1: Commons Journals, Dec, 1659 and Jan. 1659-60; Whitlocke as before.
Through all these proceedings of the first month there had been signs of a curious abatement of that thorough-going Republican fervency which had characterized the House in its previous session. The essential Republican principle had indeed been at once re-proclaimed. It had been resolved that each member of the new Council of State, before assuming office, should take an oath renouncing "the pretended title or titles of Charles Stuart and the whole line of the late King James, and of every person, as a single person, pretending or which shall pretend," &c. The very next day, however, when Hasilrig brought in a Bill enacting that every member of the House itself, or of any succeeding House, should take the same oath, a minority, among whom were Ingoldsby, Colonel Hutchinson, Colonel Fielder, and Colonel Fagg, opposed very strongly. Not, of course, that they were other than sound Commonwealth's men; but that oaths were becoming frightfully frequent, and this one would be "a confining of Providence," &c.! The first reading of the Bill was carried only by a majority of twenty-four (Neville and Garland tellers) against fifteen (Colonel Hutchinson and Colonel Fagg tellers). The effect was that, after a second reading, the Bill went into Committee and remained there, the members meanwhile sitting on without any engagement. About a half of those nominated to the Council of State, including Fairfax, St. John, Morley, Weaver, and Fagg, remained out of the Council rather than submit to the qualification made essential in their case. This was symptomatic enough; but it was also evident that, on such important questions as Tithes, an Established Church, and Liberty of Conscience, the House was in no disposition to persevere in what had hitherto been believed to be radical and necessary articles of the Republican policy. The instructions given to a Committee on the 21st of January indicate very comprehensively the prevalence of a conservative temper in the House on these and other questions. The Committee were to prepare a declaration for the public "That the Parliament intends forthwith to proceed to the settlement of the government, and will uphold a learned and pious Ministry of the nation and their maintenance by Tithes: and that they will proceed to fill up the House as soon as may be, and to settle the Commonwealth without a King, Single Person, or House of Peers; and will promote the Trade of the nation; and will reserve due Liberty to tender consciences: and that the Parliament will not meddle with the executive power of the Law, but only in cases of mal-administration and appeals, &c." Such a declaration was adopted and ordered to be published on the 23rd. It was of a nature to conciliate the Presbyterian and Independent clergy of the Establishment and the conservative mass of the people generally, but to disappoint grievously those various sectarian enemies of the Church Establishment who had hitherto been the most enthusiastic exponents of the "good old cause." The very phrase "the good old cause," one observes, was now passing into disrepute, and the word "fanatics" as a name for its extreme supporters was coming into use within the circle of the Rump politicians themselves. Hasilrig, Neville, and the rest of the ultra-Republicans, mast have felt the power going from their hands.1
1: Commons Journals of dates; Phillips, 678; Ludlow, 807-809; Letters of M. de Bordeaux, Guizot, II. 325-839.
While much of this cooling of the original Republican fervency was owing to the recent experience of the public fickleness and of the necessity of not "confining Providence" too much in the decision of what to-morrow should bring forth, there was a special cause in the relations now subsisting between the House and Monk.
The House having been restored by Monk's agency, but without that march to London which he had proposed for the purpose, the majority were by no means anxious to see him in London. Monk, on the other hand, to whom it had been a disappointment that the House had been restored without his presence to see it done, was resolved nevertheless that the march should take place. He was already within England when the news of the premature restitution of the Rump reached him, having advanced through the snow from Coldstream to Wooler in Northumberland on the 2nd of January, to fight Lambert at last. He was at Morpeth on the 4th, and at Newcastle on the 5th, to find that there was to be no necessity for fighting Lambert after all. Lambert's army had melted away with the utmost alacrity on orders from London, leaving their leader to submit and shift for himself. After remaining three days at Newcastle, Monk resumed his march, by Durham and Northallerton, receiving addresses and deputations by the way, and was at York on the 11th. Here he remained five days, besieged with more addresses and deputations, but having a conference also with Lord Fairfax, followed by a visit to his Lordship at his house of Nunappleton. Fairfax had been in arms to attack Lambert's rear, in accordance with the understanding he had come to with Monk; and it was part of Monk's business at York to reform the wreck of Lambert's forces, incorporating some of them with his own and putting the rest under the command of officers who had declared for Fairfax. He arranged also for leaving one of his own regiments at York and for sending Morgan back with two others to take charge of Scotland. By these changes his army for farther advance was reduced to 4000 foot and 1800 horse. Hitherto his march had been by his own sole authority; but at York he received orders from the Council of State to come on to London. Dreading what might happen from his conjunction with the great Fairfax, and not daring to order him back to Scotland, the Rump leaders had assented to what they could not avoid. From York, accordingly, he resumed his advance on the 16th, the country before him, like that he had left behind, still covered thick with snow. On the 18th, at Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, he met Dr. Gumble, whom he had sent on to London about ten days before with letters to the Parliament and the Council of State, and who had returned with valuable information. Next day, at Nottingham, his brother-in-law De Clarges also met him, bringing farther information for his guidance. On the 22nd, as he was approaching Leicester, Messrs. Scott and Robinson, who had been sent from London as Commissioners from the Rump to attend him in the rest of his march, made their appearance ceremoniously and were duly received. They had come really as anxious spies on Monk's conduct, and were very inquisitive and loquacious; but they relieved him thenceforth of much of the trouble of answering the deputations and addresses by which he was still beset on his route. They were with him at Northampton, where he was on the 24th; at Dunstable, where he was on the 27th; and at St. Alban's, where he arrived on the 28th. Here, twenty miles from London, he rested for five days, to see the issue of a very important message he had been secretly preparing for the Parliament and which he now sent on by Dr. Clarges. It was a request to the House to clear London of all but two of the regiments then in it, on the ground that, having so recently served Fleetwood and the Wallingford-House party in their usurpation, they were not to be trusted. The message was of a kind to surprise and perplex the House, and Monk had purposely reserved it to this late stage of his march that there might be the less time for discussion. While waiting at St. Alban's, he had to endure, we are told, "amongst the rest of his interruptions," a long fast-day sermon from Hugh Peters, who had come to his quarters, with two other ministers. Monk's chaplain, Dr. Price, who was present at the sermon, has left an account of it. The text was Psalm cvii. 7, "And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation"; and Peters, in discoursing on this text, drew from it the assurance of a happy settlement of the Commonwealth at last. "With his fingers on the cushion," says Dr. Price, "he measured the right way from the Red Sea, through, the Wilderness, to Canaan; told us it was not forty days' march, but God led Israel forty years through the Wilderness before they came thither; yet this was still the Lord's right way, who led his people crinkledum cum crankledum." Monk's present march was to be one of the last of the windings.1
1: Skinner's Life of Monk, 175-199; Phillips, 677-680; Parl. Hist., III. 1574 (quotation from Dr. Price).
While Monk is at St. Alban's, we may inquire into his real intentions. They connect themselves with the purport of those addresses with which he had been troubled along his whole route. Not only had there been addresses from the inhabitants or authorities of the towns he passed through; but there had been letters to him at Morpeth from the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, of the City of London, followed by an address presented to him on the borders of Northamptonshire by a deputation of three commissioners from the City, two of them Aldermen. Now, almost all the addresses had been in one strain. Thanking Monk for what he had already done, they prayed him to earn the farther gratitude of his countrymen either by (1) securing that the present House should be converted into a real Parliament by the restoration of the secluded members of 1642-1648 to their seats and the filling up of other vacancies, or (2) securing that a full and free new Parliament should be called at once. Both these methods implied the restoration of Charles, though mention of that consequence, and by some even the thought of it, was most studiously avoided. A full and free new Parliament meant, in the present mood of the country, a recall of Charles rapidly and unhesitatingly. The filling up of the present Parliament by the restoration of the secluded members, and by new elections for other vacancies, meant the reconstituting of the Long Parliament entire, just as it had been while negotiations with Charles I. were going on, and before the Army, in order to stop these negotiations and bring in the Republic, ejected the Royalist and Presbyterian members. Such a reconstituted Parliament, if time were given it, would also inevitably recall Charles II., though it might do so after a preliminary compact with him on the basis of that Treaty of Newport which had been going on with his father late in 1648, and which might be regarded as still embodying the views of the Presbyterians respecting Royalty and its limits. Of the two methods the Cavaliers or Old Royalists naturally preferred that which would bring in Charles most speedily and with the fewest conditions; but, as they were outnumbered by the Presbyterians or New Royalists, they were willing to accept their method. To the genuine Rumpers, of course, either proposal was dreadful. To retain the power themselves, enlarging their House, if at all, only by new elections permitted by themselves, and not to part with their power unless to a new Parliament the qualifications for which should have been carefully pre-determined by themselves, was the only procedure by which they could hope to preserve the Commonwealth. Hence, on the one hand, their willingness to throw overboard all that was not absolutely essential to a Republican policy; but hence, on the other, their anxiety to enforce an oath among themselves abjuring Charles and the Stuarts utterly. It had been to feel Monk's inclinations in this matter of the abjuration oath, and also to watch his attitude to the deputations and their requests, that they had despatched their two commissioners, Scott and Robinson, to be in attendance on him. He had baffled them by his matchless taciturnity. Very probaby, his intention, when he first projected his march to London, had been to restore the Rump and to insist at the same time on the re-admission of the secluded members; and this had been recommended to him by Fairfax. But, now that the Rump was again sitting without the secluded members, and determined to keep them out, not even to Fairfax had he committed himself by a definite promise on that point. To the deputations he would reply only in curt generalities, or indeed, after Scott and Robinson had joined him, in generalities which would have been thought crusty and uncivil, had not Gumble, or Price, or the physician Dr. Barrow, been always at hand to explain privately to disappointed persons that the General's way was peculiar. Only in one matter was he explicit himself. He would not permit the least insinuation that he designed to bring in Charles. At York he had caned one of his officers for having said something imprudent to that effect.1
1: Skinner and Phillips ut supra; Letter of M. de Bordeaux to Mazarin, of date Jan. 21, in Guizot, II. 336-340.
On the 30th of January, with whatever reluctance, the House did comply with Monk's request, by issuing orders for the removal of Fleetwood's regiments from London; and on the 1st of February the way was farther cleared by the appointment of Clarges to be commissary-general of the musters for England and Scotland. There was a mutiny among Fleetwood's soldiers on account of the disgrace put upon them, and also on account of their dislike of country quarters after the pleasures of London; but the mutiny only quickened the desire to get rid of them. They were marched out by their officers; and on Friday the 3rd of February, Monk, who had come on to Barnet the day before, marched in with his army, by Gray's Inn Lane, Chancery Lane, and the Strand. They appeared to the citizens a very rough and battered soldiery indeed after their month's march through the English snows, the horses especially lean and ragged. That night, and all Saturday and Sunday, Monk was in quarters at Whitehall, receiving distinguished visitors. Though asked to take his seat in the Council of State on Saturday, he declined to do so till he should see his way more clearly on the disputed question of the abjuration oath.1
1: Commons Journals of dates; Skinner, 199-206; Phillips, 680-682.