The Story of Britain Page 12

  “I have come to arrest these traitors!” he called.

  First there was dead silence, then someone started to laugh. The king stared along the benches. Suddenly he realized that none of the five was there.

  “I see the birds have flown,” he muttered. And everyone jeered as Charles, mustering what dignity he could, turned and led his soldiers back to the palace.

  There was no chance of peace after that. No one could agree how the country should be governed, or what the churches of England and Scotland should be like. On 22 August 1642 Charles went to Nottingham, unfurled his royal banner, and called his supporters to come and fight for him. He had declared war on his own subjects.

  The First Civil War

  CIVIL wars are even worse than wars between countries. Civil wars are fought between father and son, brother and brother. They tear apart families, towns and counties. They destroy everything that holds us together.

  The king’s most fervent supporters, who were called Cavaliers, wore rich clothes and kept their hair long, like the king and his nobles. Parliament’s supporters dressed in sombre black and cut their hair short, so they were called Roundheads.

  Most people didn’t know which side to join. They hated fighting against their king, but didn’t want him to have absolute power. They hated attacking Parliament, but didn’t want to be ruled by Puritan religious fanatics who would make them give up dancing and music. On the whole, people in Wales and the west supported the king, while most of London and the east supported Parliament. Even so, there were Cavaliers and Roundheads everywhere, and no one knew whom to trust.

  The first proper battle of the Civil War was at Edgehill in Warwickshire. Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert, who had learned how to fight during the war in Europe, led the king’s cavalry in a charge that almost destroyed the army of Parliament. The Roundheads only just managed to escape without defeat.

  For most of the time, though, there were no big battles, just skirmishes. Troops of soldiers attacked one another at crossroads, leaving a few dead in the dusty roadway. Soldiers besieged manor houses and set fire to them, then galloped away, leaving behind them a column of smoke and a family weeping over its wrecked home. Often it was hard to tell what was going on. People tried to follow by reading newspapers, for there were printing presses in many towns by now. Those who couldn’t read clustered around the readers to hear the latest news.

  Because London supported Parliament, King Charles set up his own headquarters at Oxford. Meanwhile Parliament made a deal with the Scottish Covenanters, called the Solemn League and Covenant, agreeing that if Parliament won the war it would make the Church of England Presbyterian, just as the Scots wanted. In return the Covenanters sent an army to help. Thanks to them, the Roundheads won a battle at Marston Moor in Yorkshire. But winning one battle wasn’t the same as winning the war, so the Roundhead leaders met to decide what to do next.

  Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Roundhead cavalry, was determined to get rid of interfering politicians. Cromwell, who was one of the most fanatical of the Puritans, was rough and coarse-mannered, and a lot of MPs were afraid of him; but his cavalry, who were called the Ironsides because of their heavy armour and strict discipline, swept everything before them.

  “What we need,” he said, “is for politicians to stick to politics and fighters to stick to fighting.” And he was the first to sign a “self-denying ordinance” saying he would give up politics until Charles was beaten.

  “But we haven’t beaten him yet,” someone objected. “The Cavaliers are too brave.”

  “We need an army of godly soldiers to beat them,” growled Cromwell.

  So he made Parliament a new army, which he called the New Model Army. It was well organized and trained, and the soldiers were Puritans, who sang hymns as they marched and listened to sermons around their campfires.

  “You are fighting for God!” their preachers shouted.

  The New Model Army followed the king’s army to Naseby in Northamptonshire. The night before the battle, Cavaliers heard its soldiers praying and singing hymns. This time, when the Royalists charged, they faced lines of soldiers in steel helmets, whose long, sharp pikes didn’t waver. The fighting went on until the grass was wet with blood, and in the evening the Royalists fled.

  From then on, Oliver Cromwell (who never gave up politics at all, whatever he had promised) won victory after victory with his New Model Army, and the soldiers gave thanks to God after each triumph. At last King Charles realized he couldn’t fight any longer. He didn’t want to surrender to Cromwell, so he disguised himself as a servant, travelled north towards Scotland, and gave himself up to the Covenanters.

  The First Civil War was over.

  The Second Civil War

  THE king was a prisoner. Sometimes, in the Middle Ages, kings had been captured by their rivals, but never before had a king been jailed by his own people. The Covenanters didn’t want to keep Charles prisoner, though, for they had problems of their own – while their army was in England helping Parliament, the marquis of Montrose had captured most of Scotland for the Royalists. So the Covenanters sold Charles to Parliament and went back to Scotland to fight Montrose.

  The New Model Army seized Charles from Parliament, and locked him up in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Charles sat in the castle brooding. He was very stubborn and believed that God had made him king and his subjects ought to obey him, so he refused Parliament’s proposals. During the negotiations he made promises and then broke them, and Parliament soon learned not to trust him.

  Meanwhile, Parliament’s supporters started arguing among themselves, because a lot of MPs were afraid of Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army.

  “We don’t want religious extremists in charge!” they said.

  But the soldiers of the New Model Army became bolder, took control of London, and demanded that everything in England should change.

  “Everyone’s equal,” they said. “And everyone should be allowed to vote!”

  That seems fair today, but in those days only men who owned land were allowed to vote. Levellers, who said that everyone was equal, seemed new and dangerous. Nonetheless they forced Parliament to come and debate their ideas with them at Putney, just outside London.

  Seeing how powerful they were, the Scottish Covenanters started to worry. Some of them, who became known as Engagers, decided it was better to trust King Charles than the New Model Army, so they sent messages offering to help him on condition that he made the churches of Scotland and England Presbyterian. Charles agreed, and that was how the Second Civil War began. Welsh Royalists raised an army for Charles, and the Engagers crossed the border and marched south to set him free.

  Unfortunately they had all forgotten how skilful a general Oliver Cromwell was. First he beat the Welsh Royalists, then marched north to fight the Engagers. He found them near Preston in Lancashire, where he fought a battle that lasted for two days. By the end of it, two thousand Scots were dead.

  Cromwell looked at them lying on the battlefield, while his soldiers kneeled in groups to thank God for their victory.

  “This time we must deal with King Charles once and for all,” he shouted. “It’s no use bargaining with him – he always breaks his promises! There will be no peace as long as we have a king!”

  By now MPs were more worried about Cromwell than King Charles. With his New Model Army, he could defeat anybody. Could they trust him? One day, as they met in the House of Commons, they were astonished to see the door burst open, and a friend of Cromwell’s called Colonel Thomas Pride stride in. Pride marched up and down the benches, pointing at each member in turn.

  “You get out!” he barked. “You can stay… Soldiers, take that man out as well!”

  One by one, all Cromwell’s opponents were driven from the House of Commons. Then his supporters voted to arrest King Charles and put him on trial.

  The King’s Death

  THE king was charged with betraying his own country. Every day, lookin
g pale and tired, he was brought to Westminster Hall, where his judges sat on long benches. People crowded into the public gallery to watch. Facing his enemies, Charles was far braver than he had ever been before. But at last he was found guilty and sentenced to death.

  Puritans and soldiers of the New Model Army cheered, but most people were shocked, even if they had supported Parliament in the Civil War.

  “Is it right to kill a king?” they whispered to one another. “Can a country manage without a king?”

  On the day of the execution Whitehall was packed. Boys climbed railings to get a better view of the platform which carpenters had built outside the Banqueting House. It was draped in black cloth, and a block stood ominously in the middle of it. Soldiers were stationed around the platform to stop anyone rescuing the king.

  “He deserves to be killed,” some in the crowd muttered. “We’ll be better off without him.”

  Even they fell silent, though, when the Banqueting House window opened and the king walked out between two guards.

  No one had liked Charles, or trusted him. He had broken his word and caused a civil war. But at least he knew how to die like a king.

  His head was bare and he wore a white shirt. In fact, he had secretly put on two shirts in case he shivered with cold and people thought he was scared. Fearlessly he walked to the middle of the platform, kneeled and prayed. When he laid his head on the block, some people turned away so they wouldn’t have to watch. The executioner’s axe rose up into the air. Afterwards one onlooker remembered there was no cheering. Instead, a terrible silence seemed to spread outwards from the platform. The axe lingered for a moment, then fell with a dreadful, final thump. And from the crowd, he wrote later, there arose “such a groan as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again.”

  The king was dead.

  Britain Without a King

  IN a revolution, everything changes. There is no government, no one knows who’s in charge or how to choose a new government, and the people who take over aren’t usually the most sensible, but the most ruthless.

  Puritans were determined to make everyone live under religious law, so they closed down theatres, banned dancing, and forced everyone to attend church, where preachers spoke for hours about sin and death. They went from village to village, driving out vicars who disagreed with them, and replacing them with Puritans. Because they hated cathedrals, they turned St Paul’s into a stable, smashed the stained glass windows and hacked the faces off statues. Most people didn’t agree with the Puritans, but were afraid to challenge them.

  Levellers campaigned for everyone to be equal. “No more lords!” they shouted. “Ordinary people should decide what happens!”

  Others, called Diggers, decided land should be shared equally, rather than owned by rich people. With the king dead, it seemed as if anything was possible, and nothing would ever be the same again.

  But the most ruthless and determined person in the whole of Britain was Oliver Cromwell. And with the New Model Army behind him he could do whatever he wanted.

  He began by subduing the rest of Britain and Ireland. First he invaded Ireland, and rode through the country burning villages. The people of Drogheda closed their gates, but Cromwell’s Ironsides burst over the walls and slaughtered two thousand of the inhabitants. The same happened at Wexford, where hundreds of women and children tried to escape by swimming the river, and were drowned.

  Having conquered Ireland, he went to Scotland, where the Covenanters had taken over and passed religious laws just like the Puritans in England. But after quarrelling with the English Parliament, they had invited Charles’s son, who was also called Charles, to come to Scotland. Charles was young, handsome and brave. He loved parties and flirting with girls, but he got a shock when he arrived in Scotland.

  “No luxury!” the Covenanters told him. “No wine, and no girls!”

  He had to spend hours in church, dressed in sober black, and felt more like a prisoner than a king.

  When Cromwell arrived, he defeated the Covenanters’ army in a battle near Dunbar. Charles’s only remaining hope was to find more support in England, so he gathered the remainder of his army and marched south. But Cromwell followed him and at Worcester, in another great battle, beat the Royalists once and for all.

  Charles had to escape in disguise. WANTED! said notices stuck up in every town, A TALL, DARK MAN!

  Soldiers raided houses where he might be hiding. Once, they searched a forest while Charles hid up an oak tree above their heads. But at last he escaped and reached France in safety.

  So the civil wars came to an end, leaving Britain and Ireland at peace. They weren’t at peace because everyone was content, though, but because no one dared challenge Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell went back to London and stormed into the House of Commons. Since Pride’s Purge, the remaining part of Parliament had been known as the Rump. Cromwell dismissed them.

  “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing,” he shouted. “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you!”

  After that Cromwell became Lord Protector. Britain was ruled by a military dictator.

  Lord Protector

  DICTATORS often take their countries to war and Cromwell, who knew nothing but fighting, was no different. First he attacked the Dutch, who had once been Britain’s allies but had become such successful traders that they rivalled the British. Cromwell’s ships stopped Dutch convoys, and developed new tactics to beat the Dutch in sea battles. Next he began a war with Spain. When Christopher Columbus had reached America, the Spanish had taken over the Caribbean islands known as the West Indies. Cromwell sent his navy across the Atlantic Ocean to attack them. British sailors weren’t used to the heat of the Caribbean, its deep blue sea, or jungles full of parrots. But they captured Jamaica, which stayed British for three hundred years, and where many British today have their roots.

  Cromwell’s victories were popular, but no one liked the taxes he raised to pay for them, or the Puritans’ sermons and religious laws. And most people hated the new type of government. Cromwell tried putting army majors in charge of each region, but that didn’t work. He tried a new House of Commons whose MPs were chosen by army officers, but no one took it seriously.

  “It’s not a proper parliament,” people whispered. “It does whatever Cromwell tells it!”

  Some generals suggested Cromwell be crowned as King Oliver I, but he refused.

  “My soldiers didn’t get rid of one king to make another,” he said.

  One important decision Cromwell made was to allow in Jews, who had been thrown out of England by Edward I. They returned to London, built a synagogue, and for the first time in three hundred and fifty years, a rabbi lit the seven candles of the menorah, and the sound of Sabbath prayers was heard again in England.

  As Cromwell grew more unpopular, people started wondering how they could get rid of him. The Levellers tried to assassinate him because he behaved too much like a king. Cromwell caught the plotters and threw them into jail. Royalists began a secret organization called the Sealed Knot to start a rebellion in favour of Prince Charles, who was living in exile in Holland. Cromwell discovered the Sealed Knot’s plans, arrested its leaders and executed them.

  No one loved Cromwell, but no one could remove him. And at least there were no civil wars while the lord protector ruled Britain and Ireland. But then Cromwell fell ill and died. His son Richard became lord protector, but Richard wasn’t a great general like his father, and he couldn’t command the New Model Army, whose soldiers laughed and called him Tumbledown Dick.

  After only a few months the army threw him out, and Britain’s troubles began again.

  The Year of Chaos

  THE year that followed was one of the most difficult in Britain’s long history. A council of army officers called Parliament back. It hadn’t been elected properly since before the civil wars started, so people called it the Long Parliament, and its leftover MPs were still known as the Rump. But the Rump didn’
t know how to govern Britain. The MPs drew up plan after plan and spent hours in pointless debate. In the end an army general called John Lambert drove them out and set up the Committee of Safety to run Britain.

  “The army’s taken over!” people shouted.

  Boys lit bonfires and rioted in the streets of London to protest against the army takeover.

  “Down with the army!” they chanted. “Down with the Committee of Safety!”

  Panicking at the sight of so many protesters, soldiers fired at the crowd, killing some of the rioters. That made everyone even angrier. There is a moment in every revolution when people realize the army can’t control them, and they have nothing to fear. The rioters in London became bolder every day. When the army’s commander in Scotland, General Monck, saw what was happening, he gathered his soldiers and marched south to res-tore order. In every town he passed through, he heard people discussing what should happen next.

  “The army can’t run things. They’re even fighting each other!”

  “We don’t want the religious fanatics back!”

  “Parliament’s no good. Their ‘Rump’ needs a good kick!”

  And that, Monck soon realized, left him only one choice: to bring back the king.

  The Restoration

  ALL this time, Charles II had been living in exile, first in France, then Holland. He was very poor. His courtiers called him “Your Majesty”, but his fine clothes turned to rags, and his “palace” was an ordinary house in Holland whose landlord shouted at him for missing the rent. Every time he heard news of a Sealed Knot plot failing, Charles wondered if he should give up. He seemed to have no chance of returning to Britain as king.