Parliament divided: the army gains control

This brought about an end to hostilities and a whole new set of uncertainties. Charles had surrendered his person but not his cause. For nine months the Scots held him while negotiations went on. The Scots wanted to see the Solemn League and Covenant implemented. When it was finally plain that Charles would never agree to this, they washed their hands of him. Prominent campaigners for the king were heavily fined and frequently forced to sell off their land to friends of parliament. A great mass of the middle ground population were angered by the suppression of Anglican worship, the forbidding of the Prayer Book, and the ousting of some two thousand parish clergy. The Independents were enraged by such measures as life imprisonment for Baptists, and the prohibition of laymen from preaching. These issues were brought to climax by an ordinance for disbandment of the army, apart from a few regiments retained to subdue Ireland. The war was won, and the cost of a standing army was very great; there were growing complaints about the level of taxation required. But the soldiers' pay was in arrears, and the new model army was imbued with the spirit of the Independents. The army refused to stand down, and at its head, looming larger than Fairfax, his nominal superior, was Oliver Cromwell, now the most powerful man in England.

Cromwell, backed by his able son-in-law, Henry Ireton, took possession of the king and brought the army to London. By August, Fairfax and Cromwell's regulars had smashed the royalists. The army was now in indisputable control of the country. When the Long Parliament met again on 6 December 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride seized 137 members, all Presbyterians, placing 41 under arrest. Sixty Independents now formed the House of Commons, a 'Rump' even less representative of the country than the previous assembly It proceeded to take momentous decisions, passing a bill to arrange the trial of the king, and voting that 'to levy war against the Parliament and realm of England was treason'. A special High Court was convened to try the king. No judge would sit in it, and Fairfax would have none of it, but Cromwell, backed by the army, pressed on. Denying the legitimacy of the proceedings, Charles refused to plead. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and beheaded in front of a great, silent crowd in Whitehall on 30 January 1649.

Oliver Cromwell

England loses a king – and becomes a commonwealth

England was proclaimed to be a 'Commonwealth', under the government of the House of Commons and a Council of State, with Cromwell as its chairman. The House of Lords was abolished.

Such events encouraged the extreme democrats among the army rank and file, 'Levellers' and 'Diggers' who demanded annual parliaments and social equality, but their disjointed attempt at a coup was forcibly put down by Cromwell, who did not share these aspirations. Ireland, still in a state of revolt, and Scotland, which had proclaimed Charles II as its king, were to be incorporated into the Commonwealth, which claimed all the dominions of the executed king. Cromwell took an army to Ireland and commenced the subjection of the country, which Ire ton completed in 1650. Cromwell meanwhile turned on the Scots, but in 1651 the Scots brought war into England, when Charles II accompanied an invading army. The hope was to arouse English support, but little was forthcoming, and Cromwell defeated them at Worcester on 3 September 1651. Charles II fled abroad. With the 'crowning mercy' of Worcester, the Civil Wars were ended, and England faced a new era.

The lowest point of English estimation of Oliver Cromwell came at the restoration of the kingdom in 1660, when his decayed corpse was exhumed, dismembered and abused. His old admirers kept their heads down. The highest point was when he was offered the crown, in 1656. But the stock of the great king-slayer has generally been high, in a deeply monarchic country. This is partly owed to his personal qualities of honesty and sincerity, but mostly to the fact that his rule was successful. The Commonwealth was born in the immediate aftermath of shock, large-scale bloodshed and bitter division. Civil war, disrupted trade and bad harvests had made the late 1640s a grim time. When Cromwell died, his state had unified England, Wales and Scotland as a single entity, was united, prosperous, at peace, and had made itself respected abroad. At first his energies were absorbed in the subjection of Ireland and Scotland. In Ireland, where, in sacking Drogheda and Wexford, he permitted his troops to run amuck in a way he never did in Great Britain, he earned loathing. From January 1649, England was under the control of the 'Rump Parliament', watched over with increasing irritation and impatience by the army. The Rump's main object seemed to be its own preservation, and in this it was aided by the military leaders, whose principles demanded a general election and a new representative parliament, but who shrank from the prospect of the Anglican-royalist dominated assembly that was likely to result. On 20 April 1653, Cromwell took matters into his own hands. After a few blunt home-truths – 'Do you think to sit here till Doomsday come?' quoted a balladist – he brought a troop of soldiers into parliament, dissolved the Rump and sent the members home. From then on, though he attempted various forms of quasi-parliamentary government, his own presence at the head of affairs was the consistent and driving element in national life. The 'Barebone's parliament', composed of nominated members, one of whom, Praise-God Barbon, gave it its name, had a brief life in 1653.

In December of that year Cromwell assumed the title of Lord Protector. In September 1654 the first all-British parliament met, with English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish members; by Cromwell's own constitutional document, the Instrument of Government, he could not dissolve it for five months, but he did not wait a day longer. Its offence was to discuss the lord protector's role, rather than to govern as he wished it to. For eighteen months he ruled on his own, then in late 1655 he divided England into twelve military districts, each governed by a major-general with wide powers. This reminder that the army-paid for by substantial and efficiently collected taxes – was still in command caused widespread protest. Still experimenting, Cromwell called a third parliament in September 1656; by now his experience had taught him that only a partial reversion to traditional forms would bring long-term stability, and he planned a new Upper House. It was this parliament that offered him the crown. Though he refused it, in the knowledge that acceptance would split the army and bring more strife, the protectorship in its last phase was hardly distinguishable from a monarchy; it was even made hereditary.

The Great Seal of the Commonwealth The Great Seal of the Commonwealth: reverse