By 1644 the Royalists had lost most of the north of England to the Parliamentarians after the battle of Marston Moor, in 1645 the King’s main army was crushed at Naseby; and in the autumn of the same year the south-west of England, the most Royalist part of the kingdom, submitted to the New Model Army commanded by the Yorkshire gentleman Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Oliver as his second-in-command. Realizing that he could not continue the struggle, Charles escaped from Oxford disguised as a servant, crossing Magdalen bridge as the clock struck three in the morning at the end of April 1646. He was convinced that what he had lost by war he could regain by diplomacy. His first intention was to find his way to London in order to plead his case before Parliament, and indeed he had sent a message to Sir Henry Vane the Younger, one of the leaders of the House of Commons and at that time an intimate friend of Oliver, asking him if he and his friends would invite him to revisit his capital so that he could negotiate peace.³ But Charles was resolved not to fall into the rebels’ hands if he could ‘by any industry or danger’ prevent it.

With two companions he managed to arrive at a tavern in Hillingdon, fourteen miles from London. But then - nobody quite knows why - he changed his mind and decided to turn back to throw himself on the mercy of the Scottish army, the paid allies of the Parliamentarians. Hopefully but wrongly Charles believed that the Scottish commanders, who were then encamped near the strategic town of Newark in Nottinghamshire, had committed themselves through the intervention of the French ambassador in England to treating him honourably, asking him to do nothing contrary to his conscience and, provided he agreed to a few concessions to their religious views, ensuring that he was restored to his throne in Whitehall palace. Soon he was to be undeceived. The Scots obliged him to order the surrender of Newark to them before they carried him off to Newcastle upon Tyne where they tried to convert him to the Presbyterian faith and demanded of him that it should be accepted as the state religion in England, as it already was in Scotland.

For eight months Charles remained the prisoner of the Scots in Newcastle, under constant pressure by persuasions and threats to change his religion and that of his English subjects. He complained, ‘I never knew what it was to be so barbarously baited before.’⁴ Quickly he came to understand that his captors had no intention whatever of allowing him to be more of a king in England that they had already made him in Scotland, and that they certainly did not mean to break with the English rebels in order to restore him to the position he had once held of sovereign by divine right. Reluctantly he felt obliged to inform his wife that the Scots would not make him ‘a great and glorious king’ if he satisfied them about religion.⁵ In fact during the summer of 1646 the Earl of Argyll, the most powerful man in Scotland, went up to London and agreed that commissioners from the Lords and Commons could carry an ultimatum to the King which, if accepted, would deprive him of all real authority.

Vainly Charles played for time, but eventually the English Parliament paid off their Scottish allies, who left Newcastle for home after handing over their royal prisoner to the Parliamentarian commissioners. Charles was removed by the commissioners, headed by the Earl of Pembroke, who had once been his Lord Chamberlain, to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire, which his mother had bought for him. He was delighted to get away from the Scots who, he thought, had deceived and humiliated him; on his journey south he was gratified by the acclamations of the crowds who had flocked to see him pass and wished him well. But at Holdenby, where he arrived in mid-February 1647, he was not allowed his own chaplains or grooms of the bedchamber or other personal servants. Otherwise he was treated courteously; he read and played chess, and he pursued his private devotions unhindered. So he became increasingly affable, chatting to Pembroke, and when the Earl was taken ill, inquiring anxiously after his health and graciously visiting him, which, according to Pembroke’s doctor, much helped his recovery. Charles’s own health was excellent because he was abstemious and exercised himself by walking and playing bowls.

Charles also occupied himself in preparing a detailed answer to the propositions he had received from Parliament when he was at Newcastle. He offered to permit Presbyterianism being the state religion in England for three years and also agreed to hand over the control of the militia, that was in effect the armed forces of the kingdom, for ten years. Of course he refused to consent to any of those who fought for him being excluded from a general act of pardon, but he hoped that

Such were the views Charles expressed in confidence while he was a captive of the Scots. Now that he was the honourable prisoner of the English Parliament he became much more optimistic about his future. For he found out that the Presbyterian members of the House of Commons, led by Denzil Holies, the high-spirited younger son of the Earl of Clare, were at logger-heads with the Army which had defeated him. Indeed during Easter week 1647 he is said to have received a proposal from an officer of the Army that if he surrendered himself to its charge, he would be restored to ‘his Honour, Crown and Dignity’. His reply was, ‘We will not engage our people in another war’, and he added piously, ‘The Lord be merciful to my poor people. Too much blood hath been shed already. The Lord be merciful to my distracted kingdom when He accounts with them for rebellion and blood.’¹⁰ Unquestionably Charles was sincere at that time. Yet within a year he was to plunge his kingdoms into blood again.

Meanwhile, Oliver Cromwell as an assiduous member of parliament, though still on the army payroll, had been struggling to reconcile the Army with Parliament. The difficulty was that no effective executive was in existence. The body known as the Committee of Both Kingdoms had been a kind of executive as long as the first civil war was being fought, but lost its need for existence once the war had ended and the Scots army paid off. Its executive functions were taken over by what was called the Derby House committee, which was dominated by Denzil Holies, who was to describe Oliver in his memoirs as one of ‘the Grand Designers of the Ruin of Two Kingdoms’. John Pym, the veteran anti-papist, who was the acknowledged leader of the House of Commons when the war began, had died of cancer, leaving no accepted or capable successor. No Lord Treasurer or Chancellor or Secretary of State was functioning, and decisions were taken by a fluctuating majority in the House of Commons which still sought the agreement of an attenuated House of Lords. The Presbyterian leaders in the Commons demanded that the New Model Army should be drastically reduced in size and the soldiers given a choice between disbanding or serving in an expeditionary force to be dispatched to quell the rebellion in Ireland, which had broken out in 1641. But the rank-and-file of the New Model Army was understandably restive because its pay was many months in arrears while no compensation was being offered to the widows and disabled created by the fighting. And before the soldiers consented to serve in Ireland they naturally wanted to know who their commanders would be and what were their future terms of service.

Oliver soon recognized how unpopular the existence and upkeep of large armies had become to the general public once the Royalists had been defeated. In most towns and counties the urge to be rid of the unpleasantnesses of wartime was profound. Cromwell told General Fairfax about a long petition that had been presented to Parliament by the City of London which ‘struck at the Army’ just before Christmas 1646.¹¹ Then Oliver was taken ill, but after his recovery, which he considered miraculous, he warned Fairfax that ‘there want not in all places men who have so much malice against the Army as besots them’.¹² Nevertheless, he persuaded himself that if the Army were fairly treated by the House of Commons it would disband or volunteer for service in Ireland.

Towards the end of March 1647, however, a ‘Declaration of the Army’ was drawn up, in which Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton played an important part, requiring Parliament to pay all arrears owing to the soldiers, to pass an act of indemnity for offences committed during the war, and to compensate the widows and orphans of fighting men who had been killed. A similar petition was addressed by private soldiers to General Fairfax. As a member of parliament of many years standing, Oliver disapproved of the soldiers’ petition on the grounds that they were attempting to dictate to Parliament with their arms in their hands.¹³ A majority in the Commons reacted furiously; it voted a resolution to the effect that ‘all those who still continue in their distempered condition and go on advancing and promoting that petition shall be looked upon and proceeded against as enemies of the State and disturbers of the public peace’.

The men that had won the war for Parliament enemies of the state? No more provocative denunciation was conceivable. However, once the leaders of the Commons realized that the Army was united in its demands they compromised by appointing Cromwell, Ireton and two other members who had been officers to go to the Army headquarters (then at Saffron Walden) in May to pacify the soldiers by promising them that an act of indemnity would be passed and eight weeks of their arrears paid immediately. Oliver warned the officers there that if they disobeyed the orders of Parliament nothing could follow but confusion. But after he had been in Saffron Walden for a fortnight he was obliged to report that he and his fellow commissioners had found the Army (in which privates as well as officers were allowed to express their views) ‘under a deep sense of some sufferings and the common soldiers most unsettled’.¹⁴ He thought they would disband if they were paid off, but doubted if they would agree to go to Ireland. The leaders of the Commons reacted unfavourably to the report; they drew up a plan to scatter the regiments, disband them if they refused to serve in Ireland and, if necessary, recall the Scottish army to protect them against their own troops.

Under these circumstances it was hardly surprising that both Parliament and the Army turned to King Charles, for if a constitutional government under his auspices were to be established, the general state of public confusion could be ended. In April the propositions originally presented to Charles at Newcastle were again sent to him at Holdenby House, while in the same month he received a message from the Army that he should take refuge in its ranks. At the beginning of May a rumour arose that regiments in Cambridge and Ipswich were planning to fetch the King from Holdenby,¹⁵ in the middle of the month the House of Lords voted to bring the King nearer to London, and later the Commons were considering the same idea. Parliament also contemplated dispatching him to Scotland out of the reach of the New Model Army. At the outset of June the French ambassador in London reported home that the Presbyterian members of parliament ‘were trying to prevent the King of England from falling into the hands of the Army’. But they failed to do so.

On 3 June George Joyce, a cornet (the lowest-ranking officer in the Army), after seizing the magazine at Oxford went to Holden-by with 400 or 500 cavalrymen and demanded to speak to the King. The small garrison then fraternized with the troopers and the garrison commander, a Presbyterian, fled. Charles, who had returned from playing bowls at Althorp, was woken from his slumber. After a conversation with Cornet Joyce he promised, provided he was asked to do nothing contrary to his conscience, to leave Holdenby with Joyce on the following morning. On 4 June, after being reassured about his safety and that of his servants, Charles asked Joyce to show him his instructions. Joyce told the King that he had no orders, but turned in his saddle and pointed to his long line of troopers. ‘It is as fair a commission and as well written as I have seen a commission written in my life,’ replied Charles, smiling.¹⁶ He then agreed to accompany Joyce to the royal hunting lodge at Newmarket. The Parliamentary commissioners who had brought him to Holdenby from Newcastle reluctantly went with him but, as one of the King’s grooms of the bedchamber noted, Charles was...