ABSTRACT
On 7 June 1647 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, and Oliver Cromwell, Lieutenant-General in the New Model Army that had defeated him in the civil war, confronted each other and spoke together for the first time in Sir John Cutts’s house at Childerley, a few miles from Cambridge. They must have seen each other several times before then. It is even possible that they had done so as children (they were much the same age), for Charles’s father, King James I, had enjoyed being entertained by Oliver’s uncle at his Elizabethan mansion of Hinchingbrooke, where the hunting gave the monarch enormous pleasure, for, as a contemporary envoy remarked, ‘to his kingly pursuit of stags he was quite foolishly devoted’. 1 Young Oliver, who had been named after his wealthy uncle, lived in nearby Huntingdon; he must surely have been invited to play in the gardens at Hinchingbrooke, while Charles may on occasion have accompanied his father to the estate he loved so much for tracking down and killing the unfortunate stags. 2 Years later Oliver, who was to become a member of parliament for Cambridge, would have been in his seat in the House of Commons when in January 1642 Charles as King vainly attempted to arrest five of its principal members for high treason, thus precipitating the great civil war: one of the members accused was John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire squire, who was Oliver’s first cousin and close friend. Finally, a year before they met face to face for the first time near Cambridge, Charles must have seen Oliver charging into battle on the field of Naseby, where the King suffered his severest blow in the war.
