Cromwell's Failed State and the Monarchy

By Timothy Venning

The history of Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived Commonwealth is a tale of regicide, dictatorship, internal conflict and war in seventeenth-century Britain.

After defeating King Charles I in the English-British Civil Wars, Oliver Cromwell established the Commonwealth of England. Under this unique experiment in the governance of Britain, the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland were united in the Protectorate, with Cromwell as Lord Protector, 1649 to 1660. But this ambitious new state would soon collapse.

Cromwell faced turbulence and problems from all sides. There were political, religious, and constitutional dilemmas at home and military threats from abroad—even from the Dutch, the Protectorate's natural ally. Finally, with Cromwell's death in 1658 and succession of his son, the hapless Richard Cromwell, the 'failed state' collapsed with the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. Thus Britain returned to royal, aristocratic and gentry rule.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526764225

Timothy Venning

Timothy Venning obtained his BA, followed by PhD at King's College, University of London, on Cromwell's Foreign Policy and is a gifted historian, deep and critical researcher and attractive writer, with wide range of historical interests. He can slip easily and effectually into early history, the middle ages and to the early modern period with the academic rigour, accessibility, and with both non-specialists, students and academic reference in mind.

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Part I

1646–8: Aborted Settlements

Chapter 1

Potential Resolutions After the Civil War: Did Any of Them Stand a Chance?

Bad faith in 1646–8: but only on one side?

All the proposed peace-settlements between defeated king and victorious Parliament and army in 1646–8 failed. But did the king always intend any negotiation to be a ‘stop-gap’, and if he ever considered signing any terms was this only until he could safely repudiate it? Was any agreement that he signed up to bound to fail later, due to this? From the balance of probability and observation of his complex (and mutually contradictory) manoeuvres with diverse factions, he always negotiated in bad faith and would not have been sincere in any agreement that he had signed. He would have been ready to revoke any English agreement if it had seemed opportune if he had a Scottish ‘Engager’ or Irish Catholic army to call upon. His insincerity was already well-known – as illustrated by his willingness to use foreign Catholics against Englishmen, once his private letters had been captured after the battle of Naseby. As early as 1641 he had joined the moderate Scots Covenanter commander Montrose, then alienated from the ruling clique around Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll (‘King Campbell’), in plotting a coup against Argyll while he was in Edinburgh – a visit meant to be to graciously accede to his reduction to a figurehead ruler by the militant Covenanters. While signing a treaty with Argyll’s faction he was also plotting to arrest their leader – so could he have done the same to the English Parliamentary leadership in 1646–7?

The whole question of the ‘Petitioner Peers’ (the Earl of Warwick’s English ultra-Protestant, pro-Covenanter group of ‘godly’ aristocrats) and their MP allies in 1640–2 turning Charles into a powerless ‘puppet’ sovereign forced to act on their advice – a ‘Doge of Venice’ as he said – rested on his untrustworthiness.¹ This would now recur in the postwar settlement, with the added new hazard of hostility to the warmongering and ‘Papist’ king by sections of the New Model Army soldiery and the threat of them disrupting any settlement agreed by their social superiors. On the one hand the situation had been improved by the flight abroad of the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria and other ‘bad influences’ on Charles, who had arguably pushed him into such actions as the attempt to arrest the Five Members in January 1642, and moderate royalists such as Sir Edward Hyde had persuaded Charles to pose as the protector of his people against an unscrupulous minority of peers and MPs who had pushed England into civil war for their own greedy ends. But Charles had always been susceptible to the wilder plans of his ‘hard-line’ royalist officers – the original ‘Cavaliers’ – however unlikely they were to work in practice. He had been encouraging Catholic Irishmen and Europeans to invade England as late as 1645, as seen by his correspondence captured at the battle of Naseby, and in Ireland he had gone behind the back of his local commander-in-chief the Marquis of Ormonde to secretly make offers to the rebel Catholic government at Kilkenny – the ‘Papists’ who had been behind the massacres of Protestants in the autumn 1641 rebellion. The liklihood of Charles ever really negotiating in ‘good faith’ even as a prisoner in 1646–7 is small. It was his wife, not Charles, who was the more flexible character on the question of a temporary submission to the religious demands of his captors, eg taking the Covenant. Henrietta Maria and the French ambassador Montreuil both advocated Charles signing up to the Covenant (temporarily) to gain political leverage with the Calvinist Covenanter regime; but Charles ignored them.

The Covenanter regime had already achieved this political objective in the terms of the Treaty of Edinburgh in August 1641. Now he had been defeated and a similar sort of treaty restricting his powers in England was in consideration by the victors. But his poor record did not prevent the Parliamentary civilian and military leadership from continuing to negotiate with the king as his agreement was necessary to restore a stable form of traditionally monarchical government that would last. The men who had led attempts to politically neuter Charles in 1640–2, indeed, had mostly lost power by 1646 and been replaced with lower-class generals and MPs who had less personal experience of dealing with the devious king; the Earl of Essex was in eclipse after losing his command in 1645 and was soon to die, the Earl of Warwick was still Lord Admiral but in political eclipse, and the Earl of Manchester was an enemy of the New Model Army’s second-in-command Oliver Cromwell. This was arguably a new chance for Charles, had he taken it – though one senior ‘Independent’ MP, Sir Henry Vane junior (son of a former Secretary of State and so with some experience of Court), had been speaking of installing a new king back in 1644 in the ‘run-up’ to Marston Moor so was hostile to Charles. Crucially, Cromwell – more politically involved in post-war planning than his senior, ‘Lord General’ Sir Thomas Fairfax – hardly knew the king and had had little to do with him prior to 1646. It will be seen that his distrust of Charles arose later, in the second half of 1647. The socially conservative factions among the war-victors – the majority – could not conceive of a constitutional solution without a king, though increasingly the possibility was mentioned of another, more malleable sovereign – such as his youngest son Henry, born in 1640, as a puppet-ruler. The potential of the Elector Palatine, Charles’ eldest nephew Charles Louis, may also have been considered by men as important as Sir Henry Vane (junior) while the Elector was in London in 1644–5. The king had made the Elector accompany him on his march on the Commons to arrest the ‘Five Members’ in 1642, possibly to alienate the latter and their peer allies from him. The popularity of the Elector’s mother Elizabeth, the fabled ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia whose marriage to the ‘Protestant hero’ Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate in 1613 had been hugely popular in England, was another advantage for him. Could he replace his unreliable uncle as king of England? The European ‘peacetalks’ to end the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, which would restore the Palatinate to Charles Louis, were underway as of early 1646 but not yet complete; in any case the Elector could have handed a restored Palatinate on to a younger brother, either ex-royalist senior general Prince Rupert or Prince Maurice.

The crucial factor as of 1646 was likely to be Ireland, where the illusion of a Catholic army sent by the rebel Confederation at Kilkenny (backed by the Pope, but including some ex-royalist Anglo-Irish peers) continued to hold out hope of his deliverance. The harsh terms which his unofficial envoy, the Earl of Glamorgan (heir to the Marquis of Somerset, the major Catholic landowner in South Wales) had had to accept from the Kilkenny regime – practical autonomy for the new Dublin regime and its Catholic state church from any English control – meant that such an alliance would alienate his rebel English Protestant subjects. Unfortunately for the king, it was the ‘hard-liners’ who were in the ascendancy at Kilkenny not the more moderate peers, the ‘ultras’ being led by the Catholic clergy and abetted by their best generals, Owen Roe O’Neill and Thomas Preston – both former mercenaries in Spain with no tie of loyalty to Charles. But if the Presbyterian MPs running the leadership of the Commons in London and the Scots Covenanters both demanded that Charles abandon the Anglican church in any treaty did he have anything to lose by preferring the Irish? After all, he had already accepted being politically and religiously reduced to a cipher in Scotland by the triumphant Covenanters in 1641; accepting Glamorgan’s plan was the Irish Catholic equivalent of this. His logic in agreeing to the demands of the Kilkenny regime (led by the belligerent Papal legate, Rinuccini) would have been the same as the logic of accepting the Scots treaty in 1641 – handing over real power in a ‘Celtic’ peripheral state to a non-Anglican, autonomist regime in order to get their help against the English ‘rebels’. But he was personally more agreeable to Catholics – a community mostly loyal to him in England and major contributors to his ‘war effort’ there – than he was to the truculent and religiously iconoclastic Covenanters. After all, the Catholic European monarchies were bastions of royal power and obedient subjects, besides being his artistic exemplars from the 1620s and 1630s. Charles could live with an autonomist Catholic Ireland with a restored Catholic Church easier than with a Covenanter regime in Scotland and Presbyterian regime in England.

As Charles made clear without any reciprocal compromise by the English and Scots Presbyterians through 1645–8, the question of religion – toleration for Anglican worship – was the crucial ‘stickingpoint’ for him in any negotiation. He had already refused to budge on the matter of transforming the English state church from an Anglican one, with bishops, to a Presbyterian one in the abortive negotiations with the Parliamentarians at Uxbridge early in 1645. Indeed, the obstinacy of the current leadership of the Commons on religion was to give him unlikely common ground with the army ‘Grandees’, the senior officers led by Fairfax and Cromwell, who were worried at a Presbyterian state church restricting toleration for ‘tender consciences’ among the Independent sects.This was less of a ‘sticking point’ to Fairfax, a moderate Presbyterian, than to Cromwell – but the latter was increasingly the dominant figure in the army, devoted to the cause of his ‘godly’ Independent soldiers and their right to worship how they pleased free of Church control in postwar England. The danger to Cromwell and his fellow Independents was that once the war ended the new, autonomous Independent sects that had grown up in the army and around England would be forcibly suppressed by a disciplinarian Church, as other proto-Presbyterian sects had been in the 1630s – but by a Presbyterian state church this time. The majority of MPs in 1646 were Presbyterian, and their allies controlled the ‘rump’ of the Lords and had taken over the ecclesiastical organization of London too – so did they intend to be as authoritarian and persecutory as Archbishop Laud’s ‘High Anglicans’ had been? In this scenario, the king could be a valuable ally for the Independents by refusing to accept a centralised Presbyterian state church or any renewal of the Church disciplinary organization which had been legislatively demolished in 1641.

An early agreement with Parliament or the Scots, Summer–Autumn 1646

The king’s position in England and Scotland was militarily hopeless as he slipped out of the East gates of Oxford in disguise in the early hours of 27 April 1646, pretending to be the attendant of his companions Michael Hudson and John Ashburnham. His last local army had been defeated at Stow-on-the-Wold a few weeks previously, his main force in the west under Sir Ralph Hopton had surrendered on 14 March, Exeter had surrendered on 13 April, and Sir Thomas Fairfax’s New Model Army was closing in on Oxford. His departure was a necessity to preserve some freedom of manoeuvre; it had been made clear in Parliament’s reply to his initial offer to come to London in January and in that of 26 March to his second offer that they were in no mood to be generous.² He was expected to give satisfaction for the past and security for the future, on both constitutional and religious matters, before he could be accepted back into sovereign authority.

Given the terms proposed both in the ‘Eighteen Propositions’ of 1642 and at the abortive peace-talks at Uxbridge in 1645, this would mean surrender of control of the militia and navy for a long period, the prosecution or exile of a list of his leading supporters, and religious reform inimical to his Anglican beliefs – a full Presbyterian state church as favoured by the majority in the Commons and their Scots allies. A slim hope lay in the fact that the majority of MPs in Parliament and the ‘hard-line’ Presbyterian divines in the Assembly of Divines meeting at Westminster, the latter backed by the Scots, were at odds over the supremacy of laity or clergy in the vital matter of Church discipline. The MPs asserted the right of the laity – i.e. themselves – to determine judicial matters, and linked this to the right of Parliament to decide on legal matters; the Scots and their clerical allies preferred the right of the clergy to decide them. Indeed, in April Parliament responded to the Assembly’s vote for untrammelled clerical independence on exercising Church discipline that this was a breach of Parliamentary privilege.³ Could Charles benefit from this split among the Presbyterians in the two nations, and help to arrange a nominally Presbyterian Church in England that either retained bishops (with minimal powers to control local congregations) or at least allowed toleration to other sects? His own preferred terms were that the Anglican church structure, i.e. episcopacy – and freedom of worship for Anglicans using the 1559 prayer-book – be maintained, and he wrote to the Queen that this was non-negotiable. But in his offer in March to the Independents, who were equally averse to a disciplinarian state church run by Presbyterian elders, he suggested that a formal Presbyterian church might be unavoidable for a settlement in the immediate future but he and they could then work together to restore toleration.⁴

Ultimately, the alternative idea of the king joining the Scots army at Newark implied using them as a weapon against a recalcitrant English Parliament and/or the New Model Army. Local civilian resentment at the cost and abuses arising from Scots military occupation in parts of England was rising, and so was Parliamentary mistrust of the Scots’ motives – not least now that the majority of MPs were at odds with the Scots over the nature of an English Presbyterian church settlement. The Scots leadership was not monolithic, and it included moderate Presbyterian peers (eg Callander, Loudoun, and Lauderdale) who had signed up to the Covenant and worked with the rebels but did not want to see their king lose power to the Scots militant clergy and their ally Argyll and be reduced to a cipher. These men could be used to undermine Argyll’s uncompromising stance to the king, as Charles had endeavoured to use Montrose in 1641 – and they had access to their own tenants and assorted allies who were part of the Scots army that Charles now sought to hire to challenge or attack the New Model. Fear of ecclesiastical supremacy over the laity could work for Charles’ benefit in Scotland as well as in England, and indeed his own commander Montrose, now defeated but still at large in the Highlands, had started off as a Covenanter general in 1638–9. Having backed his use of Highland and Irish Catholics to terrorise the Protestant Lowlands in 1644–5, Charles was now luring him to abandon any military hopes and link up with the moderate Covenanter peers to strengthen this party.⁵ Those of this group of peers who were now working with Parliament in London or were in Leslie’s army at Newark had already been in contact with him in 1645–6, with hints that they could force a settlement on their colleagues to save the Stuart monarchy in Scotland from Argyll and the militant clerics. The situation would have been far better for him had Montrose still had a viable army and been a major factor in Scots politics; but the rash Marquis (then briefly master of most of the Lowlands) had lost most of his troops in a catastrophic attack on his camp at Philiphaugh in the Borders by Leslie in September 1645. He had had to flee back to the Highlands and now had only a few hundred men in arms there – but it should be remembered that his most effective (though Catholic) lieutenant, Alasdair Macdonald (‘MacColkitto’), and his Irish Catholic/ West Highland levies had not been at Philiphaugh as they had left Montrose’s army earlier to take their loot home and rest. It had only been a smallish army, minus most of its Highlanders, that had been destroyed at Philiphaugh. Could Montrose raise new troops and lure MacColkitto back to form another viable army in 1647 and link up with anti-Argyll Protestant peers? Charles was evidently hoping for such an alliance, possibly not realising the bitterness caused in lowland Scotland by the huge casualties which Montrose’s men had inflicted in their victories on the ‘middling sort’ of Protestanttownsmen and tenants who would be needed to form any future Scots army. There was also the Marquis of Hamilton, Charles’ distant cousin and former lieutenant in his unsuccessful attempts to secure a settlement with the Covenanters short of surrender and then to mount an invasion in 1638–9. He was currently a nominal ally of the Covenanters and was to emerge in 1648 as leader of the moderate peers who preferred to keep the Scots monarchy with some power and to intervene in England, the ‘Engagers’. Montrose’s defeat and the Covenanter triumph now made him a major factor again, and he renewed his attempts to reconcile the king with the moderate Covenanters – the men who would indeed invade England in 1648 to save Charles’ crown. Hamilton duly turned up while Charles was in Scots custody at Newcastle to urge him to accept the Covenant to help this course, but was not that warmly received.

The problem of the Scots alliance was that Charles would be required to take the Covenant and publicly back a Presbyterian church in both countries if he was to achieve any agreement with the Scots. The Queen had urged him to accept this as a way of buying time and re-establishing some authority, as had her countryman the French ambassador in London, Montreuil. It was Montreuil who arranged for the approach to the Scots army which led to Charles’ decision to go to Newark rather than to London after he left Oxford. Indeed, it was Montreuil’s unduly optimistic ‘reading’ of the Scots commissioners’ attitude that had been the decisive act in Charles going to Newark to trust himself to the Scots. His letter of 1 April 1646 to Charles, after a visit to the Scots, had promised that the latter would treat him in ‘all freedom and conscience’ and help him to restore his position in England.⁶ But the rigidity with which the Scots insisted on having their way about a Presbyterian church argues that either Montreuil was inaccurate or he assumed that Charles would put his need of Scots help above any quibbles over the form of Church. When Charles arrived and heard the Scots’ terms on 19 April he complained in a letter to his wife that they were ‘abominable relapsed rogues’,⁷ so Montreuil was clearly naïve about his expected reaction. How much responsibility does the ambassador bear for the king’s presence at Newark?

The current terms desired by Parliament were set out in a declaration on 17 April, they having ordered the public burning of the papers presented to them by the Scots Commissioners (modified to just burning the ‘offensive’ preface) setting out the Scots terms and demanding a speedy agreement with the king.⁸ The ancient and fundamental government of the Kingdom was to be maintained, though in line with the Covenant as promised to the Scots in the 1643 alliance; the Church was to be Presbyterian but under the jurisdiction of Parliament not its own local clerical commissioners, as necessary to prevent anarchy and petty tyranny. ‘Tender consciences’ would be satisfied in the matter of toleration as far as was concordant with the ‘word of God’, which was left ambiguous and thus open to a tolerant interpretation and comprehension of Anglicans and Independents – provided that the votes were there for that in the Commons. In civil matters the king should abandon all powers necessary to prevent a repetition of the civil wars, justice was to be administered by the traditional courts of law (thus ending arbitrary jurisdictions under emergency wartime powers by army and county commissioners), and the subject was to be eased of wartime burdens – particularly taxes – as soon as possible. The Scots were warned that the Covenant should be enforced only as determined by the Parliament that had voted to accept it, not at Scots requirements.⁹

Charles’ options – London, the Scots army, or taking refuge abroad.

As departure from his wartime ‘capital’ of Oxford loomed he did consider going to London to intervene in person, but despite the possibilities of pro-royalist sentiment in the City assisting popular demonstrations for an early, lenient settlement (or even a royalist rising there) he decided against it as he reached Hillingdon later on 27 April. Instead, he persevered in his original intention of 22 April to head for the Fens, with the port of King’s Lynn his probable destination. There he would be in reach of the Scots army at Newark or of a ship to sail to the Prince of Wales’ headquarters on Jersey or the Queen on the Continent. Had he persevered in going to London he would have been an embarrassment to Parliament, which was not united in its attitude to the form of a peace-treaty. The Church issue was the major sticking-point – between the Presbyterians and Independents (the latter faction bolstered in the Commons during 1644–6 by the nature of many ‘Recruiter’ MPs elected to fill seats vacated by absent royalists) and between both and the Scots. Charles’ captured correspondence after Naseby and the terms his representative Glamorgan had reached with the hated Irish Catholic ‘murderers’ of 1641 at Kilkenny showed he could not be trusted. However he still had strong cards to play as the Head of State and symbol of the law, his consent being necessary for peace as the ‘keystone of the arch of government’ to all but a few radicals as of 1646 – provided he gave satisfaction on the basics of a treaty as stated in Parliament in April. Many politically-interested peers were also active in London, with nothing to gain from the sociopolitical danger of a permanently fettered king or the religious danger of an autonomous Presbyterian church run by its militant clerics. The supposedly repentant but distrusted ex-royalist peers in London (e.g. Holland, a former senior court official and ally of the Queen), and those of neutralist political views, were politically marginal but there were still senior Parliamentarian figures led by Essex, former commander-inchief, and Warwick (Holland’s brother), former Lord Admiral and still head of the Navy Commission. They had wanted the king politically neutered in 1640–2 and were in favour of a Presbyterian state church, but were monarchist in sentiment. As of April 1646 Essex still retained great prestige and affection, as was to be shown by the popular reaction at his death that autumn and his grand obsequies as a national hero.¹⁰

These peers would have welcomed the king’s apparent willingness to help rebuild the disrupted pre-war order; one moderate Parliamentarian peer, the Earl of Pembroke, had told the king’s adviser Sir Edward Hyde at the Uxbridge negotiations in 1645 that he had no sympathy with the lowborn extremists in his own party (as recorded in Hyde/Clarendon’s later history of the war) and he cannot have been alone. Saving some power for Charles and trying to reconstitute the pre-War social order would help them prevent eclipse by ‘upstarts’ such as Cromwell and his alarmingly radical New Model Army allies, not to mention agitators such as the proto-democrat John Lilburne. If Charles had turned up in London in April 1646 they could have been expected to urge a swift settlement with him – provided that he accepted their cherished new Presbyterian state church, which he had not in 1642 or 1645. Whether Charles proved any more trustable in the long term than he had in 1641–2 was another matter.

The Scots: Charles’ first wrong choice of destination, April 1646?

Charles could not be sure of the Scots giving him any military backing as their king unless he became a Presbyterian – anathema to his view of theology and of the role of bishops in the Church, from which they had been evicted in Scotland in ‘revolution’ of 1637–9 to his fury. He would have had to unequivocally back the Presbyterians’ version of a settlement in England without bishops as well as Scotland to win over the current Parliamentarian civilian leadership, with English MPs such as Denzel Holles and Sir Philip Stapleton as hostile to bishops as were the leading ‘rebel’ English peers Warwick and Essex and as was Argyll in Scotland. He had already expressed his anger at the discovery that the Scots were more obdurate on these matters than the optimistic Montreuil had promised. It would have made sense for him to decide he could not trust himself to their army and accordingly to go on to the port of King’s Lynn and sail to Jersey or the Continent, but after a four-day halt at nearby Downham Market (in south-west Norfolk, near to Lynn) from 30 April he decided to go on to the Scots at Newark. Politically, this was a major error as from now on until his escape from Hampton Court in late 1647 his fate would lie with others’ decisions – but he clearly hoped to use his prestige and charm to win over the Scots moderates to back him with a minimum of concessions. Making his way to his intended rendezvous with Montreuil at an inn in Southwell early on 5 May, he was joined by the Ambassador and a group of Scots commissioners whom the latter had contacted, led by the Earl of Loudoun. Unfortunately, the inexperienced Montreuil had dealt with a relatively insignificant member of the Scots leadership at Newark, the Earl of Dunfermline, whose assurances of the king being treated with great respect were not carried out by the others involved; the senior, the Earl of Lothian, had a grudge against the king for having him arrested in Oxford in 1643. Charles was carried off to the Scots army headquarters at Newark and required to order the English royalist governor of the Castle, Sir Thomas Glemham, to surrender before he was given any dinner.¹¹

Ignoring Parliament’s order to the Scots to hand the king over to the governor of Warwick, the Scots took him north to Newcastle on 12 May; he sent orders to the governor of Oxford to surrender too to show his goodwill to Parliament and wrote to them offering to agree to the terms he had rejected at Uxbridge in 1645.¹² But once he was in the Scots army’s hands he lost his freedom of manoeuvre, was kept under armed guard as effectively a hostage rather than their sovereign, and was expected to sign up to the Covenant with distinguished Presbyterian divines duly turning up at his lodgings to endeavour to convert him. As he had made it clear to the Queen and to future archbishop Gilbert Sheldon¹³ this was not an option for him – though both the Catholic Queen and the flexible Montreuil believed that his submission was excusable and desirable as politically necessary to secure the support of Scots troops. Montreuil expected Charles to regard London as worth a Covenant as his flexible father-in-law Henri IV had regarded Paris as worth a mass, but misjudged his stubbornness (or honesty). Nor would the Scots regime do Charles the favour of promising a pardon for any of his surviving royalist commanders in Scotland if they surrendered, with the current deathsentence against Montrose being upheld. The royalist leader obeyed the king’s orders in June to leave the country rather than fight on,¹⁴ though the latter might have done more good to the king given the potential Montrose still possessed to use meagre resources with great skill and tie down Covenanter armies. His lieutenant Alasdair ‘MacColkitto’ Macdonald was left holding out in Kintyre and soon returned to Ulster. Charles showed no signs of accepting the arguments for the Presbyterian cause that were put to him by Alexander Henderson (who died soon afterwards)¹⁵ and other distinguished advocates, or of signing up quickly to the Scots terms for a settlement in their kingdom.

After Charles chose to trust the Scots army. A return to the Covenanter – and English Presbyterian – plans of 1641 to make the king a nominal figurehead in both realms?

Charles’ arrival in Scots hands increased Parliamentary mistrust of the intentions of both parties, not least as a Royal letter of April to Ormonde was intercepted and showed that Charles expected the Scots to use their army on his behalf against Parliament.¹⁶ The royalist commander and Lord Deputy of Ireland, the Marquis of Ormonde, whom Charles had hoped bizarrely to bring the Confederates and the Ulster Scots Presbyterians together in a grand anti-Parliament army, was asked by the king (at the Scots’ request) to abandon any such negotiations.¹⁷ The heavy defeat of Monro’s Ulster army by the rebel Catholic Confederates under Owen Roe O’Neill at Benburb on 5 June confirmed the military resurgence of the Catholic cause and the threat that the Covenanters would be driven out of all Ulster, causing Argyll to hasten to Parliament in London for aid. But it strengthened the intractability of both Charles, who hoped for the military humbling of his obstinate Presbyterian captors without his having to agree to their demands, and of the Confederate Catholic leadership at Kilkenny under the ‘Nuncio’, Rinuccini. Far from seeking to ally with Ormonde’s royalists to avert the danger of a Parliament-Scots attack on Catholic Ireland, the Papal envoy saw even less reason to moderate his demands towards Charles. Ironically, the victory at Benburb made the chance of a coherent royalist-Catholic alliance to aid the king less likely – and so helped to pave the way for military and religious disaster in 1649–50.

A French/royalist plan was now exposed which involved the French government paying for a joint Scots and Irish expedition to England with the Prince of Wales (who had taken refuge in Jersey after the fall of Cornwall and the Scilly Islands) sent to Dublin to lead the enterprise.¹⁸ The king’s ex-companion on his journey to Newark, Michael Hudson, was handed over to Parliament and told them that Charles had intended to create a royalist-Scots-French alliance against them.¹⁹ Indeed, even within England a few garrisons were holding out for their captive king, though this was no use to him militarily. Oxford finally surrendered to Fairfax on 25 June;²⁰ Lichfield Cathedral, Worcester, and Wallingford were protected by their strong defences as were Raglan Castle and Beaumaris in Wales (all into June) while isolated Harlech Castle was to hold out into 1647. The Isle of Man, Lundy, and the Scillies were all unreduced. The proprietory colonies in the Caribbean continued to recognize the royal government not the authority of Parliament, though the Parliamentary links of the ‘Puritan’ colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut guaranteed that they would treat the victorious ‘rebels’ with more cordiality. In these circumstances it was once again clear in London that the king could not be trusted as long as war continued in any of his dominions, particularly in Ireland. So far only the anonymous Independents whom Montreuil had spoken to in London favoured removing him in favour of one of his younger sons – of whom Prince James fell into Parliament’s hands with the surrender of Oxford. (Prince Henry, abandoned as an infant to the king’s foes by the Queen along with his older sister Elizabeth, had been in Parliamentary hands since 1642, as a ‘guest’ of successive loyal Parliamentary peers at their country homes.) The Prince of Wales, who would have had the best claim to succeed a deposed king, was safe from Parliament in Jersey and on 25 June he sailed to France to join Henrietta Maria in Paris.

The ‘Newcastle Propositions’, drawn up by the two Houses on 13 July, were delivered to Charles at that city on the 31st by envoys headed by the Earl of Pembroke.²¹ They had won the official (if insincere) backing of Argyll on his visit to London, the Covenanter leader having reassured his Parliamentary listeners of his desire to continue an unbreakable alliance rather than interfere in English politics (though he did refer to a unity of religion, i.e. Presbyterian state churches in both realms).²² The terms envisaged the surrender of the militia and navy to Parliamentary control for twenty years, with Parliament then deciding who was to take charge of them. Charles and all his subjects were to take the Covenant; a Presbyterian state church was to be imposed, after consultation with the Assembly of Divines; episcopacy was to be abolished; Catholic recusants were to be prosecuted far more firmly and their children seized for Protestant education, thus wiping out their religion in the next generation; and a long list of royalists were to be exempted from pardon. The truce in Ireland was to be annulled and the kingdom dealt with as Parliament decided. This left the precise disciplinary powers of the new church open for negotiation by Parliament and the clerics, though in practice the Presbyterians were already establishing their form of church in the City of London in June and could be expected to do so across the country without waiting for official approval from the Houses. By a Commons vote of 19 May it was agreed to pay off the Scots army with £100,000 and send it home, thus ending its capacity for blackmail; the Lords did not agree, which may imply that its Presbyterian members (led by Warwick) regarded the Scots as useful allies against the Independents.²³

According to the new French ambassador Bellievre, who arrived in London in July and then went on to Newcastle, the Presbyterian leadership there were not hopeful of the king’s concurrence and some even talked of reaching an accommodation with the Independents for imposing a settlement unilaterally without Royal approval.²⁴ The danger of trusting Charles also made the practicality of enforcing an agreement difficult, with the army leaders who had done the fighting less flexible than the civilian MPs who had not had to risk their lives. Some Independents were talking of deposing Charles in favour of his captive youngest son, the five-yearold Prince Henry, possibly as an interim ‘half-way house’ to a republic – the first sign of the radical political solution that was to be considered in 1647–8 once the army leadership had driven the Presbyterian leaders from the Commons. But the two parties were also at odds over the future of both Parliament and army after a settlement as the Presbyterians favoured the dissolution of the first and the disbandment of the second. The dissolution of Parliament as part of a settlement was popular with the war-weary populace who hoped for an end to high wartime taxation, and the disbandment of the army (except presumably for troops fighting in Ireland) would lower taxation. But the Independents feared that these measures would enable their rivals to control the elections for the next Commons, and that this hiatus – and particularly an end to a powerful army in England as a political factor – would enable the king to regain authority. (The threat of the army’s enemies controlling the elections to select the next Commons, and so prolonging their own power while the army had to be disbanded, was to re-emerge in 1652–3 and finally destroy the ‘Long Parliament’.)

The potential for a Royal/Presbyterian accommodation was also hoped for by the Queen’s party in exile in Paris, as is shown by the memorandum drawn up among her advisers (principally by Sir Kenelm Digby?) which the French ambassador Bellievre took to England. It would entail Charles abandoning his religious principles and his leading supporters and reduce him to a figurehead, but preserve some authority and give him a chance to benefit from any future political reaction in his favour among the populace.²⁵ As for Charles’ own attitude, it is symptomatic that July saw him writing to his wife asking for arrangements to be made for him to escape to France, asking Governor Washington at Worcester to hold out for another month, and giving Lord Glamorgan in Ireland permission to sign what terms he wished with the Papal nuncio Rinuccini.²⁶ His intentions were thus clear. The request to Glamorgan was particularly disastrous, as it enabled Rinuccini, a ‘hard-liner’ sent from Rome in 1645 to assume command of the rebel regime at Kilkenny, to undercut the painstaking efforts of ‘moderate’ Irish Catholic rebel peers at Kilkenny to form an alliance for the king’s rescue. The agreement that their leadership, under Ormonde’s old negotiating partner Lord Muskerry, signed with Ormonde’s envoys at Kilkenny was published in Dublin by the Lord Lieutenant on 30 July.²⁷ However the king had now undermined Ormonde’s position, and Glamorgan proceeded to negotiate a new treaty with Rinuccuni behind Ormonde’s back to confuse matters and enable Rinuccini to cite the king’s own orders in defying Muskerry’s plans. Crucially, devout Catholic enthusiast Glamorgan was more loyal to the papacy and its announced intentions for an autonomous Catholic Ireland than to the political needs of the king – though logically he was also acting to help his Catholic co-religionists in Wales by working with rather than annoying a major source of European Catholic troops. As of July 1646 a royalist force under Sir John Owen still held Conwy Castle in North Wales, with its harbour. Charles also wrote to Montrose to ask him to stay in Scotland and be prepared to ally with the reputedly mutinous Earl of Seaforth, head of the Mackenzie clan and a major Covenanter peer in Caithness.²⁸

Thanks to Charles’ support of Glamorgan, the opposition which Rinuccini now led to the Ormonde-Kilkenny treaty was capable of being presented as acceptable to the king; Ormonde was even more isolated. In any case, however, the power of papal authority would have been wielded over the devout Catholic rebels to order them to back Rinuccini, who announced the excommunication of anyone who supported the treaty. Only armed defiance of the Holy Father’s representative by leading generals like O’Neill would have enabled Muskerry and Ormonde to win a power-struggle once the clergy had obediently denounced the treaty, and this was unrealistic. The leading rebel towns and magnates thus refused to come out against Rinuccini, shutting their gates to Ormonde’s envoys, and the populace were noisily on the legate’s side; Ormonde had to abandon his attempt to march to the rescue of Muskerry’s faction in Kilkenny, though in any case he would have been outnumbered by the pro-Rinuccini forces under O’Neill. He fled back to Dublin as on 18 September Rinuccini and Owen Roe O’Neill entered Kilkenny to take over and remodel the government.²⁹ There was now no hope of Charles receiving Irish aid except on the strictest terms demanded by Rinuccini, and the leading ‘Old English’ nobles of the Muskerry faction had to flee from Kilkenny stripped of all political influence. The possibility of a ‘united front’ by the more moderate Irish nobles – those on the king’s side, fighting with Ormonde, and those on the rebel side but opposed to the untrammelled power of the clergy – had presented the king with a major hope in 1645–6, although once Rinuccini had landed his Papal backing diminished their chances of defying the ‘extremists’ and the devout Owen Roe O’Neill. The ‘centre’ had now collapsed in Irish politics, and – as in 1688–90 – the corresponding Protestant reaction from England would be even more extreme. Ormonde could see this coming; Glamorgan could not.

In this situation the safest option Charles had in autumn 1646 was to accept the Scots terms and personally take the Covenant, which would crucially strengthen the position of the less hostile Scots aristocrats among the Covenanter leadership (such as Hamilton) against Argyll’s ‘extremists’. Some moderate nobles and allied officers among the Scots army, led by Lord Callander, were reported to be willing to seize strongpoints on the king’s behalf against Argyll if he satisfied national sentiment by adopting Presbyterianism.³⁰ But when a body of Scots commissioners – from all factions – were sent to Newcastle by the Committee of Estates to demand his acquiescence with the terms on offer in mid-September he returned a negative answer, throwing away the opportunity to rally potential Scots support.³¹ He wrote to the Queen’s advisers that giving way would have been disastrous for the monarchy (7 September).³²

Argyll’s implacable political control and personal humiliations of Charles II in 1649 show what sort of treatment he and his clerical allies envisaged for a restored Stuart monarchy in Edinburgh, with the king as no more than a figurehead for a Covenanter dictatorship. This was a restatement of the political submission they had forced out of Charles I in August 1641, but this time there was no Montrose available to assist the king in overthrowing it by force of arms. The nobles who talked of a military coup on Charles’ behalf might still have succeeded, but lacked Montrose’s military ability (or his reassuring role as a leading Covenanter in 1637–9). Giving in to this form of settlement would have meant that Charles could benefit from rising resentment at Argyll’s rule and hopefully aid a conspiracy by disaffected nobles like Callander to remove him within a year or two. This combination of a ‘captive’ king under control of one faction of nobles and a rival group intending to seize power by ‘rescuing’ him was common from 15th-century and early 16thcentury Stuart history, though it had usually been adolescent not adult kings (e.g. James III and James V) who were thus used.

As the Scots army was to be paid off by their allies in January 1647 and return home, at that point Charles would have been likely to be escorted to Edinburgh to preside over the formal ratification of the Scottish settlement by the Estates.