William Clarke.

The opportunity did not arrive until the 1970s, a decade which saw renewed interest in great figures of the seventeenth century. Antonia Fraser produced her major study of Oliver Cromwell in 1973, followed by one on Charles II in 1979, and two years before this a full-length biography of General Monck by the well-known seventeenth-century historian Maurice Ashley was published. This was number twenty-five of the thirty books he had written by the time of his death in 1994, and it was by far the most carefully researched political biography of Monck yet written, running to over 300 closely reasoned pages. Even so, despite Ashley’s eminence and his former position as a sub-editor of the paper, The Times unkindly called it a dull book, though a conscientious one.² After his most careful – almost forensic – examination of the many episodes in Monck’s highly charged life, Ashley went on to consider Monck’s place in history by contrasting his virtues with the apparent confusions of late twentieth-century society. Ashley saw Monck’s fixed principles and heroic mould as alien qualities to the endemic rebelliousness of the 1970s, when peace, order, patriotism and personal discipline were not fashionable.³ Maurice Ashley’s criticisms of the age in which he lived and his placing of Monck on such a high moral pedestal were virtually guaranteed to invite reaction and provoke new and genuine debate about him.

Sure enough, during the thirty-year interval since Ashley’s book and my decision to write another biography on Monck two fresh appraisals have appeared. The first is Professor Ronald Hutton’s sustained, vigorous and dispassionate account of Monck’s career that appeared in the 2004 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Monck, however, was far from diminished by his reflective and non-sycophantic approach, for Hutton pointed not only to a notable soldier but to a far more calculating and skilled political exponent than earlier commentators had acknowledged. Hutton’s study was followed in 2005 by Mark Urban’s reassessment of Monck’s long-term military contributions in his Generals: Ten British Commanders Who Shaped the World. Like Hutton, Urban not only recognized Monck’s great political skills but also considered the historical significance of his coup in bringing back Charles II as equivalent to any battlefield victory, however important, of others.

While conducting my researches, such writings have helped to confirm my growing conviction that Monck fully deserves to rank among the great British military figures of history, in support of which, together with a full treatment of his life, I pay more attention to the quality of his writings on leadership and war, and re-assess his performance as a commander on both land and sea.

Whatever my reasons for writing the book, it could never have been completed without ready help from many remarkable and generous people.

In essence, the whole process has relied upon the professional support and guidance of Rupert Harding at Pen & Sword Books, assisted by his meticulous copy-editor Susan Milligan. Much of the actual writing has been carried out in the Prince Consort’s Military Library at Aldershot amid the warm camaraderie of its staff under Mr Tim Ward, Head of Library Services there. A number of individuals have also made notable contributions towards my researches and with the construction of the book. My good friend, Mr Paul Vickers, author, historian and Head of the Army Libraries’ Information Systems, has driven me all over Scotland on the trail of Monck’s campaigns there and has produced a sequence of excellent maps and other illustrations. Mrs Jennifer Prophet has again carried out a detailed examination of the whole first draft and made telling observations upon it, and she and her son Charles have constructed the index. Colonel Tony Guinan TD has selflessly made journeys from his home at Logierat to Edinburgh to locate much-needed sources; Mrs Jean Adams allowed me to use original material written by her late husband on the Battle of Dalnaspidal; Mr John Slater at St Nicholas Buccleuch Church, Dalkeith, after notable detective work successfully located the grave of Monck’s infant son, George; Gloria Fennell conducted me on an extended tour of Dalkeith Palace, and Mr Will Murray briefed me on historical matters at Coldstream. Mrs Christine Batten has once more performed her crucial task of transforming my scrappy and disordered script into a clear and orderly form.

Of the institutions involved, in addition to the Prince Consort’s, a number of other libraries have given much-valued support. Outstanding has been the Army Central Library under its Chief Librarian, Jeanette Cohen, and further assistance has been obtained from the British Library, the London Guildhall Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, Aldershot and Farnham Public Libraries and the Navy Records Society.

In Scotland much help has come from the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Central Library, and the Fort William and Inverness Public Libraries, and publications have been supplied by Perth, Coldstream and West Highland Museums.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife Barbara for her continuing understanding over my present obsessive commitment with George Monck and her invaluable logistical support – food, shelter and love during every inch of the author’s journey.

Any mistakes remain, of course, mine alone.

Prologue

Looking down from his cell window in St Thomas’s Tower, Colonel George Monck could see the grey waters of the Thames beyond Tower Wharf and Traitors’ Gate and, looking across the river, make out the uneven line of warehouses on its further bank. Over the course of his two-and-a-half-years’ confinement, the river’s surface had sometimes been obscured: during the summer months by mists that followed constant rain, as on that day in July 1644 when he arrived, and during winter when, with the drop in temperature at the end of the short days, his window would steam up, giving rise to the chilling damp that had afflicted so many of the Tower’s prisoners.

Monck’s journey to the Tower began on his second day at the Battle of Nantwich, when, together with other royalist soldiers, he was captured by the opposing parliamentarian general, Sir Thomas Fairfax. Prior to taking opposite sides in the civil war, Fairfax and the 36-year-old Monck had campaigned in Holland as ‘soldiers of fortune’, where both showed much promise. George Monck served in the regiment commanded successively by Robert Vere, Earl of Oxford, and George Goring (later Baron Goring) where, when not seeking opportunities to fight, he discussed the science of contemporary warfare with the unit’s erudite quartermaster, Henry Hexham. According to one of Monck’s early biographers, Fairfax so appreciated Monck’s soldierly qualities that he strongly advocated bringing over such a brave enthusiastic officer – ‘a man worth the making’¹ – to the parliamentary camp. However, during his six months at Hull as a prisoner of war Monck resisted all the attempts to make him change his allegiance and it was therefore decided that more pressure was needed.

Upon reaching London, Monck was arraigned at the bar of the House of Commons and condemned to be confined in the Tower during the House’s pleasure (or until he decided to join their forces). At about the same time Major Henry Warren, Monck’s one-time second-in-command and later commander of his old regiment, was also committed to the Tower, but as ‘a close prisoner’, where he came under a straitened and arduous regime. It is likely that Monck, too, was put into spartan accommodation for a time – to help him come to the right decision; nevertheless, quarters more comfortable than those of the Jesuit priest, Edmund Campion, some sixty years before, who had been confined in ‘the Little Ease’, a small chamber 4 feet by 4 feet where no light and little ventilation entered.²

Whatever the standard of his accommodation, like every prisoner in the Tower Monck was expected to provide his own bed and augment his inadequate food, besides paying for other necessities such as heating, laundry and writing materials, and giving his gaoler the customary bribes for other minor favours. While Monck was familiar with the privations of military campaigning, as a colonel he had staff officers to support him and was unlikely to have been short of food. Now, as a common prisoner, money was the key to making life bearable. Although his eldest brother, Thomas Monck, an ardent royalist, sent him £50 shortly after he arrived, within four months George was asking for a second subscription: ‘My necessities are such that they enforce me to intreat you to furnish me with Fifty Pounds more.’³

Apart from his brother’s contributions, Monck received another substantial gift, namely £100 in gold from Charles I, despite the king’s own severe financial problems at the time. Monck never forgot this kindness, but it too was rapidly pledged (most likely for past debts) and he was described as reputedly being forced to live for long periods ‘on a pittance of seven shillings a week’.⁴ Proof of Monck’s frustration came when, together with a request for more money, he asked his brother to try to exchange him with some parliamentary officer of equivalent seniority presently in royalist hands. His letter revealed a measure of despair alien to such a determined and positive figure: ‘I doubt all my friends have forgotten me! I earnestly intreat you therefore, if it lies in your power to remember me concerning my liberty; and so in haste I rest. Your faithful brother and servant, George Monck.’⁵

For a man who seldom wasted words, he may have felt there was little more to say to his own brother, although there could have been no doubting his desire to resume active soldiering. What Monck plainly did not know was that Prince Rupert had already offered to exchange him for the parliamentary soldier Colonel Sir Robert Pye, who before his capture had performed well in the armies of Essex and Fairfax. But Monck’s worth was considered to be much greater and Parliament rejected the offer. If Monck went on refusing to change his coat he had little chance of an early release and so, like others confined in the Tower, he began taking stock of his life and for the first time in his life commenced serious writing.

Such writing in the case of churchman Thomas More had included a treatise upon the passion of Christ, while Monck’s fellow West Countryman, Sir Walter Ralegh, composed personal and majestic poetry, including a ‘prisoner’s sonnet’ that ended with the lamentation:

But now close kept, as captives wonted are

That food, that heat, that light I know no more

Despair bolt up my doors, and I alone

Speak to dead walls, but those hear not my moan.⁶

It was not within Monck’s capabilities to have written such a religious tract or sonnet nor, despite his plaintive note to his brother, did he ever anticipate the dire fate of a More or Ralegh. What he could do, though, was to consider the nature and requirements of his own profession, including a soldier’s place within the state. The result was his monumental Observations upon Military and Political Affairs, which owed much to those earlier discussions with Henry Hexham, although Monck’s appraisal went considerably further than that of Hexham’s own writings.

Evidently not all Monck’s time was spent in writing, for he also conducted a major liaison with a woman, which was to result in a lifelong commitment. While in the Tower the unmarried and unattached soldier met Anne or Nan Clarges, eleven years his junior, who as a trained milliner had the task of looking after the wealthier prisoners’ linen. Anne had been married at the age of thirteen to a perfumer, Thomas Ratsford or Radford, who lived in the City of London near the Exchange; she became Monck’s mistress and they were married in 1654, after Thomas Ratsford had died.

Anne Ratsford has been heavily criticized by Samuel Pepys in his diary and by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon in his acclaimed but highly partial history of the time, for her humble birth and for certain shortcomings in her personal and domestic arrangements, but they were both heavily biased against her – if not downright antagonistic towards her. Anne was undoubtedly the one woman in Monck’s life who was devoted to him and who, together with her brother, the physician Thomas Clarges (subsequently knighted by Charles II), played a definitive part in Monck’s manoeuvrings at the time of the Restoration.

While in the Tower Monck engaged in long discussions with Matthew Wren, an ardent royalist and former High Church bishop of Ely, and at the point of his release, when he was bound for Ireland to fight on Parliament’s behalf, he reputedly asked Wren for his blessing, telling him that he was ‘going into Ireland against those bloody rebels, but he hoped he should one day do his Majesty Service against the Rebels here’.⁷

In spite of his seemingly unguarded comments to Wren, Monck’s stay in the Tower intensified a natural caution in revealing his personal convictions. His strong sense of soldierly duty, relish for fighting and illimitable courage would remain unchanged, but after his incarceration, although Oliver Cromwell would rightly trust in Monck’s loyalty to him, Monck was prepared to practise a new degree of equivocation, if not clear deception, to cloak his deepest beliefs.

Part I

The Formative Years

Chapter 1

The Mercenary Soldier 1625—38

He has departed, withdrawn, gone away, broken out.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, In Catilinam

Like John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who campaigned so notably some fifty years later, George Monck came from a long-standing West Country family facing serious financial problems. In both cases their straitened circumstances drove them to become the most accomplished and bravest of soldiers and ingrained in them a fear of poverty that drove them later to accumulate great fortunes.

The Monck family’s association with North Devon reputedly stretched back to the time of William the Conqueror, who granted the estate of Potheridge near Torrington to William le Moyne. Legend has it that subsequently one of the family was a medieval monk who, in order to enjoy his inheritance of Potheridge, reverted from the celibate to normal life, thereby giving the family the name of Monk or Monck.¹ By whatever means they acquired the name, the Moncks enjoyed the distinction of having some royal blood in their family line, notably through an illegitimate son of King Edward IV, Arthur Plantagenet, who was created Lord Lisle in 1523. Lord Lisle’s second wife, Honor, had a daughter Frances, who, by marrying a Thomas Monck, became George Monck’s great-grandmother on his father’s side.² A second royal link, more tenuous still, came from George’s grandfather’s grandmother, who as coheiress of Richard Champernown of Insworth had brought him the Cornish bondage and kinship with King John through Richard, King of the Romans, and his son, the Earl of Cornwall.³ However attenuated such royal links might be, they would subsequently give George Monck’s fervent supporters additional cause for underpinning his candidature for Protector of the State when the post was vacated by the Cromwells.

George was born on 6 December 1608 at the family home of Great Potheridge, the fourth of ten children to Sir Thomas Monck and his wife Elizabeth, whose own landowning family came from Maydworthy, near Exeter. When three days old the infant was christened in the chapel of Holy Trinity, Landcross, where the adjacent manor house was occupied by his aunt Margaret, wife of affluent landowner Thomas Giffard. Financial reasons probably led to its taking place there: the wealthy Giffards could keep the ceremony ‘in-house’ and prevent George’s ardently royalist father – who had inherited a heavily encumbered estate – from having to show himself and risk being hounded by agents representing his creditors.

Because of his father’s monetary problems, George was looked after for some time by his maternal grandfather, Sir George Smyth, a formerly wealthy Exeter merchant after whom he was named. During this period Sir George would have assumed responsibility for his grandson’s schooling, which probably took place at Exeter Grammar School. The Smyths lived in good style, offering open hospitality to their circle of friends, and at such gatherings their robust and confident young charge, however sparing with words, was likely to have made his mark, as also when visiting his relatives in the region.

George Smyth’s eldest son lived at Larkbere close by, while Sir Thomas Monck’s sister Frances, who was married to Sir Lewis Stukeley, Vice Admiral of Devon, lived at Farringdon near Exeter. Sir Lewis was a close friend of Sir Walter Ralegh, who visited Farringdon before his final voyage, and it is just possible that he met young George there. Whether he did or not, the boy was old enough to have known about Ralegh’s earlier successes as well as the tragedy of his last expedition, when on his return he was arrested by Stukeley, his former friend, and subsequently executed on Tower Hill. George could also have travelled to nearby Bideford to meet Sir Bevil Grenville, his uncle by marriage, the grandson of that audacious sailor of Elizabethan times, Sir Richard Grenville.

With such connections George may well have dreamt of the adventures that might lie before him, for there is no doubt that he would have heard about the stirring deeds of his past relatives. His great-uncle had sailed with the famous Devonian sailor Francis Drake⁴ and died at Peniche in Spain, while another uncle, Arthur, had been killed during the English defence of Ostend in 1602. With such prominent and proud kinsmen what might he be capable of achieving?

Whatever his hopes, during the summer of 1625 – when Monck was not yet seventeen – a notable incident occurred which was to determine his choice of career and affect him for the rest of his life. In that year Charles I was progressing through Devon and Cornwall on his way to inspect his expeditionary force assembling at Plymouth and Falmouth, an army of ten regiments, each of 1,000 soldiers, due to be carried in more than a hundred ships, for an attack on Spain, and to be commanded by the Duke of Buckingham, the King’s favourite – although he would shortly withdraw and give way to Edward Cecil, later Viscount Wimbledon. The force had the benefit of the able veteran Sir John Burroughs as both regimental commander and its chief of staff, but nevertheless it was far from impressive; most of its soldiers had been pressed into service at the last minute and a good proportion of the ships were in poor condition. The King and Buckingham mounted the expedition to gain their revenge against Spain and its opposition to Charles’s intended marriage to the Spanish Infanta, but there was a secondary motive in the hope that such an attack on Catholic Europe would allay fears in Britain concerning the King’s actual marriage to the Catholic Princess Henrietta Maria of France. The aim (agreed after the fleet had set off) was to occupy the Spanish port of Cadiz prior to ambushing the Spanish treasure fleet returning from the West Indies. Dual objectives spell danger for any campaign, especially when, as in this case, the projected attack on Cadiz was modelled on that made in 1596 by the Earl of Essex, since when its defences had been strengthened.

Whatever the expedition’s prospects, its relevance for the young George Monck was soon to become apparent. At this time the majority of the Devon nobility, including Sir Thomas Monck, strongly supported the King and all were eager to pay their respects to him. However, with so many demands for debt standing against Sir Thomas, any attempt to participate meant certain arrest. Remarkably, his father selected young George to visit the under-sheriff of the county, Nicholas Battyn, with a substantial present, hoping ‘that he might with liberty and freedom attend upon his Majesty’⁵ for ‘he did