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Was their general for King, or was he for Parliament? No one but Monck truly knew.
Steadily south marched these ‘Coldstreamers’, and all opposition, real and imagined, melted away before them. ‘The frost was great, and the snow greater; and I do not remember that we ever trod upon plain earth from Edinburgh to London,’ recalled John Price, Monck’s chaplain. But unlike some later epics of winter marching – in Saxony, or in northern Spain – when the British army’s discipline faltered, this long haul saw the morale of Monck’s Coldstreamers increasing with every mile, their reception in town and village warm, the church bells ringing joyfully. ‘They were certainly the bravest, the best disciplined, and the soberest army that had been known in these latter ages: every soldier was able to do the functions of an officer,’ wrote Gilbert Burnet, later bishop of Salisbury. Doubtless he exaggerated a little, but perhaps not too greatly.
Far from being a winter’s march by which the army was almost broken, indeed, it was a march by which – almost literally – the British army was made.

If not the father of the British Army, then certainly the midwife.
     



The Return of the King

Blackheath, south-east London, 29 May 1660
     
THE KING’S THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY WAS THEATRE AS GOOD AS ANY MONARCH OF the
ancien régime
could have wished for. Charles Stuart, as still he was officially known, had stepped on to English soil – or, rather shingle – four days earlier for the first time in nearly a decade, and now he rode ceremoniously on to the ‘bleak heath’, which since Roman times had served as a marching camp, to take possession of England’s army. At Dover he had knelt momentarily and thankfully on the beach, to be greeted as he rose by Monck, and from there had made his steady progress via Canterbury. Having knighted the former Roundhead general in the dilapidated cathedral he rode on through cheering crowds in the lanes of Kent to this vast and grassy parade ground where 30,000 troops, with Monck at their head, waited to salute their new sovereign. The sun shone, although the silence must have seemed at least a trifle forbidding to Charles, for most of these men had fought his father in the war. Some might even have connived at his execution.
‘You had none of these at Coldstream,’ muttered one of Monck’s officers as the glittering royal party came on parade. ‘But grasshoppers and butterflies never come abroad in frosty weather!’
Charles did indeed cut a fine figure – tall, ‘black and very slender-faced’, in a doublet of silver cloth, a cloak decorated with gold lace, and a hat with a plume of red feathers. And his brothers the duke of Yorkand duke of Gloucester were hardly less gorgeously arrayed. Three men in their prime, the very image of Cavaliers, and behind them the Life Guard of eighty troopers, ‘gentlemen’s sons’ as Cromwell had dubbed them ruefully – exiles all, and as glad to see their native country again as was the King himself. Paradise lost, and now regained.
Sir George Monck, made captain-general by Parliament after his march from Coldstream, broke silence with the command to ‘Take heed and pay attention to what you hear!’
The ranks of the former New Model Army braced as he read out a declaration of loyalty to His Majesty on their behalf.
At the signal, pikemen and musketeers gave loud cheers, raised their hats and their weapons, and shouted, ‘God save King Charles the Second!’
Monck silenced them as swiftly with a hand held high. ‘Lay down your arms!’
Thirty thousand men in the pay of the Commonwealth bent the knee and laid down musket and pike.
‘Retire!’
They turned about, marched a few token paces, halted, and faced front once more.
‘To your arms!’
Drums beat as each pikeman and musketeer ran to his mark.
‘In the name of King Charles the Second, take up your arms, shoulder your matchlocks and advance your spears!’
Again they bent the knee; and