A history of England

by Charles Oman

The hateful illegality of the king's trial, the violence of his enemies, and the dignity of his end have half redeemed his memory. In our dislike for those who slew him we almost forget his offences. But when we condemn his slayers we must not forget their provocation. Charles had ground the nation under his heel for eleven years of tyranny. He had involved it in a bitter civil war that lasted four years more. Then, when he fell into the victors' hands, he wasted two years in shifty and evasive negotiations, which he never intended to bring to an end. Finally, from his prison he had stirred up a second and wholly unnecessary civil war. Contemplating these acts, we must allow that he brought his evil end upon himself; violent and illegal as it was, we cannot say that it was undeserved.

The Commonwealth.

The king's execution was immediately followed by the proclamation of a republic. The Independents and the army wished to be rid of the monarchy, no less than of the person of Charles. Accordingly a sweeping series of bills, passed in February, 1649, declared England a "Commonwealth," and vested its government in a single House of Commons and a Council of State. The House of Lords was abolished; of late it had been little more than a farce, for not a dozen peers had been wont to attend. But the "Rump," which now assumed to be the representative of the Commonwealth of England, was itself hardly more than a mockery. It never permitted the victims of "Pride's purge" to return to its benches, so that it was nothing better than a factious minority, depending on the swords of the army.

Scotland and Ireland.

The Rump and the army were masters of England, but in Scotland and Ireland they were as yet powerless. Ireland was entirely in the hands of the Catholic confederates, save the two towns of Dublin and Londonderry. Scotland had never laid down its arms after Preston; there was no republican party north of the Tweed, and when the news of the king's execution arrived, it only led the Scots to proclaim his son the Prince of Wales, under the name of Charles II.

Preparations for war.—Mutiny of the Levellers.

Unless England, Scotland, and Ireland were to part company, and relapse into separate kingdoms, it was obvious that the new government must try its sword upon the lesser realms. This it was fully prepared to do. In the spring of 1649 an expedition for the conquest of Ireland was ordered, and the command of it was given to the formidable Cromwell, who since the king's death had become more and more the recognized chief of the army, Fairfax having stepped into the background. Before the expedition sailed, however, Cromwell had no small trouble with his soldiery. The bad example which the generals and colonels had set in driving out the Long Parliament and overturning the monarchy, had turned the rank and file to similar thoughts. There had grown up among them a body of extreme democratic republicans, called the Levellers, from their wish to make all men equal; they were mostly members of obscure and fanatical sects, who looked for the triumph of the saints and the coming of the millennium. While the army was preparing for the Irish war, the Levellers broke out into open insurrection, demanding the dismissal of the "Rump," the introduction of annual Parliaments, the abolition of the Council of State, and the grant of "true and perfect freedom in all things spiritual and temporal." The zealots, however, were weaker than they imagined, and their mutiny was easily put down. Cromwell shot three or four of their leaders, and pardoned the rest of the band.

Cromwell subdues Ireland.

In August, 1649, Cromwell took over a powerful army to Ireland, where the civil war had never ceased since the rebellion eight years before. The remnant of the Anglo-Irish Royalists, under the Marquis of Ormonde, joined with the Romanists to oppose him, but their combined efforts were useless. So strong a man had never before laid his hand on Ireland. Starting from Dublin, the only large town in Parliamentary hands, he began by the conquest of Leinster. From the first he had determined to strike terror into the enemy. His stern veterans were capable of any extreme of cruelty against Romanists and rebels. But Cromwell is personally responsible for the two horrible blows that broke the Irish resistance. The enemy had made himself strong in the two towns of Drogheda and Wexford. Cromwell stormed them both, and forbade the giving of quarter, so that the whole garrison was in each case slaughtered to a man. Eight or nine thousand Irish perished, and such terror was struck into the rebels by these massacres that they made little more resistance. Cromwell had overrun half the island, when pressing need recalled him to England. He left part of his army under his son-in-law Ireton to complete the conquest, and hastily returned with the remainder (May, 1650).

Prince Charles in Scotland.