The struggle in the council lasted nearly a fortnight, but in the end Cromwell prevailed. The “Agreement of the People” was converted into a series of proposals to be offered to Parliament, instead of being accepted as a constitution to be imposed on people and Parliament. The demand for universal suffrage became a request for the extension of the franchise. Monarchy and the House of Lords were not to be swept away altogether, but henceforth limited in authority and subordinated to the House of Commons. The old constitution was to be preserved and amended, but not superseded by a new one.
By this time, however, even those officers who were anxious to retain the monarchy had begun to doubt whether it was possible to retain the King. For some weeks past their negotiations with Charles had been completely broken off, and distrust of his sincerity had become general. It was well known that he was intriguing with the commissioners who had lately arrived in England from the Scottish Parliament, and very little was expected from the propositions which the English Parliament was preparing to send to him. The democratic party—the Levellers, as they were now termed—were demanding not only his dethronement, but his punishment. On November 11, 1647, Colonel Harrison, in a committee of the Council of the Army, denounced the King as a man of blood, whom they ought to bring to judgment. All Cromwell said in reply was, that there were cases in which for prudential reasons the shedder of blood might be allowed to escape unpunished. David, for instance, had allowed Joab to escape the penalty due for the murder of Abner, “lest he should hazard the spilling of more blood, in regard the sons of Zeruiah were too strong for him.” If the King deserved punishment, he concluded, it was rather the duty of Parliament than the army to do justice upon him. In any case, Cromwell was resolved to keep the King safe from the threatened attempts of the Levellers against his life. “I pray have a care of your guard,” he wrote to his cousin, Colonel Whalley, “for if such a thing should be done, it would be accounted a most horrid act.”
The same night the King escaped from the custody of Colonel Whalley at Hampton Court, and on November 15th news came that he had reached Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight. Contemporary pamphleteers and memoir writers often put forward the theory that Cromwell frightened the King into this flight from Hampton Court in order to forward his own ambitious designs. This is the view expressed in the well-known lines of Marvell, which relate how
Twining subtle fears with hope
He wove a net of such a scope
As Charles himself might chase
To Carisbrooke’s narrow case,
That thence the royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn.
There is no evidence in support of this theory. In the long run, the King’s flight was one of the causes of his dethronement and execution, and so of Cromwell’s elevation to supreme power. At the moment, it increased Cromwell’s difficulties, and added to the dangers which beset the Government. At Hampton Court the King was in the safe hands of Colonel Whalley, Cromwell’s cousin, who could be relied upon to observe the orders of the General. At Carisbrooke he was in the hands of Colonel Hammond—a connection indeed of Cromwell’s by his marriage with a daughter of John Hampden, but a man as to whose action under “the great temptation” of the King’s appeal to his loyalty, Cromwell was painfully uncertain. Cromwell’s letters to Hammond prove this. For the next six weeks the question whether Hammond would obey Fairfax and the Parliament, or allow Charles to go where he chose, remained unsettled.