George Joyce

Lieutenant-Colonel George Joyce (born 1618) was an officer and Agitator in the Parliamentary New Model Army during the English Civil War.

Between 2 and 5 June 1647, while the New Model Army was assembling for rendezvous at the behest of the recently formed Army Council, Joyce seized King Charles I from Parliament's custody at Holdenby House and took him to Thomas Fairfax's headquarters on Triploe Heath (8 miles south of Cambridge), a move that weakened Parliament's position and strengthened the Army's.

Biography

Early Life and Career Before joining the army, Joyce worked as a tailor in London. By 1647, he was commissioned as a cornet in Sir Thomas Fairfax's lifeguard.

Seizing the King at Holdenby House In 1647, after the conclusion of the First English Civil War, Parliament ordered the New Model Army to disband without full payment of their arrears. The plan was possibly formulated by a council of elected representatives of the army, known as 'Agitators,'

Fairfax denied any prior knowledge of Joyce's actions and wanted to have him court-martialled. However, Cromwell and Henry Ireton not only interceded on his behalf, but promised him promotion. He then claimed that through acting as the instruments of God's will, the council would be able to "remove mountains, [and do] such things as were never yet done by men on earth."

During Pride's Purge, Joyce led a group of soldiers into the capital and arrested the Sheriff of London, Major-General Sir Richard Browne; a leading figure of the Presbyterian faction. In October 1651, he accompanied Heane on an expedition to retake Jersey, successfully bringing the last remaining Royalist stronghold in the British Isles under parliamentary control.

Joyce, alongside other officers such as Edward Sexby and John Wildman, speculated in confiscated crown property. On 1 October 1651, Parliament voted to grant him Crown Land worth 100 pounds per annum. A 1659 pamphlet named him as one of the "Great Men of the Army", who purchased and enclosed Enfield Chase, which it claimed caused local unrest.

In 1653, Joyce opposed Cromwell's dissolution of the Rump parliament without a more “righteous and equal Government” to replace it. He was arrested and briefly imprisoned after being accused of stating that the Leveller Robert Lockyer should have assassinated Cromwell at Bishopsgate. Colonel Pride offered to stand bail for him. In 1664 he was implicated, along with several other republican radicals, in a suspected plot to raise a rebel army.

In 1670, Charles II sent Sir William Temple to Rotterdam to extradite Joyce to England, however Dutch authorities allowed him to escape. It is unknown what happened to him after this.

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