The Maid Who Restored Charles II

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 husband in the least promising circumstances: the dank chambers of the Tower of London in the mid-1640s. George Monck was a prisoner, she the laundry maid or seamstress who washed and repaired the inmates’ clothing. Though George was a detainee, Anne was still many rungs below him on the social ladder. He was the 37-year-old son of a Devon knight. She was the daughter of a Soho blacksmith in her mid-20s. Their characters were also different. He was serious and uncommunicative, ‘the most reserved man alive’. She had a lively forthright manner that displeased many but captivated him. 

As a soldier of the royal army George had been captured by the parliamentary forces at the Battle of Nantwich in 1644. He was thought worth retaining and so was sent to the Tower, where he whiled away long hours writing a manual of military discipline. What relief Anne’s visits gave him and exactly what transpired between them is lost to history. But from that time on he ‘never cast an amorous glance upon any other woman’. 

George Monck was released from the Tower on the condition that he join his former opponents. He did so without hesitation, having fought for the king as a career soldier rather than from any ideological fervour. When he left London, Anne went with him. In the remaining years of the Civil War George’s abilities saw him promoted, rising up the ranks as the New Model Army fought on to victory. When moderate MPs were purged from Parliament and Charles I was tried and executed by an army-backed minority, the Moncks voiced no protest. 

In 1653 Anne gave birth to a son named Christopher. A furtive wedding took place in the early months of the pregnancy in St George’s Church, Southwark, at which only the couple’s Christian names were entered in the parish register. There was a good reason for such secrecy: Anne Clarges was already married, betrothed in her teens to haberdasher Thomas Radford. He was from Derbyshire but had been apprenticed in London and kept a shop at the New Exchange. From here, Anne had plied her trade as a seamstress, which had taken her to the Tower of London. As the Moncks’ relationship was sealed, the Radfords’ disintegrated. It was later claimed that Thomas had died, though when evidence was sought in the burial registers none could be found. Instead, Radford had, it seems, been induced to leave London.

Bigamy was a serious crime, punishable by death, so the risk George and Anne ran was colossal. Monck would later remark of his intervention in national politics that it was better to chance death in the jaws of a lion than to be slowly devoured by rats. Bravery was a characteristic he shared with the woman who was now his wife.

Treason gown

In 1654 George Monck was put in charge of the army in Scotland. It was from here and the couple’s home in the castle of Dalkeith, outside Edinburgh, that they watched events in Westminster unfold. The Commonwealth, or republic, had held for more than four years from the execution of Charles I until Cromwell expelled the Rump Parliament, telling them they had ‘stayed too long’ for all the good they had done. The Protectorate, a kingless state with Cromwell as its powerful steward, was the solution instituted. It continued for almost five years until Oliver Cromwell’s death when, under the terms of the constitution, the Protector’s nominee, his eldest son, Richard, succeeded him in 1658. 

During these years General Monck was a reliable supporter of the regime. He had rooted out royalist rebels operating in the Highlands and played no part in the politicking that embroiled others. Anne was at his side, joining her husband in entertaining visitors in the receiving rooms of Dalkeith Castle. Their marriage attracted disparaging comments, but neither paid much attention.

While the Moncks were scrupulously loyal to the Protectorate, they did not feel entirely easy about its policies. The tolerant attitude taken by the Lord Protector to the new religious sects troubled them. The Quaker founder, George Fox, saw Scotland as a fruitful recruiting ground and made several visits to drum up support. On one occasion, George and Anne encountered two Quaker spokesmen keen to share their beliefs. Anne had little patience with their views and dodged a lecture on the ‘inner light’ by manoeuvring their chaplain into position to listen in her place. 

The Moncks remained in Scotland through the six months of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorship. When George’s fellow generals in London, led by John Lambert, conspired with the former members of the Rump Parliament to eject Richard and restore the republic, matters came to a head. Eyes turned north to see whether George might act. He remained silent and when Richard appealed to him for help he turned him down flat. 

It was over the course of the summer of 1659 that Anne seems to have come to feel that a restoration of the Stuart monarchy was imaginable, even desirable. One night she had a vivid dream in which she saw a golden crown glimmering on a dung heap, encircled by guards. She then saw a tall, dark haired man break through the ring and step forward to lift the crown on to his head. Afterwards, she asked a member of their household ‘what manner of Man’ the exiled Stuart, Charles II, was. She was told he had black hair and had grown tall. 

In the evenings, when Anne had changed into her house gown, she visited her husband working in the castle’s dining room. There, according to their chaplain, she would tell him ‘that when she had that Gown on, he should allow her the liberty to say any thing’. Anne would open up conversations on politics and possibilities that caused them to call her costume ‘her Treason Gown’.

While Monck resisted his wife’s entreaties, making ‘hard faces, and seem[ing] to be uneasie in hearing her’, he would begin to admit misgivings about the treatment of Charles I and concerns about the ungovernability of the army. As one who had been trained to believe that soldiers followed orders rather than gave them, the political supremacy and religious and political radicalism of his fellow generals troubled him deeply. Anne did not persuade George to agree terms with the royalist agents sent to seek him out, but the couple’s discomfort with affairs caused them to part company with the new republic. Monck announced their plan to retire to Ireland and Anne ordered packing cases to prepare for the move.

In September 1659 the alliance between the army generals and Rump MPs that had brought about Richard Cromwell’s downfall collapsed. The generals expelled the restored parliament from the chamber. The news was met with disbelief at Dalkeith. George was convinced at last to act.

Monck’s ultimatum

In the weeks that followed George and Anne Monck operated in concert, her brother in London acting as a crucial go-between with the politicians. The general stunned the nation and his fellow officers by declaring his support for the Rump Parliament. He managed to gather enough backers, including the erstwhile commander of the New Model Army, Thomas Fairfax, to march to London, so enabling the MPs’ return. He stated unequivocally that he was acting to restore Parliamentary authority, and not to prepare the ground for a restoration of the monarchy. This he would not countenance for a number of reasons, not least his belief that it would spark a new civil war.

George Monck advanced to London down the Great North Road, while Anne sailed south from Berwick. She arrived ahead of her husband and was welcomed with fanfare by numerous visitors, including many MPs’ wives. But the blow that awaited them was that the Rump Parliament, now back in their Chamber, was in a belligerent mood. Rather than setting a date for new elections or filling their empty seats, they determined to stamp their authority on the capital and on George Monck himself. Anne was tipped off that the Council of State was meeting without her husband and she rushed to the Whitehall Council Chamber, hammering on the door on the pretext of seeking him. But her attempt to break up the meeting failed. The Council issued instructions that Monck should occupy the City of London, arrest its officials and dismantle its defences. 

That evening George and Anne, with a handful of confidants, deliberated well into the night. To act was to provoke further conflict and instability; refusal would result in dismissal. The general’s instinct was still to comply. Anne thought otherwise. As one who was there remembered: ‘His lady and we laid before him the certain ruin such an action would bring upon him; that it would lose him the hearts of all the honest and sober party, and deliver him up into the hands of those that perfectly hated him.’ 

The experience, the next day, of riding into the City to carry out these orders was scarring. That night the cabal again sat up late and this time George was persuaded that he could not continue. He rode into the City before daybreak and issued an ultimatum to the Rump Parliament: they had until Friday to institute new elections for their empty seats. London erupted, bonfires blazing on street corners and in market places, as ‘the sudden news rane like wild fier’ that Monck ‘should stand by them and they should have a free parliament’.

On 21 February 1660 members of Charles I’s parliament who had been purged to force through the revolution 12 years earlier were readmitted. As promised, they voted that new elections should be held. What this would mean for the nation’s future form of government remained unclear. Through all that had passed Monck still refused to talk of the reinstitution of the Stuart monarchy. His chaplain had tried to raise it but had been silenced by Monck ‘in some anger’; his brother had attempted to deliver a letter from Charles II but had been rebutted. Only Anne, in her ‘treason gown’, had been able to promote the king’s cause. 

Once the Long Parliament had dissolved itself and all possible alternatives had been exhausted, Monck finally conceded and agreed to meet an agent of the Stuart king. In a room in St James’s Palace he set out his terms for a restoration of the monarchy. They were carried to Charles II, who was told that ‘Monks lady’ had more influence with the general than anyone. As one of the king’s informants explained, Monck’s ‘wife rejected proposals’ that the general himself should become Lord Protector, in favour of ‘the advantages the King could give to his family’. Charles II wrote personally to Anne to thank her; a further shower of ingratiating letters followed, among them one from Charles I’s widow, Henrietta Maria, and his sister, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia. They were in no doubt that Anne had been ‘the Minerva and great Patroness of this grand design’.

Monarchy restored

Charles II landed at Dover in glorious sunshine on 26 May 1660. Waiting for him on the shingle was George Monck. As the young king crunched forward, followed by his two brothers and a scampering spaniel, the general sank to his knees and kissed the hem of the king’s cloak. Knowing well that he owed Monck his throne, the king knelt to embrace him. While the restoration of the monarchy was not Monck’s intention, the restoration of stability was. He hoped that this settlement might achieve it.

In the distribution of honours and offices that followed, none benefitted more than George and Anne Monck. They were made Duke and Duchess of Albemarle; he was given the Order of the Garter and made Lord General of the Army and Lord Deputy of Ireland. As former stalwarts of the republic they were eyed enviously by those royalists who had lived in impoverished exile. But, while Monck’s military prowess and standing with the king protected him, Anne soon felt the resentment first hand. The flinty humour and outspoken style that had helped her guide her husband added to her unpopularity, and her position as a ‘lady of low origin’ who had once sold cloth at the New Exchange was dredged up with evident delight. 

The pair spent increasingly little time at court. When George Monck died in January 1670, Anne followed him to the grave just a fortnight later. In the eulogies that had celebrated the events of 1660, Anne had been hailed: ‘Future chronicles shall blazon your ladyship the best of Women and his Excellency the best of Men.’ But trophies and public monuments did not follow. Few chose to remember how close a call the Restoration had been, or to celebrate the part played in it by a blacksmith’s daughter. Anne Monck would soon be forgotten, as would her role in helping engineer the return of a sovereign institution that, 350 years later, is with us still. 

Anna Keay is author of The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (William Collins, 2022).