While the Cromwellians supported Dick’s protectorate, many of the generals, diehard puritan republicans, wanted a saintly republic. Dick raised army pay but, short of cash, he launched a coup to seize control of the army, dissolved the council of officers and summoned a new Parliament, but it failed. In the event he could control neither the assembly nor the generals, who forced its dismissal and recalled the remains of the Parliament that had been elected in 1640. His French allies offered to invade and back him, but crushed between generals and Cromwellians, republicans and monarchists, with zealots on both sides, ‘Richard P’ – now nicknamed Queen Dick – floundered, musing that he would never spill blood to hold power ‘which is a burden to me’. His debts were so great that Parliament had to grant him immunity from arrest and agree his pension. There is only one thing more contemptible than a competent dictatorship and that is an incompetent one. On 25 May 1659, after eight months in office, Dick was deposed and a junta, the Committee of Safety, took power. As General Lambert, popular with the army, hoped to rule himself, the Cromwellian commander in Scotland, George Monck, aided by Black Tom Fairfax, defeated the radical general and marched south, secretly advising Charles II to declare reconciliation and then return.
Tumbledown Dick, lingering in Whitehall and besieged by debtors, appealed for Monck’s help: ‘as I can’t but think myself unworthy of great things so you will not think me worthy of utter destruction’. As Oliver’s secretary Milton wrote
The Planet King must have envied England its jovial young prince. Philip IV’s need of sons would lead to the incestuous marriage that would spawn the most freakish tragedy of the dynasty.
* As a young man, Heyn had been captured by the Spanish and enslaved to work the galleys for four years, making him a rare opponent of slavery.
* Jeffrey Hudson no longer enjoyed the mockery of her courtiers. When her master of the horse bullied him, he challenged him to a duel. The courtier arrived armed with a marrow, but Hudson was armed with a pistol and shot him in the forehead. Still only twenty-five, he was sentenced to death, but the queen pardoned him. She sent him back to England but somehow his ship was captured by Barbary pirates who enslaved him for over twenty years, during which he endured rape and servitude, and he only returned to England in 1669.
* The tree famously still stands, though it may be a more recent replacement.
* The Chinese hated this submissive hairstyle and rebelled rather than wear it. The Manchu enforced it. While Manchu women, like those of the Tang and the Mongols, were liberated and rode horses, Han Chinese women increasingly were confined to the home, binding their feet as a sign of submission and delicacy.
* In 1678, when he fell out with his Swedish allies, the Great Elector commandeered peasant sleighs to transport his troops. In 1929, the Great Sleigh Drive inspired a German officer, Heinz Guderian, to devise panzer warfare.
* The prize of adding the heart of Rus to his tsardom helped the second Romanov consolidate his weak new dynasty, and for future rulers, right up into the twenty-first century, Ukraine became essential – as historic realm and breadbasket – to a certain vision of Russia. Ukrainian nationalists later regarded the Cossack hetmanate as the first modern Ukrainian state though it was dominated by Cossack nobles. The crisis drew Tsar Alexei into Poland–Lithuania, which was shaken by what Poles called ‘the Deluge’ and never recovered its power. Khmelnytsky died and so did the story of the hetmanate. In 1667, Romanov tsar and Polish king divided Ukraine. Alexei got Kyiv and the lands on the left bank of the Dnieper, while the Cossacks remained autonomous under their hetmans; the south was ruled by the Crimean khan with key fortresses held by his Ottoman masters. There would not be another independent Ukraine until 1917.
* Among those watching the execution and celebrating it was a St Paul’s schoolboy, Samuel Pepys, who later served Charles’s son. ‘Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at Whitehall,’ he wrote eleven years later. At the time, he supported the execution, an attitude he came to regret: ‘I was a great Roundhead when I was a boy.’
