The decision of the committee the next day established a general sort of scheme, much like that originally laid down by Ireton. This maintained the King but robbed him of most of his prerogatives and established all real power with the House of Commons. The day following, yet another meeting demonstrated the continuing unrest on the subject of the monarchy: while Fairfax was accused of wearing “the King’s colours”, some of the soldiers were also thought to be suffering a sentimental reaction in favour of Royalty. But in general the tide of the Army Council was clearly turning against Cromwell and Ireton, for all their efforts at management, as was proved by two votes hostile to their interests on 4 and 5 November. First it was decided to extend the suffrage to all except servants and beggars, and then the extremists succeeded in getting a vote through for a general rendezvous of the Army, as well as a letter to be sent from the Council to Parliament requesting that there should be no more approaches to the King.
As if Cromwell did not have problems enough within the Army, the monarch they so much deplored was himself persistently demanding to come to London for a personal treaty. At the same time the House of Commons took the opportunity to vote that the King was bound to assent to all laws passed by them. At least a few days later Cromwell managed to secure a more helpful decision from the Army Council that officers and representatives who were members should withdraw to their regiments until the date of the general rendezvous. Still more useful was the decision reached by the Council on 9 November that there should be separate reviews on three different days in place of the huge mass meeting desired by the Levellers. The Army Council now adjourned for a fortnight, but the Council of Officers continued to sit, and it was under their auspices two days later, still at Putney, that a crucial attack on Charles’s position was made by Major Thomas Harrison. The son of a Staffordshire grazier, he had become an MP in 1646 and was soon to show pronounced millenarial tendencies in his religious views – the confident expectation of the coming of Christ’s kingdom on earth. Harrison called Charles openly “a man of blood” and urged that he should be prosecuted for his crimes.19
It has been suggested that in his reply Cromwell for the first time publicly admitted that it might come to that in the end. But from the shortened version available, his main concern seems to have been less with the problematical future than with the rather ugly present. He put several precedents, one of them Scriptural, before the Council, where murder had not been punished for the good reason that the punishment would not have served a useful purpose at the time. And he ended by stating firmly that there should only be lawful punishments of delinquents, nor should they ever be carried out under conditions of dispute, or indeed if there was anyone else to do the work. Cromwell’s conclusion was that such work must only be carried out “if it be an absolute and indisputable duty for us to do it” – a fairly tepid reply,20 whose main inspiration was clearly a desire to damp the whole debate down from such fiery discourses.
None of this took into account the “man of blood’s” own plans for his future: but these were by now quite well advanced. While Berkeley favoured the idea of escape by ship to the Continent, it was Ashburnham who, by his own account, advanced the superior claims of Colonel Robert Hammond, Governor of the Isle of Wight, believed to be favourable to the King’s cause. Hammond was actually a connexion of Cromwell through his marriage to the daughter of Cromwell’s cousin John Hampden, but he was also the nephew of the King’s chaplain; at any rate Ashburnham always stuck to the story that he had good reason to suppose Hammond would prove loyal to Charles if tested. The Scots Commissioners, busy making new overtures to Charles to persuade him to make new religious concessions preparatory to an agreement, suggested a flight to Berwick; there was also the possibility of Royalist Jersey. The only topic on which all parties were as one was on the need for Charles to escape his current captors. Danger did seem to be at every hand, quite apart from the bloodthirsty public threats of the Levellers in the Council. An anonymous cornmunication which may in fact have been written by John Lilburne’s brother Henry, Lieutenant-Colonel in one of the most mutinous regiments in the Army, warned the King of a plot to kill him forthwith, without waiting for a judicial trial. Then there was the mysterious matter of a letter dated n November – the day of Harrison’s attack on Charles written personally by Cromwell to Whalley at his post in charge of the King. “Dear Cos Whalley,” it began, “There are rumours abroad of some intended attempt on his Majesty’s person. Therefore I pray have a care of your guards, for if any such thing should be done, it would be accounted a most horrid act.” A further phrase in the letter, not subsequently published amongst the King’s correspondence, but revealed by Berkeley in his Memoirs, spoke of an increased guard being imposed on the King the next day, in order to thwart the violent intentions of the Levellers.21 This letter Whalley immediately placed before the King, not, as he said later, to frighten him, but to assure him of the goodwill and protection of the officers towards his person.
Charles acted for once with swiftness and resolution. He left a note for Whalley explaining that his escape had not been prompted by Cromwell’s letter, but because he was “loth to be made a close prisoner under pretence of securing my life”. He then took himself “by the backstairs and vault, towards the water-side” as Cromwell wrote afterwards, into the fresh night air of liberty. Outside he met Ashburnham, Berkeley and another Royalist confederate William Legge, the former Governor of Oxford. The four of them, so far as their guards left behind at Hampton Court were concerned, then vanished. It was not long before the fact at least of Charles’s escape was discovered, and the news was conveyed rapidly to Cromwell. Although unable of course to state the King’s whereabouts, he passed on the news of the escape in turn to the Speaker of the House of Commons in a letter dated “Hampton Court. Twelve at night”. By now the little party of fugitives had made up their minds: it was to be Hammond and the Isle of Wight, and to this end Berkeley and Ashburnham travelled on to warn him while Charles waited at Titchfield, near the coast, the house of the Earl of Southampton. Berkeley and Ashburnham intended to present Hammond with the choice of preparing Carisbrooke Castle for Charles’s arrival or finding him a boat to take him on to France. But Hammond’s unexpected reaction of unalloyed dismay put paid to both plans. He turned deathly pale, trembled for an hour or so, and gave vent to such horrified sentiments as “O Gentlemen you have undone me .. ,”22 Loyalty to Parliament proved stronger than loyalty to his King: Hammond decided to bring Charles to Carisbrooke as a prisoner, not as a guest, and to inform Parliament of the whole amazing unlookedfor happening.
While Charles, and indeed Hammond, found themselves in a state of singular confusion, there was one person who exhibited signs of positive cheerfulness at the news of the King’s new circumstances. When Oliver Cromwell broke the news publicly to the House of Commons, explaining how Hammond was an honest and devoted man who would guard the King jealously, he bore himself in Clarendon’s words “with so unusual a gaiety that all men concluded that the King was where he wished he should be”. This significant return to the hilarity of the battlefield, coupled with the undeniable convenience to Cromwell personally of Charles’s removal, made it easy later for his enemies to work up a highly hostile theory of conspiracy. Charles at Carisbrooke was safe from the Levellers, secure also it was to be hoped from the Scots, and yet by his secret flight had somehow forfeited something of his personal advantage. When his eventual fate was known, and Cromwell’s own assumption of power taken into account as well, it was not too difficult a jump to connect all three steps together into a staircase of cunning and deception constructed by Cromwell personally. It was a theory most neatly expressed by Marvell in his famous lines on Cromwell:
Twining subtle fears with hope
He wove a net of such a scope
That Charles himself might chase
To Carisbrooke’s narrow case …
The question remains whether Oliver was, as in so many cases of Royalist traductio
n, maligned in such accusations, or whether there was at least some element of plot on his part which went towards the making of the King’s escape. It is often pointed out with truth in Cromwell’s defence that he could hardly have planned the sheer details of the escape since these were decided piece by piece at the time in free discussions with Ashburnham and Berkeley (both of whom afterwards testified to it). But there does seem to be some nagging cloud of doubt hanging over his part in it all. That letter to Whalley – was it not, when all is said and done, so neatly fortuitous? Were not the sentiments expressed in it so exactly those most likely to induce the King to flee, and flee immediately? Did it not come so pat into an already explosive situation? Such suspicions continue to haunt one, and there is an additional mystery in the shape of an unexplained visit of Cromwell to Hammond on the Isle of Wight in early September, reported in a newsletter of the time, which for want of any other known motive, hinted that Cromwell might be threatening Hammond’s authority.23
Venturing into the realm of pure conjecture, it is possible to conceive that Cromwell, showing his new mettle as a politician, did envisage the immense advantages in having the King at Carisbrooke rather than close to the capital. He might even have established in advance the reaction of Hammond if such a transference should take place. Having done so, it was even possible that he dropped the idea into the mind of the King’s servant Ashburnham, fertile ground. From then on plans simply fell into place as Cromwell might have dared to hope they would – being possessed by more than his fair share of fortunate breaks – but from then on the uncertainties also become altogether too murky to proceed further. In the final analysis one can only say that such a line of thinking would fit suitably into Cromwell’s new political practice of leading, cajoling and suggesting where he could not drive.
* * *
Back in the centre of it all, Cromwell had to face not only the resentment of the Army, but much unpopularity in certain sections of the House of Commons, where Marten and Rainsborough even talked of impeaching him, although John Lilburne’s wilder story that Marten intended to do “a Felton” (the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham) by putting his dagger into Cromwell should probably be disregarded. Then there was the first of the three rendezvous promised to the Army to be faced. Held at Corkbush Field near Ware on 15 November, it was intended to present a manifesto of the officers’ decisions to the soldiery. But the men were in a surly mood, and like a more openly diabolic gathering, that of Milton’s council of fallen angels, displayed “that fixed mind and high disdain from sense of injured merit”. What was more, two regiments specifically not invited to the rendezvous had turned up, including that of Lilburne’s elder brother Robert, men notorious for their disaffection. Many of the soldiers actually arrived with copies of the Agreement and the pertinent motto: “England’s freedom! Soldiers’ right!” stuck into their hats. It was hardly the sort of situation which any General who believed in discipline was likely to tolerate; Cromwell reacted in a fury not only to the audacious headgear but also to the straightforward disobedience of the unbidden regiments in making an appearance in the first place. When the men refused to remove their favours, he drew his sword on them with zest. The four ringleaders were seized, and after casting lots, one was shot as an example to the rest. After such Ironsided tactics, it is hardly surprising that the other two rendezvous took place considerably more calmly.
However on 19 November Cromwell made a dramatically different speech in the Commons which showed how much he had learnt from Rainsborough and the other fanatical critics of the “Norman yoke” during those long autumn sessions in the Putney church. For although he reported thankfully that the Army were now unanimous and reduced to better discipline, he went on to tell the House that since the soldiers had undoubtedly conquered the kingdom, they, like William the Conqueror, had the right to give the kingdom laws, quite apart from preserving their own liberty.* ( * For this speech, and those of 23 November and 3 December, an important source is the diary of John Boys: see David Underdown, The Parliamentary Diary of John Boys 1647-8. A man of forty who had been MP for Kent for the past two years, Boys made radical speeches but also voted with the moderates on occasion, his career, like that of many middle-group MPs of the period, showing no particular consistency. His diary is often couched in dog-French which gives rise at times to some bizarre expressions.) When John Swynfen, the member for Stafford, questioned this astonishingly unparliamentary point of view, Cromwell did then grant that all such representation should be with the submission and acquiescence of the soldiers to the will of Parliament. But he in turn criticized Swynfen for denying the soldiers their rights as Englishmen, and only allowing them (in Boys’s vivid if mongrel phrase) “tantum come subjects”.24 Such an attitude would arouse much apprehension among the soldiers who believed that they had a right to petition the House as Englishmen.
An order was then made that Cromwell should tell the Army that the House was ready to receive their addresses, if made in a Parliamentary way. But four days later, once more addressing the House, Cromwell seemed to swing the other way in his perpetual balancing act between the various powers in the kingdom. No longer did he put forward the point of view of the conquering military. When the soldiers were generally condemned in the House Cromwell hastened to disassociate himself from all “this drive at a levelling and parity, etc.”. He perceived that it was the soldiers’ intention to exclude servants and children, only to include vast quantities of their own number: it was this sort of behaviour which had brought much obloquy on the officers and himself.
The balancing act could not go on for ever. It was towards the end of November, probably about the 23rd or 24th, that the see-saw came down finally with all Cromwell’s weight and authority thrown against the King. The decision was on the surface at least a sudden one: the many and various attempts of Cromwell and Ireton to reach some sort of settlement with Charles from July onwards have been noted. But on 26 November when Berkeley arrived with letters from the King asking for the officers’ support in re-establishing him on the throne, he learnt that only the day before Cromwell and Ireton had spoken out fiercely against Charles in the Army Council. This unwelcome news was accompanied by the further sinister report that Cromwell had also spoken with unaccustomed warmth of the Levellers – “If we cannot bring the Army to our sense, we must go to theirs.”25 Equally indicative of Cromwell’s altered mood was his message to Berkeley: he dared not see him, since he, Cromwell, could hardly be expected to perish for the King’s sake.
What inspiration, what intelligence, what discovery even, had brought about this astonishing volte face in the man who for the last four or five months had been, at any rate in the opinion of many of his own men, far too favourably inclined towards the King’s cause? The case, although equally mysterious, differs from that of the flight to Carisbrooke, in that for once Cromwell actually provided his own explanation. Two years later Lord Broghill asked Cromwell straight out why the Army at this point had given up trying to come to terms with Charles. In reply Cromwell – most uncharacteristically – had unwoven a tale quite worthy of the novels of Alexandre Dumas. His remarkable revelations were then repeated by Broghill to his own chaplain and biographer Thomas Morrice, and by him handed down to posterity as the incident of the “Saddle Letter”. The story Cromwell told was as follows: in the autumn of 1647 he and his faction would have very willingly “closed with the King” for the simple reason that the Scots and English Presbyterians together would have proved too powerful for them, and their whole cause might have been undone. But even while such thoughts of a royal settlement preoccupied them, they were tipped offby “a spy in the King’s chamber” (name never given) that for all their efforts their “final doom” was actually decreed. They would discover for themselves the truth of the King’s falsity by finding a certain letter sewn up in the skirt of a saddle. The bearer of this vital letter would come to the Blue Boar Inn at Holborn about ten o’clock that night, and could be known by the fact that
he would be bearing his saddle on his head. From Holborn he would be riding on to Dover where, although he himself was innocent as to its contents, there were men waiting who understood the saddle’s significance.
On receipt of this dramatic information, Cromwell himself seems to have taken on the mantle of one of Dumas’s dashing musketeers. Cromwell and Ireton were then at Windsor; they now dressed up in the habits of two ordinary troopers and taking only one “trusty fellow” with them, set out immediately for the Holborn inn. Here they had their man keep watch outside, while they themselves drank cans* ( * Not an anachronism: the word actually used, deriving from the Old English Canne.) of beer inside “in the disguise of common troopers”. It was indeed ten o’clock when their man outside tipped them off of the arrival of the saddle-bearer. Rushing out, the two disguised Army leaders threatened the emissary with their swords; finding him however to be an ignorant and therefore honest man, they merely slit up the saddle skirt, and there duly found a letter. This cornmunication was quite as deadly as the spy had predicted. Here was the King, the man they had been backing, telling the Queen that both factions, Scottish Presbyterians and Army, were now bidding for him “but he thought he should close with the Scots sooner than the others”. And so the two adventurers rode back to Windsor and in Cromwell’s own reported words “finding we were not likely to have any tolerable terms from the King, we immediately, from that time forward, resolved his ruin”.26
Now this strange story, coming admittedly at second hand and only made public long after the event, * ( * Roger Lord Broghill and kter Earl of Orrery lived until 1679, but could of course have told the story to his chaplain and biographer many years before his death. In the eighteenth century the whereabouts of the “Saddle Letter” was the subject of fashionable speculation. About 1743 Bolingbroke told Alexander Pope that Lord Oxford had handled a letter from the King to the Queen which had been intercepted; earlier there was a report that an auctioneer named Millington had possession of it, but would not show it to the enquirer.27) might at first sight seem too farfetched to be given much credit outside the pages of romantic fiction. Yet as it happens there are various other confirmations, including the account of Sir William Dugdale – although he actually mentions a letter in reverse, from the Queen to Charles – which do give substance to the tale, even if some of its details have become inevitably blurred or exaggerated in the telling.28 Some dramatic and radical explanation is surely needed to explain what was after all a dramatic and radical change of policy. If then we do not place too much emphasis on the precise course of the story the “spy” in the King’s chamber was for instance more likely to be a gentleman-in-waiting placed there by Hammond – and accept that the letter could have been sent equally well from Charles to Henrietta Maria or vice versa, or even both (a treacherous correspondence) we are still left with some specific proof of Charles’s essentially untrustworthy nature. This proof, whatever its nature, falling into the hands of Cromwell and Ireton in late November at a most delicate moment in their political negotiations, threatened by both Scots and Army radicals, caused them to make a total reassessment of the character of the King. As to the doubt whether one single episode could have caused such a swift change of mind in a man of Cromwell’s calibre, one should recall not only the many trailers of his unreliable nature already provided publicly by Charles, but also the personal attention Cromwell himself always paid to the indications of Providence. The Saddle Letter could well have been the sign that he sought, that further negotiations with Charles would not have divine approval.