CHAPTER NINE
‘They, who will not believe anything to be reasonably designed, except it be successfully executed, had need of a less difficult game to play than mine is.’
Charles II, June 1653
The King who arrived back at the court of France at the end of October 1651 was so emaciated, and even dirty, that people generally failed to recognize him. In Rouen he had at first been taken for a vagrant. Then Dr Earle, his old tutor, who happened to be in the town, hurried to his hotel. Looking at Charles blankly, he asked to be conducted before the King. From his mother’s favourite, Lord Jermyn, Charles received the first clean shirt to come his way since the garment given to him at Moseley by Father Huddleston.
After the first rapturous welcome, Charles was described as both ‘sad and sombre’.1 The cheerfulness which he assumed, against his inclinations, only lasted a few days. After that people noticed that he often fell very silent. There was indeed very little to comfort him at the French Court, to say nothing of his troubled thoughts wending backwards to those he had left behind in England. He could not even describe their courage in full for fear of endangering them further; it was not until after the Restoration that the full amazing story was told. Above all, he could not help them. As a result, the English government were slow to be convinced of the truth of his whereabouts – as late as 29 October the King was rumoured lost at sea. By November the official Commonwealth line, to explain away the unfortunate truth of his escape, was expressed in a sneering poster: this showed the King as ‘a Fool on Horseback, riding backwards, turning his face every way in fears’, weighed down by a full pouch of the Pope’s money round his waist.
So much for the facts, which still impress us with their gallantry. Charles himself wrote gloomily to Jane Lane a year later (she had escaped to become lady-in-waiting to Charles’ sister, the Princess of Orange). He deplored his inability to express his gratitude in some practical form, despite her need: ‘I believe it troubles me more that I cannot do it yet, than it does you.’2
France herself was in the throes of the second civil war of the ‘princely’ Fronde, which had broken out in September. Basically, it was a struggle for power between Cardinal Mazarin and the superior nobility, led once again by the Prince de Condé. One such inconclusive struggle had already occupied most of 1650, following the earlier disturbance of the ‘Parliamentary’ Fronde. As a result, the French royal family was in a state of alarm and tension, which spread to all its dependents, including Queen Henrietta Maria. That in turn affected Charles. His mother’s mood was grim. Since Charles had no alternative but to live off her charity, and she lived off the charity of the Cardinal de Retz, she made a note of exactly what his meals cost her: ‘The very first night’s supper which the King ate with the Queen began the account….’3 The result was that, when Charles did eventually get a grant of sorts, he found that he owed much of it to his mother.
There was always the Grande Mademoiselle. Time had not treated her kindly – physically, at any rate – and Charles had grown up into a handsome, if penniless and homeless, man. This was no longer the uncouth boy who had been edged towards her by his mother, as Viola had been compelled to duel with Sir Andrew Aguecheek by Sir Toby Belch. His conversation was more beguiling too. Mademoiselle shuddered deliciously at Charles’ tales of the uncouth life in Scotland, and how bored he had been by it all. Imagine an existence where to play the fiddle was a crime! And ‘there was not a woman to be seen’. Under the circumstances, she was inclined to overlook his unfashionably cropped hair and ‘a great deal of beard’.4
Mazarin continued to handle the situation adroitly, lest this wealthy French prize fall into the hands of the suppliant English. Whenever Mademoiselle grew too warm towards her cousin the English King, Mazarin was every ready to dangle the infinitely more magnificent prospect of her cousin the French king. Louis XIV had reached his thirteenth birthday – his majority – on 5 September 1651: he was thus in theory marriageable. But it was to be the war of the Fronde, not her romance with Charles, which proved the personal nemesis of Mademoiselle.
The arrival of the majority of Louis XIV also meant that both sides in this expensive and attritious French Civil War, Mazarin and Condé, could claim to act on his behalf. Charles II too was drawn into the struggle, although not precisely in the manner in which he would have desired. Unlike his younger brother, the Duke of York, there could be no question of the English King joining the army of the great Marshal Turenne and going into the field against Condé. Handsome, energetic James, tired of kicking his heels near his mother, applied for some active post. The courtiers were nervous whether his participation would further prejudice the position of the Stuarts – by identifying them in advance with one side or the other, when their one pathetic aim was to be on the winning side. In the end James was granted permission, on condition that it was a purely personal gesture.
James departed from Paris to serve in the French Army, having had to borrow money to buy his equipment, and embarked on what was probably the happiest adventure of his life – several years of active military service. He was a natural soldier, easy, practical and talented. One can understand how at this point Hyde regarded James as a more hopeful character than his elder brother, condemned to stay behind in Paris for an infinitely less agreeable life of poverty and negotiation. Charles’ situation in the spring of 1652 was ‘the most painful that can be imagined’ – at least, that was how it would be described in James’ memoirs.5 The sufferings of mother and son at the Louvre were acute. They were not even receiving the French money on which they so much depended, and they had no-one else to approach. Meanwhile the ordinary people of Paris surrounding them, who sympathized with the Condé faction rather than with that of the Cardinal, were openly indignant that the Duke of York was serving with the King’s army under Turenne.
At the behest of the Duke of Lorraine, Charles undertook an unenviable task. This was to negotiate with the King of France. The Spanish had attempted to employ the changeable Duke against Turenne. Charles managed to bring the Duke of Lorraine to the French Court at Melun. There he secured the withdrawal of the Duke from the Spanish interest. But, having performed this service and returned to Paris, Charles found himself in the power of Condé, who had taken triumphant charge of the capital. Here, Charles’ intervention made him extremely unpopular. Condé forthwith ordered Charles away and out of the city to Saint-Germain, and, having no funds whatever, he could not refuse. In this way Charles formed part of the French royal cortège, seated on a hill outside Paris, which witnessed the reduction of the city by Turenne on behalf of the young King Louis. Inside Paris poor Mademoiselle had seen her opportunity at last for achieving the gloire for which she had surely been born: dressed in a soldier’s costume, heroic, splendidly cheerful, she whirled amongst Condé’s troops, their Amazon and their inspiration. But none of this prevented Turenne from taking back the capital. Although it was Mademoiselle’s personal intervention, as she proudly related, which saved Condé’s life, her disgrace with the orthodox French Court was total. Louis XIV, a quiet boy rapidly turning into a man with a long memory, never forgave her.
By the autumn of 1652 the French Court was once more installed in Paris.
And now – at long last – would the French royal family redeem their promises and assist their poor English cousins? Regrettably, the answer was, as before, tangled in the webs of international diplomacy. Sir Edward Nicholas made a gloomy prognostication of the French King’s intentions, ‘notwithstanding all his fair words and kingly promises to our gallant Master’. Nicholas was to be proved right.6
*
It was a sad truth that the status of Charles II amidst the crowned heads and other leaders of Europe was declining all the time. The summer of 1652 had seen the outbreak of a war between the England of the Commonwealth and the Dutch. Naturally Charles tried to prise some advantage out of this, beginning with the suggestion that he might come on a personal mission to the United Provinces. But the Dutch, for all their problems with the Commonwealth, had reason to regard the Stuart connection warily.
One of the cruel blows of fate which had befallen the Stuart family shortly after the Scottish catastrophe of Dunbar was the death of Mary’s husband William II. He died in November 1650, at the age of twenty-four. Six days later Mary gave birth to a son, another William, the heir to the House of Orange (and also of course within the Stuart succession). The guardianship of this baby produced an instant quarrel between the various interested parties in the United Provinces. As has been noted, the inheritance of the House of Orange was a complicated matter. The role of Stadtholder was not in theory hereditary, and thus evaporated on the death of William II. Yet the baby William inherited certain other specific rights and possessions, including a firm hold on the government of the province of Zeeland: this automatically made his guardianship of consequence in the politics of his country. The fact that these hereditary possessions of Orange were encumbered with debt did not rob them of their potential for the future.
In the prolonged squabble over the guardianship the Princess of Orange, Mary Stuart, and the Dowager Princess, Amalia von Solms, allowed themselves to be fatally divided by their own jealousies and rivalries. Wiser heads might have realized that it was imperative for the House of Orange to present a united front, if it was to preserve any kind of power in the United Provinces in the future, against the rising independence of the Estates. In the end Mary, the Dowager Princess Amalia and the Elector of Brandenburg (husband of Princess Louise Henrietta of Orange) were appointed co-guardians; but not before the Dowager Princess had carefully denigrated Mary by suggesting that she herself, not Mary, stood for the nationalist aspirations of the Dutch. It was a damaging charge to make at this juncture against a member of the vulnerable Stuart family.
In the summer of 1652, therefore, it is understandable that the Dutch were in no hurry to accept Charles’ offer of assistance against the Commonwealth. What assistance, after all, could he provide? His few ships were away in the West Indies, under Prince Rupert, privateering with a view to filling his coffers if he could. He had neither money nor troops. None of Charles’ increasingly desperate suggestions met with favour. Could he perhaps join the Dutch Navy, and help them to victory or ‘perish in the attempt’?7Could he head a squadron of ships on their behalf? But it was made clear that his presence amidst the Dutch would be an embarrassment and there was no money to raise a squadron. The King of England was in the position of an extra chess-piece, superfluous to the requirements of the game; he could not even get onto the board.
Furthermore, Charles himself held no brief for the Dutch Calvinists. And it was a fact that the obvious spiritual links between the Dutch and the Commonwealth, like those between the Commonwealth and the Covenanters, would always work to his disadvantage, even without this personal disinclination. As it was, stories that he was approaching the Pope for aid did not help the Dutch to regard him with any greater favour.
Hyde, Acting Secretary of State since 1651, expressed an aspect of this unpalatable truth: he was not wise enough to judge which would be best for them, ‘that the Dutch should beat the English or the English the Dutch’.8 To look ahead, this natural accord of new Dutch leaders and new English ones reached its most cruel expression – for the Stuarts – when terms were finally discussed between the two countries at the beginning of 1654. The consequent peace was damaging enough from Charles’ point of view. But one of the conditions was the ‘seclusion’ of the House of Orange from the government. This condition was originally imposed by Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England since the previous December. But the Dutch, wishing to take very opportunity to humiliate the House of Orange, as one of their number told the French Ambassador, joined gladly in the scheme.9 As a result, Mary Princess of Orange, who had seemed back in the late forties the member of the Stuart family most likely to protect all the rest, was transformed into yet another distressed and protesting royal personage.
Of course, there remained Scotland. The price of Worcester – total defeat at the hands of the English – had been immediate occupation of the country. Legalization of this occupation followed, then union of the two countries, imposed from England. The situation was naturally inimical to many of the Scots, foremost amongst them the Highlanders, whose geographical situation enabled them to breathe defiance with virtual impunity if they so wished. There was however a considerable gap between Highland defiance and a royal triumph based on Highland action (as the past had already sufficiently demonstrated). A rising in the Highlands in the summer of 1652 proved once more abortive. The King wrote in disgust of the lethargy of the Highlanders, who, having promised to invade England, merely captured Inverness and then preferred to sleep in their own beds.
The real question about all these Scottish ventures was whether the leadership was to be local or imposed by the King from a distance; and, if the latter, a further question arose as to how local loyalties were to be stimulated, local feuds stifled. The appointment of John Middleton to the Highland command was along the right lines. Middleton had held command at Worcester and been imprisoned thereafter. He escaped from prison, wearing his wife’s clothes, and rejoined the King. Middleton was an attractive character and a good commander. It was not his fault if the Highlanders failed to rise in abundant numbers.
The appointment of the Earl of Glencairn to a temporary overall command in the summer of 1653 was not such a wise move on the part of the King. He had once more straddled the Scots with a divided authority: the last thing they needed, in view of their own natural differences. Glencairn, unlike Middleton, was at the King’s side. There was the renewed question of a Scottish expedition, to be sure, but with it the renewed problem – when should Glencairn sail, and, above all, when was the appropriate moment for the King himself to throw his weight into the fray?
In June 1653 Hyde was convinced that if ‘no more probable adventure’ offered itself, the King would go for Scotland.10 Yet Charles did not set out. It is true that at this point Cardinal Mazarin still held Charles in a clamp; he would neither release him nor assist him. Nevertheless, the fact has to be faced that Charles was by now profoundly sceptical about the Scots, their capacity to implement their own promises, their ability to bring any kind of victory to his advantage out of their bleak and feudacious country. Therefore any possible Highland rising was born suffering from the disease of the King’s secret disbelief – a condition which divided command did not help.
Nor can one criticize Charles for this conviction. As he had pointed out after Worcester, the Scots had not stuck by him in battle and were unlikely to do so when he was on the run; the same argument could be applied to a King in exile – the Scots were hardly likely to aid him whom they had failed to restore after his formal coronation at Scone. It was true that the English occupation, under the briskly iron rule of Colonel Robert, assisted the popularity of the absent Royalists. But there was no guarantee that this popularity would survive their actual appearance, since it had waned so many times before.
When this latest Highland rising did get under way, its progress confirmed these gloomy suppositions. There was a brief moment of glory when Middleton, the more experienced soldier, regained supreme command from Glencairn. But the treasured ability to form a proper Highland army and, having formed it, to lead it anywhere other than round and round the Highlands, was possessed by neither man. Help from abroad remained crucial. Might the Dutch come to the rescue? But by April 1654 the Dutch were no longer at war with the English Commonwealth. So hopes dwindled and ended with Middleton’s defeat at Dalnaspidal in July 1654.
Meanwhile in England itself the elevation of Oliver Cromwell to the quasi-royal rank of Lord Protector was another blow to the prestige of the uncrowned King. The position of Protector was one which had its roots in English history – both Somerset and Hertford had occupied it. After Cromwell’s assumption of the role, the Protectoral State replaced that of the Commonwealth. It was a far more conventional concept. Negotiations between England and the various European powers were eased as a result.
France had indulged in a semi-official representation in England from late 1652 onwards in the shape of a clever, adaptable envoy, Antoine de Bordeaux. As the French Court settled back into its usual state of complacency, as the Cardinal resumed the reins of power twitched from his hands during the war of the Fronde, the melancholy observers of the exiled Royalist set began to suspect that yet another blow might be in store for them: the alliance of France and Commonwealth England. It would be the death-knell to Royalist hopes in France. Yet there was really nothing that King Charles, penniless, depressed and helpless, could do to avert it. He was thrust back on a series of diplomatic missions and enquiries – to the Danes, to Hamburg, Danzig, Poland, Queen Christina of Sweden, the German Diet and so forth – which, totted up, might win a prize for optimism and persistence, but achieved little positive result.
Money remained the key to absolutely everything, in the absence of the practical support of the great powers. Lack of money caused at least one mission to be withdrawn, since the emissary could not be supported. Already by 1652 the lack of money was chronic. The letters of the courtiers surrounding Charles began to be filled with the most poignant details of their penury. The childish jubilation of Richard Bellings on a mission to Ratisbon in April 1653, at having Christmas plum porridge, mince-pies, bakemeats and brawn, illustrates how low their expectations had become.11
It was not that the King was indifferent towards his friends’ sufferings – far from it. But his official means of support were virtually non-existent. Jermyn had secured a nominal pension of £6,000 from the French government in February 1652 in order to end the King’s maddening dependence on his mother. That sounded generous enough. But the pension was very seldom paid. Charles was thrust back on Loyalist contributions from England, a declining source of supply and surrounded by danger for those who tried to collect it. Privateers in the channel provided little joy: those from the Breton ports, while paying lip service to a tithe due to the English King, got away with what they could. The haven of Jersey had surrendered to the Commonwealth in December 1651. There was only the remote hope of rich privateering prizes to be provided by Prince Rupert from the West Indies.
It is against this background that the piteous pleas of the courtiers should be seen. And it would all get worse.
Under the circumstances, the propagandist charges that Charles was extravagant, wanton with money, make ironic reading. Had the King wished to outshine the sun itself in munificence, he would still have had absolutely no opportunity to do so. He was still living under his mother’s roof at the Louvre. As he wrote to Rupert in the West Indies shortly before he left France, ‘I am sure I am not only without money but have been compelled to borrow all that I have spent these three months’12 – and these were necessary expenses of the sheer act of living.
Hyde laid his own charges that the young King, robbed of a sphere of proper action, became idle and pleasure-loving. How he nagged! The King did not write letters, the King did not attend to business, the King did this (bad) and did not do that (even worse). In short, he found that Charles’ character had not been improved by adversity. ‘God send us quickly from this place, for surely this lazy kind of life does nobody any good!’ he exclaimed.13 But it was not Paris and some fantasy existence of pleasure which was to blame, but an enforced life of disappointment.
Hyde’s temperament was not improved by adversity either. He looked for some explanation of their continued trials – much as a Calvinist might have done – and found it in the King’s lack of moral fibre, his inattention to the strict matter of the business. Charles was in effect the scapegoat. Hyde was in a more generous and a more accurate mood when he wrote, ‘If you knew the miserable life the King leads, and how he is used, you would believe that he acts his own part not amiss; nor is it enough to say that it is his own fault….’14
It was no wonder that by the summer of 1653 Charles had fallen ill with a fever. Its exact nature was undiagnosed, except that he had to have blood let five times. But in view of the fact that contemporaries commented on his depression and withdrawal, one may suppose it to have been at least partly psychosomatic in origin, one of those fevers which the healthy Charles would have shrugged off without difficulty, but now laid him painfully low.
Relief, when it came, came in the form of change, rather than any true lightening of the situation. Nevertheless, to the King a change – any change – was obviously beneficial after the darkness into which he had been plunged at the French Court. As the steps of the diplomatic dance in which Protector and Cardinal were involved quickened, it suddenly suited the French to be rid of their dependent. Having been at times cozened by Mazarin, at times virtually imprisoned by him, Charles now found himself offered what his heart most desired – the full payment of his French pension – on condition that he left the country within ten days.
The gesture had very little grace about it: the French made it clear that the step was a necessary preparation for an English alliance. Nor was the departure of the King particularly ceremonious: he travelled on horseback, having put his coach-horses into ‘a light cart’ to convey his clothes and bedding. It was not quite the abject wretchedness of the post-Worcester period, but it was far from the state of a reigning monarch. Hyde wrote of his departure that ‘the King is now as low as to human understanding as he can be’.15Yet at least Charles, literally putting the French Court, with its frustrations and chicaneries, behind him, had hope. And he was once more on his own, without his mother. As the years drew on and their differences increased, her presence aroused in him a combination of profound irritation and melancholy affection, which he was glad to avoid.
Indeed, first at Spa and then at Aachen for a month or two Charles actually found life rather fun. The decision to go to Spa was not of course taken from a very wide choice: Holland would not have him, and the various territories within and around the Holy Roman Empire, on the borders of the Spanish Netherlands, offered the best alternative.
At Spa, the impoverished little band whistled to keep up their spirits, and, as descriptions of their life show, to a certain extent succeeded. It was high summer. All the afternoon the courtiers would dance, then take supper, then dance again in the evening light in the meadows: ‘I think the air makes them indefatigable’ was one comment.16 The inclement weather, which was supposed to have affected the famous mineral waters of the Spa, obviously did not spoil this rustic fun. And the weather did not prevent salubrious bathing in Caesar’s Bath.
One of the chief dancers was Theobald Lord Taaffe, an Anglo-Irish peer who had fought with Ormonde in the late 1640s. He had not done particularly well militarily, but he had later joined Charles in Paris, where, according to the Cardinal de Retz, he had become ‘Great Chamberlain, Valet de Chambre, Clerk of the Kitchen, Cup Bearer and all’ to the King – in short, that kind of necessary mixture of courtier, agent and boon companion of which all Kings stand in need, particularly those without proper courts. Taaffe had something else in common with his master – a relationship with Lucy Walter. He was probably the father of her second child, Mary Walter.17 In Brussels Taaffe negotiated with the Duke of Lorraine, mortgaging the Fort of Duncannon to him on Charles’ behalf for funds; there was also a proposal to marry James to one of the Duke of Lorraine’s illegitimate children, and pop the pair of them on an independent throne in Ireland.
Apart from his usefulness as a confidant, Taaffe’s chief value to the King was in his Catholicism. He could thus be used as an intermediary with the Pope or with the Catholic Count of Neuburg, without the potentate feeling insulted. Certainly Taaffe enjoyed a close and warm friendship with his sovereign throughout nearly all the years of exile (only clouded over towards the end, when Taaffe killed Sir William Keith in a duel over a tennis bet – for Charles maintained very strict anti-duelling rules). As much as anyone, Taaffe understood exactly what depressions, disappointments – and pleasures – marked the long exile of King Charles II.
As Taaffe danced, and on occasion waxed ‘poetical’, the more stable side of Charles’ entourage was represented by the Marquess of Ormonde. And the mimic court was further gilded by the arrival of Mary Princess of Orange. Brother and sister occupied the two chief hotels at the Spa with their suites. Their mutual devotion was the subject of sentimental and approving comment, while Mary’s widowed status involved her in various romantic rumours, including the notion that she might now marry her cousin Prince Rupert. There were other rumours too – that another eligible lady, the eccentric Queen Christina of Sweden, might join them. It was just as well the Royalists were unaware that the Swedish Queen was also somewhere in her strange heart sighing after Oliver Cromwell, professing herself ‘vestra amica Christina’ and treasuring the Protector’s portrait.
Brother and sister went to Aachen. On 7 September the King, all in black, with white silk stockings and the ever-present colour of the Garter, visited the Cathedral of Charlemagne at the invitation of the Canons. Mary kissed the skull and hand of the great Emperor, and Charles measured his sword against his own. There was plenty of mirth and dancing and drinking. It was all very jolly and apparently carefree and gracious at the same time. Charles was described as winning universal regard by his ‘affable and free carriage’. It was left to an English spy to write a secret report to John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State and master of the Protectoral intelligence network: ‘For all his dancing, I believe he [the King] has a heavy heart.’18
By the beginning of autumn that was undoubtedly true. The upsurge of optimism consequent on departure from France had waned. The courtiers’ obsessional interest in their own poverty had taken over from their gaiety: Aachen was described as ‘a most expenseful place’, at five pence a night for a bed.19 Their complaints about local prices and their own lack of cash remind one of the sufferings of British travellers denied foreign currency after the Second World War.
When the King and his sister decided to pass on to Cologne in early October it was because they hoped that this free archbishopric, owing no allegiance to the Emperor, would provide the right base for their next step – whatever that might be.
On the surface all went well. Mary discovered ‘a very fair and curious house, full of decent rooms and pleasant gardens’ for their lodging. The City Magistrates presented silver pots and wine to fill the pots. There were receptions for the royal brother and sister at the local Jesuit College, where young boys sang to them with great sweetness, and at convents round about. The natives being so friendly, and pressing them to stay, Charles graciously acceded to their invitation, and decided to take up residence in the city. The courtiers, ignoring the fact that very soon wages were owing to them all and there was little or no hope of payment, were once again resolutely cheerful: ‘We are as brave and eat as well and are as jocund, as if we were in all plenty, so confident we are of God’s continuance in his wonderful Providence towards us.’20
Charles himself also described an existence in Cologne which recalls that of the exiled Duke in As You Like It, fleeting the time carelessly in the Forest of Arden: ‘Despite lack of money we dance and play as if we have taken the Plate-Fleet,’ he wrote. As Charles told his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia in one of his wry, joking letters, they had only two lacks: ‘the one for want of fiddlers, the other for somebody both to teach and assist at dancing the new dances’. Otherwise all was perfection. Charles also ordered clothes, a sword, and a quantity of shoes (his obsession): three black and three coloured pairs from a Paris shoemaker, and six more from one in Flanders.21
But Sir Edward Nicholas’ stoicism and the King’s good cheer cannot conceal the fact that one of Charles’ main reasons for picking on Cologne was its convenience as a collecting station for the money granted to him by the Imperial Diet. And that money proved as difficult to elicit as the French pension…. The Elector of Cologne only paid up ‘his small quota’, as Hyde described it, after an importunity ‘unfit to have been pressed upon any other prince or gentleman’.22 Furthermore, the Elector excused himself from paying an official call on Charles on the chilly grounds of ‘ill-health’. The warmth of the City Magistrates was not paralleled by that of the Princes.
When the Count of Neuburg invited King Charles and Princess Mary to Düsseldorf, they accepted with alacrity. On 29 October they repaired there by water, floating down the Rhine in a kind of Siegfried idyll. At the end of the journey the Count and Countess awaited them, surrounded by a full assembly of their court with many an elaborate ceremony and repast to follow. For instance, twenty-two tables and sixty-eight dishes were designated for the evening banquet – one hopes that the starving English courtiers of Cologne revelled in the experience. There was music, new to their ears but delightful all the same, and the Count, who prided himself on his civilized way of life, did not even drink too much (unlike some other Germans of their experience).
It was unfortunate that the taste and elegance of the Count was not matched by that of his wife Elizabeth Amalia of Hesse Darmstadt: Charles had already declared himself against the notion of marrying a German wife – ‘I hate Princesses of cold northern countries’23 – and the Countess did little to dissuade him from his prejudice. Having no French, she decided to take no part in the festivities, but sat in an ungraciously lumpen manner throughout the banquet.
From Düsseldorf King Charles and Princess Mary ventured daringly a little way into the Spanish Netherlands, although Charles had no permission to do so. Then it was back to Cologne, where, after the Düsseldorf jaunt, the rest of the winter passed somewhat sadly and even sourly. The Elector still did not call. Charles studied French, studied Italian, hunted and – walked. He had no coach. He walked in the walled city. One of Thurloe’s spies described him walking ceaselessly in the icy weather, bare-headed through this city which, originally a little paradise, had become an open prison. And of course the quarrels had broken out all over again among his advisers.
Under the circumstances, it was natural for all concerned with the royal fortunes to cast their eyes anew at England, since the near prospect was so unsatisfying. After only a few months Cologne was as stale as any other refuge. Temperamentally, Charles liked Germany no better than he liked the northern princesses. Years later, when the King was told that the widowed Duchesse de Châtillon, his lovely Bablon, was going to remarry and live in Germany, he observed with feeling, ‘If she knew the country, that’s to say, the way of living there and the people, so well as I do, she would suffer very much in France before she would change countries.’24
In England after 1653 some kind of revival of Royalist spirit had at last taken place. In November 1653 King Charles gave the first written credentials to an organization terming itself the Sealed Knot, as the official organ of Royalist conspiracy in England.25 It had always been Hyde’s contention that the King was not only most likely to be restored from within England, but also most beneficially – thus the stain of foreign aid would not be seen on his royal robe. But it was also part of Hyde’s policy, with which the King heartily agreed, that the English rising, when it came, should be a co-ordinated once-and-for-all affair. The Sealed Knot was given its commission as much to hold in check other unplanned and thus doomed risings, as to set in motion its own.
The trouble was that the English conspirators were as disunited at home as the English Court abroad. The Sealed Knot could not prevent the eruption of two irresponsible plots in the summer of 1654, that of Gerard and the so-called Ship Tavern Plot.
When a splinter group, calling themselves the Action Party, decided to plan a major coup for the spring of 1655, the King found himself in a highly awkward and even embarrassing situation as regards the Sealed Knot. First, he was well aware that without the active participation of the Knot the rising was hardly likely to succeed. Secondly, the leading members of the Knot declined to take part, unless actually ordered to do so by the King. Thirdly, the Action Party made it clear that they intended to go ahead in any case, with or without the Knot.
This embarrassment culminated in the disastrous events of the spring of 1655. As the King paced round icy and far-off Cologne, he was compelled to receive the mission of an agitated member of the Action Party, Thomas Ross, who arrived at the end of January and implored him to give his group the royal support. This put Charles in a quandary. He outlined it succinctly to the Knot representatives. How could he order the Sealed Knot to go against its own military judgement? On the other hand, ‘nor can it be reasonable for me to hinder them [i.e. the Action Party] from moving, who believe themselves ready for it….’ He concluded gloomily to the Knot members: ‘And yet I cannot look for any great success, if whilst they stir, you sit still.’26
With hindsight it is easy to see that the King’s eventual course of action did nothing to mitigate the conspirators’ difficulties. He instructed Daniel O’Neill to negotiate between the two parties, to try and work out some agreement between themselves; he also despatched the new Lord Rochester (the former Lord Wilmot) to England. What Charles failed to do was provide some kind of firm authority which all sides would respect. Ormonde, who was at Antwerp, and sent emissaries from both conspiratorial factions, slightly favoured the Action Party, but was well aware of the need for a positive decision from the King, ‘else it would be the certain loss of those that shall appear, and the very probable destruction of those that hold off’.27
Yet Charles’ indecision – which is what it amounted to – reflected only too accurately his cut-off state, the impossibility of reaching any kind of major conclusion about a country of whose conditions he remained lamentably ignorant. In this sense, it is difficult to criticize the King too harshly. All one can do is note a creeping vacillation in the nature and policies of King Charles from 1655 onwards. Nicholas called this vacillation ‘The fatal custom of his family’.28 This is unjust. For the first twenty-four years of his life we have seen in King Charles a decisive, even heroically active, character: now this new strain of inaction develops to complicate what was originally a comparatively simple nature. Its genesis in the tense conditions of exile is easily understood. But it is a further ironic fact, as we shall see, that in exile the King did as well by inaction as by action – taking the long view.
However, that consoling notion was not available to the wretched conspirators of March 1655. Nothing happened at all in Leicestershire or Staffordshire (where plans collapsed). These conspirators were the lucky ones. In the North too nothing of any great consequence happened, except that Rochester arrived, and had to make yet another escape from the British Isles once it was realized that the government had the insurrection well in hand. The rising itself was officially postponed – except that the news did not reach the West.
There Colonel John Penruddock, a member of the Action Party, did enter Salisbury and seized the town on 12 March. The rumour – incorrect – of Leveller participation in the rising had the unfortunate effect of spurring on the government to vengeance without assisting the conspirators. This merely gave the Protectoral government an excellent excuse for repression via a much-increased militia, once they had put the rising down with comparative lack of effort. Indeed, the regime of the Major-Generals, a military rule by districts instituted in England shortly afterwards, was happily attributed by the government to the necessities imposed by the Penruddock Rising. Yet the Rising never posed the faintest danger to the established regime: what with the infiltration of the Sealed Knot organization by government spies and the quarrels of the English Court abroad, there was little to fear. The prejudices of the latter included the refusal to employ the Catholic Sir Marmaduke Langdale in Yorkshire, although he was a person of much influence there, and a noted soldier.
Naturally the King in Cologne knew nothing of this. He went as far as to move secretly to Middleburg in Zeeland, hoping from this convenient spot to be summoned to England. His host was a Dutchman named William Krimson, who had married a woman from the household of Charles’ aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia; the secret of Charles’ destination was only imparted to Hyde, Nicholas and two others. Letters were to be addressed to a Mr William Thomas at the Sign of the Town of Rouen, an inn in Flushing, and from there would be conveyed to Middleburg. Despite all these elaborate precautions, it was not so easy for Charles to elude the Protectoral spies in Cologne. Henry Manning, for example, furious at the King giving him the slip, tracked him to Flushing, where the presence of one of Charles’ retainers gave away the secret. It is touching to find that Charles employed his old alias from Penderel days, Jackson, during his sojourn at Middleburg. And Ormonde reported that the presence of the daughter of the house, ‘though little more than a girl’, made ‘Mr Jackson’s’ confinement more supportable.29
In every other way the episode was abortive and slightly ludicrous. Wild rumours reached the King that the whole of north Yorkshire had declared for him … that towns as far apart as Exeter and Newcastle had risen up in his favour … that Fairfax had five thousand men behind him and had declared for Charles … that the Protector was dead … all untrue.
On 9 April the King, disillusioned and despairing, went quietly back to Cologne. He maintained his spirit in his public verdict on the Penruddock rising when he criticized his critics: ‘Those people, who take upon them to censure whatsoever I do … They who will not believe anything to be reasonably designed, except it be successfully executed, had need of a less difficult game to play than mine is.’ And he ended with a jocular boast: ‘I shall live to bid you welcome to Whitehall.’30
But of that coming to pass, in the summer of 1655, there seemed but a slender chance.