The Maid Who Restored Charles II

Summary

In the early months of 1660 the taciturn West Country soldier George Monck held the fate of the British Isles in his hands. Oliver Cromwell was dead and the British republic had descended into chaos. The army and its leaders had ousted his son, Richard, and – once again – marched Members of Parliament out of their chamber in Westminster before bolting the door. Monck had been watching at a distance as army chief of Scotland. In the ensuing game of military and strategic chess, played for the future of the nation, he intervened as few had done before or since. Declaring his support for the expelled parliament, he marched south. Monck enabled the MPs to return but, having done so, those parliamentarians then instructed him to arrest prominent London citizens and emasculate the city. He faced a stark choice. Would he carry out these orders, with which he bitterly disagreed, at the command of the ‘Rump’ Parliament? Would he reinstate Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector or take control by slipping into those shoes himself? Or would Monck do the unthinkable and make contact with the exiled Stuart, Charles II? The question of how and why George Monck made the choices he did – resulting in the return of the monarchy on terms almost unchanged from those it enjoyed before its abolition in 1649 – has been long debated. That had certainly not been his original intention. How and when was his mind changed? Was it Charles Stuart and his agents or the Parliamentary leader Arthur Haselrige? Was it his disgust with fellow army officers or the intervention of the retired hero of the New Model Army, Thomas Fairfax? In fact, the person who won George over was his wife, Anne. This remarkable woman has not been the subject of a biography and, unlike 60,000 other figures, she does not even have an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. Yet without her influence the course of British history would have been entirely different. Love in a hopeless place Anne Monck met her future husba...