BEFORE sunset on the memorable day on which King Charles the First was executed,the House of Commons passed an act declaring it treason in any one to proclaim the Prince of Wales-or anybody else-King of England.Soon afterwards,it declared that the House of Lords was useless and dangerous,and ought to be abolished;and directed that the late King's statue should be taken down from the Royal Exchange in the City and other public places.
Having laid hold of some famous Royalists who had escaped from prison,and having beheaded the DUKE OF HAMILTON,LORD HOLLAND,and LORD CAPEL,in Palace Yard (all of whom died very courageously),they then appointed a Council of State to govern the country.It consisted of forty-one members,of whom five were peers.Bradshaw was made president.The House of Commons also re-admitted members who had opposed the King's death,and made up its numbers to about a hundred and fifty.
But,it still had an army of more than forty thousand men to deal with,and a very hard task it was to manage them.Before the King's execution,the army had appointed some of its officers to remonstrate between them and the Parliament;and now the common soldiers began to take that office upon themselves.The regiments under orders for Ireland mutinied;one troop of horse in the city of London seized their own flag,and refused to obey orders.For this,the ringleader was shot:which did not mend the matter,for,both his comrades and the people made a public funeral for him,and accompanied the body to the grave with sound of trumpets and with a gloomy procession of persons carrying bundles of rosemary steeped in blood.Oliver was the only man to deal with such difficulties as these,and he soon cut them short by bursting at midnight into the town of Burford,near Salisbury,where the mutineers were sheltered,taking four hundred of them prisoners,and shooting a number of them by sentence of court-martial.The soldiers soon found,as all men did,that Oliver was not a man to be trifled with.And there was an end of the mutiny.
The Scottish Parliament did not know Oliver yet;so,on hearing of the King's execution,it proclaimed the Prince of Wales King Charles the Second,on condition of his respecting the Solemn League and Covenant.Charles was abroad at that time,and so was Montrose,from whose help he had hopes enough to keep him holding on and off with commissioners from Scotland,just as his father might have done.These hopes were soon at an end;for,Montrose,having raised a few hundred exiles in Germany,and landed with them in Scotland,found that the people there,instead of joining him,deserted the country at his approach.He was soon taken prisoner and carried to Edinburgh.There he was received with every possible insult,and carried to prison in a cart,his officers going two and two before him.He was sentenced by the Parliament to be hanged on a gallows thirty feet high,to have his head set on a spike in Edinburgh,and his limbs distributed in other places,according to the old barbarous manner.He said he had always acted under the Royal orders,and only wished he had limbs enough to be distributed through Christendom,that it might be the more widely known how loyal he had been.He went to the scaffold in a bright and brilliant dress,and made a bold end at thirty-eight years of age.The breath was scarcely out of his body when Charles abandoned his memory,and denied that he had ever given him orders to rise in his behalf.O the family failing was strong in that Charles then!
Oliver had been appointed by the Parliament to command the army in Ireland,where he took a terrible vengeance for the sanguinary rebellion,and made tremendous havoc,particularly in the siege of Drogheda,where no quarter was given,and where he found at least a thousand of the inhabitants shut up together in the great church:
every one of whom was killed by his soldiers,usually known as OLIVER'S IRONSIDES.There were numbers of friars and priests among them,and Oliver gruffly wrote home in his despatch that these were 'knocked on the head'like the rest.
But,Charles having got over to Scotland where the men of the Solemn League and Covenant led him a prodigiously dull life and made him very weary with long sermons and grim Sundays,the Parliament called the redoubtable Oliver home to knock the Scottish men on the head for setting up that Prince.Oliver left his son-in-law,Ireton,as general in Ireland in his stead (he died there afterwards),and he imitated the example of his father-in-law with such good will that he brought the country to subjection,and laid it at the feet of the Parliament.In the end,they passed an act for the settlement of Ireland,generally pardoning all the common people,but exempting from this grace such of the wealthier sort as had been concerned in the rebellion,or in any killing of Protestants,or who refused to lay down their arms.Great numbers of Irish were got out of the country to serve under Catholic powers abroad,and a quantity of land was declared to have been forfeited by past offences,and was given to people who had lent money to the Parliament early in the war.These were sweeping measures;but,if Oliver Cromwell had had his own way fully,and had stayed in Ireland,he would have done more yet.
However,as I have said,the Parliament wanted Oliver for Scotland;
So,home Oliver came,and was made Commander of all the Forces of the Commonwealth of England,and in three days away he went with sixteen thousand soldiers to fight the Scottish men.Now,the Scottish men,being then-as you will generally find them now-mighty cautious,reflected that the troops they had were not used to war like the Ironsides,and would be beaten in an open fight.