Republic

Early in the morning of 6 December 1648, soldiers began to gather around Whitehall. Some were on foot, some on horse. A pale light was beginning to show in the sky. It was cold, and the atmosphere was edgy. At the heart of the mass of buildings that sprawled along the Thames and made up the Palace of Whitehall was St Stephen's Chapel - the seat of the House of Commons. On that morning, standing at the top of the long flight of stone steps that led into the narrow medieval chapel was Colonel Thomas Pride, uniformed, hat in hand. He was waiting for the MPs to arrive, to take their place on their benches, to press on with what they had agreed the day before: to make a treaty with Charles I and end the terrible civil wars.

But the army, stoked by the radical and persuasive Henry Ireton, did not want to settle. Ireton, commissary general, had become convinced that the king against whom they had risked their lives on the battlefield could not be trusted to protect the people's liberties. He believed Charles was the 'grand Author of our troubles' and should be brought to justice for the blood he had shed.1

Pride's orders on that December morning were to hold the doors against those MPs who would block putting Charles I on trial. He had a list of the names of those who must be denied entry. Beside him stood the young army commander Lord Thomas Grey of Groby - a small man, mocked by Royalists as 'that grinning dwarf' - to help him identify the right men.2 Here is a tableau of the time: Pride, a brewer from Glastonbury, who had risen rapidly through the ranks of Parliament's formidable New Model Army; Grey, at his shoulder, the eldest son of the earl of Stamford, a Puritan peer. Both had been moved to take up arms against their king. Both were ready to confront, even imprison, MPs.

One of those turning up to take his place that day was William Prynne. He was a staunch Puritan - he had railed against stage plays, had lost his ears for slandering Queen Henrietta Maria, and had criticised Charles I's policies, arguing forcefully for the sovereignty of Parliament. Yet he was also among those who favoured a settlement; he yearned for peace. From the top of the stairs, Pride warned Prynne not to go any further. Prynne ignored him and carried on climbing until he reached Pride, who pushed him back down. 'By what authority and commission, and for what cause, they did thus violently seize on and pull him down from the House?' Prynne demanded to know. By way of answer, Pride showed him the soldiers standing by, armed with muskets, their matches already lit.3 Cowed, Prynne was led to another part of the palace, under guard, to join the forty or so other MPs who had been gathered like swine. Over the next week, many more Members of Parliament were sent home by Pride, shuffling back through Westminster Hall, past all the little bookstalls, and off into the city or into their waiting coaches and home to the country. Others pusillanimously, or wisely, stayed away.

This shocking purging of Parliament, known to history as Pride's Purge, is merely the prologue to the drama that followed. For it was this radical, emboldened remnant, this tail of a Parliament - later known, derisively, as 'the Rump' - that declared itself 'the supreme power in this nation', above the House of Lords, above the king.4 It was this 'clensed' Parliament - numbering only about a hundred MPs - that passed an act that enabled it to put the king of England, and Scotland, on trial for treason, leading to his conviction, death sentence and execution.5 The Rump Parliament then went on to abolish monarchy and the House of Lords, and usher in England's republic. For the next ten years, the country experienced the first and only republican rule it has ever known. As in many a tragedy, however, the protagonist who uses violent means fails to thrive. The political body that was born on that cold December morning was ambitious, but it was conceived in violence, delivered by the sword and branded, by many, as illegitimate.

The decade of kingless rule became possible that day, with Colonel Pride on the steps of Parliament. This beginning is the end of the longer story of conflict between king and Parliament. Many of the men Pride turned away on 6 December had been Members of the Commons since 1640 when Charles I, after eleven years of ruling without a Parliament (kings were allowed to do this, then), recalled them, hoping to raise money to fund war in his other kingdom, and native country, Scotland. Fighting on the northern side of the border had been triggered by Charles's tactless imposition of a new Book of Common Prayer in 1637: the Church of Scotland (the Kirk) did not want their liturgy dictated from Westminster, by a king they never saw, or by an archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, whom they did not know. They did not want their forms of worship corrupted by the Anglican Church's taste for fuss and ceremony, which looked suspiciously Catholic, and they did not want bishops. To assert his authority, Charles mobilised troops. Back in St Stephen's Chapel in Whitehall, the newly recalled Members of Parliament took the opportunity to challenge Charles - and the rights of a king. Led by the committed parliamentarian John Pym, certain Members of the House were troubled by Charles's willingness to rule without Parliament, his immovable belief in his absolute and divine authority, and his unsettling readiness to fight in Scotland.6

In December 1641, Parliament presented Charles with a list of grievances about the state of the kingdom. It was long. Those behind this 'Grand Remonstrance', which included the forty-two-year-old Cambridge MP Oliver Cromwell, wanted Charles to get rid of those they believed to be malignant, corrupt counsellors, intent on sabotaging relations between king and people and destroying the English Church.7 They worried about the influence of Charles's French, Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, and they feared a Catholic plot. So they moved to strip Charles of a key royal prerogative: the power to raise an army. Yet, for Charles - as for all kings and queens before him - defending his kingdom was his duty; it was a promise he had made before God. The prospect of Parliament controlling the militia forced him to make a catastrophic mistake - the first of many. In January 1642, the king and about a hundred soldiers marched into St Stephen's Chapel, seeking to arrest John Pym and four of his troublemaking allies for treason. But the so-called traitors had got wind of the plan and fled through Whitehall's garden, into a waiting boat and up the river. And, as the news spread, the people of London turned against their king, rising up to protest what they saw as his violation of Parliament's privileges, and by extension their freedom.

No longer safe in his city, Charles fled Whitehall with Queen Henrietta Maria and three of their five children. Believing that they would soon be back, they packed little. Charles would soon have to request extra linen shirts from the Royal Wardrobe. He managed to retrieve the Great Seal, that precious little metal mould into which hot wax would be poured and turned into the very stamp of royal authority.8 He fled to Windsor, then York, then Oxford. Parliament pushed through its militia bill, granting itself the power to muster forces of ordinary men in each English county. By the autumn of 1642, king and Parliament were at war. Both sides believed they were the guardians of the people's liberties and the English Church. Charles could not conceive of a king whose power was limited - then he would be 'but the Picture, but the Sign of a King' - and he believed that only chaos would come from disobedience and a rebellious Parliament.9 But that this had ended in real conflict puzzled many. As the lawyer and MP Bulstrode Whitelocke recalled, the country 'insensibly slipped into this beginning of a civil war by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea'.10

Battle after battle followed, across the kingdoms in places whose names are forever associated with the victories and losses of the Royalists (the long-locked cavaliers) and the parliamentarians (derided as 'roundheads' because of their short hair). First, in October 1642, was Edgehill, where 1,500 men were killed on a field. Locals soon reported seeing their ghosts and hearing their death groans. Then there was Marston Moor, in 1644, where Oliver Cromwell, now a rising military star, triumphed as the earl of Manchester's lieutenant-general in the Eastern Association army, joined by the Scottish army which had agreed to support the English parliamentarians. At Naseby, in 1645, Colonel Pride excelled and Henry Ireton's thigh was run through with a pike. In the middle of the wars, Henrietta Maria fled back to the continent, and to the Louvre in Paris, leaving her one-month-old daughter, Minette, in Exeter. All the while, the MPs sat on in St Stephen's Chapel, issuing Charles with proposals for settlement, directing the militia, passing laws that were...