PART ONE
‘A great and a hopeful Prince’
CLARENDON
CHAPTER ONE
‘This year Heaven was liberal to his Majesty in giving him a son to inherit his dominions.’
Richard Perrinchief, The Royal Martyr
When in the summer of 1630 a healthy son was born to the King and Queen of England, it seemed that their happiness was complete. Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles, the first Stuart monarch of that name, had presented him with an heir. King Charles was twenty-nine years old, his French wife twenty. He loved her passionately.
It had not always been so: at the time of their marriage five years earlier the young King had preferred the companionship of his father’s favourite, the dazzling Duke of Buckingham. The death of Buckingham had brought the little Queen into her husband’s confidence and favour, never to leave it. Their married love was now total. Only a family – an heir – was needed, and the last traditional ambition of a royal couple would be fulfilled. Unfortunately their first child, Charles James, was a weakling who was born and died in May 1629.
Almost exactly a year later, on 29 May 1630, at noon with Venus the star of love and fortune shining high over the horizon, Henrietta Maria gave birth to a second son, also named Charles. Unlike his brother, this baby was enormous and healthy, and, even in that age of appalling infant mortality, clearly destined to survive. Verses on a contemporary engraving referred to the brothers as two sweet May-flowers, only one of which remained ‘in our garden, fresh to grow’. The child of 1629 was shown being borne away to celestial spheres.
Of happy 1630 it was written in contrast, ‘This year Heaven was liberal to his Majesty in giving him a son to inherit his dominions.’1 And as the bells rang out, later giving way to bonfires in the summer night, the King proceeded immediately to St Paul’s for a service of thanksgiving. It was incidentally the patronal feast of St Augustine of Canterbury, he who had brought Christianity to the Angles: it must be said that the appearance of Venus would prove the more relevant portent of the young Prince’s character.
As the good news spread outwards across the King’s widespread dominions, so the spokesmen of his power rejoiced. In far-off Scotland, from which his Stuart father James had come, the King’s deputies lit fires; in Ireland too there was official rejoicing; across the water the Court of Louis XIIIwere content to hear that a daughter of Bourbon France had fulfilled the natural function of a Queen.
The child thrived. At the time it seemed like the end of a fairy-tale.
Only a few years later, it would become apparent that Charles had been born at the zenith of his unfortunate father’s short arc of happiness. Far from marking the end of a fairy-tale, the birth of the future Charles II marked the beginning of the most troubled period that man could remember in the history of the realm. By the time Charles was eight years old, war had broken out with his father’s northern kingdom; by the time he was twelve, the whole of England was plunged in civil war. A few years more and the young Prince himself was penniless and a fugitive.
At the time poets were fascinated by the presiding presence of Venus at the Prince’s birth. One of the most graceful expressions of this preoccupation was given by Robert Herrick in his ‘Pastoral’ on the occasion, set by Nicholas Lanier for presentation to the King:
And that his birth should be more singular,
At noon of day, was seen a silver star,
Bright as the wise men’s torch, which guided them
To God’s sweet babe, where born at Bethlehem;…
Later astrologers were morbidly obsessed by the significance of that delusive star in his chart.fn1 So paradoxically dreadful were the early fortunes of Charles Stuart the second, compared to the golden expectations at his birth, that they would ponder helplessly on the subject. If the heavens themselves had been misleading, was it a wonder that mere mortals had erred in predicting for him a destiny both splendid and serene?
It was fortunate that the young father and mother, as they gazed into a cradle garnished with taffeta and ribbons, could not foresee even their own future: separation, violent death for one, desolate widowhood for the other. Yet Charles I and Henrietta Maria might have been comforted by knowing the end of the story. The fairy-tale element persisted. The boy himself would pass through every vicissitude known to a prince in such stories, but ultimately he would survive them all.
Unlike his father, unlike his grandfather Henri Quatre, unlike his great-grandmother Mary Queen of Scots, unlike his great-grandfather Lord Darnley, unlike his brother James and his exiled descendants, Charles II would die in his own royal bed. And he would die as the dominating monarch his father, grandfather James and brother all dreamt of being without success. He would die master in his own house, confessing the religion his mother was harried for practising and for which Mary Stuart was executed and James IIdriven out. He would die the last absolute King of Great Britain.
So perhaps the auspicious star, whose celestial rays duly ornamented the medal commemorating his ‘singular birth’, was not so delusive after all.
The marriage of this baby’s parents in May 1625 had brought together a disparate pair – at any rate in terms of religion. The Kingfn2 was not only the supreme governor of the Protestant Church in his own country, but was emotionally committed to Anglicanism as such. He eschewed equally the Roman Catholic tenets which lay, as it were, beyond the right wing of Anglicanism, and the Puritan practices which increasingly permeated its left. His father had been raised under the influence of Scottish Calvinism, but had later grafted onto its theology a belief in proper episcopal organization best summed up by that crude and effective phrase, ‘No Bishop, no King.’ His mother had passed from the Lutheranism of her youth to the comfortable Catholicism of her later years without being allowed to make any impact on her children’s religion. Both surviving members of her family, the King himself and Elizabeth of Bohemia, were brought up as and remained Protestants.
Henrietta Maria on the other hand had been brought up as a pious Roman Catholic, and never abandoned her religion. Her father, the magnificent, dominating Henri Quatre, had deserted the Protestantism of his youth in order to attain the French crown, with another crude but effective observation, ‘Paris is worth a Mass’: the French royal family was in future ostentatiously Catholic.
But it is important to remember this mixed religious heritage when the time comes to consider the foundations and structure of Charles’ own beliefs. Although neither of his parents underwent a conversion of any sort, three of his four grandparents changed their religion for a variety of political and spiritual reasons.
Charles, the first child in our history to be born heir to all three kingdoms, also enjoyed an appropriately mixed heritage of blood.fn3 Or, as Edmund Waller elegantly turned it, Charles was
A Prince on whom such different lights did smile,
Born the divided world to reconcile!
Historic names sparkle like jewels – some of them slightly flawed gems – in Charles’ genealogical tree. Through his father he descended from Scottish James, canny, intellectual and somewhat boorish; the improbable son of that ill-fated enchanter Mary Queen of Scots and the degenerate Darnley. James had married a Danish Princess, Anne, daughter of Frederick II and Sophie of Mecklenbergh-Schwerin. The union brought a good strong strain of northern blood, Scandinavian and German, into the British royal family, which proved most helpful. Neither Tudors nor Stuarts had proved conspicuously fertile in the last hundred years: but James and Anne between them produced a quiverful of children.
The effect of this family was to transform what might otherwise have been a miserable marriage into a perfectly acceptable partnership by royal standards. Anne, easy-going if rather frivolous by nature, was quickly despised for her girlish tastes by the infinitely cleverer James. In any case the King had been since boyhood romantically inclined towards his own sex. As the years wore on, and especially after the arrival of the Scottish court in the luxurious atmosphere of London, King and Queen went their separate ways. James turned to favourites, including George Villiers, created Duke of Buckingham; Anne turned ‘to favour and to prettiness’, including such laudable if extravagant projects as the patronage of Inigo Jones. But James was a devoted father. That bond at least kept the royal pair together.
The blood which Charles inherited through his mother was half French and half Italian. Henrietta Maria,fn4 as the daughter of the late King of France, by no means considered herself bettered by marrying the King of England: for Charles I to have the great Henri Quatre as a father-in-law was surely an honour in itself. But Charles II would find it a more dubious advantage to be the grandson of Henri of Navarre. Indeed how bitterly at times he must have regretted those blithe words of his progenitor on the subject of Paris and the Mass, as people often do come to loathe the panacheof their famous ancestors, too frequently quoted against them. Whenever changes of religion were either suggested or imputed to Charles, his relationship to Henri Quatre, that celebrated worldly convert, was always stressed; at other times he was besought to emulate his grandfather in heroism, or at least to remember whose grandson he was.
Charles was, then, by blood one-quarter Scots, one-quarter Danish, one-quarter French and one-quarter Italian. Further back, the marriage of the cousins Mary Queen of Scots and Darnley increased the proportion of Scottish noble blood; while Mary’s Guise mother supplemented his French inheritance. For the thin but vital trickle of English – Tudor – blood which had ensured his family’s succession to the English throne, it was necessary to go back five generations to his great-grandmother’s grandmother, Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. And even that Tudor blood was itself basically Welsh.
It was no wonder that King James had swept aside contemporary discussions of heredity when he ascended the English throne, preferring to delve into a mythological past where creatures like Brute, first King of all the Britons, flourished. Titus Britannicus, a eulogy of Charles by Aurelian Cook appearing shortly after his death, referred to him as having all the blood-royal of the Christian world in his veins – British, Saxon, Danish, Norman and Scottish from his father, Bourbon of France, Austrian of Spain and Medici of Florence from his mother.3 It was English blood itself which was lacking.
Nevertheless, in his tastes, Charles remained a very typical Englishman all his life: his enjoyments united him with, rather than divided him from, his subjects. In his case, blood was evidently less important than those early formative years, rated so highly by the Jesuits and modern psychology. These were spent in carefree, nurturing England.
The victory of environment over heredity was the more remarkable because of Charles’ striking physical appearance, which was even more foreign than his actual blood. First, he had an abnormal darkness of complexion, a truly saturnine tint. This darkness was the subject of comment from the first. His mother wrote jokingly to her sister-in-law that she had given birth to a black baby and to a friend in France that ‘he was so dark that she was ashamed of him’. She would send his portrait ‘as soon as he is a little fairer’.4 But Charles never did become fairer. Later the sobriquet ‘the Black Boy’ would be used, still commemorated in English inn signs.
There was definitely a strain of very dark, swarthy Italian blood in the French royal family, inherited through Marie de Medici, which might and did emerge from time to time. Anne of Austria, wife of Henrietta Maria’s brother Louis XIII, was said to have given birth to a baby having the ‘colour and visage of a blackamoor’, which died a month after its birth. In 1664 another Queen of France, wife of Charles’ first cousin Louis, was supposed to have given birth to a black child.5 There was even a ‘fanatic’ fantasy at the time of the Popish Plot in the late 1670s, that Charles had been fathered on Henrietta Maria by a ‘black Scotsman’– a neat combination of two prejudices of the time, against the Catholics and the Scots. So it became convenient to refer to the then King as that ‘black bastard’.6
Of the many grandchildren of Marie de Medici, Charles was the only one to look purely Italian; the rest being in general both frailer and paler. But his appearance was certainly a complete throwback to his Italian ancestors, the Medici Dukes of Tuscany. Directly descended as he was from Lorenzo the Magnificent there is a striking resemblance in their portraits. Bishop Burnet,fn5 alluding to Charles’ Italianate appearance and intending to make a political point concerning tyranny, compared the King to a statue of Tiberius.7 Marvell was presumably describing the same phenomenon when he described Charles as
Of a tall stature and of sable hue
Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew.
Charles’ second most striking physical attribute was that same tall stature. About two yards high, said the Parliamentary posters seeking his capture after the Battle of Worcester; six feet two inches, stated another, and he may have been as much as six feet three inches tall. Since a man of six feet two would be outstanding in a crowd today, the effect of Charles’ salient height may be imagined in an age when the average male height, due to diet and disease, was so much less than in our own time. On his sea voyage towards his Restoration in May 1660, Charles marked his own height in his cabin with a knife; afterwards numerous sight-seers measured themselves against the spot, but even the tallest could not reach it.8 As with his relationship to Henri Quatre, Charles must have lived to curse his eminence. The problems of tall men today in aeroplanes, cars and beds are as nothing compared to the problem which faced Charles fleeing after the Worcester defeat, compelled to try and disguise the one physical attribute which no make-up can conceal.
At first sight this height may seem a surprising phenomenon, since Charles I was short and Henrietta Maria positively tiny: she was termed ‘the little Queen’ – not always in tenderness. But his grandmother Anne of Denmark was tall, with a large bone structure: she had what would now be thought of as typical Scandinavian looks, with tow-coloured hair and a ruddy complexion. It would seem therefore that Charles’ individual appearance was a combination of those two bloods least associated with him in the popular imagination – Danish and Italian.
The result, attractive as it may be by modern standards, was not much admired at the time. Charles was considered rather peculiar-looking, as he himself was the first to admit, with typical self-deprecation: ‘Odd’s fish, I am an ugly fellow,’ he observed to the painter Lely after inspecting his own portrait. His curling and sensual mouth, so beguiling in our day, was considered particularly hideous, almost a deformity. Big mouths were definitely not the fashion: ‘large and ugly’ wrote Madame de Motteville with firmness of this particular feature, when describing Charles at the age of sixteen in her memoir of his mother.9
And fair hair itself was in principle preferred to dark. For one matter, there was a contemporary suspicion that beneath a saturnine appearance there lurked a saturnine character, something generally defined as melancholy and not particularly pleasant. Lord Mulgrave, for example, who was brought up at Court, thought it worth making the point that Charles being swarthy and cheerful was an exception to the rule.10
It took time for Charles to prove to the world that an attractive, good-humoured fellow lurked under his dark skin. Even his mother wrote that he was an ugly baby, and so large that at four months he might have been a year old. Charles succeeded in charming much of the world despite rather than because of the oddities of his physical appearance.
In a picture painted when Charles was a few months old, his proud parents flank their offspring. The King stands, a dignified figure, if not yet possessed of that hieratic appearance of dramatic suffering uncovered by Van Dyck. This franker portrait shows Charles’ father with blunter features, of no great distinction, with a strong resemblance to those of James I.
Henrietta Maria’s appearance also needed the help of a great artist and courtier to flower on the canvas. There is general agreement about the quality of her looks: when she was young, her attraction lay in her animation and in particular her sparkling black eyes, which, combined with her doll-like figure, made her at the time of her marriage ‘a most absolute delicate lady’, in the words of Simonds D’Ewes. But there was something simian about her. Her arms were disproportionately long, and, as she grew older and more unhappy, she lost weight rapidly, which did not suit her. By the birth of Henriette-Anne in 1644 she had become a sad, small monkey of a person, whose wide mouth looked almost grotesque. It was left to Pepys, at the Restoration, to describe Henrietta Maria – at fifty – as ‘a very little plain old woman’.11
Those days lay far in the future. The young couple in the portrait are boldly delighted with their new treasure.
As has been related, the first child of Charles I and Henrietta Maria died at birth. All the circumstances of this sad event were unfortunate, including the fact that the baby was premature and the local midwife called into Greenwich Palace inadequate. But the Queen determined to put the tragedy behind her: ‘As to my loss, I wish to forget it.’12 After all, she had now had the reality of her husband’s love, and it must have been some secret comfort to her that during the labour he had urged that, if there was any choice to be made, the mother rather than the child should be saved.
Henrietta Maria concentrated her energies on recovering, and replacing the lost child as soon as possible. To that end, she took herself off to the spa at Tunbridge Wells, whose waters were renowned for their good effects on gynaecological problems. (This spa, incidentally, makes constant appearances in the court history of the seventeenth century, as high-born but barren ladies, not the least of them Charles’ own wife, Catharine of Braganza, sought there the cure to their troubles.) But the conception of Charles was more romantic than such planning might indicate. The Queen grew restless, cut short her visit to Tunbridge Wells, and moved with her entourage to Oatlands Palace, near Weybridge. The King, hearing of this, paid Oatlands a surprise visit. It was here that Charles was conceived. By mid-October the Queen knew she was pregnant again: in one of the last letters of his life the King addressed Charles in a moving phrase: ‘You are the son of our love….’13
This time a midwife was sent over from France by Marie de Medici. She also despatched a useful chair, and a charm against miscarriage in the shape of a heart: Henrietta Maria wore the charm constantly, worrying when she forgot to put it on. It was also decided that this birth should take place at St James’s Palace, so much quieter than the official royal residence at Whitehall. London in those days had a heavily eastward slant: thus the setting of this red-brick hunting lodge, built by Henry VIII, was quite pastoral in the early seventeenth century. Not only did it have a fine view of the St James’s deer park – that park on which Charles himself later lavished so much care – but, being surrounded by other open spaces and fields, St James’s Palace was cut off from the bustle of Westminster.
Here a bed with hangings of green satin was made ready at a cost of nearly seven hundred pounds. Luxurious beds were one of the major outlays of the time, as will be seen in the magnificent beds caparisoned for Charles himself, his wife and mistresses – rather as expensive cars are bought today.
Finally, Queen Henrietta Maria reached that ‘happy hour for herself and us’, as one contemporary put it.14 Her labour began at about four o’clock in the morning. Shortly before noon, the baby was born in one of the Tudor rooms to the south of Colour Court, fronting St James’ Court.fn6 Almost immediately, according to the custom of the time, he was taken from his mother and given to a wet-nurse to be fed. Rockers stepped forward to the royal cradle: that too was according to the custom of the time, the only thing of note about them being the fact that they were Protestants. It had been part of Henrietta Maria’s marriage contract, carefully laid down, that her children should not be nursed by Catholics. But the King presented the successful midwife, who, being French, probablywas a Catholic, with £1,000.
The baptism, which took place on 27 June, was also according to the rite of the English Church. The ceremony was performed by the Bishop of London, the King’s friend William Laud. It was a significant and appropriate choice. Although it would be another three years before he was created Archbishop of Canterbury, already Laud’s name was synonymous with the repression of Puritanism within the English Church. Laud was nearing sixty, but his whole preferment had come since the accession of King Charles I: he had been made a Privy Councillor and had recently taken part in a harsh judgement against the Puritan Leighton in the Star Chamber.
For the baptism, the Lord Mayor of London presented a silver font. The Duchess of Richmond stood proxy for the godmother, the Queen of France, and, as a tribute to her principal’s status, was fetched in a coach drawn by six plumed horses: her retinue (both sexes) arrived wearing white satin set off by crimson silk stockings. The baby’s wet-nurse received a chain of rubies from Marie de Medici, the dry-nurse being given a silver plate; the six (Protestant) cradle-rockers were given a selection of silver spoons, cups and salt-cellars. From a less successful relation, the Elector Palatine, the husband of his aunt Elizabeth, the baby received a jewel.15
Charles began his life in the traditional long white clothes of linen and satin. But, unlike English babies of the time, he was not swaddled. Aristocratic French mothers did not approve of this habit of rolling up the baby like a tiny mummy – the Huguenot heiress Charlotte de la Trémouille, wife of the Earl of Derby, fought the same battle in her nursery at about the same date. Psychologists who have recently pointed out the dangers of deprivation of physical contact in the new-born would be happy to think that the baby Charles was allowed to lie freely (and he undoubtedly showed every sign of enjoying physical contact uninhibitedly in his later years).
The next step was to dress the child in tiny linen shirts (still preserved in the Royal collection). In 1631 he was handed over to the Countess of Dorset, who became his official governess, and given his own miniature establishment. Unlike the first choice of governess, the Catholic Countess of Roxburgh, she was an impeccable Anglican. The Countess of Dorset replaced the dry- and wet-nurses he had enjoyed since birth. One of these foster-mothers, Mrs Christabella Wyndham, was to feature in Charles’ life in another interesting connection. Later the early experience was recalled most favourably by Charles’ foster-sister Elizabeth Elliott. It had been the greatest happiness that could befall her, she wrote at the Restoration, ‘to suck the same breast with so great a monarch’; she therefore petitioned the monarch for some financial recognition of the fact.16
The nursery of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria, once established, was soon filled with healthy and charming children. For all her fragility Henrietta Maria proved a most efficient child-bearer, after her first bad experience. With speed and love that nursery made for ever famous by Van Dyck was created. The Queen bore a total of nine children in fourteen years, of whom six survived infancy, a gratifyingly high proportion by the standards of the time, when even petted royalty would consider themselves lucky to provide so many healthy heirs.
Mary, the Princess Royal, the ringleted girl with rosebud mouth and slightly droopy, chubby cheeks, who stands at the fore of the most famous Van Dyck picture, was born in November 1631. James Duke of York followed in October 1633, and Elizabeth, Van Dyck’s grave-eyed child, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents in 1635. At the time the coincidence puzzled the local panegyrists: as her Carmen Natalitum, produced by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, put it, ‘Hast thou dared to be born on the day when infancy was a crime?’17 Later, in view of her early death, commentators found it sadly appropriate. Henry Duke of Gloucester was born in 1639, and Henriette-Anne in 1644.
These were the survivors. But of course the royal nursery was not without its tragedies. A baby Katharine died at birth. Princess Anne, Van Dyck’s delicious infant, stretching out one fat arm to the world, died a little later of consumption. Bishop Fuller described her affecting death-bed, and how he said a short prayer over the child: ‘“Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” … This done the little lamb gave up the ghost.’18
For Charles it was a loving childhood. Like many children throughout history down to our own day, he formed an attachment to an odd toy ‘without which in his arms he would never go abroad or lie in his bed’.19 In his case the object was a piece of wood, which led courtiers to predict either that blockheads would one day be his favourites or else that he would rule with the club – wrongly in both cases. Like many children of his own time, the Prince was also obliged to wear uncomfortable iron supports for his legs until one of his nurses braved the King’s wrath and hid them. For all this, by the grim standards of childhood of the time, Charles enjoyed a great deal of uncritical affection.
He was also expected to demonstrate love and care to others. As one of the speakers in Herrick’s ‘Pastoral’ upon his birth had it:
And I a sheep-hook will bestow,
To have his little Kingship know,
As he is Prince, he’s Shepherd too.
Henrietta Maria, with the awakening of her deep protective feeling for her husband, had noticed the damage done by his stiff manner, to which a speech impediment contributed. Courtiers and populace alike were unnecessarily antagonized. She wanted her eldest son ‘to be bred to wonderful civility’ in contrast. The little Prince, by nature affectionate and affable, found the lesson an easy one to learn. The result, wrote Bishop Burnet with his usual carping tone where Charles was concerned, was that the adult man was ‘civil rather to an excess’; there was ‘a softness and a gentleness in him, both in his air and his expression’; in this he outdid even his brother James, in whom the same lesson had been inculcated.20
But it is difficult to see that in this case Burnet’s disapproval was justified. For the rest of his life Charles displayed the radiant civility of a happy nature to all comers, in marked contrast to the dreadful public awkwardness of his father, whose natural charm was only seen in his immediate family circle. The quality enabled him to endure the indignities of his exile, on the one hand, and on the other hand in better days to transform himself into that popular monarch summed up by Evelyn as ‘debonair and easy of access … down to the spaniels who dwelt in his bedchamber’. Elizabeth of Bohemia summed it up: ‘Though he be my nephew, I must say this truth of him, that he is extremely civil….’21
That was one keynote of his upbringing. The other, unquestionably if at first sight surprisingly, was the high moral tone of the royal family as a whole. In this respect the nurseries merely echoed the prevailing attitudes at court. Unlike almost any otherseventeenth-century monarch, King Charles I was absolutely faithful to his wife, and the Queen equally devoted. Any court is essentially a chameleon, taking its colour from its principal figure: King Charles I was extravagant, building up an incomparable art collection which unfortunately he could ill afford, but he was not wanton.
In short, Charles in youth was surrounded with security: he was granted the supreme blessing of a happy childhood.
By the mid-1630s Queen Henrietta Maria had already sufficient anxious reason to hope that the son would not repeat the character of the father she loved so much. Beneath the level of official rejoicing, there had been certain grumblings at the birth of Charles. If there was one bad fairy at his christening it was a Puritan sprite. Puritans resented the fact that the Catholic Queen had proved herself fertile: hopes had been pinned on the accession of one of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s enormous brood of children. As her brother’s heir before the birth of Charles, Elizabeth was in those days regarded as a Puritan sympathizer, her children as Protestant white hopes.
As the children moved on their cheerful round, winters at St James’s Palace, happy summers at any one of a number of royal palaces such as Greenwich, Hampton Court and Oatlands, their father was playing out his part in a very different kind of drama. It is difficult to date precisely that moment at which the King’s troubles began in earnest. His first great Parliamentary defeat, ending in the acceptance of the Petition of Right, had taken place in June 1628, two years before Charles’ birth. In August the King suffered a personal as well as a political blow when his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham – already under pressure from Parliament – was assassinated. Thus Charles had been born into a time of tranquillity only if, in the words of the intelligent Puritan sympathizer Lucy Hutchinson, ‘that quietness may be call’d peace, which was rather like the calm and smooth surface of the sea, whose dark womb is already impregnated of a horrid tempest’.22
The King had accepted the Petition of Right with reluctance and only because the acute financial demands of his foreign policy left him no choice but to conciliate Parliament. He was obliged to make certain concessions concerning arbitrary arrests and taxation in order to continue to operate as he wished in the foreign sphere. But at the same time he was extremely careful to make it clear that his personal prerogative, that vexed but vital attribute of a British monarch, had been left intact.
The exact nature of the royal prerogative, which like a phoenix rose again in the reign of his son from the ashes of the Commonwealth, was a subject of running debate throughout the seventeenth century. But in 1628 no-one denied its actual existence. In practice the King was generally allowed the sole right to direct foreign policy. More vaguely, he claimed to be able to wield certain special powers, beyond those possessed by King and Parliament in concert – but here, with the theory of it all, argument began, and would not end with his death, nor with the death of his eldest son. It was more to the point, once again speaking practically, that the King had the power to prorogue or to dissolve Parliament without the agreement of the Commons. Prorogation was a form of suspension and did not necessitate a fresh election before Parliament met again. Dissolution on the other hand implied an election and with it the possibility of a differently constituted House of Commons. But neither prorogation nor dissolution bound the King to recall Parliament within a specified period of time.
In the spring of 1629 King Charles I dissolved Parliament after a series of unruly scenes and, as he saw it, ‘seditious’ speeches from the MPs calling attention to such financial abuses as the levying of tunnage and poundage. Parliament did not sit again until 1640. In the meantime the King governed, or attempted to do so, by use of his prerogative powers without the assent of the Commons. Charles was therefore born into the second year of what was afterwards termed the Eleven Years’ Tyranny.
With Parliament in abeyance, there was still no closed season for religious differences. The early 1630s were a time of constant abuse and counter-abuse in this respect. The Puritans can be roughly divided into the Independents (such as Oliver Cromwell), who believed in the primacy of conscience and a general tolerance of sects, and the Presbyterians (including many leading Scottish nobles); the latter believed, as the Greek root of their name indicates, in the authority of the elders, and thus the need for conformity. Both factions, while disagreeing with each other fiercely on matters of church organization, condemned any excrescences on the plain surface of the Church of England. The Puritan opposition in the House of Commons – and Lords – had included Independents as well as Presbyterians.
Their protests arose, as so many protests do, out of fear. Their particular fear was ‘Popery’ or ‘Papistry’, but since Roman Catholicism was in fact proscribed by the law in England, and the numbers of Catholics were diminishing, their precise target was the right wing of the English Church. The Puritan argument suggested that those guilty of High Church or ‘Arminian’ practices (named after a Dutch theologian) might turn into Catholics at any moment. The sulphurous path leading to the Roman Church was, in the opinion of Puritans, thoroughly adorned with such ‘Arminian’ trappings as surplices, altar rails, crucifixes and statues. These were to the Puritans horrifying and idolatrous symbols; even the celebration of Christmas was denounced as being a piece of Popish flummery.
It was in this sense that the Catholicism of Henrietta Maria, although strictly supervised by her husband, was always a potential source of weakness to the Crown. The Queen’s Chapel in St James’s, newly designed by Inigo Jones, was granted to her: here, angry subjects were aware, the Mass was being said daily. When William Prynne, the Puritan demonstrator, wrote about Henrietta Maria’s frizzled locks, her odious dancing and so forth (small crimes to us if at all) he knew himself to be on safe ground with a great many of his contemporaries – because the Queen was a Catholic
The fabric of religious dispute was shot through with political colours even before the King dissolved Parliament in 1629; political and religious issues remained interwoven throughout the so-called Eleven Years’ Tyranny. For example it was relevant that those Anglicans who supported the secular authority of the bishops, in Parliament tended to be more favourable to the King. This in turn persuaded the King that Puritanism was to be identified with attacks upon the monarchy as well as upon the Church.
In Scotland the ritual of the English Church had always been dourly regarded. At least old King James had known, none better, how to deal with that country, in which he had not only been born and brought up but also spent most of his adult life. King Charles Ihad been born there, but that was all. Neither by upbringing nor by temperament was he able to understand the Scottish nation, at once so arrogant and so sincere. When little Charles was three years old, his father paid a disastrous visit to Scotland. In the course of it he managed to remind the Scots by a series of tactless gestures, including an elaborate coronation ceremony, of exactly those religious observances which most disgusted them. The imposition of a new prayer book in 1637 was but a further proof of the King’s total lack of comprehension of the very nature of his Scottish subjects.
The year 1637, by which, according to the Jesuit tradition, the young Charles’ character had been formed for ever, was in other ways a year of destiny for Great Britain. In England, in the heart of the quiet Buckinghamshire countryside, John Hampden refused to pay that tax known as ship-money, on the grounds that the King had no right to levy taxes on his subjects at will: ship-money was normally levied on the coastal counties and no extra peril justified the extension. The King took the line that he was the best judge of any extra peril, and the law narrowly upheld him. In the same year William Prynne, along with two others, was mutilated and left in the stocks, for the crime of seditious libel. Early in the next year the Scots formed the greater National Covenant, a direct and stark answer to the imposition of the hateful new Prayer Book. Those who took its Oath pledged their lives to resist the recent innovations in the Church, which they declared to be contrary to the Word of God – and to the spirit of the Reformation. They vowed to defend ‘the true religion’ of Scotland. It was a document which in one form or another (for it was extended five years later) would haunt the King’s son for the next twenty years.
The year 1637 was also that in which Van Dyck painted all five of the surviving royal children at the behest of their father – that celebrated picture which focuses on the solid head of an enormous mastiff. After haggling over the payment and reducing it from £200 to £100, the King hung the portrait above the table in his Breakfast Chamber at Whitehall.
Like many weak but upright men, the King had pronounced views on everything, not only the nature of the Scottish Prayer Book, but also how his children should be painted. Even on canvas, they were not to be swaddled or over-protected. Two years earlier Van Dyck had irritated him by painting Charles in infant ‘coats’. The picture was intended by Henrietta Maria for her sister the Duchess of Savoy, but it had taken some time to complete because one of the subjects, Mary, would never sit still for long enough. Normally boys at this period were put into jackets, lace collars and breeches at about five: the ‘breeching’ was made a little ceremony by the formal attendance of the tailor to measure his new client, and a miniature sword was generally thrown in, to the delight of the recipient. At the King’s behest, Charles was painted in grown-up clothes, in contrast to his younger brother James; the picture probably ended up being hung by Henrietta Maria at Somerset House.23
In the spring of 1638, as the Scottish horizons grew dark with the clouds of approaching war, the young Charles was made a Knight of the Garter and Prince of Wales. The medal struck for the occasion – presciently – showed ‘the Royal Oak’ under a Prince’s Coronet. He was also granted his own household, according to the serene routine of the time. Charles had made his first public appearance at the age of six in one of Inigo Jones’ airy fantastic masques, The King and Queen’s Entertainment. Now he was established with both a governor, the Earl of Newcastle, and a tutor, Dr Brian Duppa.
Both choices were indicative of the King’s growing desire to bind to him men of proven loyalty in a time of mounting crisis. Newcastle, now in his forties, was being rewarded for his championship over a long period, a championship which was not entirely disinterested. As Clarendon put it, he ‘loved monarchy, as it was the foundation and support of his own greatness’. That apart, Newcastle was an obvious choice, because he combined a love of sport (he was an expert horseman and authority on equitation) with a passion for the arts. Newcastle was ‘active and full of courage’: he particularly enjoyed pastimes such as fencing and dancing, while being at the same time ‘amorous of poetry and music’.24 One recognizes in this determination to enjoy the world in all its appealing aspects a pattern which his royal pupil would also display.
In any case, there need be no doubts as to the kind of advice which Newcastle pressed on the Prince by precept and example, since he took care to write it down.25 His most famous piece of advice was to avoid being too devout, since one can be a good man and a bad king. Like another gubernatorial tip he gave Charles, ‘Above all be civil to women’, it cannot have had an unwelcome sound to his pupil’s ears.
Dr Duppa had the capacity to exercise a very different kind of influence. At fifty he was a distinguished divine, a protégé of Laud, through whose patronage he had recently become Bishop of Chichester. By nature he was both learned and devout, but, as Newcastle bore witness, Duppa took care to ‘hide the scholar in him’ in order not to appear a tiresome pedant to Charles. The result was that Charles was undoubtedly fond of him – years later, as the newly restored King, he rushed to his old tutor’s death-bed at Richmond and knelt to ask for his blessing. Nevertheless, the values which Charles carried into his adult life were those of Newcastle, not Duppa.
The tutor who succeeded Duppa, John Earle, later also Bishop of Salisbury, scored more success with the Prince by his unglossed mixture of piety and charity. Earle later went into exile with his pupil. Perhaps the charm of Earle’s manner – his light, ‘facetious’ conversation – won the Prince’s heart; more likely it was his lack of hypocrisy. As Bishop Burnet observed, Charles was ever on the look-out for pretence of this kind. At any rate, at the Restoration Earle was duly rewarded along with those others to whom Charles felt properly grateful.
It was important for Charles’ future that his little world also included the orphaned Duke of Buckingham and his brother Lord Francis Villiers (killed in the Civil War). Indeed, it is impossible to understand the extraordinarily deep bond which existed between Charles and Buckingham in later years – despite the most reckless behaviour on Buckingham’s part – unless one remembers this shared childhood. Buckingham shared all the memories of Charles’ halcyon past, since after the assassination of his father he was taken with Francis Villiers into the royal household. The King made the gesture not only out of loyalty to his dead friend, but also because the boys’ mother was a Catholic, and as such considered unsuitable to have guardianship of such important infants. So the two were ‘bred up’ by the King with his own children. For Charles to reject Buckingham would in a sense have been to abandon his own happiest memories.
Charles was a spirited and cheerful child. He was also a normal boy, as Henrietta Maria’s first letter to ‘her dear sone the Prince’ reveals: ‘Charles, I am sore that I must begin my first letter with chiding you, because I hear that you will not take physick, I hope it was only for this day and that tomorrow you will do it….’ She threatened to tell Lord Newcastle.26 Whether or not the threat worked, Charles’ own first known letter is also on the vexed subject of ‘physick’. To Lord Newcastle he wrote, at the age of nine, ‘My Lord, I would not have you take too much physick, for it doth always make me worse and I think it will do the like with you….’27
In the Van Dyck portrait, Charles’ steady gaze is central to the picture. He looks out, his cheeks still childishly round, the sensual mouth slightly more set, his hair dark and long, his eyes dark and enigmatic. It is a study of confidence. The accidents of childhood, a broken arm, a fever, jaundice, were surely the worst that could befall him. The Prince’s world must have seemed as steady as the head of the dog on which he rests his hand.
It was not so, however. By the summer of 1639 his father the King was taking the high road to Scotland, armed on this occasion not with the Prayer Book but with the sword. The confrontation which ensued was subsequently known as ‘the First Bishops’ War’, the specific cause of its outbreak being the resentment felt by the Scottish Presbyterians towards the Bishops’ new Prayer Book. The Bishops’ position was considered to be quite incompatible with the system of Presbyterian church government envisaged by the National Covenant. Nevertheless, beneath the open assault on the Bishops was concealed, at any rate in the opinion of Charles I, a covert attack on the royal authority. It was a situation covered by his father’s famous dictum: ‘No Bishop, no King’. So the drama commenced.
The King himself once correctly predicted his own eventual fate, when he took the so-called Sortes Virgilianae in a library at Oxford, at the request of Lord Falkland; this was a method of dipping at random into a book and discovering a text. The King hit upon Dido’s fearful imprecation against Aeneas, the prophecy that he would be ‘torn from his subjects’ and his son’s embrace’ and ‘fall untimely by some hostile hand’.28 It would have been an advanced seer who was able in 1639 to visualize just how that might come about. Nevertheless, by the age of nine Charles’ own life was permanently altered.
‘The Prince … hastens apace out of his childhood’, wrote Duppa in September, ‘and is likely to be a man betimes, and an excellent man if my presage deceive me not, and flattery and humoring him, the bane of Princes, do not spoil him.’29 It was, however, not flattery which now threatened the Prince of Wales. Heaven had been liberal at his birth. But it would be over twenty years before Heaven showed itself liberal again.
1 For the astrologically minded – as most of Charles’ contemporaries were – it is of interest to note that he was born with the Sun in Gemini, Virgo on the ascendant, the Moon and Venus both in Taurus. The celestial picture is thus dominated by Mercury, denoting a quick intelligence and a certain restlessness of temperament; there is also an earthly love of pleasure, a stubborn loyalty, and, with Mars in Leo, physical courage.2
2 The single Christian name Charles, in Part One, is always used to denote its central figure, the future Charles II. His father is usually referred to as ‘the King’, for clarity’s sake, with occasional variants of ‘Charles I’.
3 His father was the second son of James VI and I, only succeeding his brother, the legendary and lamented Henry Prince of Wales, as heir on his death in 1612; in any case both princes were born before James ascended the English throne in 1603, uniting the three crowns of Scotland, England and Ireland.
4 As she will be known, according to the English custom, and to distinguish her from her daughter, later Duchesse d’Orléans and Madame de France, who will be called Henriette-Anne (baptized Henrietta, the name Anne being added later as a compliment to Anne of Austria). The Queen herself naturally used the French version of her name, signing herself as Henriette Marie throughout her life; but the English at the time often found the whole name too confusing to cope with and she sometimes appears merely as Mary. One of the Royalist watchwords at the Battle of Naseby, when Charles I was fighting for survival, was ‘For God and Queen Mary’.
5 Burnet, the Scottish-born Bishop of Salisbury, was the author of the History of My Own Time, first published in 1723 (after his death); frequent allusions to it will be made in this work since Burnet provides many fascinating sidelights on the period. Nevertheless, allowance must always be made for his highly prejudiced pro-Whig and anti-Catholic views.
6 Few traces remain today of Henry VIII’s palace other than the Gatehouse, parts of the Chapel Royal and the old Presence Chamber. The present Marlborough House was then Friary Court, where Henrietta Maria installed her Capuchin confessors.