CHAPTER FIVE
‘Almighty God, who do’st establish thrones of Princes, and the succession in those thrones, by giving thy judgements to the King, and thy righteousness to the King’s Son …’
‘Prayer for the Prince of Wales’, The Cavalier Soldier’s
Vade-Mecum, 1648
In the light of the Scottish defeat at Preston, the immediate instinct of the Prince of Wales was to head back for Holland. There counsel could be taken, this new situation assessed and a new strategy devised. There was obviously no future in hanging about the shores of England. The Engagers were in total disarray. Nothing could be expected from the Covenanting Scots.
But Charles reckoned without his surly navy.
Seeing no reason whatsoever to depart without the fun of a fight, they crowded on deck of the royal ship and threatened to throw Lauderdale and John Colepeper overboard. It was their belief – quite unfounded – that this little clique intended to take the Prince away from them in a single ship. The only person they would heed was their Prince himself. Charles rose to the occasion. After a great deal of pacification at his hands – or the ‘so kind words’, as they were afterwards described – the sailors finally agreed to return to Holland.
Or so it was believed on the Prince’s ship. In fact, two of the largest vessels continued to ignore orders and sailed defiantly in the direction of Lord Warwick and the Parliamentary Navy. This was an age when there were new chords of disobedience to be heard, amidst the general music of strife and war. It was a phenomenon from which neither side was immune. The year before, the ranks of the Parliamentary Army had threatened their officers in a bellicose manner; in 1649 the Levellers in the Burford mutiny would challenge the authority of Cromwell himself.
The royal ship was compelled to give chase to the deviants and an absurd and unnecessary engagement took place. The action would have been farcical if men’s lives had not been at stake. Before the battle was joined the rival royal commanders, Sir William Batten and Prince Rupert, were already yapping at each other like jealous dogs. When Batten wiped the sweat off the back of his neck with a napkin Rupert took it as a signal to the enemy and threatened to shoot Batten for treachery if they were defeated.
The only person who continued to behave with calm and courage, as he had done throughout this long and trying summer, was Prince Charles. He refused to go below decks to protect himself, just as he had tried to remain on the scene of battle at Edgehill. This time he had his way. He told his attendant lords very firmly that dishonour meant more to him than his safety, and stayed on deck.
The sailors’ action was particularly ill-advised since they had hardly any water aboard. In the end it was a propitious storm which saved them from the consequences of their rashness by deflecting the Parliamentary Navy from their challenge. And on 3 September, when there was a possibility of an encounter with Warwick’s ships, they were saved by the determination of the Dutch States-General to remain neutral. The Dutch Admiral Tromp was ordered to station himself between the Royal Tweedledee and the Parliamentary Tweedledum.
So Charles returned at last to Holland.
For the next six months he was, with his brother James, more or less dependent on the personal charity of the Prince of Orange, the Dutch States-General having declined to provide further financial assistance for the crippled English Royalist cause. It was a curious time in Charles’ life, during which cares were not unalleviated by pleasures. Like the phoney war which preceded the bombing of London at the beginning of the Second World War, it was in some ways a period of calm and even relaxation, a prelude to, rather than a foretaste of, the searing experiences to follow.
The Hague itself was not a bad place in which to take up residence. It was cut off from the inhospitable North Sea by a stretch of dunes and had been designated the seat of the States-General, and of the provincial body, the States of Holland, at the end of the sixteenth century. When Prince Maurice of Nassau settled there in 1618 it became the royal residence as well. The cultural life of The Hague flourished. Not only literature, philosophy and the arts, but that inevitable seventeenth-century offshoot, theology, were part of the general cultural air of the city. While Amsterdam remained the commercial capital, bolstered up by the prosperity brought by commerce and industry, the lifeblood of the Dutch people – painters, philosophers and theologians – enjoyed the free and argumentative atmosphere of The Hague.
It was a time of development for Charles personally. At least he was free of his mother’s apron strings. With James to care for, he moved to a position as head of the family – those members of it who were at liberty. Then there was his relationship with his sister Mary. It had to be faced that Mary, the pretty, ringleted child of Van Dyck’s pictures, had not grown up into a particularly agreeable young woman. Marriage before she was ready for it and a troublesome mother-in-law – Amalia von Solms was fearfully strong-minded – had combined to inspire in Mary an undiplomatic dislike of her adopted country.
Poor Mary had inherited the tactlessness of both her parents. She refused to learn Dutch, hardly the mark of an amiable spouse, and made it clear that, in her eyes, France was preferable to Holland. As a result, she has been harshly treated by Dutch historians. Correctly, they have drawn attention to her deficiencies as Dutch consort. It is true that circumstances might explain the emergence of this outwardly chilly figure, indifferent to the susceptibilities of her adopted people. Princesses in those days however were not expected to undergo psychological difficulties. At least the English should regard her with more sympathy, since the consequence of all this was a true devotion to her brother Charles, both to his person and to his interests.
Nonetheless, it was distressing that the one member of his family in a position to aid Charles practically at this juncture was a square peg in a round hole. As it was, Charles found himself covering up for Mary, atoning for her unfortunate hauteur with his own civility. The Prince of Orange himself was a decent fellow who took his responsibilities to his in-laws seriously, not merely because it would suit him to have his wife’s father back on the throne of England. After William II’s premature death in 1650, Mary’s lack of judgement – like that of her mother, similarly placed – grew worse, and her determination to aid Charles ostentatiously, at the expense of Holland, more pronounced. Once again it was Charles who indulged in graceful little gestures, such as addressing the Elector of Brandenburg as ‘brother’ (indicating an imaginary equality of rank between them, as opposed to the correct salutation of ‘cousin’).1 His sister, on the other hand, did not care to study the art of how to please.
In general, Mary placed a quite pathetic reliance on her status as an English princess. It gave her a much needed sense of security to meditate on her royal rank: but that again was somewhat tactless in view of the fallen fortunes of the house of Stuart and their reliance on the good will of other European rulers, whether of equal status or not. Determined to emphasize that she remained the daughter of a king, Mary complained loudly that she ought to continue to take precedence over her sister-in-law Louise Henrietta of Orange when she married the Elector of Brandenburg. Mary’s case was weak because the Elector was a supreme ruler, whereas the Prince of Orange was not. The new Electress should really have preceded her.
In the autumn of 1648 however the devotion of Mary helped to support Charles’ growing feeling of authority in the family. This family was in the process of being extended, on one side of the blanket at least, by the pregnancy of Charles’ mistress Lucy Walter. The character of this straightforward young lady later became surrounded by myths. The truth about Lucy, ‘brown, beautiful and bold’, as John Evelyn called her, was that she was neither a whore, as one legend suggests, nor the chosen bride of the Prince of Wales. She was not even of low birth, as Monmouth’s enemies would declare in later years, in order to taunt him with the fact that other royal bastards – the son of Louise de Kéroüalle for example – were of superior antecedents on their mother’s side. Lucy Walter’s own mother was a niece of the Earl of Carbery; she herself came of a perfectly respectable Welsh family, hence her appealing, dark-eyed Celtic looks.2
Lucy Walter was not a whore. But she did belong to that restless and inevitably light-moralled generations of young ladies who grew up in the untrammelled times of the Civil War. Barbara Villiers, a far more celebrated mistress of Charles II, was another such. As their brothers, who had grown up frequently without fathers, became the undisciplined high-spirited bucks of the 1660s, so those young ladies who survived to the merrier times of the Restoration became the great ladies of the Court. But Evelyn added that Lucy Walter was ‘insipid’. Perhaps he implied a lack of a survivor’s instinct. For Lucy Walter died in 1658, to be buried in an unnamed grave in Paris. It thus became fashionable to blacken her birth as well as her character.
Lucy Walter probably ended up at The Hague via Paris, having been taken there by her uncle. She quickly adapted herself to the age in which she found herself. By September at The Hague she was probably the mistress of Robert Sidney (Charles had of course been absent for nearly two months); but she was also pregnant by Charles. Later these simple facts would become embroidered and re-embroidered with all the complicated threads of the succession politics of the 1670s as the circumstances of Monmouth’s birth became a matter of political importance rather than light conjecture. (Even the republican Algernon Sidney was described as her lover – although he was in England throughout the period, guarding Dover Castle.)
The child afterwards known as James Duke of Monmouth but first called James Crofts, after his guardian Lord Crofts, was born on 9 April 1649. Therefore his conception must have taken place some time in July – that is, just before the Prince of Wales sailed off at the head of his rumbling fleet. It is important to bear the date in mind in view of the fantasies which would later cluster like brambles round the circumstances of this boy’s birth.
These fantasies take two principal, and contradictory, forms. The first concerns Monmouth’s paternity and suggests that he was not really Charles’ son at all, but, seeing that Lucy was free with her favours, the offspring of Robert Sidney. This canard can be ignored for two reasons. First, Monmouth as a boy bore a striking resemblance to his father at the same age; later he enjoyed the highly characteristic looks of the Stuart family: the paternity over which the scandal-minded sniggered at his birth was never questioned in the periwigged duke, lounging at his royal father’s Court. Secondly, Charles himself never questioned Monmouth’s parentage. He assumed responsibility for the child from his birth and was inclined rather to remove him from his unsuitable mother’s care than to consign him to a limbo of doubtful bastardy. Yet Charles did not acknowledge every child that came his way, as it were – the offspring of every pretty woman that had pleased his fancy. In the 1670s, as a secure monarch, he declined very firmly to acknowledge Barbara Palmer, the sixth child of Barbara Villiers, despite her mother’s protests. It is unlikely that the perilously placed Prince of Wales was any more complaisant in 1648. Obviously Charles had every reason to believe that Monmouth was his son.
The other fantasy suggested that Monmouth, far from being another man’s bastard, was actually the Prince of Wales’ legitimate son. It is on this point that the date of the baby’s conception becomes vital. It has been seen how tense and strife-torn were Charles’ days in July. He was extinguishing the naval mutiny on the one hand, as he desperately strove to reach agreement with the Scots on the other. It is inconceivable that he should at this point have taken time off to contract a highly unsuitable – and secret – marriage. Charles was, on the contrary, only too aware that in a dwindling hand of cards his marriageability constituted about his only remaining ace. His parents, one way or another, had been attempting to play this card to their advantage since his childhood, as Dutch princesses, Spanish and Portuguese infantas, were considered; Charles was well aware of his own value in this respect. Indeed, when he finally elected to play the ace, after his Restoration, he did so after a very cool estimate of the advantages to himself which would thus accrue.
There is negative evidence on Lucy’s side as well. Her liaison with Charles continued sporadically until 1650. Now known as Mrs Barlow, she was with him in Paris, witnessed by Evelyn, and possibly in Jersey. Thence she passed into other hands. Charles himself was absent from her side for nearly two years while he was in Scotland and England; during this time her second child, Mary, was born. Furthermore, Lucy contemplated wedding Sir Henry de Vic, the English resident in Brussels, with the full approval of Charles – an insane move, if she was actually proposing to commit bigamy.
For others than the lighthearted Lucy, life at The Hague that September had its complications and anxieties. In the streets, the followers of Prince Rupert and those of the pro-Scottish John Colepeper began to battle. Their feud was by no means ended by the failure of the summer’s naval expedition. It was a particular piece of ill-fortune that at this critical juncture Prince Charles should be laid low by smallpox, since he represented the one figure of authority that everyone tacitly agreed to respect.
Hyde was back at his side. He had arrived at The Hague, exhausted from sea-sickness, having tried in vain to catch up with his Prince in France. But Hyde continued to preach against the Scottish involvement. On hearing of the previous Lauderdale agreement, disrupted by circumstances, he wrote to Henrietta Maria that, if another such concordat was proposed, he would have to move to another part of her service. He was thus hardly a figure of reconciliation.
The Prince, who still managed to appear in this attractive role, was out of action until November. On recovery, his first task was to sort out those same disorderly sailors, who were now drinking and rioting their way about the port of Rotterdam, to the general discontent of the Dutch and the English civilian exiles alike. Some crews actually returned with their vessels to the Parliamentary side; others were recaptured. Charles’ method of dealing with them was to make the uncompromising Prince Rupert their admiral, and that despite a few remaining demands for the appointment of the Duke of York. Rupert’s name has come down to our day trailing chivalric garlands: in his own time he was known less charmingly as ‘Prince Robber’. He was certainly a man of action. Once he had thrown a mutineer or two overboard with his own hands, the Royalist Navy reluctantly recognized itself to be under control once more. With his brother Maurice as Vice-Admiral, Rupert set about restoring the reputation of the Navy as a striking force. The pair of Palatine princes captured a number of prizes, which helped to swell the pathetically depleted exchequer of the Prince of Wales.
But there had been vital months of delay and indecision. And time and tide round Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight had not waited for this happy resolution of the Royalist naval problems. Divisions between Parliament and Army grew daily more pronounced. One was represented by corrupt and often inefficient members, who nevertheless could still claim legality behind their authority; the other by the soldiers victorious in the recent war, who could and did claim right as well as might. There was hardly likely to be accord between them. In any case, the King still hoped to divide and so to rule again. On 18 September a Parliamentary delegation arrived at Newport on the Isle of Wight in a final effort to negotiate with him according to their notions of compromise. They were animated not only by a wish to fend off the encroachments of the Army on their own authority, but also, being principally Presbyterians, by a desire to subdue the Army’s religious Independents.
The King showed himself in principle prepared to make concessions, but understandably refused to deny pardon to Princes Rupert and Maurice and certain other designated Royalists. As ever, he spoke up firmly for the use of bishops as a system of church government: ‘Episcopacy,’ he said, ‘had been exercised by the Apostles.’ Although these abortive negotiations were known as the Treaty of Newport in the language of the time, no such treaty in our sense ever existed. And the King made it clear in a private letter to the Duke of Ormonde that he had no intention of honouring it even if it had been concluded: Ormonde should pay no attention, he wrote, if he ever read of such an agreement.
In any case, Parliament itself was scarcely more constant. In October it rejected those terms already agreed, although negotiations were still in progress. As for the attitude of the Army, Cromwell lingered in Scotland. He had arrived as an invader, but then discovered the more pacific delights of theological conversation in Edinburgh.
People cannot help their personal predilections, although they may conceal them. It was one of Charles’ difficulties that the Scots were naturally distasteful to him. But they were naturally agreeable to the English Independent general. Cromwell might fight the Scots, but he would always be able to strike up accord with them afterwards. To Cromwell, the Scots were not after all such bad fellows, particularly the Covenanters, like Argyll, who had not been involved in the recent holocaust. With Charles, the process was in exact reverse. He might make any number of agreements with them. But in his heart of hearts he could never like or even admire them. It is possible that during this Scottish sojourn of Cromwell’s delicate feelers were put out, like the exploratory touch of a cat’s paw, concerning the future of the King. If – only if – it came to a trial and if – only if – such a trial brought about a death sentence, how would the Scots …? But Argyll to his dying day strenuously denied that any kind of pledge of complaisance towards their King’s execution was given in advance by the Scots.
In the meantime of course the safety of the King was a subject of agonizing concern, rather than diplomatic feelers, to his wife and family abroad. Why not rescue him? There existed a force of upwards of a thousand Lorrainers: could this not be used to raid the Isle of Wight, as Henrietta Maria and Lord Jermyn continued to hope? The idea sounded more practicable than it actually was. There was the problem of transport. The Isle of Wight was distant, the Parliamentary Navy effective, and, since the King’s guards did not intend that there should be another precipitate flight, there would be no connivance this time. Moreover, the King himself had given his parole, his word of honour, that he would not escape. He did not – as yet – consider himself to be absolved from that promise.
Towards the end of November, the Prince of Wales decided that the Lorrainer troops would be used to better effect trying to capture nearby Guernsey and issued a commission to that effect. In general, he was trying to rally the Royalist forces, and provide them with some kind of unified animus parallel to the inspiration of the Roundhead Army in time of war. Charles made efforts to work up an equivalent campaign: the Cavalier Soldier’s Vade-Mecum, printed in 1648 at his command, contains a number of prayers and psalms for use by Royalist soldiers. It is, ironically, highly derivative from Roundhead propaganda, and the psalms include Cromwell’s favourite, to be used as the Parliamentarian battle-cry at Dunbar: ‘For the Lord of Hosts is with us: the God of Jacob is our refuge.’
However the ‘Prayer before a March or Battle’ was applicable only to the Cavaliers: ‘It is not Ambition, or Malice, that hath thrust us into this posture, but the necessary defence of thy Church, thy Truth, our Laws, our Liberties. …’ Here was the voice of King Charles I, not Cromwell. And the King himself was to be the subject of prayer in order to alleviate ‘his long and bitter sufferings’. Charles’ own position was acknowledged in a prayer for his specific benefit, beginning, ‘Almighty God, who do’st establish thrones of Princes, and the succession in those thrones, by giving thy judgements to the King, and thy righteousness to the King’s son …’3
As far as Charles was concerned, it was not empty compliment. Indeed, it could be argued that the King’s son at this point was showing not only righteousness, but also a degree of judgement lacking in the counsels of his father. The Prince of Wales tried to maintain an element of stability in an increasingly unstable situation; unfortunately, his ignorance of developments on the other side of the Channel, due to lack of intelligence and a general news black-out, was profound. His father’s letters, written to him at the end of November, did not arrive into the Prince’s hands until late in December; then their text was poignant rather than relevant.
There was often a gap of some weeks between some epoch-making dénouement in England and the Prince of Wales hearing what had taken place. One striking example of this was Colonel Pride’s forcible purge of Parliament on 6 December. All those members who did not bow to the Army’s increasingly radical demands – including the trial of the King – were ejected: a ‘rump’ of under sixty members was left. This meant that the Army leaders, including Oliver Cromwell, the victor of the Second Civil War newly returned from Scotland, and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, were in virtual control, with the aid of this Rump Parliament to carry out their behests. On the day of Pride’s Purge the King was taking freezing walks along the shore of the Solent, Henrietta Maria crouched in poverty and misery at the equally cold palace of Saint-Germain, and Charles himself was by now at Breda, an ancient stronghold at the confluence of the Mark and the Pra, just north of today’s Belgian border. He had decided to make the move, as the situation in Holland grew increasingly impossible. For all the amity of the Prince of Orange, an individual, even a royal one, could do little. The Dutch were embarrassed and slightly hostile.
Charles’ first choice had in fact not been Breda but the welcoming island of Jersey. There Henrietta Maria could join him. Their ultimate objective was Ireland, which could be more easily reached from Jersey. But Henrietta Maria’s finances did not even permit her to get as far as Jersey. With her son, she could expect but little from the French Court at that time. It was true that the Peace of Westphalia in October had brought an official end to the Thirty Years’ War, which had plagued the people and beggared the state exchequers (although France continued to fight Spain for another eleven years). In theory, European rulers were now free to get on with their interior business of government. But the granary of this particular peace contained within it the seeds of popular dissidence as well as those of absolutism. In France the first war of the Fronde, which broke out in October and lasted until March the following year, fully occupied Queen Anne and Cardinal Mazarin.
Breda lay in North Brabant, which was part of the Prince of Orange’s personal patrimony; in addition the Brabantines tended to be Catholics, and would not therefore, like their Dutch neighbours, yearn after the Protestantism of the Parliamentary party. It was not a dull place. Later A Briefe Relation, a Commonwealth gazette, would call it a ‘town smelling with delight, gallantry and wealth’. Its artisans were said to be eminent in ‘the schools of Mars and Venus’.
Of Charles’ counsellors at Breda not only Hyde, but the Marquess of Ormonde, still concentrated on the prospect of an Irish venture. The presence of Ormonde at the Prince’s side at Breda was in itself reassuring. This splendid man of enormous vitality, head of the Anglo-Norman family of Butler, had been brought up in England under the guardianship of Archbishop Laud, but his vast estates were Irish: as he neatly put it, summing up the enduring Anglo-Irish situation, he himself was Irish ‘by fortune though not by birth’. His blonde good looks called forth the admiration of Cromwell himself who, gazing at his portrait, observed approvingly that he looked more like a huntsman than a soldier. Ormonde was twenty years older than Charles (and would outlive him) and had a passion for hard work, coupled with a romantic admiration for King Charles I, which made him a wonderfully energetic and loyal servant. Indeed, Ormonde is one of the few consistently admirable and sympathetic soldiers-cum-statesmen throughout the Civil War period, Commonwealth, Protectorate and reign of Charles II. This in itself is a remarkable achievement, since many behaved admirably in some of these periods, but generally those who behaved admirably throughout did not also behave sympathetically.
For the time being, therefore, with the experienced Hyde and the stable Ormonde to head them, the pro-Irish party of Charles’ advisers were in the ascendant.
As for Charles at Breda, he experienced for the first time the unpleasant fate of being a provider who could not provide, an experience which became disastrously familiar to him during the years of exile. Much was traditionally expected of a royal prince in the way of benevolence and charity – whatever his fortunes. Desperately, his suffering followers (who had of course suffered in the royal cause) assumed that their prince or monarch could still exercise his ancient role as a fatherly protector, at any rate in the financial sense. Increasingly, as far as Charles was concerned, that could not be. In December the Prince could not even borrow £200 from a banker at The Hague called Monsieur L’Empereur; he finally scrounged the money out of another banker called Boyet. In the meantime the demands of his pathetic co-Royalists – the ‘Crowd of Fugitives who hung upon them [the Court] for bread’ – swelled.4 At Breda, where Charles existed with a greatly diminished household, these demands could only be met by the small subscriptions still forthcoming for the cause from the loyal Cavaliers.
At Breda in December there was stringency, a certain amount of hope, a great deal of waiting. Elsewhere the pace was moving faster and ever faster.
In December the Prince of Wales received at last renewed overtures from the Scots. The Committee of the Estates and the Kirk had at last agreed. The Committee’s letter referred to Charles tactfully – or perhaps menacingly would be the right description – as their ‘native Prince’; as such, he should urge his father to take the Oath of the Covenant, which had always been the price demanded by the Scots for their approval and assistance. There was certainly a note of menace in the Kirk’s reference to Charles’ own way of life, his need for ‘prayer and understanding’. Both Committee and Kirk agreed that in this vital ‘prayer and understanding’ lay the true key to the King’s recovery of his own throne. The Prince returned a negative answer.
Even if he had so wished, there was not much that Charles could have done at this point. During this same period, events were galloping to a crisis in England. Charles could not reach his father. He did not even know where his father was now held. That left ‘prayer and understanding’. No doubt Charles did pray, if not according to the Scots’ model. But his prayers did not prevent his father being removed from Carisbrooke on 1 December by the Army. The King was confined first of all at Hurst Castle, a grim and isolated fortress on the Hampshire bank of the Solent, near Lymington – he observed that he was leaving the best castle in England for the worst. A few days later, following Pride’s Purge of the House of Commons, the Army officially seized power. On 17 December the King was taken at their orders to Windsor Castle.
About this time Charles at Breda was receiving his father’s letters written from Carisbrooke at the end of the previous month. The sentiments expressed therein were admirable, although the Army leaders, becoming rapidly convinced that there would be no peace for the weary English people while the King could continue to stir the pot, might have viewed them with cynicism.
‘Son,’ began the King, ‘by what hath been said, you may see how long we have laboured in search of peace. Do not you be discouraged to tread those ways, to restore yourself to your right; but prefer the way of peace….’ This particular letter was long and full of sage advice, couched in beautifully rounded phrases, the King being as ever a master of the graceful admonition. Its final words were prophetic. It is likely that they remained in the memory of the young Prince until the time came to implement them: ‘The English people are a sober people,’ wrote the King, ‘however at present under some infatuation. We know not but this may be the last time we may speak to you or the world publicly…. To conclude, if God give you success, use it humbly and far from revenge. If He restore you upon hard conditions, whatever you promise, keep.’5
Charles returned to the Court at The Hague for Christmas, and it was a paradox that life there during that brief but festive season was extremely gay. In England Christmas had been visited with grim official disapproval, and banished from the calendar, as being Popish and undesirable. The House of Commons continued to sit. Shops were forbidden to close. It was supposed to be a day like any other. But at The Hague Charles flirted with his cousins, the numerous Palatine princesses, and admired in particular the vivacity of little Sophia.
It was not until 13 January that Charles was informed that the trial of his father was going ahead. The news was horrific enough – the trial of a reigning monarch by his subjects administered a shock wave throughout Europe in itself. But at this point Charles did not seriously envisage his father’s life being in danger. Deposition, a lifetime’s incarceration: these were the possibilities, frightful enough in themselves. Charles wrote immediately to General Sir Thomas Fairfax – widely and correctly rumoured to be far less intransigent on the subject of the King than his colleague Oliver Cromwell – and the Council of War.6 He pointed out in the most urgent terms that he had no sources of information about the health and general condition of his father other than the ‘common gazettes’ – the newspapers which trickled across the Channel and into the Low Countries, often weeks late. The Army had not allowed his father at Windsor to receive the Prince’s own emissary, who had been sent with the specific task of reporting on the King’s state.
Now there had come to Charles’ ears a rumour ‘the mere thought of which seems so horrible and incredible’ that it moved him to address the Council of War directly. He begged them to testify to their fidelity by reinstating their lawful King, and restoring peace to the kingdom. It should be appreciated that to Charles his correspondents were no more than a collection of enigmatic strangers, who had mysteriously seized power in his own country. He had never met Cromwell or the other insurgent leaders. Charles’ complete ignorance of the make-up of the new men at the helm in England, although hardly his own fault, was to be a great disadvantage to him subsequently when trying to cope from abroad with the phenomenon of the Commonwealth. On this occasion he made a pathetic attempt to woo these new men with flattery: the restoration of peace, he wrote, would be ‘an honour never before given to so small a number as you’.
The letter was of course perfectly useless, not to say irrelevant, in an England now totally dominated by the revolutionary junta. The Army leaders had ears, but they did not wish to hear. Their growing suspicions of each other added to their determination not even to be seen to hearken to outside pleadings. A letter written by Henrietta Maria during the previous autumn, asking to be allowed to be near her husband ‘in the uttermost extremity’, was not even opened – it lay sealed for thirty-three years.7
In his despair, Charles also tackled his theoretical friend and ally, France, once more. On 18 January he wrote to his cousin the King, and to Mazarin, begging them to remonstrate with these English plenipotentiaries. But there was little comfort to be derived from France: on 6 January the eight-year-old Louis and his brother Philippe d’Orléans, sleepy and ill-prepared, had been bundled away from Paris, where their palace was surrounded by the howling and contumacious Frondeur mob, to Saint-Germain. Their new abode was icy cold and ill-furnished: the nightmare trip was later blamed for Louis XIV’s lifelong dislike of Paris. Peace was not made for three months – three crucial months, in which all influence of the French royal family was in abeyance, from the point of view of the English royal family. Letters of remonstrance, received too late to weigh very heavily, were the best Charles could get out of them.
On 20 January 1649 the trial of King Charles I opened in Westminster Hall – the sombre scene of Strafford’s ordeal eight years earlier. Two days later the Prince of Wales seems to have realized for the first time that his father’s life was actually in danger. His slowness to grasp the exact nature of the King’s predicament is explained not only by difficulties of communication but also by the nature of the age in which he lived. Monarchs were put to death, it was true, but such events had been appalling rarities in European history. Although the King’s own grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been executed, so earth-shaking was the event felt to be that parallels were sought back in the Middle Ages to gloss it over with the patina of historical precedent; moreover, the deed had not been carried out by her own subjects, but by their neighbours.
On 23 January one of the Prince’s attendants, Boswell, pleaded in French on the King’s behalf in front of the States-General. Charles’ own French was still considered too limping to carry out such a crucial task. He was horrified to have to tell them, began Boswell, that an English Prince came before them, seeking intercession for the life of the King his father. As a result of this personal appeal, two Dutch envoys, Albert Joachimi and Pauw Adriaen, set off for England, led by an emissary from the Prince in the shape of Sir Henry Seymour. It was the intention of the Dutch to ask for the trial to be delayed, at least, in favour of some kind of arbitration.
The mission was useless. By the time the Dutch reached England the King had already been condemned to death. Some of the most determined judges had already signed the death warrant by the Friday, 26 January – although certain names were not to be found amongst their number, including that of Fairfax. Representative of that (large) section of the English people who could not follow the revolutionaries down their messianic path any further, Fairfax had not even attended the trial. When his whereabouts were questioned, a masked woman called out from the public gallery that he had too much wit to be present. It later transpired that it was his wife. The same masked unknown, made fearless by her confidence in her own rectitude, had something to say when the charge against the King was proposed to be in the name of ‘the Commons and Parliament assembled and all the good people of England’. She cried out once more, ‘It’s a lie, not half nor a quarter of the people!’8
On the Saturday, 27 January, the King was brought back into the court to hear the sentence of death read out.
The next day, at St James’s Palace, to which he had been brought from Windsor and where he would spend the last days of his life, the King was allowed to receive Sir Henry Seymour, the Prince’s messenger. The mission was accomplished through the good offices of the King’s guard, Colonel Tomlinson – who was after the Restoration rewarded for this chink of humanity in the hitherto unbreachable Army wall by being let off trial for his life. Seymour was thus able to receive last messages for Charles, and the King’s final letter to his wife.
On the next day, the last day of his life, the King was permitted to see those two touching little figures, Princess Elizabeth and Henry Duke of Gloucester, who had remained as captives in London since the collapse of their father’s regime. It was fifteen months since they had set eyes on the King. Princess Elizabeth had grown into a delicate but intelligent girl of thirteen: the tears rained down her face as she clasped her father. That set her brother off crying too. It was a scene which wrung all who witnessed it, including the King’s custodians.
Later that night the Princess wrote down the contents of the interview in full, the first and most affecting of all the many documents which form the martyrology of King Charles I.9 The King spoke to the girl of her mother: she should tell Queen Henrietta Maria ‘that his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love should be the same to the last’.
But even in such a poignant moment the King did not forget the future of the royal house he had tried in vain to serve, and had only succeeded in ruining. The interests of the true succession must remain paramount. There must be no young puppet kings in the hands of Parliament, agreeing to conditions which older and wiser heads would have rejected. Elizabeth was to tell James Duke of York that in future Charles was to be to him not only his elder brother but also his king. To the eight-year-old Harry, the King was even more explicit. Taking the boy onto his knee, he told him, ‘Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head.’
Then, as Harry continued to gaze steadily at his father, the King patiently explained the most important worldly message of all: ‘Mark what I say, you must not be a king as long as your brothers Charles and James do live. For they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last. And therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.’
The little boy sighed deeply and to his father’s gratified surprise said very firmly, ‘I will be torn in pieces first.’ The King ended on a note of a martyr’s holy pride: ‘And that he doubted not but that the Lord would settle his throne upon his son … and that we should all be happier than we could have been if he had lived.’
That son was in the meantime in a state of turmoil and despair. The only step he was not prepared to take on behalf of his father is the one sometimes ascribed to him in popular mythology – the presentation of a blank sheet of paper to the generals, bearing his signature, for them to name their own terms to save his father’s life.10 It had been dinned into Charles by the King that nothing was worth the sacrifice of the Church of England, whose preservation was bound up with that of the monarchy itself. If the generals had demanded a series of religious concessions, Charles knew well his father would not have wished to live on those terms.fn1
Charles thrashed about him, looking for foreign aid. Letters were sent on behalf of Louis XIV to both Oliver Cromwell and to Fairfax, whose withdrawal from the proceedings had given rise to false hopes that he might head some northern or even Scottish-based rescue attempt. But it was symptomatic of the tense, icy, suspicious – and determined – atmosphere which prevailed among the remaining Army leaders in London, that the generals did not even dare open these letters, and those of the States-General, except in the presence of three hundred officers. In the same way the Dutch emissaries were heard on Monday, 29 January, in complete silence. Afterwards no comment was given. None was necessary. In England the Gadarene hours were rushing by towards the execution of the King.
Tuesday, 30 January, was the appointed day. Then, at the very last minute, there was a hitch. Curiously enough, it was the existence of Charles Prince of Wales which held up the proceedings and brought about that very delay which foreign supplication could not achieve.
It was suddenly realized that the execution of King Charles I was not enough. That would simply leave the junta and England itself with the spectre (or vision) of King Charles II. It would be a powerful case of ‘The King is dead, long live the King’. For although the House of Lords had been abolished in early January, leaving the House of Commons with the self-appointed power to pass new statutes without the agreement of either Lords or King, no one had yet got round to the task of abolishing the monarchy itself. They had all been too much involved in the process of cutting off the King’s head with the crown on it, in the jovial, blackguardly phrase ascribed to Oliver Cromwell. There was no time before the execution to pass through such a radical measure – in fact, the monarchy was not officially abolished until six weeks later – but something had to be done about the succession. Otherwise they might cut off the King’s head to their heart’s content, but the crown would merely be transferred by the devout monarchists to another head of the Royal Hydra, the head of the Prince of Wales.
In the course of that freezing January morning an urgent measure was passed ‘that no person whatsoever should presume to declare Charles Stewart (son of the late Charles) commonly called the Prince of Wales, or any other person, to be King, or chief magistrate, of England and Ireland….’ Only then was it time for the King, wearing two shirts against the cold so that he should not shiver and be mistaken for a coward, to step out of a window in the Palace of Whitehall towards the ready scaffold.
‘I go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown,’ the King told his chaplain, Bishop Juxon, ‘where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ To the Bishop also he entrusted his last letter to his son, a long message of advice and blessing. It was a sad and sapient document, in which Charles was pressingly advised to take his stand on goodness and piety: how much better to be ‘Charles le Bon’ than ‘Charles le Grand’, how much better to be ‘good than great’.11 In the meantime the frantic boy in Holland, in ignorance of this last pacifist testament, was still searching for military support, believing correctly that one who was held by the sword would only be rescued by it. And otherwise would die by it.
Just after two o’clock in the afternoon that day the King went finally to his incorruptible crown. He was dressed all in black, but with the George, the insignia of the Garter, a jewel made of a single onyx. This he handed to Bishop Juxon, with the instruction that it should be given to the Prince of Wales together with the single word, ‘Remember’. As his head left his body, cleft by the axe of the masked executioner whose identity would be for ever hidden from posterity for fear of vengeance, a great groan went up from the spectators: a groan which, like the deed itself, would never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. They had no need of onyx jewel or last instruction. They would remember.
It was not until 5 February that Charles, in Holland, learned that the corruptible crown was now his.
Immediately after the execution the ports had been sealed, in an effort to stop the intelligence reaching the Continent until the situation in England was stabilized under the new regime. The news itself seeped into Holland in that most horrid of all forms for those who are waiting: bad news received in a series of newspaper reports, at first unsubstantiated, later growing in circumstantial detail.
But Charles himself did not learn the news from these reports. Once his advisers had to accept that the worst had happened, there was a terrible debate amongst them as to how they should tell him.12 The method chosen provided a bitter contrast to that famous romantic night scene at Kensington Palace by which the young Victoria, two hundred years later, would learn, from the royal address of her courtiers, that she had become Queen.
Charles’ chaplain, Stephen Goffe, used the same expedient. He entered the room and, after a slight hesitation, began: ‘Your Majesty—’
To the agonized son, he needed to say no more. After the weeks of uncertainty, Charles burst into bitter weeping. To Goffe he could not speak. Eventually he made a sign for him to leave. For several hours, Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, otherwise Charles Stuart, son of that man of blood Charles Stuart the elder, remained quite alone.
1 The blank sheet of paper preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, bearing the signature Charles P, said to be proof of the story, is in fact some kind of Irish military instruction.