BOOKS
Fools, hypocrites and humbugs
Hugh Trevor-Roper
THE REGICIDES by A. L. Rowse Duckworth 06.99, pp. 183 Two centuries ago, the Revd Mark Noble, rector of Barming, Kent, published his two-volume Lives of the English Regi- cides. It was a topical work: he dedicated it, in a withering epistle, to 'the Regicides of France'.
You have copied the worst transactions in our annals [he told them], and have the supreme infamy of having far exceeded those whose lives are here given. Preparatory to the murder of your gracious sovereign, you printed the mock trial of our unhappy monarch. You will now also see, as a prelude to your own fate, that of King Charles I's judges.
Noble wrote in the mood of his time, before Carlyle (who both used and abused his work) had idealised the Grand Regicide for the Victorian middle classes. Now Dr Rowse, in this slimmer work, resumes the tone of Noble. Like Noble, he too sees the subject as topical, containing 'salutary lessons, even morals' for our time. I hope these sinister apprehensions are exaggerat- ed.
Who were the regicides? Technically, they were the 59 men who sat in the kanga- roo court which condemned Charles I and who signed his death-warrant. But there are others whom it is hard to exclude from the list: 'that execrable skellum' Hugh Peter, for instance, the buffoon preacher whose inflammatory sermons pressed for the King's death, and Milton, whose gloat- ing pamphlets justified it afterwards. Mil- ton was very lucky to get off scot-free after the Restoration; Peter was less lucky: he suffered the full penalty — as did Sir Henry Vane, who also, technically, was not a regicide. Dr Rowse is indulgent to Peter, a fellow Cornishman — more so than to his other Cornishman, John Carew. But Carew was a real regicide and a Fifth Monarchy fanatic, comparable with 'the deluded maniacs of Waco, Texas' — and also 'a gentleman of ancient family' who should have known better. 'Nothing could be done with such a type.' In general, the restored monarchy was sparing in its revenge. Neither Charles II nor Clarendon wished to re-open old wounds. An Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (Indemnity for the King's enemies and Oblivion for his friends, disgruntled royal- ists complained) limited the number to be tried, and the trials, by the standard of the time, were very fair. The worst offenders Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw, the presi- dent of the infamous court, were already dead. Their bodies were dug up and hung in chains. A dozen of the chief culprits were executed; another dozen or so locked up in various prisons. Some two dozen escaped to bolt-holes abroad, in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, New England. Not all were safe even there: royalist assassins got Dr Dorislaus, the Dutchman who had drawn up the charge against the King, in Holland, and John Lisle, Bradshaw's assis- tant, in Switzerland. Three others were extradited from Holland and executed in 1663: a coup for Charles II's ambassador, George Downing, who thus atoned for his own past service to the usurper.
Surprisingly, some real regicides were acquitted altogether. Colonel Hutchinson, a stiff, smug republican, was got off by his even smugger wife Can insufferable snob') and her royalist relations, though he had a spell in prison later, and of course he had to return the pictures which he had acquired from the royal collection. Unlike most of the others, he had aesthetic tastes — music as well as art. Colonel Ingoldsby, Cromwell's cousin, who was refreshingly free from the family cant — he could 'nei- ther preach nor pray' — and who had worked his passage back, was even knight- ed at Charles II's coronation. He had signed the death-warrant, but, he protest- ed, under duress: Cromwell had 'put the pen between his fingers and with his own hand writ Richard Ingoldsby'.
Others made similar excuses, less effec- tively. But some boasted of their own hero- ic action and declared that they would do it again. Had they not observed the forms of law? Yes indeed, but only the forms: the `My husband didn't agree with me.' King's trial was a travesty of justice by a revolutionary junta and has been defended only by bigoted republicans and radicals. Even the whigs, who created the myth of Charles I's 'tyranny', disowned it: a good cause, they would say, had been carried beyond their control. That did not prevent them (and some Tories too) from risking a repetition a generation later. But this time they were lucky: James II, unlike his father, ran away.
Dr Rowse has no sympathy with republi- cans or radicals — or with 'second-rate professors' of history who write only for `their own sub-culture'. He writes, he says, for 'the general reader', and for himself, with very few footnote references, and those mostly to his own works. But he writes with undiminished verve and vigour, drawing on real erudition and laying about him with a will: knockabout turns and knock-out blows. He tells us the worst about all the regicides — and not only them: anyone whom he can label 'puritan' starts with a handicap. The motives of such men were all base: if not fools or hypocrites, they were greedy humbugs: 'the nasty Lord Brooke', 'the Presbyterian pomposity' Sir Arthur Hazelrig, Lord Saye and Sele, whose 'prime motive was to get his snout into the trough'. The 'puritan' clergy were `trouble-makers' (a favourite phrase) 'riddled with envy'. Envy, he observes, is 'a powerful factor in human affairs', though seldom noticed by aca- demics, who are 'themselves so much sub- ject to it'.
Dr Rowse is particularly impatient of `intellectuals' and will not waste the time of his 'general reader' by mentioning ideas. The universities come in for some stick on that account: dammit, Sir, Hobbes was right. Ireton, the political brain behind Cromwell, was 'a lean, mean, hungry- looking intellectual'. That does for him. The 'thinking' (his quotation marks) of the Levellers, with their notions of the rights of man, which led to Locke, is 'simply silly'. He has not much use for the idea of national independence either: the Scotch Covenant, which expressed it, is also 'silly'. Political ideas, he assures us, are merely means `to advance one's own interest'. `Principles' simply reflect the size of one's sexual equipment. That does for them.
So, by generalising from his rogues' gallery, and devaluing all ideas, and by liberal use of the label 'puritan', Dr Rowse both supplies his biographical miscellany with an articulating point of view and can declare the 'salutary lesson' of the English revolution. The ruling class, we are told, should never have let their divisions come to civil war: they should have remained united, `to keep order in the nursery' (another favourite phrase) and control 'the daft crowd'. This, perhaps, is to solve the problem rather easily.
Still, if it simplifies history, it makes easy reading. The saloon-bar boutades are expressed in lively prose, the portraits touched with livening colour. Dr Rowse's elitism is as uncompromising as that of Milton, and he can clown it as merrily as Hugh Peter. So, in his preface, he can express the hope that 'the attentive reader may gain not a few laughs from the dis- tasteful subject'. I gained my laugh at his description of the 'doctrinaire intellectual' Milton, in the last agony of the Republic, publishing 'tract after tract, signalling fran- tically, like a stranded sailor on the sea- coast of Patagonia'. What a happy image! Others will no doubt find other occasions for hilarity — provided they are not too sympathetic to 'intellectuals', 'puritans' or (another of his bugbears) 'ordinary people'.
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