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By Root 1239 0

Ormond managed to secure a twelve-month cessation of arms in Ireland, leaving only very limited royal outposts on the east coast and around Cork in the South-west, and some fortresses in the north and west. Ormond’s misgivings were shared by other influential figures such as Murrough O’Brien, Earl of Inchiquin (a Protestant of distinguished parentage and commander of the government’s forces in Munster), and Barnabas O’Brien, Earl of Thomond (governor of County Clare). But the larger logic of the arrangement was plain. Ormond’s hesitations fed doubts about this peace party strategy among the Confederates: that the bargaining position was being given up too easily or to someone who could not be fully trusted.4

The Cessation was (to put it no more strongly) unlikely to be well-received in England and Scotland, particularly since its purpose was to allow troops to be brought back and used against the English parliament. It brought an end to Sir Edward Dering’s flirtation with royalism, for example. Returning from Oxford he was examined at Westminster, and said ‘that since the cessation in Ireland, and seeing so many papists and Irish rebels in the king’s army and the anti-parliament set up at Oxford, and the King’s counsels wholly governed by the popish party, his conscience would not permit him to stay longer with them’. He was allowed to compound for his delinquency, his treatment to be a model ‘for all others that would come in after him who was the first’.5 Perhaps more damagingly, the Cessation made Charles’s hopes of getting Scottish support seem even more remote. The truce left Monro with a choice: to enjoy the benefits of the Cessation or to face the Confederate army without support from Ormond. Ormond’s diplomacy therefore also aimed at preventing Monro fighting for Parliament, if possible. By early November the arrival of Irish troops had been negotiated and on 15 September a cessation was agreed, to last twelve months.6

While backing the plan for the Cessation in Ireland, Charles had also sought support in Scotland, hoping to exploit cracks in the Covenanting coalition, but these were more or less contradictory policies. He did not seem concerned that his Irish policy would upset others among his allies, or that Sir Edward Hyde (supporter of the policy of winning the war by subverting London through such means as the Waller plot) was not aware of these plans for Ireland. Hyde had been knighted as recently as February, joining the Privy Council and being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer shortly afterwards-he was apparently a rising man in Charles’s counsels, but he was in the dark about the Irish policy. Hamilton, the leading Scot at the English court and long-suffering adviser to Charles, who currently enjoyed Charles’s confidence, thought that by normal means of aristocratic intrigue he would be able to generate support for the King in Scotland. In particular, the leading role played by the Earl of Argyll in the Covenanting movement was generating hostility in Scotland, particularly among his rivals, and this might form the basis for a royalist party without the necessity of making war in Scotland. The price of such a deal was likely to be a secure Presbyterian settlement, but making such guarantees appear convincing would be even harder than before as a result of his Irish policy.7 Charles clearly saw his government in a ‘three kingdoms’ perspective, and was alert to the implications of dissent in one kingdom for the good order of the other two. It is hard to credit, therefore, how relaxed he was about the obvious difficulties of promoting a royalist alliance in three kingdoms, or at least one that was not obnoxious to many of his subjects.

An alternative vision for Scotland was the more militant one proposed by the Earl of Montrose. He was keen to create a royalist force in Scotland, and met Henrietta Maria soon after her landing in Bridlington, hoping to get the King’s support for a rising in Scotland. Later in the year he met Charles in person outside Gloucester during the siege, to discuss this plan,