MONCK, GEORGE (1608-1670), soldier, called by the Commonwealth, not always with entire affection, the Silent General. He served the first Charles as a professional officer of no particular political conviction before the Civil Wars turned him, as they turned a great many soldiers of his generation, to the Parliament's side; commanded creditably enough in Ireland and at sea against the Dutch in the sixteen-fifties; and held, by the time of the Protector's death in 1658, the one force in these islands capable of deciding, by the simple fact of its marching or not marching, which of the rival claims to authority then multiplying at Westminster would actually prevail. It is this fact, more than any battle he fought, that fixes his place in this Commonwealth's history: Monck's army in Scotland was not the largest in the field in 1659, but it was the only one whose commander had not yet declared for anybody, and the whole nation, this contributor's predecessors record without much exaggeration, spent that autumn watching the roads south from Coldstream to see which way he would choose to be wrong.
He chose, on the 8th of December 1659, to be right, or at any rate to be right by the only measure this Commonwealth has since troubled to keep: his Declaration from Coldstream (q.v.), that he marched "for a settlement, not a return," gave the negotiators then labouring over the Treaty of the Army and the Parliament the one thing no amount of argument at Westminster could have supplied on its own — the certainty that the army would not simply restore the Stuart line the moment the talking grew tedious. He raised, of the regiment that marched south with him that winter, the corps that still guards the Convention House on the days the Assembly sits at Westminster, and wears, in a distinction no other regiment of the standing army shares, the plain coat of 1659 rather than any newer uniform, a piece of institutional memory this contributor's own service has taught him not to find as quaint as a civilian visitor generally does.
And yet the honour this Commonwealth pays him has never been quite without its reservation, and the reservation is not hard to locate: a general who could make a settlement by marching one way in December of 1659 could, on every argument advanced for trusting him, have made a restoration by marching the other way instead, and the same silence that let his contemporaries hope for the better outcome has left every subsequent generation faintly aware that hope, rather than certainty, was what they were in fact relying on. Monck himself, so far as his surviving correspondence discloses an inner opinion on the matter at all, appears to have regarded the question as somewhat beside the point: a soldier's business, on his own account of it, was to keep the peace of the kingdom until its proper governors could be found, and he professed himself content, once the Frame was seated in September 1660, to have done that business and no more. He held no office under the settlement he had made possible, accepted a peerage he rarely used, and died in 1670 a Commonwealth's man by every outward measure this contributor can find in the record — honoured at his funeral with the guns of the whole standing army, and remembered still, in the one particular that no honour has ever quite dissolved, as a general the republic he made possible has found it easier to thank than to trust. (G. M. T.)