A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

222 Ch. 6 • England and the Dutch Republic

London Levellers. This text anticipated later theorists by claiming that all
“freeborn Englishmen/’ not just property owners, were the source of polit­
ical authority and that “the poorest man in England is not at all bound in
a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put him­
self under.” Cromwell ruthlessly restored order in the New Model Army,
subduing mutinous Leveller regiments and ordering several leaders shot.
In November 1647, King Charles escaped the custody of Parliament and
fled to the Isle of Wight. Against the opposition of Presbyterians who hoped
that some compromise could still be reached with the king, the House of
Commons passed a motion that no further addresses should be made to
King Charles. The implication was that Parliament alone should proceed to
establish a new government without Charles’s participation or consent,
probably indicating that Cromwell and many other members of Parliament
had already decided that Charles I should be put to death and a republic
declared.
In May 1648, Presbyterian moderates joined Cavalier uprisings in south­
ern Wales and southern England. Charles had been secretly negotiating with
the Presbyterian Scots, hoping that they now would join an alliance of Angli­
cans and members of Parliament who had become disillusioned with
Cromwell’s radicalism. But the New Model Army turned back a Scottish
invasion in August, and besieged royalist forces in Wales surrendered. The
king was placed under guard on the Isle of Wight, “more a Prisoner,” as an
observer put it, “than ever... and could not goe to pisse without a guarde
nor to Goffe [play golf].”
A detachment of the New Model Army, under Colonel Thomas Pride,
then surrounded the Parliament house and refused to let Presbyterians—
and some Independents as well—join the other members. “Pride’s Purge,”
which took place without Cromwell’s consent or knowledge, left a “Rump
Parliament” of about a fifth of the members sitting.
The Rump Parliament, dominated by Independents, appointed a High
Court to try the king on charges of high treason. Charles refused to defend
himself and was found guilty. Charles I was executed at Whitehall on Jan­
uary 30, 1649, the first monarch to be tried and executed by his own sub­
jects. Charles’s beheading had immediate international repercussions; one
power after another severed diplomatic relations with England.

The Puritan Republic and Restoration

The Rump Parliament abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords. It

established a Puritan republic, the Commonwealth of England, with

Cromwell as its leader. In 1649, Cromwell brutally put down the Irish upris­

ing that had gone on for eight years. The Act of Settlement in 1652 expropri­

ated the land of two-thirds of the Catholic property owners in Ireland,

assuring the ascendancy of English Protestants in that strife-torn land for