How often does pride come before a King’s fall?

Ah, you wax lyrical, when does a King fall without the aid of pride? Was it absent with Lear, or Louis XVI,  or Canute, or that self styled emperor Bokassa?

There is one undisputable time at which opinion had no sway. It must have been perplexing and puzzling to the monarch, because on this occasion, Pride had come from very humble beginnings indeed.

His beginnings are so humble that they are not properly documented. When we enquire of history where Thomas Pride was born, history waves its hand vaguely in the direction of Somerset.

He does not, it seems, have a definite date of birth. As an infant he made the journey from Somerset to London where records finally pinned him down. Thomas Pride was brought up not by parents, but by a London parish.

It fell to St Bride’s to bring up the man who caused a king to lose his head.

But having pinpointed him geographically, detail about his childhood still eludes us. The next we hear, he was working as the 17th century equivalent of a truck driver.

He became a drayman, a cart driver, and later a brewer. There was plenty of scope for that line of business in London in the time of Charles I.

Do you ever hear that phrase bandied around: ‘The army was the making of him’? It’s possible it is a purely British concept, this taking of rough young men and riveting them to a certain type of discipline. I have heard it said to me throughout my life, and I’m sure military life  suited some, though surely it is the most double-edged of swords.

We know not how Thomas Pride came by the Parliamentarian cause during the days in which the Civil War brewed, but he exchanged one kind of fermentation for another. He is next heard of fighting for Robert Devereaux, 3rd Earl of Essex, the first leader of those most uncompromising of military forces: the Roundheads.

It seems he was a good soldier and rose through the ranks, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Preston in August 1648 and taking part in the military occupation of London in December of the same year.

By this time, Pride was head of a regiment.

King Charles I had been messing about for some time now: befriending the wrong people, teetering close to Catholicism, forcing a new prayerbook on the Scots: his Royalists had been defeated already by Cromwell’s New Model Army.

But Charles had a swan song. He escaped his Roundhead captors, stirred up a few disgruntled Scots and gathered supporters in the tiny Isle of Wight, off England’s South Coast.

There were still those who sympathised with the King in Parliament. The worm could still turn, if the king and the parliament reached a compromise.

And so Thomas Pride supervised a strong-arm operation.

His regiment was stationed at the doors to the House Of Commons. He stood there with a list of sympathisers and a few well-chosen advisors who could point out any trouble makers. And one by one, the men who might have changed the course of history were picked off: arrested, or excluded.

It was dubbed Pride’s Purge. A highly perilous undertaking: but one which left behind a core of those loyal to the Parliamentarian cause. The remaining parliament was named after the back end of a cow, with a certain basic earthiness. The Rump Parliament was unfettered by a king, and free to carve a new kind of freedom for the people it served.

The man with no birthplace became the judge of a King, and his name is signed on Charles I’s death warrant.

Come 1649 the New England began in earnest. Having brought about an immense fall, Pride observed the results of his labours largely from the wings, away from the cut and thrust of political intrigue.

It served him well, though, that fall: in 1656 he was knighted by the Lord Protector (interesting title for Cromwell, I have always thought) and soon afterwards, when the second chamber of Parliament was created, he took a seat.

The former pauper and brewer was able to stump up the cash to buy another King’s fancy: Nonsuch Palace, a hunting palace in Ewell, designed a century earlier by King Henry VIII. It no longer exists, but a cursory glance at an archived image will show how very far this man had risen.

A frontal aside: this castle, which had such a stellar rise in the hands of a great king, fell to become nothing again soon afterwards. Charles II gave it to his mistress, Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, who had it pulled down and the materials sold off to pay gambling debts.

Pride ended his days peacefully there, though, in 1658. And two years later, all hell broke loose.

It was after Pride’s death that his own fall came. For the Protectorate could not protect forever: it was simply too dour.

Without Cromwell, the forces which had been held in check by his iron will found purchase once more, and a cauldron of unrest culminated in all those men who had been on Thomas Pride’s piece of paper, back in 1648, being readmitted to Parliament. Restoration was reality, and a king on the throne once more.

Revenge was not sweet. Orders were given to exhume Pride, along with Cromwell and a handful of other key players, from the grave and suspend their bodies from the infamous Tyburn Tree, the site of many a notorious hanging.

Not that Pride knew anything about it, of course.

And it is said the sentence was never carried out. The body was just too far gone.

Thomas Pride was the instrument of one of the most shocking falls in history, but also one of the most short-lived. He came before a fall, and then he died, and then, unbeknown to him, he fell, at least in the estimation of his peers, if not from a hanging tree.

England has known others like him in its chequered history: but none quite so aptly named.