The constitutional scheme of the army was presented to the Parliament on January 20, 1649. They did not ask that it should be imposed on the nation by law, but that it should be tendered to the nation for acceptance. It was to be circulated, somewhat as a petition, amongst the people for signatures, and if most of the supporters of the cause approved of it, steps were to be taken to give it effect. The Parliament received the Agreement with thanks, and laid it aside.
April, 1649, passed and they showed no sign of dissolving. Their feeling on the subject of a new Parliament was well expressed by Harry Marten in 1650. Marten compared the Commonwealth to the infant Moses. When Moses, he said, was found amongst the bulrushes and brought to Pharaoh’s daughter, she took care to find out the child’s mother, and to commit him to her to nurse. The Commonwealth was an infant, of weak growth and very tender constitution; nobody was so fit to nurse it as the mother who brought it forth, and till it had obtained more years and vigour they should not trust it to other hands.
In 1649, there was much to be urged in favour of this view. At home and abroad the young Republic was surrounded by enemies. In England it was threatened by Royalists, Presbyterians, and Levellers; in Europe it had no friends. The execution of Charles I. had excited universal horror amongst foreigners. There was indeed no prospect of the general league of European potentates to punish regicide, for which Royalists hoped, but both governments and peoples were hostile. In Russia, the Czar imprisoned English merchants and confiscated their goods. In Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, ministers preached sermons denouncing the English sectaries, and proving that there was no necessary connection between Protestantism and king-killing. In the United Provinces, where republicans might have expected sympathy, public opinion was equally incensed against them. The States-General addressed Charles II. as King, condoled with him on the death of his father, and allowed Rupert to equip his fleet in Dutch ports. They refused to give audience to Strickland, the English agent in Holland, and declined to recognise the new State. In May, 1649, a special ambassador from England, Dr. Dorislaus, was murdered by Scottish Royalists at The Hague, and though the Dutch Government promised redress, popular feeling secured the escape of the murderers. Much of this hostility was due to the influence of the Stadtholder, William II., whose marriage with Mary, daughter of Charles I., had made the House of Orange the one firm friend of the House of Stuart. William II. helped his brother-in-law with money and advice, and would have done more if he had been able. But Holland, the richest and most powerful of the seven provinces, was opposed to the warlike schemes of the Stadtholder and wished to remain at peace with England.
In France, the King’s death made every Englishman unpopular. The war with Spain and the distractions of France itself prevented Mazarin from assisting Charles II., but he would not recognise the Republic. The relations of England and France grew rapidly worse. The French Government forbade the importation of English draperies; the English replied by prohibiting French wines, woollen goods, and silks. French privateers and even government ships attacked English commerce, and during 1649 and 1650 took English shipping to the amount of five thousand tons, and goods worth half a million. Naturally English merchants made reprisals on French trade. Diplomatic intercourse came to a stop; one French agent was ordered to leave England, a second was turned back at the coast, and a third was dismissed almost as soon as he arrived in the country.
The hostility of France made Spain comparatively friendly. It did not recognise the Republic, but its ambassador kept up unofficial intercourse with the Council of State, and its Government maintained a real neutrality between English parties. It waited till the permanence of the new government should be assured, and in the meantime declined to help a claimant whose chances of restoration seemed precarious. Cottington and Hyde, the ambassadors whom Charles II. sent to Spain, were received with coldness, and their petitions for assistance rejected. On the other hand, Ascham, the agent of the Commonwealth, was murdered by English Cavaliers as soon as he reached Madrid (May 27, 1650), and only one of his murderers was punished. “I envy those gentlemen,” said the Spanish prime minister, “for having done so noble an action.” Political necessity might force Spain to preserve friendly relations with the Commonwealth, but the feeling of subjects and rulers alike was as hostile as that of the French.
In England itself, the reaction which began when the King became a captive was increased by the manner of his death. Ten days after the execution, there appeared in print the Eikon Basilike—the portraiture of King Charles in his solitude and sufferings. The book was really written by Dr. Gauden, but no Cavalier doubted that it contained the King’s thoughts and feelings set down by his own hand. It inspired Royalists with more fervid loyalty; converted the wavering, and touched even the indifferent. The mob began to believe that Charles had been the best of monarchs, and the meekest of martyrs. He was no longer the perfidious tyrant of politicians, but the man with the mild voice and mournful eyes whom dramatists were to glorify. Milton complained that the people, “with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except some few who yet retain in them the old English fortitude and love of freedom, are ready to fall down flat and give adoration to the image and memory of this man, who hath offered at more cunning fetches to undermine our liberties and put tyranny into an art, than any British king before him.” In his Eikonoklastes, he undertook to shatter the idol of “the inconstant, irrational, and image-doting rabble,” but failed altogether.
For the moment, the royalist party was too weak to be a serious danger. In Holland and in France, a crowd of ruined noblemen and battered soldiers waited impatiently for the chance of striking another blow against their conquerors. Already Montrose was enlisting men in Northern Europe for a fresh descent on Scotland. In his lines to the dead King, he had promised to avenge his death.
“I’ll sing thine obsequies in trumpet sounds,
And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds.”
Other exiles, with an eye to profit as well as vengeance, took to privateering. From the Irish ports, from the Isles of Man, Jersey, and Scilly, issued swarms of privateers, who infested the Channel and plundered English merchantmen. Nor were more distant seas secure. A few months later Prince Rupert, with what was left of the royal fleet, took a number of prizes in the Atlantic, made a sudden raid into the Mediterranean, intercepted homeward-bound ships off the Azores, and even spread havoc in West Indian waters. “We plough the seas for a subsistence,” wrote one of his officers, “poverty and despair being our companions, and revenge our guide.”